Absurdistan Read Online Free PDF Page A

“All he does is learn and pray all day.”
    “Why don’t you become a Hasid, then?” I asked him.
    “I have to work hard now,” Papa said. “The more money I make, the more I can be sure no one will ever hurt you. You’re my whole life, you know? Without you, I would cut my throat from one ear to the other. And all I ask you to do, Mishka, is get snipped by these Hasids. Don’t you want to please me? I loved you so much when you were small and thin…”
    I recalled how my little body felt when encased in his, his wise brown eagle eyes eating me up, the worsted bristles of his mustache giving my cheeks a manly rash I would treasure for days. Some wags say that men spend their entire lives trying to return to their mother’s womb, but I am not one of those men. The trickle of Papa’s deep vodka breath against my neck, the hairy obstinate arms pressing me into his carpet-thick chest, the animal smells of survival and decay—
this
is my womb.
     

     
    Several months later, I found myself in a livery cab, roaring through a terrifying Brooklyn neighborhood. In the Soviet Union, we were told that people of African descent—Negroes and Negresses, as we called them—were our brothers and sisters, but to the newly arriving Soviet Jews at the time, they were as frightening as armies of Cossacks billowing across the plains. I, however, fell in love with these colorful people at first blush. There was something blighted, equivocal, and downright Soviet about the sight of underemployed men and women arranged along endless stretches of broken porch-front and unmowed lawn—it seemed that, like my Soviet compatriots, they were making an entire lifestyle out of their defeat. The Oblomov inside me has always been fascinated by people who are just about ready to give up on life, and in 1990, Brooklyn was an Oblomovian paradise. Not to mention the fact that some of the young girls, already as tall and thick as baobab trees, their breasts perfectly shaped gourds that they regally carried down the street, were the most beautiful creatures I’d seen in my life.
    Gradually, the African neighborhood gave way to a Spanish-speaking section, equally disheveled but pleasantly coated with the smell of roasted garlic, and that in turn gave way to a promised land of my Jewish co-religionists—men bustling around with entire squirrels’ nests on their heads, side curls flapping in the early-summer wind, velvety coats that harbored a precious summer stink. I counted six tiny boys, probably between three and eight years of age, their blond untrimmed locks making them look like infant rock stars, running around a deeply tired penguin of a woman as she pattered down the street behind a scrim of grocery bags.
What the hell kind of Jewish woman has six children?
In Russia, you had one, two, maybe three if you didn’t care for constant abortions and were very very promiscuous.
    The cab stopped in front of an old but grand house whose bulk was noticeably sinking into its front columns the way an elderly fellow sinks into his walker. A pleasant young Hasid with an intelligent expression (I’m partial to anyone who looks half blind) welcomed me in with a handshake and, upon ascertaining that I spoke neither Hebrew nor Yiddish, began to explain to me the concept of a
mitzvah,
meaning “a good deed.” Apparently I was about to perform a very important
mitzvah.
“I sure hope so, mister,” I said in my burgeoning but imperfect English. “Because pain of dick-cutting must be intolerable.”
    “It’s not so bad,” my new friend said. “And you’re so big, you won’t even notice it!” Upon seeing my still-frightened expression, he said, “They’ll put you under for the surgery, anyway.”
    “Under?” I said. “Under
where
? Oh, no, mister. I must go back to my hotel room immediately.”
    “Come, come, come,” said the Hasid, adjusting his thick glasses with a worn-out index finger. “I’ve got something I know you’re going to