Absurdistan Read Online Free PDF

like.”
    I followed him into the bowels of his house with my head hung low. After the typical drabness of the one-room Soviet apartment with the bulbous refrigerator shuddering in the corner like an ICBM before launch, I found the Hasidic home to be a veritable explosion of color and light, especially the framed plastic pictures of Jerusalem’s golden Dome of the Rock and the crushed blue pillows embroidered with cooing doves. (Later, at Accidental College, I was taught to look down on these things.) Everywhere there were books in Hebrew with beautiful golden spines, which I erroneously imagined to be translations of Chekhov and Mandelstam. The smell of buckwheat kasha and used underwear proved homey and inviting. As we progressed from the front of the house to the back, little boys ran between the tree stumps of my legs, and a young chesty woman with her head wrapped in a handkerchief popped out of a bathroom. I tried to shake her wet hand, but she ran away screaming. It was all very interesting, and I almost forgot the painful reason behind my visit.
    Then I heard a low, guttural hum, like the sound of a hundred octogenarians brooding at once. The hum gradually resolved itself into a chorus of male voices singing what sounded like: “A
humus tov,
a
tsimmus tov,
a
mazel tov,
a
tsimmus tov,
a
humus tov,
a
mazel tov,
a
humus tov,
a
tsimmus tov,
hey hey,
Yisroel.
” Several terms I recognized:
mazel tov
is a form of congratulation,
tsimmus
is a dish of sugary crushed carrots, and Yisroel is a small, heavily Jewish country on the Mediterranean coast. What all these words were doing together, I couldn’t begin to fathom. (Later, in fact, I found out those weren’t the words to the song at all.)
    Ducking beneath a low frame, we entered the house’s back annex, which was filled with young fedora-wearing men hoisting plastic cups along with slices of rye bread and pickles. I was speedily given one such cup, slapped on the back, told
mazel tov!,
then pointed toward an old bathtub reclining in the middle of the room on two sets of clawed feet. “What’s this?” I asked my new friend in the thick glasses.
    “A
tsimmus tov,
a
mazel tov,
” he sang, urging me forward.
    Vodka does not have a smell, but it didn’t take long for an eighteen-year-old Russian to register that the bathtub was indeed filled with that substance, along with floating bits of onion. “
Now
do you feel at home?” the happy Hasids shouted to me as I swigged from the plastic cup and chased the drink with a sour pickle. “A
tsimmus tov,
a
humus tov,
” they sang, the men branching their arms and kicking up their feet, their remarkably blue eyes drunkenly ablaze from behind their black getups.
    “Your father told us you might need to drink some vodka before the
bris,
” the lead Hasid explained. “So we decided to have a party.”
    “Party? Where are the girls?” I asked. My first American joke.
    The Hasids laughed nervously. “Here’s to your
mitzvah
!” one of them shouted. “Today you will enter a covenant with
Hashem.
”
    “What is that?” I asked.
    “God,” they whispered.
    I drank several cups’ worth, marveling at how the onion helped improve the mixture, and yet the idea of entering into a covenant with God did not go down as easily as the 80-proof swill. What did God have to do with it? I just wanted my father to love me. “Maybe you should take me to hotel, mister,” I stammered. “I give you seventeen dollars in my pocket. Please tell my papa I got cut already. He never look down there anymore, because now I am so fat.”
    The Hasids were not buying my suggestion. “You have to think of us, too,” they chanted. “This is a
mitzvah
for us.”
    “You also getting dick cut?”
    “We’re redeeming the captive.”
    “Who is captive?”
    “You’re a captive of the Soviet Union. We are making a Jew out of you.” And with that, they helped me to several more oniony vodkas until the room fairly blared at me with its twirling