The Great Good Thing Read Online Free PDF Page B

from a sign that said “Restricted Neighborhood,” meaning No Jews Allowed. “ What on earth are you doing here? ” Dad said to her.
    Gammy’s antipathies took hold in his younger daughter, his favorite. Like him, she was elegant, charming, and urbane. Like him, she wanted nothing to do with Old World behaviors. The more traditional forms of the Jewish religion were anathema to her. When my parents were married, the traditionalist side of my father’s family insisted my mother take a mikvah before the wedding . It’s a ritual Jewish bath for brides. It involves getting naked while other women wash you. My mother had never heard of the practice and—well!—she thought it absolutely barbaric. She flatly refused to have anything to do with such a thing. There is an entire wing of my extended family that apparently includes famous rabbis and Jewish theologians, but I’ve never met any of them because they never forgave my mother for blowing off the bath . They never spoke to us after that day.
    It wasn’t the religion that bothered her most, though. She could live with that. It was the cultural lines she wouldn’t cross. The mikvah did not offend her spiritual sense. It just struck her as uncivilized , that’s all. A civilized person takes her baths in private, thank you very much. A civilized, British-style person doesn’t speak some guttural hodge-podge language like Yiddish. I can honestly say, with no exaggeration whatsoever, I’ve learned more Yiddish words from my WASP-Irish-American wife than I ever learned from Mom. Likewise, any suggestion she was behaving like a clichéd “Jewish mother”—overbearing, smothering, manipulative—made her bridle. In all fairness, she was not that way. She was, rather, aloof and guarded. Hurt in youth and fearful, she lived at some inner distance from the surface of the world.
    There is one incident, one exchange between her and my father, that I remember particularly. I must have been no more than four or five at the time, but it struck me even then and stays with me still.
    My father, as I’ve said, was a master of accents and dialects. He could speak gibberish Italian to an Italian and convince the man he was speaking his native tongue. On his radio show every morning, he would pretend to be various characters with various funny voices. His straight man partner, Dee Finch, would interview these make-believe people about the weather or the news or whatever product was being advertised. The radio team—Klavan and Finch—had a little rolling closet in their studio in which they kept a collection of sound props: a guitar, a tambourine, a squeezy car horn that went aruga and so on.
    But the central prop was the closet door itself. My father would snap the door open and fling it shut— bang— to indicate to the listening audience that a new “person” had entered the room. Then he would launch into one of his character voices. There was Trevor Traffic, who would read the traffic report while my father rolled a marble around in an empty can to make it sound as if he were in a helicopter above the highways. There was the doctor Sy Kology, the poet Victor Verse, the Italian singer Emilio Percolator, and so on. All of them were admirably complete creations with their own personalities, accents, and ethnicities.
    Among the most popular of this imaginary crowd was Mr. Nat. He was an enthusiastic but hapless middle-manager with some hilariously meaningless title like “Coordinator of Interrelations.” I think he represented my father’s hostility toward the radio station’s various corporate suits who thought they should have some say in the content of his show. Nat would come sailing through the prop door calling out his catchphrase, “Mr. Nat is here!” And you could hear immediately that he had a thick Jewish accent. He sounded like the Brooklyn-born son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe.
    The audience loved Nat. What New Yorker didn’t have some corporate