A Little Short of Home Plate
Playing Right Field: A Jew Grows in Greenwich by George Tabb
by Liz Orenstein
A boy walks into the school bathroom and gets clobbered by the class blind kid, wielding a Braille typewriter. Two friends slaughter a giant sea turtle as it charges around the yard. Sound absurd? How about two brothers sharing one baseball jersey because their father won’t shell out seven dollars for a second? Or arriving at school each day bloodied and lunch-less, and returning home bloodier and hungrier?
These were every-day events for the young George Tabb, now a music critic and punk rocker–briefly of the Ramones, more famously of the group Furious George. Tabb recounts growing up Jewish in suburban Connecticut–apparently not as easy as it sounds–in a new memoir, Playing Right Field: A Jew Grows in Greenwich. Through stories, musings, and flat-out rants, Tabb recalls the horrors of the playground, the agonies of the baseball field, and his truly painful relationship with his father. Tabb’s memories range from the humorous to the painful, with pit stops in the implausible (think small boys, sea turtle, shotgun). And though he entertains his reader–and nauseates with his graphic descriptions of violence–Tabb doesn’t manage much more. Eventually, one gets the suspicion that this punk-star-turned-memoirist is less interested in telling his story than in releasing pent-up hostility at, well, everything that’s ever happened to him.
Playing Right Field is strategically incoherent, its narration meandering at best. Each chapter opens at the climax of an episode of childhood mayhem–being stuck with his brother at the top of Coney Island’s rickety Thunderbolt rollercoaster, for example–but just as the scene is set, Tabb interrupts himself with a “but wait, let me go back.” The Coney-Island cliffhanger is abandoned in favor of lengthy exposition on his parents’ divorce and an explanation of how he sees his mother on Sundays, when they go on expeditions such as this one to Coney Island. Only after eleven pages of interruption does Tabb return to resolve the tale of the Thunderbolt. This pattern, employed in every chapter, quickly grows old. The consistency of the device, the tall-tale nature of his memories, and the wrath he harbors for everything in his childhood are the only elements that tie the book together.
Tabb spares no sentimentality for himself or for his torturers–either as a young boy or as an author. As a kid, he threw punches on the baseball diamond and was punished at summer camp for giving a fellow camper, as he recounts it, “two black eyes, a bloody nose, and a bloody mouth, minus a few teeth.” And no one is spared a well-chosen epithet, including his father, who is generously referred to as a “fuck-wad.” But this is probably par for the course from someone who, as the lead singer in Furious George, frequently informed his screaming fans that they were “the worst audience ever.”
The young Tabb tries to convince his high-school band director to let him play trumpet, only to be exposed as a fake who’s never had a lesson in his life. Playing Right Field echoes that sense of desperate effort–it wants to be taken seriously, despite a lack of finesse and any attempt at cohesion. Still, the stories are raw enough to engross–and gross out–his reader. But in the end, maybe that’s the point.
Trading On Our History
David Bezmozgis’ Natasha and Other Stories
by Katya Schapiro
“Congratulations, you’re the toughest kid in Hebrew School.” At least, until the next Gary Shteyngart comes along. Young, transgressive Jewish writers never go out of style, but most notable recently is the popularity of Jewish literati from the Former Soviet Union. Such authors as Shteyngart and Lara Vapnyar have garnered attention for their dual foreignness: they are post-Soviets in their adopted countries and Jews in the post-Soviet world. And after decades of Communism left many Jews unfamiliar with even the most basic Jewish rituals, their identity poses an age-old question: is it family that makes you Jewish? Culture? Religion? What is left besides memory and ancestry to make these young Russians Jews?
David Bezmozgis takes a stab at these questions in his new collection of short fiction, Natasha and Other Stories. The book features a single narrator–Mark Berman, a Bezmozgis alter ego–in episodes that span three decades. David Bezmozgis is Canadian, a circa-1980 Latvian Jewish immigrant, son of a massage therapist and a housewife. Mark Berman is exactly the same and entirely different: because Bezmozgis uses an autobiographical setting for the book, he has the freedom to fictionalize his plot while retaining authority over the subtly shifting backdrop. Mark’s language evolves incrementally as his immigration recedes from view, and each episode, a tiny window into Mark’s life, illuminates the untold stories between.
Natasha’s structure belies its title: the book is essentially an episodic novel, fragments that accumulate to much more than the sum of their parts. The same formula applies to Mark’s changing, contradictory Jewish identity, which is the subtext for much of the book: his family’s natural new-world affiliation is with the Canadian Jewish community, yet that world is as repellant as it is welcoming. Ultimately, Mark gains a level of closure that undermines the complexity of his search–but his journey evokes the harsher questions of identity with which immigrants–and by implication their new communitie–struggle.
Natasha begins through the newly naturalized six-year-old’s eyes, and ends with that six-year-old a grown man. Forced to attend Hebrew School, he is hounded by his classmates for being different: not only a foreigner, but also outside the local Jewish loop. In “An Animal to the Memory,” he responds thuggishly to these taunts, attacking another student in that modern-day holy of holies, the Holocaust memorial room. His principal, appalled by the disrespect, pushes him against the wall and demands that he bellow “I’m a Jew” until, as the principal says, “my uncle can hear you in Treblinka.” The principal wonders, “How is it that all of this doesn’t mean anything to you?” And Mark hedges, weaseling out of the situation with an unintentionally accurate answer: “It means something,” he says.
But what? If Mark isn’t sure, neither are his parents: they vacillate among attempts to convert their “refugee” status into social currency, indifference to Judaism, and efforts to resuscitate half-remembered customs. This mixture comes to a painful, hilarious head in “Roman Berman, Massage Therapist.” Invited to dinner by a voyeuristic doctor and his wife, the Bermans vie for sympathy by embellishing their tales of Soviet persecution, portraying themselves as the committed Jews they never were. The charade falls to pieces, and as they leave clutching the apple cake–rejected as unkosher by their hosts–that is all Mrs. Berman can remember of Sabbath festivity, neither they nor the reader know which way to look.
On leaving adolescence, Mark suddenly claims an earnest Jewish identity entirely missing from the early stories. Citing his nostalgia for old Jews, he spends every weekend in his grandfather’s apartment building. Overtly, he longs for the old men and women of that generation; implicitly, for the faith and the lost history they represent. The absence of this feeling in the early stories makes it a jarring change. And beyond that, it is Mark’s struggle with Judaism–one that runs the gamut from conviction to indifference–that makes his character compelling. By the time his ident
ity is stabilized, his tale has lost its urgency.
But the final story, “Minyan,” returns to the vague conviction of the young Mark. Now 30, Mark finds himself caught up in the politics of the small congregation in his grandfather’s building. Zalman, the all-powerful gabbai, conducts his services with an inclusive philosophy: “My concern is ten Jewish men,” he says. “If you want ten Jewish saints, good luck…Homosexuals, murderers, liars, and thieves–I take them all. Without them we would never have a minyan.”
The Judaism in this book, as Mark says, “means something.” And with that, Bezmozgis muscles his way into the growing minyan of post-Soviet Jewish writers, for whom Judaism is also “something.” Whether they applaud, betray, or struggle to inhabit their Jewish worlds is beside the point. This proliferation and variation, in true Jewish tradition, is the best of Jewish identity. And as for Bezmozgis’ place in it all–I would say, as Mark’s buddies do when he brags of bashing in heads, “Congratulations, you’re the toughest kid in Hebrew school.” At least this year.
