The Making of Invention-A-Minute Ben

January 10, 2001

8:00 AM

Another morning off winter's block of stationery—skim-milk light, brown branches, a rock or two showing through the snow, sameness. It's up to me to break the monotony.

I've made up my mind to go through my father's letters, which till now I've skimmed, without satisfaction, looking for mentions of my mother and myself. These letters were given to me by Israeli friends of my father's, the Shimshons. Shimshon knew my father from a commando unit, the "Negev Beasts," who were known for their unkempt beards, Australian slouch hats, and motorcycles. They would roar into a kibbutz, hog the communal shower, raise the galvanized roof of the dining hall with gnashing and guzzling, remount their bikes and zigzag off into the dunes, leaving behind military intelligence and other kinds of gossip. My father was never a Beast, they weren't his style, but they had visited his kibbutz. Shimshon, when I met him, was a mute carpenter who looked with habitual tenderness upon his wife, who handed me these letters tearfully, cheerfully, and without ceasing to chatter for several hours. For years after our meeting, I'd get overseas calls from Mrs. Shimshon.

"When are you coming? You promised! Last time we spoke you promised. You must take a vacation. You must visit. Nonsense. I'll pay! We were his khevrei!" Mrs. Shimshon would cry.

"The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman," wrote an American author; Israel began in the hearts of the khevrei. Without this slang term and its implications, Israel is no more comprehensible than the United States minus the word "liberty." There is no translation. Here are nine English equivalents and the reasons they don't work:

1) Group: too generic.

2) Gang: too gangsterish.

3) Clan: too feudal.

4) Tribe: too archaic.

5) Band: too nomadic.

6) Society: too vague.

7) Collective: true only of the kibbutz, the logical extreme of khevrei-ness.

8) Pack: too zoological.

9) Y'all: not a noun.

The way an American veteran feels about his platoon-buddies, extended to include both sexes, every aspect of life, and one's entire lifetime. That might come close. The people you played with; went to school with; served in the army with; married among; had kids at the same time as; went into business or the university with; criticized; consoled; dealt with and felt with, and could not imagine yourself, the insides of your head, without. Khevrei.

A singular noun that takes plural verb forms.

Here is my father's first brittle blue aerogramme, crammed up to the shiny strips of its adhesive with his round Hebrew script. He wrote from Leominster, a village in northern Massachusetts, where he'd landed a job at the factory of Harry Cohen, a board member of the Weizmann Institute of Science. My father's physicist friends had gotten him this job, because Israel, a tiny socialist state without a dime to its name, in the worst depression of its history, was no place for technological entrepreneurs—and he didn't want to make weapons anymore.

The next letter features my father's first American word. It follows his discovery that the work week in the U.S. was not Israel's Biblical six days. Like most people who have to learn a series of adopted tongues, he cut corners, and never wrote the English lower case. His American words jut from the background of Hebrew like an aerial view of the tops of skyscrapers.

Surely it was tough on Itzik to meet khevrei who'd been sent abroad to the best schools, by the Israeli government, with the aim of returning home and creating nuclear resources. While Itzik—did what? Made plastic pearl necklaces. Where? In a village forgotten by God. He had reason to be irked. But to ignore American popular music! This gives me pause. Although I was raised on Boston's classical music stations, I have a bad feeling about my father's starting off this way.

Alone in his room, his stockinged feet in sandals, he reads Scientific American by the light of a second-hand lamp. Outside, it's true that there's a sky of northern black, and the little wooden houses, desolatingly far below the stars, are built on frozen granite. Yet everything he needs is in this hard subzero air. Swirling in the draughts around his bluish ankle-bones are tinctures, potions, and balms for the homesick and the lonesome. There's Sinatra for cool nerve, Como's croon for relaxation, and Satchmo's brass for stimulation. There's the Grand Ol' Opry for salt-spangled balladry, and Billie Holiday to teach him how to show pain its place. Outside his window, by the icicle thicket that hangs from the eaves, there is a sharkskin suit hovering hopefully, cut from starlight and just his size, if only he would look. If only he would stop chasing the Boston Symphony Orchestra around his radio dial. If he would only give the kapellmeisters a rest, let go, now and then, of his European imported consolations. Europe! Just how many homes is he homesick for?

Now, here's the letter to his big sister, his only surviving family member. She went to Palestine before 1933. When I met her, in 1968, she was a heavy, ground-down creature living in a farming cooperative with her family. I didn't take to her, poor lady, because she never stopped her bitter complaints about the nice life she'd lost, in Czechoslovakia, where she'd played competitive tennis and had been served by maids. I glimpsed, on her bedroom wall, portraits in oval frames, and was awed to think they might be my grandparents, the dead ones; but when I asked, she jiggled all over with a jeering cackle that seemed aimed at someone who wasn't in the room. After I returned to the States we lost contact. During the summer of 1995, between visits to the Khemed, I did call and say hello. Not to my aunt, by then hospitalized with dementia, but to her eldest daughter. We had a friendly chat, and I asked if our grandparents had left behind any letters. My cousin gave a shivery laugh and said there were letters, in Hungarian, that my aunt used to lip-read and cry over.

"They were frightening to behold!" "They were sent from the camp and the Nazis cut holes in them—they looked like lace!"

"I can have them translated," I volunteered eagerly.

"I begged her, Sharona, I begged her. She burned them."

My cousin did oblige by sending me the following letter that my father had written in Leominster.

Driving in the shank of winter, in dead Canadian cold, hundreds of miles over mountain roads, in order to see khevrei. I remember how he rode in winter. His car was as idiosyncratic as a Yukon miner's shack. To the dash he'd affixed a compass, as well as plastic compartments for packets of Kleenex, Sucrets, and Palgin, an Israeli aspirin (American aspirin did not kill his pain). His glasses case lay clipped within easy reach. His hands were shielded, first in thin woolen gloves, then in shearing gloves, cut so that each finger, dressed in wool underwear, poked from a sheath of yellow fleece. With his neck wound in a tattered scarf, and his sallow face, drained of color, stubbled gray despite the red nicks he'd left trying to shave closer, my father in wintertime looked positively orphaned.

Returning to Mrs. Shimshon's pile of aerogrammes, I find Itzik ever more anxious to hear from his khevrei.

The chief engineer might not have been Jewish; in Israel "a Jew" means "a dude." Otherwise this letter was scandalous. The khevrei drank beer to cool off, and wine on festive occasions. They had no concept of social mixology. Occasionally, some lout went on a spree and drove the tractor through the kibbutz gate. Sex they smiled upon, but in the dark. Drunken kissing in full view? Tfoo!

This frigid planet of whizzing speeds, dizzying drinks, sliced foods, public lips, plastic jewels by the ton, and mountain-descending rivers of enameled, enormous cars. In Israel, you could stand in many spots and look into another country, which, it's true, wanted to kill you, but within your bearings. Itzik was marooned on Mars.

I read this, and I'm like, uh-huh. His character had begun to take on protective camouflage: he wanted a bigger salary, better benefits, and more fun. And fewer Jews.

As for his ungallant remarks about my countrywomen, I can translate those readily enough. "Spoiled," now, that might mean "too expensive to date on a green card salary." For "stupid," how about "too smart to act brainy on a date?" "Narrow-minded," in nineteen fifty-five, in white-gloved, pearl-chokered Boston, home of the Boston ban? Oh, dear.

For the first time, Itzik's success with women, which had been perfect to the point of inconvenience, had gone sour. He no longer attracted fully fascinated girls by walking across their field of vision; he was no longer the target for heat-seeking missiles. Holding a chilly cocktail glass, he would edge up to circles of partygoers wearing garments for which he had no names, all of them purring busily in American. Looming behind their elbows, he would wait to overhear some topic which he partially understood: the Kennedys? He'd honk to clear his throat.

"Ehhh, Protestants and Cat'oleeks, excuse me, zey are all Christians, right? Ehhh, can you please to explain what is zeh difference?"

In Israel, any girl you met was like your cousin. If she was a kibbutznik, she was khevrei. If not, you still knew khevrei whom she knew, from her city (there were only three), or her college (there were two), or her army corps. You listened to the same radio broadcasts (there was one station) of the Israel Philharmonic or the comic routines of Chizbatron. You hiked the same mountains, swam in the same lake (there was one), and sang the same songs (which were innumerable). What gave a girl mystery was the thought that she must, somewhere in her heart, have unshared thoughts.

He wants to go home. He wants to go home, but how? Then Israel strikes oil (one well).

In the midst of this sad, begging, hopeful letter in Hebrew script, there stands out a pure hard fragment of American poetry:

When you deny the music of a new homeland, it will play upon you in its own voice.

This letter gives me goosebumps because I see in it my own conception, in my father's desire to banish nerves with the deliberate acquisition of that ambiguous asset, a wife.

Itzik met Miriam during a WEEKEND, at a party given by graduate students in a crowded Cambridge apartment. My mother was in a corner, being startlingly conspicuous. She was five feet eleven inches tall, with long, straight hair as glassily black as the belt around her eighteen-inch waist. Her eyes flashed; her voice was cultivated; her gestures imperious. But when she laughed, she was like a little girl hanging from a jungle-gym and grinning upside-down. Around her clustered her typical circle of admirers: fidgety intellectuals who lived on talk, parasites sniffing around for a naive hostess, and here and there, someone so modest, so devoted to her animal gaiety and rebellious mind, that he was almost bound to be overlooked.

My father was impressed. He missed the fun of discussing ideas, and Miriam had a bachelor's degree in philosophy on top of twelve years of Talmud school; he missed speaking Hebrew, and she spoke Hebrew, albeit somewhat Talmudically. Within fifteen feet of her he knew that she had fire and magnetism enough to warm up his room in Leominster and reorient his north. He was thirty-two, she was twenty-five; they shared purity of hearts, and neither of them had a clue about themselves.

"He's a desert rat!" argued Miriam's roommates. "He's uncivilized!"

"He's a breath of fresh air," she laughed, but what she really meant was the incident of her Italian boat-neck sweater. Nothing is quite like a boat-neck sweater, the sleeves draping from their vees at the bare verge of the shoulders, the tension in those corners. Miriam chose Itzik one night when they were sitting together, elbows on the table, and he took the crease of her left sleeve between his fingers, pulling it back slightly so the fabric wrinkled, no longer stretched taut. Then he sighed and said,

"Now I feel better."

Miriam immediately adjusted her other sleeve to make life gentle for the knit. Best of all, unlike her father, Itzik never raised his voice.

In my mother's tale of how my father proposed, there is, to my ear, already a fatal hint of disjuncture. They were watching a show together in the Haydn Planetarium of the Boston Museum of Science. Out of the dark, my father said shyly,

"Nu, so, when are we getting married?"

"Huh? We're getting 'married'?" Miriam was nonplussed. He had already asked her once; but somehow, she'd thought he was joking.

"Aren't we getting married?"

"Okay, we'll get married," she replied, in disbelief.

On their wedding day, my uncle Bert (ex-Navy, B.U. law school) went hunting through the fourteen rooms of my grandparents' house. The rabbi was waiting. The parents and relatives were assembled and seated, even upon the velvet sofa's buttock-prodding buttons. My mother sat hiding her veiled face in her hands, in an upstairs bedroom. Finally, Bert strode into the attic and found my father deep in the New York Times Sunday supplement.

"Is time to get married now?" Itzik asked.

"Geez," apostrophized Bert. "Will you put down the paypah?!"

A few minutes later, my mother became the bride in the oil painting that used to hang over my grandmother's piano: her hair upswept obsidian, her face young and spacy, as she dragged the train of her gown, encrusted with seed-pearls, down the stairs and into the TV den. My father, wearing a tie for the second time in his life (the first being his passport photo), waited underneath a nuptial canopy's white plastic trellis and white plastic flowers. Furtively, Itzik was pulling at a plastic rambling rose.

Miriam stepped up to his side. Ooh, murmured aunts and cousins in approval of the bride's satin pooled on the carpet, and the shining column of her back. Unseen to them, Itzik began scraping the plastic flower with his thumbnail, absorbed, while my grandparents' ancient little rabbi (of whom it was always said, "Now, that's a rabbi!") quavered through the liturgy and came to a pause. And paused. With the point of her satin heel, Miriam jabbed Itzik's instep. The rest took place in whispers:

"Ai! What? What?"

"Not now!"

"Oh! Sorry! I've never seen such a polystyrene!"

After the ceremony and the feast, as Rose swept the honeycake crumbs from the linen, but before the newlyweds departed in his PLYMOUTH, they decided to open their wedding gifts and store them at Miriam's parents' while on their honeymoon. The couple decamped to Bert's room, and spread their wealth over the taut bed underneath the Red Sox pennants. First they opened the envelopes. Fives, tens, and a lone fifty-dollar check were extracted. Itzik, his tie unknotted, scoured the offending envelopes with a limber forefinger and expressed, to his unveiled bride, disgust. She was ashamed. Without raising his voice, he called her family "petit-bourgeois." The slashing retorts she would have mustered in any other dispute were laid by, for me to pick up a generation later:

Wasn't he a fresh bridegroom, with a lovely young wife?

Wasn't he a Holocaust orphan, welcomed into a thriving family who hoped to love him?

Wasn't he a kibbutznik who shunned money-grubbing materialism?

Wasn't he a Zionist who had turned his back on the degenerate customs of the ghetto, including dowries?

I keep returning to that sniffy "petit-bourgeois." It betrays him to have been, after all, Imre Tobias, a provincial Slovak whose values were European. He aspired to belong to the moneyed, cultured, assimilated gentry of the town, not the little Jewish shopkeepers. What a yawning ignorance was his! When I think of how my grandmother raised college graduates on a Great Depression diet of barley and bone soup; how she and my grandfather slept three-hour nights for all the punishing years it took to build their little bakery; how they composed, with other family businesses, the yeomanry of American capitalism—this great native epic was to Imre a closed book.

They left on their honeymoon; he wrote to the Shimshons.

I rise from my desk. I take this last aerogramme and go into the kitchen, where my husband is stirring a beef stew that I made earlier today. He's lifting the ladle to inspect the melting beef and carnelian carrots, and to inhale the flavors of bay leaf, anise, caraway, and peppercorns mingled in the vapors clouding his face.

"Sweetie, wanna hear something funny?" I ask him.

"Sure do." I read the letter aloud, translating. Ward lets out a whoop.

"I can't believe he would write that! 'Above average,' what a—I just can't believe it! What a character. You can't ever let your mom see that letter."

"You like my stew?"

"It's goo-ood." I hug him and go back to work.

He remembers a freezing motel. She remembers that he was too cheap to pay for the heated one across the road. Anyhow, what can be learned from an occasion like a honeymoon, which exists to defy repetition? Ward's and mine was a day long. We drove six miles to a river-town, slept holding hands in the Mill House, and took a ride on a historic canal-boat. I dozed on my husband's shoulder, the covered boat was so warm and the water rose, rocking, so gradually in the lock; while a youth in period dress, cheeks fuschia from the heat of his derby hat, pretended to speak his mind about President Grant.

My father's next letter was written during the Suez campaign, but even into this serious business, he insinuated the name of his beloved, his passion, his north star.

I would enjoy this picture of my parents' vigil around the radio, perhaps holding hands, as the announcer speechifies through their two rooms. If only I weren't sick of the Godot-like, the eternally anticipated Spitzer, whoever he was. Judge for yourself whether or not I have reason to resent Spitzer from day one. I unfold a greeting card. The front shows a bedraggled cartoon couple holding a baby bottle and pacifier, and the caption, "We've had it!" My father's script covers the interior of this announcement of my birth.

Who was more welcome in my father's life, eh? I wish, Spitzer, that you had visited—I would have liked to spit up on your shoulder, Spitzer!

January 11, 2001

Look at this snapshot dated 1958. My father is conferring with two engineers. They must be near MIT, in one of those vintage factories whose brick walls advertised products in giant letters: TOOL & DIE, or PIPE FITTINGS. Inside the conference room, a strip of wood trim runs around the walls painted cream above, brown below, a perpetual reminder to drink coffee. I can smell that lead-based paint. I can hear that old radiator clank.

Engineer One rests his foot on a chair some distance from the one he's slouched in, holding a meerschaum pipe. Engineer Two raises his dark Latin eyebrows in grimacing interest. What sets my father apart, standing by the flip-chart, is not the tie he doesn't wear, but his stance. One hip leans toward a relaxed hand; the other hand, at breast height, displays a forefinger drawn apart from the rest, not quite beckoning. Somehow an attitude of classical statuary, known to Athens and to Rome, has revived to grace my father's technical presentation. He's happy. When the camera caught him, he had been smiling for some time. The engineers are on the verge of exclaiming "Say—" and "Look, suppose—" and "Why the hell not?"

When I add up the photograph and the letter, the sum is a successful pursuit of happiness. Itzik Bentov had become Invention-A-Minute Ben.

January 12, 2001

I've avoided this next translation job for twenty-four hours. Yesterday, the forest trails were freshened with light snow, as if someone took last year's leaves, blue shadows, white glare, and tossed them all together. I was too pleased with life to translate the past.

Last night, I woke and heard a noise, in hoarse squeaks, outside the bedroom. I rose and felt my way along the wall until I encountered fur. I lost it and stood still, wrestling with the impression of a long tube of superimposed dogs, a probabilistic topology, a topolo-doggie, stretching toward my hand. There he was—nearly kicked him—lying on his side, lifting his forepaw hopefully. I rubbed his deeply-keeled chest, remembering the night that Ward and I drove Mix home across two states, all the way from the Chicago seat of the German Shepherd Rescue Association. It had been snowing, like tonight. As I rode in the back seat, the dog's warm tongue kept swiping my face to taste who I was. He'd had an awful life. Now his paw draped over my wrist, and with a last pat I returned to bed.

Ward, awake, asked about Mix. Getting only mumbles from his wife, he slid out of bed and went to make herbal tea, waking Daisy. She started to pant in her rattled cage. Black Daisy, mistress of hullaballoo, whining her need to follow Ward into the kitchen and protect him from perils. I thought about letting her out, but she spits up sometimes at night, and this simple problem ballooned into a metaphysical conundrum as I melted into dreams. Mix tromped in and slumped by my side of the bed, shaking it, wafting his stale popcorn smell, and slowly filling the dark bedroom with his loudest House of Usher groan. Then Ward returned and lay down. For a time, we had quiet.

A tactile hallucination in the form of red-hot sand drifted under the quilts, between my toes, into my throat, and eventually onto various parts of my husband. We scratched and sighed. The dogs scratched, jingled their tags, and sighed.

On a night like this, I know for sure that there's no such animal as the classic individual; that the enchantment of personality lies in each one's flaring-out, budding-off, from the common bond. Nothing brings it home like bad dreams when the khevrei are trying to sleep.

Back to translation. Itzik has a new address:

I have no images of my parents' married life. Memories begin here, on Dana Street, with the story that my father liked to tell about my childhood. My memory and his voice are alternately stirred within me, in plangent counterpoint.

I had felt something like the plunge of a see-saw on which I'd been riding high. Hiding the transgression did not make it right, and I'd feared, not God's wrath, but my own fall from a steady place. What is memory? A record that began with losing trust in my father, but not in God, or in myself. My father and I never got to celebrate Passover together. All the tradition we'd had between us, when he died, was this tale of an exuberant inventor who was bringing unprecedented things into the world. I wish that Invention-A-Minute Ben had lived long enough to outgrow his chutzpah, and to hear how God laughed, comprehendingly.

As the Brits used to say, it's a rum go. If their police had caught my father with a recoilless rifle under his coat, that spring of '48, he'd have been shot. Yet that home-made weapon, and the struggle against the British, and the war against the Arabs, all connived to bring him on vacation to the Empire Club. . . .

I have reached the bottom of the stack: a business-sized air mail envelope. The Shimshons' kids, who collected stamps, razored off the upper right corner, but the return address provides an approximate date. It is where my father lived during the latter seventies; his last home and laboratory. Inside the envelope, I find no letter. Instead, folded like paper, there is only a thin sheet, perhaps a sample, of flexible plastic.

For Libby Roberts

in memoriam