Consent

By BEN SCHRANK

The following is an excerpt from Chapter 6 of this novel of love, loss, and Jewish scholarship.

...I walk down near the Williamsburg Bridge, around the projects beyond where I imagine my grandparents' old apartment might have been, on Willett Street. It's past midnight. Though it's only the first week of April, there are already bunches of teenagers, young couples with baby carriages, and older people all standing quietly in the parks that surround the housing projects.

I go into a bodega and buy some food–roast beef and cheese on a roll and a couple of oil cans of Foster's. I eat and drink while I walk past the odd combination of working professionals and poor teenagers who fight for space on the stoops of what used to be tenements. I stand in front of a very clean white tile lobby that might have replaced the staircase leading up to the apartment where I imagine my father was born. Although I have seen the photographs, it's still difficult to imagine that these streets were ever filled with hundreds of thousands of Jews.

My father did nothing but distance himself from this place, so I never knew what growing up was like for him, save for the tinny flavor of his poor Yiddish, tossed at my mother whenever she decided that it was time to go visit their families in Brooklyn: "Khob zey in bod," which he gleefully interpreted as "To hell with them."

My mother always responded the same way, with a sarcastic "Klap kop in vant un shray gevald!" or "Go bang your head against the wall and yell for help!"

My father did this once when my mother was arguing with him, but he didn't yell for help, he just screamed, "Ver dershtikt!', over and over again at her. This means, "You should be choked," and my mother, in response, kept repeating, "Doorkh du? Doorkh du?" which means "By you?" and was a dare...

...There's a picture of the Golem from the twenties movie version (Wegener's, just like Weingarden said) on the cover of Gustav Meyrink's book, and I stare at the picture, and flare my nostrils and glare. Then, in the other books, there are some pictures from an illustrated version of about 1911, and they look like me. One picture has the Golem in repose, and I don't even have to distort my face to resemble that one. Even a few minutes of this quiet, soulless existence feels so relaxing and completely unlike my own. Yes, I can do what Weingarden requested of me. I'll learn a lot by making his questions mine.

Here is what I write on paper:

You don't kiss me without stopping, you don't fall into a restaurant and keep kissing, you don't allow a man to fall in love and then he calls the next day and you tell him no more phone calls, no more nothing, ever. You stunned me. I liked you so quickly. And now to lose you is what you can't do to me. You can't. You did. Find another part of your life that will let go. I want to stay.

As I write I'm left with little beyond one most unfortunate thought: If Katherine finds out that my father killed himself, she'll only want to work harder to stay away from me. She says: I've got enough problems without a boyfriend in such tragic circumstance. I hardly know him anyway. I'll send him a note of condolence in a few months, if I remember.

I will hide what happened from her for as long as I can. I lie down in my clean bed and fall asleep so fast with no room left to think or mourn what my father, this big, angry, mess of a man I knew who was called Jefferson Gerard Zabusky—over what he did.

Excerpted from CONSENT by Ben Schrank.
Copyright (c) 2002 by Ben Schrank.
Published by arrangement with The Random House Ballantine Trade Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.