The Frumkiss Family Business - Couverture souple

Wex, Michael

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0307397777 ISBN 13 : 9780307397775

Editeur : Knopf Canada, 2011

Synopsis

Book by Wex Michael

A propos du livre

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1
THE FINAL DAY


It was probably the all-kugel diet that killed him.Probably. It’s hard to be sure with a man of 103: hecould trip down the stairs, get hit by a car, succumb to the kind of illness that young people don’t get any more—phthisis, diphtheria, the neurosyph—but Faktor was never accident-prone, and not even his bitterest enemies—a good three or four of whom lived long enough to see him die—could recall him ever having so much as a toothache or runny nose. A touch of scurvy during the War, when it was almost compulsory—unless he induced it to keep out of the army—but Faktor? Sick?
 
When the Yiddish paper of record called for details of his death, his wife repeated the question as if she didn’t quite understand. “Sick? I don’t know about sick.” It was like they’d asked if he had two foreskins. “Faktor was never sick.” Mrs. Aubrey, the professional name she insisted the paper use, had been in Toronto since 1927, but she never entertained any idea of calling her husband by his given name, not even when they were alone. He was Faktor when they met and Faktor is who he stayed. It was a sign of affection and respect, and was what everyone else called him, too. “He was too busy getting under people’s skin to spend time getting sick. We were married for sixty years, I know what I’m saying.”
 
She didn’t know the half of it. Faktor’s whole life was about getting under skins, driving others up a wall. “I want to be a yatesh,” he wrote, the gnat that burrowed into Titus’s head to punish him for his mockery of God. It banged against his brain and didn’t give him a moment’s peace: its claws were made of iron, its beak of brass. “That’s me all over,” he said. “A yatesh, but without the God. Every time a Jew is born, the rest of the world gets a headache. Most of us do it inadvertently; the difference between me and the rest of the Jews is that I want to cause headaches on purpose. We have to work on the world like the yatesh worked on Titus after he burned down the Temple and ruined our lives. Heinrich Heine had the same idea. And now—there’s me.”
 
He started in 1926, when he was living in Paris and frequenting brothels that specialized in religious themes. He was young, naive enough to fall in love with a whore who appeared everywhere, in private and in public, in the brothel or in church, in full Carmelite habit. She told Faktor that she was in the middle of her temporary vows when she lost her vocation, as well as her faith. She didn’t say why, and he wasn’t naive enough to ask how or why she became a whore. He just knew that he felt a real bond with her. “We had a great deal in common, having both been religious once.” When Faktor realized that it was strictly business on her end, he published a book of French sonnets called Ma Soeur, Ma Fiancée: Chants d’amour pour une Religieuse. He used the pseudonym André Zhid.
 
Mrs. Aubrey, his second and most long-lasting wife, knew nothing about this. She didn’t know that back in Poland two years later, he published his first novel, anonymously and at his own expense. A contemporary critic described Memoirs of Jesus’ Moyel, the man who circumcised Christ, as “the first plea for a pogrom ever to have been issued in Yiddish.” It was condemned by the government, forget about the Church, and not a single copy is known to have survived. Those who saw it—and there were plenty—said that it was a virtual encyclopedia of foreskin jokes and anti-Christian slurs, including a number invented by Faktor himself, all of it presented as the after-dinner speeches from the banquet portion of Jesus’ circumcision. The Nazarene’s foreskin was described as broad, leathery and marked with the sign of the cross; no matter how often the narrator sliced it off, it grew back again in a very few minutes, which is why he was able to make so many speeches.
 
Faktor had the book printed by ostjüdische anarchists living in Berlin. They had it smuggled into Poland, where copies were handed out on street corners, in front of popular theatres and restaurants, and beside newspaper kiosks all over Jewish Warsaw by boys yelling, “Extra! Extra! The truth about Yoyzl’s bris!” It was distributed for free, and they gave away five thousand copies in a single day. Faktor also sent one to every bishop in the country. Insiders, including Yiddish-speakers in the pay of the police, were pretty sure that they recognized the anonymous author’s style. Faktor was a well-known journalist by then, and his weekly columns in the Warsaw Haynt were stuffed with slightly milder near-blasphemies. Faktor threw his hands into the air and denied everything. There was nothing to connect him to this regrettable perturbation: at the Tachkemoni seminary where he had studied, Jesus, with a foreskin or without, had no place in the curriculum.
 
He never admitted responsibility for the Memoirs. Neither of his wives knew anything about it, and the secret of its authorship would have died with Faktor, had he not explained the whole affair to his biographer only a few weeks before he died. Loud as Faktor could sometimes be, self-restraint for the sake of a punch line or prank was one of the guiding principles of his life, perhaps the only guiding principle of his life. He was a tzaddik of shtik, a saint of shenanigans. He had a talent for strategic self-effacement and was willing to sacrifice anything, possibly even his life, to safeguard the purity of his japes. In the real world, Faktor craved all the attention he could get; when it came to hoaxes and provocations, though, he could conceal his name and forgo any credit, while patting himself on the back for his near superhuman self-abnegation: he craved efficacy, not renown—he got enough of that in literature and the theatre. He didn’t want a vulgar craving for reputation to come between the work and its victims: “Crazy ol’ Faktor, up to his crazy ol’ tricks again,” could dampen the most incendiary prank.
 
And Faktor could afford to play pranks. His father was one of the wealthiest textile manufacturers in Lodz, and Faktor grew up in the very bosom of early-twentieth-century Polish-Jewish luxury, all velvets and tutors, music lessons and Hebrew grammar. His father saw him as heir to an empire, a new, better educated sort of businessman who was just a bit of a rabbi on the side. Along with the usual religious education, Faktor received extensive instruction in French, German, Russian and English—the language of any country where he might have to do business with people who didn’t know Yiddish or Hebrew. His father was an old-fashioned Orthodox intellectual who believed in the kind of education that he himself could never have obtained. In 1923 he sent Faktor abroad to learn the international end of the business. Though the boy was only eighteen, he was bright and eager and, as even his father realized, temperamentally unsuited to the rabbinate. He had finished at the top of his class at the recently established Tachkemoni school in Warsaw, but showed no evidence of any feelings of piety. He was as ambivalent about God as he was about work: he knew that they existed, but could see no reason to bother with either.
 
He lived in Manchester for a year, a stay that marked his English forever after, giving it more in common with Coronation Street than with Isaac Bashevis Singer, his classmate at the Tachkemoni. He spent another year boarding with his father’s French agent, a religious Jew from Poland who kept a kosher home, but finally got up the nerve to take digs on the Left Bank and throw himself wholeheartedly into student life and la vie parisienne. He was beholden to no one, not even his father; his maternal grandfather, who had taken his father into the business, passed away not long before Faktor went to Paris and left him a monthly stipend: Faktor was an Old-World trust fund child who could do whatever he wanted and buy his way out of any trouble that he’d either caused or gotten into. He quit the job at his father’s firm and spent the next two years writing poetry and mailing the results to French, Polish and Yiddish journals, where he started to gain a reputation as a talented youngster who didn’t take himself or anything else too seriously.
 
He chased girls but didn’t get very far. Faktor was heavy and pale, with a spare tire that seemed to sag from his navel to his knees and that no amount of vigorous walking ever changed. Floppy, with folds of hidden skin almost everywhere, he had the curly red hair and pasty, freckle-splotched skin of a Japanese demon. He was known variously as di miyeskayt—the ugliness—le rideau à chair and le cochon cacher. His granddaughter Rachel described a photo of Faktor taken around that time as, “Bozo goes Poland. With schmaltz on every side.” For all his wealth and all his wit, Faktor spent three or four years in Hemingway’s Paris and never had sex with anyone but prostitutes; some of his cheaper conquests actually winced on going off with him, but Faktor pretended not to see.
 
He went back to Poland for his mother’s funeral and found himself with enough of a reputation to be invited by one of the editors of Haynt, the Warsaw-based Yiddish daily, to contribute a weekly column of humorous verse on issues of the day. He called it Der Mazik— the li’l devil, the troublemaker, Lucifer Junior or Satan in shorts—and the name soon stuck to him: in Yiddish circles he was known as Der Mazik for the rest of his life. The column ran until September 1939, and was picked up after the War by a succession of failing Yiddish papers in the States, finally ending up in the Forward once there was nowhere else for it to go. Faktor faxed the last one to New York on his final Monday; it came out the day that he died.
 
His mother died of a heart attack at the age of forty-one, and all of her doctors said that it was because of her weight. She was five feet tall and weighed 255 pounds. Her death affected Faktor in ways that a whore’s sneer could never have done; as soon as he established himself in Warsaw after his mother’s shloyshim, the thirty days after her death, he joined one of the Jewish gymnastic associations and began to swim—once he’d been taught how—and work out with bowling pins and medicine balls, kettle bells and pommel horses for an hour every day. He went on a strict vegetarian diet, eating meat only once a week, for a full twelve months, until he looked like Douglas Fairbanks from his neck to his knees. He kept exercising until he was close to ninety, doing push-ups, sit-ups and other exercises that needed no equipment even while f leeing the Nazis and starving in Soviet Asia.
 
Faktor had an iron will and a rare sense of discipline; he could go days without sleep in order to meet a deadline or follow an unusually hot inspiration. Whatever he wanted to do, he did; and for reasons that not even he could explain, Faktor wanted to piss people off. The older he got, the more adept he became. Eight years after the Jesus memoir, he published an art book, a collection of nude photos of a model who looked so much like Magda Goebbels that he had no trouble calling the book Die erblühende Magda, “Magda in Bloom,” or describing the pictures as “figure studies” of “a now famous lady” made just before her first marriage in 1920. The girl was a domestic who’d once worked for Faktor’s parents in Lodz, but the pictures were taken in Warsaw. The book was printed in Buenos Aires at a press owned by former members of Zvi Migdal, the Jewish pimps’ association, and was bound by a left-leaning volksdeutsch pornographer in Teplitz, who smuggled all 250 copies into the Reich. Faktor himself took over from there, driving all over Germany in a Hispano-Suiza and mailing the books from eighty-odd post offices, whence they were delivered to prominent journalists, political figures, foreign diplomats and government officials, including Himmler, Goering and the Führer himself. He sent two to Dr. Goebbels.
 
No one knows how many arrests were made or the number of executions that might have followed. Word of the book leaked out through discreet reports in Le Monde, the London Times, the Neue Freie Presse, and the Neue Zürcher Zeitung concerning the mysterious appearance of a volume of highly artistic photos of a certain matron, “now well placed in the New Germany,” in her somewhat more free-spirited youth. All four papers found the pictures “excellent propaganda, as it were, for the German mastery of streamlined form.”
 
The book quickly acquired legendary status among the Nazi-obsessed, probably because so few of them ever saw it; a copy from Berchtesgaden with Hitler’s personal bookplate sold for $100,000. There were abundant theories as to its origin—including one that held the photos to be authentic and attributed their publication to the family of Gustav Ritter von Kahr, the Bavarian Staatskomissar who helped quash the Beer Hall Putsch and was murdered during the Night of the Long Knives—but its true origin remained unknown until Faktor, once again, spilled the beans to his biographer.
 
Faktor, of course, earned nothing from such a book, just as he never asked to be paid for his column after the War. Between what he had from his family and what he earned from Yiddish plays and performances—even then, poetry didn’t make anyone a living—money was the one thing that he didn’t have to think about. In 1935, a year before the beginning of the economic boycott of the Jews in Poland, he and his father, with whom he remained very close, despite his defection from the shmatte trade, began to shift most of their own money, as well as anything that the business didn’t immediately need, to Switzerland. They took good care to convert it all to sterling before socking it away. Faktor’s father was run over and killed by a delivery truck owned by a prominent Endek, a member of the fascist National Democrats, in 1938, after which Faktor sold the business for a fraction of its real value, went to Switzerland and consolidated all the accounts into one vast holding of his own.
 
So why didn’t he get out of Europe? He didn’t have a clue, except that he was a celebrity in Poland and nothing but a foreigner in America. A year or so after his return from France, Faktor had been approached by Zaynvl Nurgitz, a writer of popular dramatic shlock who made the leap to impresario and become the manager of a number of popular Yiddish theatre stars, including Shula Kutscher.
 
A good ten years older than Faktor and with a century’s more knowledge of the world, Shula Kutscher, “the Hebrew Duse,” was also the Lillie Langtry of Yiddish theatre. Mistress to the wealthy and powerful, tall and majestic looking, with bright red hair, a gentile nose and a bosom that made grown men long for infancy, she was remarkably reticent about her origins and early life. “I was born,” she used to declare, rolling her shoulders back and lifting her nose into the air, “the day I stepped onto a stage.” No one knew her real name or where she was from; her off-stage Yiddish came straight from the Warsaw fish market, and her inabil...

Revue de presse :

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

“Wex is as irreverent and humorous, [and] he has his own style. . . . Breathtaking. It’s so subtle you don't see what’s coming until . . . all of a sudden something beautiful appears.”
— Winnipeg Free Press
 
“[Wex has] certainly nailed the Borscht Belt humour. . . . A lively and entertaining fictional debut.”
— Edmonton Journal
 
“A hilarious portrait of Jewish life in Toronto . . . and a new hero for Yiddish literature, one who, even while portraying that most tragic of birds, the dodo, represents not the extinction of Yiddish culture, but its tenacity.”
— The Globe and Mail
 
“[Wex] sets out to do for Toronto’s Jews what Mordecai Richler’s fictions did for Montreal’s and Philip Roth’s for Newark’s: paint their portraits so acutely, so knowingly, so as to inspire their apoplectic rage.”
— Tablet

“A good portion of the reading world, including the 2010 Booker Prize jury, finds Harold Jacobson’s The Finkler Question . . . hilarious — I found it tedious. . . . However funny or unfunny Jacobson’s book may be (maybe it just didn’t hit my funny bone), this Canadian-authored entry into the world of Yiddish humour had me chuckling, laughing and sometimes roaring from start to finish. . . . If you are looking for some escapist reading that is totally irreverant and very, very funny, you could do a lot worse than picking up a copy of Wex’s book.”
— KevinfromCanada.wordpress.com
From the Hardcover edition.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Knopf Canada
• Date d'édition: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0307397777
• ISBN 13: 9780307397775
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 384