The Book of Air and Shadows

trivial really, but-and contemporaries picked this up as well-there is no one like him for seizing something out of life and putting it on the stage. Such a coup is the end of act II, scene ii. This is the famous balcony scene, and I don’t mean the front part that everyone quotes but the depiction of a love-mad child at the end. An adult playing it-Claire Bloom perhaps-can’t help but seem absurd, but a sixteen-year-old can make it live, especially if one is in love with the girl, as I was, and I recall very distinctly the moment when, as I watched the divine Miss Gottleib draw out the long goodbye, I thought to myself this is the life for me, this is my destiny, to open my being to genius, to be possessed, to be free of my miserable self.
    This was my junior year in high school, a year that marked the beginning of the long twilight of the mob in New York. In that era, before the code of silence collapsed with Mr. Valachi, the best way to put a big-shot Italian away was to get him for tax violations, and my dad was therefore right in the crosshairs. As usual, they had him on numerous charges and were putting on the pressure to make him testify against his employers. Had they taken time to consult his family they would not have thus confused him with someone lacking moxie. All during the fall of that year, while we rehearsed
R &J
, Dad was on trial in federal court for the southern district of New York. While we had never been what you could call a happy household, this period was especially grim.
    Let me here touch briefly upon the family drama. Izzy and Ermentrude continued as they had begun, at gunpoint (at least metaphorically), although I believe they believed they were in love, this defined as the continued attempt to bend the beloved to one’s own will. Here is the tableau that sticks in my mind. It is evening. We boys are prepubescent, perhaps I am eight, Paul is ten, the girl is six. We have dutifully done our homework and had it inspected by Obersturmbannführer-Mutti. The air is redolent with heavy Teutonic cookery. This is still the time of
alles in ordnung
, before the discovery of That Whore, his mistress, after which our mom more or less gave up on life for a while. We are perhaps watching a small-screen colorless television, perhaps arguing over which channel to watch. Growing tension as six o’clock comes and goes. Will he appear? Will he be in a good mood or not? Six-thirty, and Mutti is banging pots and slamming drawers, and muttering in German. We listen for the clink of bottle on glass. Seven o’clock. A smell of burning, of expensive proteins going dry, of vegetables steaming into inedible slush. We are ravenous, but none dares to enter the kitchen.
    Seven-fifteen and the door opens. Our hearts sink when we see his face. No little gifties for the kids tonight, no hearty hi-ho Silvers for the boys, no snatchings up of the little girl and whirlings-around. No, tonight we go straight to the table, and the ruined dinner is flung thumping and clattering on the board, and my father says I’m not gonna eat this shit, and then they get into it, back and forth, in English and then demotic German, in which, even if we can’t follow the exact meaning, the violence is perfectly apparent, and then the platters and cutlery start flying, and Miriam ducks under the table and I follow, holding her little weeping head to my chest. Paul stays upright in his chair, and I can see him from my position below, face white, white too the knuckles of the fist that clutches his table knife. The fight grows in volume, ending usually with “fucking Nazi” from him and “Jew pig” from her and then he slugs her one and leaves.
Slam!
And we come out again and she makes us sit up straight and finish every scrap of the inedible food while she tells us about how it was to actually starve in poor Germany, after zeh war, and zo we must finish everyting. This isn’t why we choke it down, though; it’s because what else can we do for her?
    But during the trial we didn’t do that anymore; now silence reigned. Mutti slapped warmed-up canned goods on the table and retreated into her bedroom, from which the sounds of the German classics emerged, Beethoven, Bruckner, Wagner. She started drinking more, and when she got her load on, the volume went up. Dad might kick the door down then and smash records, or he might just leave and not return for days. Paul also was rarely home. After graduating (barely) from high school he had