Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Thane Rosenbaum is the author of the acclaimed novel-in-stories Elijah Visible, which was awarded the Wallant Prize for best book of Jewish-American fiction. A law professor in human rights and a teacher of creative writing, he is also the literary editor of Tikkun and writes essays and reviews for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and other national publications. He lives in New York with his daughter, Basia Tess.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Second Hand Smoke

St. Martin's Press

Chapter One

It wasn't so much that as a family they were strange, or thatfrom the very beginning they had been estranged?althougheach in its own way was true. It was that they were damaged.Irreversibly ruined. The Katz family of Miami Beach came assembledthat way, without manuals or operating instructions or reassuring warranties.Everything was already broken. Nothing worked right; nothingever would. The damage is what defined them best.

    It was the way they functioned or, as psychologists now call it,dysfunctioned. A state of mind in civil war with itself. And there wereno defenses or cures for this condition. Whatever predator was outthere would have little difficulty tracking them down. That was theworld as they saw it. They were experts in survival, and yet at thesame time they were rank amateurs in recognizing the languid, solitary,untroubled moment.

    For them, the scarring ran deep and, in fact, had traded placeswith the surrounding skin. But the Katzes weren't visibly disfigured.There wasn't anything particularly hideous about them. A family portraithung in the living room of their apartment, taken in 1964 bythat German photographer used by everyone on Miami Beach's ArthurGodfrey Road. Framed and suspended on a stark white wall. Each daythe sun plunged through the window of their high-rise apartment andfaded the photograph, reducing the assorted hues to a blunt, burntyellow. The Katzes aged better than the images around them. Thethree of them posing: mother and son sitting beside one another,tight-lipped, stone-faced; the father standing behind, as though areferee in waiting. No smiles, but no apparent signs of deformity, either.The camouflage was both convincing and inviolable.

    The name Duncan, however, revealed the first sign of disguise.That was the name in 1953 that Mila and Yankee Katz had giventheir first and only child on the day of his bris.

    "What kind of a name is that for a Jewish boy?" an old man remarked,bits of whitefish precarious at the end of a long fork. Theold man speared the air, making his point, beating back any rebuttal.

    "Maybe they can't spell," a younger women, armed with a moreupstream appetizer?a carp or sable?whispered. "They are refugees,after all. Their English can't be so good. Maybe they wanted Davidbut got it wrong when they looked it up in the baby-naming book.It's an understandable mistake, no?"

    "What's the matter with you?" another old man joined in. He waswearing a pair of all-occasion green polyester slacks and a white shirtwith a golf emblem. An outfit equally suitable for both afternoon tee-offsand the severing of Jewish foreskin. He was late for a foursomeat Normandy Isle Golf Course, and had hoped that Duncan's rite ofpassage would have begun by now. Instead, the newborn was stillwaiting to have the work done on his genitals, while the golfer wasforcibly delayed from the tsuris with his own clubs. Agitated, he said,"Yankee graduated from Heidelberg. You mean to tell me a man ofsuch learning couldn't tell the difference between a David and a Duncan?Listen to me," he urged as the nibblers of nosh inched forward,"one thing is for sure: the boy's name isn't a mistake. These peopleare trying to tell us something."

    "They were both kings," a young college coed interjected. She wasslender with sleepy brown eyes. The daughter of a neighbor. Untilnow she had been sitting demurely on a soft, velvet, floral club chairin the Katz apartment, all the while wishing to be elsewhere, hermind not so much wandering as in a dull state of perpetual park.

    "Who?" the golfer wondered. "Yankee and Mila? Of what kingdom?Auschwitz?"

    "No, I mean Duncan and David," she spoke up proudly, offeringan insight that?for the moment, at least?justified her tuition at Miami-DadeCommunity College. "Maybe Mila and Yankee want to givetheir son a royal name. Maybe they have great things planned forhim."

    "Where? In Glasgow?" The man with the whitefish rejoined theconversation, having just returned with more provisions?potatosalad, some tongue, a smear of mustard on two slices of naked rye.

    This ancient ritual of Jewish tribal commitment had suddenly takenon less importance than the mystery behind the infant's name. Thegirl was right: Duncan was the name of a Scottish king, the recipientof a tragic Shakespearean end. With such a name, and finale, whatwere the parents hoping for?

    Despite their best efforts, Mila and Yankee hadn't really fooledanyone. They were trying to have it both ways, and their guests knewit. In giving birth to a son, they were holding up their end of thesacred covenant with God?laughably, the same god who was noweven harder to trust than before. Nonetheless, they showed their obedienceand good faith, the bris forever branding their child as a Jew.But in naming him Duncan, they were also not taking any chances,either. He had to have goy papers as well, something that would allowhim to blend in on the other side, to survive unharmed and completelyadaptable in the larger ghettos of the outside world.

    This strategic obsession with names was a fact of life for theKatzes. Everything was in the service of deception. Like secret agents,they preferred to have aliases, but they rotated them in case anyonecaught on. Names were easily disposable?interchangeable with numbers,in fact. Such were the lessons of the Nazis. Upon liberation,however, the refugees all learned that, unlike everything else abouttheir former lives, their names could be reclaimed?if they could beremembered, if they wanted to remember them.

    For some, the recovery of a name was not enough. Why have thatwhen all else was lost? For others, the memory of zebra costumes andbranded arms had forever soiled their attachment to anything thatwas once personal, precious, and intimate. Like the costumes and thearms, their pasts could never be washed cleaned. Perhaps it was betterto walk away from the camps, and the nauseating mess, with nothingat all.

    So some renounced their original names, changing them, clippingoff a syllable, or escaping entirely into a new language. In Israel theJews of the new Exodus became Hebrews all over again; in Americathey adopted the king's English, seasoned with shtetl spices thatrefused to be shaken loose in the New World. The Gentiles of America hadlong known that Jews could be named Brown or Smith or Wilk orHarris. Ploys to protect the innocent. Or maybe to conceal the guilty?

    Yankee had changed his name, too. No real mystery there. Theguests at Duncan's bris all imagined that his father had once beenknown as something else. He couldn't possibly have been born aYankee?not in Germany and not as a Jew. Sure, there were Jewsnamed Yankel, but they weren't German Jews. Too lowbrow for them;too peasant-sounding. But Yankee? Still didn't sound right. Somethingmust have gotten lost in translation.

    Arriving as a refugee in New York, Herschel Katz took on thename of a baseball team. He had never played the game in his life,and Mickey Mantle was more likely to conjure up an image of a mousethan a slugger. But he was looking to lose himself in something foreign?notjust in a country, but also the indelibility of its ways....