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History on a Personal Note
Stories
By Kirshenbaum, Binnie Ecco
ISBN: 0060520892
History On A Personal Note
A LEGENDARY YEAR: 1984
Whatever Happens, We Ought to See It Coming
Despite the theoretical knowledge that history repeats itself, Lorraine was devastated by a second Ronald Reagan landslide victory. In response, she declared herself a Communist, as if that would fix something or someone. This was Lorraine's take on Communism: Donald Trump would have to buy every woman in New York a gold and diamond tennis bracelet.
Me, I saw Reagan's second term as an inevitability. Not that the foresight made it any more palatable. It's just that I was prepared to be miserable.
Another thing Lorraine didn't see coming down the pike was her falling in love with Peter. Lorraine was a corporate travel agent, a career she chose for the benefits. Lorraine liked to fly in planes and stay in complimentary hotel rooms. Peter was one of her clients, a middleman who arranged jaunts for German tourists to places like Niagara Falls and Busch Gardens. Peter was also a German, and Lorraine referred to him as "that pain-in-the-butt Kraut who always wants discount rates and special favors." Often Lorraine responded to his requests by saying, "Hey, remember who won the war." Yet, one day she called me up and said, "Would you believe I've fallen in love with that painin- the-butt Kraut?"
Lorraine and Peter went mad for each other, but as Goethe once said, "The Germans are trouble to themselves and everybody else." This romance came with predicaments. Peter's stint in New York was temporary. He could, at any time, be transferred to some other country. He prayed it would not be Romania, where he was last, or anywhere in Africa because he had a fear of snakes. Another stone to trip them up along the path to bliss was the cross-eyed girl in the fox fur coat. Although he was not legally married to her, she and Peter had been living together for the past seventeen years. Their families were old friends residing in the same German gingerbread village, and that cheap-o tour company Peter worked for shipped them off to foreign lands, as if they were married, together.
Lorraine, hailing from south of the Mason-Dixon Line, would think about such things tomorrow. For now, she was in love, and she told me -- although she never used such a word -- that she and Peter were soul mates. "Southerners and Germans are one and the same," she said. "Both set out to enslave other peoples. We lost the wars we started. As a group, we're stupid as shit. And no matter where we go to, we have a strong attachment to our own soil, our land."
I, a Jewess, didn't know from such things. My people jumped like fleas from one place to another, never allowed to stay put long enough to form an attachment to the neighborhood. Even later, when history was kinder to my families, offering us haven in America, we moved a lot, upwardly mobile, until we wound up in a brand-new house, built just for us, in a suburb freshly developed. Raised up in one clip, it wasn't the sort of house that harbored ghosts. It had no past, no roots. Rather, one day we were there, and the next day we could be gone without a trace. My house could've been in the town that Hitler built for the Jews.
Lorraine tried to bake a Flammkuchen but didn't have the knack, and Peter couldn't develop a taste for peanut butter pie. But still, love flourished because, Lorraine explained, "The cross-eyed girl flatly refuses to give him a start-to-finish blow job. She won't swallow. Why do you think that is?" Lorraine asked me.
How could I possibly understand a people who consider swallowing a gob of jizz to be filthy, but found it conscionably clean to wash up with soap made from Jews, Gypsies, and priests? I shrugged, and Lorraine guessed, "It's one of those German peculiarities, isn't it?"
WILLKOMMEN: 198586
Reagan Honored SS Dead at Bitburg/
Peter Transferred Back to Frankfurt
Lorraine and Peter wrote long letters to each other. Lorraine lamented that his English was slipping fast. "Sniks, he writes," she told me. "He wrote that at least there are not sniks in Frankfurt. He meant snakes."
At work, Lorraine spent most of her days trying to finagle free airfare to Frankfurt. In December of 1986 she scored a pair of tickets from Lufthansa, and so I went with her to Germany.
While Peter and Lorraine made up for lost time in our freebie room at the Intercontinental Hotel, I went sightseeing. I did not go to museums and cathedrals. Rather, I went sight-seeing for Nazis. I sat around cafés clocking anyone old enough to have been one and tried to guess in which bit of nastiness they partook. Later, after Peter returned home to the cross-eyed girl, Lorraine and I went out for dinner. "Like that one there," I said, pointing to a table across from ours, indicating an old woman wearing one of those queer Tyrolean hats. "She either worked at a camp sorting clothes, pocketing whatever she could, or else she indoctrinated children, gathering them around her to read them that version of 'Hansel and Gretel' where the Jew tries to bake the little German children into matzo."
Lorraine nodded and remarked, "And where is the justice in this world that she sits here now eating that sausage like nothing ever happened?"
THE FOLLOWING DAY : 1986
Giving You a Number and Taking Away Your Name
Even after getting trapped on the Geisenerring, driving around and around it as if it were a maypole, as if there were no exit, and then having to stop for gas at the last-chance-for- gas station where the attendant stank from stale beer and looked like a serial killer, we managed to reach the border before nightfall ...
Continues...
Excerpted from History on a Personal Note by Kirshenbaum, Binnie Excerpted by permission.
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