Rudman skillfully explores his own life and past.
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry (1995)
Mark Rudman – poet, essayist, translator, and teacher – has consistently pursued questions of human relationship and identity, and in Rider he takes the poetry of autobiography and confessional to a new plane. In a polyphonic narrative that combines verse with lyrical prose and often humorous dialogue, Rudman examines his own coming-of-age through the lens of his relationships with his grandfather, father, step-father, and son. These memories emerge against the background of a family history anchored in the traditions of Judaism and the culture of the diaspora.
Rudman skillfully explores his own life and past.
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry (1995)
Mark Rudman – poet, essayist, translator, and teacher – has consistently pursued questions of human relationship and identity, and in Rider he takes the poetry of autobiography and confessional to a new plane. In a polyphonic narrative that combines verse with lyrical prose and often humorous dialogue, Rudman examines his own coming-of-age through the lens of his relationships with his grandfather, father, step-father, and son. These memories emerge against the background of a family history anchored in the traditions of Judaism and the culture of the diaspora.
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Overview
Rudman skillfully explores his own life and past.
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry (1995)
Mark Rudman – poet, essayist, translator, and teacher – has consistently pursued questions of human relationship and identity, and in Rider he takes the poetry of autobiography and confessional to a new plane. In a polyphonic narrative that combines verse with lyrical prose and often humorous dialogue, Rudman examines his own coming-of-age through the lens of his relationships with his grandfather, father, step-father, and son. These memories emerge against the background of a family history anchored in the traditions of Judaism and the culture of the diaspora.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780819572189 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wesleyan University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/13/2022 |
| Series: | Wesleyan Poetry Series |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 122 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
1
Got a letter yesterday from a synagogue on the East Side
asking for money to keep my father's name alive. I
balked. And would explain (not justify). Wanted to walk into the synagogue across
the street for a few minutes just to get a taste. Needed tickets. Father always had tickets for high holy days too
(never set foot in a temple on any other day). What
am I getting at? I lived with a Rabbi between the ages of six and fifteen, he was my mother's husband. We were very tight.
So you never had to buy a ticket because you were the Rabbi's stepson?
No. First, we never used that word "step." Second — and this is what I was getting at — there were no tickets.
Yes, it was assumed that temple members paid dues but anyone who could not afford these dues was still welcome, heartily, not half-heartedly welcome.
Hey, you lived in a lot of places, are you sure?
I'm sure. It's the kind of thing one remembers.
There are a lot of advantages to living in the boonies.
I look at it another way. The right to pray.
I don't think you're talking about tickets. You didn't really want to go. A friend offered you tickets and you hesitated ...
And finally said no.
I had to think about "the little Rabbi" and I didn't want to do it in the presence of another Rabbi.
I didn't call him the "little Rabbi" when I was a little boy. It wasn't that he was so short (5' 9? on stilts) but that he was frail. My mother and I used to elbow each other when he went to lift the Torah out of the Ark: he must have had help from God.
A Mormon friend in Salt Lake City called him The Brain. First, (he broke down his arguments point by point, often, in later years, by pressing his right thumb against the fingertips on his left hand — a habit that drove me mad) because he was the smartest man he'd come across. (By "smartest" I think my friend meant he used words that hadn't migrated to those latitudes — that valley Brigham Young — standing up in his stirrups — called "the place.")
Second, because he had this enormous head, and forehead, and nose, which dwarfed his body, his stick-thin arms and legs. He was the most bodiless creature I've ever known.
That may have helped keep him alive for over five years after he had his stomach removed.
I think his body discovered heretofore unknown nutrients in bourbon.
I can't separate his charm — what was enchanting about him — from his size. And the hugeness of his forehead, the jut of his nose, his jug ears.
He never imposed God on me. I was expected to go to temple most of the time but — I who could not stomach school — liked it. He was on such intimate terms with God, had thought so deeply about scripture, made the stories so compelling. ... And he looked so holy in his robes.
This immense head suspended over the pulpit.
(The anonymous Caxinua poem of the moon's creation: "You going to the sky, head?")
There's more. The small communities we lived in in those first years together were welcoming. It meant something more to be a Jew in small towns in Illinois (in Chicago Heights and Kankakee) where there were, at best, a few hundred out of ... 20,000. ...
Mourning for him has been difficult. Mourning for my real father took so much out of me. ... (That phrase always makes me bristle.) And then the type of cancer he had, combined with his frailty, made me think of him, in those last few years, in an almost post-mortem way. Every meeting had that feel of "the last" meeting and it began to get to me.
Can you be more specific?
It began to get to me.
I wanted him to live or die, not hover between two worlds — as if this hovering weren't our condition.
And he asked so many questions. He trafficked in confidences.
* * *
This is not the time for me to tell you what happened to him in his worldly life in later years. This is not
a portrait of my torment and ambivalence about
the man apart from being
great to me in many ways when I was a little boy
(I came to question too much: seeing him (as an adult) lavish attention on young children I began to wonder just how specific his love for me was — or his love for my son — whom he loved — but so did he "love" another two-year-old in his apartment complex in his last place of residence, Florence, South Carolina. He talked and talked about the affection this blond/blue eyed baby showed him, the hugs, kisses. ... He was nuts about children the way some men are about women.)
And your son, Samuel — can I call him Sam? — isn't exactly cuddle-crazy.
He doesn't cotton-up. He likes to announce how he hates hugs and kisses with an indescribable relish.
You're grateful?
Grateful implies I owed him something.
No, we shared something. We were pals, co-conspirators.
He loved children and as a child I loved him.
Tucked him into bed.
Felt responsible he was so little.
* * *
But by the time I was a teenager the drinking had taken him over so that it was as if he no longer cared. He "quit" the Rabbinate again.
* * *
What was a Rabbi's salary in the mid-fifties to the mid-sixties?
Thanks for asking. It hovered around the $10,000 mark.
That magic figure cropped up even when he left the Rabbinate and went to work for General Klein and City of Hope: he was offered $10,000 10% of whatever money he raised for City of Hope.
Even numbers. Keep it simple.
But what made that salary so galling was that his average congregant earned at least twice that, and many three, four, five, twenty times more. And then put that 10% of zero — since he was constitutionally incapable of asking anyone for money, "closing a deal," as they put it in the business — against what the actors made who funded City of Hope.
I won't do that. But I get your point.
It was a different world than the world of his childhood.
He tried to marry out of it in marrying your mother.
And look what he got into there: sturm and drang and no reward. Once again he misread the signs. He mistook the fancy address and the accumulated possessions of fifty years for money in the bank he would one day — have access to.
Are you implying something smarmy here?
No, but others have, especially, or should I say predictably, my father.
He called your grandfather a mountebank.
I liked that. But they didn't have to joust and quarrel so much.
I was intoxicated by the Biblical stories he told me as a child; not me really — religion only entered our house on the sabbath — our class at Sunday school. I loved to hear how the Jews overcame obstacles and suffering through miracles and prayer. He spoke "off the cuff," without condescension — as if he knew that children were his deepest allies in this life.
But even when he worked for General Klein in Public Relations he kept his hand in the Rabbinate. Didn't you go to Oshkosh on the weekends?
He went to preach, and pick up a few extra bucks.
Driving through Madison, he pointed out the green lawns of the university. The temperature hovered around zero. A thin aura of ice smote the glass, the grass. A few scraggly downcast students toted book-bags across the Common.
We stayed at someone's house, a calm Wisconsin couple. They had a son (daughters too, but I only saw them running up and down the stairs). We were assigned to each other and we went through the motions of playing Monopoly and Clue. Saturday afternoons we were dropped off at a movie theater where we watched terrible B westerns in a black and white like the five o'clock shadows of Steve McNally and Rory Calhoun.
No dialogue, just shouts and imprecations. All the heroes seemed to do was mount and dismount. No palominos or pinto ponies, just interchangeable bays. Ambush, dry gulch, bushwack — each held at the same passage between the rocks.
In Oshkosh I first felt boredom as a weight. I longed for that sweet shiver of solitude in my basement pup tent, the sheer rustle of absence, of the distance shimmering and fading, not the blank slate of the town in the too bright afternoon sun. The sun, a subtle, serpentine irony in the flux, just heightened the glare off the ice. Our hosts, silvery, benign, reined-in, kept gestures to a minimum. There were no febrile histrionics. The shag rug had tendrils that grasped the cold. I knew I could never explode in Oshkosh. They wouldn't understand. They'd think something was wrong. But this is what really happened in Oshkosh: I sensed clues and signs, keys to the mystery, scattered everywhere, each one radiant and strange, yet by itself impoverished. In Oshkosh I felt my brain begin to curl around an idea, to comprehend the seizure.
* * *
But you never observe holidays.
One December I was startled, like some space creature, to look up and see the bodies in the window huddled around the menorahs, the quiet moment ripped out of time, the blind avenue become human for a moment, out of a time yet in time; only one candle lit the first night, the other branches of the menorah scarcely visible if visible at all behind these gray windows in the winter dusk; the story no more than an image of persistence against the odds; the miraculous oil burning beyond its energy quotient....
So oil was an issue even then?
That's what the little Rabbi offered in his sermons:
contemporary takes on ancient themes.
Let's go back. You were walking in the winter dusk. You looked up and felt alone: those others still had rituals, like a balm.
To speak of balm is to speak of wounds. These followers of Mammon claim the right to pray; to be heard by a higher order.
You with your "days of the spirit" have no hope that anyone might hear.
But that's another matter. I was talking about lights in windows at nightfall, at that precise moment when something in your brain clicks and knows it's dark (when it wasn't a moment ago), and the bodies outlined. It is an image of what cannot be possessed, what can never be taken for granted, or taken at all.
* * *
You were a child and children were his allies.
With his congregants, he played cards.
I don't think he ever lost a hand at rummy.
Now you're exaggerating.
Yeah. But he always always always always
won,
because "the brain" remembered every card that flashed by.
And yet there wasn't a trace of competitiveness in his prowess. Things came so easily to him, a Rabbi at twenty, utterly bored with what had been his vocation at forty, ready to do anything, go into Public Relations,
work for the corrupt General
("what, a Jewish General"?) Klein, who cashed in his "successful military career"
for a Public Relations firm in Chicago
"we specialize in
trust" (Klein, later tied to the doomed Kerner administration, was not known to be a grafter when Sidney took the job).
* * *
I remember my visits to General Klein's office: the grayness and funereal air and squeaky wooden desk chairs; the embossed citations, plaques on the walls, the golden awards. Though in awe of the General's regalia, I was also suspicious about the nature of "Public Relations." It sounded specious, intangible, unnecessary, a cloak of busyness to escape real work.
A Jewish General! I imagined him in a tank in the desert but somehow his pudgy face didn't fit the image. And yet Julius Klein, being a General, was up there with Hank Greenberg in the pantheon of Jewish Ubermenschen. I also didn't understand how Sidney could trade what seemed to me his congenial and social job for this lonely, isolated office with its impressively antlered hat rack and daunting phones. There was such an intimidating air of importance in these offices — yet what were they doing that was necessary for the public good? I was very proud of Sidney around the bigwigs: this was man's work.
I couldn't put the two together, a General and Public Relations. True, even the Korean war had receded, but how could a general consign himself to a desk for life?
I was granted an audience with General Klein around the time of my birthday. He had a drawerful of glossy photos. He pulled one out and signed it. I put on my "awe" face for Sidney's sake, and peeped —"Thanks General Klein" unable to short circuit the emphasis on his title. "Thanks," Sidney echoed nasally, and ushered me out.
"What would you like to do now?"
"Buy some soldiers."
* * *
We entered the toy department at Marshall Fields: there I saw a thousand antidotes to loneliness, a way to get through endless solitary hours no matter what else happened. Sidney was big-hearted in many ways. He could be generous with time. He could be warm, which is why children crawled all over him at Sunday School, pulling off his glasses (how could he have sacrified that for this?). But money made him crazy, penny pinching in ways that were convenient to him. Cigars and liquor were necessities. Anything I desired was worthy of serious interrogation. Why do you want it, what for, do you need it, why does it have to be this brand and not that one? Maybe he thought that as a step-father he should go only so far. But the $40 a week my father sent as child-support should have gone a long way to maintaining a child in the late fifties.
He didn't like the idea of soldiers, but after the visit to General Klein's I had him over a barrel. I would have soldiers then. Of course I already had a million generic soldiers, whose likeness I saw right away in the toy section — green men massed together, piled in bins — you could get a hundred for $.99. "Here," he said, taking advantage of the opportunity to be done with this expedition as soon as possible, "soldiers. A hundred. That'll keep you busy." I flushed. "No," I said, "I want these." I grabbed a box with a see-through cellophane window from an adjacent table: these men were silver; they had definition; they were three times the size of the generic men; there was one of each type (officer, bazooka wielder, belly-crawling rifleman); they wouldn't fall down when a train went past in the railroad yard below my window. "Why should I buy twelve soldiers for $3.98 instead of one hundred soldiers for $.99?" He had the bag and made a gesture to leave. I broke down. It was my birthday. I wanted a present, a testimony of his love for me. (What, another test? Another test? Don't you ever tire ... ?) I could not get through to him; I couldn't even get his attention. This was torture for him. He looked overheated too in his Fedora and heavy tweed overcoat and cranberry cashmere scarf. "I am not going to spend three dollars and ninety eight cents on twelve soldiers and that's final. Have these or nothing." Exact amounts of money, dollars and cents, were given the same vocal emphasis as the names of his favorite prophets when he stood on the pulpit. Venom coursed through me: if I'd been a snake I would have hissed. The simplest litany imaginable was running through my head: "I just want you to buy this for me because it's what I want and it's my birthday."
I could hear it coming: the lecture about the Rockefeller children's small allowances.
They worked so hard not to spoil me.
But he did take you to Marshall Fields and not some cut-rate —
He and my mother had an almost religious belief in the power of brand names.
I concede that one. — And one of your worst moments with them was when you met for dinner near the airport when they were coming back from a tour of Scandanavia, when Sidney, working hard to convince you how wonderful their trip was, listed every country and major city they visited, a string of nouns unaccompanied by the slightest change of inflection.
He just droned on. Pressing thumb-finger of right hand to each successive finger of left hand to mark each passing country with its name.
Can you go a little deeper here?
All right. I sensed that he was in a rage — no trace of calmness; no love in his voice any more ... as if going through the motions of having had a good time ( — he'd paid for it —) had thrown an abyss at his feet which he could neither look at nor ignore.
There was something formless about his suffering — this man who in his first alert hour after he had his stomach removed announced that if he "had to do it again" he wouldn't be "a Rabbi in a thousand years."
Is there ever an end to mourning work?
Only the morning light assuages it.
What are you doing now?
Sitting at a white iron table at Cafe 112
on 112th St and Broadway at 9:15 (a.m.),
the green letters and intersecting circles of a billboard on a wall above a garage on the east side of 113th St
simply
KOOL
it says
and the G and the A and the R are effaced so that the garage sign
reads
A
G
E
and the P on the PARK sign is blotted out by a tree so it reads
A
R
K D. H. Lawrence in the TLS anticipates my next thought: "The things one cares about are all invisible, like seeds in the ground in winter. But one has to attend to the things one only half cares about. And so life passes away."
An attractive nun takes a seat on another white chair: the threat of her chastity arouses me.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Rider"
by .
Copyright © 1994 Mark Rudman.
Excerpted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
What People are Saying About This
"A new departure in autobiographically confessional poetry . . . Relationships and characterizations are unfolded with brilliant boldness. It is striking the way this work evolves into a moving elegy for the stepfather, a rabbi manque, in this brave, very American work."