Heartland

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It all began in the summer of 1976 when I won the Blue Ribbon at Elmira County’s Junior Progymnasmata with “Benbassa,” an inadvertently anti-Semitic fable. In the first of a long series of obfuscations about my person, I pretended to be fifteen to qualify for the contest, when I was just eleven years, seven months, three days and seventeen hours old. At the time I composed “Benbassa,” I didn’t know any Jews, unless one counted the sweltering Rafael Cohen, which no one did, including him. That didn’t keep me from declaiming about The Jew: then, as now, I thought that ignorance about a subject is a rhetorician’s ideal state, an inoculation against false certainties. These I confined to the quickly dispatched, clichéd tale: the miserly moneylender Benbassa is stabbed to death in a dark alley of Constantinople’s Galata by one of his desperate debtors who steals his gold; the murderer, who does not know that the man he has killed is Benbassa, then rushes to the miser’s home to repay his debt. (There was a great deal of gore and mistaken identities in my youthful stories.) The fable’s heuristic meat, however, was Benbassa’s duplicitous essence and his transcendent love of gold for gold’s sake. Benbassa, the spiritual voluptuary, the absolute un-Elmiran alien, was me and I was him, as I scribbled on the kitchen table while my parents gurgled discreetly in their bedroom like oversexed carps in a stagnant pond.

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