The Family Morfawitz


 
 
 
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 books by daniel h. turtel
 Greetings from Asbury Park
 The Family Morfawitz
 
 
 
 
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 Copyright © 2023 by Daniel TurtelE-book published in 2023 by Blackstone PublishingCover design by Luis Alejandro Cruz CastilloAll rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidentaland not intended by the author.Trade e-book ISBN 979-8-200-70515-3Library e-book ISBN 979-8-200-70514-6Fiction / SagasBlackstone Publishing31 Mistletoe Rd.Ashland, OR 97520www.BlackstonePublishing.com
 
 
 In loving memory of Harry Spiera
 
 
 
 Book ICreation
 My soul would sing of metamorphoses.
 But since, o gods, you were the source of these
 bodies becoming other bodies, breathe
 your breath into my book of changes: may
 the song I sing be seamless as its way
 weaves from the world’s beginning to our day . . .
 Ovid, Metamorphoses i
 
 
 
 I The Family Morfawitz
 Hersh has changed our family’s origin story into a series of bad jokes, anachronistic jabs so lewd they cannot be told outside the confines of a family home; after all, we are not alien to media scrutiny. Fortunately for him, our weekly Sabbath dinner provides an ample stage for his humor, and his failing memory means these recitals are something of a guarantee.
 An element of clockwork is at play as the more closely allied members of our family gather each Friday in one of the ten family floors atop the Tower Morfawitz. Hersh insists that we are crammed, but that is far from the truth. Only when some of the more remote clan join us on High Holidays are we forced to make use of anything but the grand dining rooms themselves. On such occasions, makeshift tables are set up in the entry halls, ostensibly for the children to sit at, but—before the prayers are through—we have inevitably segregated along party lines. Like eats with like. Our walls are thick, and each time the service door swings open, a silence falls on either room.
 In any case, Hersh’s insistence that some of the apartments are less comfortable than others is absurd, for we occupy the top ten floors, and the apartment layouts—with the exception of Zev and Hadassah’s penthouse—are exactly the same.
 Zev is sick and ailing upstairs, and Hersh has slowly encroached on the coveted seat at the head of the table, just falling short of sitting in the stately, empty chair. If it were possible to make jokes about Hadassah, somebody might have suggested that Hersh was only trying to put as much distance as possible between himself and her seat at the opposite head. In private, I have often been asked how I can stand to sit so close to her throne and how I keep myself from freezing over. Hersh himself has inquired how it is that I spend so much time with our matriarch, whether I’m planning a coup, ha ha, and wonders that I don’t doze off at her constant retelling of our family’s recent past.
 “I hope,” he tells me, “that you’re writing it down. She won’t be around forever . . .”
 But it isn’t clear to me that he really believes that, or that anyone really expects the old woman to die. He says such things only in private. Even Hersh has his limits, broad as they are; granted, where these limits might be is not always so clear when his jokes of the Old World begin:
 “Once upon a time, your great-grandfather Uri was driving his three daughters home from the market in a wagon, when they were set upon by a group of Cossacks. ‘Quickly,’ he says to them. ‘Hide everything you can. Take these precious jewels and hide them in your knishes, in your schmundies.’” (He has the habit of using multiple Yiddish words as a means of conveying his mastery of the old tongue’s vernacular; it does not go unnoticed that his vocabulary is limited to anatomy.) “They do as he says, and the Cossacks come and steal everything but the clothes off the family’s backs. Watching his wagons be driven away by his own donkeys is too much for Uri, and he collapses in the dirt. ‘Get up, Papa,’ say the girls. ‘It could be so much worse. We’ve still got the jewels . . . Come now, what’s wrong?’ To which Uri replies, ‘If only your mother was here, we could have saved the wagon, too!’”
 His next routine features once again this infamously large wife of Uri’s. Gallina was her name, and she was, by all accounts, a physically tremendous woman. Her girth is the star of a few of his jokes:
 “On the night that your ancestors left Russia, the Cossacks come to do their looting and their pillaging. They pull the family out into the yard by the hair on their heads, torch the house, and then take their turns raping the daughters. Finally, the lead pogrommer-in-charge, the big pischer, shoves his own unsullied but very attractive son into the mix and points at Gallina. But the beautiful blonde boy—bless him—refuses. ‘But it’s a pogrom,’ says his father. ‘A pogrom is a pogrom.’ The boy nods but defends: ‘I’m all for the pillaging and looting, Father,’ he says. ‘I like to burn down a synagogue as good as the next. And the young girls, I understand. Give me one of them. But is it really necessary to have the mothers, too? And in front of their husbands and children?’ By this point, the flames of the house have offered up sufficient light to illuminate the youth’s superlatively beautiful face, and Gallina stands up and