that their descendants would dutifully record and trumpet with oracular verve. A ham at the age of three or four, I’d memorized several ancestral precepts. I recited them at will when we had company. My parents beamed with pride. When a child doesn’t quite understand adults, he apes them:
The young want to add wings to the chariot of time; the old want to remove its wheels.
One is more often unjust through carelessness than bad faith.
Life is absurd; only death is logical.
Happy is he who doesn’t take himself seriously.
Politics is the art of exploiting events for the benefit of the dominant class while persuading the populace that they’re profiting from their leaders’ intrigues.
When two people agree on anything, one of them is tired, in a hurry or confused.
Coined by my father, two axioms would guide the rest of my days:
You were given life; now fashion yourself.
When you talk about nothing, you say too much.
*
I was eighteen when I landed in America, alone, with the fifty dollars my mother had sewn in the lining of my overcoat. The avatar of Babeuf, the 18th century French revolutionary agitator and journalist, would soon replace Sacha Guitry, the early 20th century playwright and ham actor of my childhood. The iron was hot; it was time to strike it.
*
My ancestors, natives of Spain, the Guzmán (a German surname they had the wisdom to modify once settled in Burgos), almost certainly also had the prudence to convert to Christianity -- a precaution they might not have taken a century earlier. Indeed, under the enlightened rule of King Alfonso X “the Learned,” Jews occupied positions of influence and privilege at the court. Alfonso surrounded himself with Jewish doctors, diplomats, scribes, astrologers, tax collectors and bankers. A major Jewish cultural and commercial center since the 11th century, Burgos had already suffered the defection of Solomon Halevy, later re-christened Paul of Burgos. In 1390, Halevy, the son of a rabbi, abjured Moses, kneeled before Christ, became bishop of Cartagena, then archbishop of Burgos, and spent the next forty-five years orchestrating savage pogroms against his fellow Jews. He dispossessed and exiled those he couldn’t convert by force. Others paid with their lives. According to historian Jeremy Cohen, the century marked a disastrous abandonment of Augustinian tolerance and the onset of modern anti-Semitism.
Halevy had an able and zealous confederate, Vincent Ferrer, a Dominican friar venerated as a saint by the Catholic Church. Ferrer engineered the mass conversion of Jews, more often by questionable means. He made their lives so miserable that they surrendered their synagogues and “dedicated” them to the Church. One of his early converts was Solomon Halevy himself. Anti-Semitism spread in Spain under Ferrer who fomented violence in towns where Jews lived. He promulgated various anti-Jewish laws banning Jews from trading with Christians, prohibiting them from changing residence and, so they would stand out, from cutting their hair or trimming their beards. In 1391, he preached to mobs whose riots led to the transformation of the synagogue in Toledo into the Santa Maria la Blanca Church.
The defection of the Guzmán, a widespread practice among Jewish subjects of their “very Catholic” majesties, Ferdinand and Isabel, and despite the minor rewards and privileges it brought, would elicit -- posterity would claim -- our most memorable epigram:
Conversion is a despicable act of disloyalty only Jews are apt to commit.
Despite its cynicism and distinctive Guzmán cachet, this imputation may be apocryphal but it lingered for many years in popular lore. The accusation is also specious: Moors fared no better during and after the “Reconquista” and most were coerced to forsake Allah the Compassionate and genuflect before his cantankerous and vengeful Judeo-Christian twin. Halevy’s more notorious copycats would include Spain’s Grand Inquisitor, Tomás de Torquemada, the descendant of converted Jews. The apostasy of the late Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger (né Aaron), the archbishop of Paris from 1981 to 2005], would lend a certain legitimacy to the incendiary saying my ancestors devised and circulated well into the 20th century. Unlike the others, Lustiger, a vocal opponent of anti-Semitism who considered himself a Jew until the end of his life, evoked hesitant sympathy: “Poor man, he’s misguided but not unlikable.”
The Guzmán would expiate their impiety (and ditch the Castilian lisp) soon after their expulsion from Spain. They trekked to Worms, in Germany’s Palatinate, dropped the z from their Iberian surname and restored the virile t of their forebears. The men regrew their beards and side curls, changed from doublets and hose to kaftans and fur hats, and the women took ritual baths, groused and gossiped, this time in Yiddish or Ladino.
Known in Medieval Hebrew as Vermayza, Worms was an important Jewish center whose origins go back to the 10th century. The first synagogue was erected in 1034. In 1096, 800 Jews were murdered by Crusaders and the local rabble. The Jewish Cemetery, dating back to the 11th century, is believed to be the oldest in Europe. The Rashi Synagogue, which dates back to 1175 and was lovingly rebuilt after its desecration on Kristallnacht in 1938, is the oldest in Germany. Worms today has a very small Jewish population and any semblance of an established Jewish community can only be found in the buildings of the Jewish Quarter which were renovated in the 1970s and 1980s and now serve as an outdoor museum.
In 2010 the synagogue was fire-bombed. Eight corners of the edifice were set ablaze and a Molotov cocktail was tossed through a window for good measure.
Some say that if you scratch your family tree you’ll find strands of Jewish DNA in the bark, the sap, the leaves, the fruits. And if you dare dig down to the roots, you might discover generations of scorned Maranos (Jewish converts to Christianity) or, earlier yet, reviled Khazars (converts to Judaism). We're very popular that way.
*
Soon enough, wanderlust still coursing through their veins, my clan pulled up stakes and set out for Poland, Ukraine, Russia and Romania where my parents were born. It’s in Romania, where I spent four years as a child that I discovered the mind-bending quirkiness of paradox. I would long revel in its incendiary potential.
Cynicism is honesty with a grudge.
A circle fancies itself sexier than a square; a trapezoid thinks it’s nimbler than a triangle.
An upright mind, like vertical surfaces, gathers less dust.
Common sense is more Cartesian than logic -- and less corruptible.
Memorizing incongruities and reciting them as Allied bombs rained on Bucharest and, later, as Fascist Romania turned overnight into a communist state would prove useful to the boy of seven I was at the time.
*
I often imagine my ancestors gathered around a large table festooned with plates of sliced stuffed derma and sizzling latkes, saucers brimming with gefilte fish, kishka and vine leaves filled with rice, large platters of fried mamaliga squares daubed with sour cream and sprinkled with goat cheese, and tureens overflowing with piping hot cholent, an indescribable but savory mishmash of potatoes, barley, beans, carrots, garlic, mushrooms and fried onions. They are no doubt downing fermented cider, schnapps and plum brandy. At Purim, they scoff hammentashen, bite-size raspberry, apricot, and prune tartlets shaped like the ears of the dastardly Persian vizier Haman, the appendages by which, so legend says, he was hanged to avenge his genocidal plot against the Jews.
Jews celebrate victory or flight from persecution by eating. They mourn catastrophe and death and expiate sin with a fast. Our history is filled with feasts, abstinence and famine. Every calamity is seen as divine retribution, God’s payback for the debauchery and impiety of his people. No disaster, no torment, however inscrutable and cruel is deemed