Boogaloo On 2nd Avenue by Mark Kurlansky Read Free Book Online Page A

buttered flesh. Buttered sex. He quickly moved down the street. After that he would sometimes see her and feel so overcome with lust that he thought it showed. He would never go to the Edelweiss with his wife for fear she would see his yearning.
    As Nathan entered his apartment on this fated Friday, his destiny had already been set in motion. He had planned to talk to Sonia about Ira Katz and his offer, but when Sonia told him that his mother had asked him to pick up the strudel, panic erased all thoughts of Copy Katz. Fearing his wife would want to come with him, and having already acquired the too quick false voice of an adulterer, he agreed and, taking Sarah with him for protection, mounted her on his shoulders.
    She liked riding up there. She liked playing with his hair, and he liked it, too—tiny fingers stroking, and curling, and gathering up his hair. But now he could feel her recalcitrance above his shoulders. She was not playing with his hair, was not happy They rode to First Avenue, avoiding Sixth Street, where aging men were always in search of Jewish men for their Friday night minyan—one of the things his small daughter on his shoulder could shield him from.
    On Tenth Street the pushers, still discussing the remains of Eli Rabbinowitz, knew to avoid Nathan and his daughter. There was only that fat little boy—a sturdily built little cube of a boy with black curly hair. He reminded Nathan of Fat Finkelstein, who was the meanest kid when he went to school. Finkelstein was the only boy in Nathan's class who had not successfully avoided the draft. He went to Vietnam, and it was an unverified rumor that Fat Finkelstein had died in a place called Khe Sanh. Nathan kept a horror of that name Khe Sanh, the cruel place that had finally given Fat Finkelstein much more than he deserved.
    Now Nathan recognized that this boy was the ill-fated Fat Finkelstein of his generation. It was his belief that, like a Talmudic legend, every generation had its mean but luckless Fat Finkelstein.
    The chubby eight-year-old looked up at Sarah and stuck out his tongue. He always did this, trying to catch her at a moment when she was looking and Nathan wasn't. On cue, Sarah began crying. He was a mean kid, but Nathan had to be sympathetic because the Fat Finkel-steins are all fated to meet a bad end. Nathan had tried to convince Sarah that the boy stuck his tongue out only because she cried and that if she wouldn't cry, it would ruin it for him. But it always made her cry. The Fat Finkelstein of his generation thought that he might have made a mistake in timing. Nathan might have seen him. He waddled up the stoop of his brownstone as fast as he could hoist his pudgy cubic body and then hid in the entrance to his building. The door remained opened a crack, through which he still watched.
    Nathan took Sarah off his shoulders, but she was inconsolable. This was about more than the Fat Finkelstein of her generation. Finally she told him, still sobbing, "They're going to Punim County!"
    "Who is?" asked Nathan, struggling not to laugh because punim is Yiddish for "face," and the county was named Putnam.
    "My best friend, Maya, is going to Punim County."
    "Punim County," Nathan repeated, but Sarah saw nothing funny. Her best friend was hardly ever going to be around this summer.
    "And Daddy," she added pointedly, "she is taking swimming lessons."
    Swimming lessons. There, she was asking again. The Gemorah, the midrash, somewhere in the Talmud, the obligations of a Jewish father are listed. Teaching the Torah, teaching a craft, finding a mate. And one is to teach the child to swim "because his life may depend on it." Nathan asked Rabbi Litvak to explain the significance of learning swimming. "It refers to the Egyptians who drowned when the sea parted. Why? We are our enemies and we must be ready This raises the questions How can we be our enemy? and Ready for what? It is interesting that in most languages both the enemy and the enemy's enemy are