From the Scrotum to God
From the Scrotum To God
Baghdad to Brooklyn, rabbinic school to bacon juice.
It takes a lot to mess up a book about growing up in a Syrian Jewish family in Brooklyn. I mean, you've got the exoticness, the intellectual feel and the hint of ancient history, all with a whiff of the sandy Middle East. But Jack Marshall's memoir doesn't live up to its enticing title.
Marshall's narrative begins with an account of his Syrian Jewish mother's freaked-out response upon seeing a fat man in a red suit-their landlord dressed as Santa-on their fire escape. She lets loose a stream of Arabic invectives that "originate from deep in the throat, with hawking, gargling, choking vocables, meant to burn their fiery way through the offender's genetic makeup via his inherited rectum all the way back to his ancestors, leaving for their descendants a lineage of scorched waste."
This memorable account of Arabic cussing is restated later in a section about languages: "[A] curse in Arabic emits a jet like a flamethrower burning through the scrotum's genetic channel, back through time, through parents, ancestors, origin, and God." Ouch.
Striking as this is, it's not clear why it is repeated twice. In the course of the book, I encountered many such unexplained duplicates. After a while, I wondered whether Marshall had accidentally turned in an early draft to the publisher.
The book is broken up into numbered chapters, each of which contains titled sections describing experiences or individuals that Marshall knew in his childhood or adolescence. Passages like "Seymour Abadi: 'What's a Rabbi's Son Like You Doing?'" and "The night I was introduced to Sigmund Freud" give us a sense of the characters that Marshall was exposed to in his insular community in mid-century New York, and of the experiences and revelations that brought him from boyhood to manhood. Unfortunately, the text doesn't move smoothly from one theme to the next. It feels, again, like a first draft-a compilation of thoughts, ideas, memories and writing styles. At some points, Marshall inserts quotes from his father's letters, and his brother's emails, and later on sections of his own or his idols' poetry-but none of it with consistency.
In addition, Marshall's strong abilities as a poet seem only to hinder his efforts as an autobiographer, as his finely crafted lyrical phrases unintentionally break up the narrative. Some of these sentences are quite beautiful-introducing his mother, he tells us, "Her name in English was Grace, in Arabic, Garaz. I used to hear as a boy and to this day still prefer hearing it that way: two warm a's glowing apple-red between consonants, with z's final flash." Though this is a lovely-and alluringly Arabic-description, it is distracting when reading a work of prose to be led so far from the story at hand.
The oddest facet of this work, though, is Marshall's relationship with Judaism. Even he notes that when he discusses religion, he takes on a passionate, angry and bitter tone that he otherwise doesn't have. He is mad at orthodoxy and at the traditional faith that he feels denies science and reason.
His memories of the Magen David Yeshiva that he attended don't evince much nostalgia. "If our attention strayed and we lost track of the text being droned and slurred in rapid mumbling monotone by successive readers, we'd suddenly get smacked on the head or on the knuckles with a stick by the rabbi." But, he adds in one of the details of Syrian Jewish life that lighten up the book, "there was another reward: for us kids who weren't as yet privy to the caffeine habit, ah'wae was a secret weapon in the arsenal of fragrance our rabbis used?a dollop of finely ground Turkish coffee mixed with powdered sugar spooned into your open palm when you gave a correct answer."
The young Marshall, taken with the devout life, applied and was accepted at a rabbinical academy. But he later dropped out, relishing the juices of bacon strips and, as far as the reader can tell, cutting himself off from religious observance for good. In one of the last get-togethers with his siblings before his sister succumbed to cancer, he tells us, "I couldn't help myself. My backed-up anger at Renee's condition boiled up and spilled over in a crude summary: 'All that crap about a merciful God. Where do you see God caring? Why must we ask his forgiveness? Why must we be more perfect than he is?'"
We never hear an answer-but we know that for Marshall, it was important to get the question off his chest. Very important for him, no doubt-for the reader, not so much. n
From Baghdad to BrooklynBy Jack MarshallCoffee House Press, 260 pages, $16