Jacob Edelstein stumbles upon a snapshot of Shira Horowitz and Gus, her war-traumatized father, taken in Griffith Park seventy years ago and feels a stab of pain in his gut as he slips back into that bittersweet past when he spent his summer mornings stuffing the latest editions of the Examiner and Herald Express, along with the current issues of Look and Life, into the racks at Sonny Roth’s southwest L.A. newsstand. Once again, he watches Gus Horowitz limp into view. He will smoke his pipe, study a Racing Form, and place a bet with the bookie fronting as a hockshop proprietor nearby. And once again, Gus will describe to Jacob in gut-wrenching detail the horrors he endured in the camp. 

*

Gus eases himself onto an orange crate, massages his left knee, then fishes out his pipe and tobacco pouch from his Dodgers’ jacket that looks to be two sizes too big for him. “Where’s Sonny?”

“He’s getting us coffee and donuts like he always does.”

Gus gazes intently at him. “Tell me your name again?”

“Jake.”

“Jake . . . as in Jacob. Jake what?” he growls.  “You were born with only one name?”

He takes a deep breath. “Edelstein.”

Gus points to the rack containing the Racing Forms and Jacob tosses one to him. “Not comfortable telling people your last name, I see,” he grumbles, lighting his pipe with shaking fingers. 

Jake’s gut tightens. “I want to change it, Gus. I’m sick of the smirking, the pigeonholing.”

“Score another win for the antisemites!” Gus slaps his Racing Form. “I feel lucky this morning, Edelstein.” 

“It’s time you got lucky, Gus. It’s really Gustav, right? As long as we’re on the subject of names?”

“Never call me Gustav!” Gus’s spittle flies.

“Why not?”

“Why not, he asks. When a Gestapo pig began beating up my father for asking him a simple question, Father cried out ‘Gustav!’ I just stood there like a disgusting coward.” He sets his pipe aside, whips out a handkerchief, and blows his nose. “Talk about being ashamed.”

A car pulls up and honks. Shit! If Sonny could see how inattentive he has been. . .” He scrambles to make the sale.  

Gus looks him over when he returns. “You look undernourished, boychick. You need to put some meat on those bones.”

Jake glances down reflexively at himself and shrugs. “I eat like a pig.”

“Imagine if you can—but of course you can’t but try anyway—being so hungry that you would have risked a bullet in your head for a piece of moldy potato. You want thin? I could have showed you walking sticks.”

“Why did those Nazi bastards starve you if they wanted you for—how did you describe it— ‘slave labor’?”  

Gus’s face shakes. “You want to know their reasons?” 

Just then, Sonny Roth arrives carrying a tray containing three steaming coffees and a bag of donuts. He hands Gus a cup.  

Gus sets it aside. “So, Roth, are you hosting tonight?”

“If you insist.” Sonny tosses Jake the bag of donuts.

“Who’s insisting?” Gus looks at Jake. “Was I insisting?”

“When you ask it sounds like you’re insisting. Yeah, yeah, I’ll host for the second week in a row. Hey, kid,” Sonny slaps Jake on the back with a calloused hand, “wanna play Royal Rummy with a bunch of old farts?”

“No thanks.” He shuns social gatherings, takes after his mother that way.

Sonny cracks a grin. “Not just old farts. This old fart’s daughter is gonna be there too.”

Gus snorts. “Now he wants to play matchmaker.” 

“Listen, this kid knows how to manage things. Sells twice as many papers as the last zhlub I hired—” He glances at the stack of newspapers. “This morning appears to be an exception, though.

“Shira has enough boy problems.” 

“Don’t pay no attention to him, Jakie. Shira’s gonna want someone her age to talk to.” 

*

Jacob Edelstein, sitting in his dimly lit room with the wrinkled snapshot of Shira and Gus in his hand, recalls what it was like being at one of the Roths’ social gatherings, how Sonny’s friends and relatives regurgitated their miseries in the Warsaw and Lodz ghettoes: trading cigarettes for chunks of moldy bread or wilted turnips; seeing corpses stacked like firewood, the stench of disease and death everywhere. And interspersed with those horrors, lamentations over current woes: bunions and hemorrhoids and arthritic fingers, and of course the recurring nightmares. They’d also manage to squeeze in some carping about the game in progress: “The woman is magnetically attracted to aces”; “A million games of Royal Rummy and he still don’t know the rules;” “You cluck like a hen every time you get a good hand; don’t ever play poker!” Then later, as everyone settles into the living room for aperitifs, the focus would shift to current events: the first nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania; another Soviet satellite orbiting the earth, who knows what they’ll put up there next, H-bombs for all we know! Khrushchev slamming his shoe on the lectern and promising to bury us. “The world has become a charnel house,” Gus Horowitz shouts. “What does it matter if we’re blown to oblivion?  What kind of God lets six million Jews go up in smoke?” All the while, Shira mercilessly flirts with him, not so subtly exposing a healthy portion of thigh while arranging her skirt or leaning forward to expose some healthy cleavage. 

And then. . .

“This mensch here,” Sonny Roth announces to everyone, slapping Jake on the back, “is a go-getter. Sells ten times more papers than that last blubber ass I hired. Helps his mother out, a good sign he’ll make some lucky girl a fine husband.” He winks at Shira. “And look how tall he is.” Sonny tugs at Jacob’s arm, motioning for him to stand up. Panic shoots through him; it isn’t possible for him to stand at the moment, having dwelt a little too intensely on Shira’s legs and chest. His ears are burning. “I’m not so tall,” he croaks.

“Sonny!” Rosie Horowitz screeches. “You’re embarrassing the poor guy.”

Jake wants to shrink to the size of an ant and crawl out of the house.

“He’s six feet if he’s six inches,” Sonny persists. Why should that embarrass him?”  He leans over to him. “Stand up! Shyness will get you nowhere.”

He shakes his head vigorously, trying to explain with his eyes, man to man, why that would not be a good idea.

Gus is grumbling, “Of all the things to get embarrassed over.”

Shira finally proclaims, a voice from heaven, “You think I can’t see how tall he is? Honestly!”

Eventually, everyone starts saying farewells. Shira clasps Jake’s arm and whispers, with breath that smells of lipstick and Chicklets, “We’re having a picnic in Griffith Park tomorrow. Mama said I could invite you.”

*

“If you want it to rain, plan a picnic,” Rosie Horowitz sighs as Gus pulls his dusty Plymouth into the parking lot by the picnic grounds in Griffith Park. Shira leaps out of the car, adjusts her red shorts, and raises her arms to the clouds. “Soak me to the bone, Great Spirit!”

“Listen to that mental case,” Rosie says. “She’s gonna get her wish with a vengeance.”

“So we’ll eat under the pavilion,” Gus grumbles. “What’s a little rain?  Try eating in heavy snow, especially when you’re sick with dys—”

“Sha!” Rosie snaps. “Don’t spoil our appetites.”

“Be grateful you can satisfy your appetite.” He opens the trunk and heaves out the cooler packed with food.  “Grab the drink cooler, Edelstein.”

*

“See this?” Gus shows Jake his right thumb, twisted out of shape. It is drizzling, and the smell of wet ash from the barbeque pit mingles with that of sage from the surrounding hills. “I was protecting my head from a jackboot. Better my thumb than my skull. But the fucker pardon my language found a way to my skull anyway. When I came to, I was bleeding from my ears and choking on mud.”

He lifts Gus’s arm and studies the blue digits.  

“That was the whole of my life then: a number on an arm skinny as a chicken bone.” Gus grazes the numbers with his finger. “I look at it and I’m back in that Auschwitz shithole, the smell of incinerated corpses always in my nose. I once cut my shoulder on a protruding piece of metal and lapped at the blood like a bludgeoned dog. They call us survivors, but all we do is keep breathing.” 

At the other end of the pavilion, Rosie is braiding Shira’s hair while the latter sprays insect repellant on her long white legs. She sings as she sprays, and smiles when she catches Jake ogling her. 

“My mother,” Gus is saying in a calm but wooden voice, “went straight to the ovens. I also lost my brother from starvation. My sister . . . they brought her out of the camp, delirious with typhoid.  She’s in the state hospital in Camarillo, a living dead person like me. When anyone goes near her, she throws a blanket over her head and screams.” He puffs on his pipe. “I watched a buddy get shot in the head for shoving a guard.” Gus starts to blink spasmodically. “So tell me, Edelstein, what do you want to do with your life in this stinking world?”

Jake has no idea, despite his mother’s pleading with him to decide on a major for college, to keep from ending up like his loser father; but he replies, “Rid the world of bigots.”

Gus barks a laugh. “By doing what, boychick?”

He has no answer to that.

*

     “Let me show you how to waltz, Jakie,” Shira pulls his arm, but he yanks it back.

     “How rude!”

     Gus looks up. “He don’t want to dance, why are you pestering?”

     “Is that the reason, Jakie?” Shira presses her fists on her hips. “Or are you too bashful?”

     “I can’t dance.”

     “That’s ridiculous. You just keep doing it until you do it right.”

     He shakes his head. Images of the death-camp horrors Gus has conjured up keeps replaying in his mind.

     “Fine. Let’s hit the trail.” Again she reaches for his arm, and he retracts it.

     “It’s raining, Shira.”

     “Good grief, that’s the best possible reason for hiking!”

     “How come,” Rosie is saying to Gus, “you never told me about the boy who got shot next to you?”

     “I never told you lots of things.”

     Shira wraps her arms around her father’s neck. “Okay if we go hiking up the trail, Daddy? What’s a little rain, huh?”

     “Yeah, yeah, don’t stay gone more than a half hour. And no funny stuff.”

     Shira kisses him on the cheek then once again grabs Jake’s arm, this time succeeding in pulling him to his feet.

     “He was only eighteen,” Gus is telling Rosie before Shira and Jacob are out of hearing range. “He never gave up hope.”

*

Shira sprints up the stone steps that lead out of the picnic area; Jacob struggles to keep up. He is sadly out of shape. Once on the trail, Shira continues running, her long braids flapping. He finally manages to catch up with her, trying to hide his wheezing, and grabs her around the waist. She shrieks and stops so suddenly that they both tumble to the ground, his head slamming against her rib cage. She gasps for air, then says with exaggerated severity, “Jacob Edelstein, get off my body this instant. Some nerve!”

He helps her to her feet and dusts her off.  “Sorry.”

“Hey, watch those hands, mister.”

He feigns confusion then places his hands in front of his face. “Now what? You sure ask me to do strange things.”

She kicks him in the shin.  “What am I going to do with you?”  Then she glances down at her shirt.  “Look, you missed a spot.”  She points to a smudge over her left breast.

He cautiously brushes it. Shira keeps perfectly still. He brushes a little more vigorously, splaying his trembling fingers. Suddenly their lips clamp together, but she shoves him away, gasping. “What are you doing?”

“I’m sorry.” 

“Learn some self-control!” 

“I will, honest.”

“You should be ashamed of yourself.”

“I am ashamed of myself. You have no idea how ashamed I am of myself.”

She wipes tears from her face. “I’m sorry—I’m over-reacting. We’d better return to the picnic grounds or else Daddy is going to be extremely upset with me. He gets upset so easily.”

They head back down the trail. After an awkward silence, Shira says, “Daddy keeps saying he’s good as dead. Is it self-pity? Has he given up on life?”

“Maybe he’s ashamed that he survived when so many didn’t.” 

“Mama is scared that he might . . .”

“He shouldn’t keep bringing up those horrible things that happened to him in that death camp. It’s like picking at a wound that’s trying to heal.”

“I don’t think he wants it to heal. Does that make sense?” 

“Yes, he wants to keep feeling the pain.”

She nods gravely. “No story can capture that horror, though. He once told me about the typhus epidemic that broke out a few weeks before the Soviet army liberated the camp. A thousand inmates had survived; but they were so emaciated that most of them died within a few days. ‘I should have been one of them,’ Daddy said. And I said he survived because he had more endurance than the others, but that upset him even more. ‘Maybe it was because God wanted me to be born,’ I finally said. He seemed to like that reason.”  

“I have an idea,” Jake says. “This place is full of wildflowers. Let’s gather some of them. You know—for a bouquet. Isn’t it true that flowers help heal?”     

“There aren’t enough flowers in the whole state of California that could heal Daddy. But okay.” 

They discover a spot off trail where flowers are growing in profusion. and they each gather several bluebells, daisies, others they could not identify. “You’re right, this is a lovely idea,” Shira says. She embraces him perfunctorily, her flowers brushing against his neck, and pecks his cheek. “Flowers from the pleasure gods to vanquish the awful pain.”

*

Rosie, draped in a shawl, is extracting Tupperware bowls of food from one of the coolers.

“Where’s Daddy?” Shira asks as she hands her mother the bouquets.

Rosie sniffs the flowers and sets them aside. “He’s acting crazy, talking to himself. Maybe the two of you can help him snap out of it.”

“Where did he go?” Jake asks.

“Back to the car. Something about a prizefight on the radio.”

Shira and Jake hurry to the parking lot. Gus is in the car, ramming his head against the dashboard.  

“Stop it!” Shira tries to open the door, but it’s locked.  “Daddy!” she screams. Gus continues pounding his head.     

Jake reaches for the rear door; it opens, and he lunges inside, wraps his arms around Gus’s chest, and pulls him away from the dashboard, but Gus pushes him away.

On the radio, a referee is yelling something about a left hook; there is wild cheering in the background. “Murder the bastard!” Gus yells. “Smash his face to a bloody pulp!” Despite Jake’s grip on him, Gus succeeds in slamming his head against the steering wheel, setting off the horn.

He shoves him against the seat, but Gus once again breaks free of his grip and twists his head toward him. “Can’t you understand?”

“Understand what?”

“They’re still lurking all around us.” He pounds the dashboard. “That’s one of them in the ring. They’re in the schools, in government, in business, everywhere, waiting for the chance to finish the job.” He stares mournfully at them. “I should have leaped for the gun. I’m so ashamed.” 

“What are you talking about, Daddy?” Shira cries.

“I was this close to him when his brains blew out all over me.” He thrusts out his mutilated thumb and index finger. “This close.”

Shira and Jake extract Gus, still whimpering So ashamed, so ashamed, from the car. Shira pulls out a Kleenex from her shorts pocket and wipes saliva from her father’s chin. 

Gus shrugs them off. “Let go of me. My Nazi shitfit is over. Suddenly I’m famished.” He starts limping back toward the picnic area, Shira and Jake following.

During their absence Rosie has spread out a checkered tablecloth, paper plates and bowls of pastrami, corned beef, potato salad, sliced tomatoes, and kosher dills. Rain clouds are roiling.

Gus embraces Rosie from behind, but she swats him away. Undaunted, he kisses her lavishly on the back of her neck. “Enough, already!” she exclaims. Laughing (for the first time Jake can recall), he grabs a bottle of Pepsi Cola from the cooler and slaps Jake on the shoulder. “With every bite of this feast, Edelstein, with every swallow of soda pop, a Jew-hater will vanish in a puff of smoke!”

Jake chuckles. “We’d be eating and drinking nonstop for weeks.” 

“Enough with the cynicism already!” Rosie pleads. “And not another word about antisemites and concentration camps while we’re eating.”

Shira reaches for the wildflower bouquets and hands them to her father. 

“What’s this?”

“A gift from the pleasure gods, Daddy!” Shira exclaims. Rosie grabs her Brownie camera and takes the first of several snapshots to commemorate the special day.

*

Jacob Edelstein studies more closely the snapshot of Shira pressing two anemic-looking bouquets of wildflowers into her father’s hands. He can make out the gash in Gus’s forehead from having rammed it against the dashboard of his Plymouth. How did he die his final death? What became of Shira? After she left for college, he never heard from her again. Why would she even want to stay in touch with someone so . . . detached from himself, so ashamed of who he was? He tries to think of her as an old woman now, a grandmother, possibly a great-grandmother, yet still vibrant: a woman who exulted in life despite its ugliness, a Jewish pagan dancing in the rain.