Ivan and Anne lived in a stately little building on West Twelfth Street.  Their apartment was utterly enveloping.  It wasn’t luxurious, quite, but beautiful:  the wine-dark dining room with its claw-footed table and silver candlesticks, the living-room walls thick with oil paintings and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, neat stacks of sheet music and a cluster of photographs splayed atop the grand piano.  The coffee table was stacked with books about Jewish mysticism and boxing and the Irish famine; a spare bedroom was filled with even more books.  This apartment, obviously, was what Abigail had been trying to replicate in our little walkup.  It felt like home but more than home:  It made you want to live up to its embrace of achievement.

As Abigail trailed Anne into the kitchen, Ivan sat me down in the living room.  The air seemed to quiver with the promise of an inquisition, but I found myself looking forward to it.

“So Abigail told me about your parents,” Ivan said, “That’s some story.”

“I guess so.”

“You guess so?  You think it was easy for them to do what they did?  You think a Jewish father was happy to hear that his son was becoming a Catholic?”

“I guess not.”

“So what are you doing about it?”

“About what?”

“You go to church, you go to synagogue?”

“We go to church once in a while.  Grace Church-Episcopalian.  I’ve never been to a synagogue.  I’m not Jewish.”

“Son, you’d have been plenty Jewish enough for Hitler.  You’ve got the map of Poland written all over your face.  You could have worn a crucifix down to your knees, and they still would have thrown you in the ovens, you understand?”

I was stunned.  I had never considered myself remotely connected to the Jews in the regard.

Ivan’s tone eased up.  “Not that you should let the Nazis define you, or anyone else.  But you should figure it out.  So you’re not really Jewish and you’re not really being a Christian.  It’s not my job to tell you what to do”- he said this in a tone that contradicted his words- “but I don’t think it’s such a brilliant idea to live with nothing, you understand?  You like the world the way it is now?  You like all this crime, you like this utter disregard for ethical behavior?  What you’re looking at, darling, is called the breakdown of Judeo-Christian society.  Maybe you’re a fan of that, but I’m not.  You think your parents did what they did so you’d just walk away from it?”

Ivan, as I would learn, was the kind of man who could slap you across the face and leave you wanting to thank him.

“I’m not saying, ‘Boy, oh, boy, we’ve got to recruit this Jew,’” he continued.  “Look, I’m a Jew who married two Catholic women, although Anne’s converting.  I’m just saying, What are you?  This is no small thing, coming from a family like yours.  And if you’re going to get married and have children, you better figure it out.”

He paused, but his pause was clearly not an invitation to respond.  “You’re an interesting case,” he said.  “According to halakha, the Jewish law, you’re probably Jewish because your mother was a Jew.  But I’m not sure, since she converted before you were born.  I’m no expert.  I know some rabbis, though-let me look into it.”

Leaving their apartment that afternoon, I felt as if a rough hand had clamped my shoulders and hoisted me high above the earth to peer down on myself. From above, my smallness rattled me, and left me dizzy with an ache to grow.  This vortex I had stumbled into, this Ivan Kronenfeld, would prod and shape me no less than Madame Souvorina had prodded and shaped my mother fifty years earlier, and I knew it right away.  It wasn’t that I felt powerless to resist; I simply felt that resisting would have gone against my better interests.  Ivan was a strong-arm man, almost comically pushy, in love with the sound of his voice- but I was in love with it too, because for all its bluster, his words settled upon me with the comfortable weight of truth.
 

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