Pulling at the fringes of the universe's tallis: "The Master Mourner" by Ben Ehrlich

It's pretty obvious that "The Master Mourner" belongs to a class of stories that could be grouped under the category of "stories with ambiguous endings." The way you're asking yourself "What did he say to her" at the end of Lost in Translation, or the way you're wondering what was real and what was an implanted memory at the end of Total Recall, or the way you're asking yourself "What the hell did I just watch?" after 2001: A Space Odyssey or Inception, so at the end of "The Master Mourner," I think it's pretty easy to find yourself asking what has gone on. The story itself encourages the reader to look for secret conspiracies and hidden shenanigans, beginning as it does with the Hebrew school teacher who once helped the Irgun to carry out a terrorist plot against British occupiers of Israel by distracting them with her piano playing. The reader at the end of "Master Mourner" is justified in wondering if he, too, has been distracted throughout in order to be surprised by a bomb at the end. 

There are hints throughout the story that a secret plot--in both the literary and espionage meanings of the word--is going on beneath the surface plot, which resembles a familiar Jewish coming-of-age story. Jacob, son of Henry Singer, fails to emotionally connect to his mother's death when he is young. Jacob only experiences mourning as series of social obligations he must fulfill: "...to open the door with my face prepared with a mourner's mixture of pale sorrow, stiff resilience, and a hint of eye-smiling gratitude for the offering of yet another fruit basket." He looks upon his duties as a mourner much like he looks upon singing and praying at church--as something to be endured until it's over. Meanwhile, Jacob's father seems to check out emotionally after the death of his wife. He retreats to a "different realm," one in which nothing reaches him, where even if Jacob tries to yell to him or to buy the wrong eggs to "get him out of reverse," the sound is "inaudible to him." As opposed to the Hebrew teacher with her three hearts allowing her to be resilient even through trauma, Henry stops running, a hobby he seemingly enjoyed, because, he claims, he has a bad heart. Bad heart, indeed. 

That's the surface story, at least, but there's another story straining to be heard throughout. Even inanimate objects seem to be trying to let Jacob know something is afoot. The pews in synagogue squeak "No!" and "Please" to him. The floors of his house say "No! Stay!" when he goes to answer the door in the middle of the night. 

Then there's Jacob's understanding that the universe is full of mysteries to be solved and resolved. When he attends temple as a boy, impatiently waiting for the end of service, he spends "most of the time playing with the fringes that dangled from my father's tallis. I tugged at them, pretending they were levers that opened the ark or did some other unexpected trick." Jacob hopes to open the ark, the replica in the temple of THE ark, the ancient religious relic that supposedly housed the glory of the Lord God himself. Jacob hopes, that is, to unlock the mysteries of the universe. 

However, he is doomed to disappointment. Moses-like, he hears the voice of God as a young man when he is coming out of the drug store where he picked up medicine for his ill mother. Jacob is wondering if he will end up like his father, and God Almighty answers: "Of course." Near the end of the story, Jacob, having tried to embarrass synagogue icon Bernie Bernstein, is ashamed when he realizes Bernie lost a brother in the Holocaust. At this point, Jacob realizes "that everything I thought I was I was not and everything I would be I would never be and everything I assumed I would never be I would most certainly be." Jacob's not going to live up to his big dreams of penetrating the big mystery of it all. Can the reader hope to escape the same fate?

God's presence everywhere can be viewed as either a balm or a menace. 

Who is Bernie?

After opening with the former-terrorist-turned-Hebrew-school-teacher telling Jacob's class that God is everywhere, the story then encourages us to equate the suggestively named Bernie Bernstein with God Almighty. The idea of God's omnipresence could be viewed as either reassuring or a threat, but in context, it feels more like a threat, given that it's coming from the woman who once played piano until her listeners ended up in chunks all over the keys. It's more "God can get you anywhere, any time" than "God is always there to help in time of need." This affects how the reader feels when Bernie replaces God in Jacob's mind: "This was after my mother passed, during the time when I realized that God is not everywhere; Bernie Bernstein is everywhere." So Bernie feels like a vague threat throughout. But is he?  

The first thing you'd have to say about a name like Bernie Bernstein is that it's an obviously Jewish name. Sure, "Bernie" doesn't have to be a Jew, nor, technically, does "Bernstein," although most people with that name are Ashkenazi Jews. But I doubt anyone would hear that name and not assume the person answering to it was Jewish. It literally "doubles down" on its Jewishness. You couldn't have that name and pretend not to be Jewish if you were ever in a position where you thought it was dangerous to be Jewish. Henry Singer isn't the same. The surname Singer has been pared down from the one used by "longer-surnamed shetl dwellers from the morasses of Eastern Europe" who are Jacob's ancestors. Henry (a name more German than Jewish) might have wanted to distance himself from his Jewishness, a feeling Jacob shares, as he doesn't like to think about the people from whom he is descended. Bernie has taken the opposite approach from blending in. He's not just Jewish; he's Jewish, damnit. 

A second unmistakable thing about Bernie is that he's an important member of the congregation. Henry's the one who first identifies him as such. He receives congratulations at the end of every Shabbat service for nothing more, Jacob thinks, than having survived another week. 

Henry actually seems to like Bernie, in spite of how one seems to value his Jewish identity and the other seems to downplay it. Before long, Bernie is Henry's only friend. They're both in the same business together, and they meet once a week to talk about the old times. 

Punishment or sympathy? 

So what the hell happens with that ending? One possible way of reading it is that Bernie has killed or attacked Henry. We've just learned that Henry is the only member of the congregation who violates the laws of the Sabbath by driving to temple rather than walking to it. In this sense, one could read it that Bernie, the image of the traditional Jewish community, is taking the place of the omnipresent God who can punish us when we do wrong. If this is what happened, then Henry's saying "I'm sorry, Jacob," is him apologizing for doing "what had to be done," the same way Morah Lev did what had to be done when fighting for Jewish independence. 

I don't think that's what happened, though. When Jacob sees Bernie at the door, it's with a torn shirt, which could suggest that there was an altercation between Bernie and Henry. But it's much more likely that this torn shirt is the traditional torn shirt of shivas, the mourning ceremony. The story is called "The Master Mourner." Jacob believes that he's mastered the art of mourning, by which he means looking grave and telling people thank you for bringing over a whitefish salad, but it's Bernie who is the real master mourner. The torn shirt isn't a sign that Bernie has attacked Henry; it's a sign that Bernie has joined Henry in genuine mourning, at least partly in order to help Henry with his own loss. In this sense, the "I'm sorry" isn't "I'm sorry I did something terrible," it's a genuine expression of sympathy. 

Bernie has already had a lifetime of practice in mourning, having lost his brother in a concentration camp years ago. If we extend Bernie from an individual to being a larger symbol of the Jewish community and its ability to endure suffering over the ages, he's had much more than one lifetime. This symbolic reading is suggested by Jacob's inability to guess Bernie's age: "He could have been anywhere between thirty and three thousand." If Bernie isn't just one person, but a symbol of Jewish endurance over the ages, then this explains why his continued survival from week to week is such a cause for celebration. 

With all this practice mourning loss, Bernie is the perfect person to help Henry. He's not God's terrifying presence seeking vengeance for sins to the ends of the Earth; he's the comforting presence of Jewish tradition there to help Henry. Bernie isn't interested in punishing Henry for driving himself to temple. Henry has said he's too "heavy" to walk; Bernie merely wants to help lighten Henry a bit by mourning along with him in his loss. Bernie has already had one opportunity to get angry about another driver, that being Jacob when Jacob almost ran into him with a shopping cart. Bernie didn't get angry, though. He merely advised Jacob to "drive the cart" rather than "let the cart drive him." Bernie doesn't object to traditions changing. The important thing is that as they change, they should serve the people who carry them out, rather than the other way around. 

What's up with Morah Lev?

Reading Bernie as a symbol of Jewish tradition and its ability to provide comfort makes sense to me, but what, then, to make of Morah Lev, the Hebrew teacher who once duped a room full of British administrators carrying out the Palestinian Mandate to their deaths? Some people today will argue that Irgun wasn't a terrorist organization. They will point out that Irgun at least occasionally attempted to minimize deaths. I hardly qualify to pass judgment on this. I will only say that Morah Lev might signify a counterweight to Bernie. If Bernie represents the ability of a people to endure through resilience and tradition, Morah Lev is the voice that insists that a people can only endure if they fight for it. Bernie is a people enduring through culture; Morah Lev is a people enduring through defending themselves by any means necessary. 

To strengthen herself for her role as defender of the people through violence, Morah Lev carries out a series of rituals of her own. She uses three colors of lipstick at once and braids her hair (using three strands, I presume--is there another way to braid hair?), rituals meant to reinforce the three levels of heart she has to maintain. 

Henry doesn't have much to say about Morah Lev except to call her "colorful." Morah Lev operates on her own logic. That logic might serve to prevent some tragedies for the Jewish people, but it has nothing to say once loss has already occurred. She is unable to unsee the blood and flesh on the white keys of the piano she used to distract her victims to their death. Mourning isn't for her. Her three hearts keep her strong, but they are too strong an armor to pierce through mourning in order to heal.

It's the cultural symbol of endurance in Bernie, rather than the military one in Morah Lev, that ultimately stands as the hope in the story. At the end, having shared in real mourning with Henry, Bernie hands Jacob literal keys, which are hard not to also read figuratively as unlocking some kind of code for life. Having received the keys, Jacob then runs upstairs to see his father. That is, Jacob is ascending a stairway to Heaven. In the original, Biblical account of Jacob seeing the stairway to Heaven, God reaffirms his covenant with the Jewish people, in which he promises to make of them a great people and to give them a land to dwell in. Jacob isn't running to find his father dead. He's running to join with his father in continuing life.  

The story doesn't deny that situations may call for Morah Lev's ways, but they do seem to suggest that the key to a continued future for the Jewish people has more to do with the comfort and encouragement of tradition and culture than through the might of arms and the cunning of plots. 

Timing

This story was published in Gettysburg Review (RIP--the loss of which may require its own mourning) months ago, but it comes out now as part of Best American Short Stories at an interesting time. Yet another terrible chapter in the long history of irrational hatred for Jews has taken place, leading to yet more mourning, to more torn shirts and paltry-feeling signs of sympathy from the community. Israel's government, led by a ruling party which is in some ways a direct political descendant of the Irgun, has launched a counter-strike, which some say is too much, but which Israel justifies, given the extremes of inhuman hatred its people face. 

I've been debating continuing with BASS blogging for some time, or even with literature and writing as an earnest pursuit. One of the reasons I always feel this way is that blogging about a short story seems so irrelevant, given the number of people suffering in the world. This story, though, seems to be arguing that without an identity beyond survival, survival will ultimately be pointless and short-lived.