`No Ambition to Overleap Mortality'

Manny Dubinsky is 78, retired after half a century in the scrap-metal business, a widower three years. He’s lonely, angry for no reason he can name, not bookish but a reader:

“Dubinsky had always been a reader. Thank God for that. He began using the Evanston library, where he took out two or three books a week, mostly on current history and especially on the war – his war, World War II. He was also a sucker for books on Winston Churchill, the greatest man, he thought, of the twentieth century.”

At the library he meets Olivia Hampton, 72, widowed nine years. She’s black, he’s Jewish and no one seems to mind. They meet for lunch. What they have in common is bafflement with the world. Both yearn for the comfort and familiarity of the past but remain thoughtful enough to know it’s a frustrating, futile longing. Olivia says:

“I think the only penalty you pay for a good marriage is that you never really get over its coming to an end. I still get up some mornings disappointed that Charley isn’t next to me.”

In “Dubinsky on the Loose,” Joseph Epstein leaves the conclusion open-ended so it reads convincingly: “He braked gently and wondered how many days he was required to wait before calling her for dinner.” Many stories in Fabulous Small Jews (2003) are about widows and widowers, mostly elderly Jews in Chicago learning to adapt to a world they no longer recognize. Dubinsky vows to cease “delivering little lectures on the superiority of the past to the present.” Often Epstein’s people reminded me of L.E. Sissman’s line: “My thirst for the past is easy to appease.” His stories usually end with a qualified acceptance by the protagonist that the future will not resemble what he expected. First, he must allow another person to enter his life with some degree of intimacy, fondness and trust – girlfriend, neighbor, grandson.

In “Moe,” Morris Bernstein is a widower whose son is “a phony and a royal putz.” After he suffers a minor heart attack, a young cardiologist advises Moe to undergo bypass surgery. He declines, in part, because “he didn’t feel like changing the way he lived.” All of us can understand this. At age 67, Moe declines an invitation from the digital age:

“He did have a VCR, which he used occasionally to record a Bears game when he was going to be out of the house. When he first got it, he rented movies, mostly the old ones he had grown up with, the Bogarts and Fred Astaires, William Powells and James Cagneys and Spencer Tracys, but he soon lost interest. [Olivia Hampton vows, “`I don’t ever want to see another movie I haven’t already seen before – maybe thirty years before.’”] Television news and the Cubs and Bears and Bulls gave him all the entertainment he needed.”

It’s Moe’s nine-year-old grandson – neurotic, nerdish, unhappy, wracked with allergies, already seeing a psychotherapist -- who moves him to love and live. He takes the kid under his wing and promises to teach him to play handball. He also calls the cardiologist and agrees to have the bypass performed, though Moe still finds the doctor’s manner “smarmy.” Moe hangs up the phone and we get Epstein’s final paragraph:

“A good deal less than certain himself, Bernstein hung up and stepped around the corner into Manny’s Delicatessen, where he ate a four-inch-high pastrami sandwich on a Kaiser roll, a potato latke the size of a cake dish [by this point I was salivating], and a heaping serving of rice pudding, all washed down by two cups of black coffee. Sure, O.K., all right, let them cut out his whole heart. But if they thought they could change Moe Bernstein, they had another thing coming.”

Manny, Moe and the others in Fabulous Small Jews remind me of no one so much as the men (and women) Shirley Robin Letwin anatomizes in The Gentleman in Trollope: Individuality and Moral Conduct (1982). Letwin was a political philosopher not a literary critic but her book ranks with the best ever written about a novelist – an endlessly edifying work, as Samuel Johnson is morally edifying. In her final paragraph, Letwin describes the moves Epstein’s “gentlemen” make from estrangement to purpose. She begins:

“In a world of people who think only of getting and spending, who are trying to wipe the slate clean or tie up everything in large, neat, sharp-cornered parcels, who feel obliged to rebel in order to go their own way, or think of peace as the achievement of repression, who confuse authority with power and deference with slavishness, who shudder at the dappled diversity of the human world, the gentleman will not feel at home.”

Letwin concludes:

“[The gentleman] has firm convictions about what is good and true, for which he will fight, without forgetting that nothing in nature prevents other men from questioning his verities and that he himself cannot keep hold of them without support from others to keep him aware of what he has overlooked or distorted. But whatever disagreement he encounters, however uncongenial he may find his neighbors or his fortune, he will always be thoroughly at home in the human world because he can enjoy its absurdities and has no ambition to overleap mortality.”

Epstein’s peculiar title, by the way, comes from Karl Shapiro’s “Hospital”:

“This is the Oxford of all sicknesses.
Kings have lain here and fabulous small Jews
And actresses whose legs were always news.”