Chapter 1, The Shady Elders of Zion

copyright 2008 by Robert Samuel Gilbert

CHAPTER ONE

It's a great day to be dead.

On this April afternoon in Hibbing, Minnesota, it is cold outside, a mere nineteen degrees under a bright blue sky. But inside it is warm. Here I am at this great wake. And it's all for me too. The people I knew and loved on this frozen prairie, the iron-men and women of the Mesabi Range have turned out en masse to celebrate my life and the mood is joyous. If you didn't know better you'd mistake me for an Irishman.

The corpse, all stark, somber and stretched out straight, is me. For a guy who lived past his 100th birthday I look pretty good. An Italian homosexual designed that genuine, three-piece sharkskin suit I’m wearing. I hesitate to sound bourgeois but I keep waiting for someone to recognize it from the pages of Gentleman’s Quarterly. It’s double breasted, the way I liked my women. On my feet, wing tip shoes, the key to success. Of course, the tie is red. The white shirt has extra starch. Not exactly my choice and thank God I'm not alive to feel it around my neck because by now I'd have broken out in a rash.

My white hair has been cut short. The make-up and rouge that covers my face was applied with great discretion. They even gave me a manicure for the occasion not to mention a little clip job for my nose hairs and those annoying wiry ones inside my ears that sprang out like spider legs.

As a stiff I cut a pretty good figure. Strong Semitic nose, delicate ears, a chin that could always take a punch, blue eyes and you'd never know it now but I once had hair as black as a Gypsy. With the ladies I was quite the stud, yet a man’s man to the core. Comfortable with both genders, that to me is the consummate individual.

Of course my body broke down over the years in a woeful progression of stages and so I am now gleeful to be a spirit free from the laws of physics and no longer the mortal tied to that old container of flesh and bones. It's not easy growing old. Without a hearing aide I was deaf, without eye drops my cataracts ached and my teeth–oy vay–three root canals in the past five years. The ability to take a solid crap constituted a good day. But all that is now in the past.

Check out the casket. It's mahogany with a red velvet interior. Not bad, huh? The United Brotherhood of Steelworkers, local #44, paid it for. The casket handles they'll carry me to my grave with are made from real brass and from my vantage point glint the same color as the buttons of my jacket.

I love this. The somber mood honors the widow despite the party atmosphere. After all, we get lonesome up here on the Iron Range in winter. People haven't been out and about for several months and any excuse for a get together is welcome. The man who said no good comes from a corpse lied.

The turnout exceeds my expectation. Not to sound smug mind you, but I deserve all this. Old men have a moral obligation to accept such tribute from younger men. So if I gloat, please don’t think poorly of me.

Men are at their best when bragging. I've seen ninety-eight pound weaklings transformed into Homeric heroes while reciting some daring do. Even if it's only brag, who cares? A good story is better than the truth and let's be honest, nobody brags better than a Jew.

My comrades contributed much of the food and it's quite a spread. The buffet table must be thirty feet long. Fine meats like Fraboni Sausage, made right here on the Iron Range, and porketta­–easy on the fennel, the way I like it, is plentiful. There's roast beef and turkey and three roasted pheasants that my nephew Ollie Koskinnen shot last fall. Hearty bread and pastries from old Europe, all of which is laid out with white doilies that look like snowflakes, make for one fine feast.

Red-haired Rosie Meyerhoff canned the pickled vegetables himself. In her early years Rosie was a charity girl to local iron miners but later became treasurer of the American Communist Party. The red veggies came from her garden and have spent the past two years in Mason Jars in her basement. The tomatoes, peppers, radishes and beets add great color to the display.

Up here on the Iron Range we drink like fish. Mostly Canadian whiskey and American beer, there's plenty of both. But in my honor there is also vodka. For the kids, there is Pepsi Cola.
An old newspaper photo of me is taped to the door. Nobody can enter this chapel without noticing it. It's from the Mesabi Daily News someone found down at the union hall. They took it to Kinko's and had it enlarged and mounted. It's a flattering portrait of me, standing at a podium, addressing a throng of steelworkers, during the great strike of 1958, which I engineered so brilliantly as head of the strike committee. The headline reads: ­­"Vukovich Fires Up Striking Steelworkers."

Leaning forward with all the choreography of Lenin, hand in a fist, face contorted with anger, I harangued the crowd from a makeshift podium surrounded by my favorite goon squad. You can see from my breath it was a cold afternoon. If you didn’t know better you'd think I was breathing fire. I rumbled, I railed, giving that crowd passion like they never heard before and just when they were about to bow down to those capitalist dogs of the Hanna Mining Company. I put lead in their pencil with that speech, I can tell you that. The old timers still speak of it.

Offered my preference, it's exactly how I want to be remembered–a firebrand.

Contract negotiations with management were pitched that day. True, I was only holding out for an extra two cents an hour. But jerking the chain of those hen-pecked Babbits was the closest thing to revolution I’d enjoyed since leaving Mother Russia.

Plus, I wasn’t getting laid that year and delaying the settlement was like putting off an orgasm during a good schtupping. Sometimes you just want to make it last.

I've had my share of kibitzing this afternoon. The phrase “oh to be a fly on the wall,” has a deeper meaning now. I'm invisible and buzz around unafraid of sticky yellow ribbon, fly swatters or Black Flag.

I've looked down ladies’ dresses. I've looked up ladies’ dresses. Unfortunately, peeping at tits and ass is about the most harm I can do. After all, I'm dead.

I’ve divided my time between Rosie's pickled beets on the buffet where the old folks are gathered and the back door where the young people smoke cigarettes. I still love the smell of Camel straights and even in death can catch a buzz. Hmmm, nicotine, I love it.

Eavesdropping on conversation is interesting and I am privy to many new secrets. For instance, Mae Dahl's daughter took a trip to Minneapolis not for a job interview but for an abortion. Should the mother ever find out there would be hell to pay. Mrs. Albert Jenson is making sexual advances to Mrs. Dorothy Bidwell near the ladies room door while their husbands discussed Vikings football at the bar. Duane Simonsen is selling nickel bags of marijuana in the bathroom. Little Susie Perich is in love with Peter Popovich but is afraid to announce her feelings because one is a Croat and the other a Serb and the two families still hold a grudge against each other from the old country.

But by far my favorite thing to do is to sit on my casket and watch people come forward to pay their last respects. Little Sammy Nord, still in kindergarten, slipped a cherry lollipop up my sleeve as a bribe that I might say hello to his grandfather, Dick, who died last October.

"Sammy, no problem, I'll even tell him you're no longer wetting your bed.”

Mary Graziano came up to the casket, said a few kind words, winked at my dead face and actually touched my groin. She was surprised to find me hard. Honey, the whole body is hard. What do you expect from rigor mortis? That was the most beautiful tribute of the day. No one saw her do this of course, except maybe her husband, Buster.

I watched Buster sprinkle black pepper from a shaker to his palm. When his turn came at the casket he put the pepper to his nose, inhaled deeply and sneezed all over my suit. He whispered, "Fuck you, Vukovich, you prick. Were you alive now I'd a smack that smile off your face."

OK, I can look past that. He’s never forgiven me for screwing his wife. Ah, it was the annual May Day picnic, we were drunk and those things happen. Were it not for the mosquito bites on her tushy he'd never have found out. God, I miss the '60's. But when she got pregnant nine months of anguish ensued. Fortunately, the child had Graziano's ears and not my nose, and it was apparent the first day, a blessing for the family.

But Buster has a point. In truth, I am a little disappointed with the way the mortician, Tim O'Shea, shaped my mouth. It suggests a serenity I never knew in life. And if Buster noticed, the others probably noticed as well, even though they're too polite to mention it.

Now Tim O'Shea was a good friend to me in this life and I trusted him so much that he is also the executor of my will. O'Shea, the middle class mortician with the blonde wife, the big boat, the twelve kids, and the thirty-one grandchildren. O'Shea, the affable Irishman who never met a man he didn't like, the faithful Catholic who never knew alienation, a man who prepared thousands of old, beaten and battered bodies for the grave.

I was staring over his shoulder in the embalming room, which is in the basement of this funeral home. With such panache did he cut into my arteries to suck my body’s blood. It's a hell of a way to make a living, I'll tell you that. But this O'Shea is quite the artist. The man cuts hair and applies make-up as well as anybody in Hollywood.

I saw it happen. He smeared Krazy Glue in a long swathe across my bottom lip and carelessly pushed my jaw up with his thumb. He was in a hurry. His wife Mona hates it when he's late for dinner. So there it is, that fucking smile! God damn it. I want to look like that fire-breathing dragon in the old newspaper photo hanging on the door. That's who I really am–an angry Jewish rebel-rouser. Now the last glance people have of me resembles some feygele.

I wanted to tell O'Shea that the smile he glued on my face really stunk, so I marched up to the chapel door. I found him standing there with a red carnation in his lapel. It's kind of his trademark, this flower in his lapel. Usually it's white, but for me, today, as a result of my emphasis on class struggle he wears red. He stole it from one of my bouquets. He too is an old man and recently gave his mortuary business to his youngest son, Tim Jr. However, he comes out of retirement to prepare old timers like me for the grave.

"O'Shea, it's a good thing that I like you or I'd get you for that silly smile," I shouted, my index finger wagging in his face. "And don't think I don't keep score either. I'm willing to look past that goofy smile which my body will wear until it rots away in its casket and that other insult as well–the satisfaction you took shoving a cork up my ass so I didn't foul my good suit during this wake. I've known you for forty years, even liked you, you Philistine, but don't ever make light at my expense again or you'll get it in the neck."

O’Shea couldn’t hear my rant, nonetheless, I felt a little better.

And why shouldn’t I feel better? At least I don't have to be Joseph Vukovich anymore. That wasn't my real name­–only an alias. Of course, if I do say so myself I performed my role as Joseph Vukovich with aplomb. Yes, aplomb, I tell you, aplomb.

Poise, self-assurance, confidence, yes, that was me. OK, so not all at once. You try playing the role of a second-stringer for half a lifetime while waiting for the revolution. My God, I tell you, no agent provocateur ever did it better. But now it’s over. You see, as Vukovich, one of my assumed names, and here in Northern Minnesota I led a secret life.

My passage through the 20th century was no picnic. During my boyhood, in a dreary Ukrainian village near Kiev, before I repudiated my family, my name was Gerson Broverman. I grew up in a girl house: a Jewish mother, three sisters, a missing father, and a rabbi named Yedwab.

But a passion for adventure ran through my veins and propelled me beyond the narrow confines of my home. I was inspired by stories of my mother's first cousin, a political radical named Lev Davidovich Bronstein who changed his name to Leon Trotsky and went on to lead the Bolshevik Revolution. I ran away from home at the age of thirteen, pledged my life to the Communist Party, steeped myself in the dogma of Karl Marx, and changed my name to Ivan Kalinsky, my favorite alias.

I worked as Trotsky's personal secretary for ten years. My reputation was that of a man who could make problems disappear. I was at Trotsky’s side when he negotiated power with Lenin after bringing down the Czar. I was his captain when, as Commissar of the Red Army, Trotsky defeated an international army of counterrevolutionaries and saved the Bolshevik revolution in 1919. I marched in step with the Dictatorship of the Proletariat and socialized with great men like Gorky, Zinoviev, Kaminev, Kirov and Stalin.

As a Soviet cultural attaché, I accompanied Ambassador Maxim Litvinov to Washington, D.C., attended state dinners with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and ran a spy operation out of the Russian embassy during the 1930's.

Following the assassination of Trotsky in Mexico in 1936, I was recalled to Moscow for a special briefing. Stalin was kissing Hitler’s ass and purging the entire Russian Communist Party of Jews at that time. The writing was on the wall–a bullet awaited me. So I secretly hopped a flight from Washington, D.C. to Minnesota.

I accepted the protection of Gus Hall, head of the American Communist Party, who I had worked closely with while in Washington and went into exile. Gus was from Cherry, Minnesota and he brought me here to the Iron Range under his aegis. Only a small coterie of dedicated party members knew my real identity and in those days we ruled Northern Minnesota.

I settled into this small community so quietly that people didn't notice. They had no idea they were harboring a famous fugitive. When two Stalinist agents pursued me, Gus visited their room at the Kalor Hotel with a few hired hands, beat the hell out of them, escorted them to the Hibbing Airport, put them on a plane and told them never to come back. I didn't know it then but I was safe. Unfortunately, within the next five years Stalin extirpated all the Yiddish flowers of the Russian Communist bouquet. No wonder the revolution withered and died.

I spent most of my life here in obscurity, more afraid of Communist assassins than the FBI. Gus changed my name from Kalinsky to Joseph Vukovich because the man had just died and Gus had his driver’s licenses. It allowed me to drive, open a bank account and write checks at the liquor store.

I worked as a janitor in the Hibbing Library. Overnight, I went from a big shot to a nobody. My fall from grace caused great anguish, not to mention the culture shock of living here in this American Siberia that I lost my will to live and as a result nearly drank myself to death.

But you might say, Kalinsky, at least you were alive. But I am going to tell you the truth–life without revolution is no life at all. Especially so far away from everything I loved. During those years my list of complaints about life in Minnesota could have filled the Torah.

Let's talk about deprivation. First of all the horseradish is wrong. I realize that Minnesota is a dairy state but creamed horseradish? What can you say about a people who eat creamed horseradish? They knew nothing about cuisine.

That first Minnesota winter I longed for a saltine with a little smear of chicken fat, topped with Berkowitz's Real Hassid Horseradish, the kind that made you gasp when you unscrewed the blue plastic cap and inhaled. How it singed your nose hairs and burnt your tongue. But those precious things were lost to me.

While World War Two raged for control of the collective European soul and my former brothers in the Red Army were toe to toe against the Fascist Wehrmacht, I sat the bench in a quiet Minnesota backwater, a man battle ready with the scars and kills to prove it. But I could not contribute to the cause. Me, the great Kalinsky, the Hebrew Hangman, one of the founding fathers of the Russian Communist movement was now persona non grata, alone, unwanted, and anonymous.

So I drank some more and cursed my fate. I took to the notion that if I only hated myself sufficiently then God might be appeased. Yes, I know what you must be thinking: Kalinsky, you’re a Communist and Communists don’t believe in God. But I did believe in God and I wasn’t about to let that bastard hate me more than I hated myself.

It was my idea that incredible self-loathing would relieve him of the obligation to thwart my future intentions: That seeing me suffer, he might be satisfied, take pity on me and end this damned isolation. So I hated myself mightily. But nothing in my life changed. Over time I learned something very important–a man should hate himself less and hate God more.

Slowly, I made a life here. I went from janitor to union organizer for the steelworkers. Then I met my shiksa wife, Hilda Rukavina. She owned a small beauty salon called “Hilda’s Hair Hut” on Main Street. She didn't have much money, education or culture. But she had a great set of knockers which entered a room one full second before her torso. She had a little house on the outskirts of town, liked to garden, watch soap operas but unfortunately was unable to conceive children. Yet she was a dutiful wife and I loved her. She’s the old blonde with the big hair and the low cut black dress standing over there by the porketta tray.

Of course, as a man of the world I dallied. And it is with great sadness that I confess the one person not in attendance today is my mistress of long standing, Greta Niemi. Ah Greta, she had a neck as graceful as a swan, hair the color of golden wheat and lips like speed bumps. She loved me in ways beyond Hilda's morality, though I never held it against my wife. Hilda was Hilda and Greta was Greta and I felt fortunate to know them both.

This send off does not seem complete without Greta. Oh to have her here. But how could she ever show her face in a room filled with those holding sympathy for Hilda?

Wait. Father Terrence Goodlad, the Vatican's man in Hibbing at Our Lady Of Perpetual Sorrow, just joined O'Shea at the front door. The Catholic parish is right next door to O'Shea's Funeral Home. Goodlad and O'Shea do business. The Ultramontane recommends local Catholics to O'Shea's mortuary and in return O'Shea buries the nuns for free.

Look at them standing at the door, without me O’Shea and Goodlad are now the town’s leading patriarchs.

Goodlad, Dublin born, now in his late sixties, is a former boxing champion who decided to dedicate his life to fighting for Jesus Christ. Fighting for Christ, isn’t that an oxymoron?

I never did understand how Catholics appropriated one of our own rabbis, hailed him as God and made his death a Jewish crime. For me it’s one of the great lies of history. But I don’t feel like talking about that now.

The priest is about to share a joke with his pal O'Shea. (Don't ask me how I know, I just do.) Those two Irishmen love to swap stories and even though a good belly laugh is beyond me now I put myself beside them to listen. It's always easy to tell when Goodlad is about to say something crass. He lowers his voice, nervously twirls the end of his long mustache while at the same time covering his mouth with the same hand lest any of his parishioners read his lips and find out he has a dark side.

"Tim, have you heard the story about the Jewish burglar?" asks Goodlad, in his hoarse voice.
"No," says O'Shea and he licks his lips in anticipation of the story. "Let's have it."

Oh no, not that Jew joke again. I've already heard him tell it once before. Perhaps if he knew I had a Jewish soul he wouldn't tell it at my wake. Or maybe deep down he suspected I am Jewish and that is precisely why he tells it. Here it comes.

"It seems that there was this Jewish burglar who broke into a empty house one night while everybody was away," said the priest. "As he walked through the rooms with a flashlight he heard a voice call–Jesus is coming, Jesus is coming. Now the burglar, let's call him Lewinsky, was a bit frightened because he thought the house empty. But he walked on through the dark rooms until he came to a birdcage and aimed the light right into the parrot's eyes. He stands before the bird and it repeats its cry, ‘Jesus is coming, Jesus is coming.’

“Who the hell are you?” asks the Jew.

“My name is Moses,” replies the parrot.

“What kind of idiot names his parrot Moses?”

“The bird cocks his head a bit to the right and says, the same idiot who names his German Shepherd Jesus."

With this the two men burst into laughter. Several of Goodlad’s parishioners saw them yucking it up and felt uncomfortable for fear that perhaps they laughed about something told at confession.

Truth is I never liked Goodlad. But I felt obliged to be nice to him because I was married to Hilda Rukavina and for the past 25 years she, as a devout mackerel snapper, (a nickname we had for her Catholic brethren because of their Friday meals) worshipped the ground Goodlad walked on.

“Hey. Goodlad. Here’s one for you,” I called. “Do you know the first recorded case of PMS? It was the day Mary rode Joseph’s ass from Nazareth all the way to Bethlehem.”

He didn’t hear me, on account of me being dead.

Here’s something. A brown shirted man with blonde hair from the United Parcel Service just entered the chapel. With his close–cropped blonde hair and a big toothy smile, he could have been a Hitler poster child. But no, he was just a cheese head from Wisconsin. When O'Shea signed for the package, the teamster walked back to his brown truck and carried a heavy flat box into the chapel. The headstone I ordered months ago arrived and just in time.

The kid’s neck muscles bulged from its weight and he seemed on the verge of a hernia. How nicely his straining red face paired with his brown uniform. Tim asked him to lay the monument honoring my life against the wall near the coffin.

For the occasion, Goodlad, standing beside the casket, offered a little eulogy about my civic virtue and dedication to the people of this community. Oy, talk about being damned with faint praise.

Following the speech, right in the middle of my party, Hilda decides to unveil the headstone for the admiration of the crowd. She got on her knees and began pulling off the paper as if it were a Christmas present. A crowd of men and women gathered around her in curiosity.
The top of the red stone monument came into view. How the crowd oooed and ahhhed. “Nice color,” someone said.

As Hilda tore the brown paper wrapping from the top, the name Joseph Vukovich, cut deeply into the stone in large block letters became visible to all eyes. She stopped to admire it. “Yes that’s him,” another said, nodding his head in affirmation.

The dates of my birth and death came next as Hilda unraveled the paper further. A murmuring affirmed that for a guy who made it within days of his 100th birthday I looked and acted much younger. That pleased me.

As she pulled the paper further smaller letters read beloved husband, oh that really got the crowd. That gave Hilda pause and a tear came to her eye. I thought I heard several sniffles from the women folk as well.

Finally Hilda pulled the paper entirely off and there it was–the hammer and sickle. “All hail the revolution!” I screamed.

It was a big hammer and sickle too, nicely done, engraved in a size even larger than the name Joseph Vukovich. Yes, featured on my gravestone the great symbol of strength and egalitarian virtue of the twentieth century stood stalwart.

Hilda's gasp carried across the room. A few old cronies applauded loudly but were quickly censored by their wives. When Hilda looked up to the crowd and saw Father Goodlad staring disapprovingly into her eyes, surrounded by the parishioners at Our Lady Of Perpetual Sorrow–she fainted.

When my bereaved widow awoke a few seconds later in the arms of Goodlad, she started sobbing and it was the priest who comforted her.

OK, so I should have discussed the tombstone decoration with her before I ordered it. After all, she will, one day, lay beside it. But fuck it, I didn't feel like compromising.

Now I’m not the first man on the Iron Range to have the symbol of revolution on his tombstone. Thousands of hammers and cycles just like mine litter the graveyards of Saint Louis County, Minnesota. But with the fall of Russian Communism and the advent of capitalist economies pumping so much money into their propaganda machines around the world, the symbol embarrassed my old girl. Truth is, it shouldn’t have. The only reason the steel workers in Northern Minnesota are working these days is because the demand for steel is soaring. And why is that, you might ask?

Communist China.

Hilda, still on her butt, propped up by the priest’s strong arms sobbing, surrounded by her concerned friends and family, pointing to the tombstone with her right hand, remained unable to express her mortification with words.

What happened next was unbelievable. Maureen O'Shaunessy Rukavina, Hilda’s meddling sister-in-law, took the pewter crucifix with rosary beads and with the great Christian savior hanging miserably in the middle from around her neck and gave it to Hilda.

With the eyes of Hibbing upon her, my wife rose to her feet. She walked to the casket, kissed my cheek and before the entire assemblage, in an expression of reverence before God, put the crucifix standing vertical between my thumbs, which were folded neatly upon my chest. She blessed me with the four Stations of the Cross and retreated with her head bowed. This time the women applauded.

“What the fuck!” I shouted. “You silly cow, you ruined my party! Hilda my wife, the bane of my life, peer pressure has always been your weakness. Now you've succumbed and this manly farewell of mine has been spoiled. You put a cross in my casket? Are you nuts?”

All right, so I never told Hilda I was a Jew. It never came up and she wasn't the kind of wife who asked questions. “But Hilda, you can't do this to me. I'm not only a Jew, I’m a Bolshevik.”

“Verklempt.” I think that word hits the nail on the head. I was verklempt and so distracted that when red-haired Rosie Meyerhoff, now drunk, grabbed her shirttails and bare-titted the men folk just like she did in the old days, I didn’t even laugh like I used to laugh. Nor did any joy come from the tall tales the old men told the young bucks regarding my verve.

Now what am I to do? Throw a temper tantrum? Turn off the Lawrence Welk CD? Hit the circuit breaker and kill the lights? Knock over the flowers, blow out the candles, overturn the buffet and soil the carpet because the guest of honor has been humiliated?

“Comrades, just look at that,” I called out to the rank and file, “it’s an image straight out of Catholic Digest. And to think that up until a minute ago I was having a great time.” They didn’t hear me.

"Father," said Hilda, "he's never been baptized and we neglected to give him last rights at the nursing home."

So Goodlad sent one of his alter boys next door to get the holy water and his Bible. Were it not for O'Shea, my executor, complaining that my will made no mention of baptizm and that the holy water might do damage to the make-up he so discreetly applied, I might have gone into the grave as a Catholic.

Not to be deterred, the priest began chanting some Latin mumbo-jumbo over me. I got so mad that the chapel door flew open from a strong gust and the walls cracked three times. And I’ll tell you it wasn’t for the Father, the Son or the Holy Ghost.

Do you think that small-minded Papist paid any attention? Hell, no. He was too busy with his Hail Mary's and Our Father's. How can a man of God be so blind to the messages that come from the realm of shades?

I'm confounded by this Jewish dilemma. It's makes the other Jewish dilemma–sausage at half price–seem trivial. I must get that cross out of my hands. I cannot be buried as a Gentile.
Walking to the chapel door, I stared at that newspaper photo of me just to recall what mean a bastard I can be. There had to be some reason for this insult, some trickster, some villain behind all of this. Everything is on purpose, they say, but for what purpose I did not know.
I raised my fists to the heavens and screamed out in fury to whoever might be listening, “You fuckheads. Fix this!”

Don’t mistake it for impotent rage. I knew exactly to whom I shouted: The cadres of my Communist brethren in heaven. And they knew exactly who shouted at them because I heard the echo of small voice with a Yiddish accent wafting down from the heavens say, “Boychik, give us a minute.”

I’ve kicked ass for lesser insults than this. But just this once I willingly gave them the benefit of the doubt. But I sat there feeling like a glum-faced schlemiel amid the revelers enjoying the drunken merriment of my wake.

Have I become a great fool in death? Has my epic journey been reduced to farce? Is my drama now burlesque? Will this long sojourn in the land of lefsa eaters end in disgrace?
Nobody changes genres on me and gets away with it!

It took a few minutes but two words came back from the great beyond. The very sound of those two words sent chills down my spine. It made me so crestfallen I almost wished I had curbed my histrionics because I didn't want to hear what I heard.

The two words were, “Joshua Bronstein.”

Joshua Bronstein? No, not him, say anything, please, just don't say Joshua Bronstein. To suggest that the answer to my predicament is Joshua Bronstein is enough to make a grown man cry.
Who knows from this Joshua Bronstein? He’s probably dead drunk and asleep in bed beside that Ojibway woman he runs around with.

The knowledge that only Bronstein can save me from being buried as a Christian impersonator must be someone's idea of a joke. That my legacy on earth should rely on that pathetic ex-Bar Mitzvah boy is ridiculous.

That Bronstein, I'll tell you, I always felt sorry for him. He too lived in exile. Lacking the aegis of the Communist Manifesto, he had idealogy to battle middle class anxiety. So he drank. And he drank more than I ever did. Of course, I admit that at one time I did have affection for the young man, after all, though he was no relation to my beloved Trotsky, he was a Bronstein.
But now what do I do? Wait for Bronstein to walk through O'Shea's big oak door into this sanctuary with his ridiculous Jewish kit?

He showed it to me once. The blue velvet bag which contains his black satin yarmulke, his white prayer shawl with the gold fringes and his old Hebrew Union prayer book given to him at the age of thirteen. What I wouldn’t give to have him stand over me with his hat and shawl, open his book to the appropriate page and read the ancient Hebrew words of the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, while rocking back and forth like some Hassid at the Wailing Wall and then take the cross from my hands.

But only a fool waits for such redemption. After all I am dead and Bronstein is drunk. Not only that he is O’Shea’s disgraced ex son-in-law and wouldn’t be caught dead in here. Pardon the pun. But somebody’s got to get that cross out of my damned dead hands.
So now what do I do?

Stay calm now, Kalinsky. Think. Something must be done. I will not go gentle into that good night. I am prepared to hover over this body until I get satisfaction. I can stand the fires of hell, but not this insult.

Life doesn't get any easier after you die–you mortals should know that.