Author’s note:
This is a short story of a Jewish boy who learns about the ugly realities of antisemitism, both past and present. The story was inspired partly by a talk—an argument, civil but lively—I had with an old friend. I mean a friend who is old, decades older than I. My friend is Jewish, as am I, and has lived enough to know a few things about the subject I refused to believe. What I did believe was something closer to the opposite: that he was too old to be in touch with the sunny new realities. Then came the Hamas attacks in Israel of October 7, 2023 and in its wake an antisemitic wave.
My own experiences of being taunted, hurt, insulted, hated simply for being a Jew have been, by historical standards, mild. My friend, who happens to have traveled widely as a journalist, including in Gaza, has had a very different lived experience. His position was simple: Jew-hatred waxes and wanes, but it never goes away. It can and will erupt in any place at any moment. My position was that, here in the developed West, the days of open, virulent antisemitism are over; the ancient hatred has been conquered, or at least diluted beyond recognition, by modern multiculturalism.
I was so wrong. My fictional offering this week is an admission of sorts—of ignorance, of hubris, of failing to appreciate the wisdom of age and of the knowledge that comes through suffering.
The Poison Game
One day after school, Davey and his friend Eugene were walking along the railroad tracks. For most of a mile they didn’t talk. Then, as if picking up a conversation they had been in the middle of, Davey said, “Arsenic.”
“That’s totally obvious, Isaacs. Plus you used it last time.”
“It’s a new day so it’s a new game. You name one, Stein.”
“Drano.”
“Drano’s not a real poison.”
“Define poison,” said Eugene Stein.
“Do I look like a dictionary?” said Davey.
“No, but you sound like one lately.”
“I’ve been working on my vocabulary.”
“According to you, Isaacs. I bet you don’t even know what poison actually is.”
Davey knew that poison was something Jews spoke of—if they spoke of it at all—with an almost tragic respect. But he couldn’t remember why, and right then poison was just fun, the way they sometimes had fun with the names of baseball players.
“It’s something you swallow that can kill you,” Davey said with authority. But even as he did he saw the problem with the definition. He hoped Eugene would not, but of course he did. Eugene was one of the smartest kids at school, maybe the smartest. He was one reason Davey was determined to improve his vocabulary.
“That’s just dumb, Isaacs. You ever hear of a gas chamber?”
Embarrassed and flailing, Davey said, “I know more about poison than you ever will, Stein.”
“Prove it.”
“Strychnine.”
“Mercury.”
The game was on. To stall for time, Davey stopped to break off one of the reeds that grew from the unused rail bed. The tracks were a spur that used to be so busy you could take a train to the Jersey shore in the morning, cool off at the beach, and ride home the same day. Davey’s father had explained all this to him, and more besides: according to Mr. Isaacs, there was a time when people used railroads the way they now used highways, and in the depot on South Street there was a lunch counter. Mr. Isaacs would get a faraway look when he talked about this, as if those had been better times. Davey didn’t understand this at all, since his father had also explained how there were signs back then in hotels and restaurants that said RESTRICTED. This meant no Jews.
“Are you playing or not, Isaacs?”
Davey realized he’d been daydreaming. In his distracted state the only poison he could think of was one he’d been saving, a special poison, one his friend couldn’t possibly know. But he had no choice.
“Hemlock,” said Davey.
“Hemlock?” said, Eugene.
“Everyone knows that, Stein.” Everyone didn’t know it, since it came from a play neither Davey nor any kid he knew had ever read. But Mrs. Isaacs read Hamlet—she read it over and over—and she liked to tell Davey how in the play someone committed murder by pouring hemlock into the victim’s ear.
“It’s in Shakespeare,” he said proudly. Which silenced his friend but only temporarily.
“Thallium,” said Eugene.
Now it was Davey’s turn to feel stupid. He wondered if Eugene had a book, which as far as Davey was concerned would be cheating. Well, he could get a book, too. There was a library at school but Davey doubted they would have a book about anything as interesting as poison. There was a smaller library in the synagogue, on the upper floor where classes were held, but the only person he had ever seen go in the room was the principal, Dr. Levi.
Davey walked slower. Eugene, short-legged and chubby, was breathing hard, but that wasn’t why Davey slowed down. They would be late for shul, but that wasn’t the reason either. Davey simply wanted to make the fun last, the fun even of losing. The fun of being with Eugene Stein, who said things like “totally obvious.” The thrill was not in the words themselves but in the way he said them, a smart sort of sneer. But really the fun went deeper, to an idea. The idea was that the two of them had something special—knowledge, kinship, a connection of spirits—that no one else in the world had, not the way they did.
For inspiration Davey looked around, but he saw nothing interesting. He knew the building yard they were passing where cement blocks were stacked in the grass. He knew the spot near a rusted switch in the tracks where the barbed wire was missing from the fence and you could climb over. He knew particular weeds and when they flowered and when they died. He knew when there was something unusual in the weeds—and there was, just beyond the fence before the tracks crossed South Street. It was a big kid sitting on a tree stump, smoking.
They turned down South Street in the direction of the synagogue, both of them walking faster now. Eugene had quickened the pace, despite breathing harder than ever.
“You heard him?” Davey asked. The question was unnecessary; the kid on the stump had spoken clearly.
“I basically just ignore him,” said Eugene.
“He was left back in first grade, you know.”
“I heard first and third. Ehrets is a moron.”
“I believe it,” Davey said. “He’s too big for sixth.”
“He looks like he should be in high school. Smokes like it, too.”
The glow of the cigarette was what had attracted Davey’s attention. The instant their eyes met, the kid named Eddie Ehrets had said, “The two Jew boys.”
Eugene, walking faster than Davey had ever seen him move, looked over his shoulder a few times. Davey refused to do that. He was determined to stand up for them by this small proud act, for what they believed in. Not their faith; the insult was annoying but no more so than all the insults that came casually and not infrequently from kids and the occasional adult. Those he was used to. Davey was fighting for something more basic: the right to walk the streets of their town feeling free and happy and, yes, a little bit special. Eddie Ehrets, with whom Davey had shared maybe five words once on a playground, obviously didn’t think they were special. More than anything, Davey’s anger came from what this dumb overgrown kid, with nothing better to do than sit in the weeds smoking, had done to Davey’s current best friend. Eugene Stein had been turned in a moment from confident and clever to a small terrified boy waddling as fast as he could along a broken sidewalk.
A few blocks before their destination they stopped in front of Gianelli’s Variety Store. Eugene insisted they go inside, but Davey urged them on. Gianelli’s Variety, he knew too well, was an evil place. Also a foul and shabby one. FOUNTAIN CIGARS CANDY STATIONERY said flaking gold letters on the filthy glass. Stained curtains hung limp in the second story windows. He had been inside, but not in a year, and not ever again. Because Mr. Gianelli, intentionally or not, actually sold poison.
•
“Cyanide,” Davey whispered.
They were sitting now in the last row of the classroom. Dr. Levi, the ring of scalp around his yarmulke glistening, wrote at the blackboard.
“That’s in bad taste, Isaacs,” Eugene whispered back.
“Why? It’s a perfectly good poison.” For some reason it had come to him, maybe because he’d been thinking of Gianelli’s Variety, of the chipped counter and the spigots behind it that pumped poison from nickel spouts. He had once been made sick—so sick that he remembered wondering if a person could die from puking—by something in a root beer float.
“Cyanide?” Eugene said. “In a synagogue?”
“So?”
“Totally obvious.” The sneer was soft but it was back; the threat called Eddie Ehrets was behind them, forgotten for another day.
Dr. Levi’s bald head turned and the two boys went silent. The lesson was about Abraham. Usually Davey’s attention wandered during these Old Testament stories but this one kept his interest despite the asides with Eugene. The story was how Abraham, the founder of their faith, was commanded by God to kill his son Isaac. Davey Isaacs, the first-born in his family, would according to Jewish tradition be the sacrifice. He imagined his father standing over him with the big kitchen knife.
When the bald head with its shiny ring turned away, Eugene whispered, “You know what Nazis are?”
“Of course I know what Nazis are.” Images of his own father holding the knife mingled with characters from a TV show about a German prison camp. Davey didn’t much like Hogan’s Heroes, but they only got three channels and for half an hour every afternoon it was the only thing on.
“Then you know they killed Jews, right?”
“I’m not some idiot.” Davey heard himself talking loudly. He waited for Dr. Levi to turn his severe face on them. When he didn’t, Davey added, “Like Eddie Ehrets.”
“Ehrets is a German name,” Eugene said.
“Ehrets is a Nazi,” said Davey.
The boys giggled—they couldn’t help themselves—and this time Dr. Levi turned. Their teacher was not old, no older than Davey’s father. His face was round and flat, not like some of the angular men’s faces you would see at shabbat services. He had a trace of a foreign accent; otherwise he spoke English with perfect precision. He was fluent in Hebrew and, it was said, several other languages. Davey didn’t dislike the man as much as fear him. Now here was Dr. Levi looking right at the two of them, the only boys in the class.
•
“Your father is a teacher, isn’t that right, David?”
“He’s a history teacher. My mother’s a teacher too.”
“Is she indeed?”
“A student teacher. She’s goes to college.” For some reason Davey was more proud of what his mother would be doing than the work his father had always done. “She goes to the state college in Salem and will be a real teacher next year.”
This information produced a look of disapproval on the principal’s round face. Then the expression passed, or was willed away, and he said, “We are in the Old World no longer.”
“I thought the world was billions of years old, Dr. Levi.”
This time the teacher smiled. “I don’t know your mother well, but I’m sure she’s a very intelligent woman. Do you know how I know, David?”
“How?”
“Because she has such an intelligent son.”
Davey didn’t know whether or not to say thank you. He didn’t know what to say. They were alone in Dr. Levi’s tiny office, the smallest of the several rooms above the sanctuary. Class was over and the building was quiet. Eugene had left, walking the single block to his father’s store, which sold and repaired shoes. The girls in the class had run shrieking down the stairs to waiting cars. Dr. Levi asked Davey how he usually got home.
“Up the top of the hill, then down Crandall Street—”
A small fleshy palm stopped him. “So you walk, David.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Would you please call home and tell them you will be late?”
In the silence of the tiny room Davey could hear more clearly the slight accent. Valk instead of walk, vould instead of would. Almost how his grandmother, his father’s mother, talked. But Grandma Freyda, who had grown up in Russia, never went to school and couldn’t read or write. This teacher, who was also a doctor and a rabbi, sat before a wall of books with titles on the spines in English, Hebrew, and at least two other languages that Davey didn’t recognize. Now Dr. Levi turned his desk phone around.
Davey was certain his mother or father would ask to talk the principal, and his humiliation would be complete. He resigned himself to it. But his brother answered and their conversation went: “Sam, tell Mom I’m still at shul.” “Okay.” “Bye.”
Across the desk Dr. Levi was looking strangely at him. When he didn’t say anything, Davey asked, “How come I’m in trouble and Eugene isn’t?”
“Who said you’re in trouble, David?”
“I’m not?”
The round head shook slowly from side to side. “Your only problem seems to me to be innocence, like all the children in this fortunate land. I did not have the luxury of innocence. You are eleven?”
“I’m twelve.”
“Then you are old enough. Your friend is not.”
“Eugene’s almost thirteen.”
“He is not old enough in the way that matters, David. Your conversation in class, you and your friend”—Dr. Levi acknowledged the transgression with a quick punishing eye—“gave me the impression that you are aware of the Shoah.”
“I am?”
“The Holocaust. The great crime against our people.”
“The Nazis,” Davey said, beginning to understand.
“Nazis are not something to make a joke of. They are history’s greatest criminals. They are beyond even God’s forgiveness. But then you are innocent…”
“Innocent of talking in class?”
“Innocent of evil, David. Now you will know. Come with me.”
The top half of the door to the library room was glass. Davey had looked in many times at the leather books, some very old, but also at the shelves of books in colorful modern jackets. He had never been inside. As recently as that afternoon, before class, he had looked at the shelves hoping to see the book he was looking for, the book about poison. Now he saw only the foolishness of this errand. Dr. Levi used one of the many keys on a large dangling ring to open the door.
“I want you to study this one, David.” I vant you. In the library Dr. Levi sounded more than ever like Grandma Freyda. The principal dropped a heavy book on the table. “Also this.” The books had tattered paper covers, on one of which was a building like a factory with smoke coming from two square chimneys. Davey knew the book had to do with Nazis and Jews, and he wondered if the relatives he had never met—Grandma Freyda’s sisters and brothers who had died in the war, and for that matter family on both sides whom Mrs. Isaacs spoke of sadly—had been in the ugly place on the cover.
“I will be in my office. Sit. Read. Study the photographs. They are very difficult to look at but you will soon be thirteen. A man. Take as much time as you need.”
And Davey was alone in the library.
•
School was in its final hot days, and Davey still walked the railroad tracks toward the synagogue every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Sometimes he walked with Eugene Stein, sometimes not. Today he did, but he let Eugene walk ahead. He watched the boy wobble, his natural gait. The slow pace suited Davey. He looked at the trails of jets, which marked the sky with a writing as strange as Hebrew used to seem. He thought of the astronauts who had almost reached the moon but had to turn back, because that was their mission. The next crew, God willing (as Grandma Freyda liked to say) would land. He had been reading the newspaper but not so much the sports and comics in the local paper, the way he used to. Now he read his father’s paper, the Boston Globe, or tried to. Usually he read it alongside Mr. Isaacs, each of them taking a section and Davey watching to see where in the newspaper his father looked and for how long.
That morning a small item in the first section had caught his attention. It was a report of a skirmish on the border of Israel and Egypt. A few soldiers were killed. Davey had been nine during the Six-Day War, and had to have the event explained to him, which Dr. Levi did in one of their recent conversations. He and the director of the shul were practically friends, as if what Davey had lost with Eugene had reappeared in a surprising new form. Of course they weren’t really friends, they couldn’t be; but Dr. Levi made him feel like they were, and already, well ahead of schedule, they had begun preparing for Davey’s Bar Mitzvah. The news from Israel was somehow part of that, a part of his relationship with Dr. Levi and everything else that went on at the synagogue but not so much at home. His father hadn’t even noticed the small article about the border incident, or if he had he turned right past it with his methodical, moistened finger.
Now they passed the old depot, its roof caved in from a storm years before. It was hard to imagine that once, when Mr. Isaacs had been Davey’s age, you could get lunch at the counter. Except that his father couldn’t eat there, not with Grandma Freyda and not alone. The lunch counter, Mr. Isaacs had told him, was restricted. They passed the building yard and the rusted railroad switch where you could climb the fence. Then the tree stump where Eddie Ehrets had sat, but Ehrets wasn’t there. Suddenly lonely, Davey caught up with Eugene and tried to talk baseball. Both of them liked the Mets, who never won anything and were always overshadowed by the Yankees. But his friend, who was still his friend even if he knew less of the world than Davey once believed, was in one of the distant moods that seemed to overtake him lately, and they ended up talking about nothing. By unspoken agreement they no longer played their old game. Davey had learned too much, and Eugene either silently understood this or had simply gotten sick of the game, as they eventually got sick of every game. At shul it wasn’t unusual now for Davey to stay after by himself, supposedly to study for the far-off day when he would become a Bar Mitzvah, even though Eugene was older and thus closer to the event. Always the conversations with Dr. Levi went onto other, often difficult, topics.
•
He was sitting in the dirt smoking, his back to the faded clapboards of Gianelli’s Variety. They would have passed by unaware if he hadn’t spoken. First he showed them the crooked grin. Then he said, “Isaacs the Jew boy.”
It seemed Eugene was no longer worth his notice. This, along with the grin, is what did it. To Davey the grin said something worse than the words: that Eddie Ehrets was the master and they were prisoners, prisoners of the streets of their own town. Davey was of average strength but something inside him was not, and before Ehrets knew what happened—before Davey himself knew—the larger boy was being crushed into the dirt by the smaller.
He held the big arms down with his knees and squeezed hard on the surprisingly thin neck. Here beside Gianelli’s nothing grew, as if the ground itself been poisoned. For a while Ehrets’s lit cigarette glowed in the dirt, then lay as dead as all the other discarded butts. A small amount of blood pooled near it. The ugly head must have hit broken glass on the way down. At a safe distance Eugene sat watching. Bearing witness.
Bearing witness was very important when it came to the Shoah, Dr. Levi had said. There were people who wanted to erase it from history, people right here in this rich, enlightened country. Davey found this hard to believe at first but easier after more discussion; he found it perfectly believable here next to Gianelli’s Variety, watching Ehrets struggle as he squeezed the skinny neck. Eventually the struggling stopped. Davey had all of a lazy summer afternoon to decide whether Ehrets should be allowed to live or die. Among the lessons at shul were the commandments, and Dr. Levi had gone over them individually in private study. Not killing was number six.
Also covered were matters not in the Bible or the Talmud, horrors unforeseen even by the ancient writers who dwelled on every war, pestilence, plague, and catastrophe they knew or could imagine. But even they could not have imagined the Shoah.
Dr. Levi had been about Davey’s age when his father’s butcher shop in Budapest was destroyed. He was just a little older when the family moved from their house to live with another family in a single room in a slum—a ghetto, he called it—in the distant city of Lodz, Poland.
For a moment Davey relaxed his grip and Ehrets, able to talk, said, “I have to go to the bathroom.”
“So?” Davey said.
“So you want to sit there all day smelling my shit?”
“I smell it already.”
From the other side of the dirt lot Eugene laughed.
“They had to go to the bathroom in the concentration camps, too,” Davey said. “You think the Nazis let them?”
“You’re crazy, Isaacs,” Ehrets said, and Davey squeezed again, harder.
Something Davey had read about with special fascination and horror were the medical experiments. Dr. Levi, who spoke openly, if emotionally, of most aspects of the Holocaust, preferred not to talk about this topic. Out of respect Davey studied it by himself. The synagogue library had many books.
“There were doctors there who did experiments,” Davey said. “One was where they sewed up people’s assholes, then watched what happened.”
“What’s that have to do with me,” gasped Ehrets.
“It makes you lucky,” said Davey. “Lucky you can go at all.”
Eugene Stein laughed hysterically.
In 1942, a year after they had been forced into the ghetto, Dr. Levi and his family were moved to Auschwitz. His sister and mother were killed immediately. His father, who had a bad heart, was spared the gas chamber only because he died on a work crew. Dr. Levi, whose name was Bela, slept with his brother Sandor on a wooden pallet. They slept in each other’s arms to keep from freezing. On New Year’s Day, 1945, fifteen-year-old Bela woke up colder than usual and discovered that his little brother had died during the night. A few weeks later Russian soldiers in tanks broke through the electrified fence, and a year after that Bela Levi arrived in America.
There was nothing more to see or do here. Ehrets lay motionless with his eyes closed, like a corpse. Eugene, a spectator, was useless. To liven things up Davey said, “Let’s play, Stein.”
“Play what?” Eugene said.
“You know what. I’ll go first. Cyanide.”
Eugene looked uncomfortable, squatting in the dirt. Finally he said, “Henbane.”
“Cyanide,” Davey cried. He expected Eugene to tell him repeating was against the rules but he did not. Davey knew he wouldn’t dare say it was in bad taste.
“Sarin,” Eugene said without enthusiasm.
“Cyanide!”
Eugene shifted his position, like a catcher getting ready for a pitch. “Maitotoxin.”
“You’ve been cheating,” said Davey. “Admit it, Stein. You have a book.”
Eugene Stein admitted it.
Suddenly it was fun again, fun to be here with his friend, fun to be free. Davey, done deliberating, concluded that it would be wrong to break a commandment, and let go of the skinny neck. The foul-smelling boy got up and ran away so fast he probably didn’t hear Eugene call after him, “You’re a Nazi, Ehrets!”
For a little while they played the game but it got boring. Eugene suggested a soda at Gianelli’s. Davey said he would rather drink poison. They laughed and suddenly they weren’t bored anymore. And the boys sat in the dirt amidst the broken glass and blood and talked about the long vacation that was about to begin and whether the Mets had a chance this year, 1969.
The author would like to thank the Editors of the Lowell Review for permission reprint this work.
This is a skillful, layered story showing the poison of antisemitism. Davey's attack on his tormenter at the end isn't triumphant; the way it's written, the reader sees the spreading affect of the poison, how it transforms innocents, how hate begets hate. The barbed wire of the fence is one example of how elements of the story reflect the dark history Davey is learning. I'll single out two parts that I found particularly devastating. The first is this: economically packed into a couple lines are both the boy's rage as he witnesses what fear does to some--and in his rage I would say he almost joins sides with the tormenter who sees the victim as an object of disgust--and the heartbreaking image of his friend "turned in a moment from confident and clever to a small terrified boy waddling as fast as he could along a broken sidewalk." A reflection of how confident men were reduced in the Holocaust. The second is the end: After hate is met with hate, after the new victim runs away, the boys sitting in the dirt return to innocent interests--what just happened is covered over but it doesn't go away, and that is underscored by the heartbreaking precision of that final "1969," burned into memory.
Good story well done!