The Mathematician’s Shiva by Stuart Rojstaczer Page A

do you mean?”
    “Out! Out of this house! Do something! Play some stupid game, baseball or something. Go
shtup
a girl. Don’t read this dreck!” He reached over and grabbed the book from my hands. “Kafka was a
mamzer
.”
    “What do you mean? How can you say that? It’s not like you knew him,
zaydeh
.”
    “Get the hell out, I tell you. Look at this stupid writing,” he said, thumbing through the pages, then resting on one. “‘K. looked at the judge’ . . .
yob tvoiu mat
. That idiot sat in his apartment all day making up dreck like this. Depressing stuff. You want to be an idiot like him?”
    I looked at my grandfather. He wasn’t talking abstractly or making assumptions. That wasn’t his style. “You really knew him, didn’t you?” I was getting excited.
    “Kafka was Czech. I’m Polish. Why would I know him? I heard of him, certainly. I knew
of
him. I forced myself to read his dreck a long time ago.”
    “He was a genius,
zaydeh
.”
    “Genius? What the hell are you talking about? Your mother, that’s genius. Kafka? A scribbler for the depressed, lost, and spoiled. Worthless dreck.”
    “So why did you read him?”
    “Out! You get the hell out of here. You writing depressing shit like this, too?”
    “I’m trying, yeah.”
    “No. Not in this family. I will not have a Kafka in my family. Out!” My grandfather ripped the cover from the binding of
The Trial
and threw it into the hallway. “That man caused enough trouble when he was alive. Screwed up a girl from my hometown.”
    “But you said you didn’t know him.”
    “No. I didn’t. But there was a girl from Komorow, a
dorf
not far from where I was born. She knew him. Screwed up her life forever.”
    “She knew Kafka?”
    “Yeah, she knew Kafka and I knew her. Beautiful girl. So intelligent. She could talk about anything in such a beautiful Polish. Broke her mother and father’s heart. She moved to goddamn Prague to take care of that sick
mamzer
.”
    “She was a nurse?”
    “A nurse? What kind of nitwit grandson do I have? A nurse. Yeah, right. Like Rebecca Weidman in Chicago. She a nurse to you?”
    “She’s a friend.”
    “A friend. A special kind of friend.” My grandfather was chuckling. “Pretty good deal you got down there. I got to hand it to you. You eat Mrs. Weidman’s
shabbas
meal, say a few prayers, and then, you little devil, what do you do? You didn’t get this from me or your mother, that’s for sure.”
    “She’s just a friend is all,
zaydeh
. I don’t know where you get such ideas.”
    “You’re worse than Kafka. Little liar to your
zaydeh
. Out!”
    I never found out how my grandfather learned about Rebecca and me. But the network of Polish-Jewish émigrés in the Midwest was tight. Fortunately, Dr. Weidman and his wife were born in the United States, and both their parents were long deceased. If the grapevine hadn’t passed them by, I can well imagine what I would have had to endure.
    At first, I didn’t believe my grandfather’s story about a girl he knew falling for Kafka, but it more or less checked out. Dora Diamant, daughter of a well-to-do devout family, was the girl in question. She managed to make it to England before the war. Perhaps there were only two degrees of separation between myself and my hero. But with my family, you never know. The details that define the stories of our lives are malleable. If it isn’t science or math, it’s fair game to be trampled upon, stretched, wrung out of its water, and rehydrated with vodka. My grandfather, like everyone in my family, was a skilled liar. Maybe my
zaydeh
had simply heard about this girl and appropriated the story in an effort, no matter how ineffectual and ridiculous on the surface, to teach me a life lesson.
    He was in the living room when I decided to find out what was what.
    “You knew Dora Diamant?”
    “You still reading that little
mamzer
Kafka?” He put down his newspaper and took off his glasses.
    “Yeah. He’s brilliant.