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Three chapters from what I can't bear losing
American Poetry Review, The, Nov/Dec 2003 by Stern, Gerald
I wasn't there and there was no attempt to have me come. God knows how uncomfortable or enraged I would have been. Nor did I send a telegram, as some others did. It was one of the many things we never talked about. I was poor, radical, had ambiguous feelings toward Israel, and despised the comfortable and dishonest hum. In one of the photographs my father was wearing a beautiful blue tuxedo and his face was shining; my mother had on long white formal gloves that came above her elbow and a white matching gown. They were of the Conservative persuasion and went to services twice a year. They were absolutely conventional members of the Jewish middle class in Pittsburgh, with all its virtues and faults. Though my mother had a little wildness in her and often-in her younger days-stayed up all night reading my books.
When she was in her mid-eighties, that would be 1985, she called me one day to tell me she had been invited to join an organization called "Parents of Famous Children." I was of course suspicious and started to ask her questions, which made her angry and defensive. "Was it a national organization?" "Where was its headquarters?" "What kind of people belonged to it?" "Why are you so suspicious?" she asked, "What does it matter?" And gradually I learned that the "organization" consisted of Miami widows and that the organizer was a rabbi in the schul she went to every Friday night, and that it probably consisted only of women-maybe a man or so-from that schul. It was just a rubber chicken dinner in a second-rate hotel somewhere, the rabbi officiating and handing out 4x6 framed "diplomas" on which were handwritten "Parents of Famous Children" with my mother's name, Ida Stern, inscribed in the bad slanty handwriting of the rabbi. My name was nowhere to be seen, though I was the "famous child." It was pure scam. The reb was a first-class con artist. If he took in gross a couple thousand, assuming he was charging a hundred a head, and the frames cost fifty cents apiece, which would be ten bucks, and the dinner ten bucks a head, maybe twelve with some wine, and the room was donated, he would be making about $1700-at least $1500-for the one-time affair (no more famous children after that). My mother proudly nailed her diploma to the wall. The person sitting next to her was Mel Brooks's mother.
Different lambs, different scams! How much they hurt, how evil they were, could be measured in-what? How the victim suffered? What if he didn't know? What if the con and the mark were both "innocent"? Say one was signing up for Jin Shin Jyutsu, the "ancient art of harmonizing life energy" or the Power Optimism Workshop, where you learn to replace negative patterns with positive practices, or "On the Verge," or "Coming Out Group for Women" or "Fat Chance" or "Coping with Sibling Rivalry" or even going to a postseason sale, or buying anything from underpants to credit cards. Stocks. Tanning. Resorts. Is it all swindle? Lying? False information? Partial information, fake fondling and kissing?
