Goodbye Columbus

“It was only eight o’clock, and I did not want to be early, so I drove up and down the streets whose names were those of eastern colleges, as though the township, years ago, when things were named, had planned the destinies of the sons of its citizens.”

Neil once again notices the wealth and privilege that characterizes the suburbs of Newark in comparison with the city where he lives. The streets are named after prestigious colleges, foreshadowing the futures of the children in the houses lining the streets.

“Brenda shook the wetness of her hair onto my face and with the drops that touched me I felt she had made a promise to me about the summer, and, I hoped, beyond.”

From early on in their relationship, Neil looks forward to a future with Brenda. He consistently tries to unify them and becomes paranoid that she does not want him. His focus on the future leads him to neglect the present and fight with Brenda every time he suspects something endangers their relationship.

“It was a pleasure, except that eating among those Brobdingnags, I felt for quite a while as though four inches had been clipped from my shoulders, three inches from my height, and for good measure, someone had removed my ribs and my chest had settled meekly in towards my back.”

This excerpt contains an illusion to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, specifically referencing the giants of Brobdingnag. Neil thinks of the Patimkins as giants and himself as smaller, focusing on their class differences and suspecting their judgment of him as lesser.

“Mr. and Mrs. Patimkin’s bedroom was in the middle of the house, down the hall, next to Julie’s, and for a moment I wanted to see what size bed those giants slept in—I imagined it wide and deep as a swimming pool.”

Once again, Neil is obsessed with the comparative wealth of the Patimkins, and he sees the large physical size of Brenda’s parents as a sign of general superiority. With their large, single-family home, they take up far more space and resources than his own family, and he imagines this reflected even in their bed.

“Julie was looking at me as though she were trying to look behind me, and then I realized that I was standing with my hands out of sight. I brought them around to the front, and, I swear it, she did peek to see if they were empty.”

Neil is constantly conscious of the Patimkins’ perception of him, and in moments such as this, he suspects that they do not accept him because of his poorer socio-economic status. In this moment, he imagines that Julie suspects him of stealing.

“At the top again, I started to swim the length of the pool and then turned at the end and started back, but suddenly I was sure that when I left the water Brenda would be gone. I’d be alone in this damn place. I started for the side and pulled myself up and ran to the chairs and Brenda was there and I kissed her.”

Neil’s paranoia over Brenda’s commitment to him begins early in their relationship. Even in the first few weeks together, he suspects that she will leave him at a moment’s notice, and in this particular game at the pool, his insecurity over her commitment pushes him to declare his love for her.

“I said hello to her as I went out the back door, and though she did not return the greeting, I felt a kinship with one who, like me, had been partially wooed and won on Patimkin fruit.”

In this excerpt, Neil feels a connection with Carlota, the Patimkins’ maid. He believes that they occupy a similar rung in the family’s hierarchy. He fails to recognize his own privilege and actual position in the house, and his insecurity makes him feel that he is as valued by the Patimkins as Carlota, who works for them.

“[S]omeday these streets, where my grandmother drank hot tea from an old jahrzeit glass, would be empty and we would all of us have moved to the crest of the Orange Mountains, and wouldn’t the dead stop kicking at the slats in their coffins then?”

Neil recognizes as he drives through the old Jewish neighborhood of Newark that the community is largely moving out of the city, into the suburbs and rural areas nearby. He wonders at the loss of history and community as time will pass and erase the memories of the neighborhood.

“Life calls us, and anxiously if not nervously we walk out into the world and away from the pleasures of these ivied walls. But not from its memories. They will be the concomitant, if not the fundament, of our lives.”

This excerpt references the need to move on and acts as foreshadowing to Neil and Brenda’s breakup. For Neil, this relationship is important and impactful, and though he will move on reluctantly, he knows that the memory of it and the lessons he learned from it will influence him for the rest of his life.

“Mr. Scapello didn’t want me to leave on Rosh Hashana either, but I unnerved him, I think, by hinting that his coldness about my taking the two days off might just be so much veiled anti-Semitism, so on the whole he was easier to manage.”

Neil recognizes that his boss does not want him to take a Jewish holiday off because it disrupts the normal operations of the library. He knows that if he lightly accuses his boss of antisemitism, the man will cave. He does so to receive those days off, though the boss’s initial refusal does show a reluctance to honor Jewish traditions.

“What was it inside me that had turned pursuit and clutching into love, and then turned it inside out again? What was it that had turned winning into losing, and losing—who knows—into winning? I was sure I had loved Brenda, though standing there, I knew I couldn’t any longer.”

In “Goodbye, Columbus,” Neil struggles to discover himself and understand his emotions and motivations for being with Brenda. He does not know if he pursued her for her wealth or a need to feel like he possessed her, but he knows that despite this, he did feel love for her, though after their fight over the diaphragm, it is gone.

“The first time he had wanted to know how Rabbi Binder could call the Jews ‘The Chosen People’ if the Declaration of Independence claimed all men to be created equal. Rabbi Binder tried to distinguish for him between political equality and spiritual legitimacy, but what Ozzie wanted to know, he insisted vehemently, was different.”

Ozzie is curious as to how the Jewish people can be a chosen people if the laws governing the country he lives in designate all men as equal. Though Rabbi Binder tries to explain it in terms of spirituality, Ozzie continues to focus on the notion that each person is created equally, complicating Binder’s assertion.

“There was no thunder. On the contrary, at the moment, as though ‘one’ was the cue for which he had been waiting, the world’s least thunderous person appeared on the synagogue steps.”

When Rabbi Binder threatens Ozzie with a countdown, he realizes that it is meaningless. Nothing will happen when the countdown ends, and this realization greatly diminishes Ozzie’s sense of the rabbi’s authority.

“Threatening to? Why, the reason he was on the roof, Ozzie remembered, was to get away; he hadn’t even thought about jumping. He had just run to get away, and the truth was that he hadn’t really headed for the roof as much as he’d been chased there.”

When Rabbi Binder accuses Ozzie of threatening to jump, Ozzie feels misrepresented, as he came to the roof to escape the rabbi’s violence. He sees that the rabbi is lying, changing the firefighters’ perception of what is going on. Binder tries to take control of the situation by placing the blame fully on Ozzie.

“Yearningly, Ozzie wished he could rip open the sky, plunge his hands through, and pull out the sun; and on the sun, like a coin, would be stamped JUMP or DON’T JUMP.”

Ozzie looks for direction throughout “The Conversion of the Jews,” and as he stands on the roof, his confusion is amplified by the cries of his classmates for him to jump. He is a child and needs guidance in this stressful situation.

“My mind might inform me otherwise, but there was an inertia of the spirit that told me we were flying to a new front, where we would disembark and continue our push eastward—eastward until we’d circled the globe, marching through villages along whose twisting, cobbled streets crowds of the enemy would watch us take possession of what, up till then, they’d considered their own.”

Nathan Marx struggles throughout “Defender of the Faith” to transition away from a state of warfare back to civilian life. Even when he is told that he will no longer face combat and will instead work on a base, he feels himself expecting a new front and a new battle.

“But now one night noise, one rumor of home and time past, and memory plunged down through all I had anesthetized, and came to what I suddenly remembered was myself.”

As Nathan rediscovers who he is after the war, memories begin to emerge of his previous life. He hardened himself against these memories for survival during the war, and the lack of danger or need for strict discipline and uniformity present opportunities for him to once again find himself.

“I saw that his teeth were white and straight, and the sight of them suddenly made me understand that Grossbart actually did have parents—that once upon a time someone had taken little Sheldon to the dentist. He was their son.”

Marx sees Grossbart as the child he is in this moment, rather than the soldier he is training to be. His time in war has hardened him against seeing the unique humanity of those around him, and the realization that Grossbart has a backstory, and a family, softens Marx’s attitude toward him.

“Once or twice Epstein had tipped his hat to her, but even then he had been more absorbed in the fate of Epstein Paper Bag than in the civility he was practicing.”

Lou Epstein spends his entire life working to make Epstein Paper Bag prosper, and because of this, he is often ignorant to his surroundings and the people in his life. His affair with Ida only started because of a curiosity sparked by seeing her daughter naked and realizing that he never truly noticed her because his mind is always concerned with business.

“Believe me, she’s not losing any sleep…She doesn’t deserve me. What, she cooks? That’s a big deal? She cleans? That deserves a medal? One day I should come home and the house should be a mess. I should be able to write my initials in the dust, somewhere, in the basement at least. Michael, after all these years that would be a pleasure!”

One of the reasons that Lou’s marriage crumbles is because he cannot handle the stability and predictability of Goldie. She consistently cleans the house and keeps to a tight schedule, making life easy for her family. Lou despises her blamelessness and tries to use it to discredit her in the eyes of his nephew.

“I looked again at number twenty-six; then back to Albie; and then propelled—as I always was towards him—by anger, pity, fear, love, vengeance, and an instinct for irony that was at the time delicate as a mallet.”

The protagonist of “You Can’t Tell a Man by the Song He Sings” is drawn to Albie Pelagutti for many reasons and cannot ignore how their differences unite them. Albie is in many ways the opposite of the protagonist, but they respect each other anyway and support each other when they can for as long as they can.

“Eli rose and lifted his briefcase. It felt so heavy packed with the grievances, vengeances, and schemes of his clients. There were days when he carried it like a feather—in Tzuref’s office it weighed a ton.”

Eli feels the weight of his briefcase in Leo Tzuref’s office because he does not fully believe in the cause he has been assigned. He sees the moral complication of driving these Holocaust survivors out of town, and this is what leads him to attempt to find a middle ground with them. His goal is to let them stay but have them modernize to assuage the anxieties of the townspeople.

“Is this what we asked of you, Eli? When we put our faith and trust in you, is that what we were asking? We weren’t concerned that this guy should become a Beau Brummel, Eli, believe me. We just don’t think this is the community for them. And, Eli, we isn’t me. The Jewish members of the community appointed me, Artie, and Harry to see what could be done. And we appointed you.”

Once again, Eli struggles with the task at hand, as he feels he must work for the entire Jewish community of Woodenton, New York, even if he does not agree with them. Ted scolds Eli for attempting to follow his own conscience rather than enforcing the collective will of the townspeople.