From Jerusalem your father Shmiel the Holy Beggar called—the last thing I needed at that moment. I hadn’t heard from him in over five years, when I had bought off all his rights to you with an all-expenses-paid, five-star deluxe spiritual tour. I had assumed the cannibals of the Andean Islands had taken care of him for me, but apparently he was unpalatable even to them. Now he was calling to inform me that business was very bad at the gravesite of the Singing Rabbi, nobody came anymore—and why was that? Because word had spread that his daughter—his own daughter, the daughter of Shmiel the Holy Beggar no less—had run off with an Arab. According to the intelligence reports, there was a danger the couple might figure out a way to sneak into the country on her Israeli passport even though there was an all-points bulletin out blocking them, and make their way to the cemetery to blow themselves up at the grave of the Singing Rabbi while everyone was sitting around having such a nice kumsitz, and feeling mamesh so high, so openhearted, turning their pockets inside out and emptying every last grush into his guitar case. The whole cemetery was crawling now with military types with shaved heads and walkie-talkies, Mossad, Shabak, guys in suits and sunglasses and hearing aids, the security was so tight with X-rays and shmex-rays and body searches and pat downs and friskings and the whole shmear, nobody wanted to put themselves through all that garbage even for the Singing Rabbi, nobody was coming to the gravesite anymore, it was just too much of a pain in the you-know-what. His whole personal income, his livelihood, his bread and butter, his pita and hummus, all of his revenue was flushed down the toilet, down to minus zero—and why was that? Because bottom line, he claimed, I was too busy to do my job as a mother and watch over my own daughter in the proper way, I was too busy bowing down to elephants and monkeys, sinning and causing others to sin like Yerovam ben Nevat, with my idol-worshipping tour business, I was too busy chasing after other women like a “prevert,” and so on and so forth.

I cut him off; I could not bear it any more. I did not deserve this, I was in pain. I was quite possibly a candidate for the title of em shakulah, for which there is no equivalent word in the English language, as if only a Jewish mother can be a mother who has lost a child in the tradition of our Mother Rachel weeping over her children, unreceptive to comfort of any sort, and here he was your own father thinking as per usual only about himself and where his next falafel would be coming from, it was inhuman.