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completely the clutches of self-justification? To learn to lead a wholly indefensible, unjustified life—and to learn to like it? If so, thought Zuckerman, if that is the future that my pain has in mind, then this is going to be the character test to top them all.

 
     
     
     
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    Zuckerman had lost his subject. His health, his hair, and his subject. Just as well he couldn ’ t find a posture for writing. What he ’ d made his fiction from was gone—his birthplace the burnt-out landscape of a racial war and the people who ’ d been giants to him dead. The great Jewish struggle was with the Arab states; here it was over, the Jersey side of the Hudson, his West Bank, occupied now by an alien tribe. No new Newark was going to spring up again for Zuckerman, not like the first one: no fathers like those pioneering Jewish fathers bursting with taboos, no sons like their sons boiling with temptations, no loyalties, no ambitions, no rebellions, no capitulations, no clashes quite so convulsive again. Never again to feel such tender emotion and such a desire to escape. Without a father and a mother and a homeland, he was no longer a novelist. No longer a son. no longer a writer. Everything that galvanized him had been extinguished, leaving nothing unmistakably his and nobody else ’ s to claim, exploit, enlarge, and reconstruct.
    These were his distressing thoughts, reclining on the playmat unemployed.
    His brother ’ s charge—that Carnovsky had precipitated their father ’ s fatal coronary—hadn ’ t been easy to forget. Memories of his father ’ s 4ast years, of the strain between them, the bitterness, the bewildering estrangement, gnawed away at him along with Henry ’ s dubious accusation; so did the curse his father had fastened upon him with his dying breath; so did the idea that he had written what he had, as he had, simply to be odious, that his work embodied little more than stubborn defiance toward a respectable chiropodist. Having completed not a page worth keeping since that deathbed rebuke, he had half begun to believe that if it hadn ’ t been for his father ’ s frazzled nerves and rigid principles and narrow understanding he ’ d never have been a writer at all. A first-generation American father possessed by the Jewish demons, a second-generation American son possessed by their exorcism: that was his whole story.
    Zuckerman ’ s mother, a quiet, simple woman, dutiful and inoffensive though she was, always seemed to him a slightly more carefree and emancipated spirit. Redressing historical grievances, righting intolerable wrongs, changing the tragic course of Jewish history—all this she gladly left for her husband to accomplish during dinner. He made the noise and had the opinions, she contented herself with preparing their meal and feeding the children and enjoying, while it lasted, the harmonious family life. A year after his death she developed a brain tumor. For months she ’ d been complaining of episodes of dizziness, a headache, of little memory lapses. Her first time in the hospital, the doctors diagnosed a minor stroke, nothing to leave her seriously impaired; four months later, when they admitted her again, she was able to recognize her neurologist when he came by the room, but when he asked if she would write her name for him on a piece of paper, she took the pen from his hand and instead of “ Selma ” wrote the word “ Holocaust, ” perfectly spelled. This was in Miami Beach in 1970, inscribed by a woman whose writings otherwise consisted of recipes on index cards, several thousand thank-you notes, and a voluminous file of knitting instructions. Zuckerman was pretty sure that before that morning she ’ d never even spoken the word aloud. Her responsibility wasn ’ t brooding on horrors but sitting at night getting the knitting done and planning the next day ’ s chores. But she had a tumor in her head the size of a lemon, and it seemed to have forced out everything