Epstein - Liebestod: opera buffa with Leib Goldkorn

ALSO BY LESLIE EPSTEIN

The Eighth Wonder of the World

San Remo Drive

Ice Fire Water: A Leib Goldkorn Cocktail

Pandaemonium

Pinto and Sons

Goldkorn Tales

Regina

King of the Jews

The Steinway Quintet Plus Four

P. D. Kimerakov

FOR EZRA AND JACK

May you live as long as Leib and
have just as much fun.

Leib falls into despair, meets a new friend,
and sets off on a journey.

L OVERS OF MUSIC, friends of Leib Goldkorn: Hail! Also farewell. You are in the year 2005. Being addressed by a man born in 1901momentous not only for the completion of the MombasaLake Victoria railway, but also for the composition by G. Mahler of his Fifth Symphony, with, in the key of C-minor, the celebrated dirge of the dead. Leib Goldkorn: ask not for whom the musicians parade. Its your funeral.

How old is this gentleman with one foot, sporting a Thom McAn, in the grave? For this we make a lightning calculation: 2005, the present year, minus 1901. Hmmm. Hmmm. One from five. Done! Zero from zero. Done! But a nine from a naught? This is the higher mathematics. See how, like a schoolboys, my tongue protrudes from my mouth. The two, hoopla!, becomes a one; the deficit attaches itself to the nil. Eureka! Leib is in years one hundred and four. Not exactly young.

Slight correction: we have not reached, on this brisk fall morning, the ninth of November, the precise day on which my head, as bald then as it is now, emerged from between theyou will pardon the expressionloins of my mother. Goldkorn, Falma. Ne Krupnick. Ergo, the present speaker is but, hmmm, one hundred and three. Sculptor! Carve, please, on the tombstone, L. GOLDKORN, GRADUATE: 11/9/01 10/10/05 . Erect it on the family plot at the cemetery of Hachilah Hill.

Surely the reader now exclaims: Is not today, this Monday, October tenth, 2005? It is. Proof: the date of my current National Enquirer is October 9. Headline: TOP MOB MISTRESS IN SPANISH HARLEM SHOOT-OUT. SON LEFT UNHARMED . Story, p. 4. Do you now understand? Has the incandescent bulb ignited above your head? Your interlocutor will not reach the day that is not only the anniversary of his hatching but also that of the famed Kristallnacht, 11/9/38, when the streets of Berlin were as strewn with broken glass then as are these of New York with fallen leaves now.

Why such haste to hear the Funeral March, key of C? Let us speak of the ills of the body. Primo, the coldness of extremitiesa sensation reminiscent of those childhood days when the family Goldkorn would bathe on the banks of the Iglawa, emerging from the chill spring waters with ejaculations of pleasure Gott! Gott! Ist das kalt! on our blue-toned lips, much as in America the daring associates of the Polar Bear Club sport in the surf at Coney Island. It is their belief, shared by Goldkorn pre, that such a frosty dip is a boon to virility. Virility, ha! ha! ha! Try to find Mr. Johnson now! Once, in excitement, three and one-half American inches!

The difference between past and present: the Polar Bears, both shiny-scalped males and broad-shouldered females, wear bathing costumes of one and two pieces. But in the Iglawa we younglings, and oldsters too, sported au naturel. On occasion one had to avert ones eyes from the nativities of let us say Frulein MinchkeJa! Ones own sister!lest a fellow experience a stiffy.

But we were speaking of the frailty of the flesh. Bicuspid pain. Ringing, key of B-flat, in the inner ear. On the tongue, fur and tastelessness. Response to blows from Dr. Goloshess rubber hammer: nil. Missiles, like half notes, hover in my squinting eyes. Abdominals: distended, obscuring the organs of procreation. From this pouch rise gurglings and faint cries, as if from a drowning man. The excrementas? Do not inquire. Luckily, little comes out since little comes in. No Williams Bar-B-Que Chicken, with side order of half-soured tomatoes. From B. Greengrass, the Sturgeon King, no saltwater treats. Instead of such dainties: Meals on Wheels.

Sleep? On this Posturepedic? Home to silverfish. A congress of fleas. Bite, bite, little ladies! And suck! Not to mention the encounter with a snout beetle. At my age, called by the Bard that of the pantaloon, one does not require forty winks. Instead I sit in my Windsor-type chair and read, a-squinting, page 4 of the excellent Enquirer : The young upper-Manhattan trophy-gal of famed mobster Tony-the-Anchovy-Crappenzo fell early yesterday in a hail of bullets. Karima Castillo, 24, who neighbors described as both fun-loving and a woman who de

Here the flame of my candle, like the flicker of life within Seorita Castillo, goes out. What? Candlelight? Like the friar in his cell? What happened to the Sylvania-brand bulb? Intact still, my trusty tungsten. It is the Edison electricity, the running water, and the steam for heat that have been extinguished. Radiators cold, grim, and mute. And my lumberman-style jacket has no longer elbows, my gabardines no longer knees. And look who comes: Old Man Winter, friends.

What happened next? Thats what everybody wants to know. Who pulled the trigger? And what of the young ladys fate? These items have had to wait until the light of dawn fell upon the printed page. Only then do I discover that the fun-loving Karima lay dead. Worse. Worse, still. She was a single mother who devoted her life to her eight-year old son, Jaime, who was abandoned when the Anchovy sped away in a blue BMW sedan. BMW. This is Bayerische Motoren Werke.

Can you blame Leib Goldkornonce fun-loving himselffor wishing to leave such a world? Eight years old! Poor Jaime! An orphan! Abandoned! And the evildoers still at large. In four more minutes, or perhaps threemy Bulova has long since been deposited at the Glickman Brothers shop of prawnsI shall no longer be forced to think of such cataclysms. Pantaloon? Who am I kidding? I approach the age of childishness. Sans teeth, melancholy Jacques: sans eyes, sans taste. Sans everything.

Yet it is not the cold, the hunger, or the ache of bones that will kill me. Nor am I cast into despair by the iniquities of the world. Leib Goldkorn has already encountered the worst that men can do. Was he not thrown in ridicule out the doors of the Wiener Staatsoper? Did he not watch with his own eyes as his entire familysisters Yakhne and Minchke; Mother Falma, ne Krupnick; putative presailed off on the barge Kaliope not downstream to Budapest and freedom but up the Danube to Dachau and death? Did he not suffer the scorn, in sunny California, of D. F. Zanuck? I do not need the callow Kennedy, President Jack, to tell me that life is not fair.

Then why does Leib Goldkorn look with longing at the Magic Chef oven? Into which he will soon thrust his head. Could it be the absence of Liebe und Arbeit , the words that my Coreligionist, S. Freud, employed in order to describe what a chap needs to find meaning in life?

Love :

Of that I have had my share. We begin, in youth, at the teats of Madam Goldkorn. An only son, never did I doubt I was her hero, a Hannibal. Next: the young man who pressed against me, a mere Jngling, during a performance of Tristan und Isolde . Let us speak last of the mammalia of Minchke. All here was innocent, all here was pure. Without effusion.