#474 How We Avenged the Blums- Nathan Englander
Three Blum brothers have been under steady harassment from
who they only call The Ant-Semite. The smallest, Zvi has just been knocked
unconscious and left hanging by his underwear from his friends to find him. The
police are called, something not all the Jewish families are willing to do, but
nothing of consequence happens.
“Our parents were born and raised in Brooklyn. In Greenheath, they built us a Jewish Shangri-la, providing us with everything but the one crucial thing Brooklyn had offered…a toughness. As a group of boys thirteen and fourteen, we grew healthy, we grew polite, but our parents thought us soft.”
With the grudging support of their rabbi and parents, the
Jewish children begin a self-defense training program. They not only want to
protect themselves but they want vengeance from past transgressions. When the
Blum’s mother is attacked, the kids finally spring to action, but really what
good did it do?
I’m not sure what message we are supposed to glean from this
story. Not only do the children not really learn self-defense, or proper
teamwork, but in the end their “revenge” was wrought by a ringer they brought
in to help. Zvi did stand up for himself, but that was it, all the other
children acted as mere onlookers. I wasn’t expecting a big good-guy-wins type
of ending, but I still missed some sort of conclusion.
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