No Heroes by Chris Offutt

Author:Chris Offutt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Dirty Money

Sometimes I worry if I can pull this off. I leave my writing desk in tears. Will people care that a gentile is writing about the Holocaust? Am I appropriating Jewish material? Am I respectful enough? Why am I doing it in the first place? The questions continue endlessly, the writer’s self-torture at three A.M. There were no Jews where I grew up. As a kid I thought they were the same as Christians only they went to church on Saturday. I married the first Jew I met.

I remember a local woman whose husband beat her repeatedly for twenty years. He once shot her brother for trying to protect her. After that no one bothered the couple again. He eventually beat her so badly that she was hospitalized for several weeks and he went to prison. The husband was released a broken man, having aged hard in every way. His wife suffered brain damage from his last beating and required significant care. Because neither of them could work, the state sent them a monthly check, a form-of welfare that reminded me of war reparations.

I call Arthur and ask if he has looked into compensation. The subject pisses him off mightily.

“No,” he says. “I have no interest in money from the Germans or the Poles. My wife says take the money and give it to the kids. Let the grandchildren go to college. On what, I ask you? On the lives of their great-grandparents? If a murderer pays me money for killing my brother, it makes me dirty. You pay twenty-five dollars, twenty-five thousand dollars, two hundred fifty thousand dollars—then you’re okay. You’ve paid off your debt. And what after they pay me off? What do I tell my mother and father if I should see them in Heaven? Hi mother, they paid me off. They paid me off! That money is dirty. That money is fricking dirty.

“And Sonny, I know them. They are cheapskates. If they pay me back wages for slave labor, they will charge me room and board for concentration camp.”

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