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207 18 Epitaph for a Canadian Kike This essay begs to be read aloud. It is one of Krim’s most Jewish articles, not just exploring a Jewish theme but reveling in a Jewish tone of voice, indulging in Jewishisms such as “Mr. Disgusting,” and employing off-color Yiddish phrases such as momser (bastard) and priceless Jewish mother understatements such as the oneword sentence “Nice” in response to the news that the subject of this essay, shit sculptor extraordinaire Sam Goodman, told a potential buyer, “I shit on you, too.” Krim brings the obscure Goodman vividly to life as a knowing Jewish knave and scoundrel thoroughly at home with the dirty facts of life and gleefully eager to rub your nose in them. Krim’s easy, fluent, street-corner use of four-letter words enlivens , joyously, this portrait of an unmannered son-of-a-bitch, and it is a testament to Krim’s skill that it is impossible to know for certain whether this 1969 article was inspired by Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, which appeared at the beginning of the same year. That’s what Picasso meant when he said that great artists steal. This essay is in many ways a Jewish version of the “Black English” piece (chapter 9) that examines how blacks use obscenities, and the similarities between them suggest that the Jews’ affinity for black life stems from a shared anger. Just as Krim understood black cursing as a regurgitation of the foulness blacks had been forced to swallow in America, Krim views Sam Goodman as a deliberate offender who offered gifts of excrement to a world that had fed the same to the Jews. The similarity between the two essays goes further. Krim’s sympathy for black cursing and Goodman’s art cannot overcome his distaste and condemnation of both. Krim makes no special pleading for Goodman out of Jewish brotherhood. He provides a hilarious and brilliant interpretation of Goodman and his art, but rejects the man nevertheless, just as his understanding of black foul language does not make him a defender of it. 208 . Missing a Beat H ow much of what I’m going to say about Sam Goodman— yes, Sam, I’m trying to come to terms with you at last, you prick, you enduring pain in the world’s ass!—is “true,” actual, the way it really was, and how much is my own anxiety-specked creation I don’t know, ultimately; but if God existed and he wanted a view of Sam on earth (or Sam on concrete since I only knew him in N.Y.), as heaving and personal as anyone else’s protests today, I would tell him what I am about to tell you and, in working it out, myself. Was it the tough old Arab-boy-fucker Gide who said we write things down to define them for ourselves?—he did, but so did half a dozen others whose names do not come to mind in this gloomy instant and they were all correct. I’ve buried Sam far down in my safety-seeking head until now, refused to acknowledge that accusing corpse, been afraid of what I’d find in myself as much as in Sam. But that’s all over. I’ve shed my shame. Let come out what will, what must—that’s my motto for tonight, alone here in an empty Madrid apartment, far from my roots, home, N.Y., America, alone with the sneering ghost of Goodman . Some ghost, believe me, I can feel him mocking me as I write, but feverishly wanting the publicity also: “You know fucking-A I deserve it, Krim, now where is it going to be published—when?—and do you have pictures? There’s a very good one of me . . .” Good one of you? Don’t make me laugh or I might actually, legitimately , throw up. Let me do this my way, momser, user, Mr. Disgusting, or I won’t tell it at all . . . yet I have to, eventually, so you win again you— you—cheap hustler! No. You were both more than that and less effective. To get on with it: all I can do is sketch what I saw and felt, take my chances, and I certainly had a lot of shooting, unexpected feelings in the dozen or so times I was around Sam. Different body-pulls traveling all over the place and causing me pain, mostly. Boris had introduced me to...

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