The Nose Jew (WIP)

I wrote this short story or sketch a few weeks ago and have since been more or less constantly afflicted with the sense that it is incomplete. However, my efforts to complete it — whether by extending the fictional mythology to some better dramatic conclusion or by developing the naturalistic stub of the story — have stumbled. So I will post The Nose Jew here and hope that inspiration creeps by on its tiny malformed feet.

The schnozzenjud can creep through a house silently on his tiny feet, stopping into the room of a sleeping Gentile boy. He draws his nosefork, a long, sharp precision instrument, as the boy snores. Swoop! He slips the nosefork into the boy’s nose, and tugs, hard, extending even a perfect Roman nose into a hooked, crooked, Isaac Bashevis Singer schnoz. The Nose Jew is so well-practiced in his art that he can do all this without waking the poor child, and creep back to the land of Israel before morning, when the child will wake, nose stretched sore, look in the mirror, and barely have time to howl in horror at the mountain dominating his facial landscape before the SS comes to cart him off to Auschwitz.

As I finished the story for the umpteenth time, Jeremy had already drifted off to a calm sleep, his hand draped lightly over his face, with a small gap between ring finger and tiny pinkie to allow noisy breathing.

Little Jewish boys have their noses extended right after they’re born. Not by the Nose Jew. A man called a mohel takes a nosefork and gives the nose a gentle tug — baby’s noses are still soft, so that’s all it takes — and pulls it into a great crooked shape, like a rhinoceros’ horn, or its nose for that matter. Some say that the little Nose Jew, busy with Gentile boys’ noses at night, works as a mohel by day.

Does it hurt, daddy?

Well, the little babies cry, but babies are always crying, so who can tell?

Sometimes, even after the nose fork is used, the nose grows back to normal. Those babies grow up to be Christians, not Jews. That’s how they knew Jesus was a Christian — his nose grew straight. His parents were very upset, naturally. They had the mohel fork his nose over and over again, but it kept growing back straight. They even called in a special expert from out of town, a mohel who made his living taking the hardest cases of straight noses for the wealthiest families in Jerusalem.

For forty days and forty nights this expert tried. He even made special headgear for Jesus, which stretched a wire from a fork-shaped plug in his nose to anchor points behind his ears, constantly pulling it into the proper shape. It was all very expensive.

But as soon as the doctor left, and they took the headgear off, the nose shrank and straightened back to its old shape.

“For this 8,000 shekels?” said Joseph.