The Tunnel

Holy shit, it’s bright in here. Don’t ask me where, exactly. It’s hurting my eyelids. It’s like living in the headlights of a subway train, shaking and rumbling its way through Brooklyn, then heading across the river to Manhattan and up to Yankee Stadium, with passengers entering and exiting onto platforms, then climbing the steps, and going about their business aboveground. In my tunnel, I am safe and sound. Everything I need is right here, including a clock on the wall.

The distinction between day and night is hardly that important here. During the morning and early evening rush hours, the trains come and go in four-to-eight minute intervals, rattling the dishes in my wash sink. Deeper into the night, the intervals lengthen, first to 10 and then 20 minutes, then 30 minutes, and then to an hour or more, according to the wall clock, which judging by its dignified fonts has probably been hanging up there since the start of the Korean War.

The clock is not entirely reliable, though. Sometimes it runs fast, and sometimes it runs slow, before stopping entirely. I make a point of correcting it to the time on my phone after my occasional trips to the surface, where I pick up my packages and cop a copy of the New York Post. Safe in my tunnel, I read the paper front to back, and then again back to front. Then I lay them out on the table and clip stories of interest, to be included in my personal news feed, like “Tunnels discovered beneath Crown Heights synagogue” or “Hezbollah leader killed in bunker.” When I feel like time is moving too slow, or too quick, I set the clock ahead or back by an hour or two, in my own private version of daylight saving time.

In the center of the main room of my underground apartment is the old metal console, which is the undoubted star of my living arrangements. Starting early in the evening and late into the night, the blinking lights trace the progress of the trains from station to station beneath the city that never sleeps, bringing tired commuters from their jobs in hospitals and newsstands to the stations where they make their homes. It’s a vision of progress from a bygone era, familiar to my Grandpa Ernie and Uncle Abe up in the Bronx, a single panel on which our fates could be contained, and which could be viewed at a glance by enlightened engineers in white shirts, black shoes and black-rimmed glasses. Little did they know that the apostles of control would decide to throw us to the dogs.

I have everything I need down here and more. Next to the giant console with its red and green lights is a dedicated electrical panel which carries enough power to light up the World’s Fair, as well as an old field telephone marked “Central Services” which as far as I know still remains operative, though the temptation to pass some time in conversation has always been equaled by my fear of discovery. Picking up that phone would be an act of pure foolishness. Down here, I have endless electricity, running hot and cold water, a kitchen with a double hotplate, and an exposed toilet that looks out into a square concrete room with a drain in the center of the floor, in a room that could easily fit another three or four toilets in separate stalls along with a row of shower heads on the opposite wall—part of a design for a fallout shelter that was never completed, but which speaks well of the chances of my surviving anything short of a killer plague, or a direct hit by a Iranian nuke.

In any case, your average upwardly mobile couple in Park Slope or the Upper West Side, with a couple of advanced degrees each, can only dream of finding space like this in aboveground Brooklyn, with separate rooms for eating, sleeping, working, and watching television, walk-in supply closets containing mountains of old boxes, and enough extra space for a home gym. Granted, it is buried at least 75 feet underground and there are no windows. But apartment hunting in the city has always been a matter of trade-offs and compromises, the question being what you are prepared to give up in exchange for what. Here, there are no noisy neighbors cooking dinner, with strange cooking smells emanating from their apartments, while they concentrate the entire force of their beings on my demise—which in their understanding, as shaped by the sectarian logic of their countries of origin, which is also the logic of their new homeland, is a precondition for becoming whatever new version of Americans they imagine will inherit the promised land.

There is no escaping the brightness, though. There are no switches to control the lights. Down the hallway I discovered a supply closet containing what must be at least a hundred-year supply of ultrabright fluorescent bulbs, which appear to be of the type that are used to illuminate subway platforms. Inside my tunnel, though, the ceilings are perhaps 8 feet high, instead of 40 or 50 feet high, which further concentrates the light, which easily overpowers the military gray paint on the walls. Replacing burned-out bulbs with new ones only makes the place glow brighter.

When I first moved down here, the effect of packing such a large quantity of light into a comparatively small space was like coming face-to-face with the sun. When I closed my eyes, no matter for how long, the light was always there, foreshadowing a type of blindness that would manifest itself not as unending night but as a permanent wall of illumination, too bright to ever see through. Unscrewing one of the two parallel bulbs in the main room from its socket helped to reduce the blinding effect by maybe 15%-20%, which was only somewhat more bearable. When I removed both bulbs the room was plunged into darkness, relieved only by the faint but constant glow of the console, which faded out before I reached the hallway.

The choice was a tough one. In the end, however, I chose light, just like Judah Maccabee and his brothers did on the holiday of Hannukah, when a small amount of oil miraculously burned for eight whole days. I found the answer to the question of how the light could be safely contained in a first class British Airways amenities bag from a red-eye flight to London, paid for by the U.K. branch of a multinational entertainment conglomerate that needed emergency assistance in filing New York state taxes. To accentuate my experience of a padded seat that reclined at a 70-degree angle inside a kind of curved Danish wood pod, I was offered a tartan sleep-mask whose luxurious design pampered the eyelids with soft cotton while shutting out light at the sides of the wearer’s head with a gogglelike contrivance that years later succeeded in turning the high-intensity beam of lumens from my ceiling into something resembling night.

I found the amenities bag packed neatly inside one of the dozens of cardboard boxes that I transported down the ladder and through the tunnels. After excavating some adequate reminders of my former homes, I stacked the rest of the boxes up in a supply room alongside some unused buckets and mops. More to the point, the closet contained five cases of ancient, caked detergent, which does a credible job of scrubbing dirty surfaces when dissolved in water from the wash sink.

The night that I recovered the sleep mask, I slept through the night, or day, for the span of nine hours. I have slept soundly down here ever since, with no apparent damage to my eyesight, accompanied by the reassuring rumble of the trains.

The center console, with its glowing lights by the hundreds, offers proof, whenever I need it, of the fact that I am hardly alone. I calculate that, during rush hour, up to a tenth of the city’s population joins me underground, either in the trains or waiting on the platforms. I feel their presence daily, through the vibrations that are carried through the tunnels. Every once in a while, a particularly vigorous salute from a passing train may dislodge some object or another from my bookshelves, which are laden with tchotchkes from my former life. A David Cone bobblehead. A piece of Hermes wedding china with a picture of an elephant. A tennis trophy from the University of Pennsylvania, where I attended college. When one falls off a shelf and shatters, I sweep it up and dump the remains in a black plastic bag.

Millions of people, many millions, can sympathize with my experience of isolation. They are rooting for me, for us, to win, and for our enemies, whom they despise, to fail, rooting for the victory of civilization, and for the criminal murderers and rapists, who delight in burning little children alive, to be locked up in cages. Either that, or they fail to properly differentiate between killers and victims, or else they want the bad guys to win and the good guys to fail.

There are plenty of Jews living in tunnels these days, the difference being that I am the captain of my own fate, in some large-enough part. My heart breaks for tunnel dwellers everywhere, from the Jews who were kidnapped to the tunnels beneath Gaza to be starved, beaten, and tormented, to their captors, whom the world believes to be even more worthy of their concern, whose coincidence with violent Jew-hatred is itself only a coincidence.

Tunnel Jews. It’s got its own category on TikTok. I’m hardly a follower of vulgar trends, but it’s not like I can pretend that I ignore them either. They’ve got Israel snipers firing high-velocity bullets into children’s skulls, where the bullets remain miraculously whole—the better to be shown to newspaper readers around the world as evidence of the horror of criminal Jewish blood lust. Never mind that what actually happens when you fire bullets through a small child’s skull is that they pass through it like jelly. Physics after all was a Jewish invention. The zombielike credulity of the viewers is in fact part of the performance, the same way it was at medieval Passion plays, where audiences gasped in horror as the Jews used the blood of Christian children to bake matzo.

The internet is hardly responsible for my feeling of being besieged by maniacs, though it’s hard to argue that it does a better job of conveying the complexities of the human condition than the books that I brought down here in boxes and set out in careful order on my bookshelves. I made the bookshelves out of long boards of black oak I found in a junk shop in the Catskills, where I first fled. I liked it up there, but I got lonely during the winters. So I brought the boards down here, and lovingly sanded them down, staining and nailing them together to contain such varied treasures as a complete set of WPA guidebooks, the autobiography of Willie “the Lion” Smith, Really the Blues by Mezz Mezzrow, the collected works of Saul Bellow, the Library of America set of Philip Roth, and a set of the Encyclopedia Judaica whose nameplate indicates that it formerly resided on the shelves of the Butler Library at Columbia University. I read these books at night, either seated at the console, or else in the comfortable leather chair which I found up on the surface, discarded by a Hasidic family to make room for another kid or a famous rabbi’s marginalia, a library of a discarded civilization whose distinctive formation and location my ancestors, as far back as Spain, and as near as the Warsaw Ghetto, would surely recognize.

Books aside, the supply problem down here was surprisingly easy to solve. At first, I made runs to the corner deli, where I placed my order of coffee with half-and-half and egg and cheese on a roll from Mohammed Jawad, who has fed me breakfast off and on for the better part of two decades. Mohammed is an Afghan from Peshawar, who joined the International Red Cross at the age of 17 and earned an engineering degree from whatever Pakistani institution of higher learning. After 9/11, he joined up with the American military as a translator and was issued his own Desert Eagle. A photograph of Mohammed smiling broadly and holding his weapon in the mountains of Khandahar Province, hangs behind his cash register, reminding customers that there might be risks involved in robbing him. In the old days, before I got married and moved to Manhattan, we watched basketball and baseball games together, since which time he has succeeded in putting two sons through college and his daughter through pharmacy school.

“You look pale,” he said. “Like you’ve been living in Tora Bora,” referring to the caves where Bin Laden and his men retreated after the undoubted miracle of 9/11 changed America quite dramatically and comprehensively for the worse. Mohammed is hardly the problem, though. He’s an American through and through, the same way that I am, in love with cowboy songs and wide-open spaces. Like me, he wants to get as far away from this shithole as possible. His plan is to drive his Chevy Suburban to Alaska, and settle down there. “Maybe meet an Eskimo women,” he says. He will have the Desert Eagle shipped to him from Peshawar, where his brother still lives, and kill a moose. My choice, I told him, is to live underground.

“It’s not healthy never to see the sunlight,” Mohammed asks me. “How do you expect to meet a new girl?”

A few months later, Mohammed closed up his store and moved away, following through on his part of the bargain. Now I order wholesale from Amazon, like everyone else.

Every week, a large box of essentials is delivered to the building across the street with my name on it, followed by the initials “UG” in place of an apartment number. At night, I come up to the surface through a series of tunnels and ladders, which end in the sub-sub-basement of the building, which is inhabited mostly by Hasidic families. Among their boxes, I find mine, and I take it down to the laundry room in the basement. When the coast is clear, I open the supply closet, moving the mops and brooms and the large industrial vacuum cleaner carefully aside, and open the small iron door marked “Security,” which resembles the entrance to a coal shoot, and leads down to the sub-sub-basement. Before I came along, it had apparently not been opened in ages. Now it opens smoothly, after I treated the hinges with some oil that I ordered in one of my boxes.

Each box brings new treats and pleasures, new varieties of mouse traps, a projector that changes from day to night, so that I can stand beneath the Milky Way, a fuzzy blanket from China that feels exactly like llama wool, a life-size wooden sheep that sits by the console and keeps me company. I have a surround-sound stereo system, stereoscopic night-vision goggles with a range finder that allows me to dial in targets up to 1,000 yards away for my pellet gun. I ordered organic jams from Europe, a rowing machine, a set of gold clubs along with a projector that lets me play all of the world’s greatest golf courses, a Peloton bike, and a set of inflatable furniture that reminds me of the Jetsons. I have ordered rooms and rooms of this stuff, enough to supply a small army of people who might be foolish enough to join me down here. For now, however, I am alone, in my fortress of solitude, from which I will emerge in who knows what new form.

Why not live aboveground? Until recently I did, though I can’t say that I found the experience terribly satisfying. I had a lovely apartment in a white brick building on East End Avenue within walking distance of the office where I worked as a tax attorney for multinational conglomerates that distribute digital entertainment across the borders of space and time. My wife, Lakshmi, worked as a curator at the Met and took the crosstown bus to work. We had no children, which, when I look back on things, was both an obvious sign as well as a cause of disconnection in our relationship, though I understood our childlessness as a conscious choice that we had made together in our marriage.

It wasn’t that we didn’t love each other enough. The divergences in our cultures and upbringing made the idea of forming a coherent family unit appear to be a dead end, while we told ourselves that we preferred such activities as going birding in Central Park and attending the opera. Our greater disposable income also afforded us the pleasure of weeklong vacations at desert spas where we could drastically restrict our caloric intake. For my wife, these vacations were a foretaste of heaven where the only foods allowed would be vegetable broths and low-cal smoothies. When it came time to pay the bill, somewhere in the low five figures, I felt proud to be able to pay it and to walk away with a pair of slippers.

After all, what else had our parents imagined when they sent us to the University of Pennsylvania, where we met as sophomores? She was the exotic daughter of a Pakistani family that worked in the carpet business. I was the son of a diabetes doctor with a practice in Sheepshead Bay. By marrying, we affirmed the guiding spirit of the institution that had accepted us both, under the banner of uniting the children of the professional classes according to the principles of assertive mating, regardless of race, religion, or country of origin—while observing the unwritten rule of neither aiming too high nor stooping too low. She majored in art history, while I majored in business, with the hope of going to Wharton. I played singles on the junior varsity tennis team, which was no minor accomplishment in a university where upward of 80% of the students grew up in suburbs where they took regular tennis lessons at the behest of their parents, who were lawyers and doctors and accountants, who urged their children to practice their forehands and backhands in the hope that such attainments would be blessed with degrees from Ivy League colleges, and who knows—perhaps invitations to the summer homes of their betters.

We got married two years after we graduated, after moving in together to a third-floor walk-up apartment in the Village, in a building once inhabited by the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, whose name Lakshmi delighted in reciting while drunk. Our wedding was a strictly secular affair, held on an off-season weekend in early October on the lawn of a large rented house on Shelter Island, where we united in pushing our parents to the margins while gesturing at the cross-cultural nature of our marriage with the witty gesture of serving vegetable samosa appetizers alongside matzo ball soup. With our wedding gifts, we bought an apartment, where our childlessness would leave us more time to climb our respective mountains alone—her lack of interest in tax law being more than equaled by my inability to sit through dinners related to the acquisition of paintings by modern masters.

The betrayal of the equation on which our childless marriage was founded, of mutual disinterest in each other’s careers combined with the mutual rejection of our own and each other’s backgrounds, happened first on her side. Having made her way from the subcontinent to Manhattan, it turned out that the center of world culture had now shifted to places like Lahore and Tabriz, where canvases were decorated in purple and gold, like the brightly painted trucks that her grandfather used to transport carpets across the subcontinent. At first, Lakshmi was torn by this development, which made a mockery of her personal journey, or so she felt at first. She had written her thesis on Marcel Duchamp, after spending the summer before our senior year in Zurich, where she had an affair with a half-Swiss American whose father was a banker there. After we got married, she told me that he had broken up with her, though at the time she had told me that the initiative was hers, and that the affair was a mistake, born of her loneliness for my company. As it turned out, neither Switzerland nor the Swiss were especially accommodating to dark-skinned foreigners who worshipped strange gods—the God that the Swiss worship coming in the abstract yet portable form of gold bars.

Some of those bars, I told her, taking out my anger over her affair on the Swiss, were made from the fillings extracted from the mouths of the Nazi victims of the Holocaust, who included my Grandma Rose’s sisters, Flora and Dora, who had stayed behind in what to them was still the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Their father, a former cavalry officer, had received a personal commendation from the Emperor Franz Joseph himself. Flora and Dora were rewarded for their patriotic feeling by being no doubt very properly gassed to death at Auschwitz. Her boyfriend’s family, I added, probably still had their teeth.

“What a ghastly thought,” she said. However, if I thought that a shared animosity toward the Swiss might bring us closer together, I was mistaken, as she quickly made clear by changing the subject.

“I’m on the artists and curators committee for the Free Gaza gala,” she said brightly, while preparing her morning green smoothie. It was a Saturday, so neither of us had the excuse of leaving for work. As I walked out, I regretted saying nothing, other than that I needed some fresh air.

The elevator on the way down stopped on every floor. “It’s the Sabbath,” the woman in the elevator said to me. She lived higher up than we did, in a penthouse—the building having four of those, with spectacular views of the East River. She had us up there for drinks once, her being a gallerist on Madison Avenue and Lakshmi having the ability to influence her boss, a Germanic lady named Helga who came to the apartment three years ago from Berlin and whom I suspected perhaps too eagerly of a fondness for various S and M practices that for all I knew might alleviate the boredom that had overtaken my marriage. When I raised my dissatisfaction with our sex life to Lakshmi, she laughed at me. “You’re a tax attorney,” she said. “You have tax attorney sex.” The idea that our boring sex life was my fault appeared to give her a thrill. Perhaps if I was a big-money bond trader, or an Alpine skier, I might be deserving of more excitement in bed.

“It stops on every floor,” the gallerist added. “Because they have to make everyone else’s life miserable.”

“Miserable?” I asked. I looked her over. She looked entirely normal.

“I am blaming the Jews,” she said. “I’m sick of seeing dead baby pictures with my coffee.”

Now we were getting somewhere, I felt. “It’s inconsiderate of them,” I agreed. “The idea of surviving.” She flashed me a broad smile.

I saw her two days later in the laundry room. A week later, we were having an affair. It turned out Lakshmi was also having an affair, with a London curator who specialized in modern Iranian painting. To make a long story short, I quit my job, we sold the apartment, and I moved to Brooklyn, where I joined a local Chabad synagogue and studied Jewish texts. I went to rallies, where I wrapped myself in an Israeli flag and yelled “terrorists!” and “baby killers!” at deranged 19-year-old “students” who waved Hamas and Hezbollah flags on the dime of their upscale parents and yelled “baby killers!” and “terrorists!” back. None of it made me feel any better. What I wanted was to be away from it all.

It was several months later that my wish would be granted. I was learning in the beis medrash at 770 when a guy named Chucky, whom I knew from my weekly chavrusa, approached me with a gleam in his eye. I looked up from my English-translation copy of a commentary by Rav Moshe Isserlis on the Shulchan Aruch. “Have you been to the tunnels?” he asked me.

Chucky was a skinny redhead with a wispy beard who had been studying semiotics at Brown before being driven by events to “rediscover his Jewishness,” as he put it. Whereupon, over the hysterical objections of his parents, he packed up his stuff from his dorm in Providence, Rhode Island, moved to Crown Heights, and took up residence in an apartment within walking distance of the World Lubavitch headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway, which had seen his type before.

“What tunnels?” I asked him. In response, he invited me back to his apartment, which he shared with four other learners, each of whom was at least 15 years younger than I am. I had visited there once on a Sabbath afternoon at Chucky’s invitation and ate cholent from a hot pot that stayed on a low temperature throughout the day, before resulting in a thick gray paste that struck me as a likely substitute for mortar. As it turned out, my guess wasn’t so far from the truth.

Sitting on the couch were Shraga, formerly Jimmy, who was built like a fireplug and had graduated from Harvard with a degree in macroeconomics; and Schmulik, formerly Samuel, a tall, mournful kid in a hoodie who wrote his thesis on the rap poetry of Eve in the Department of African American Literature at Berkeley. Now, he announced to me, he was majoring in Nachmanides, drawing out the final “e” of the name like he was gleefully announcing the name of a hot new rapper. There was also Mordecai, formerly Marek, who would make his life in a different part of the tunnels.

“Help me move the oven,” Chucky asked me, as Shraga popped onto to his feet and flexed his biceps, before taking his place in front of the old black-and-white gas stove, and giving it a single-handed shove. Amazed, I watched the oven slide neatly back into the wall, with the help of a metal track on which it had apparently been mounted. It was neat work. Behind the oven, Shraga-Jimmy explained, was the food pantry, the upper half of which remained usable.

“You did this yourself?” I asked him. Shraga-Jimmy nodded.

“We don’t have girls over,” Schmulik-Samuel reminded me. “And you don’t want to burn yourself out on learning. Physical exercise is a necessity.”

“Meaning what?” I wondered.

“We started during COVID,” Shraga-Jimmy explained. Beneath his feet was a circular plate that resembled an old manhole cover with a kind of catch-handle in the center, which he neatly leveraged with a crowbar. In a different life, I could easily see Shraga-Jimmy with his fireplug build working as a blacksmith or a drayman—the kinds of jobs that Jews haven’t worked in America since Ernie and Abe triumphantly returned to the Bronx after conquering Berlin. I felt a sudden jolt of nostalgia at the thought of ordinary Jews, leading ordinary Jewish lives, which was a concept that Crown Heights with its bakeries and sforim stores gestured at but ultimately failed to capture. It was Jewish life, yes, the life of Yiddishkeit and study, but cut off from the people who make and grow things, who always struck me as the soul of the enterprise.

Ernie and Abe could read, and they prayed dutifully in the synagogue on holidays and even sometimes on Shabbat. Ultimately, they preferred breaking heads to reading books. I had determined to be Jewish, in part because my wife had left me, and because the rest of the world seemed determined to leave me no choice. But a Jewish world without Ernie and Abe wasn’t for me. Neither was the study of ancient texts. I had no intention of fighting in a war halfway around the world. I was a New York Jew, who grew up cheering for Bernie Williams and Derek Jeter at Yankee Stadium. My home was here, in New York. But where exactly would I live?

“Wait till you see what else is down here!” Shraga-Jimmy exclaimed, shifting excitedly from one foot to the other. Beneath the open manhole cover, a long iron ladder descended into a pit of darkness. Schmulik handed me an LED headlamp, which projected a beam of light from a cluster of little bulbs that suggested the eye of a fruit fly as seen through a microscope.

“Mordecai is already down there,” Shraga-Jimmy encouraged me, as he climbed down into the pit. I followed behind him, and Chucky followed behind me, bent low. Eight or 10 feet later, I found myself standing in a low-ceilinged tunnel, which for Chucky was little more than a crawl space. Twenty feet of darkness more, and we arrived at a T, above which hung a sign with an arrow, to which someone had added “770.” The arrow pointed to the right.

“What’s to the left?” I wondered out loud.

“The tunnel leads to the rebbe’s library,” Chucky said impatiently, illuminating the distance ahead. At the end of the tunnel I could see Mordecai, chipping away at a brick wall on which someone had outlined an entranceway in black paint. A picture of his head poking through the wall of the beis medrash would later appear in the Post.

“Where does the other way lead?” I asked.

Shragga-Jimmy shot me a look of annoyance. “There’s nothing there,” he said. “Just an abandoned Con Ed substation.”

I know better than to think that the people chanting slogans about Zionist baby killers have anything to do with me. They only mean to condemn Zionist Jews—who strictly speaking, aren’t really Jews at all, having become Nazis. Jews=Nazis. The authors of this syllogism are clearly masters of historical irony and poetic inversion, which is why people inscribe their clever new slogan on walls and on sidewalks, where it becomes part of the mad poetry of the streets. Zionist Jews put little Palestinian children in camps and shoot them in the head, then steal their organs and sell them for profit, as part of a bloodthirsty genocidal campaign, which is centered on the denial of reproductive freedom, which is an attack on oppressed people in every time and place on earth.

Genocide, baby killers, land stealers—all the crimes of which the West accuses itself daily—are laid onto the figure of the Zionist Jew, who laid the most massive and undeserved guilt trip of all time on the goyim. The last place that Zionist Jews, or any other types of Jews, belong is Judea, where they busy themselves by robbing and attacking the indigenous population and stealing their land while murdering the poor refugees in Gaza, who kidnap women and children and old people into tunnels. And if the people in Gaza are murderers, who live to kill Jews who lived here 2,500 years ago, or 1,000 years ago, and were driven from their land by Arab colonizers, then who says that their cause, as well as their methods, aren’t just?

What matters in the end is who decides. Still, I would venture to say that my Grandpa Ernie and Grandma Rose would have been plenty surprised to learn of their role as oppressors and land stealers, the only lusts I ever saw them indulge being for whitefish salad. To them, an apartment was simply an apartment. Still they were proud to have lived on the Grand Concourse, where Ernie carried Rose over the threshold, dressed in his GI uniform. After that, it was off to Europe. Tough boys from the Bronx, they served in the same unit, which fought in North Africa and was then dropped behind enemy lines after the landing at Normandy. Of the 108 men in their unit, only 17 made it home alive.

Ernie always told my father, Stanley, the diabetes doctor, that the reason he and Abe beat the odds was because they both knew how to read. “Reading saved our lives,” he told my father. “Whenever there was any kind of dangerous mission, the captain said that one of us had to always stay behind, to write letters home to the families of the soldiers who didn’t make it.” After Abe was wounded at the Battle of the Bulge, earning himself a Purple Heart, Ernie spent the rest of the war by their captain’s side.

Plenty of mothers in the Bronx lost sons, but their mother, Selma, saw both of her sons return home, safe and sound. Seeing both her sons alive was the greatest moment of her life. “You’d think we won the war single-handed,” my grandfather remembered of his mother’s pride on the day when they marched through her kitchen and into the living room and hung the American flag they carried through Europe over the ornamental gas fireplace. From General Omar Bradley on down, it was a group effort, Ernie told us every Passover, as we celebrated the freeing of the slaves in Egypt. The freeing of slaves was something that he had seen with his own eyes, as a private in the United States Army, which was no small thing to be. When General Patton slapped an ordinary soldier in the face, he was suspended from duty.

A lifelong Yankees fan who loved Mickey Mantle, Ernie nearly beat a man to death at a World Series game in 1955. The fight started because Ernie was rooting for the Dodgers. “I was rooting for Jackie Robinson to win the World Series,” he explained. “Mickey Mantle could wait a year.” When the Yankees won in 1956, Ernie celebrated that, too.

Patriotism, based on the idea of human equality under the U.S. Constitution, was as natural to both brothers as breathing. After having lived through the Great Depression and then fought their way through Europe, they knew what freedom meant. America was a great country, where every man could work hard and eat three square meals a day. Yes, there was poverty and discrimination in America, just like every other place on earth. They both remembered seeing the signs on the hotels in Miami that prohibited Jews and coloreds. There were quotas that kept Abe out of law school at Columbia, and sent my father to medical school in the Caribbean, and then to a poor hospital in Brooklyn. That wasn’t America’s fault, though. It was the fault of the bigots.

Ernie loved Columbus Day. Cristopher Columbus, he told me, was Jewish, the son of hidden Jews from Spain who sailed from Europe, in Genoa, to find a new world that he believed existed somewhere over the ocean, where he could live freely. That world was America.

When I told Ernie that he was wrong, he shook his bald head and wagged his trigger finger at me across Grandma Rose’s long mahogany dining table, which she transported from their apartment in the Bronx first to Riverdale, and then to a house with a broad front lawn and an oak tree in Saddle Brook, New Jersey. I spent many of the happiest hours of my childhood beneath that tree, before my mother died of an overdose of pills that she obtained from my father, after which Grandma Rose got sick with cancer. I visited her only once in the hospital, which is the one thing in my life that I feel guilty about.

Ernie was right about Columbus, he said, even if he never went to college. He knew the story because he read it in a newspaper in Alabama, where he went through basic training before being shipped off to Europe. Why would they put a story like that in the paper if it wasn’t true? Name one other country in the world, besides Israel, that was discovered by Jews—and what was more, name another country that would advertise that fact, even if it was true. I replied by telling Ernie that Columbus didn’t discover America. But he was already ahead of me.

“Because the Indians already lived here?” he mocked me. “And where do you think they came from?” He waited a beat, before answering his own question. “The Indians came from Russia, just like my father did. Which means that the Jews discovered America twice. It’s our country, just the same as everyone else.”

Having been to college, I laughed at Ernie while secretly enjoying the superiority of my own knowledge. Down here, in my tunnel, where I am free to conduct my research safe from outside interference, I have realized that he was right. Genetic evidence shows that Christopher Columbus was indeed Jewish. The aboriginal people from whom the Native American tribes are descended have much of their DNA in common with the aboriginal people of western Russia and virtually none in common with the tribes of Asia. If Russian Jews are indeed descended from the Khazars of western Russia and not indigenous to Palestine, we are at least the genetic inheritors of the Americas, just like Ernie said. History has spoken. Let’s call it the “1492 Project.”

So please, listen up. Anyone who doesn’t agree by now that America is a Jewish country, by which I mean a country discovered by Jews and populated by Jews, and then by people who only imagined themselves to be Jews, but who taught their children to read Hebrew and imagined themselves as a chosen nation in the image of the Jewish kingdom, bound by their own covenant with God, is welcome to go back to where they came from. Go back to England. Go back to Africa. Remove yourself from Jewish lands. Everyone else, including Jews, Indians, Mexicans, and Mormons, is welcome to stay. Together, we will smoke the peace pipe and study Torah, and set out to discover a new nation, just like Columbus did. I’m eager to get started. But first, I need to figure out a few more things down here.