A recipient of the National Book Award and two National Book Critics Circle awards, E.L. Doctorow has published several critically acclaimed novels, including Ragtime (1975) and The March (2005). The following passage, from Chapter Five of his autobiographical novel World's Fair (1985), is told from the point of view of Edgar Altschuler, a boy who (like Doctorow) grew up in the Bronx in the 1930s.
With his customary attention to precise details, Doctorow describes the small rituals carried out by the boy's grandmother, a "desiccated, asthmatic little woman" whose gentleness has been consumed by senility and rage.
from World's Fair* (1985)
by E.L. Doctorow
Grandma's room I regarded as a dark den of primitive rites and practices. On Friday evenings whoever was home gathered at her door while she lit her Sabbath candles. She had two wobbly old brass candlesticks that she kept well polished. She had brought them many years ago from the old country, which I later found out was Russia. She covered her head with a shawl, and with my mother standing beside her to keep the house from burning down. Grandma lit the white candles and waved her hands over the flames and then covered her eyes with her wrinkled eyes and prayed. The sight of my own grandma performing what was, after all, only a ritual blessing seemed to me something else--her enacted submission to the errant and malign forces of life. That an adult secretly gave way to this sentiment I found truly frightening. It confirmed my suspicion that what grown-ups told me in my life of instruction was not the whole truth.
Grandma kept her room clean and tidy. She had a very impressive cedar hope chest covered with a lace shawl, and on her dresser a silver hairbrush and comb. There was a plain slat-back rocking chair under a standing lamp so she could read her prayer book, or Siddur. And on an end table beside the chair was a flat tin box packed with a medicinal leaf that was shredded like tobacco. This was the centerpiece of her most consistent and mysterious ritual. She removed the lid fron this blue tin box and turned it on its back and used it to burn a pinch of the leaf. She applied a match and blew on the leaf as my brother blew on punk, to get it started. It made tiny sputtering pops and hisses as it burned. She turned her chair toward it and sat inhaling the thin wisps of smoke--it was a treatment for her asthma. I knew it helped her breathing, and that it was scientific, having been purchased from Rosoff's Drugstore on 174th Street. But the smell was pungent, as if from the underworld. I didn't know, nor did any of my family seem to know, that this medicinal leaf my grandma burned was marijuana. Even had they known, it would have held no significance, since it was readily and legally available without prescription. But to this day the smoke of grass produces in me memories of the choking harsh bitter rage of an exile from the shetl, a backfired life full of fume and sparks, like a Fourth of July held in an open grave and projecting on the night a skull's leer and a clasp of crossed bones.
Selected Works by E.L. Doctorow
- Ragtime, novel (1975)
- Drinks Before Dinner, play (1979)
- American Anthem, photographic essay (1982)
- World's Fair, novel (1884)
- Billy Bathgate, novel (1989)
- Waterworks, novel (1994)
- City of God, novel (2000)
- The March, novel (2005)
- Creationists: Selected Essays 1993-2006 (2006)
* From Chapter Five of World's Fair, by E.L. Doctorow (Random House, 1985). World's Fair is currently available as a Random House Trade Paperback (2007).
