I am writing from my childhood bedroom. Some of the books that still line the shelves: The Yearling, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, On the Road, The Tempest, Rabbit Run, Deliverance, The Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, The Ox-Bow Incident, Franny and Zooey, Final Harvest: Emily Dickinson’s Poems, and Hooray for Yiddish.
When cars come down Northrop Road, their headlights ricochet through the room’s corner windows. Tucked into my bed, at ten years old, I often imagined I was Anne Frank as the high-beams circled the room, soon to be followed by angry Nazi boots on the stair. Only we lived in a ranch. Later, I imagined a Helter Skelter scenario in our suburban neighborhood; when I learned that Sharon Tate was murdered on MY BIRTHDAY, I nearly plotzed*. But my most terrifying fantasy of all was imagining that we were the Clutter family, waiting to be murdered in our sleep by some two-bit criminals immortalized in one of my favorite books of all time.
I know, it explains a lot.
*Plotz: plats (standard) Yinglish, with juice. Rhymes with “dots.” German: platzen: to burst.
- Bust, burst, explode (“I laughed so hard I thought I would plotz!”)
- To be aggravated, frustrated, or infuriated to an extremity. (“He was so furious he almost plotzed!”)
–from Hooray for Yiddish, Leo Rosten
Filed under: Books, The End of the World as We Know It
What a fantastic reading list. As I read it all those books tumbled through my memory mind and finally, Hooray for Yiddish! Perfect. Your blog always makes me smile and think and smile and then think some more.
What a delightful combination of nostalgia, Americana, literature, linguistics, history, mass murder, and creative paranoia. Thank you for sharing it.
Sunday morning… I just taught my 7 yr old son, Maleek, the word “plotzed.” He seemed suspicious about why I was teaching him this word and indicated he would never use it.