(Shoemaking has long been a common trade among Jews. And just as I sit here wearing socks that disguise my feet, but not really, so too have shoemakers, throughout the centuries, concealed the Jewish foot, but barely, and enabled the Jews, with their telltale feet, to pass, sort of. The evidence? Since the Middle Ages, the Jewish foot has been characterized as ugly, misshapen, flat, even cloven, like that of the he-goat and his close relative, the devil. History has weighed in on my body, and I have come up. Once, at a sleepover, my cousin pointed at one of them and asked me what that was, but I had no idea what she meant. Bunions, I suppose, but they’ve always been there, part of my geography. So what’s Jewish about my feet, planted under my desk and swaddled, for warmth and comfort, in SmartWool? I look down at them, and even through the socks I see the rounded contours of the first joints of my big toes. She and my aunt saw, not Eva’s coffin hoisted above the shoulders of her grief-stricken followers, not Che Guevara singing “Oh, What a Circus” at the edge of the crowd, but instead parent and progeny traipsing down Randolph, lock-stepped in harmony.
Meanwhile, Ann, a few steps behind, had a different view. Did he have to be so self-absorbed? Did everything have to remind him of my mother’s death, even though, at the sight of the coffin, I thought of her too? My mother’s life, like Eva’s, prematurely occluded (Eva was thirty-three when she died, my mother fifty-six - not nearly as young as Eva, but young enough). My father was still shaken by the image of Eva Peron’s coffin being carried across the stage. My father, brother, and I in front, Ann and my great-aunt behind. We were walking back to the car after seeing a performance of Evita. She too seemed amused - the way you’re amused, smitten almost, by the most familiar traits of the one you love. And later it was my lover, not my mother, who noted them. Nate Shinner and his gawky daughter, one imprinting on the other. We - father and daughter- were among the fallen, the downtrodden, the miserable flat-footed. Somehow she was high class and we were low. Her father was a sign painter, his a tailor. Or that she and my father both came from Russian-born parents who’d fled the pogroms. Never mind that she wore heel pads in her shoes, sorry slabs of beaten leather. Something in her amusement suggested superiority. When she walked behind us, she was amused by the similarity of our turned-out gaits. My mother used to say we walked like ducks. My feet, or more specifically my walk, seemed to be a source of family tension.
I scored in the lowest percentile for the number of knee lifts I could do while hanging from the bars in gym (ten). com, an online encyclopedia, “that … horses also develop flat feet.”) Already I was round-shouldered and prepubescent. Wasn’t walking as natural as breathing? How could I screw up? (“It should be noted,” reads an entry in Reference. I suppose I wore them, but I don’t remember. He assessed my walk, took some measurements, prescribed orthotics. When I was eight or nine, my parents took me to an orthopedist. Liopothes, or “people with smooth feet,” wrote Greek physician Galen, who was the first to describe flat feet in the medical literature. What I thought was familial is, in the eyes of some, tribal.
Disclaimer: 100% Free basic membership allows you to browse the site, view profiles, send flirts and modify your profile.