Richard M Shatzman

Schmuckala Richard M Shatzman

A search for balancing acts to the universe of fears dominating a man's life anchors Schmuckala. It is a phobic chemistry for nearly driving Jeremiah Levi into rewriting his namesake's Book of Lamentations. From Levi's three quarter cape home in suburban Boston and his teaching English Literature at the überupscale Wellesley High School his commentary encompasses high and low brow explanations, including Mona Lisa's short career advising teenagers to eat their broccoli, Eleanor of Aquitaine being a role model for his immigrant Yiddish speaking grandmothers, and the prophet Elijah showing up at his door reciting questionable limericks. The portal into Jeremiah's autobiography is his declaring, "My God. God only knows what they said about me when I was born." This 'who am I/who are we?' is directed solely towards Anna, his gentile in-house philosopher-wife-muse. And its asking is the overture to a painstakingly footnoted overnight question and answer session that will take time out to reflect upon a host of whos whats wheres whens and hows that somehow expand into Moses' issues with higher math. Only a year later Anna provokes her husband's psychic limits, hardened boundaries that fracture with her sentiment that it is time to grow up. And do so by becoming a father. His wife's suggestion is a tipping point for a complete disruption of his previously aligned universe. A measured normalcy returns within his teaching and counseling. And better more tangible pleasures arrive with substituting in a King Lear seminar, replete with Yoko Ono's guest appearance, and all her outsized personality bringing its own special truths and consequences. Soon enough Jeremiah is a dozen years into fatherhood and reporting on the allegro con brio trials of three waking daughters. They each complement Anna's secretive disclosure of a suspected unplanned pregnancy. Her announcement collapses his little user-friendly morning. Honest to God balance once again comes with work, focused upon a departmental conference to gain approval for a hope to teach the art of mystery writing. Taking his presentation's half success with him Jeremiah finally embarks on another homebound commute, a distracted odyssey that ends in the asymmetrical counterpoint marrying Goethe's deathbed to Jeremiah's recitation of the Shema, the most basic of all Jewish prayer. All through Schmuckala Jeremiah strives to do some good. In his interior and public dialogues this intent is constantly being exposed. A nurtured love for the best of English is universal here too. Even while that English is pitted against a love and fear of an idealized Yiddish world. These scheming dichotomies are always cajoling him. Eventually they take Jeremiah into a larger almost embarrassing knowledge that he needs something to cling to, maybe something even larger than life itself.