Free The Great Good Thing by Andrew Klavan

As the day drew near, I found I barely knew my part at all, just patches of it here and there, and I could sing only a vague meandering imitation of the tune. So, of course, when my bar mitzvah finally arrived, I stepped onto the chancery with the purest sense of dread. It was like one of those nightmares where you find yourself on a Broadway stage but can’t remember your lines. There I was in tie and jacket, standing in the temple before a congregation full of family and friends. My pulse was thundering. My spit had first turned sour then gone dry. I joined the rabbi in the sacred procedure of lifting the bejeweled Torah scrolls from their cabinet. We paraded them majestically before the pews. We laid them on the podium—the bimah —and rolled them open to the proper place. I took up the Torah pointer—the yad , it’s called—and placed it under those ancient and noble words that, after years of attending Hebrew School, I could read no better than if they were chicken tracks or a schizophrenic’s meaningless doodles. And I began to sing.
    Well, the rabbi had come to the house often enough that I had some vague idea of where the words and music were located on the spectrum of available sounds. I found their general location as a man might stumble into the side of his own barn while wandering lost in the dark of night. Since the words meant nothing to me anyway, I only had to imitate the noise of them to get by. And for the most part I did, with the loan-sharking rabbi whispering helpful cues into my ear from time to time. There were a few portions that were lost to my memory completely, but I never faltered for all that. I had inherited a small measure of my father’s talent for realistic-sounding foreign-language gibberish. Faced with an absolute mental blank, I invented a bunch of Hebrew-like gobbledygook on the spot and pushed through, singing meaningless nonsense without a pause. I don’t know how many people noticed. The only person to mention it to me was a cousin of mine, a sophisticated lad a few years older than me. He sidled up to me after the ceremony as I was receiving the kisses and congratulations of my jubilant relatives. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone ad-lib the Torah before,” he murmured in my ear. I laughed wildly—with relief but also with a grifter’s pleasure at having pulled off a successful con.
    I don’t remember the party afterward. This strikes me as odd. I was thirteen, after all. It was a big occasion. I should remember. But I don’t. I’ve blocked it out. My conflicting emotions must have overwhelmed me. On the surface, I surely felt happy enough. I’d gotten through the ceremony. There was a party in my honor. Food, music, dancing, gifts. But inwardly, I think I was half insane with rage and shame—more rage and shame than I could feel or know—at having been forced to violate my deepest sense of things.
    I do remember this, though: Being a Klavan thing, the party was supposed to be more tasteful than the usual nouveau riche Great Neck affair. There was no rented hall, no pink walls, no chandeliers, no fountains. We did have a tent in the backyard, but it was just a small one over the badminton court, which was serving as a makeshift dance floor. There was no live band. My father was an expert with electronics and sound systems. He received most new records free from producers. He had made what today would be called “mixes,” tape cassettes with various songs on them. My friends and I ate food and danced to the taped music beneath the tent. For the time and place, it was meant to be very restrained and genteel.
    But in one regard, there was no restraint at all: the presents. In that neighborhood, in those days, a bar mitzvah boy received a fortune in gifts. Cash and savings bonds. Gold watches and gold pen sets, not one but half a dozen of each, maybe more. Silver identity bracelets that were the current fad. Money clips and tie clips, chains and rings set with