Schlimazel Phase: Twerp by Mark Goldblatt

January 11, 1969

My English teacher, Mr. Selkirk, says I have to write something, and it has to be long, on account of the thing that happened over winter recess--which in my opinion, doesn't amount to much. It's not like I meant for Danley to get hurt, and I don't think that what happened was one hundred percent my fault, or even a lot my fault, even though I don't deny that I was there. So I guess I deserved to get suspended like the rest of them.

But now the suspension is over and Selkirk says I've got to write something. I know what's going on. Selkirk thinks that if I write about what happened, I'll understand what happened. Which makes no sense, if you stop and think about it, because if I don't understand what happened, how can I write about it?

I know there's going to be a Julian Twerski in the future that's going to look back and maybe shake his head. (That last sentence should make you happy, Mr. Selkirk.) But when I look back right now, I'm just saying that what happened with Danley Dimmel isn't the worst thing I've done.

As an incentive, Mr. Selkirk offers to substitute Julian's diary for a report on Julius Caesar, and Julian readily agrees, beginning a semester of writing, a first-person stream-of consciousness journaling that recounts the misadventures of Julian (Twerp) Twerski and his friends on the block--Lonnie, their charismatic leader, Quick (because he's slow on the uptake) Quentin, Eric the Red, (because he's a rehead) Howie Wartnose, (because his last name is Wurtzberg), and Schlomo Schlomo (because his mom always calls him home that way.) The gang centers their activities in a scruffy vacant lot they call Ponzini (because it's behind the apartment of Victor Ponzini and because they have to call it something.)

Ponzini is the focal point where most of Julian's misadventures begin.  It's the place where Lonnie taunted him into chucking a rock into an amazingly dense flock of pigeons who have landed there between two rusted out cars.

"C'mon, Julian, chuck a rock."

"You chuck a rock."

"Don't you want to see 'em take off at once?" said Lonnie.

"I might hit one of them," I said.

"C'mon," Lonnie said. "It'll be like a science experiment."

Like most of Lonnie's ideas, it's a bad idea, but despite his own best instincts Julian chunks the rock, hits a pigeon, and is wracked with guilt when the pigeon finally dies. Lonnie's ideas always seem to end badly for the impulsive Julian and the rest of the guys. Quentin gets his eyebrows and most of his hair burned off when the guys pool their leftover Fourth of July fireworks into one big bang. Then Lonnie persuades Julian to ghost-script a letter pitching his love to  Jillian, the girl of his dreams, and with predictable results: Jillian thinks the letter is from Julian and even begins to sit with him at lunch, putting him on the outs with Lonnie. Trying to impress his buddies, Julian smarts off in social studies, not with his regular teacher, Mr. Loeb, who is himself a josher, but the untried intern Mr. Caricone:

It started, I guess, a couple of weeks ago, when he taught us about India.  I like that kind of stuff.... We got real deep into India.

Mr. Caricone began last week's class with the question, "Does anyone remember how the government takes the census in India?"

I called out, "One little, two little, three little Indians!"

The entire class cracked up.

Through it all Julian clings to the belief that, no matter what, he's the fastest kid in the school, until Jillian's family takes in an enormous thirteen-year-old from Guatemala, Eduardo, whose quick moves in games of tag strike fear in Julian as the annual Field Day approaches.  Bad outcomes seem to follow Julian's every move, and as events pile up, one by one his buds start to shun him. When Julian blows a pop quiz at schul,  Rabbi Salzberg sums it up:

"Mazel, by itself, means "luck." Thus, "schlimazel" means "bad luck," the rabbi said.

"Am I a schliemazel?" I asked.

"No, Mr. Twerski, you're just going through a schlimazel phase."

Schliemazel Phase is not a bad term for the temporary insanity that is early adolescence, that critical turning point in the making of the man (or woman), and the key to ending Julian's schliemazel phase seems to be for him to confront his personal responsibility in what happened with Danly Dimmel (a.k.a, Stanley Stimmel) back in December. Julian's last diary entry tells all, in Mark Goldblatt's hit first novel, Twerp (Random House, 2013), with his spot-on depiction of the yin and yang of personal conscience vis a vis group pressure.  Both a drop-dead funny boyhood story and a dead serious coming-of-age novel,  Julian Twerski's self-revelatory diarist holds his own with the great boy characters of literature--Tom Sawyer, Tom Brown, Penrod Schofield, and Holden Caulfield, right up to Jack Gantos' Joey Pigza and various Jacks, and James Patterson's Rafe Khatchadorian. As Kirkus Reviews puts it, "Goldblatt's tale provides a thought-provoking exploration of bullying, personal integrity and self-acceptance."

God's Good Time: Mary Mae and the Gospel Truth by Sandra Dutton

When Granny asked me what we learned in school today, I tell her all about trilobites and how southern Ohio was right down by the equator. "We're digging for fossils tomorrow, too," I tell her.

"Wish I could dig for fossils," says Granny. "But I'm just an old fossil myself."

"Digging?" says Daddy. "You know when I was in school, we didn't go out digging. We stayed inside and learned our lessons."

"Ain't no different ages," Mama says. "Tempting kids to believe in something that ain't so!" Mama goes on. "The world is 6000 years old. You look in the Bible."

God must have loved curious kids, because he made so darned many of them. Mary Mae Krebs can't help being one. "What do we believe?" she asks her mother, and her mother tells her to read Genesis.

That works for Mary Mae, whose Sunday School class is already practicing for a puppet play about the Creation right from the book of Genesis. She's in charge of Mrs. Noah, whose job, she is told, is to look after all the animals on the Ark. Practical Mary Mae hits a snag right there. How could one woman, even with those daughters-in-law, clean that many cages? And what about the insects? They're animals, but the Bible doesn't say anything about rounding them up and housing them in the Ark in all those little bitty cages. And what about fresh meat for the lions and tigers?

When Mary Mae and her class study the Cincinnati Arch, a band of ancient rock filled with the fossils of the Ordovician sea which once covered the Ohio River basin, her teacher Mrs. Sizemore takes them on a field trip to the school grounds themselves where a construction project has uncovered a treasure trove of trilobites, ancient snails and starfish, and crinoid fossils. Mary Mae is fascinated by the "enrolled" trilobite she finds and as she writes her "Interview with a Trilobite" report, she and her great-grandmother write a song for fiddle and guitar about the little creature. Then Mary May spots hundreds of little fossils embedded in the rocks around her own backyard fish pond, and when she shows them to her mother, Mama's protests fail to past muster even with Daddy, not to mention Granny.

"She oughtn't to be learning such things," says Mama.

"But this is our backyard," says Daddy. "Can't go walking around like an ostrich."

"Them fossils was put in the ground to trick us, Farley."

"Trick us?" says Daddy. "Who's trying to trick us?"

"The Lord," says Mama.

"If that's what the Lord's up to, you can go to church yourself. I ain't going."

Things come to a head when Mama finds her trilobite report and takes her out of school. Forbidden to read anything but the Bible, Mary Mae goes back to adding up the "begats" in Matthew to see if the generations total up to 6000 years, but she runs into the question of how to count those Bible folks who lived for hundreds and hundreds of years. Mama's already overloaded, what with her job and distributing fliers for the church and everything else, and she finds Mary Mae's endless questions about the Bible a trial and tribulation, And then, when Mama drives a young friend home to Indiana, the young woman talks her into stopping to see the famous local site, the Falls of the Ohio, in whose shoals millions of fossils are all around to be seen by visitors, "like the Lord's science lesson." Although Mama is gruff with her questions, Mary Mae senses that her mother is beginning to have some doubts about her interpretation of Genesis as well.

Then Mary Mae's educational luck changes. A chance talk with a visiting pastor shows Mama that there are differences of opinion about the form Creation has taken even among the faithful at the Remnant Church of God.

"I can understand your concern," Pastor Tilbury says to Mama. "but fossils is God's creatures, too. The way I see it, they was all fossilized during Noah's flood in 3500 B.C."

"Now me, I believe they was fossilized in 90,000 B.C.," says Mrs. Tilbury.

"I think you're way off," Pastor Tilbury says to his wife, "but everybody's got a right to their opinion."

With a reassurance from the pastor that fossils were mentioned in the book of Romans, Mama is convinced that it's time Mary Mae went back to school so Mrs. Sizemore can take over the job of answering at least some of her questions.

In Sandra Duncan's latest, Mary Mae and the Gospel Truth (Houghton Mifflin, 2010), her inquisitive and level-headed Mary Mae comes head on against the eternal verities. A member of an evangelistic church which affirms the primacy of the Scriptures, she has a hard time reconciling her mother's version of creation with what she sees before her eyes, and her natural childlike drive to understand the world puts her into opposition with her mother's weary assertions that there are some questions that ought not to be asked. Still Mary Mae's parents and church elders are sincere and loving, and Dutton refuses to portray them as enemies in the ongoing conflict between faith and knowledge. Her use of the everyday speech of her characters is rich and pitch perfect, and her theme, that no one has an absolute answer to the questions of life, is crafted with the respect that can only come with love and the love that can only come with respect. As Publishers Weekly says in its starred review, "Dutton sensitively navigates the sticky debate between creationism and evolution both through the young narrator's delightful curiosity and honest questions, and through the various responses she receives from numerous caring adults, who all strive to provide truthful guidance."

"Now tell me about them fossils," says Granny.

"They're older than the dinosaurs," I say.... "Miss Sizemore says the world is fifteen billion years old."

Granny's clicking her teeth. "Hmm... Well...My..."

"God takes his time," I say.

"Yes, he does," says Granny.