Jonathan Papernick – Excerpt from ‘The Oppressor Professor: A Novel of the Tentifada’

Even after teaching for more than twenty years on Weldon College’s bucolic campus, tucked away amid a mature hardwood forest of maple, beech, ash and oak beyond the Boston exurbs and the concrete belt of Interstate 495, barely a speck on the map between Worcester and the Quabbin Reservoir, Jake Altschuler still felt a sense of awe every time he had the chance to teach his fiction writing workshop in the Founders Room.

Situated in the former chapel of the fieldstone church that anchored the original property, the Founders Room was really more of a hall with its high, stone-ribbed ceiling vaulted in the Gothic Revival style. The college’s guiding principles Contemplatio et Studium were inlaid prominently in gold leaf on the formidable oak transom above a pair of heavy double doors countless students had passed through since the first freshman class matriculated in the distant fall of 1901.

Stern oil portraits of the college’s founders lined the walls, with the exception of a dirt-rimed rectangle where one of the paintings had been famously defaced with pig’s blood after an exposé some thirty years prior in the student newspaper The Arrow revealed the now-canceled founder was a ruthless profiteer during the Spanish-American War and was instrumental in displacing poor Cubans, Puerto Ricans and Filipinos in a bloody campaign of terror.

The original stained glass windows crafted by the studio of Louis Comfort Tiffany, featuring a luminous Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil were sold off during the height of the Great Depression to help keep the college afloat and replaced with tall mullioned windows bolstered with diamond crosshatching that only magnified the beauty of The Meadow, a six acre lawn stretching three hundred yards to the front doors of Chilton House, the college’s main administrative building, a colossal ivy-covered Tudor mansion which housed among other things, the Office of the President, the Provost and the Dean of Studies as well as half a dozen student dorms that were once servants quarters.

The Founders Room was assigned on a rotating basis, which meant every four or five semesters Jake was able to teach his advanced fiction writing seminar in this numinous space which he believed inspired his students to elevate their work to new heights. The room had its pull, and his students felt it too, their voices booming off the high walls, the room’s acoustics perfectly tuned as they read their stories aloud, amplified by some invisible spirit that inhabited all great art. A long oak table of enormous dimensions sat on a wide dais overlooking The Meadow. Decades of initials and arcane symbols etched into the wood spoke of the enduring spirit of youth.

On days when he taught in the Founders Room, Jake liked to arrive early and work on his novel-in-progress The Destroyer, rather than the cramped cubby hole of his office or his apartment which was loaded with too many distractions and temptations to count. What had started out as a bravura attempt at a fictional accounting of the Khmelnytsky Massacres of Jews in 17^th century Poland had bogged down into a muddled exploration of the theory of eternal recurrence and divine punishment.

It was going on twenty three years now since Jake published his first novel, The Faithless Rabbi, a minor commercial success shortlisted for several awards and translated into French, Spanish and German. Since then, just two slight story collections, one with a now-defunct independent publisher and another with a respected university press that lacked effective distribution.

The Faithless Rabbi had been called by some critics a profane exploration of the nihilistic impulse to embrace the hedonistic world of the flesh. Jake had always thought that criticism was unfair and intended the novel to be an updated take on the Book of Job. Whereas Job chooses faith and virtue after losing everything, Rabbi Isidor Rosenbaum follows the path of disillusionment and vice made manifest through a wild spree of sex and violence set in motion by an indifferent God’s failure to protect his own loved ones from harm.

Jake had long since given up on the idea of fame. His books remained largely unread, his name rarely mentioned among the literary lights he had come up with a quarter century earlier. With each advancing year Jake found himself more and more grateful for the quick cocaine high of success The Faithless Rabbi found that had thrust him onto the map, however briefly, and helped him land this job doing something he loved, literary success be damned. Jake had once thought his destiny was to be a great writer, but now he believed it was to be a teacher and mentor to young writers just starting out on their creative journies. And that, Jake believed was more important than childish dreams of fleeting celebrity, because his influence would carry on through the work of countless students long after he was gone like the infinite root network of a great oak.

It was a beautiful spring morning, a bright sun lighting up the stirring blades of grass, the endless chill of winter finally banished. Beyond the neatly manicured boxwood hedges a few clutches of students moved across the frame of the window, backpacks slung low on their shoulders. Someone was flinging a frisbee farther out on The Meadow, his long shadow trailing him on the grass as he whooped in delight. A foraging flock of wild turkeys edged its way onto the lawn, led by a pair of strutting toms fanning their feathers in a show of dominance.

 Jake slipped his laptop out of his messenger bag and was about to place it down in front of himself when he noticed something new on the wood surface where he always sat.

Zio.

It hadn’t been there at the end of class last week.

Three letters had been gouged into the wood and filled in with a manic, delinquent energy, a violence even, that set Jake’s stomach tumbling. Beneath the letters an upside down triangle pointed directly at Jake.

Since the world-historical shocks of October 7^th 2023, ancient angers had been awakened again with a terrifying shock of inevitability. Weldon wasn’t immune to this contagion and the college seemed to have slipped ever so subtly off its foundational moorings, belying its reputation as a serene sanctuary in the woods, drifting an unsteady course towards an inevitable clash. Though Weldon’s sylvan campus had so far avoided the chaos of the encampments roiling so many schools around the country, someone had repeatedly torn down Jake’s posters of kidnapped Israelis from his office door back in the fall semester. The once lonely table in the foyer of the Cabot Family Dining Center run by the Palestine Collective offering stickers, flyers and petitions was a buzzing hive of interest. Jake sometimes heard the words Intifada and genocide emanating from the excited mouths of students as he passed. A handful of students had taken to wearing kefiyahs on campus in the aftermath of the October 7^th massacres in southern Israel, but Jake believed they were mostly worn as fashion statements, resistance chic, Generation Z’s answer to the once ubiquitous Che Guevara T-shirt.  Still, the majority of Weldon’s 2,300 students seemed to be agnostic on the subject of Israel/Palestine and Jake hoped the predictable rhythms of campus life would go on as they had for the past two decades.

His colleagues however were something else altogether, and Jake suspected he had lost the trust of those around him, and was being judged for things he had never done in places he had never been. The averted eyes of professors he had known for years, the judgmental whispers, reminded him that he was expected to get in line or be shunned as a morally vacant avatar of evil.

Jake rummaged in his bag until he found one of his blue Uni-Ball pens and began to fill in the contours of the three inch block letters. Scratching over the mysterious swirling grain patterns on the surface of the wood felt like a sacrilege, yet Jake scribbled with an intensity that surprised him, slipping into that ecstatic state he sometimes felt when he found himself in the heat of creation.

Jake didn’t hear the footsteps behind him echoing off the high walls, so he jolted in his seat when the familiar voice of Becky Turgiss said, “Hey professor. What are you doing?”

Caught in the act, Jake’s face lit up with guilt.

“Um, someone. Someone wrote something…”

“Racist?” Becky prompted.

“Yup,” Jake said. “That’s right.”

“Not cool.”

“Nope,” Jake said. “Not cool at all.”

Becky took her seat directly across from Jake, where she was backlit by the sun’s morning light. Becky, with her shapeless mop of auburn hair was usually the first to arrive, but she had an awkward habit of opening her laptop and scrolling around without so much as saying a word to Jake as they sat in silence waiting for the rest of the class to show up. Once workshop began, she was talkative, thoughtful even with her insights, but before class started, Becky was strictly off the clock.

The seats around the table filled up as 9 AM approached, a ritualistic procession of Jake’s ten students sloughing off their bags and jackets and seamlessly shifting their attention from AirPods and iPhones to the screens of their laptops.

Only Kat Budde was missing.

A solid, corn-fed daughter of the Great Plains, Kat had taken each of Jake’s introductory and intermediate workshops in previous semesters, crafting raw but potent stories of alienation and disillusion in the suburbs of Wichita, Kansas. Her stories were bleak as a knife blade, harrowing in their unflinching portrayals of the dark side of the human psyche. She had been a painfully shy freshman, afraid to make eye contact, her soft voice barely above a whisper. Kat was lonely and ready to drop out and Jake assured her that her writing and the characters she created would be a constant companion throughout her life. When her first story was accepted for publication in Weldon’s literary journal Whetstone, she told Jake she couldn’t have written it without his guidance and steadfast support.

Kat was one of those projects that made Jake feel lucky to be a teacher, knowing that he could affect change so profoundly in a writer’s artistic journey. But, Kat had become sullen this semester, arriving late and rarely speaking during workshop, and ignoring Jake altogether. Jake had emailed Kat to check in on her and she had not replied to any of his messages. A profound sense of betrayal settled in the pit of Jake’s stomach.

“Has anyone seen Kat?”

“I saw her in the Cab,” Nick Denton said. “There was a killer line at the waffle station.”

“A well-rounded breakfast is important,” Jake said, though he himself rarely started his day with anything more than a cup or two of black coffee. “I just advise you all to build in enough time before class to nourish yourselves appropriately. It’s important we start on time since we have a lot of material to cover.”

When did he start sounding like somebody’s father? Every year he got older, but the students stayed the same. Now at the age of fifty Jake could no longer claim to be the hip professor he might have been when he was first hired as a visiting Writer-in-Residence. The creases in his handsome face served as a testament to a life lived, the lines and tributaries marking his high forehead, the delicate cracks radiating out from the tender skin around his eyes, the cut of his strong jaw fashioning a vivid portrait of a man comfortably settling into middle-age.

“Rita’s story is leading off today. Who wants to read a favorite sentence?”

Ten weeks into the semester and the class knew exactly what was expected of them.

Several hands shot up to share a quick sample of Rita Mullins’ story, “Badlands,” set in North Philadelphia where a young African American girl murders a low rent gangster named Jazz Coleman after he insults her. She shoves him in front of an oncoming Septa train where he is crushed to death. The reader finds out through a devastating point of view shift that Jazz is Jessica’s boyfriend Michael’s half brother as Michael weeps in Jessica’s arms, declaring he won’t rest until he finds Jazz’s killer.

The dilemma: Should Jessica tell Michael or not?

“No, she shouldn’t tell him!” Brian Dempsey said.

“Fuck no,” Felix Feldman said. “He called her a fat booty bitch. Can you blame her?”

The class burst into laughter.

Jake’s workshop followed the traditional Rule of Silence in which the writer whose work is up for discussion is forbidden to speak while the rest of the class offers their critiques. The students discussed Rita’s pages with great energy, unusual for a 9 AM class at Weldon. But Jake was used to spirited, freewheeling debate in his workshops no matter what time of day.

“All right, folks. Let’s focus,” Jake said. “This is a serious moral question.”

Rita sat quietly at the far end of the table earnestly taking notes and chewing on the end of her stylus as she listened.

Though she liked to write about the underbelly of urban Philadelphia, Jake knew from reading applications Rita had grown up on Philadelphia’s Main Line and had attended The Shipley School where she had achieved a 4.3 GPA.

The discussion was going well – they’d been at it for nearly half an hour, and each student had spoken multiple times, offering thoughtful craft-based feedback on Rita’s story.

“I don’t think the flashback is necessary,” Ashley Duda said, voice muffled through her ever-present protective mask. She had short black bangs and pale, frightened eyes. Jake had never seen the lower half of her face and sometimes wondered whether he would recognize her without her face covering. “It stops the forward movement of the story. Your heart’s already pounding and you wanna keep going instead of throwing up a stop sign and falling back into the past. And we can learn everything we need to know from the flashback in just a sentence or two.”

“What about when Jazz says, God don’t got nothin’ to do with me. And I ain’t got nothin’ to do with God. That’s just the way things are in the Badlands,” Brian Dempsey said.

“Sometimes you’ve just got to murder your darlings,” Ashley responded. She could be counted on to roll out this old chestnut every couple of classes.

“Okay,” Jake said, taking the opportunity to steer the conversation back towards the heart of the matter. “Let’s get back to the actual murder.”

Yuki Satō-Sanchez said, “It’s super rad how Rita makes us sort of complicit because we don’t want her to tell Michael what she did to his brother. We just want them to live happily ever after.”

“Ok, good,” Jake said.  “So you see your own moral scale shifting before your eyes. Thou shalt not kill — is just a cheap slogan?”

“I don’t know. Jessica and Michael have something real going on. True love. Why risk spoiling it?” Nick added. “Telling Michael will just ruin his life.”

“After she ruined Jazz’s life,” Jake said. “So what is Rita doing to make you feel that way about a girl who killed another human being? In Crime and Punishment Dostoevsky gives us Raskolnikov who believes the murder he commits will benefit society. Jazz has done some bad things in his life. Is he destined to continue doing bad things? Is he beyond saving? And is it up to Jessica to decide? Is there a moral theory where murder can be justified?”

Jake let a purposeful silence hang in the air, long enough that he was able to observe the floating dust motes swirling above the long table as if performing some finely choreographed dance.

“What dials is the writer turning inside you to make you feel that way? I’ll bet you wouldn’t feel the same if Rita used different words or a different order. Even a different rhythm. Too many syllables, too few, it’s over, you’ve lost your reader. There’s something magical in the composition of a story that can reach inside each you over time and space and make you actually feel something physiological in your body.” Jake paused. “So what is Rita doing here to make you feel this way?”

Felix Feldman, with his big stage voice jumped in, “It’s definitely something primal because we just wanna see them get down and fuck.”

The class burst into laughter, and Felix went on, “No, seriously. I’m not trying to be cringe.”

“You’re always cringe,” Ashley Duda, who was Felix’s best workshop friend, said.

“I blame my autism,” Felix said.

“From one Aspie to another, you’re barely on the spectrum.”

“All right, all right,” Jake said. “Let’s talk about the craft, Felix. What is the writer doing to elicit such a strong feeling in you. What specifically? Let’s see your evidence.”

“I’ve got it right here!” Felix said. The passage was ready on his laptop and he launched into reading with his voice turned up to eleven.

The heavy double doors behind Jake swung open with a pneumatic sucking sound as Kat Budde entered from the empty foyer. Felix stopped reading mid-sentence and the rest of the class looked on in silence.

“So nice of you to join us, Kat.”

Jake searched Kat’s face for some sign of contrition but she offered nothing as she took her seat at the far end of the table. This would have been a good time for Jake to remind Kat of his policy on tardiness but Jake was so surprised by Kat’s stylistic transformation that he simply said, “Let’s speak after class.”

Kat wore a checked black and white Palestinian headscarf around her neck and shoulders like a shawl, contrasting with the wholesome outdoorsy flannels and fleeces she typically wore.

When Kat Budde had first set foot in Jake’s classroom two years earlier she was still a slump-shouldered ungainly kid who had never been east of the Mississippi. Her lank hair curtaining her pale cheeks obscured acne scars and lingering baby fat that gave her round face a childlike milky softeness. Jake remembered her favorite book had been Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Süskind which contrasted with the majority of his students who often cited the Harry Potter books, the Hunger Games series or something or other by John Green or Stephen King.

Kat Budde had always been poised for some form of rebellion or other with her strict upbringing within the Evangelical church, and now it seemed she had found a path worth walking. Jake’s stomach sank irritably. How had he not seen this coming, how had he not known that this moody raincloud of a young woman would find someplace besides the pages of her hypercharged prose to channel her anger and disappointment.

Kat snapped open her laptop, her round flat face blank. A new sticker had been pasted in the center of the top panel of her MacBook Pro, a black, white, green and red clenched fist floating above the words Free Palestine: By Any Means Necessary! Jake recalled Kat’s laptop had once featured a forest green Weldon College roundel that was given out to all students at orientation. “A College in the Woods — Since 1901.”

            Nick Denton sat to Kat’s left facing Jake, his chair tilted back precariously. His laptop cover was coated with stickers of punk bands including Misfits, Black Flag, Bad Religion, and a band called Zero Boys Jake had never heard of. Becky Turgiss sat in the twelve o’clock position directly across from Jake. Her MacBook Air featured a vinyl decal skin covering the entirety of her laptop lid made to look like the spines of old leather bound books on a library shelf, their gold embossed covers scuffed and loved. Brian Dempsey with his thick Van Dyke beard favored a gamer computer. Its cover was pristine aside from a small logo featuring the wide-eyed head of an alien. Yuki Satō-Sanchez sat to the far left of the table, their rockabilly pompadour in full blossom against the morning sun. Their laptop cover featured: “This Machine Kills Fascists,” above a barcode with the words “I am not for sale.” Felix Feldman, in his usual spot at the head of the table, covered the lid of his laptop with stickers proclaiming, “Get In Loser, We’re Going Shopping,” and “Places, Everyone!” Ashley Duda, sitting directly opposite her friend Felix at the foot of the table featured a creepy little plastic figurine perched on top of her screen that Jake had just recently learned was called a Labubu.

            To Jake’s immediate left, Rita took notes with a silver stylus on a wafer thin tablet. And beside her sat Leslie Wyman.

            “Ok, where were we?” Jake said, forcing cheer into his voice. He hated to admit how disappointed he was in Kat Budde and how distracted he felt by her looming presence.

            “Can we talk about the end?” Daisy Peters said.

            “Sure,” Jake said.

            “It’s not the actual end,” Daisy said, blowing a loose strand of hair out of her eyes. “I want more.”

            “Me too!” Felix said. “If you don’t give me like five more pages I will literally die.”

            “It should be a novel,” Becky Turgiss said.

            “Ohhh,” Felix said. “Do it!”

            “I don’t know,” Daisy said. “Maybe just push your characters farther and see where it goes.”

“I vote novel,” Felix said.

“Novels are more marketable anyway,” Becky continued. “When you’re querying, most agents won’t even look at story collections unless you’ve got a huge social media presence. And novels are way more likely to be optioned, so that’s where the real money is.”

            Jake tried to avoid the subject of marketing whenever it came up because it had little to do with the craft of writing and the craft of writing was what his students were there to learn. The Faithless Rabbi had been optioned for a meager $500 on the eve of publication, but any Hollywood fantasy Jake might have imagined went nowhere as the option lapsed in radio silence and the rights reverted back to him, never to be discussed again. Jake tried to bring the discussion to a gentle conclusion. “Why don’t we just split the baby here?”

            “Wait, what?” Rita Mullins said.

            “Ew!” Daisy Peters said.

“Maybe consider a longer short story instead of a novel. You see 10,000 word short stories in Best American, and you can do a lot with 10,000 words. As you know, writing a novel can take a very long time. It took Victor Hugo seventeen years to write Les Misérables. I mean, that would make anyone miserable.”

He paused to make space for laughter that never came.

“All right then, what are three things we’d like to see Rita work on when revising this story?”

Everyone raised a hand except for Kat Budde. The checked kefiyeh around Kat’s shoulders could not have looked more jarring if she had been wearing a Jewish prayer shawl.

            Next up was Brian Dempsey’s story about a former Wall Street titan who had been canceled for cheating on his wife and found himself forced by a panel of judges to starve himself to subsistence on a live feed for tips. It felt to Jake like Brian had been watching too much Black Mirror, but Jake’s own college writing had been heavily influenced by years of reruns of the Twilight Zone, so he wasn’t in a position to judge Brian for being derivative.

            After being released from the Rule of Silence Rita went first, “I really like the concept. It’s bold. And it’s nice to see a man write such a powerful story about restorative justice.”

            Brian nodded his head in appreciation.

            Is it just to force a man to starve himself for cheating on his wife? Jake thought.

What about drawing and quartering, or the rack?

A few other students piled on gleefully as if they believed a CEO of a top NASDAQ-listed company guilty of adultery was just as bad as a mass murderer and quite possibly worse.

            “The story reminds me of ‘A Hunger Artist,’” Becky Turgiss said. “It’s giving strong Kafka.”

            “Yes!” Jake said gratefully. “There are some clear parallels between this story and Kafka.”

            “Kafka was a colonizer.” Kat Budde’s reedy voice rang out like a slap. “And reading his work is problematic.”

            “Excuse me?” Jake said.

            “Franz Kafka supported an oppressive colonial project.”

            Jake couldn’t even pretend to understand what Kat was talking about. She knew better. He had given her Kafka’s Letter to his Father to read as a sophomore and she had been moved to tears at the pity of Kafka’s desperate longing for connection with his abusive father.

“He studied Hebrew and read Zionist literature. Dora Diamant, his girlfriend was a Zionist and was committed to a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Kafka himself was even going to immigrate to Palestine.”

            Jake took a long, calming inhale before speaking because he sensed this was not an argument he was going to win. Something had turned in Kat and she was clearly trying to provoke him with this ridiculous power play.

But it was his job to provide the facts.

            “Franz Kafka died in 1924. In Austria. He never set foot in Palestine.”

            As if releasing a long-held breath, Kat Budde rattled out her pre-planned response. “All of his papers were taken to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem built on stolen Palestinian land by his best friend Max Brod, a lifelong Zionist. And his papers are still to this day in the National Library in Jerusalem. Palestinian stories are being erased while Kafka’s actual manuscripts occupy Palestinian land.”

            Where was Felix to jump in and say, “Knock this stupid shit off! Let’s talk about the starving man’s shriveled dick.”

Where was Becky to offer a quip about Kafka’s influence on Jorge Luis Borges?

“Are you suggesting we should boycott Franz Kafka?”

            “Why not? It’s a tool of solidarity,” Kat said. “The entire Kafka family were Zionists.”

            Jake’s best students had always been inclined to provoke, to needle, to push the boundaries as they found their voices as young writers facing a world that made so little sense, but this kind of fanatical sophistry was something different altogether and represented a direct attack on the pursuit of knowledge and truth, core principles for which Jake had dedicated his entire life. Jake let Kat’s words hang in the air for a long moment before saying in the most deliberate tone he could muster, “Kafka’s three sisters, Elli, Valli and Ottla were all murdered in Nazi concentration camps.”

            That should have been the end of the conversation. Jake didn’t think he could be any more shocked than he already was by his one time protégé calling the sickly Franz Kafka, who spent so much of his adult life in sanitariums to treat his tuberculosis, a fucking colonizer. It was an outrage for her to say such a thing, but Jake dug deep and and tried to reframe her statement as part of the give-and-take of being a college professor. He had learned over many years in the classroom, not to react, and was ready to move past Kat’s inflammatory words without any further comment.

            Until…

            Kat Budde leaned forward, flashed a churlish smile and said, “Supposedly.”

            “Supposedly?” Jake boomed. “Are you denying that Franz Kafka’s three sisters were murdered in the Holocaust?” The former chapel’s unique acoustics caused Jake’s already resonant voice to fill the hall like a furious God thundering from the top of Mount Sinai.

            An astonished stirring filled the room, eyes anywhere but on Jake.

“Whoa,” Nick Denton said. “Chill.”

Felix buried his face in his hands.

“No, I will not chill! The Holocaust happened, and millions of Jews were systematically murdered.” Jake slammed his hand on the table so hard it raised pins and needles on the soft skin of his palm.

“Everyone knows the numbers were exaggerated to gain sympathy,” Kat said with that twisted little smirk on her face. “To justify the theft of Palestinian land.”

Now Rita edged forward in her seat and said, “I have to agree with Kat. Even the Red Cross said only a few hundred thousand Jews died.”

“That is not correct.” Jake said, his voice hoarse as if someone were gripping his throat with iron fingers. “Not even close to correct.”

“I’ve done my research,” Rita said, with the casual self-assurance of someone who had never truly done the hard work of research. “And most Jews died of typhus or other natural causes.”

“That is patently not true,” Jake said. “Six million Jews were systematically murdered by the Nazi war machine. That is an unarguable fact of history.”

“I respectfully disagree, professor,” Rita said.

No fig leaf of respect could make Rita’s absurd assertion any less outrageous. When a society can no longer agree what is true and what is false everyone is doomed to suffer. Some vacancy within Jake was filling with fire, his field of vision flooding with a surge of swarming sunspots, his tongue as dry and sour as spoiled fruit.

“Don’t you people know anything, anything at all about history that you didn’t learn on TikTok?”

Jake’s voice boomed off the vaulted ceiling and he could almost see his past and future selves splitting in two as some ragged thing some might call a soul took flight there in the chapel like steam rising off a cold field in the morning.

“This is insane. Truly insane. The Holocaust happened. The death camps were real. If you don’t know that basic fact I don’t even know what you’re doing here.”

The class was silent. Ashley Duda’s eyes watered above her black Covid mask. Nick Denton stifled a laugh, with the back of his fist. Felix Feldman’s forehead rested on the scarred table, unable to watch the disaster unfolding before him. Rita Mullins stared back in shock, the whites of her eyes glassy with tears.

Kat Budde tilted her head and smiled a small smile that disappeared almost immediately. “The true Holocaust is happening right now. In Palestine. And anyone who denies it is complicit in genocide.”

________