PROLOGUE: HITLER IN JEWISH POONTANG
“The immediate source of a body is that of its parents. But physical matters cannot produce mind, nor mind matter. The immediate source of mind must, therefore, be a mind which existed before the conception took place; the mind must have continuity from a previous mind.” ~The Fourteenth Dalai Lama in his memoirs, My Land and My People
I like girls, the way Hitler did, with their bodies smooth and their faces pale.
He and I click a great deal, you will see, on ideas and goils.
Unlike Hitler, I don’t dig German females. I like chicks from New England and Mississippi. American girls. Deutsche Mädchen have bad breath and hairy armpits but American girls, the gentiles, do it like nobody else. I like their precision and speech and the way they slide down the runway. I love Catherine in A Farewell to Arms and Brett in The Sun Also Rises. I dig women who can gesture with subtlety and smile when the rest of the world is cruel—like when my brothers call me a “cunt,” or when the kids in middle school laugh at me in the cafeteria because I haven’t shaved my legs. I find redemption knowing cool-haircut girls are enamored though others find me graceless.
Marilyn Monroe makes me ballistic when I see her in old movies. Marilyn, in her white sweater on the beach. Marrying Arthur Miller, a Jewish intellectual—just think about it—an all-American babe choosing one of my brethren. So glad she said “fuck you” to that beast Norman Mailer. Machismo out the ass. He wasn’t for my Marilyn. She was more a Kennedy girl—a Miller babe—defying all and then, well … you know the rest. Inherently good American poontang ends up suicidal.
For the record, I’m a chick, a Yiddisher damsel, which makes me a Jewish lesbian from the ashes of Adolf Hitler. Some people dispute this fact—consider me a hostile mental case, but they haven’t seen the little man who peers through my ovaries and assorted organs. He sticks his hand outside my bra and waves to passersby.
I am Anita Schwartz, formerly known as Adolf Hitler. I am also currently Hitler. I love leather boots. I wear loafers because the Führer does not like socks. He also does not like cocks, or so he says. Hitler’s relationship to penises is peculiar—like his adoration of Albert Speer (his architect) or his attentions to Rudolf Hess (his effeminate deputy Führer)—but we’ll get to those fags later on.
Hitler liked younger women. He liked his niece and Eva Braun. He was not terribly conventional and committed suicide after he and Eva were married. Cyanide and gun powder. Plus, he killed his dog Blondie and her puppies in the bunker, along with himself and Eva. It’s heart-wrenching to kill German shepherd pups. “We were more distraught by the death of Blondie’s kin than Magda Goebbels giving her kids chocolate-covered cyanide pills,” Hitler told me. But the Russians were coming and Hitler didn’t want Stalin to get his purebred canines.
A photograph of Joseph Goebbels’ charcoal corpse was found in the Russian archives. Stalin, they also discovered, kept Goebbels in a vase.
Alas, charcoal puppies are more disturbing than charcoal SS members because the Führer and I prefer animals.
I have Hitler’s moustache—facial hair under my nose—and use tweezers because it means his moustache will be subverted by my chin plucking.
“Ouch!” he yelps when my tweezer forcibly removes the great black grass by his/my face. Each Hitler moustache hair is connected to a chin hair and is a torture session for him, which he calls a “plucking season.”
“Stop your Medieval persecution,” he utters and tries to get a word in edgewise, despite the piercing/plucking.
I eventually stop yanking. I don’t want to infuriate the Führer who lives inside this hairy-legged Jew girl. Such punishment for a man who had high ideals.
God stuck Hitler in a canto in Dante’s Inferno—Hitler lies in the body of a Jewish lesbian.
There are several theories about how Herr Hitler got lodged inside of me. One is that Satan vivisected my mother during a nightmare and stuck him in her womb. Another supposition is that Magda Goebbels never forgave Hitler for not reining in her husband Joseph and his adultery and had a Hades divorce court start proceedings against Hitler. This landed the Führer in my mother—so he could feel a woman truly suffer—as Magda did when Joseph sexed other flowers.
The most resilient theory: the Teutonic gods, it was rumored, struck Daddy’s sperm and Mommy’s egg with lightning.
It should be known that the Teutonic gods were appalled that the Nazis worshipped them, and none would accept blame for “Third Reich vermin.” The chief fertility god Freyr, and Odin, the head warrior god, bickered as to who was responsible for the “Hitlerites.” Freyr castigated Odin and Odin tyrannized Freyr for “birthing these maggots.”
“You’re the original father of swasticklers!” Freyr squawked.
“You sold Eva Braun those wigs and gave her boyfriend a discount on ideologies,” Odin countered.
Their fueling tempers, which transformed into world-wide tsunamis, caused cataclysmic and irreparable damage that nearly destroyed the planet.
Thus Gandhi, who had sexual relations with Freyr, and assisted Odin with the eviction of England from India, convinced these Teutonic lords that “since Hitler was not a terribly Christian or Aryan fellow, you must punish him rather than yourselves.”
Gandhi reasoned that Charlie Chaplin’s duplicitous twin should be begotten by a blue-collar Jewish couple in Trilateral Commission, New Jersey. And Freyr and Odin, listening to Tristan and Isolde on WBAI-Aryan radio, permitted Hitler’s volatile soul to transmigrate to my mom’s embryo. Gandhi also, it should be noted, was abetted by the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, who donated karma spices so the womb could easily absorb the Nazi tyrant.
This not so miraculous occurrence became me and the Nazi who are now co-writing this memoir. Of all the numerous premises about Hitler becoming the capricious bastard inside me, this seems the most logical.
God made him me. A Hebrew Sappho with an average IQ.
There are no clinical studies, to date, linking me to Hitler, so I’m not sure how it scientifically came to be; he is certainly not part of a psychotic condition some accuse me of having.
As an alienated Jew-dyke, who is disliked by Jews and dykes, it is far easier to have a Nazi inside. Perhaps it gives me a false sense of self-esteem, but it also permits me to castrate nouveau riche and Pynchon-Sartre wannabes who smoke clove cigarettes and drink Budweiser. I don’t know why people pick on me—but they do—so I am remarkably grateful that Satan or the Teutonic gods gave Hitler to me.
And in my hometown, Trilateral Commission, NJ, kids were mean to me. You know how chickens will pick at their fellow chickens, usually the weakest chicken? Well, that was me in Hebrew and public school.
I’m a Jersey prole. Our kin never advanced like the Rothschilds. We lived in a purple-shingled Cape Cod house on a major highway. We’re the weeds of Diaspora of the Garden State Parkway. But blue-collar Jews don’t imagine their daughter will be the next Adolf Hitler. They think, “Eh, maybe she’ll be a newscaster on a local cable channel if her acne goes away” or “she’ll teach Mahjong to senior citizens with big toenails.” Hitler is not a preconceived resume bullet that appears shyly on LinkedIn. He does appear, without despair, on Twitter (now “X”) and Grindr.
My family got a few hints when I threw temper tantrums in German. Hit and I speak fluent but grammatically incorrect German. His Austrian German is in conflict with my New Jersey English. This creates a bastardization of German…though occasionally my English suffers. The German and English verbs are at war. I have hired French adverbs, as gendarmes, to fight against his vulgar adjectives, but the French succumb to the Deutsch charm. Though our linguistics battle continues, we write this memoir, which I’d like to show to professors, but Hit doesn’t want Ivy League pricks messing up our prose.
Hit and I encountered upstart gentile-wannabe Yids in the Conservative synagogue in our hometown during my teen years. The Hebe bourgeoisie and their imitation fur coats fled Trilateral Commission, NJ, when the Hasidic Jews moved in. The doctors and lawyers were fearful that the Orthodox Jews from Brookeyeliner, NY, “would bring the real estate prices down.” In reality, the real estate prices have quadrupled since the Gentile-Jews left. We’d live there, in Trilateral Commission, NJ, but Hitler fears the Hasids would go berserk if he did an unmitigated “Seig Heil” hand salute.
Indeed, my brother Harold nearly caused a riot recently by asking for a ham sandwich in the kosher deli at the Exxon station. We don’t have enough insurance to cover us if religious Jews in Yankee yarmulkes attack us with baseball bats during the Führer’s speeches in the public bathroom.
In addition, Hit and I have transgender bathroom conflicts where his penis comes out when my vagina wants preference, and as there are cameras surveying the gas station bathroom, we get fined for gender confusion and must appear in court after receiving a summons from the undercover bathroom police officer.
“Are you a girl or a boy?” the judge asks.
“We are neutral on that issue,” we reply.
Hit resented these Orthodox who ignored us growing up, whereas the suburban, “blend-in” tribesmen were malicious and spiteful. The Hasidim, whom I respect more, are not as fixated on your yearly income, but get a little touchy when you’re flushing with a Third Reich victory salute.
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Eleanor Levine‘s writing has appeared in more than 200 publications, including Fiction, The Evergreen Review, The Hollins Critic, Gertrude, Faultline, The Raleigh Review, the Notre Dame Review, and others. Her poetry collection, Waitress at the Red Moon Pizzeria, was published by Unsolicited Press (Portland, Oregon). Her short story collection, Kissing a Tree Surgeon, was published by Guernica Editions (Toronto, Ontario, Canada). She was nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize and received an MFA in Creative Writing from Hollins University. She is a former movie, theater and book critic and currently a medical editor in New York City. Eleanor lives with her brother Michael in Monmouth County, New Jersey, with her cat Raleigh and dog Lenny.