The Impossible Makht

      After a while, I began to think of the photos in my album in a genetical sort of way.

      As though each scrip, whether cracked and yellowed or shiny and Polaroid, bore a single twist in the code that I shared with my ancestors.  Here perhaps was a guaninic snap of Hym Yuda’s stubbornness, there a cytosinic shot of Meyer Shapiro’s faithless faith, and so on through a helix that was at once elegant and brute and inexorable.

      I imagined forces in my own being – at the molecular level mind you – shaped and shaded by survival down through the long story of evolution from sponge to ape to man.

      So naturally when I heard that there was a strongman on the family tree, I beamed.  A strongman!  Surely those abilities – to lift horses over your head, to pull trains with your teeth – would be lying dormant in me.  Yes me with my dental implants, achy shoulder, and arthritic fist.

      His name was Eyal Shapiro but he was known, if at all, by his vaudeville name The Impossible Makht.  He was a small squat fellow from the photos, sturdy but not sinewy, and not at all the steroid musclemen of my time.  But he was strong and that was what I wanted to be and so I adopted him size and shape and all.

      If the idea of a Jewish strongman sounds wrong then you simply do not know your history for in this Eyal was following in a great and grand tradition: Zishe Breitbart climbing a ladder with a baby elephant in hand and holding a locomotive wheel by rope in his mouth with three men dangling from it; Siegmund Klein balancing twelve hefty girls on his broad shoulders; Frans Bienkowski ripping apart coins with his fingers; Eugen Sandow toying with barbells no one else could even budge off the floor; Joseph Greenstein, the Mighty Atom, driving a nail through a board with his bare hands, then pulling it out with his teeth.  Alexander Zass, the Amazing Samson – from Vilna no less! – bending steel bars five men could barely lift.

      And for that matter Superman leaping from tall buildings with a single bound, Spider-man and the Batman, Captain America, the Hulk, the Spirit, the X-Men, Magneto, the Thing, the Fantastic Four…all of them mighty because they overcame all odds and Jewish because if your parents were, so were you.

      We have strongmen in our blood; we have been the victims of the world for too long not to dream of transcendent power.

      The Impossible Makht may have been small, but he had hands like mountains, the palms wide as rivers, the fingers thick as trees.  The word makht was strength; not to be confused with a makher which meant a big shot or fixer.  Eyal was not that at all; he simply had amazing power in his hands.  He could poke a hole through a piece of wood with his index finger, crush a thick glass bottle between his thumb and pointer, do push-ups on a single pinky.  I took all this to mean that I too could break through barriers, get a grip on my slippy life, raise myself up on the thinnest of hopes, if only I could somehow reach inside and access my own napping DNA.

      I recalled reading that the Mighty Atom used to take on whole beerhalls of Nazis, sending them flying to the hospitals and that was stirring of course.  So when I heard that the Impossible Makht had had one such encounter I was anxious to find out about it, to have that kind of story in my head and body.

      But it turned out that the incident took place long after Vilna and vaudeville were both nothing more than pictures in a musty box.  It was in Brooklyn in the 1970s when Makht was already an old man, but sturdy and with hands still like rocks.  He was giving a lecture on the righteous life; like the biblical Samson he was a kind of nazirite; he did not drink, he grew his hair, he took ritual baths.  He told people how to stay healthy by avoiding sin.

      The audience was filled with sleepy seniors mostly and some fidgety teens who had to do a school report but then a handful of punks found their way in.  They stood at the back of the hall filled with disgust at what they saw as an old Jew telling people how to live.  They were not Neo-Nazis exactly; they had not thought through their own hate that clearly.  Nor white supremacists or even skinheads.  They were wannabees looking for ways to prove themselves in a bitter world.

      When Makht was done and walked to the door, they stopped and then surrounded him.  They heard he was a strongman once – that was what drew their interest in the first place – but so were they.  Tough, hard, harsh; they wore black leather jackets and shitkick boots and no little old man was going to get past them.

      As they blocked his path, Makht tried to avoid them.  He even smiled as if to say “excuse me” though the words never came out.  The gang leader, whose name was Richie but who was known on the street as Slice, stood directly in front of him.  He was a big kid, over six feet tall, with a thick head and a nasty smile.  Makht tried to sidestep but the kid blocked him again.  This game went on for a few minutes, Slice increasingly annoyed that the little man before him displayed not one iota of fear.

      Then slowly, almost as a kind of symbolic gesture, Makht raised his hand and extended his index finger as though pointing out that the kid’s heart, just on the other side of some bone and tissue, was in jeopardy.  Slice, not realizing that the finger poised like that was a lethal weapon, grabbed it with his fist and started to twist pain into it.

      That did not work.  He could not budge the finger.  He laughed to his friends, then tightened his grip and bent it upwards to force Makht into some kind of submission.  No use.  It was like trying to dent a lead pipe and it seemed glued in space.

      After a few more futile tries he let it go.  Makht gingerly moved his hand forward and placed the tip of the finger against the kid’s chest.  He tapped it once gently, although that tap must certainly have resonated inside, and Slice looked down to see that the button on his shirt was open.  He quietly closed it and stepped aside to let the old man walk away.

      They say that later on, when asked about it, the Impossible Makht said this: that a strong man was not strong because he was strong; he was strong because he was not weak when weakness mattered.