And did our Father find his powers of expression limited by this peculiar choice?
Not at all, not at all! On the contrary: he’d say: Turn it and turn it for everything is in it (Avos 5:26). Indeed, father’s knowledge of the scriptures was so complete he was able to carry on lengthy conversations on a wide range of topics, once, for example, discussing his gastric pains with our family physician.
Dr. Kirschbaum asked him, in Yiddish, of course.
Father said. I’m in distress (Lamentations 1:20). He pointed to his belly. There is an evil sickness I’ve seen under the sun (Ecclesiastes 5:12).
“And your bowels?” the doctor asked, palpating him, “how are they?”
my father said: They’ve shriveled up (Job 6:17).
“Any problems with flatulence?”
Father shrugged. Is there no end to these words of wind? (ibid. 16:3).
Dr. Kirshbaum handed him a curative powder in a paper sleeve and played along. This will be a cure for your navel (Proverbs 3:8).
Another time, when Father had ordered manure to be laid upon the orchards, he’d noticed the gardener boy idling about. he muttered. There he stands behind our wall, peering through the lattice (Song of Songs 2:9). He called to the lad. Incline your ear to me and help (Psalm 71:2) for now the winter is past and the rains are gone (Song of Songs 2:11) the flowers have appeared on the land and the time for pruning has come (ibid. 2:12). Steering his charge towards the fertilizer, he commanded him: You shall spread it out powerfully westward, eastward, northward and southward (Genesis 29:14) that it may blow upon my garden and its perfume spread (Song of Songs 4:16). But he cautioned him: My boy, let your mind retain my orders (Proverbs 3:1), for why should the work be halted when I leave? (Nehemiah 6:3).
As incredible as it may seem, those who knew my father as a young man claim that though he never uttered a word that couldn’t be found in the Torah or the Talmud or the Commentaries or the Codes, he was a chatterbox who never ceased talking. However, as he grew older, the fear that he might tarnish the holy tongue through everyday use took hold of him, and by the time I was born, he’d ceased speaking in complete sentences and only whispered one or two phrases to make his will known. If our mother pleased him, for example, he might say, (Who can find?) or (greater than pearls), and we understood that he was showering his abbreviated praises upon her. Who can find a noble wife? Her price is beyond pearls (Proverbs 31:10). Or if, on a cold winter’s day, I raced out to skylark with friends in the snow, he might block my path and hold out two woolen scarves to me and say, and I knew he meant Bind them as in Bind them about your throat (Proverbs 3:3). On Sabbath evenings, after we children had been put to bed, we’d hear him, through the thin walls of our house, crooning Song of Songs to our Mother. Indeed, he did this so regularly that, after many years, if, in her hearing, speaking of agricultural concerns, he happened to mention “a flock of goats” (6:5) or, in looking at our ceilings, muttered something about “the beams of our house” (1:7), she was helpless to control her blushes.
My sisters — Gitl, Golde, Rukhl, Reyzl, Feyge, Khayke, and Sore Dvore — all older than I, understood him perfectly. Perhaps their education, occurring at home, had been more thorough than mine; perhaps, having known him when he’d spoken in complete sentences, they could decipher his shorthand more easily; perhaps they simply loved him better than I did and found it easier to indulge him. Whatever the reason, I couldn’t understand a word he said. Taking pity on me, my sisters and sometimes even my mother translated his remarks into a warm and womanly Yiddish, and as a result, I seldom bothered listening to him at all, nor did I take seriously the obligation to learn the Torah backwards and forwards in order to understand what he was saying.
(A word of caution here: as my father’s eccentricities were explained to me when I was a small child by my sisters, it’s possible they thought to cast it all in a wondrous fairy-tale light, suspecting that I, a stubborn child, might be more amenable to the polylingual demands placed upon our family by our father if I could believe in their tales of talking bears and jabbering angels. It’s also possible that I’m misremembering — perhaps even intentionally! — what was in fact no more than my father’s not unusual penchant, given the time and place, for peppering his speech with scriptural quotations.
Be that as it may, when he towered over me that day in his office and said, You shall be holy, as I, the Lord your God, am holy (Leviticus 19:2), I understood from his tone that the preamble was over and the specifics were now to be addressed.
He sighed unhappily. he said. Stand erect and prepare yourself (Jeremiah 46:14). A virgin girl will lie in your bosom (I Kings 1:2). Be calm, fear not, let not your heart grow faint (Isaiah 7:4). Blood may be dashed (Ezekiel 43:18) on the day of a man’s entry into the inner courtyard (Ezekiel 44:27). The place is tight (Isaiah 49:20). It is hidden (Judges 13:18). For as it is written: Between her legs, he knelt, toppled, lay (Judges 5:27). One fell against the other (Jeremiah 46:16). He sat on her lap (II Kings 4:20). Joy and gladness shall be found there (Isaiah 51:3).
Something made him hesitate. he said. Alas, I know not how to speak (Jeremiah 1:6). He scowled and wet his tongue nervously. But you will know what to do (I Kings. 2:9). He peered down at his hands, lying upon his desk. Regarding your heart’s desire (I Kings 8:18) whatever is in your heart, go and do (II Samuel 7:3). The maiden shall conceive (Isaiah 7:14). Your offspring will issue from your loins (II Samuel 7:12). Labor pains shall come (Hosea 13:13). A bit here and a bit there (Isaiah 28:10). Then your house will be established forever (II Samuel 7:16). Then you shall see and be radiant, eager and expansive shall be your heart (Isaiah 60:5). he said. Good (Genesis 1:10). Now nothing will be hidden from you (Jeremiah 32:17).
He had covered apparently everything and was at a loss now for anything further to say. He raised his eyebrows: two semaphores signaling man overboard, and mine, involuntarily, imitated his: I was lost at sea. We stared at each other in this way until he said, God made man upright, but he sought out other inventions (Ecclesiastes 7:29). Any questions? (Judges 8:24).
I folded my hands and cleared my throat. Father’s talk had included no pictures, no charts, no helpful graphs or diagrams of any kind — he hadn’t so much as sketched anything in the air with his hands while he spoke — and I could imagine the sexual act only as well as I could, which is to say not at all, or rather as through a glass darkly (BT Vevamos 49b).
“No, Father,” I replied. “Thank God, everything has been sufficiently explained.”
He sighed again, apparently in wild relief.
And the boy grew and the Lord blessed him (Judges 13:24), he said, as a way of dismissing me.
For many years afterwards, this conversation comprised the entirety of my knowledge on the subject.
IT SAYS MORE about our town perhaps than about our father that he was not considered the least bit odd there. On the contrary, he was counted among Szibotya’s principal citizens. O Szibotya, what a strange little town you were! Its streets were muddy whether it was raining or not, and the town square was rhomboidal. We faced east in our synagogues, as tradition demanded, aware that Mother Russia had imposed herself there between the Holy One and ourselves, like an imperial censor, and few of our petitions, we suspected, were being let through. Rumors of violence on the eastern horizon sent paroxysms of fear through our little town, and fire was a problem as well. Every few years, Szibotya burned to the ground, and every few years, for reasons that defied logic, we rebuilt it again.
The market was a shambles: moist barrels of glazed-eyed fish suffocating slowly; chickens, alive one moment, dead the next, their necks slashed, their feathers ripped out by gossiping matrons; legless men in wheel-barrows begging for crusts and, when crusts were scarce, for crumbs; porters sleeping on their boxes, shielding their eyes with their hats, their hands thrust into the mouths of their shoes, their most valued possession.
And there was nothing more terrifying than a visit to the tailor’s shop. Zusha the Amalekit
e was the most frightening man I’d ever known. Because his big beard crept nearly to his eyes, I couldn’t look him in the face. His hands were strong enough to break a boy in two, and his breath, which he expelled from his mouth in labored grunts, smelled as though field mice had been sucked into his lungs and died there. When, on his knees to measure an inseam, he placed his head next to mine, death seemed not only the inevitable but also the preferable consequence.
In Russia, it was said that Zusha had kidnapped boys from one town to serve in the army as the next town’s quota, and when the first town paid him, he thanked them by stealing their children to serve as a third town’s recruits. He’d made a small fortune in this way but he lost it all in bribes, fleeing from the tsarist police. Everyone knew the story: when his daughter, Frume-Liebe, slept with a Russian captain and had gotten herself pregnant, Zusha refused to let her see a doctor. Worse, when her time came, he tried to kill the baby, strangling it with a shoestring, and he would have succeeded, too, if his wife, Beyle, hadn’t restrained him. Refusing to speak to her father ever again, Frume-Liebe denounced both of her parents to the authorities before running off with her lieutenant and abandoning her child. Stuck with the baby, a brain-damaged girl they called Ita, Zusha and Beyle raced across the border and returned to Szibotya, where Ita sat now each day in Zusha’s shop on a high stool doing absolutely nothing. There was no point in sending her to school or in teaching her to cook, everyone agreed. She was an idiot first and last. Why, she could barely speak and only repeated whatever anyone said to her, but she had no idea what she was saying.
my mother greeted her, upon entering Zusha’s shop. Shalom aleykhem. (It was my mother’s task, of course, to take me to Zusha’s for my wedding clothes.)
“Lech … umm … shlom,” Ita repeated in her halting voice.
“You’re looking well, Ita.”
“Uhr … ‘ooken … wuuh.”
As Ita tried to repeat my mother’s words, growing flushed at the prospect of a conversation, I hid behind her skirts, waiting for the terrible interview to end. Unlike with my father, conversation for my mother had nothing to do with the littleness of man in the face of God’s terrible greatness. Talk was for her, instead, a way of bringing everyone closer to her. Large-boned and strong, she broadcast her affection everywhere she went, her words like love letters addressed to “Whomever It May Concern,” and it was no different with Ita.
“Have a good Shabbos, Itale,” she said, touching Ita’s sticky hands.
“Gud … Szpass … ‘uhn.” Ita nodded and drooled, et cetera, et cetera. Her face was flatter than it should have been, and her eyes didn’t focus, and when she breathed, a harp of snot vibrated inside her nasal passages. Because of Ita, I learned from an early age to keep immaculate care of my clothing. Adults commented upon it as though it were an oddity, but I would have done anything to avoid coming into Zusha’s shop.
“Ah, so, this is the young man who’s getting married then, eh?” Zusha barked out. Mother pretended not to hear him when he added, “Oh, yes, the whole town’s buzzing with the news!”
I’D FALLEN INTO bad company, you see.
One afternoon, when I’d exhausted his stock without finding anything of interest, Avrum the Book Peddler asked me to stay behind. Perhaps he’d sensed my intellectual dissatisfaction — by age ten, the mandatory piety of my education had begun to bore me — or perhaps without my realizing it, when we were speaking, I’d pronounced some secret word that identified me to him as a fellow maskil. Whatever the reason, when his other customers wandered off to pray the afternoon prayers, Avrum made no attempt to hide his true feelings from me.
“Ah, just look at them, Yankl,” he said, biting into his pipe stem, “running off to beg the Master of the Universe to do all the things He put them on this earth to do for one another.” He shook his head, and I found myself shaking my own. Those little blackened figures scurrying across the town square appeared to me for the first time as benighted and pitiable creatures of limited intellect and daring, and I wondered how I’d never seen them before in this light.
“You like to read,” Avrum said. Though it wasn’t a question, his tone demanded some sort of confirmation, and I nodded in reply. “Good. I thought so. A smart boy like you. Well, for a smart boy like you, Avrum has a special trove of books. Or didn’t you know about Avrum’s special trove?”
He spoke in such a way that anyone passing by would neither hear what he was saying nor suspect it was of any special concern: just a boy and a peddler. Perhaps the child’s mother had sent him to invite the man home for a meal or to pick up a special order. Avrum glanced over the swayback of his horse and combed the mare’s mane until he was certain no one was watching us. Then raising the plank that served as a seat on his wagon, he brought out from beneath it a handsome traveling pouch.
“These might be of interest to you, who knows?” he said, handing me a couple of books and a number of pamphlets. For a boy like me, it was like finding a buried treasure. Still, I was unsure if I could accept them. “No, no need to pay for them,” he said, “if that’s what you’re worrying about. If you enjoy them, good. If not, return them to me, no harm done. But there’s only one thing.” He attempted to make his face appear as benign as possible but succeeded only in making it seem sinister and cunning. “You might not want anyone to know what you have here. Your father, for example, or anyone with authority over you, your mother, for instance, or your teachers. We understand each other, yes? There’s a new world coming, Yankl, but it isn’t here quite yet.”
A new world! I knew these words could mean only one thing: the coming of the Messiah, the return of Israel to its national borders, the restoration of our holy Temple.
“Pah — no!” Avrum frowned, coughing out a puff of smoke. “That’s the old new world, Yankl! I’m speaking of the new new world.”
He gazed over my shoulders at the horizon behind me where, I imagined, he could see the light of this new world dawning, although it was already almost dusk. Instead, he straightened up and said, “However, I see that your father has come to pray, and you’d better go join him.”
“Oh, and Yankl!” he said, grabbing me a little too roughly by the collar. “This remains just between ourselves, correct? That’s a good friend. Just between ourselves. That’s right. Now go!”
I crossed the square, stopping to hide the books and the pamphlets in the coal bin on the far side of the old Beis Midrash. When I entered the synagogue flushed and out of breath, Father pierced me with his customary look. It was as though each time he saw me, he had to remind himself who I was; and when he remembered, his mood darkened considerably. I returned to the coal bin after dinner, and thus began my second education as over the next year or two Avrum supplied me with all sorts of books — Lilienblum’s The Sins of Youth, Luzzatto’s Samson and Delilah, Pseudonym’s History of a Family. This last title was so inflammatory, Avrum told me, that its author couldn’t even sign the novel with his true name and had to use the name of an ancient Greek philosopher who’d been executed by the government for his controversial views.
“Just like Jesus,” Avrum said, spitting. “May his name be blotted out.”
AS I SAY, this was my second education. The first began when I was only three.
When they told me I had to go to school, naturally I assumed they were joking, that it was some new game Mother had invented. My sisters will pretend to take me to this “school,” to this cheder: a room — they couldn’t even think up a proper name! — where they’ll pretend to abandon me; I’ll cry and they’ll return; they’ll dry my tears and, once again, when they’re baking or sewing or cooking or cleaning, I’ll be passed, like a newborn duckling, from one of their laps to the next. I was willing to play. But no, they assured me, it wasn’t a game; every little boy had to go to school. “Then let me be a girl like the rest of you!” I cried, resisting so fiercely they had to pry my arms from Gitl’s neck and carry me, kicking and screaming to this cheder. Clearly, I’d don
e something wrong. This room, as they called it, this school, was obviously a punishment of some kind. And I wasn’t the only malefactor apprehended at whatever misdeed had sent me here. No, six or seven other boys, their dirty faces broadcasting blank stares, sat around a long wooden table, where we were all forced to read from books when anybody with any sense could have seen that none of us knew how!
I looked up at our keeper, Reb Sender. He had a thick black beard and bushy black eyebrows, but his crinkly face seemed kindly. If I behave myself, I remember thinking, Reb Sender will set me free, because unlike the other boys, who (it didn’t take much imagination to see) really were savages, I didn’t belong here. Surely Reb Sender will realize a mistake has been made in my case, surely he will send me home, if I show myself agreeable and compliant, and if I uncomplainingly learn to decipher those ugly black squiggles in the thumb-smudged books he kept thrusting beneath our noses even after we’d given up resisting and it was clear our spirits had been broken.
(The starchy smells of those books sent my head swimming, and most mornings I could barely keep down the breakfast of groats Reb Sender’s wife made for us.)
Hoping for a commutation of my sentence, I finished the year’s work in a matter of weeks, mastering both reading and writing, demonstrating in this way, I hoped, that I’d repented of whatever crimes had placed me in his care, that my character had been reformed, and that I could be safely returned to my former life.
This strategy backfired. Though I was the most docile of his students, as well as the most helpful and the most learned, I wasn’t forgiven, but rather laden with extra responsibilities and doubly burdened with Reb Sender’s loathsome praises. “Yankele, I don’t know how I’d ever run things here without you,” he told me repeatedly, his words throwing me into a panic. If I’m indispensable, I told myself, I might serve out my sentence and never be returned home!
A Curable Romantic Page 7
