Kagan's Superfecta: And Other Stories

by Allen Hoffman

  I took everything up to the roof. Without hesitating, I cut the rope. Before I had everything set up, I had already started blocking out the basic areas. Barely looking up, because I knew what it looked like, I worked with almost fevered swiftness. Possessed, I stayed with it until the darkness descended. A contact drill Vince Lombardi would have loved! Then, grabbing everything together at once like a mad refugee, I hauled it downstairs into the house and continued until the early morning. After a few hours’ rest — I’m not sure that I slept — I returned to my painting. By midmorning, I had dragged everything up to the roof. I wouldn’t answer the door. I told my wife not to call me to the phone. I didn’t change any clothes at all, and I hardly ate. Finally, on Friday afternoon, an hour before the Sabbath, I finished. I brought the painting and all my equipment into the house and in continued frenzy I put everything away.

  “I’m finished!” I yelled in triumph, seized with a great burning desire to prepare for the Sabbath.

  “What can I do to help?” I asked my wife.

  “Take a shower,” she suggested.

  “No, I must help,” I said.

  I collected the garbage from under the sink, the old newspapers, the bottles. I ran out the door, down the steps, and all the way to the garbage container. On the way back, I met my neighbor. It was the first time in three days I had left the house. He stared at me uneasily for he had not been permitted to visit while I was working.

  “I’m finished,” I said.

  “You’re not going to shower?” he asked.

  “The picture,” I explained. “I finished the painting. Please come and see it,” I invited.

  He looked at the pail of garbage in his hand.

  “All right,” he said, “when I’m finished with everything. Right before Sabbath,” he added enthusiastically.

  “Fine.”

  I ran upstairs to shower.

  I was dressed except for my shoes when he knocked.

  He, too, was freshly scrubbed.

  “I never had a private showing before,” he said with a laugh. He entered with the sly, hampered step of the very curious and the very involved. He was my neighbor and he wanted my painting to be good so that he would mean all the kind things that he would want to say.

  As I led him into the room that was my studio, my wife gathered the girls to light candles.

  He looked at the painting once and his eyes widened. A man who is in very precise control of his emotions and his appearance, he quickly reined himself into a neutral mask of observation. Even then, his eyes moved too quickly, darting back and forth as if to confirm what he thought he had seen. Then he realized that he had to say something. In embarrassment, he looked down at his feet and hesitantly shifted his weight. He cleared his throat.

  “It’s late. We’d better go to pray. We can talk later,” and then he quickly added, “It’s very interesting, of course.”

  The poor man, his eyes always betrayed him. They were filled with disappointment and a twinge of disgust — for this you came to Jerusalem?

  “It’s based on the verse in Daniel,” I explained. “The one about the Messiah: ‘I saw in the night visions, and behold, one like the son of man came with clouds of heaven and he came even unto the ancient of days.’”

  “Yes, I see,” he said, seeing very little. “I’ll be late,” he added and he left.

  I stayed and carefully examined my creation. It was the view from the roof: I had captured a beautiful Mount of Olives. The clarity, poetry, and decay of the cemetery. The tombstones of mere stone, but so deeply rooted in faith that from those roots amid the bodies returning to eternity they draw nurture that suggests that they themselves are the congregation of the faithful. And what faithful! Exuberant, boisterous, but disciplined — no straight lines, no right angles, but grouped together in a zone defense to block out every spirit and demon in creation. The mountain itself has the solidity of a mountain sitting on center stage of the earth and the soft, delicate magical potency and assurance of a hill as fragrant as an almond blossom. The cemetery, too, is part of this procreative paradox of passionately gentle deathly renewal.

  And above the mountain, the cloud-acclaimed herald is arriving. Uncle Maxie sails in airy majesty. He is not alone. Blissfully silent and no longer grasping, the brilliantly plumed parrot sits on his shoulder like a dove, for this is the age of peace when silence articulates and beauty is shared. Uncle Maxie is not ascending as an El Greco would have him. Nor is he floating in aimless memory like some aged Chagall figure. Rather, Uncle Maxie is purposeful and masterful, a cross between Charles Lindbergh and Tom Corbett, space cadet. He is arrival. Arrogant — deservedly so, that’s a good number flying along with the clouds — but polite. His jaw is set. His eye is firm. His stance is dramatic and aggressive, as well it should be. His flesh isn’t youthful but it has good tone. This is the Uncle Maxie of seventy years. He has his bald head, his paunch, and his bandy legs, but he’s a son of a gun, all right! There’s life in those thighs. The lean pluck of an old rooster, flexing his comb before crowing the dawn of the new day, The Day. And you can see part of his thigh, too, because Uncle Maxie is wearing the purest ribbed white underwear you can imagine. But these are not modern B.V.D.’s. These are long, form-fitting underwear, appropriate for an elder, for a herald, and for the discretion of Jerusalem. The pants descend gracefully to mid-thigh the way they do in the old silent movies when disrobing did not imply indiscretion. The T-shirt sleeves are halfway to his elbows. The flamboyant initials on his chest are at long last truly his: M.V.P. (When the dead live again, it goes without saying who gets that award!) His hands are held low in stately arrival. These are the hands that juggled eight eggs, but there are no eggs, nor lemons, for Uncle Maxie doesn’t need them now. He himself is in the air. This is the age of the Messiah! All in the radiant stream of light.

  I look up to find my wife by my side.

  “For this I came to Jerusalem,” I whisper.

  About the Author

  ALLEN HOFFMAN, award-winning author of the novels Small Worlds, Big League Dreams, and Two for the Devil, was born in St. Louis and received his B.A. in American history from Harvard University. He studied the Talmud in yeshivas in New York and Jerusalem, and has taught in New York City schools. He lives with his wife and children in Jerusalem where he teaches English literature and creative writing at Bar-Ilan University.

  SMALL WORLDS, the first volume in Allen Hoffman’s critically acclaimed series Small Worlds, takes place in 1903 and introduces the wondrous rebbe of Krimsk—a small Hasidic settlement in Eastern Europe. Secluded in his study for the past five years, the beloved rebbe suddenly emerges on the eve of Tisha B’Av, the holiday commemorating the destruction of the holy Temple in Jerusalem. His congregants are overjoyed to see him, but their joy is to be short-lived, for this holiday at the dawn of the twentieth century will be marked by strange and momentous events that will change their lives forever.

  “Allen Hoffman tells a great story. Krimsk... is a wild place, reminiscent of nothing so much as a religiously intense version of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s imaginary village of Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude.”

  —COMMENTARY

  “There’s magic in Hoffman’s first novel.... It’s much in the tradition of Sholem Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Singer, but with a contemporary edge.”

  —DETROIT FREE PRESS

  “Every few years readers devoted to Jewish literature... can lift their eyes from the page and whisper, ‘This is it. This I will savor.’ Such is the case with Small Worlds.”

  —JERUSALEM POST

  SMALL WORLDS by Allen Hoffman

  280 pages • 5¼ x 7¾"

  Cloth • ISBN 0-7892-0129-1 • $24.95 • UK £15.95

  Paper • ISBN 0-7892-0582-3 • S12.95 • UK £9.25

  BIG LEAGUE DREAMS, the second volume in Allen Hoffman’s critically acclaimed series Small Worlds, finds the rebbe of Krimsk—a small Hasidic settlement in Eastern Europe—and many of his flock in
St. Louis on a Saturday, the Sabbath, in the summer of 1920. It is an American Sabbath, characterized by Prohibition, bootlegging, bookies, the criminal syndicate, hometown blondes, and big league baseball. It is also Krimsk in America: Matti Sternweiss, once the ungainly child wonder of Krimsk, is now catcher for the St. Louis Browns, scheming to Wx Saturday’s game against the Detroit Tigers. In the Wnal, decisive innings, it will come down to Ty Cobb versus the kabbalah.

  “First-rate fiction: reminiscent... of such precursors as Sholem Aleichem, but possessed of distinctive individual strengths and Wrmly rooted in its characters’ strange new land and even stranger adventures.”

  —KIRKUS REVIEWS

  “Hoffman fashions a haunting, bittersweet story of exile, dislocation and redemption in the Promised Land.... Robust humor, insight into human nature and an absence of sentimentality augment Hoffman’s storytelling skills.”

  —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY STARRED REVIEW

  BIG LEAGUE DREAMS by Allen Hoffman

  296 pages • 5¼ x 7¾"

  Cloth • ISBN 0-7892-0191-7 • $24.95 • UK £15.95

  Paper • ISBN 0-7892-0583-1 • $12.95 • UK £9.25

  TWO FOR THE DEVIL, the third volume in Allen Hoffman’s critically acclaimed Small Worlds series, records the fate of the villagers of Krimsk as they encounter the twentieth century’s greatest agents of evil: Joseph Stalin and Adolph Hitler. In Moscow at the height of the 1936 Stalinist purges, Grisha Shwartzman discovers on Rosh Hashanah—the Jewish New Year and Day of Judgment—that he is in danger of liquidation by the secret police he serves. In 1942, Yechiel Katzman finds himself on a train of imprisoned Jews as it leaves the Warsaw ghetto on Yom Kippur—the Day of Atonement—for “resettlement in the East.” Stalin and Hitler decree certain death, but in the course of their experiences Grisha and Yechiel discover Jewish fates. Through memory, both men gain community, dignity, and the awareness of sanctity. Grisha’s “Soviet” Rosh Hashanah and Yechiel’s “Nazi” Yom Kippur are truly “Days of Awe.”

  “It is a remarkable feat to produce dense, allusive fiction in the manner of I. B. Singer or S. Y. Agnon in prose that is so airy and spacious. Allen Hoffman’s deceptively small worlds offer a broad, expansive mystery tour, full of fire and smoke, that visits both individual souls and the spirit of a community.”

  —THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

  TWO FOR THE DEVIL by Allen Hoffman

  256 pages • 5¼ x 7¾"

  Cloth • ISBN 0-7892-0397-9 • $24.95 • UK £15.95

  Paper • ISBN 0-7892-0641-2 • $12.95 • UK £9.25

  FICTION

  THIS captivating collection of stories by Allen Hoffman, award-winning author of the critically acclaimed SMALL WORLDS series, opens with a tale about Moe Kagan, madcap remedial reading teacher and unsuccessful horseplayer-”I bet below grade level”-who has the perfect superfecta bet. While winning would rescue him from his habitually penniless state, there is a problem: He must bet on Yom Kippur, which this year falls on the Sabbath, but Kagan cannot bring himself to gamble on this holiest day of the year. The perplexed and passionate unorthodox Orthodox Kagan seeks to solve his dilemma in a quest through Manhattan’s Upper West Side. There he is confronted by his corrupting personal angel Ozzie, his Connecticut-born wife who expects him to take an interest instead in the trees of Central Park, and the High Priest in the Holy Temple who conducts a lottery to select the sacrificial goat that will atone all of Israel. Kagan is astonished: “What’s Off-Track Betting doing in the Holiest of Holies?”

  From Bluma the old beggar woman who resembles Dom DiMaggio and will not accept alms from the poorer congregants of her temple to Hymie the well-to-do arsonist who develops a morbid fear of fire, to Maxie the juggling uncle who refuses to change his underwear, the comic and sympathetic characters of Hoffman’s title novella and four short stories celebrate the universal human experience. Hoffman loves and integrates two worlds, the modern secular and the timeless traditional. Kagan’s Superfecta is a dazzling, inspirational performance.

  “Hoffman has it all just right in these rich, amusing tales... The novella and four short stories gathered here are marvelous mirrors of Jewish ways and hearts and minds... Original and wonderful.”

  -PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY

  PRAISE FOR Small Worlds, Big League Dreams, AND Two for the Devil

  “Allen Hoffman’s deceptively small worlds offer a broad, expansive mystery tour, full of fire and smoke, that visits both individual souls and the spirit of a community.”

  - THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

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