After the song, “All I Ever Need Is You,” ended, Chickie said to us, “Are your friends pretty informal?” and without waiting for an answer, left the room. We sat a moment, looking at Rabbi Levine and his majestic beard. Suddenly he smiled. “I like it! It has a meaningful message.”
One Sabbath, Susan and I were seated with twelve others in the church where his tiny congregation was forced to meet. (They had no building.) Rabbi Levine was giving his sermon. Birds outside began to sing very loudly. He stopped talking. “What can I say that is as beautiful as that?”
The following Friday, Rabbi Levine was incensed about an ad that had appeared in the local paper. Queen Elizabeth was visiting Vancouver, and a local citizen had taken a full-page ad entitled: “Queen, You Have Nothing To Be Ashamed Of!” He had traced the Queen’s lineage back over the centuries and had come to the certain conclusion that she was descended from King David.
Rabbi Levine held up the newspaper in his hand and proclaimed, “This is a terrible insult to the Queen!”
We heard muttering in the congregation, and a lady beside us said aloud: “You call this a sermon?”
He had trouble with bar mitzvahs as well. The church would be filled for a change on such occasions with the family and friends of the bar mitzvah boy—some of whom might conceivably join the fledgling congregation if the rabbi were appealing.
One Friday night, the bar mitzvah boy had completed his speech, and it was time for the rabbi to speak. People around us looked up proudly at the boy and expectantly at the rabbi.
The rabbi placed a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Sidney, I could ask you to try again. To do the whole thing over again. But I won’t. I know it wouldn’t do any good. Sidney, I sincerely hope that someday you will remember this day and wish you’d done better.”
People around us stood up, some walked out, one man shook his fist at the rabbi.
When my wife and I planned our marriage, we had to find a rabbi who would convert her. That left us only one choice, and that is how we came to know Rabbi Levine, the one Reform rabbi in Vancouver.
He said he would perform the marriage, but on the condition that Susan faithfully attend conversion sessions with him for several months during which he would immerse her in the history and meaning of Judaism.
I sometimes went with Susan to these sessions, which were held at Rabbi Levine’s home—a one-floor house next to a row of like houses. We sat with him in his closet study, the dog barking, the children running about, and Chickie battering the dishes in the kitchen. His study had no door.
“Where did I leave off last time?” he would begin his conversion session.
“Greenland.”
He smiled. “Oh yes. My army days. Chickie was in Brooklyn and I was in Greenland. I was young, I couldn’t stand it. Stop me if I’m repeating myself …”
“Kugel or tzimmes with the roast chicken?” came a shout from the kitchen. Chickie, a fulsome lady, rested her elbow against the wall.
“Kugel.”
“Kugel it will be.” She went back to the kitchen.
“I was young, I was intense. So the guys worked it out. On alternating weekends, when planes flew to the States with missions, I was on those planes. I spent the night in Brooklyn, the next day I went back to Greenland … I wish I could go back to Texas.”
“Texas?” I said.
“My last congregation. What a difference. My own building. Committed, motivated members. Here there is an emptiness. They only wait for the jokes.”
Which is perhaps why, on the following night, Rabbi Levine’s sermon was on the theme that Jonathan Livingston Seagull was Jewish.
We joined Rabbi Levine’s congregation. I had never belonged to a synagogue before, and often felt like a stranger in one. In Hebrew school, I was taught to read without learning the meaning of the words. Services, too, often seemed mechanical and by rote.
But in Levine’s congregation, watching him stumble, grope, argue, and express his arbitrariness in truly amazing ways (One night he said three times: “Maybe I’m tired of being Jewish. Why do you insist that I be Jewish?”), I felt at home.
Rabbi Levine called me once and said he wanted a favor of me. There was a girl who had come to him and shown him her poetry. She was alone, a little troubled. He thought that as a writer and editor, I might offer her encouragement. Her name was Sheila Green.
On a Friday night after the service, Susan and I were having coffee and cake when Rabbi Levine walked over to us. Beside him was an obese, limpid girl in a swollen black dress. She had a vacant, sullen, withdrawn look. The look of someone who wasn’t used to talking with people anymore.
“This is Sheila,” he said, and walked off.
“I’ve been watching you both,” she said. “You’re so pretty,” she said to Susan. “You are so lucky.” She stared at Susan. “You are so lucky. You don’t know how lucky you are. No trap doors will slam down on you. I have no one. Perhaps you’ll let me come to your home and spend time with you. I won’t set fire to it. It would be a good deed. You have everything. I wish you the best but you already have the best. You’re very, very lucky. I won’t set fire to you. I’ll leave your pretty face alone. Don’t trouble with me if you don’t want to. I’m used to it. You have everything going for you. Can I call you up on the phone?”
“Yes, sure,” I said.
Her stare swung to me.
“But your phone is unlisted. You’re getting rid of me very easily. You’re sitting on top of the world. There is kindness in your eyes.”
“Here is our number.” I wrote it down.
“You edit a magazine?”
“Yes.”
“Will you publish my poems?”
“I don’t know. I would have to see them.”
“Will you publish my poems?”
“I would have to see them, naturally.”
“You can’t see them.”
“Why not?”
“My poems are written for rabbis. I only show them to rabbis.”
I tried to laugh. “But how can I judge them if I can’t see them?”
“I don’t want you to judge them. I showed them to Rabbi Levine. I trust him. He likes them. You can ask him.”
“Well. But look, call us.” We backed away.
“You’re getting rid of me. I’m used to it. Ask Rabbi Levine about my poems. I smell bad.”
We walked to another corner of the room and talked with other people. But wherever we moved, we saw Sheila, standing alone, staring at us. Shaken, we left the building.
Weeks passed, Sheila did not call us, and we did not call her.
One day, I was seated alone at a restaurant.
She stood over me. “I heard what you called me that day.”
“What?”
“I heard what you called me that day,” she hissed.
“What day—what are you talking about?”
“Jew.”
“What?”
“Jew. You called me a Jew—”
“I didn’t.”
“You called me a dirty Jew.”
“I never—I would never—”
“You called me a dirty Jew.”
I signaled for the check and started to move away.
“YOU CALLED ME A DIRTY JEW.”
I left five dollars on the table and left her standing there, shouting at me.
I called Rabbi Levine and told him what happened.
“I’m sorry. I thought she was getting better,” he said. “I will have to call her psychiatrist. Actually it was the psychiatrist who told me she was improving. She’ll have to be sent back. I’m sorry.”
Sheila did not bother us again.
At our wedding, we had also asked Rabbi Levine to read a favorite poem of ours, “Kaddish,” by Charles Reznikoff. The poem begins:
Upon Israel and upon the rabbis
and upon the disciples and upon all the disciples of their
disciples
and upon all who study the Torah in
this place and in every
place,
to them and to you
peace;
The poem goes on to ask for safety for all the persecuted Jews of the world. It was written in 1936.
upon Israel and upon all who meet with unfriendly glances,
sticks and stones and names—
on posters, in newspapers, or in books to last,
chalked on asphalt or in acid on glass,
shouted from a thousand thousand windows by radio;
who are pushed out of class-rooms and rushing trains,
whom the hundred hands of a mob strike …
Rabbi Levine agreed to read the poem aloud, but made a suggestion: that we remove the last two lines. We asked why, and he said he thought they were too depressing, too disturbing.
We said we wanted the poem to be read intact.
He finally agreed.
It was human darkness that he had trouble understanding.
On Passover, he went through a crisis with the congregation.
On our way into the services, there were two armed guards stationed at the door.
We stared at their pistols as we showed them that we were entitled to enter the synagogue.
Later in the week we sat with him on the couch. He shook his head. “The board of the congregation, they’re businessmen, you know. They decided the only way to make sure we would collect fees from people coming to services (the ones who only come on the holidays) would be this way. It’s the big opportunity of the year to make money. I pleaded with them that it was a terrible thing, but when I came to the services myself, there they were. They had real guns!”
He lowered his head into his hands.
Shortly after that we were at his house again for Susan’s next conversion lesson. His face suddenly lit. “You know what I really want to do? I’ve thought about this for a long time. I’d like to open up a storefront synagogue. Put on a pair of jeans, go to where the people are, and take them off the street.”
My wife and I decided to leave Vancouver and return to New York.
When we called Rabbi Levine to tell him, I began, “We’ve decided—”
“—to get out of Vancouver,” he finished the sentence for us.
We went to see him for a last time.
“Perhaps you too should be thinking of moving on,” I said.
“Of course that has been in my mind. Not moving on, but making a change.”
“What kind of change?”
“Well …” he paused for a moment. “I’ve been thinking about leaving the rabbinate.”
“And doing what?”
He paused again. “For some time now I’ve thought of opening a bagel shop. Actually it was Chickie’s suggestion. She would work out front. Bagels are a big business in the States. They have onion bagels, cheese, pumpernickel, garlic, blueberry, sesame, and so on. It would certainly be a first for Vancouver.”
We were silent. He looked rueful, and stroked his beard.
He remained a rabbi.
May the birds continue to sing for him, and may Rabbi Levine continue to stop at their song, look up, and not know what to do.
6
THE MAN WHO REFUSED TO WATCH THE ACADEMY AWARDS
I dream that my friend Michael and a crony are in Hollywood, beside the pool, dressed in red, white, and blue suits, and top hats. Michael asks me, “How is your father?”
“Still the most ridiculous person I’ve ever met!” I reply. Michael and his crony bark with laughter at this, pleased. I have said it to please, but am shocked to hear my own words, which I do not mean at all—
I have been waiting three months for a letter that will never arrive. From my friend Michael, who is a director in Los Angeles. It would be a response to the letter I wrote to him: the first letter in which I ever lied to him. I had falsely praised his last play (the second to be produced on Broadway in two years), a black gospel musical about the murders of the civil rights figures.
In Michael’s play, the assassination of Malcolm X, for example, is followed by the reaction of the cast. One actor turns to another and says, “My God, this is terrible—I feel sick.” The other person says, “We’re not gonna let anything keep us down,” and sings a song, “Keep on Truckin’,” with handclap-ping from the audience and, after jumping off the stage, some fancy prancing up and down the aisles. Then the murders of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert Kennedy, and Chaney, Schwemer, and Goodman.
I waited several weeks to write him after seeing it, a delay he must have noticed, since he’d given me passes to the fourth night. I did not know what to say. I finally wrote him. “It was even better than your wedding!” (Michael had staged his wedding in a theater, with people performing on stage and dancing in the aisles.)
I had lied. It was not at all like his wedding.
He did not reply.
A year and a half ago, I was seated in my cubicle at Animals magazine, where I am an editor, flicking the pages of Variety and swallowing hard. There, in the list of notables who were traveling to one of the three places Variety considers important enough to mention, “New York—L.A.—Europe,” there in the “L.A. to New York” list was Michael’s name: Michael Green-berg. He had made it. His first Broadway show was opening the following month.
I smiled to myself. I put on a hearty look of congratulations. A “give him credit—he worked for it” look. But I was upset for a number of reasons. Mainly envy. Also hurt—he hadn’t told me he was coming to New York. Most importantly, his success was another nail in my coffin. Or so it seemed at that minute. When my secretary poked her nose in the door, I screamed, “Who cares about animals anyway? What are we wasting our lives on?”
I took a Librium. I felt miserable. I hated myself for what I felt. He had moved too fast. It was only yesterday he installed the tape machine on his phone that gave you his recorded voice when he was out and a minute to talk your message into the receiver. That was impressive—especially if you knew, as I did, that he was living in two closet-size rooms on Fourteenth Street and Eighth Avenue. That was pure chutzpah, that machine—a $250 investment in his future. I should have known then. There was already a certain change—an iciness—talking to a machine, hearing my friend’s voice from that spooky remove.
And wasn’t it just a few years ago, Michael and Linda thumbing their way to L.A., his teeth rotting? I hadn’t had the time to adjust to his wonderful success. The four years in Vancouver, where I studied creative writing, didn’t help either.
Of course I had to remember nastily his father. Long before I met Michael, I sat in the sun in my bathing suit at Greenacres in the Catskills. I was fourteen years old. A short man with a big dog was giving a lecture to the guests at poolside: Michael’s father. The staff psychiatrist. A nephew of Greenacres Senior. He smoked a pipe. He told a joke to warm us up. He addressed us all as “darling.” He’d been doing this a long time. His talk was called “Whores I Have Known.” It got quiet. Five minutes later he switched to “Bores I Have Known.” Then, “Shores I Have Known” (travel lore). He answered questions for thirty minutes, including two about sunburn.
A short, chubby man: the dog lent him a certain style.
Michael kept him a secret for five years—as well as his entire Greenacres heritage. His father had become famous, but Michael summed up succinctly his own opinion: “He sold out.” New School radical, crazy about the oppressed—Michael starved on Fourteenth Street rather than take a dime.
He stayed free, and sold out on his own! What am I saying and what am I thinking? I should have hung on in therapy for an eleventh year and achieved rationality. My therapist said I was just about to break through.
A previous therapist interpreted a dream I had about Michael when I first met him in 1965 at the New School. In my dream, I place Michael in a box. I close the lid. I enclose the box in another box, which I enclose in another box, which I enclose in yet another box.
“Is he aggressive?” my therapist asks.
“But is he aggressive?”
“Yes.”
“Very aggressive?”
I smile. “Yes, I guess he is.”
“Are you afraid of him?”
“No. He’s my friend.”
“But are you afraid of his aggressiveness?”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“Yes, I am.”
Michael has a way of looking at people. If you are suffering, he suspends any movement; he seems to have put everything aside and is focusing only on you. There is pain in his look. Yet it is hard to catch him at it. For when you pause, stammering, his gaze seems to shift to an inch over you, or around you, so that you do not become self-conscious. But you know he is with you. When you are in control, he looks directly at you again.
Sometimes he would catch my panic and it would become his.
He had migraines here for days on end, leaving him unable to function. What happens to migraines in Hollywood?
Michael finally did call me at Animals that day. I got over my relief and immediately became anxious about demonstrating to him that my career was progressing. I deepened my voice.
My wife and I met him for dinner. He had seen LaBelle, the rock group, the night before. He said reflectively, “Black and gay—that’s the wave of the future.”
To anyone else in the world I would have said, “What the hell does that mean?” and “Isn’t there a certain contradiction there?”
I only smiled and nodded my head vigorously, my muscles tensing, my eyes twitching. I had to cut through the bullshit and establish what I was doing that I was proud of. My wife and I took him up the elevator to my studio in the office building off Times Square. We got off at the twenty-sixth floor, and we walked with him up the narrow winding orange staircase to the studio tower where plaster fell from the ceiling in chunks. I opened the door.
Ducking the plaster, he stood by the window. We talked about our work, about our hopes.
He asked me how my father was. I told him that my father, who lived alone, had recently taken to tagging along when the prisoners at the jail near his house were taken out on pleasure trips, and that he ate his meals at the prisoners’ cafeteria.
The One-Star Jew: Stories Page 7
