“Not much here to inspire a young man, is there?” the rabbi said good-naturedly.
Maximilian remained silent, but it occurred to him that a day or two spent at A. Glick & Son’s might prove to be a real eye-opener for the rabbi.
“Well,” Rabbi Teitelman went on, trying to be jovial, “the scriptures bid us walk humbly with our God, but I go a step further, you see. I sit humbly with Him and sleep even more humbly.” Through the open door of the rabbi’s bedroom, the boy spotted a narrow cot, made up army-style, with not so much as a wrinkle in the blanket. “Humbleness in the sight of God is one of the first lessons a man must learn, Maximilian.”
Here it comes, thought Maximilian Glick, one of those boring lectures, like Mr. Sterling, the principal of his public school, was so fond of delivering at morning assemblies.
When the rabbi suddenly dropped the subject, Max was somewhat relieved. “Tell me something about yourself, Maximilian. All I know at the moment is that you’re twelve-going-on-thirteen, and, God willing, before we know it you’ll be at the magic age of manhood!”
Max nodded. Like a prisoner of war, he decided to volunteer only the bare facts: name, rank, serial number.
“Any hobbies?” asked the rabbi. “I’m told you can’t become a citizen of Steelton unless you play hockey in the winter, baseball in the summer and football in the fall.”
Maximilian resented the idea that he should be lumped together with a mass of sports-loving citizenry because of some country-style claptrap fed into the rabbi’s brain. “I play the piano,” he said. “I was in the Grade Eight piano course, but I skipped to Grade Ten after I won the top prize at the Steelton Music Festival.”
It was only after this response had passed the boy’s lips that he realized he’d boasted. He wished for a split second that he could recall his words, the way automobile factories recall defective cars. But then he thought, So what? So I boasted a little. Why not? It’s something to be proud of. This funny-looking guy might as well know right now that he’s not dealing with some ordinary puck-pusher.
Rabbi Teitelman smiled slyly.
“Did I say something funny?” Maximilian asked, increasingly unhappy over the turn the first interview was taking.
“No, nothing funny.” The rabbi smiled again. “You said something very impressive, Maximilian. Very impressive indeed. Obviously you are a young man of special accomplishments.”
Darn right I am! Maximilian said to himself, feeling a little more secure now that he had established the fact.
“However,” the rabbi paused, still smiling, but now with a tinge of sadness, “don’t you think it would have been even more impressive if you had left it to me to find out about your great success on my own?”
Suddenly the room struck Maximilian Glick as very hot and stuffy. He could feel his face burning, his shirt collar damp at the back of his neck. Was this a deliberate attempt by the new rabbi to cut him down to size? Was all that earlier stuff about humility intended for him? Maximilian was convinced the answer to both questions was decidedly yes. Well, he thought, so this is how it begins, with a declaration of war.
The rest of the first hour was a strain. The rabbi, perhaps realizing he had overplayed his hand, tried bravely to lighten the tone of the lesson. But Max sat stolidly on one of the folding wooden chairs, across the desk from his teacher, betraying not the slightest emotion as Teitelman strove to make the coming bar mitzvah program sound stimulating and challenging.
“Your bar mitzvah falls … let me see now …” The rabbi consulted a list of his pupils’ birthdays; then his enthusiasm gave way to a look of disappointment. “September.”
“Something wrong with September?” asked Maximilian.
“Not really. It’s just that I was hoping it fell in May.” “Why May?”
“I’m being selfish, I guess. My own was in May. It would have been fun, at least for me, to relive my experience through you. My Torah portion was taken from the Book of Numbers. That’s not the telephone book of numbers, but one of the five books of Moses.” Rabbi Teitelman chuckled at his own quip, but then, realizing that he was laughing alone, he said, “I gather you’ve heard that joke before.”
“Many times,” said Max matter-of-factly. Grandfather Glick used that line every chance he got at the Glick family dinner table. Maximilian didn’t mind laughing at a worn-out joke when his grandfather told it, but he was in no mood to extend the same courtesy to this man.
Shoring up his courage with a tuneless whistle, the young rabbi gazed up at the ceiling and squeezed his eyes shut, as if reading from an imaginary chart. “If my memory serves me correctly,” he said slowly, “my Torah portion described the various numbers of Israelite males who were recorded when God ordered Moses to take a census in the second year following the Jews’ exodus from Egypt. To be recorded you had to be twenty years of age and up and able to bear arms. From the tribe of Reuben there were 46,500. From the tribe of Simeon, 59,300. There were 45,650 from the tribe of Gad, 74,600 from Judah’s tribe, 54,400 from Issachar’s tribe … uh … from the tribe of Zebulun … uh, 57,400 … or was it 57,500?”
Scratching his head, the rabbi went to his bookcase, withdrew the well-worn volume of the five books of Moses and leafed his way swiftly to the precise passage. He grinned and looked over at the boy. “Ah, I was right the first time. The correct figure for the tribe of Zebulun is indeed 57,400. An elephant never forgets!”
Without quite realizing what he was saying, Maximilian challenged him. “I thought elephants were also expected to walk humbly with their God.”
Caught with his own pride showing, Rabbi Teitelman all of a sudden looked grave. “Your point is well taken, Mr. Glick. Tonight I will have to say a special prayer for both of us.”
That’s two strikes against you, Teitelman, Max said to himself. One more and you’re out! The way Maximilian Glick saw it at the moment, he himself wasn’t in need of any special prayers.
Seeking once again, this time a bit desperately, to pin a set of wings on their earthbound relationship, the young rabbi now forced a bright smile and tone of voice. “And now, Mr. Maximilian Glick, so much for lesson number one. Where are you off to?”
“My dad’s store.”
“Excellent. Then we’re headed in the same direction. I have an errand to do at the synagogue. We’ll walk together.”
Before Max had time to concoct a suitable excuse to avoid the rabbi’s company, Teitelman had removed his skullcap and donned his wide-brimmed black hat and black frock coat. A minute later, the boy found himself on a street he’d known practically all his young life, walking side by side with this strange apparition of a man, this eye-catching, attention-getting ensemble of clothing and beard and sidelocks, this ghost from a time long past, from a place as remote as the dark side of the moon. Though the side street was fairly deserted at this late afternoon hour, it seemed to the boy that a thousand eyes were on him, that hundreds of tongues wagged behind his back, that behind the windows of all the houses people stole glances, pointed and snickered.
The two walked briskly, but to Max it seemed the longest walk he had ever taken. Miles!
And then they rounded the corner and found themselves on King Street, just a block from A. Glick & Son’s. Unable to face being part of a two-man parade down the town’s principal thoroughfare, Max thought quickly. “I just remembered something, Rabbi. My mother told me to pick up a loaf of bread at the bakery before I go home. That’s it across the street. So, if you’ll excuse me —”
“Of course, Maximilian. Good night. It was nice meeting you. I guess we’ll be seeing a great deal of each other in the future.”
“I guess so,” said Max, without the slightest enthusiasm. “Good night.” He sprinted across the street toward the bakery. But as he drew closer, Maximilian Glick realized that he had blundered, for in the shop, staring at him through the windows as if he, too, were now from some other planet, was a cluster of his schoolmates. He turned, as if to pass by, but it was no
use. He was committed. The rabbi stood across the street, waving goodbye. Max had no choice now. He took a deep breath and entered.
When one expects the worst, one is seldom disappointed.
“Hey, Glick,” said one of Maximilian’s schoolmates, “where’d ya dig up the Black Phantom?”
“Isn’t that guy kinda early for Hallowe’en?” another called.
“Frankenstein and Glickenstein,” a third cried out. “Help! Save me! Save me!”
Maximilian Glick looked desperately about him. Laughter was coming from everywhere. Loaves of bread on the shelves, jelly rolls, pies and cakes, everything seemed to be convulsed, cackling and snickering with malicious glee. The donuts, dozens of them arranged on large pans, had twisted themselves into row upon row of grinning mouths. Worst of all, one of the youths in the bakery was none other than Bobby Rosenberg, who could afford to laugh the hardest because, as he now took pains to point out, he was two years older and had been lucky enough to be tutored for his bar mitzvah by Rabbi Kaminsky.
“You know something, Glick,” said Bobby Rosenberg, loud enough for everyone, from the cashier at the front of the bakery to the pastry chef at the rear, to hear, “for a kid whose last name means ‘good luck’ you sure blew it today.”
Later that evening, Maximilian, before going to bed, asked Henry Glick, “Dad, if ‘Glick’ is the Jewish word for ‘good luck,’ what’s the Jewish word for ‘bad luck’?”
“Umglick,” Henry Glick answered. “Why?” “No special reason. I was just wondering.”
In the middle of the night Maximilian had a dream. He was a soldier, a prisoner of war under interrogation. A faceless enemy officer was barking at him, “Name, rank, serial number … name, rank, serial number!”
“Umglick,” Maximilian, the hopeless, hapless captive, could only answer. “Maximilian Umglick.”
Nine
Throughout the deepening days of autumn, Maximilian had made his way to the Lubavitcher’s apartment every Monday and Thursday after school for private bar mitzvah lessons. Somehow, on Mondays and Thursdays, the skies over Steelton hung heavier and greyer, the trees looked barer, their fallen leaves deader. And somehow, when winter came, landing heavily on both feet, the season seemed to save its iciest blasts for Mondays and Thursdays. On those days, even when Max tried not to inhale, needles of cold shot up through his nostrils and bored holes in his skull just behind his eyes. By the time he reached the rabbi’s doorstep he was looking at the world through a silvery film of frost.
To make matters worse, the rabbi’s apartment was as uninviting on a late wintry afternoon as the inside of a boxcar. Nowhere within that hard little rectangle of living space was there a single stick of furniture that offered warmth and comfort. The folding wooden chairs, the oak desk, the gooseneck lamp, all conveyed one message: “Let’s get on with it.”
And that was precisely the spirit in which Maximilian carried on, Mondays and Thursdays, week after week. Each and every lesson, scheduled to last sixty minutes, began promptly on the hour and ended not a minute late. Max showed up on time, homework done, lessons learned. He chanted the traditional Hebrew prayers in a boyish tenor that was clear and steady, unlike most youngsters his age whose voices caromed from one corner of the musical scale to another like pinballs. Ask Maximilian to recite the thirty-nine acts an Orthodox Jew was forbidden to perform on the Sabbath and in thirty-nine seconds flat you were told, “Ploughing, sowing, reaping, sheaf-making,” and thirty-five more.
So mechanical was all this, so devoid of spontaneity or surprise, that Maximilian composed a poem in his head, and trudged to and fro on Mondays and Thursdays to its rhythm:
Press a button, hear a click,
It’s time for Maximilian Glick.
Time for numbers, time for dates,
Time for measures, time for weights.
Remember the cities, remember the states,
And the prophets who rose up through Heaven’s gates.
Keep it simple and clipped like grass,
With patience and luck this too will pass.
So Max be nimble, Max be quick,
Remember you’re Maximilian Glick!
Punctuality and proficiency. They were apparently the only virtues the Lubavitcher looked for, and they were all he would get, as far as Maximilian Glick was concerned. Punctuality, proficiency. But these were qualities that great bank clerks or night watchmen were made of. Great scholars? No.
And nobody understood this better than the young Lubavitcher rabbi. How many times, in his years of training, had Kalman Teitelman’s teachers drummed it into him that learning began with a spark; then came imagination, fanning the spark like a bellows; finally the fire itself, glowing when teacher and pupil began to forge a friendship. How many times had Kalman Teitelman been cautioned by his teachers that the most meticulous scholarship, the most faithful fulfilment of God’s commandments, were empty if there was no passion.
But in the case of Maximilian Glick, the rabbi’s oldest pupil and his one and only bar mitzvah candidate, all these things were absent. No spark, no bellows, no fire. “We are like two robots,” he lamented to himself. “Hello. Goodbye. Nothing more.”
Studying himself in the bathroom mirror, a private act of vanity the young rabbi occasionally indulged in, he murmured, “Look at you … a man at home in two alphabets. You can add, subtract, multiply and divide. You’re blessed with the power of reason and a leak-proof memory. You’ve inherited a faith that’s as ancient as the hills. And yet, to this twelve-year-old, this kid who looks at you with sidelong glances, what are you? No more than a mound of mashed potatoes, making pious noises and gestures that rise up and disappear like so much steam.”
Leaning more closely into the mirror, the Lubavitcher pulled his skin down tight over his cheekbones so that his face became a grotesque mask. “Yes … yes, Teitelman, your flesh is too pale, your blood too invisible.” Turning from the mirror image, the Lubavitcher brought his soliloquy to a final passionate resolve. “I must put life into this relationship! But how?”
Several days passed and still Rabbi Teitelman could find no solution to his problem. He had prayed. He had searched his soul for an answer to the question “How?” He had prayed again and longer and when the answer was not forthcoming, he had prayed more fervently, remembering always an old Lubavitcher saying, “You are praying correctly when you are so absorbed that you do not feel a knife thrust into your body.”
Then, in the mail one morning, there arrived a crisp white envelope addressed to “Reverend K. Teitelman.” In its upper left-hand corner, two lions, each on its hind legs, faced one another angrily, engaged in a fight to the death. Beneath ran a banner across which was printed in Old English lettering:
LABOR OMNIA VINCIT. Above the lions, embossed in gold, were the words OFFICE OF THE MAYOR, CITY OF STEELTON. The rabbi, presuming its contents to be something more than an invitation to pay taxes, opened the envelope carefully.
Inside was a crisp white note, neatly typed, signed in a careless blue scrawl befitting the sender’s high office.
Reverend Sir:
As you are no doubt aware, the City of Steelton is proud to number among its native sons the noted author and humourist, and recent recipient of the prestigious Governor General’s Award for Literary Humour, Buckner Finsterwald. In recognition of Mr. Finsterwald’s acclaimed achievements in his field, and upon the occasion of his sixtieth birthday, the City of Steelton, of which I have the privilege of being Mayor, will tender a reception in Mr. Finsterwald’s honour on Wednesday night, January fourteenth next, in the Auditorium of Steelton Collegiate Institute. Tributes will be paid to our honoured guest by a number of prominent dignitaries, including the Minister of Culture for this Province. It will be my special pleasure to present Mr. Finsterwald with the key to the City and to announce the creation of the Buckner Finsterwald Annual Scholarship Fund, established by an act of the City Council, which fund will provide a yearly prize of fifty dollars to a student of Steel
ton Collegiate Institute who submits the best humorous essay. Following ceremonies in the Auditorium, there will be refreshments and Mr. Finsterwald has kindly consented to autograph copies of his new book, Pleasure Before Business, a collection of rollicking tales recommended for busy executives and people in public life. We have invited your colleagues of the cloth, The Very Reverend Kingston Salisbury Archer, Bishop of the Anglican Diocese of Steelton, and Reverend Monsignor Jean-Paul O’Neil, Rector of the Sanctuary of the Precious Blood, to grace our stage and to participate in the opening invocation. We would be especially pleased, particularly since Mr. Finsterwald is also of the Hebrew persuasion, if you would join in the opening portion of the ceremonies making a contribution that I am certain will be unique because of the common faith that our honoured guest shares with you. To assist our Committee in making final arrangements, your earliest possible response is respectfully requested.
Faithfully,
J. Lawson Perkins, Mayor
That afternoon, Maximilian Glick took his seat precisely as the hands of his watch touched four, and opened his notebook to the latest page of homework.
The Outside Chance of Maximilian Glick Page 8
