by Howard Fast
He watched his aunt as she had her telephone conversation with Rabbi Belsen. At a point, she began to cry again. “He’s a sweet man,” she told David. “He said such nice things about your mother.”
David spent the rest of the day packing dishes and pots. One of the congregation, Moe Saberson by name, had a large appliance store in Bridgeport, and he had offered to send down his truck and his two large sons, age seventeen and age fourteen, to take care of moving the bed, chest, and dishes from New York to the parsonage. For all of the fact that he was being paid on the scale of an itinerant cotton picker in the most backward state of the South, David had the additional bonus of being surrounded by people who desired to solve his every problem. Of course, the only problems that had arisen so far were either financial or logistical, but at least some of them had been solved. And the day had been so wonderful, in terms of the weather, and he was so deeply in love with his new wife and so delighted with the challenge of Leighton Ridge that nothing could dull his exhilaration.
And underlining everything every day was the enormous fact that the monstrous, unspeakable war that had gone on for endless years was over.
He stayed with his aunt in his old bedroom that night, and the following morning he loaded the prayerbooks into the car and started off for Leighton Ridge. Just inside the Leighton line, a policeman in a patrol car waved him over.
“You’ve lost one of the screws off your rear license plate,” the officer said.
“Oh? Sorry. Will I lose the plate?”
“It’ll hold. There’s a service station up the road. They’ll put another bolt onto it.”
When he told Lucy, she shook her head hopelessly. “It’s my fault, David. I shouldn’t have let you go. You’re not entitled to drive alone until you have a license, which you don’t have, but that cop looks at honest faces. You do have an honest face, sort of. Well, come let me show you.” She had scrubbed the little house clean. “Della Klein came by; otherwise I would have been marooned here. She took me shopping. Four miles to a proper grocery store and butcher — would you believe that? The girl’s dear. I don’t care if she looks at you the way she does. Anyway, she’s happily married.”
Lucy had roasted a chicken for dinner that night, and with it she put out baked potatoes, string beans, salad, pickles. In the dining room, there was a Pembroke table as old as time and four rickety chairs.
“Ware chairs,” she explained.
“How do you know that?”
“Millie Carter stopped by. That’s the parson’s wife. I’ve got to rethink my whole life in this crazy place, David. To me, the parson’s nose was always the turkey’s ass. Anyway, Ware chairs are old and important, and this Millie Carter’s a knockout. You’re going to flip over her; one of those tall, skinny blond types, short hair and smart as a whip. Nice. She brought home-baked bread and pie. She decided we were both sold into theological bondage before the age of reason, but we’re survivors. She’s got two kids, and he only makes twice what you do. And by the way, they heard about you doing the first service tonight, and they want to come and bring a few friends. I told them it was all right. It is, isn’t it?”
“I don’t see why not,” David said. “But you know, I don’t have a real sermon. I’ve only made a few notes.”
“You’ll be great.”
“How do you know? You never heard me preach.”
“I love you. That’s enough for me.”
“I wish it were enough for me.”
Someone was knocking at the front door, and when Lucy opened it, there was Mel Klein, fat, bald, perspiring, and wiping his face with a large handkerchief.
“Sit down. I’m just cutting Millie Carter’s pie. Carrot pie. I never heard of it before, but it’s delicious.”
“I’ll have a piece of pie. Fine. I haven’t even eaten. Good Shabbas, Rabbi. First time. I feel real good about that, but on the other hand we have a large problem.”
“Coffee?”
“Yes. Sure.”
“What’s the problem?” David asked him.
“I’ll give it to you quickly, because we have just under an hour to work it out. I offered my house because our living room is big, seventeen feet wide, thirty feet long. That’s pretty big for up here on the Ridge, where the old houses have small rooms. Well, we got ten dining room chairs, eight bridge chairs, some kitchen chairs, and the couches and stuff. I figured Joe and Jack could bring some more bridge chairs. We got fourteen families. Even with all the kids and if everyone turns up, that’s got to be less than sixty people. But look what happened. It’s the way the war winds up. The kids come out of the service, they get married, and they find a place up here in Connecticut, and most of them know which way is up, and they’re looking for a Reform synagogue. And there aren’t any — no closer than New Haven. So let me tell you what’s happening, Rabbi. Freddy Cohen, he’s got this mechanized garden thing, and he works over in Ridgefield and Wilton. He spread the good word, and he thinks we’ll have at least twenty from there — if they don’t spread the word. Four families in Redding and three in Brookfield. Could we say no to them?”
“Absolutely not,” David said.
“And Herbie Nathan — he’s got this army surplus store in Westport — he’s been spreading the word to everyone who comes in there. He got an old copy of Yank with a story about you, Rabbi, and he tacked it up on the wall of his store, and he figures we could get anywhere from twenty to thirty out of Westport and Norwalk. But let me tell you something, if those clowns figure they’re getting a free ride right down the line, they’re mistaken. They got to join and pay their dues. And now listen to this, Jack Osner’s got a partner in his firm lives in Greenwich. Greenwich, Connecticut. I didn’t know there was a Jew alive living in Greenwich. But there it is, and this Greenwich type is coming with five people. He got very exact directions from Jack. So now tell me, what do we do with maybe a hundred and fifty or two hundred people?”
“That’s wonderful,” David said. “That’s absolutely wonderful.”
“It’s wonderful. What about my living room? I feel I’m a good Jew, but that still can’t squeeze a hundred and fifty people into my living room.”
“We’ll use the church.”
Mel Klein shook his head slowly, wiping the perspiration from the folds in his neck. “David, you’re a nice boy and I like you. Impractical — that’s a rabbi’s privilege. We can’t use the church. We don’t own it.”
Lucy slipped away from the table. Confused, David asked, “Why? We bought it.”
“We bought it. Which means we signed a contract and put down ten percent. The same with this house. How could we know how long it would be before we found a rabbi? All right. We found you and we set a closing date. Monday, three days away. All right, you and Lucy are maybe sleeping here tonight. No big tzimmes. But if we put two hundred Jews into a church we don’t own, Arnold Sloan and Charles Winter are going to blow their tops.”
“Who are Arnold Sloan and Charles Winter?”
“Two of the coldest farbissener anti-Semites you ever ran into. Also, they’re deacons in Carter’s church.”
“Deacons in the church? But why?”
“Because Carter is a remarkable man, and he plays the game the way England does, a proper balance of power. When we proposed to buy the church and the parsonage, Sloan and Winter fought him tooth and nail, claiming that we were opening the door for the anti-Christ, whatever the hell that is, and give us an inch and we take a foot and before you know it, the whole Ridge will be crawling with kikes. That’s the word he used, and when Marty Carter exploded, Winter — has the biggest estate on the Ridge — Winter says he was down in Washington and Truman used the same word for the lice who infest New York, and if the President of the United States can talk that way, he has the same privilege. That’s why we can’t use the church until we close, because Winter would like nothing more than to call the cops and empty the building in the middle of the service.”
“Could he do that?” David
asked.
“Why not? It’s his building.”
Lucy came back into the room and told them she had telephoned Martin Carter.
“When did you get a phone?” Klein asked, puzzled, nodding his approval of Lucy.
“Today. Martin will be here in a few minutes.”
When Carter arrived, David summed up the situation. “I think that’s great,” Carter said. “My word, it’s like an act of faith. Two hundred people! David, we only hit that figure on Christmas and Easter.”
“I don’t think it’ll ever happen again. But can he break up the service and order us out of the church?”
“He cannot!” Carter answered angrily. “There are other deacons. He has one vote. Sloan has one vote. We have outvoted them twenty times, but even if they outvoted me, I would take it to the congregation. We are a Congregational church, not a tool of bigots and fools!”
“And if he comes in and raises hell?” Klein asked.
“I’ll be there. My word, Mel, if there’s one pledge I made to myself, it’s that Leighton Ridge will not become another Greenwich.”
“And how did you get the telephone?” David was asking Lucy. “Other people wait for weeks.”
“The perks of the cloth, Millie calls it. Tell them it’s for the rabbi and they hustle it right along.”
Klein was worrying about the lights. “If there’s no electricity in there, Marty?”
“It’s there. You get back home and start sending your people over this way, and David and I will take care of the church.”
Lucy found a bucket, some old towels, soap, and two brooms. Martin was still sweeping the aisle while David and Lucy worked frantically to get some of the loose dirt off the pews, when the first of the congregants began to arrive. All three gave up and went into the tiny parson’s refuge or study — too imposing a word for a room seven feet square.
“You’ll want it lit, won’t you?” Carter asked. “The sun will be setting in about fifteen minutes or so.”
“Oh, yes — yes, indeed. Lucy, I forgot about the prayer-books. In the trunk of the car.”
Lucy dashed off for the prayerbooks. Carter switched on the lights. Jack Osner joined them in the parson’s refuge, where he picked up on Klein’s worries about Congregational objections.
“You’re all my guests,” Carter told him. “There will be no objections.”
David was unfolding his robe. Osner held it for him to slip his arms into the sleeves, and then he put a small velvet cap on and placed his prayer shawl, his tallis, over his shoulders. He felt strange, divorced from himself, outside himself, watching apart from even himself as more and more people crowded into the already crowded parson’s refuge, Lucy to assure him that the prayerbooks were being distributed, Joe Hurtz to report a count — two hundred and eleven people and more coming, every pew in the little church packed solid — Della Klein asking for more prayerbooks. There were no more. Shelly Osner squeezed into the tiny room, surveyed David, and told him that he looked positively beautiful. David, smiling, uneasy, kept nodding.
“I think he ought to be alone,” Mel Klein said, with surprising sensitivity. “Let’s give him a few minutes alone.”
Then they emptied the room, and David drew a deep breath, and then another and another. He said in a whisper, “I am a priest of the dead.” He had taken time that morning, before returning to Connecticut, to write a three-page sermon, and now he took it out of his pocket, glanced at it, and then crumpled it and threw it away. Then he walked out onto the bimah, the little platform at the front of the old church, and said, almost harshly, “We will begin with the greeting to the Sabbath. We have too few prayerbooks, so try to share them.” He looked at a sea of faces, and wondered what was wrong with him. Almost all of them were young, the kids he knew and had known for years, at Fort Dix, in England, in France, who had come here from all over Fairfield County because they heard there was a rabbi in Leighton Ridge and because it was Captain David Hartman of the 45th Infantry Division, and because someone had stuck up an old story from Yank on the wall of an army surplus store. Inwardly, he groaned, Oh, shit! Why that damned story? And then he recalled, all in a flash, the time Colonel Patman informed him that he was going to put him in for an M.O.H., and he had lost his temper and called the colonel names that could have replaced the medal with the stockade; and now here he was in Connecticut, conducting a Jewish Sabbath service in an old Congregational church that was packed with young ex-G.I.s and their wives, and the whole thing became so ludicrous that he almost burst out laughing, which he knew he would have done had Lucy been there to meet his eyes; and yet it would not have been laughter-funny but laughter-what-am-I-doing-in-this-insane-world?
He felt better after that passage of inner turmoil. Tonight was properly primitive; no choir, no sanctuary, no hand-inscribed roll of the Torah, the five holy books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy; only himself and the congregation, the parson’s podium, and a silver goblet of wine. And when at last it came time for him to speak, to preach, David said:
“My dear friends, I was going to plead time and the pressures of these past few days as a reason for not writing a sermon, but it would not be a good thing for me to begin a rabbinate with a deception. I did write a sermon of sorts, but it was no good, and I threw it away because it said nothing of real meaning or importance. I am not sure that I will ever learn how to say things of real meaning and importance, but I’m only twenty-nine years old, and that’s no time to give up hope, is it?”
They were grinning at him. His manner was gentle and deferential and sweet, and he appeared to be totally unaware of how gentle and sweet it was.
“So, if you will, instead of a sermon I would like to tell you something about myself and how I came to be here. That’s important. I don’t want to have any secrets.” He looked around the old church. “I feel somehow that we’re in a good place. Congregations have sat and given thanks to the Almighty in this church for almost two centuries, and from what I’ve been able to learn, those old Puritans were not so different from us. So, if you will, we will thank them for their gift of a house of God — just a moment of silent prayer.”
He closed his eyes for a few seconds, and when he opened them, the congregation had quieted and there was not even a rustle of sound from the children.
“I went to the Institute,” David continued, “not because I had a calling, as the Christians say, but because my mother, may she rest in peace, desired it so ardently. It was a good education, and my mother was a widow and quite ill. I had to face that fact, and I decided that after the seminary I’d put in a few more years of school and become a physician or a teacher, which was the way my thoughts went at the time.
“The war intervened. I enlisted and broke my mother’s heart. But there are enough of you in this congregation wearing that funny little pin which we call a ‘ruptured duck’ to understand what motivated me. Even today, so soon after the fact, it is becoming difficult to recall the nature of that cloud of horror that Adolf Hitler and his Nazi movement cast upon the world.
“I am not going to bore you with any account of my life in the United States Army. Suffice it to say that I was a chaplain in the Forty-fifth Division, Seventh Army, and a trail of horror and human suffering and courage and fear led us finally to a place outside Munich that was called Dachau. That was just about a year ago, on the twenty-ninth of April, nineteen forty-five. It was also an eternity ago in another world.
“I was with one of the first rifle companies that went into the place. I can’t truly tell you what I saw there, as much as I might want to. There are bits and pieces of the horror, like standing at an open mass grave and staring at the stiff, naked bodies of those who had been murdered and cast there, and trying to breathe through the terrible smell of decaying flesh. Pieces of memory like that, and I still wake up at night, moaning and frightening my poor dear wife.
“But there is one part of the memory as clear and lucid as if it had happened only yesterday.
With a couple of G.I.s, I was walking toward one of the prison buildings, when the liberated prisoners began to come out. They didn’t come out running and leaping to greet their new freedom. They came out slowly, tentatively, as if they were afraid that this might be another grotesque trick. They were walking skeletons, inhabiting filthy striped and ragged suits, bearded, fleshless agony walking, dragging their feet, blinking.
“I stopped, and the two kids from the company who were with me, they stopped, and one of them was a Jewish kid from the Bronx who had gotten three commendations already, and he was one of those crazy, brainless kids who will go up against anything, a rifleman, and he began to cry, and through his tears, muttering, shit, shit, shit — and I say those words here in this house of God because if there is a God, he will understand that prayer, because it was a prayer — and we just stood, watching them and waiting. They came up to us and stopped, and we could smell the stale, unwashed odor of their bodies and clothes, and because we were what we were, American kids full of clean, we moved back away from them.
“And then one of them, a small man, skin and bones and bloodshot eyes trying to weep, pointed a shaking finger at the Star of David I wore on my blouse. He tried to speak, but couldn’t. Then another said, ‘Zeit yir a rebbe? Zeit yir a Yid?’ Are you a rabbi or simply a Jew? My Yiddish isn’t very good, but my German is better, and I told them that I was a rabbi and an army chaplain. Then they gathered around me, close, these poor, emaciated people, touching me, calling a dumb, twenty-eight-year-old American kid abba, the Hebrew word for father. Goodman, the Jewish kid from the Bronx, was still crying, and the other kid with me, who wasn’t Jewish, he was crying too, and then one of the men, one of the concentration camp men, he said to me, in Yiddish, ‘Please, Rabbi, please, will you say the Kaddish with us for the dead?’ For the benefit of Reverend Carter and his friends here with us tonight, the Kaddish is an ancient prayer spoken for the dead. It is not easy for me to talk about this, so I will only say that I took out my tallis, put it over my shoulders, and I led them in the Kaddish. It was then that I put aside other things and became a rabbi. So if you will permit me, I will ask you to join me in saying the Kaddish — for the dead in Dachau, Auschwitz, Treblinka, and all the other places of killing that the Nazis made.”
