by Howard Fast
David put it up to the board. “No use,” Oscar Denton told him. “No way in the world, David. It’s over twenty years since I came in here, first Jew, and it only worked because I bought the land first, and they all figured it was a development idea, never dreamed that I was a Jew and was going to live here.”
“We could buy the house and then rent it to MacGregor.”
They voted him down. As MacGregor had predicted. Mel Klein said, “You’re right, David. You’re a good man. But the world we live in is the world we live in. Don’t make waves.”
Then what in God’s name am I doing here? David asked himself, as he had a hundred times before.
This morning, MacGregor said to David, “Rabbi, the plow will be here in about an hour; but you know, if I had a blade on my pickup, I could clear that lot myself and save us twenty-five dollars each time it snows.”
“What would a blade cost?”
“I can get a nice one for about seventy-five dollars.”
“Get it and tell them to bill us.”
“I put the book back,” MacGregor added. “Can I take another?”
“Any time you wish.”
“Curious thing,” David said to Lucy that evening. “You know how Nash MacGregor sleeps over in the basement on Friday nights so that he can clean up and have things ready for the morning service? Well, time hangs heavy Friday nights during the service and I suppose later, too, so he asked me could he take a book from the library and read it. He’s not a quick reader — has to mouth each word. I think he said he went to the fifth grade and then he had to go to work. But the first book he picked was Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun, which I happened to have on my desk. I don’t know what he could have made of it, but he read it through to the end, and then he took Hersey’s book The Wall. It takes him months, but he stays with them and finishes them, and each time he asks my permission to take another book.”
“Sometimes,” Lucy said to David, “I can see why you want to be what you are. But only sometimes,” she added quickly.
MacGregor was indebted. Being treated decently and with respect by whites was not so frequent an occurrence that he could take it in his stride. And he was an emotional man. Therefore, when he called David at eight o’clock in the morning on the Friday following the snowstorm, his voice shook and the words came with difficulty. “Rabbi, you better get over here right away. Something terrible happened.”
David was in the kitchen, setting the table for breakfast, while Lucy fried eggs and watched the toast. The children were already gulping their oatmeal. Lucy, one eye always on David’s face, reading it, wanted to know what had happened.
“I don’t know. Something at the synagogue.”
“Breakfast?”
“Later, perhaps.” He threw on his old army winter jacket and practically ran to the synagogue, where MacGregor was waiting outside the front door. To the left of the entrance, the brass letters that spelled out TEMPLE SHALOM were defaced with red paint, and all across the front of the building, spray-painted, were swastikas.
“Worse inside,” MacGregor said hopelessly.
Inside, the red spray paint was wildly spattered over the pews. The single, small stained glass window, behind the sanctuary, which depicted the tablets with the Ten Commandments, had been smashed, and an icy wind was blowing through the main hall. The curtains of the sanctuary had been ripped off, and the cover of the scroll of the Law, the Torah, had been ripped and defaced with the red paint.
“There it is,” MacGregor said woefully. “If I’d a been here, it wouldn’t a happened. But I ain’t here. I ain’t here on Thursday, and I ain’t seen nothing as terrible as this in a long time.”
“Not your fault, Nash,” David said. “It’s not your fault at all.” He put his arm around the black man and stood there for a while, just staring at the devastation around him. “Tell you what, Nash,” he said, “first thing I want you to do is to get something to close up the hole in the stained glass window. I remember seeing some large pieces of cardboard in the Sunday school room.”
“They is pictures.”
“We can get more pictures. Main thing is to close up that hole as soon as possible.”
When the black man had gone, David replaced the scroll in the sanctuary. The scroll was one of the hundreds that the Nazis had taken from German and Polish synagogues and put aside for some future use. Rabbi Belsen had obtained this one through the Institute, and it was a gift to David’s synagogue. He was staring at the torn, stained cover of the scroll when Mrs. Shapiro, his secretary, came through the door into the main hall and let out a scream.
“That’s enough!” David said sharply. “Go into my office and start calling —” She was sobbing violently. “Please, Mrs. Shapiro, do you have a pencil and paper in your purse?” he shouted.
She found the pencil and paper. The sobs weakened under David’s stern glance. Pencil and paper gave her weapons to face this unreasonable and threatening world.
“Call all the members of the board. Mr. Klein first — he doesn’t leave before eight-thirty, so catch him — and then Mr. Hurtz, Mr. Denton, and Mr. Frome. And when you’ve called all of them and made sure they’ll be here in the next hour, call the Reverend Carter at the Congregational church and tell him what happened and ask him to join us. And when the people come for morning service, have them wait.”
“Shall I tell the others what happened?”
“Briefly. Just say someone has vandalized the synagogue. Don’t go into details. Now hurry.”
By nine-fifteen, they were all there, Martin Carter included, plus Mel Klein’s son-in-law, a Dr. John Ash, who taught psychology at Yale. The mood varied. Hurtz was loud and angry, Klein was deeply worried, and Ed Frome was shocked and bitter. Martin Carter was horrified, and could not conceal his misery, a misery sharpened by the fact that he was the only Christian present. Oscar Denton alone was relaxed and apparently philosophical. “I am seventy-five,” he told them, “and past surprises. The human race does not improve, change, or show any evidence of a divine touch. You might say we’ve come of age in a world that’s as uninventive as it is disgusting.”
“That kind of talk doesn’t help,” Joe Hurtz said. “I wish Jack was here, but he isn’t. I say we seen a crime, and we call the cops and make the bastards who did this pay for it. This is the U.S.A.; it ain’t Germany.”
“Cops,” said Ed Frome. “We live in a very small town. We have five policemen, three on the day shift, two on the night shift, and they have all they can do to find their way home.”
“That’s an exaggeration.”
“Have you ever seen our police force at work?”
“I say call the cops. Whatever they are, they’re still cops.”
“What do you think, David?” Mel Klein asked him.
“I certainly don’t think we should call in the police, not until we’re able to discuss what happened with less emotion. It’s not what was done here that disturbs us, but the memories it evokes. I’ve sent Nash MacGregor out for paint remover. The Torah was not damaged, and the window will be fixed. No one was injured, thank God.”
“It’s still a matter for the police,” Hurtz insisted.
David turned to the psychologist. “How do you react to all this, Dr. Ash?”
“With disgust. On the other hand, it appears to me to be an act of adolescents, high school kids.”
“Why kids? Why not adults?”
“Because it’s so quick and incomplete. I get the impression of a couple of kids with cans of red spray paint. Were the front doors forced?”
“No,” David said, “but we haven’t locked them since the synagogue was built.”
“My guess is that these kids knew the doors were open. It was more of a prank than a gesture of anti-Semitism.”
“Like hell it was!” Martin Carter said vehemently and unexpectedly. “If you don’t see this as an ugly, sick piece of anti-Semitism, then your head is in the sand.”
“Carter’s right,” From
e said. “What the devil is wrong with us? I have to ask you that, Rabbi. I am just as angry as hell, and I’d like to take those young hoodlums and beat the living daylights out of them. Do you want to cover this up, pretend it never happened?”
“No, I don’t want to cover it up,” David said, “but I also don’t want it blown all out of proportion. I asked Reverend Carter to join us, not to increase our sensitivity to anti-Semitism, but because, like Dr. Ash, I felt that this was the work of kids, and the Reverend Carter, who knows the community better than any of us, might lead us to them.”
The meeting ended with a decision to inform the police chief, as he was euphemistically titled. The matter, they felt, had to be reported. The question of locking the doors in the future arose. David was strongly against it. “It’s simply not an appropriate reaction,” he insisted. “Even if this should happen again, to lock the doors of a sanctuary is an awful admission of failure.”
“Failure for whom and whom do we admit it to?”
“To ourselves.”
The argument was short, and David won his point. For the time being, they agreed, they would not lock the doors.
Martin remained after the others had left. “You’re damned angry at me, aren’t you?” he said.
“Not very angry, no. Only —”
“Only, who the hell is this goy to give us lessons in anti-Semitism?”
“Something like that,” David admitted.
“Did it ever occur to you that there’s a very basic difference between us on this question of anti-Semitism?”
“Oh? Tell me.”
“You were never an anti-Semite, David. I was. Rabidly. My father was a bigoted anti-Semite, maniacally so. He and two of his business associates became involved in Henry Ford’s terrible swindle with the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion. But my father believed them. In many ways, he was a kind man, but his whole being was saturated with this sickness of anti-Semitism. At first it captured me, then it horrified me, and in the end it was one of a number of things that turned me toward the ministry. That’s a long story, and perhaps some other time, but I don’t want you to hold against me what I said before. We’re old friends, David, and I don’t want anything to hurt that friendship.”
“Nothing will,” David said.
The chief of police came in person, a gray-haired man in his middle sixties, and he prowled around and looked at the damage and nodded sagely. “Kids today,” he said, “God only knows what gets into them. What do you want me to do, Rabbi?”
“Catch them, I suppose.”
“Won’t be easy. Lots of folks have prejudice. It ain’t Germany, but lots of folks have prejudice and don’t like your people.”
“Then I guess you’ll just have to sort them out, Chief. You know, our people, as you call them, pay taxes and they vote.”
“Not for me. I’m past that age and retiring next fall. That’s why I can afford to say it the way it is. A man running for office can’t afford that.”
The police chief was leaving when Mrs. Seligman, a stout, emotional woman in her late thirties, pushed past Mrs. Shapiro and declared, “I know what a terrible day this is for you, Rabbi, with what happened to the synagogue, but I must talk to you. It’s life and death. Alone,” she said, glaring at Mrs. Shapiro.
David nodded. “You can go, Mrs. Shapiro.”
“I’m only trying to do my job,” Mrs. Shapiro said, returning to the refuge of tears. “Everyone wants to talk to you today.”
“Of course, and thank you.” He asked Mrs. Seligman to sit down. “What’s the trouble, Mrs. Seligman?”
“The trouble is that my daughter is pregnant, and she’s fifteen years old, God help her.”
“Yes, that’s trouble.” He recalled her daughter, a luscious, lovely young woman, dark eyes and silken hair. “Do you know how it happened?”
“It happened with a football player in high school whose name is Freddy Bliss. Not Jewish. Anyway, how could a girl her age get married?”
“No, we don’t want to destroy her that way. Does Bert know?” He hoped he recalled her husband’s name correctly.
“I’m afraid to tell him. He goes into rages.”
“Suppose I come by tonight, and we’ll tell him together. We can’t make any decision about your daughter until he knows.”
His phone rang then.
“David,” Lucy said. “I heard what happened, and things must be a little crazy over there —”
“You could say that.”
“But Mom called. Pop had a heart attack. They’ve taken him to the hospital.”
“I’ll be there in a few minutes,” David said, and then he explained the circumstances to Mrs. Seligman.
“Do you think I should tell Bert?” she wanted to know. “By myself. He’ll go crazy, but I can tell him.”
“If I can’t come by tonight, it will be some time in the next two days. Better wait.”
“I hope it’s all right at your home. Today isn’t a good day, Rabbi.”
It wasn’t a very good day. By the time David got home, Lucy’s father was dead.
“It’s so damned unjust,” Lucy said. “He was only fifty-five. He was such a good, decent man. Why is the world so rotten unjust?”
A long, long time ago, when he was a student at the Institute before World War Two, David had complained to Rabbi Belsen about the unjustness of God.
“And what has God got to do with justice, David? Man, not God, invented justice.” So he had said, or something of that sort. It was long ago, and David’s memory might well be failing him. It was said and taught that the God of Israel was a just God.
Della Klein came to take care of the kids. “Don’t tell me anything,” she said to Lucy. “We’ll all survive. Just go.”
Lucy sat next to David, crying quietly as they drove to New York. He had no easy words to say to her. He could imagine an Orthodox rabbi saying, “Your father will be among the blessed ones.” All the religions had words to say, and no one said simply that death was a rotten and terrifying thing that we understand as little as we understand everything else. For some reason, his thoughts were taken back to a road in Germany, and by the roadside there was lying the head of a young German soldier, just the head, with its blue eyes open and staring and its hair like corn silk. No body, only the head, and the American kids marching by it would see it and pretend not to see it, glance at it and then turn their eyes away. Why the thought at this moment? Why mourn, even in vague memory, one dead of a nation that had inflicted upon mankind a war that left fifty million dead? But his mind was not a single thing. It was split into past, present, and future. Where had he read that when the mind is a single thing, a person is given a state of grace?
Lucy touched his hand on the wheel. “David, David, is it the end? Will I ever see him again?”
“Darling, I don’t know.” That was a lie. Her question had evoked the terrible finality of death, and it laid its icy fingers over his heart. Never, not when his mother passed away, not during the war, had he responded to death like this. It was not her father; David liked Herb Spendler. He was a good-natured, easygoing man whose years of composing the news in the Linotype room of the New York Times had bred in him an unaggressive cynicism. He had tried gallantly to conceal the contempt he felt for the rabbinate, the ministry, or any other aspect of religion, and his affection for David had been very real.
“You didn’t know,” Lucy said, “but whenever we had a scrap, or when I felt I had come to the end of my own rope, I would call him. Now he’s gone.”
“I’m here,” David said.
She pressed close to him, silent for the rest of the drive.
In New York, it was Lucy’s mother pleading for him to unfold mysteries. David had never realized what a young and attractive woman Sally Spendler was, perhaps because one reserves a certain point of view for a mother-in-law. Now she clung to him and told him tearfully, “We don’t even have a burial plot. We never belonged to a synagogue. What shall I do, David?”
“That’s no problem,” David assured her. “We’ll bring Herb up to the Ridge and bury him in our cemetery,” wondering meanwhile what it would be like with the frozen ground and the winter weather.
It was snowing again, lightly, when they laid Lucy’s father to rest. The little circle of family and friends stood mutely in the snow, cold and shivering. Lucy and her mother wept. It was as if death had reached out and touched the whole world with its icy fingers.
But, as occurred to David, life denies death and asserts itself; and the life in question was growing in the uterus of the fifteen-year-old Seligman girl. Or child, as David noted, sitting facing Bert Seligman and his wife. Bert had already expressed his anger, stalking back and forth across the room, raging that he would kill “that rotten little slut,” demanding that he face her with her “crime” immediately. His wife wept, and David allowed the man’s anger to use itself up.
“Would you send her away?” David wondered.
“Send her away? Rabbi,” Bert Seligman said, “she’s a slut, but she’s my kid. I don’t send my kids away.”
“Then you must understand,” David insisted.
“What in hell’s to understand?”
“That she needs love and it isn’t there. If you’d stop tearing the kid to pieces and take her to your heart —”
