An Orphan's Tale

by Jay Neugeboren

I believed this when I was a young man, and so I trusted the stranger who stayed with us and I gave him my money so that he would buy me passage to the border and onto a ship bound for Palestine, to join with the Knights of Zion in building our Homeland.

  So, my dear grandchildren, bound to me in the blood of the children of Israel, I wish you long life and happiness! But how can a Jew enjoy life if he is not part of His people? For in the study of Torah is the highest happiness. Remember what we sing each Shabbos when we open the Holy Ark—OUT OF ZION SHALL GO FORTH TORAH!

  And so I came to America. The voyage across the ocean stank. There was an epidemic and half the ship died. Jews were thrown overboard into the sea. Did they believe they were going to the Promised

  Land? I arrived in New York, with no money and in ill health.

  If you want to know the rest you should ask your father. I became a man of the world. I studied money. I made my fortune and I bought land and I left Gomorrah and moved here to the country to build a colony which would train Jews and prepare them for a future life in the land of Israel. I had many followers in my time, don’t ask me how many. We had cabins full of Jews who spoke all languages, but with each other Yiddish.

  We built our homes with my money. I continued to study money. I married and had only one son and I saw my duty in life as preparing others for the journey I never made. Did I believe it was God’s will to stay here, or did I really love the land I was in also? Who can tell.

  We argued about everything: Should a mother nurse and bring up her own children or should she put them in the care of others? Were children private property or communal? Should we speak in Hebrew or Yiddish? We farmed the land and we built furniture to sell and we prayed and we had children. We sent settlers to Palestine and many died and half of those who didn’t die came back to New York.

  You should look up and study about all the things we argued about: Marxism and Socialism and practical Zionism and synthetic Zionism and cultural Zionism and political Zionism. Some of us followed Herzl and some of us followed Jabotinsky and some of us followed Weizmann and some of us followed Gordon.

  Look up the history of Palestine before and after the Mandate!

  Chaim Weizmann said this: “Memory is right.”

  On several hundred acres, at our height, we were like Babel itself. Answer me this: Why did God give us so much brains if he wanted us to be One people? Without poverty, nothing joined us except our different theories. We became our own enemy.

  The Colony of New Zion has been dead for 20 years. I have lived here alone since its death studying Torah and finding only questions. Maybe, wherever he is, my son has answers. My followers forsook me for the temptation of America. Why should they suffer the hard winters of our colony and the harder life in Palestine? Hadn’t they left the Old Country to abandon Suffering?

  Many of them forsook God, so that they lost both ways, in this world and in the next one too!

  Many of them died and we buried them.

  My son, your father, wanted them to stay and, like Akiba, he warned them against corruption and assimilation, but when they fled, he fled also. He had my blood.

  Without land a man is nothing. Without God a man is nothing.

  I left my land to my son, and I left myself only enough money to travel to Palestine, where I hope to die and be buried soon after my arrival there.

  Finally, I leave you the words of Rabbi Akiba, “Whoever is buried in Palestine is as though he were buried underneath the altar, for all Palestine is fit for the altar.”

  The choice is yours!

  The boy was about to return the letter to its envelope when a thin slip of a paper fluttered out of it. He caught it in the air as if it were a frail butterfly. On it was 1 sentence, in the same handwriting as that on the letter, except that the script was very shaky as if it had been written by a much older man than the one who had written the letter. Trembling, the boy read: “If my grandchildren are not in the world, I pray that you will use this letter with your mind and with your heart, so that you, my dear friend Daniel, can tell the generations of the Story of New Zion!”

  Amen. Selah.

  LATER

  What I learned today from writing a story: Not to be fooled by the deceptive power of my own imagination. Even if I could write things like this forever, filling myself with myself, the answer is still no.

  If I created enough people like Dr. Fogel’s father, from the way I see people the way I described today, would they be able to keep each other busy and happy after a certain point, or would they still need me?

  Remember this: There were no Jews before Abraham.

  Also: Never never show this to Dr. Fogel.

  Why did I love my story while I was writing it and despise it now that it’s finished?

  My decision: If Charlie comes tomorrow I’ll reveal myself!

  MONDAY

  This morning I found a tree that had a hollow and a spider web over the hollow and I wondered if I ever saw it before I wrote my story or if writing my story made me notice it. I don’t know enough about Nature to know how long the spider’s web could have been there, or if he could have spun it overnight.

  Once when King Saul was chasing David with his soldiers to kill him, David hid in the hollow of a tree and a spider spun a web over the hollow so that David’s life was saved.

  I stuck my hand through the web and inside the tree trunk was nothing but pieces of wood like sponge.

  I woke up feeling better and I walked in some new directions on the property but didn’t find any artifacts of the old settlement or any traces that anyone ever lived in any other part. There were some flat stretches that might have been farming land.

  If Charlie marries Anita and I go to live with them, what will happen between Hannah and myself, living in the same house? What do brothers and sisters who are close to the same age feel toward each other and if they think unhealthy thoughts, what do they do about them?

  I practiced music for an hour this morning, before lunch.

  After lunch I walked outside on the roads all around the property, to make sure there are no other ways’ of getting inside, so that I won’t miss him if he comes again.

  While I was walking outside and looking in across the fence at the trees I saw the 2nd story I’m going to write down now. I knew football practice started by then and that he wouldn’t be coming today. I was imagining horses and wagons of Jews going in and out of the property and speaking to each other and to their horses in Yiddish and Polish and Russian and Hebrew when something made my mind see an opposite scene, from the future, and this is what it was:

  THE EPILOGUE

  A Story Projected from Real Life

  by

  Daniel Ginsberg

  Twenty years had passed from the time when the 2 friends had last seen one another. The visitor, a tall blond man in his early thirties, with strangely restful hazel eyes, was passing through the town in which he had once spent several crucial months of his life, and out of curiosity he had driven along the road he knew to see if the house he had once known so well was still there.

  He had walked up to the door, and, seeing that the name was the same as that of his childhood friend, he had knocked.

  When the door opened, the visitor and his friend needed to look at each other for only the briefest instant before the flash of recognition entered their mutual eyes and all of the changes of the 20 years which had passed were obliterated.

  They embraced like brothers and held one another tightly and then stood back.

  “I don’t believe it,” said the tall handsome man in the doorway, who was as dark as his friend was fair. “It is too good to be true!”

  “No,” said the visitor. “It is true!”

  “You’re Daniel Ginsberg!”

  “And you are,” said Daniel, “by the nameplate on your door, Ephraim Mendelsohn!”

  They now shook hands, somewhat awkwardly, since they had grown used to covering up their strongest emotions in their re
gular lives, and Ephraim invited his dear friend to come into his house.

  Daniel looked around the kitchen, once so familiar to him, and it seemed that it had been only yesterday that he had been sitting there and that the 2 of them had been boys, each lost in his own world. How much, really, had they known of one another’s inner thoughts back then? And yet, how close they had been, in a way that could never be repeated!

  “The kitchen is the same,” Daniel said, and then, without warning, he felt a rush of tears flood his eyes and he was holding his friend by both shoulders and staring into his warm eyes and saying, “Oh Ephraim—there’s so much I want to know, don’t you see? There are so many questions, so many thoughts!”

  “I know how you feel,” Ephraim said, and he too was crying, from a mixture of joy and sadness. “I have questions also, though for the moment it seems enough to have you here with me.”

  “I thought the same thing,” Daniel said. “And even if I should turn around now and leave, without talking with you or ever seeing you again, the moment that has just passed would be enough, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yes!” Ephraim said, and he took his friend by the arm. “But come,” he said. “Let me offer you a drink, or some nourishment.”

  Daniel had walked to an old cabinet and opened the glass doors without asking his friend’s leave. He took out a beautiful antique Tsumin box and held it in his hands and shook it gently so that the bells tinkled. “When did you recover this?” he asked. “It is the same one—the one which was lost 20 years ago, in the week in which your father died, is it not?”

  Ephraim looked down for a brief second, and then looked up and smiled, and Daniel wondered about the shadow which had flickered across his friend’s eyes, in the moment before he spoke. “It was an accident. I was purchasing a Talis for my son Moshe—”

  “A son?” Daniel exclaimed. “How wonderful!”

  “I have 3 sons,” Ephraim said. “But let me continue.”

  “Please do.”

  “I was purchasing a Talis for my son Moshe, named after my father, as I know you must realize, for his coming Bar Mitzvah—this was less than 10 days ago—when, in the store of the old Jew from whom I often buy objects of Jewish interest, I saw it in the corner of a shelf behind him, and I recognized it at once!”

  “How curious,” Daniel said. “That you should find it in the same week in which I should be passing through!”

  The 2 friends laughed, and Ephraim asked Daniel if he would write down the coincidental experience in his diary, but Daniel only sighed. “I have long since given up such foolishness,” he said. “I think it was my way back then of keeping myself from having to live in the real world and communicating with real people.”

  “I thought so at the time,” Ephraim said. “But I didn’t dare say so, for I knew how much it meant to you!”

  Daniel nodded and a dark look came across his brow. “In a way, it was my writing things down that sustained me, you know. I’m not sure I would have survived without it.”

  “Of course you would,” Ephraim said, and he clapped his friend on the back. “Why, just look at you now!”

  The 2 friends talked like this for a long while and then they retreated to Ephraim’s living room and talked to one another about their lives and their families and all the intervening years and books they’d read and people they had known and what had become of them.

  Ephraim was now a widower whose wife had died 4 years before, after giving birth to their 3rd son. Ephraim did not think he would ever remarry, so intimate had he and his wife been to one another! But Daniel had to wonder secretly as to the real reason, for he remembered how affected his friend had been when his friend’s father had died and his mother had cared for the family of 4 brothers and 2 sisters by herself. All this happened many years ago.

  Daniel thought of a saying from Rabbi Akiba which he loved very much: “When a husband and wife have merit, God’s presence may be found in their midst. When they lack merit, a fire consumes them.”

  Ephraim showed his friend the laboratory he had built in his basement and the hothouses he had added on to the house in back, where he did his botanical research, for he had become a highly successful consultant to scientific firms. “By working at home,” he explained, “I am able to be with the children more—and that is the most important thing.”

  Daniel, walking through the hothouses and admiring the plants, said laughingly, “Murray the Mower.”

  Ephraim puffed on his pipe and laughed also. “I know,” he said. “It’s very strange, isn’t it, how these things work themselves out in life? But now, Daniel, tell me about yourself.”

  Daniel and his friend adjourned to Ephraim’s office and, smiling at the coincidence, Daniel told his friend that he too was a research scientist, and about his work in Biomedical Engineering. Daniel also revealed that, under the pseudonym of Charles Fogelstein, which name Ephraim at once recognized, he was also a highly successful writer of science-fiction books for children.

  “Why, I read them to my sons all the time!” Ephraim exclaimed. “And in all the years I never thought to see anything special in the name of the author!”

  As the afternoon wore on and was subdued into dusk, the friends talked as if time had had a stop.

  This is what Daniel learned:

  Ephraim’s sister, Hannah, had become a lawyer, and was married to a Jewish lawyer and lived in New York City and had 2 lovely children of her own.

  Dov had moved to California, where he was a highly regarded brain surgeon, and went on camping trips with his family of a wife and 4 children.

  Rivka lived in Washington, D.C. and was married to a Congressman whose name Daniel recognized. She had 3 beautiful children.

  Eli had emigrated to Israel at the age of 16, and at the age of 17 he had been killed in a guerrilla attack on his border settlement.

  The youngest child, Murray, whom Daniel had never seen, was a student at Harvard University.

  “Just think,” Daniel said, “of all the things I would feel if I were to meet him, and of how he would not understand. Isn’t that the difference, my friend?”

  Ephraim’s mother, Anita, had moved to Florida, where she was an educational consultant and was receiving continual offers of marriage, though she had never accepted any. “Please give them all my love when you see them,” Daniel said.

  “They’ll be so happy to know about how your life has turned out,” Ephraim said. “We have talked about you often through the years.” Then Ephraim paused meaningfully. “You heard about Charlie, didn’t you?”

  Daniel said he had, though he did not explain how. Charlie had died of a malignant brain tumor, just before his 40th birthday.

  “I used to think,” Daniel said, “that if I had not left him, he would not have become ill. That was the way my mind worked in those days, though I see how foolish such thoughts were.”

  Ephraim, who vividly remembered visiting the man in question in the hospital before his death, did not tell his friend that Charlie had asked for Daniel frequently, up until the end!

  Dr. Fogel, who had been a teacher to both Murray and Charlie, and to Daniel also, had died, and according to his wishes, his body had been transported to Israel for burial.

  Mr. Mittleman had died, but Mrs. Mittleman was still alive, and quite a wealthy woman. She was living in a retirement village in Florida. Anita visited her several times a year and the 2 women shared much, strange to say.

  Ephraim did not know what had happened to Charlie’s wife or beautiful daughter. They had moved away from Brooklyn and no one had heard from them again. Some of Charlie and Murray’s old friends, for they had grown up in the same orphanage in which Daniel himself had been raised, still kept in touch with Ephraim, though a few of them had died.

  Irving and Jerry and Herman had died. The others had not.

  The 2 friends laughed together, remembering experiences they had shared, but they did not make any promises about seeing one another again, for to do so wo
uld have ruined the magic of the afternoon.

  “Will you stay and eat with us?” Ephraim asked.

  “I fear not,” Daniel said, and Ephraim understood.

  The friends were at the door when a car drove up and 3 children bounded out of it. “Your boys!” Daniel said.

  “They’re just returning from Hebrew School,” Ephraim said. “We have a synagogue in our town now, and quite a nice community of Jews.”

  “Would Dr. Fogel approve of them?” Daniel asked, and the 2 friends laughed at the joke.

  Then Ephraim, after mentioning to Daniel that he had for many years feared that his friend was long since dead, introduced his boys to Daniel and they each gave him their names. The oldest, 12 years old, was named Moshe, and the middle son, 9 years old, was named Chaim, and the youngest boy, who was 4 years old, was named Daniel!

  THE END

  This is what I believe: True friends lie to one another, the way Ephraim did to Daniel when they were boys.

  A puzzle Ephraim showed me in a book:

  All sentences

  within this box

  are false.

  My diary is the box and my story is the sentence.

  What I know nothing about: what it’s really like to study Torah. What would a truly wise man do to me if he saw my thoughts written down?

  In Murray’s study once I looked into one of his volumes of the Talmud and I couldn’t understand anything except a few words. The Talmud is written mostly in Aramaic. There is a Babylonian Talmud and a Jerusalem Talmud but I couldn’t even tell which one I was looking at.

  When I think of all the things I would have to learn, first just to be able to read and understand the letters and words themselves, and then to know how to follow the arguments between the Rabbis and understand them and interpret them, I get sick inside!

  I don’t even know what any boy my age who goes to a regular Yeshiva knows. My memorizing is no substitute.

  Can a dedicated man learn as much between the ages of 55 and 65 as he does between the ages of 5 and 15? Why should there be such a difference?

  Oh how far I am from God, whatever my real age may be!!