An Orphan's Tale

by Jay Neugeboren

  TUESDAY

  It rained all day today and I didn’t go outside. I stood at the window but he never came. Have I miscalculated?

  Asking myself that question makes me especially calm and I don’t know why. I made up no stories today. I stood at the window and prayed and waited. I tried to ask myself what we really have in common, other than our origins, and why, really, I ever expected him to take me in.

  I was outside just before because the rain stopped. There was a full moon in the sky and the clouds floating in front of it like vapors made it look like a sliver of dry ice with steam coming off. I felt very close to it, as if I could touch it and burn my fingers!

  There are special prayers for the new moon and the new month in Hebrew but I don’t know what they are. The Jewish calendar goes according to the changes of the moon, not the sun, and I don’t know why that is either, or whether it was always that way.

  In the time of Rabbi Akiba some Jewish men had a dangerous operation performed on themselves to conceal their circumcisions against the Romans.

  How much do I know about all the exact persecutions Jews suffered throughout History?

  I found some empty cartridge shells in back of one of the other cabins, but I haven’t heard gunshots or seen tracks of any hunters.

  Is Charlie with Anita now, and are either of them thinking of me at this moment?

  WEDNESDAY MORNING

  Sometimes I’m an idiot!

  I woke in the middle of the night and heard them, across the way, in another cabin. At first I was scared, but then I listened for a while and I could tell they were just teenagers making out. They were laughing and struggling with each other and throwing beer cans against the walls.

  I walked across the clearing and listened at the wall to their cabin. I heard a girl giggle and say, “Don’t you 2 do anything we wouldn’t do!”

  I heard a guy’s voice and he sounded drunk. I couldn’t make out his words, except that he kept saying, “C’mon, huh? C’mon, huh? C’mon, huh?”

  I heard another girl giggle and tell somebody to stop, but she didn’t mean it. I wondered what she looked like. Her voice was very refined, as if she took speech lessons. She sounded much older than the others and I wondered what she was doing there. I wondered what her face would look like in the morning when she faces her mother across the breakfast table.

  This is what one of the guys shouted that made the 3 others laugh: “Because it’s my birthday!”

  Then I acted like an idiot, I don’t know why. I just kicked the door open and yelled in at them, “THEN HAPPY BIRTHDAY, GANG!” and then I ran!

  The girls screamed but I didn’t wait to see what any of them looked like. I ran into the woods behind the clearing through the wet leaves and the slosh and I didn’t stop until I thought I was far enough away. The girls were still screeching and I heard the guys cursing and yelling at them to shut up.

  They probably thought I was just somebody from their school who followed them but I can’t take any chances.

  It doesn’t matter why I did, even if it was just for fun, because it told me what I must have wanted to tell myself anyway: that I shouldn’t stay here anymore. Charlie might come back again, and then again he might not. There’s no reason to wait any longer. The best thing is to admit that I miscalculated and to go forth.

  What the words “go forth” remind me of: the Rabbi’s speech at Murray’s funeral.

  In the woods, thinking of them hopping around with their pants caught around their ankles, I had a good laugh. I thought of the guys at the Home and how I would have been a hero to them if I could have told them a story like that about myself! I could have added things about seeing the girls naked and it wouldn’t have mattered if anyone believed me or not.

  I sat on the ground with my back against a tree and didn’t think about anything except how I must have scared them to death and about what a child I was not to have been able to control myself when he said it was his birthday.

  What I forgot to do: wish him a “mazel tov.”

  Even if I hadn’t barged in on them, how can I sleep in the cabin tonight wondering if they’ll be coming back? If I sleep outside I’ll surely catch a terrible chill. Just from sitting on the ground for less than an hour with my jacket under me I’m sniffling this morning.

  When everything was silent for a long time I walked back to the clearing. The sky was filled with millions of stars and I thought of God’s promise to Abraham.

  There were 9 empty beer cans in their cabin and some leftover potato chips and a damp army blanket they left behind. I took it to my cabin and I lay on the floor with it under me and that way I couldn’t feel the dampness under my coat. I was afraid to go to sleep for fear they’d return but I rested well until sunup.

  Then I said my prayers and had a farewell breakfast of potato chips, warm beer, bread, and lettuce. I’ll get something warm to drink in town at the bus station before I leave.

  Will I ever see this land again? If I hadn’t come here to wait for him, in how many different directions might my life have gone? But since I did come here, even though it was a temporary mistake, it was a necessary step for me so that I might realize how foolish my planning was,

  for I was really waiting on him to do something instead of relying on myself to create my own fate.

  That was what my foolish act last night showed me, so that I revise my earlier statement about you being an idiot, Daniel Ginsberg. For if you had not acted the fool you might have erred in waiting here even longer!

  Charlie will be surprised when he sees me to find such a new look in my eye! He’ll see that even though I have to make plans and decisions concerning my future, I’m not as much in need of him as even I thought I was a few days ago.

  My name is Daniel Ginsberg and I come from the Home and I can save myself, thank you.

  Hear O Israel the Lord Our God the Lord is One!

  Eight

  Danny sat at a table in a corner of the small cafeteria, sipping from his glass of tea. As disappointed as he had been at not finding Dr. Fogel at home, he was surprised at how good it felt nonetheless simply to be in Brooklyn again. He had been foolish in those thoughts also: imagining himself living in the country all the time with Charlie.

  He had even, during his walks around Dr. Fogel’s property, sometimes imagined an entire colony of orphans there, living new lives. In Danny’s dreams Charlie had, of course, been the director of the colony, one that contained hundreds of Jewish boys, including refugees from all over the world. There had been classes and workshops and teams, good meals and singing and parties and dances. On Saturday nights, busloads of beautiful young girls had been brought in (blindfolded, so they could not return on their own), and Danny had fallen in love with one of them….

  Danny felt comfortable in the cafeteria, among old Jewish men. Next to the counter two bearded men were playing chess, and two others, looking like their twins, sat behind them, watching the moves. This, Danny thought, remembering Charlie’s phrase, was probably their home away from home.

  Through the window Danny watched a Puerto Rican fam ily moving their possessions. The father had ropes around his chest and, as he pulled a dolly loaded high with boxes and clothing and furniture, he strained forward like a workhorse, steam billowing from his nose. At the very top, a large green stuffed easy chair was turned upside down. A boy wearing sneakers pushed the load from behind, one hand stretched high, on the leg of the green chair, to keep it from toppling. The mother walked behind the boy, pushing an enormous black baby carriage that overflowed with pots and clothing and clothes hangers and plastic dish drainers and toys. She carried an infant in a pack on her back. A small girl in a red flowered coat walked at her side, sucking her thumb and pulling a wagon filled with shoes.

  Danny had intended to pay Dr. Fogel for his room and board. In his situation, the best thing would be to keep all arrangements aboveboard; he did not want anything for nothing. What he did want—and what he had intended to explai
n to Dr. Fogel—was to live in an Orthodox Jewish home during the weeks preceding his Bar Mitzvah. Dr. Fogel was the only person he knew who had a home that was both kosher and located near a synagogue.

  If Dr. Fogel had been unwilling to take him in he would have asked to be sent somewhere else—another Jewish home, a Yeshiva that had sleep-in facilities, a hotel or rooming house that catered to Orthodox Jewish men. Whatever else Dr. Fogel might have been capable of, Danny had reasoned, he could not have knowingly kept another Jew from the performance of a mitzvah.

  Danny warmed his hands on the outside of the glass of tea and bent over it to sniff in the steam. He’d had the passage ready for him, should he have needed it. Had not Simeon the Righteous said that the continuance of the Jewish people depended on three things—the study and practice of Torah, religious ritual, and acts of loving-kindness?

  Danny took out his notebook. None of the men in the cafeteria seemed to question his presence. He wondered what they would say were he to go to each of them and tell them his life story and then ask for theirs. He would stand in the middle of the room and ask who would be the first to teach him Yiddish, and who would be the first to tell him about his childhood, and who could remember a story his father’s father had told him when he had been a child….

  *

  I’m in Brooklyn again and I’m sitting in a room called Skulsky’s Dairy Cafeteria with 8 other Jewish men, and I know I made the right decision in leaving. They’re old men and I could probably make them happy by telling them about myself and making them tell me about themselves, but the best thing is to do nothing.

  I have no obligation to bring joy into the lives of others at every moment of my life. I still believe in Simeon the Righteous’s doctrine of Torah, ritual, and acts of loving-kindness, but the important thing for Danny Ginsberg right now is to consider his situation and to make New Plans!

  That’s what the Rabbis mean when they say “There is no Torah without bread.”

  Despite all my setbacks, what surprises me is how good I still feel, as if I’m ready for any experience which may befall me!

  There was a sign on Dr. Fogel’s front lawn saying his house was sold. I looked in his windows and all the rooms were bare. Even the curtains and Venetian blinds were gone. The Mezuzah was gone from the front doorpost.

  But this is what I thought: Even if he flew to Israel to spend the rest of his life on a Zionist kibbutz, my life would stay the same! If night becomes day and day becomes night, my fate still remains in my own hands.

  What I still have to do, no matter what: find a place to stay until I can face Charlie and say to him: “THIS IS WHO I AM AND THIS IS WHAT I WANT TO DO WITH MY LIFE AND THESE ARE THE THINGS YOU CAN HELP ME WITH IF YOU WANT TO.”

  It’s all right for Ephraim to live in the country because he was born there, but if Charlie asked me I would tell him he should come back to the city so he can be in touch with his early life.

  Also: It would be all right with me if Sol lived with us too, since he’s so old already.

  *

  Danny put a teaspoonful of strawberry jam into his tea, as he had seen one of the old men do. The sweetness caused him to close his eyes and sigh with pleasure. If Charlie should refuse him, he wanted to be able to allow that to make no difference either. If there were no records of him anywhere, then he wanted to be ready to demand that new ones be created. He wanted to be ready to go to whomever he had to go to—whatever civil liberties groups or legal aid groups or Jewish groups—in order to receive a true accounting of his origins: the names of his mother and father, and of their mothers and fathers; his real date of birth; and his rights, under law, concerning his future.

  But until such a moment arrived he had to be careful. He could not, for example, as he had considered doing, spend his nights in bus terminals or on the subways, for if a policeman were to question him, and if someone else were to discover that he had no actual identity before he himself demanded that his identity be returned to him, then he would lose control. They would be able to do with him whatever they wanted to.

  His secret wish—not so secret, really, since he had been prepared to discuss it with Dr. Fogel—was that he be sent to a Yeshiva where students lived in, if such a Yeshiva existed. In Yeshivas, he knew, students spent half the day studying Jewish subjects and learning Hebrew, and half the day studying what students in regular schools studied. So long as the Home had been alive, he supposed there had been technical reasons for keeping him there—but if there was no one place any longer into which a Jewish orphan had to be placed, and if he could demonstrate to them his potential for becoming a contributing member of the adult Jewish community when he would reach that age, he did not see how or why they could deny him. To do so, he told himself, would be to deny all of Jewish history and practice.

  *

  What I am: a good investment. If somebody were to support me now, he would be paid back many times over in the future.

  I don’t depreciate and my expenses are still deductible.

  To remember: Don’t be shy about my talents and brains and what I know.

  What I need to do more of: Decide which talents to cultivate. There must be boys and girls my age somewhere who already practice musical instruments or study mathematics or science or Torah 5 or 6 or 7 hours every day. If you do anything that much every day you will eventually know things nobody else knows.

  But I can’t become like that until I have 1 place to be living in.

  Is Dr. Fogel a happy man?

  Like the men who are sitting around me right now he has observed ritual and studied Torah all his life and knows no other way of living. His devotion to the Home must be counted an act of loving-kindness no matter what his reasons were, even if rituals are to him like water to a fish!

  But the Rabbis say this also: SUFFERING IS A GIFT FROM GOD.

  What interests me as soon as I write down what the Rabbis say more than why they say it is this: Why, sitting here at this moment of my life, did the question about Dr. Fogel come into my head? If I didn’t write it down, would the rest of my life be different than what it’s going to be?

  My conclusion: If I followed all my thoughts forever, to the ends and beginnings of their trails, I would never have time for living!

  Coming into the city on the bus I saw what would have happened if I stayed on the land: I would have caught a chill. Each night I would have slept half-awake, worrying. My head would have become heavy with fluid and I would have been afraid to go to a doctor for fear he would have to know who I was or send me to a hospital and then they would have disposed of me through some agency that would have placed me with morons and delinquents and retards and retreads.

  I looked at my reflection in the window of the bus coming here and I saw a scene with myself stumbling into a synagogue. People stared at me as if I was an old dwarf. I was shouting to them that it was my Bar Mitzvah. I saw clean-shaven men in Yamulkas and suits coming down the aisles to carry me away. I saw myself screaming that I was Jewish and that it was my Bar Mitzvah day and that I was in the House of God. I began chanting my Haftorah even as they carried me down the aisle above their heads. My nose was dripping and my eyelids were stuck together with phlegm. My ears were stopped up. Yet my voice, when I heard myself singing, was pure and sweet like a child’s!

  Outside in the lobby of the synagogue they laid me on the marble floor, which was made of large black and white squares. They wrapped me in an army blanket and telephoned the police but I rolled away from them out the door, down the steps and into the street, and I got up and ran deliriously until I found another Synagogue! I went inside and saw that the Ark was open and they were taking out the Torah. The Cantor and Rabbi wore long black robes and the Torah glistened with its silver breastplate and silver crowns. I smelled cloves. I hid behind the back row where nobody could see me and when it was time for the Bar Mitzvah boy to be called to the Torah I marched down the aisle, my eyes on the Eternal Light, and summoned myself to the Bimah. I c
ould smell my own foul odors as if my flesh was already rotting! I had the army blanket wrapped around me to cover my body where it showed through the slashes in my clothing.

  I stopped, realizing that I could not in summoning myself for the Aliyah give the name of my father. A thick crowd of men in black suits was blocking my way to the Bimah.

  The real Bar Mitzvah boy was holding his mother’s hand and giggling and pointing at me. I demanded that the men let me through but they pushed me backward and walked over me. Then they lifted me above their heads again and I floated out of the sanctuary. The Rabbi stood above me, and when my blanket was torn away, he looked at me and then said, with disgust, just like Dr. Fogel: “Do you call yourself a Jew?”

  Here’s a beautiful new one I memorized from PIRKAY AVOS on the bus: “If love depends on some selfish end, when the end fails then love fails. But if it does not depend on a selfish end, it will never fail.”

  This is why: If you love a woman because she’s beautiful and she becomes sick and loses her beauty, then the love is gone too. But where love is for the sake of God, as when a disciple loves his master in order to learn, then the love never vanishes because the cause endures forever!

  *

  Danny went to the counter, bought a cheese Danish, and asked that his glass of tea be refilled. The old man who served him looked past Danny and said, as if to no one, “It’s snowing.”

  Danny sat at his table and watched the large white flakes fall. He saw himself, on the ground, with flakes falling on his own cheeks and covering him. He saw Charlie and Dr. Fogel finding him there, on the forest floor, hard and cold, and he saw the tears in Charlie’s eyes—and then, what thrilled him more, the anger.

  He saw Charlie raise his fists to the sky and curse God. Dr. Fogel walked away, into the woods. I’ll be with you soon, Charlie, Danny said to himself as he sipped his tea. We’ll be together again. He saw Charlie walking into a strange synagogue. Charlie sat, without praying, for hours—through an entire service—until the time came to say the Kaddish. Then he rose. Yisgadal v’yiskadash… Would Dr. Fogel have stopped him if he were sitting in the same shul? If Danny had no blood relative living after him, who would the Rabbis say would be allowed to say Kaddish for him? What was the Law?