An Orphan's Tale

by Jay Neugeboren

  Danny turned and gave her his best smile. “Adolf Hitler!” he cried, and then he ran down the hall and out of the building, as fast as he could, his sack swinging at his side.

  *

  LATER

  I’m sitting on the floor of the dormitory right where my own bed used to be, writing by candlelight. I stopped in a store and bought candles and Kosher baloney, potato chips, and a sour pickle for supper. I’m wearing my extra shirt and underwear for warmth in case it gets very cold.

  What surprised me: how easily I climbed the wall where Larry and the others used to do it!

  While I was walking around the empty building before I could hear Larry Silverberg talking to me about the 2 of us living in Israel together when I would be a doctor there (he remembered that) and about the things we would do together to girls from the Israeli Army. He said they didn’t care who they slept around with. Things are very loose in Israel.

  This is the thought that came to me then: I CAN ASK CHARLIE TO SELL ALL HIS BELONGINGS AND TAKE ME TO ISRAEL WITH HIM!

  What ties does he have, to land or family, that have to keep him here?

  This afternoon I went to Dr. Fogel’s Shul to see the Rabbi and ask him to let me be Bar Mitzvahed but he wasn’t there and his secretary told me what I think I knew before I went: that it was hopeless.

  She was scared of me, from what I said to her. I wish Charlie could have seen her face when she refused me and wanted my name so she could give it to the police and I told her it was Adolf Hitler. She’ll never be able to explain me to herself.

  Why I had no choice: If I want to become Bar Mitzvahed I have to go to a synagogue and tell a Rabbi. If I want to see a Rabbi I have to see his secretary and speak to her if she’s there when I arrive. If she asks me why I want to see the Rabbi I have to tell her or she’ll become suspicious. If I state my case and she refuses me the way she did today then I can never return to the same synagogue again because they might be ready for me the 2nd time.

  I’ll try another synagogue tomorrow and if they won’t have me, I’ll know for certain that that option is gone also, and that means I’ll have to do what I didn’t want to do: Ask Charlie to help me become Bar Mitzvahed.

  But he’ll have to account for me also, to whatever synagogue he goes to, which shows why I should come to him with my situation all planned out.

  If I couldn’t have come here, where could I have gone?

  This is what my mind has been thinking: that when all my options are gone, only my true choice will be left and the way will be clear!

  Do I really believe that?

  The answer is that I believe it when I write it but not when I’m doing things like eating in a cafeteria or talking to the secretary.

  A story I thought of writing: about Charlie when he was a boy, before he came to the Home and was living with his grandmother. She didn’t speak English. He didn’t understand her when she talked to him in Yiddish. Is this why he couldn’t learn to read? I saw her with a red scarf on her head and no teeth. Remember to ask him if what I imagined was so. Did he lie to me about his mother the way I lied to him about mine?

  If I can’t become his son, can I become his brother?

  Could he do that more easily by law than making me his son?

  If I become his brother and he marries Anita, then I become an uncle to Hannah! Would she love me more or less in that situation?

  The answer: Let’s find out!

  A conclusion: If I have no identity and no money and no food and no clothes I’ll still have my imagination. I could invent stories and live in them, the way I did with Dr. Fogel’s father, and with Ephraim and the Epilogue.

  But the truth is this too: that would just be playing with words!

  This is what I really believe: that if I concentrate and think hard enough I can always find a choice and a solution I didn’t think of before.

  That’s how I have 2 more new options: 1. becoming Charlie’s brother instead of his son. 2. emigrating to Israel with him.

  What I hear Charlie saying: Stop imagining me! I’m still here!

  Sometimes I forget exactly what he looks like. I saw the dark square on the wall downstairs where the picture of him I liked most used to be. Is it more terrible to live through an experience or to imagine living through it?

  How easy and short my 5 years of life in the Home now seem!

  If I can’t figure out the solution to my life maybe others can.

  Guess what? The instant I wrote down that sentence they all started to talk inside my head, sitting around the cabin and searching for solutions. I’ll know what each of them said when I write their words down. That way I can discover the truth at the same moment each of them does!

  Here he is again, folks, your favorite storyteller, bringing you a new story about your favorite Jewish orphan:

  THE FINAL SOLUTION

  A Most Surprising Sequel by

  Daniel Ginsberg

  When last we encountered our young hero he had become reunited for a brief and wonderful afternoon with his dear friend from childhood, Ephraim Mendelsohn, who was himself the son of an orphan who had, a generation earlier, been raised in the very same Home for Jewish orphans as our hero Daniel Ginsberg!

  But now let us journey back in time, dear reader, to an afternoon many years earlier, and to a day which Daniel Ginsberg often reflected upon, for when he considered the course of his brief life and the man he had become, he knew that the afternoon we are about to describe for you was the turning point of his existence!

  If he did not hear what he heard on that afternoon and decided what he decided he might never have become the man he is, and millions of children would have been without the opportunity of reading those magical works of science fiction which he now writes under the name of Charles Fogelstein.

  Knowing his true identity, we, of course, can see where the hero and heroine of so many of his tales come from—those homeless wanderers, Abra-X and Sara-Y, who, in order to save the planet Earth, dare to enter the unknown anti-universe through a black hole of space. But the ways in which they use their Imagination and Knowledge to transform those they meet, both the good and the evil, the beautiful and the horrifying, the remembered and the unexpected—especially the unexpected!—are doubtless well known to many of you, and we leave it to your discretion to interpret his tales in the light of what we are about to tell you about his life.

  For there was a time when, like the hero and heroine of his tales, he too had lost his way in life, despite his numerous talents and his awesome ingenuity. There was a time when, forced to run away from the Home in which he had been raised as a Jewish Orphan, he became confused and distressed. To whom did he belong? When and where had he really been born? What would become of him if he became a ward of the state?

  These were the questions which vexed him, and which moved him to set forth from the city for a sojourn in the country, during which sojourn, as you have already seen, he chanced to discover the curious document written by the father of one of Daniel’s most influential teachers, Dr. Fogel.

  What immediate effect did reading this document have on our young man, lost and confused as he was?

  This is the answer: He imagined Epilogues to his own life, one of which you have already had the pleasure of reading. And he imagined himself at the end of his own life, and an old man living alone in the woods and looking back over a life wasted. Even his precious Torah and study no longer satisfied him! For what had he done with his life? He recited his favorite saying from PIRKAY AVOS to himself: WHO IS THE RIGHTEOUS MAN? HE WHO DOETH RIGHTEOUS DEEDS!

  He saw himself writing in a notebook just as he did when a boy, and he saw that all his thoughts and study had merely been the exercise of his own vanity!

  Vanity of vanities, he chanted to himself, during his last days on earth. All is vanity and a torture under the sun, and my vanity was to have believed in the reality of my own mind!

  When I am gone, he said to himself, who will ever know that
my mind existed and contained what I believe it contained?

  Truly, he concluded, thinking back over a lifetime of thoughts, when I contemplated my own words I was like the worm in horseradish who thinks the horseradish sweet!

  Where oh where, he asked, are the other lives I have not led?

  Being a good Jew, and not believing in any real afterlife, he realized how futile his lonely existence had been, and even as he scoured the pages of his mind for sayings from the Rabbis, his heart was breaking in 2.

  Like Jerusalem, he confessed at last, he too was lost because he had adhered too strictly to the law.

  Thus, kind reader, would your young hero muse, considering his future life. Oh how unhappy he was as he walked back to his cabin from his favorite pond, for he saw how few choices in life truly lay open to him!

  For if there was 1 thing that was certain about our young hero, it was that HE LOVED LIFE! Despite his harsh upbringing and the plight he found himself in, despite the sufferings he had undergone (which he knew were as nothing compared to the sufferings of others, especially of Jews throughout History!) our hero continued to love life! He wanted to live! He wanted to have those things he desired only so that new desires would take the place of the old! He wanted to explore as many of those possible lives which he had previously imagined for himself as life would allow him to! Though he had been living a strange life, apart from the ordinary world of normal boys, yet still he hungered to bring private joy and hope into the lives of others, more and less fortunate than he in these very early years had been.

  Did his strength lie in his imagination or in his foolishness?

  But listen now to what happened: He was thinking thoughts such as these and approaching his cabin when he heard the unmistakable sound of voices. At first, like a small animal suddenly face to face with a hunter, he was startled and afraid. But then he recognized the tones of some of the voices and his heart grew warm. He walked on silent padded toes to the cabin wall and pressed his ear against the winter wood.

  Inside, he soon discovered, those people whom he had loved most in life until this moment were gathered in a circle and were discussing him, wondering what had become of him, and debating what to do with him, should they find him.

  He crawled under the cabin, so as not to be caught should one of them have gone to the door or window, and he listened to them through the floor.

  DR. FOGEL, his former teacher in the Orphanage from which he had come, said that he could find a position for him in a Yeshiva. In exchange for cleaning rooms and making beds and such tasks, Daniel would receive a full scholarship. Dr. Fogel believed that the boy had the brains and inclination to become a great Talmudic scholar.

  UNCLE SOL, an old man who had been a benefactor to the Home and the lifelong enemy of Dr. Fogel due to a conflict about how Jewish the Home should be, which fascinating story we shall tell to you presently, disagreed violently. Uncle Sol did not see why the boy, as he referred to him, should receive such special treatment. He believed that young Daniel should 1st return to the Home from which he had run away, a Home which had produced over the years some of the most distinguished doctors and lawyers and businessmen in America. Uncle Sol believed that the boy needed to be forced to face reality, however harsh it was.

  MR. MITTLEMAN, a highly successful realtor in whose home Daniel had lived for a brief time, then spoke. He said they should do nothing until they were forced to. “In what way are we responsible for him?” he asked.

  Dr. Fogel retorted in Hebrew, reciting the Rabbinical saying , which meant: “All Israel is responsible for one another.”

  Then Uncle Sol said, “If you believe that, why don’t you believe in the state of Israel?”

  Dr. Fogel replied that the state of Israel was material and would pass away. What lived on was God’s word and commandments!

  IRVING, a Professor and a former orphan in the Home with which all these individuals were associated, agreed with Dr. Fogel. He said that he and his wife had been to Israel on a tour and had found it to be terribly vulgar and materialistic. “All people care about there is clothes, property, and money,” he said. “They’re worse than Americans.”

  “God bless the state of Israel!” replied Uncle Sol, and he spoke about the Second World War and of how the nations of the world, before and after, refused to allow Jews to come upon their shores. If the Jews had a Homeland before 1940 and did not have to rely on others, millions of them would have been spared the gas chamber! He challenged Dr. Fogel to prove why it was a good thing that, homeless, the Jews should be forced to wander and be massacred forever. Didn’t God command His children to love life? “Never again!” he proclaimed.

  Then, before Dr. Fogel could reply, Daniel heard the voice he had been hoping to hear, that of his dear friend, CHARLES SAPISTEIN, himself a former orphan from the Home and a man who was different from all other men in ways which they did not perceive. “Why don’t you just let the kid live with me?” he asked, simply.

  There was a silence for several seconds, during which Daniel heard the sounds of chairs moving, and of his own excited heartbeat.

  When the other men did not answer him, Charles spoke again. “Come on,” he said. “Talk to me. It’s my life, isn’t it? It was given to me to do with what I want, right? So why can’t I let him stay with me?”

  “Oh Charlie,” came the sound of a female voice, that of Ephraim’s mother, ANITA MENDELSOHN, who was then, just recently widowed, an attractive young mother whom Daniel suspected of wanting to marry Charles. “You’re such a sucker, aren’t you, Charlie?” she asked.

  Then Charles laughed. “Me? Why should you think that? You don’t understand anything. I’ve lived with the boy already and do you know what? I like having him with me. You think I’m doing it just to be noble and to pay back some invisible thing for what was done for me once upon a time by the Home and Uncle Sol and everybody, but it’s not that at all!”

  “What is it then?” Anita questioned.

  “You have to be willing to take chances,” Charles retorted. “To step into people’s lives if you have to!”

  “I don’t see why,” said Anita.

  Daniel’s heart fell when he heard what it was that Charles next said: “What would you propose then?” Charles asked.

  Daniel felt true despair! “Why don’t we pool our money—you certainly have enough—and send him to Israel, since he loves Jewish things so much,” said Anita Mendelsohn. “On the Kibbutzim lots of children grow up without real mothers and fathers. He’d be quite happy there. I’ve looked into the matter.”

  “But that’s the easy way out for all of us,” he heard Charles say. “Don’t you see that?”

  Daniel had to fight to hold himself back, to keep from crawling out from under the building and bursting into the room, but even as he heard them argue with Charles he sensed that the solution was in sight. “Where there’s a will there’s a way, right?” he heard Charles say to them, and he sensed how important this was for the completion of Charles’s own most strange and interesting life. He believed that his friends above him were becoming angry, for he heard the sounds of much scraping, and then the slow steady sound of something quite heavy, like iron beating steadily against wood, which he at first believed

  *

  Danny stopped writing and listened; the sound he had been writing about in his story was coming up the metal staircase to the dormitory. No! he cried to himself. Not yet! I’m not ready!

  He pressed his fingers against the inside corners of his eyes, to make his dizziness go away. Then he blew out the candles, stuffed his notebook into his sack, and rose from the floor. The sound was louder. He stood rigid in the middle of the room, his fists clenched, his body trembling. He was so angry he didn’t know what to do. Why was somebody coming now?

  He heard steps clicking along the hallway, toward him. For the briefest instant his anger flowed down and out of him and his heart suddenly flared; he saw the door open, with Charlie standing there, his arms s
pread wide for him to run to….

  His imagination did not fool him. He picked up his sack and moved quickly across the floor, opened the door at the end that led to the game room, ran through the empty chamber and then down the stairs at the far end of the wing. The footsteps followed him.

  Outside, in the moonlight, the courtyard was white. Danny stood in a doorway. The snow had stopped falling and had not stuck to the ground. He felt cold. He thought of Larry’s hideout, but remembered that they had never given him a key.

  “Stop where you are.”

  Danny turned but saw no one.

  “This is a policeman talking to you. In the name of the law I’m ordering you to stop where you are, drop what you have, and put your hands over your head.”

  Danny smiled and ducked back inside the building, running as fast as he could, feeling a strength in his legs he had never suspected was there. He pushed through swinging doors and ran down the corridor in which the photos and trophies had been, and he felt as if he were in one of his own dreams, when, running fast, he would suddenly find himself taking off and flying above the heads of the other boys from the Home.

  He plunged down a staircase, into the kitchen. The stoves and sinks were already gone. He passed through the kitchen to the laundry room, and from the laundry room into the boiler room. He heard steps, slow and steady, walking from the kitchen into the laundry room, and he couldn’t understand how the policeman, without even running, was staying so close behind him.

  A beam of light shone in under the door. “I’m giving you your last chance. Come out now with your hands up. This is a warning.”

  Danny burst through the door and up the stairs. The shul! If he could make it there, even though he himself might not be saved, his notebooks would. He could leave them in the Genizah, wrapped in a talis. Even if the building were torn down, Danny knew, the Federation would never allow holy books to be destroyed, not only because it would be a sin, but because the old books were probably worth money and could be sold to some Yeshiva or library.

  Going up, he took the stairs two at a time, thrilled by his anger and the ability it gave him to move so swiftly in the dark. The courtyard was beautiful and peaceful in the moonlight, but he knew that he hated it. He hated the courtyard and the buildings and the Home and his years in it and the people he’d lived with, and he wished only—to make the experience complete—to see his face in a mirror, to see what he looked like when he was smiling with hatred.