The Frozen Rabbi

by Steve Stern

  All this Max observed with a certain detachment, buffered as he was by Zalman’s stipend, which is not to say that the excursion was without peril. The rail leg of a journey that should have taken only a matter of days took instead a fortnight, and there were constant interruptions when officers carrying weapons came aboard to inspect documents and passports. (Forged by Pisgat’s associates, his papers consolidated an identity to which the smuggler still had only a tenuous connection.) Sometimes they were accompanied by physicians threatening the spot examinations Max dreaded. Then he would have to dip into his funds and hand over another installment of the sweeteners that Pisgat had settled on him. But the funds were limited, and at the rate he’d had to dole them out along the route, oiling palms at every juncture, Max knew he would arrive on the other side with empty pockets. Still, bureaucratic obstacles notwithstanding, he owed Pisgat a debt of gratitude for partially clearing the way for him, because at each depot and border crossing he would be called upon once again to present his papers and explain the frozen stiff he was transporting (this was his story) to his bereaved family across the sea for burial. It was an anxious trip at every turn of which suspicious officials had to be silenced with zlotie, then marks, dissuaded from their insistence that the young man submit to disinfection and quarantine. No wonder that by the time the train reached the coast Max was fresh out of sops for insuring the secrets that lay beneath the ice and his own increasingly fusty suit of clothes.

  In the louche North Sea port of Hamburg, sailors with their painted doxies and passengers on board electric trolleys ogled the invasion of the Jewish unwashed—who were hounded through the city as far as the seawall by a corps of money changers and bogus ticket agents, cheapjacks and impostors. Speaking a Yiddish he could scarcely make understood, Max once more asserted to officials that his papers were in order and the deceased already approved for transport, its ice-bound condition a guarantee against putrefaction. While all the time he thought: Azoy gait, so be it, I’ve done what I could; let them confiscate the box and everything it contains. Let them discover the contraband payload and fling me into a dungeon; it’s immaterial to me. Or were these the thoughts of Jocheved, with whom Max was so often at odds? In the end, though, the ticket was validated, the bill of lading stamped, and the casket carted by porters up the gangplank into the bowels of Rolling Billy, as the crew called the gargantuan flagship of the Hamburg-Amerika Line. Max straggled behind them into the ship’s yawning hold to make certain that the rabbi was well situated among the racks of splayed and gibbeted mutton, the crates of perishables and cases of brut champagne.

  He was assigned a berth in the third-class section, where he slept alongside the retching masses in a stench to which Max himself, stewing in Salo Frostbissen’s funeral suit, contributed. Two days out the ship hit a storm, and the steerage passengers, pasted against the bulkheads when not tossed into one another, declared that the vessel was lashed to Leviathan’s tail. In fair weather they fought over the gruel ladled from the common kettle into their dinner pails, only to spew it later on into the aisles, creating between bunks a moat in which the pious stood davening. Compromised laws of kashrut aside, Max was unable to eat in such an environment, though he might occasionally nibble a bit of fruit or dried fish that some shy maiden, blushing vermilion, would press upon him. Such overtures, however, made him as uncomfortable as did the viscid-eyed victims of nausea and dysentery gulping air whose oxygen was usurped by foul gases. The toilets were bogs, the showers briny trickles that Max had anyway to avoid for fear of revealing his secret anatomy. Every bodily function involved an irksome covert procedure, often in the presence of men whose exposed parts were abhorrent to the girl concealed beneath Max’s apparel, which was why he kept as much as possible to himself.

  When not trying to inhale a salty breeze through a porthole below decks, he preferred to keep company with the rabbi, during spells in which he established an uneasy intimacy with his charge. In the polar climate of the ship’s capacious meat locker, Max would plunk himself down on an asparagus crate, shivering in the dense air from the ammonia compressors that was scarcely more breatheable than the Sheol of steerage. Still he preferred the solitude, where he was seldom interrupted in his meditations concerning the past that he hoped to outdistance. Picturing the basement flat back in Zabludeve Street, as vacant now as a plundered crypt, he would make an effort at shoring up his new identity, though Jocheved invariably kicked out the props. He thought about his bedfellows in third class and wondered what, aside from their shared rootlessness, they had to do with him. What had become of the faith that bound him to his own kind? He wondered as well about the assertion of Jocheved’s father, Salo Frostbissen, for whose sake his daughter had been willing to shlep an ungainly impediment halfway around the world. How could the watchman have believed that the rabbi (who would be carrion were it not for his artificial preservation) was still somehow alive? It was a conviction to which Jocheved also paid lip service, if feebly, though Max could only disdain her credulity with a scorn that she assured him was mutual.

  The smuggler had to exercise stealth during these visits, since the storage hold was technically off-limits to passengers—especially third-class passengers admonished not to stray from their confines, their very presence constituting an offense in the better quarters. But as the route through the ship’s entrails was lengthy and circuitous, Max could scarcely avoid the occasional confrontation with a purser or ordinary seaman. Then he would try through gestures and snatches of fractured German to explain his unauthorized presence, while the crewman, who already knew him by reputation as the lad with the refrigerated relation, would wave him past without further interference. At first Max couldn’t account for their leniency, though ultimately he came to understand that his looks were a factor in their favorable disposition, just as they had been for the railroad officials and border guards. And while Jocheved had only contempt for the comely features she shared with the smuggler, Max was, himself, not above exploiting them for the sake of survival. Of course, his face could just as easily have become a liability, particularly in steerage, where the girls were forever finding excuses to approach him, which was all the more reason not to bathe.

  Once, having taken a wrong turn in the depths of the vessel, he descended through an open scuttle and found himself in a brass and lead jungle among grease monkeys swinging from exposed ducts and flues. Bare-chested toilers caked in ebony dust wielded shovels from atop a hill of soft coal, feeding the maw of a belching boiler whose flaming tongue set the dials on the pressure gauges spinning crazily. Giant turbines whined a counterpoint to the shooshing of screw propellers ploughing the unseen waves, while Max stood nailed in the hatchway by the glowering of the stokers, which chilled Jocheved’s blood. Their attention, however, was abruptly recaptured by a crookbacked immigrant in a shabby jerkin, his neck craned like a turtle peeping from its carapace. Appearing to have stumbled out of a jet of steam expelled from a whistling slide valve, he commenced asking questions he seemed simultaneously to answer, in a Yiddish the stokers couldn’t have understood. “So does it make by you a difference, the quadruple expansion of your twin-screw propulsion engine, which requires 560 tons coal a day…?” The stokers peered at the interloper with uncordial bloodshot eyes while Max made his getaway.

  Another time Max climbed an unfamiliar companionway that turned a corner into a carpeted staircase, emerging into an opulence like nothing he had ever beheld. Still aboard the windward-riding steamship, he had entered a palace where lounges and plush smoke rooms bordered a grand saloon, a chandelier like a diadem dangling from its ceiling. There was a baroque dining room appointed in ornate carvings, gilt-framed mirrors, bas-reliefs, and stained glass; a library with a blazing fireplace and a marble mantel, Tiffany gas lamps the rich relations of the hurricanes that scattered shadows in the benighted quarters below. Trespassing amid all that splendor, Max could scarcely believe that such a place occupied the same planet as steerage.

  In a palm cou
rt luxuriant with potted orchids beneath a vaulted glass dome, a bushy-haired man in a boiled tuxedo shirt, his rolled sleeves showing powerful forearms, was performing card tricks before an audience in evening dress seated in white rattan chairs. There followed a round of polite applause after which a slight, bird-breasted woman in puce tights appeared bearing an assortment of properties. She proceeded to manacle and strait-jacket the solemn magician, then helped him into a steamer trunk, which members of the audience were invited to encompass in chains. The darting assistant then drew an ornamental screen about the trunk and, gravely pronouncing the name of the presentation, “Metamorphosis,” disappeared behind the partition. Mere seconds after she’d vanished, however, the magician himself stepped forth to universal gasps and riotous applause. Folding back the screen, he unlocked the locks, removed the chains, and lifted the lid, as out popped the lady assistant, straitjacketed and handcuffed.

  So spellbound was Max by the performance that he’d forgotten what a distraction his unlaundered presence might be in such genteel surroundings. He could have retreated unnoticed had not a filigreed matron with terraced chins, seated at the end of the row of chairs, pointed at him to exclaim in a piping contralto, “You’re bleeding!” He looked down to see that the dampness which had seeped through the crotch of his pants had leaked a droplet of blood onto the bottle green carpet. Fleeing toward the promenade in a frantic search for the hatch that would lead him back to the ship’s kishkes where he belonged, Max felt a renewed disgust for the female body he was forced to accommodate. Didn’t the men in shul thank God daily for not having been born a woman? Nor did it assuage his humiliation to recall how the gentiles of Lodz clung to the age-old belief that male Jews had monthly emissions. Still, there was the consoling afterthought that Jocheved, having had no womanly discharge since her abduction, had at least not been impregnated during her ordeal.

  Looking over his shoulder for the rest of the voyage, Max was scarcely aware of their proximity to the New World until the ship, escorted by spouting tugs, nudged into its berth at the flag-bristling Hamburg-Amerika wharf. The first- and second-class passengers streamed down the gangplanks to be absorbed by welcoming crowds, while the rabble of steerage, teased by their close encounter with the mainland, were unloaded onto launches that ferried them to Ellis Island. Max had held out the hope that the special circumstances of his alleged funereal mission and the burden it entailed might somehow exclude him from diversion to the Isle of Tears. But the casket with its licit and illicit contents was lowered by cargo net along with the baggage of the other prospective greenhorns, then transported to the island and dumped in a cordoned area pending further inspection; nor could it be reclaimed until its owner had been admitted through customs. This prompted a period of forced separation from his property that caused Max his greatest anxiety thus far.

  On the island the candidates for immigration were herded through redbrick portals into the cathedral-size echo chamber of the receiving hall, the sunlight slanting down from high windows like crossed swords. Tagged with numbers and letters, the logy assemblage were made to wait hours on hard wooden benches, then rousted from their languor and hustled into stalls according to nationality, driven between the paint-chipped railings as into an abattoir. Stations of uniformed examiners awaited them, as Max dredged his empty pockets for the bribes that no longer remained. He steeled himself to face the first inquisitor, at whose shoulder stood a spade-bearded gent—apparently there to act as interpreter—with the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society insignia stuck in the band of his bowler hat. A relentless battery of questions ensued, designed to determine whether Max were a lunatic, convict, anarchist, polygamist, or otherwise potential parasite and threat to the state. Encouraged by subtle jerks of the interpreter’s head to answer every query (how else?) in the negative, he was then shoved along toward a doctor in a dirty smock, who ordered him to open his shirt just short of revealing the tender buds of Jocheved’s breasts. Thankfully inattentive, the doctor concluded that Max suffered from neither leprosy, consumption, nor any other “loathsome or contagious disease,” then passed him on to yet another doctor seated on a stool surrounded by a circular hospital curtain.

  This one, with a cigarette dangling from fleshy lips, was in the process of lifting with one hand the sagging belly of a burly peasant in order to inspect his external genitalia with the other. The sight of the big man standing there with his trousers about his trunk-like ankles made Max rigid with panic. All the accumulated tensions of the journey revisited him with a gathered force that rocked his entire frame, until he had no way of measuring whether his fear was proportionate to the situation. Flinging madly about in his brain for some reason that might exempt him from the examination, he fixed on the gory excuse of an injury inflicted by rampaging hooligans during a ghetto episode. Perhaps the tale might inspire a sympathy that would stay the doctor’s hand from exploring the conspicuous absence in Max’s pants.

  Then just as the physician dismissed the balagoula (who’d farted like a horse as his parts were handled) and summoned Max with his rubbergloved fingers to step forward, a disturbance erupted in the next line over. Even above the surflike cacophany of the hall, urgent voices could be heard calling out for assistance—as coincidentally a hospital screen crashed into Max’s, which toppled domino fashion, the wreckage revealing a knot of officials kneeling over a fallen woman. Wearing a headscarf and several layers of skirts despite the heat, she had the look of an open umbrella tossed in the wind as she writhed on the floor in the throes of a seizure. Yellow sputum bubbled from her lips, her upturned eyes as blank as boiled eggs. Heaving a sigh, Max’s doctor got leisurely to his feet and toddled over to the aid of his colleagues, one of whom was struggling to prevent the woman from swallowing her tongue. In the doctor’s absence the HIAS man assigned to him, one half of whose face was contracted in a wink, took up a piece of chalk from the box beside the physician’s stool and made a mark on Max’s sleeve. Confused, Max had yet to budge from his spot when the man yanked him roughly forward by the lapel and, looking both ways, beckoned to the fellow behind him in line. Faint with relief, Max pushed through a turnstile back into the discordant hall, past the quarantine cages where men and women who had failed their examinations were detained.

  Reunited with the rabbi and once again aboard the launch, he allowed himself to appreciate for the first time the cloud-banked perpendicular city ahead of him, believing that the worst was surely over. It was an optimism that, for once undisparaged by Jocheved, was borne out by the expedition with which events began to fall into place. Pisgat, who’d assured Max that arrangements had been made at the other end, proved as good as his word. The poker-faced agent of the financier (whose name was not to cross the smuggler’s lips) was there to meet him on the North River docks in the molasses-thick afternoon sunshine. Recognizing him by the plank sarcophagus beside which he stood, the man spared the new arrival no more than a nod before seeing to it that a couple of porters transferred the casket with swift dispatch into the waiting wagon. All fortitude spent, Max was content to climb aboard the wagon himself and place his fate in the hands of his tight-lipped convoy. There was of course much to see as all around him disembarking immigrants were beset by long-lost relations or confidence tricksters posing as such, by labor gang contractors and sweatshop recruiters. There were omnibuses whose rooftop passengers had to remove their hats as they passed beneath the Elevated trestles, kiosks that invited pedestrians to descend into rumbling catacombs beneath the earth, a gothic tower on the side of which frolicked a lady fifteen stories tall in a bathing costume. But Max preferred to keep his eyes fixed straight ahead, as blinkered in their way as the nag’s that hauled the wagon, which might now be mistaken for a hearse. The streets of America, he resolved, would offer him no distractions until he had first attended to the business of collecting his wits.

  Gebirtig & Son’s Ice Castle on Canal Street, give or take its crenellated turrets and galleried façade, was a bookend to Pisgat’s overs
eas operation, the two establishments bracketing the whole of Max’s journey. It was true that the present structure was the more imposing, its breadth spanning a whole city block. A fleet of mule-driven delivery vans was parked in the furrowed thoroughfare outside and an army of laborers wheeled dollies and barrows up and down a ramp through the wide warehouse doors. But once he’d stepped over the Ice Castle’s threshold, passing from the torrid month of Tammuz into a frosty Shevat, Max relaxed in the chill environment familiar from a former life. Vertical lifts containing bales of salmon and pyramids of artichokes rose in the chromium light to the upper lofts, where the freight was slid along tramways on sledges, stored in niches carved out of the frozen ramparts like shrines; and Max, unlettered but for the Yiddish romances that Jocheved had browsed on the sly, had the reverent sensation of having entered an archive of ice. Deflated as he was, he was glad to be behind these vault-thick walls leaking sawdust like sand from a thousand hourglasses; he was glad of the business that gave him a reason for being there, acutely aware that, when the business was over, he would be left entirely on his own.

  The casket was rolled upright on a handcart into the building’s deepest sanctum, a pine-floored locker where wheels of cheese large as millstones, beer barrels with ivory spigots, and various imported delicacies were stored. There the proprietors, Gebirtig Junior and Senior, welcomed their guests to the Castle’s keep. Well-fed burghers both, wearing identically striped galluses and with fat cigars plugged into complacent grins, they seemed happy to defer to the brisk direction of the financier’s agent. At his command the mammoth green lozenge of ice with its dormant occupant was hoisted by workers from its box by means of a winch suspended from an overhead gantry. Max held his breath as the dripping block dangled in the frigid air from a hawser-thick noose, dipping left and right like the arms of precarious scales. Then the flannel-wrapped pillows of fish roe upon which the ice had rested, smelling surprisingly fresh, were removed from the casket and placed on a butcher’s slab, after which the block was thankfully lowered back into its crib. But what made Max even more ill at ease than had the thing’s visible exposure was the way the two Gebirtigs had scrutinized the ice-entombed rebbe almost as covetously as they had eyed the caviar.