The Frozen Rabbi

by Steve Stern

  Shmerl told himself that such thoughts were foolish and dangerously out of place, but he could no longer ignore his own discontent. There came a night when, lying in his nest of scraps in front of the stove installed in an empty fireplace, he couldn’t sleep for his rampant imaginings. Despite the cold weather that gripped the city, the tenement remained close and stale from the lingering vinegar odor of the departed laborers. Eyeing the machines, Shmerl decided that he’d suffered his servitude long enough to warrant a holiday. Not that there was anywhere in particular he wanted to go, not on the planet at any rate, since his fancies tended toward more empyrean destinations. With his latest brainstorm brewing, he reasoned that a minor experiment would hardly disturb the fabric of the universe, and try as he might to resist what he regarded as an impure impulse, he nevertheless succumbed in the end to temptation. He rose after midnight and stole out of the apartment, braving the wind in his thin Prince Isaac jacket to venture beyond Rivington Street for the first time since he’d arrived in New York.

  What surprised him was that the sleepless city, even at that small hour, was less menacing to walk in than it had been to descry through a filmy third-floor window. In fact, Shmerl was so distracted when passing the all-night coffee saloons and dancing academies, the stalls piled with fish like segmented rainbows lit by blue carbide flares, that he nearly forgot his mission. On a corner a soapbox orator exhorted a phantom audience concerning the crimes of the idle rich; a puppeteer walked a gypsy marionette around a circle of lamplight; a quorum of Chasids gathered beside a hoarding to bless the new moon. Remembering himself, Shmerl began trolling the construction and demolition sites that interrupted the tenements, delighted at how readily available were the scraps of aluminum, copper wire, and iron nails he required for his bricolage construction. Back in the apartment he blew on his stiffened fingers, then removed from his carpet bag the electromagnet complete with alkali battery he’d brought with him from across the sea. That and his Book of Wonders were the only vestiges of his shameful old life he’d permitted himself to take along on his journey.

  In truth, it was not a complicated operation; he’d undertaken more ambitious procedures back in Shpinsk, and his uncle’s tool chest was more replete with precision instruments than any he’d previously had access to. But by the time he’d assembled the mechanism and fastened it to the curlicued struts of a sewer’s treadle, looping the elastic belt around the flywheel, Shmerl was too fatigued to see his experiment through. It was still dark out and there was time for a catnap to restore himself before testing the success or failure of his motorized Singer; dawn, he assumed, was still hours away. He crawled onto his piecework pallet lulled by a sweet suspense, ignoring the window shades turning from gray to a pale lemon hue. Nodding off, he saw a swarm of raggedy wage slaves pedaling their machines across the face of the moon on their way to celestial ports of call. He awoke to screaming, and only later, after the Oyzers had sent him packing, was he able to piece together what had happened.

  “JEWS, GIVE TZEDAKAH,” crooned an old man with a flowing beard and helical sidelocks stationed beneath an awning on Christie Street. “For the righteous of Palestine, give halukkah, your pennies for the destitute of Jerusalem…” His voice a touch too mellifluous for his wasted face, he rattled the soup tin that served for a pushke in the failing light of day. The tin rattled from the buttons and pins that citizens lacking spare change had dropped in, believing no doubt that something was better than nothing. Did they think that because he was ancient he was also blind? (Though blindness had sometimes figured in his arsenal of afflictions.) Finally someone deposited an actual coin, and the old man muttered a blessing barely distinguishable from a curse before retiring to a drafty cellar nearby to count up the day’s take. There he removed the false beard and earlocks, peeled the crusted putty from his cheeks and nose, and hung up the mud-daubed caftan and the shtreimel that resembled an ermine babka. He sat down at a table covered in an oilskin on which puddles of wax had congealed, spilled the coins and other items from the tin can, and with slender fingers protruding from ragged mittens totted up the negligible amount he’d collected. Max Feinshmeker, née Jocheved Frostbissen, was growing tired of this particular ruse and would soon feel compelled to adopt another, a transformation he had repeated several times throughout that frigid winter.

  He could see his breath in the cellar storeroom beneath Tzotz’s Dairy Restaurant on Delancey, where he kept company with barrels of pickled sturgeon and tubs of sour cream. Tzotz the proprietor, for charity’s sake, had agreed to let the mendicant kip there awhile before he returned (this was his story) to the Holy Land. Over the long winter months he’d slept in an assortment of cellars, three-cent lodgings, and detention cells, assuming a variety of disguises in his effort to remain elusive. Uneasy with each new incarnation, however, Max had tried on and discarded a dozen impostures, employing them a week or so before rejecting them for good. It was a sound enough strategy, he reasoned: Before his enemies had time to unmask him in one guise, he would already have taken another—though Jocheved sometimes insinuated that, in donning and doffing these serial personae, altering his character with each new subterfuge, he was looking in vain to find his own true self. She needled him that way persistently, urging him to continue the search for Rabbi Eliezer ben Zephyr in his zinc-lined casket, which quest was all that seemed to matter to her.

  “We’re alone here without a pot to pish in,” was Max’s routine complaint, which he was sometimes observed by passers-by to mutter aloud. “We’re hungry and dirty and even if I had the pittance for a shvitz, I couldn’t use it for fear they might discover you—and all you can think of is a corpse on ice?”

  “He’s not a corpse,” Jocheved would reply through Max’s own mouth, making him feel like a ventriloquist’s dummy.

  “Then what is he?”

  “Asleep.”

  At this Max would sock his brow with the heel of his hand. “Farvos?” he asked. “Why why why is the old kucker so important to you?”

  And here Jocheved always chose to keep mum, as if the answer should have gone without saying. It did go without saying as far as Max was concerned, because it made no sense. But discordant agendas aside, there was the real and present danger of Pisgat’s threat hanging over his head.

  At first he’d considered becoming the girl again, if only temporarily—that would have been the most practical disguise; but Jocheved wanted nothing to do with herself, nor was she willing to assume any other version of a female, neither maiden nor balebosteh, and Max couldn’t battle her. “You don’t want anymore to be yourself,” he complained, “yet you snipe at me for staying under wraps,” a point her silence suggested was well taken. And so, disguised as Ig Smolensk, who welcomed greenhorns fresh off the boat, soliciting their dues for an imaginary landsmanschaft; or Chaim Fut, who received alms for a rare and disfiguring skin disease; or Reb Itzik Saltpeter (sometimes the Blind), who sold Jerusalem dirt for sprinkling on stiffs and begged remittances for the saintly Jews of Palestine, Max Feinshmeker remained incognito. But all these assorted masks came later, after he’d pledged himself to vigilance and stealth and then set about failing miserably at both.

  Having wandered the dense streets around Division and East Broadway during the first night after his arrival, bone-weary, mortally dispirited, and ravenous, Max had snatched a solitary orange from a bin. His inaugural theft, it was an act prompted as much by his hypnotic attraction to a fruit he’d never seen as by extreme hunger. He was caught red-handed. The grocer, whose wizened frame belied his dogged strength, grabbed the thief’s wrist with both vicelike hands and wouldn’t let go. He hailed a cop on the beat, who handcuffed the thief, then flagged a hack-drawn black maria, which transported Max in disgrace to the well-worn back steps of the nearby Essex Market Courthouse. There he was frog-marched by a pair of gin-soaked warders through a corridor and down a ringing spiral stair into a subterranean cell block echoing with the cries of unseen prisoners, where he was locked up for the n
ight. It was a three-by-seven stone cell with built-in iron berths and a noisome slop bucket, but so played out was Max that he took some solace in simply having a roof over his head. He might even have slept, had not a slit-eyed cellmate, leaning against his upper berth and boasting of petty swindles in an underworld patois, kept finding excuses to touch his person: “Used to I fenced your fawneys which the tiny forks would hoist for Red Augie, him that flashed a rare handle to his physog…” Reclining on his pallet, Max of course had no clue as to what the fellow was talking about, though he winced every time the man rested a clammy hand on his shoulder or arm; and once, as Max began to doze off in exhaustion, his cellmate squeezed him between the legs, pincering air. So horrified was Max by the intrusion—which equally shocked the intruder, who shouted, “You ain’t a cove, you’re a tum-tum!”—that his bladder let go; it was that long since he’d had access to a private facility. Ashamed of the dampness and the ensuing odor, abused by the leering speculations of his cellmate, and afraid of giving vent to Jocheved’s outrage, he lay in a tight fetal ball throughout the remainder of the night. In the morning, despite his long fast, Max could scarcely face the bowl of glutinous gruel delivered through a slot in the door; though for the sake of his enfeebled condition (and indifferent to the dietary laws he’d already abandoned), he forced himself to choke it down.

  Hauled into the dock at the Essex Market tribunal, he understood nothing of the proceedings. The courtroom was a circus of aggrieved and bedraggled humanity, the pews swarming with professional criminals—pickpockets, prostitutes, firebugs, horse poisoners, two-bit confidence men—as well as drunks and vagrants guilty of a clumsy desperation. Court reporters slouched in the casement windows; runners colluded with jackleg lawyers squirting tobacco juice between their teeth into brass spittoons. All appeared oblivious to the pounding gavel of the judge issuing pleas for order from the bench. Beet-faced, the judge dispensed draconian punishments—this one for the water drop cure at Blackwell’s Island, that one to the treadmills at Ludlow Street—which a wry-necked shorthand stenographer conscientiously recorded in her log. When it was Max’s turn, the arresting officer stood to recite the immigrant’s alleged offense, but in the absence of the greengrocer, for whom the affair had apparently ended with the apprehension of the thief, there was no one on hand to press formal charges. Nevertheless, the judge was reluctant to let such an obvious felon go scot free. “How do you plead?” he demanded, careless of legalities, while Max shook his head in incomprehension, anticipating the worst. Then a spruce, brilliantined young man in silk suspenders stepped up to offer his services in Yiddish. Max was ready to accept help from any quarter, when the man was interrupted by another, this one in rumpled attire, with a doleful bloodhound face, who explained that the pushy fellow was an opportunist and had not the greenhorn’s best interests at heart; whereas he, clutching a battered briefcase bound with twine to his threadbare vest, was the true voice of the oppressed. Having said as much, he set down the briefcase, hooked his thumbs in his sweat-ringed armpits, and began to declaim in orotund fashion; but the speech, despite its repetition of catchwords—“bourgeois toadies,” “bloated plutocrats”—was entirely lost on Max.

  The judge had begun banging his gavel again, ordering the attorney to keep silent, when a brash voice whispered in Max’s ear that “nisht gedeyget, don’t worry,” she would look after him. She was—when he turned—a plump woman in her middle years, acrid with the fragrance of rose water and perspiration, her grin slightly predatory, her coral wig shaped like a ziggurat. In the brief hush that succeeded the curtailment of the lawyer’s peroration, she spoke up, informing the judge with all due respect that she would stand surety for the greenhorn. “Give to me in custody the boy, and I will guarantee he should behave himself and personally put him in the way of gainful employ.” Impatient to move on to cases of more moment, the judge agreed to remand Max into her care.

  IT WAS EASY enough for Shmerl to guess what had happened: the cutter, the baster, and the finisher, along with the three lady stitchers, had come in early that morning as usual, and as usual had avoided any friendly chitchat preceding their work in his uncle’s shop. (Chitchat was discouraged as leading ultimately to guild socialism.) They all removed their coats, the stitchers grumbling under their breath that only one machine had been returned to its operational position; then they rearranged the machines and sat down to work. The pasty-faced Pearl Voronsky sat at Shmerl’s customized Singer and started without preamble to stitch a hem. Leaning over her machine to position the fabric beneath the needle bar, she began to pump the pedal, only to find that the pedal, activated by the elementary friction-drive engine that Shmerl had installed in the undercarriage, pumped away on its own. The needle began its rapid pecking, the pedal its automatic seesawing motion, the improvised fan belt rotating at an ever increasing speed. Then a loose strand of the girl’s mousy hair was caught in the sewing mechanism and was itself sewn in a literal “lock” stitch into the fabric, yanking Pearl closer to the treadle platform with each tick of the needle. Finally her head, as if leaning nearer to hear a secret, was yanked to the level of the metal platform and her scalp torn loose with a sickening pop from her skull. The bleeding was profuse, her screaming shrill, general chaos having erupted in the parlor. The noise awoke Shmerl whereas a kick in the behind from his uncle, making his customary entrance after the arrival of his workers, had not. There was no question on the part of Zaynvil, squinching his brow above the tufted bulb of his nose, as to who was responsible for the disaster; he’d had advance notice from abroad of Shmerl’s monkey business and had been warned that he should be on guard against it. Nor did Shmerl deny his part in the debacle. Without protest he accepted his uncle’s hasty justice, seconded by a scowling Tante Dobeh handing him his bag, and allowed himself to be bum-rushed out the door.

  On the street it was winter, the banked snow peppered with soot, and now both homeless and penniless, Shmerl considered his options. He might present himself to Messrs Westinghouse and Edison, whose new patents were announced almost daily in the Forward, which had assumed the task of educating its subscribers in scientific as well as political revolutions. It outlined in detail the uses of the labor-saving and pleasure-giving devices that these elui, these modern Prometheuses, had begun to conceive in rapid succession. Surely such venturesome men had need of a lad with Shmerl Karp’s gifts. But this latest fiasco was the final straw, and beyond contrite, Shmerl found himself actively deploring the notion of secular progress, which clearly led only to disaster. “What place is there in the Golden Land for a wizard who’s sworn off wizardry?” he asked, then felt instantly ashamed of the self-pity implicit in the question. Sorry as he was for the pain that his runaway sewing machine had inflicted on an innocent, Shmerl was in any case relieved to be away from Rivington Street. His pauper’s status served him right, he supposed, though recalling Sholem Aleichem’s Motl Peyse’s, the happy orphan whose adventures were serialized in the Yiddish dailies, he was secretly a little thrilled by his situation. For all around him thrummed America, which he still didn’t approve of, though he had to admit that, barren as it was of holiness, its streets had spectacle and drama to spare.

  So buoyed was he by the sights of the neighborhood, in fact, that he knocked about its streets a day and a night before realizing how tired and hungry he’d become. Everywhere the hucksters and pullers-in, warming their hands at ashcan fires, beckoned you to step with them behind the scenes, though the streets outdid their most eloquent come-ons. At a bookstall an arrogant peddler snatched a volume from a potential buyer and informed him that “this one ain’t for you,” while on a fire escape above them a blanket-bundled prodigy played a mournful rhapsody on a violin. A scribe with a fiddlehead beard squatted on a bucket, offering to pen salutations to your ancestors “that I promise will stink from Isaiah”; a city editor emerged from a basement press festooned in teletape aflame from an ash that had dropped from his cigar. These were attractions that Shmerl could afford, whe
reas he lacked the means to enjoy even the cheapest cafeteria fare—a fact he remembered once his eyes and ears (gone numb from the cold) were sated, leaving his stomach to make its own demands. That’s when he applied to a storefront Canal Street mission for a bowl of soup tasting of solvent, and in the mongrel tongue he’d been refining over his weeks in the sweatshop, inquired through still chattering teeth after a job. He knew there were factories of every type in the ghetto, foundries and tool and die shops, garment factories, of course, by the score; but Shmerl thought it best to keep his distance from machinery, and he’d had enough of the rag trade to last him the rest of his days.