The Frozen Rabbi

by Steve Stern

As Comrade ben Blish launched into his standard recital of miracles performed in the desert, cataloguing fruits that had not been grown there since the time of the prophets, Yigdal and Yehezkel surveyed the congregation. It was their habit even in the friendliest environments to stay alert to the possibility of trouble; to the enemies of Zion no place was sacred. They scanned the faces of the prosperous men in their velvet skull caps and their caparisoned wives in the gallery, focusing on one whose disturbing beauty struck a chord. They turned briefly to each other as the chord thrummed musically in their barrel chests, increasing in volume; then, though it was unseemly to leer for any length at the weaker sex, they turned back toward the handsome woman. Jocheved, from her own angle of vision, felt a similar tug of attraction, the tremor building to a quake that opened a fissure between the moment and a long-buried past. As the speaker began to wind down his talk, he looked ceremonially left and right, which was the signal for his assistants to step from the altar and begin circulating the blue tin collection pushkes. But the twins had already fled the altar, having made a beeline for the stairs to the women’s gallery, where the ladies were astir over the impetuous exit of the decorative Mrs. Karp from their midst. From the staircase beyond the high-domed sanctuary the assembled could overhear peals of laughter signifying a joyful reunion.

  She invited them back to the apartment to meet her absentee family, apologizing that her son Ruben was seldom around and her husband Shmerl often worked late on projects at his plant. She tried phoning him but as usual got no answer, since it was after hours and, on nights when he planned to stay over, the inventor would send the watchman home. She busied herself with serving tea and homemade schnecken; there was also—as despite Prohibition Jews were allowed a portion of wine for ritual purposes—some sugary muscatel. She wouldn’t cease her bustling about until the brothers forcibly sat her down in a wing chair, urging her not to be nervous, it had after all been no more than twenty-two years since they’d said good-bye. “Look on you,” exclaimed Jocheved when she’d collected herself enough to take in their brute demeanors, “like overgrown Boy Scouts.” The twins grinned with damp eyes as if to acknowledge that their rubashka shirts and bandannas, khaki shorts and chukka boots, did perhaps resemble the uniform of some children’s brigade. For their part Yehezkel and Yigdal, between whom Jocheved made no attempt to distinguish, assured her that the pretty sprig they remembered had blossomed into exquisite fruition in her married estate. She touched her thick curls, blushed in an excess of pride in her truant boys, despite the fact that one was given over to wickedness and the other a hostage to his own loopy imagination. Reunited with her brothers, it seemed to Jocheved, at least tonight, that her life had progressed in a triumphal arc from the pestilent ghetto in Lodz to the Upper West Side of New York City.

  They filled each other in on the histories they’d missed the way you’d pitch stepping stones from either bank of a stream. Each item of information—Jocheved’s silent partnership with her husband, Yehezkel and Yigdal’s labors on a collective farm in the Galilee—constituted another stone that brought them a little closer to connecting their respective pasts. They chose, however, only the steadiest and least slippery stones, letting lie the more misshapen and bruising to the touch, for both parties had memories that might not advance their proximity. In this way the ordinarily taciturn brothers and the sister intent on drawing them out passed several charmed hours together; they ate the rolls, drank the cloying wine, and determined that all concerned could not be more content with their lot. The twins had remained unmarried, though in the communes the men and women felt little need for official sanctification of their unions; but they were without wives or issue, having dedicated themselves with the zealotry of the Essenes of old to the creation of a Jewish state. Jocheved listened with a slightly affected awe to their tales, since her time as a man among men had made her no stranger to the anomalies of human behavior that her brothers described. In the small hours when their sister despaired of her husband’s returning home that night, Yigdal and Yehezkel, enlivened by the happy occasion, declared they would go downtown to fetch him. Jocheved protested: No subways or buses would be running at that late hour and taxis would be scarce; they should sleep awhile and wait until morning. But the brothers were restless, insisting that they would walk if they couldn’t find transport; they could in any case use some air, and besides, sleep was something they had learned to do without in the Holy Land.

  THE FIRE AND its attendant explosion, about which a number of unresolved theories had evolved, took three hook-and-ladder brigades and a corps of volunteers to put out. Since the Ice Castle occupied the entire block, the devastation had been largely contained; the neighboring structures suffered only minor damage, and though several firefighters collapsed from inhalation, only one life was lost. But the ash pit which was all that was left in place of the Castle smoldered for days, as if some volcanic landscape complete with smoking fumaroles had erupted in the midst of the ghetto. In the dreary aftermath of the event the twins found themselves unable to abandon their newfound (and newly desolated) sister. Her son, whom they’d discovered in his reckless effort to extract his father from the catastrophe, remained in apparent shock, and was therefore incapable of tending to his mother in any useful way. Informed of the misfortune, their compatriot and charge, Zerubavel ben Blish, was sympathetic. He downplayed the inconvenience, assuring the twins he could manage on his own, though he nevertheless delayed the continuation of his tour and accepted more invitations to speak at Jewish venues around the city.

  In the meantime it seemed to the brothers that they had become re-acquainted with their beautiful sister only to see her fade into a black bombazine specter before their eyes. They’d encountered her luster just in time to see it cruelly snuffed out. Overnight her native composure had folded into a grim passivity, her sable hair uncoiling into gunmetal gray. If she said anything, it was only to utter some self-indictment, such as, “This is my fault for the obscenity I was,” while the untidy attitudes she assumed in the chair she never vacated during the week-long shivah period were oddly genderless. Only on the subject of money did she recover any of her former energy. Due to receive a generous settlement for the factory, whose destruction the twins urged the insurance company to declare an act of God, she said flatly that she didn’t want it; and though her brothers respectfully argued that she was being unreasonable, she refused to accept any benefits from her husband’s death. Needless to say, she had no heart for rebuilding the business; she had scarcely the impetus to feed or clothe herself, and were it not for the efforts of the spinster Shinde Esther, who coaxed her to take a little nourishment, she might ultimately have followed her Shmerl to an early grave.

  As it happened, the inventor’s premature passing had come on the eve of a trip that Esther had been planning for some time. Ever since the loss of her parents over a year ago (one from a terminal mal de mer, the other frightened to death by her husband’s ghost), she’d decided to accept an invitation to visit the only surviving brother save Shmerl that she was still in touch with. The others had been swallowed up by the mammoth American interior, and only Melchior, now Marvin and residing in the exotic fastness of Tennessee, had continued to write. But the trip had been repeatedly postponed due to Esther’s cold feet. It wasn’t until the family-minded Marvin had proposed her outright relocation, offering her a position in his retail emporium—and adding somewhat illogically that her marital prospects might be more promising in a warmer clime—that the top-heavy little woman made up her mind to go. Her parents’ caretaker and crackpot brother’s dependant for far too long, she craved her autonomy. Then came the fire and once again the trip had to be deferred for the sake of looking after the sister-in-law to whom she’d grown attached.

  But sometime during the stagnant days that followed the week of mourning, Esther had a radical idea: Why not make the journey with the widow? After all, what did Jocheved have to look forward to in New York other than sitting alone in an apartment
appointed in obsolete account books and revenant memories? At the very least the trip might distract her, at best jar her into a renewed interest in life. It might even turn out that the town of Memphis, devoid of unpleasant associations, was a desirable place in which to make a new home. Esther talked over her plan with Yehezkel and Yigdal, who agreed it was worth a try and even volunteered to escort the women as far as their destination. They discussed their intentions with Comrade ben Blish, who suggested that, since his itinerary might be altered to include a swing through the southern states, they make the trip together in easy stages. For despite his self-possession on the podium, Zerubavel was a timid man, insecure in the face of traveling alone into the remoter regions of this goyish nation.

  When it came time to present the proposition to the widow, all were braced against her expected resistance. But once her wishes had been honored with respect to the insurance benefits—the attorneys were instructed to distribute them as severance packages among the unemployed staff of Karp’s Castle—the emotionally destitute Jocheved became almost lamblike in her docility. She accepted the judgment of her fellow mourners that the trip would be good for her with the resignation of a prisoner receiving a sentence that could not be appealed, a sentence she felt she deserved. Of course, arrangements had to be made: The apartment must be sublet, Shmerl and Jocheved’s joint account liquidated, the Canal Street property placed in the hands of brokers licensed to sell it at auction, its profits allocated as a sop to the Ice Castle’s investors. Finally it was almost exhilarating how quickly the life the widow had shared with her chimerical husband had been revoked, and with it the able woman she once was. More than merely neglectful of her appearance, she seemed to have reverted to the ambiguous being she had been before her marriage: She’d either hacked off or shed her luxuriant hair until it resembled the bristles of a seven-cent brush, and exchanged her mourning dress for a pair of her dead husband’s trousers; she had also acquired a stoop from the dowager’s hump that had recently risen between her shoulder blades. She was judged now to be frankly unhinged, but at least she was pliant, a small blessing for which all gave thanks.

  There was meanwhile one last detail the brothers had yet to see to, one that when it was mentioned to the widow caused her to stuff her fingers into her ears and cry “Yemakh shmoy!” May his name be blotted out. For hadn’t both her father and her husband made a sentimental fetish of the ghastly thing in its ice-bound hibernation?—and just look at the untimely ends they had met. Jocheved flared up at the rabbi’s mention and let it be known she would be content to leave him atop some rubbish heap where he could melt and decompose as food for the crows. So it was up to her brothers, in deference to the memory of their father and a dead man they had never met, to take care of him. They arranged for his temporary storage in a basement locker at Duckstein’s Funeral Salon on Henry Street, where they supervised the recaulking of his wooden container; they had the zinc lining refilled with water, thus reconstituting via an ammonia absorption agent the frozen mass that had been diminished in the fire. Then once the holy man’s protruding toes and furry ears were again sealed for safekeeping in ice, the twins agreed that the continued maintenance of this reverend family tradition should fall to young Ruben Karp, who needed something to do.

  He had been lurking about the margins of the apartment, an unkempt, brooding figure to whom everyone gave a wide berth. Since the fire he had refrained from washing his face, thinking perhaps that the ashes that smudged his forehead belonged to his father. The neglect was due not so much to reverence as the wish to be marked like Cain for his deed on that fateful night. He kept aloof from participation in the mourners’ minyans that took place whenever there were sufficient visitors to say Kaddish; though from time to time he was compelled by some vague instinct to plant himself beside the chair of his mother, who despite her general inattention might consent to acknowledge his presence with a touch. This he would suffer with a stoic shiver, mildly amazed at the disdain he felt for the woman his actions had so effectively undone. On occasion he had the urge to add insult to injury by confessing his crime. It was certainly no secret, notwithstanding the insurance company’s pressured decision, that the fire had been the result of arson; so intimate were the cops with the trademark methods of the local arson mechanics that they doubtless could have fingered the culprits off the bat. But Naf the Sport had always been punctual in distributing his sweeteners among the local authorities, so the heat from the icehouse fire never touched his tribe. For this Ruby was almost sorry, as a lifetime of penal servitude would have suited his mood.

  Already crushed, his mother would most likely be shattered beyond a hope of retrieval by his confession, but wasn’t that how restitution was made? He knew from the Yom Kippur services of yore that guilt was something you expiated through atonement, and knew also that for what he had done he could never atone. But surely, as action had always been his medium, there was some course of action he ought now to take. It occurred to him that, having destroyed his own father, the next obvious step should be to destroy himself. Then it struck him that this was his conscience speaking—had he suddenly developed a conscience? But the logic it asserted was as foreign to him as a conversation overheard by chance, and if he tried to listen a little harder his brain would cramp up, as if squeezed like a sponge leaking toxins that rankled in the gut. This Ruby supposed was remorse. It was the single identifiable emotion left in his depleted arsenal, while on the other hand it didn’t seem to belong to him at all. He was in any case paralyzed by his present circumstances… until his mother’s brothers lumbered toward him with a proposal.

  He glowered at them from the kitchen table, as who were they, this meddlesome Tweedledum and Tweedledee? True, they had saved his life (thanks for nothing), which he grudgingly supposed gave them the right to an audience. Since the brothers had virtually no English and the Hebrew they’d been speaking for two decades had left them impoverished of their mameloshen, they anticipated some difficulty in communicating with Ruby—who had little enough Yiddish himself, never mind his disinclination to speak to anyone at all. So they engaged his aunt Esther as an intermediary, since, once she’d determined he wouldn’t bite, she had been almost as attentive to the son as to the mother during the past few weeks. Tolerating her ministrations with disregard, Ruby had allowed her to change the dressings on his hands and head, applying salves and ointments as a result of which his wounds were practically healed. But now Esther appeared a little puffed with importance in her office as mouthpiece, and Ruby was almost amused to see how her baked-apple face puckered in the effort to translate the twins’ Hebraized Yiddish into American.

  “As you know, must not be abandoned, our family treasure,” she submitted, turning to ask the twins: “Vos iz der taytsh ‘treasure’?” The twins advised her to please just repeat after them, which she did tugging at her corset in a show of displeasure at having been left out of the loop: “‘We offer to you the privilege exceptionalary that you should escort it, the legacy—’ What legacy?”

  At that point Ruby, having already heard enough, pronounced one of the few Yiddish expressions he knew, “A klug tse eykh alemens (Screw you all),” after which the brothers made it clear to him through an esperanto of persuasive gestures that no was not an option.

  The plan was for Ruby to watch over the casket, much as he’d once guarded truckloads of contraband hooch, on the trip down to Tennessee. He would travel with the rabbi by freight train to Memphis, while his recently extended family took a more leisurely route via Philadelphia, Baltimore, Cincinnati, and St. Louis, with Zerubavel ben Blish promoting the Zionist dream along the way. Once Ruby had grunted his tepid assent, things happened swiftly: He left the apartment for the first time in weeks with his strongarm escort. They took a subway to Hell’s Kitchen, where it was Ruby’s turn to play translator, a function he performed with brusque economy on the loading dock of the Armour Star meathouse adjoining the Hudson railyard. Having assumed that the company men in the freight
office would either balk or up the ante, Ruby decided to bypass them in favor of going straight to the dockhands, with whom he and his uncles soon struck a deal.

  A few days later on a misty morning in early April, a freshly waxed Phaeton hearse from Duckstein’s Funerals drove into the gravel yard. From the rear of the hearse the rabbi in his moldering sarcophagus was transferred by an overhead conveyor directly into a Union Pacific reefer car filled with hanging hams. “You can’t put him instead with flanken?” the twins had inquired, disturbed by the indignity, but Ruby scoffed at their concern. Throughout the operation the railroad laborers, whose palms had been previously oiled, looked the other way. In the meantime, so active was the yard with its switching and shunting, with the clamor of coupling and the hiss of hydraulics, the thud of truncheons cracking hoboes’ heads, that the loading of an old coffin onto a boxcar went virtually unnoticed. Ruby had already swung his duffel along with his father’s salvaged sheep’s pelt onto the refrigerated car. He was in the process of stowing Aunt Esther’s hamper containing a three-day supply of knishes and a thermos of tea, and was about to climb on board himself, when a flashily dressed contingent stepped onto the platform through a billow of steam: a delegatz as it turned out from the mob captain Naftali Kupferman. Ruby wondered what had taken them so long.

  They were led by Naf’s chief stooges Shtrudel Louie and Turtletaub, both wearing belted topcoats over their tropical suits. The moron Little Lhulki was also in tow, along with a couple of rookies in Oxford bags that Ruby didn’t recognize. The lot of them appeared to him now as figures of make-believe, caricature gangsters with cute nicknames stepped from the columns of Damon Runyon, the newspaper scribe.

  Shtrudel Louie gave Ruby a neutral salute with a finger to the brim of his Stetson: “Naftali says sorry for your loss but it’s not nice to leave town without you should say good-bye.” Mr. Turtletaub seconded the sentiment, adding that the boss’s feelings were deeply hurt, while Shtrudel narrowed his eyes to assess the duplicate brutes that stood in their short pants beside Kid Karp.