by Steve Stern
1929 – 1947.
I must have contracted some kind of Yid virus from wrestling with the rabbi in the river,” Bernie read to Lou Ella in her bedroom, where Lou sometimes referred to herself acidly as the unmade girl on the bed. “It was a virus with a long incubation, because many years passed before the fever woke up in me.”
WHEN HIS FAMILY arrived several weeks later, they found Ruby bivouacked beside a packing crate containing the frozen holy man in a “frigidarium” at Blochman’s Cold Storage just off North Main Street. Blochman’s was an all-purpose facility housing wine, furs, antiques, and pharmaceuticals as well as meat and produce, located around the corner from Karp’s General Merchandise, the concern owned and operated by Ruby’s Uncle Marvin. A paunchy, balding, ordinarily generous man, Marvin had initially offered his young nephew accommodations in his Mediterranean-style house out on the Parkway but had been visibly relieved when the uncommunicative kid declined his invitation. For despite having been notified of what was coming, Esther’s brother, who’d arranged for the stowage of Ruby’s freight, found the deadpan nephew and his charge a bit more than he’d bargained for. On his side Ruby had reached the end of his tolerance for newly acquired relations and preferred to stay behind the cam-locked door of the warehouse cold room, where he could continue to keep an eye on the rabbi.
Both Blochman’s and Karp’s establishments were situated in a downtown district called the Pinch, a neighborhood of mom ‘n’ pop businesses run by Russian-Jewish immigrants who lived in the rackety apartments above their shops. They were the dross of a vestigial community who, unlike the enterprising Marvin Karp (who’d voluntarily dropped the inski from the end of his name), had not prospered enough to move out of their ghetto and clung to it as to an island in uncharted seas. It was an island bounded on the west by the river, clogged with barge and packet-boat traffic, and surrounded by a city that often hosted spectacles that tried the nerves of the Jews. There were the parades down Front Street of the syklops and kleagles of the Ku Klux Klan marching in their cotton sheets, some of which had been purchased at Karp’s General Merchandise. There was the tabernacle erected on the river bluff from which the voice of an itinerant Billy Sunday challenging the devil to seven weeks’ combat could be heard all the way to North Main. Sometimes the sovereignty of the Pinch itself was violated, such as when the city fathers shut down the Suzore Theater for showing a film featuring Theda Bara (neé Theodosia Goodman), a film star of questionable morals; or when a representative from the board of health came to the Neighborhood House on Market Square to declare that dancing the Charleston (since when did Jews dance the Charleston?) could lead to death through inflammation of the peritoneum. There were the creepers and poison lianas that overtook the tenements in spring, and the sickly scent that lingered for days over the Pinch after the auto-da-fé of a Negro a few blocks north at Catfish Bay. So the Jews had enough already to rattle their composure without the additional bogey of a sinister young stranger rumored to be the guardian of an old man in a lump of ice.
For rumor was mostly what Ruby was, since he seldom appeared in the street, venturing out only to purchase an occasional plate of kishka from the sidewalk window at Rosen’s lunch counter. Unwashed and unshorn, his blue flesh mottled with chilblains, the sheep’s pelt steaming in the sun, he was an eyesore the citizens of North Main Street could frankly have done without. There was about him the unhappy air of the penitent, and what with the daily penance of making a living with which the Jews had been cursed since their expulsion from Eden, who needed more emphatic reminders of their fate? Though in truth Ruby had no formal program for scourging himself, having advanced to a state of dispassion far beyond self-loathing. It was just that, since rescuing the rabbi from watery ruin, he’d concluded that his place was now to look after the old antediluvian, an attitude as near to purpose as he could come. Also, there was the habit of numbness he’d acquired during his refrigerated transit that made the temperature in the cold storage locker seem almost favorable.
But the twins had other plans for their nephew. Certain matters had been neatly resolved, if not during the train ride down to Memphis then shortly thereafter. For one thing, Zerubavel ben Blish and Shinde Esther, both daunted by the size and disharmony of the American continent, had tended to cling to one another out of a mutual solicitude. More adaptable, Esther had summoned untapped reserves of pluck for the sake of soothing Zerubavel, who by journey’s end had come to esteem her just this side of idolatry. In the meantime Esther had been thoroughly indoctrinated by Comrade ben Blish’s Zionist propaganda, so that by the time they reached Tennessee her thoughts (when not of him) were almost exclusively of the Jewish National Home. In this way the spinster decided that, once she’d seen Jocheved comfortably settled in Memphis (there was no talk of her returning to New York), she would follow her destined one back to Eretz Israel where they would be wed. Meanwhile, though the widow, stooped and wearing items of her late husband’s apparel, no longer resembled her former self, her new persona had lost some of its fog of melancholy. This was perhaps owing in part to the city of Memphis itself, with the aromatic musk of its sultry spring, which may have worked as effectively to reduce Jocheved’s paralysis as refrigeration had to consolidate her son’s. Despite her unseasonable aging and a countenance euphemistically referred to as “bohemian,” Jocheved exhibited an animation that manifested itself, upon her arrival in the mid-South, in a furor of concocting glacés and ice cream.
Marvin and his good wife, Ida, whose pinched face belied a sanguine disposition, were understandably overwhelmed by such an infestation of family, most of whom they had never met. They were intimidated by the bullet heads and oxlike brawn of the twin brothers, nonplussed by Esther’s announcement of her wedding plans and by the widow’s idiosyncrasies. Nevertheless they provided lodging for one and all, both in their rambling house with its green-tiled roof and in a guest cottage entered through a wisteria arbor in the garden out back. It was in that little mother-in-law annex that Jocheved began to set up a kind of laboratory—assembling there the pails, spaddles, and confectionery ingredients commandeered with Ida’s consent from her well-equipped kitchen—that she would need for the manufacture of her frozen treats. In light of her own bliss the affianced Esther was now anxious to get Jocheved off her hands, and toward that end she had early on consulted with her brother. Since the guesthouse stood empty most of the year, why not reap some bonus income from renting it out to the widow? On that score Marvin had needed no cajoling: “I thought already the same thing myself.” A childless couple who compensated for their barren union with cats, Marvin and Ida had already begun to look fondly on the widow, as if in her hoydenish habits she were yet another stray. Then there were the sorbets, tutti fruttis, and frozen custards that Jocheved served at their communal dinners, which had given Marvin a bright idea. Pixilated though she was, Jocheved was at the same time a fully functioning agent: He would set her up under an awning in front of his store “where she will reign supreme as the empress of ice cream.” He grinned his pleasure at the impromptu jingle. Always in great demand in the scorching southern summers, ice cream would draw more customers to Karp’s than his squad of schwartze pullers-in ever had.
For a while Marvin and Ida, whose affluence had estranged them from their old neighbors in the Pinch, began to warm to the windfall of their sudden family, and though they’d run out of reasons to prolong their visit, the guests found it difficult to give up such hospitality. The twins, schooled for decades in collective habitation, performed the household chores unsolicited and with jugglerlike sleight-of-hand; Zerubavel, who wore his high collar and silk four-in-hand to dinner, recited the Hebrew verse of Bialik and Tchernichowsky after meals, and Jocheved plied the table with tasty desserts. The only note of discord—the one that finally spoiled everyone’s good time—originated with Esther, who under the influence of her betrothed had become something of an ideologue. For all the gladness she’d expressed at their reunion, she soon after began to tr
y her brother’s patience with her criticisms of his bourgeois lifestyle, even taking issue with his choice of residence in such a backward jerkwater town.
“What are they anyway doing in Memphis, the Jews?” she’d asked one night as the twins, mindful bulls in a china shop, were clearing away dishes from the dining-room table.
To which Marvin, a booster for whom the Bluff City had always spelled opportunity, replied testily, “What are they doing in Palestine?”
Things degenerated from there into name-calling, the host and his sister addressing each other coolly thereafter as Red Esther and the Baron. Within a week Zerubavel and his intended had departed in a huff for New York, where they would take passage on a steamship of the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique bound for Marseilles, and from there ferry on to Haifa. But before they left, Esther had accompanied Yehezkel and Yigdal—satisfied now that their sister was in good hands—to Bloch-man’s Cold Storage, where they informed Jocheved’s son through the medium of his aunt that he would be sailing with them to Eretz Israel. Having observed him in action, his uncles had determined that the lad, despite his near hypothermia, could be of signal use in the development of the Yishuv; and since he was only marking time in America, why shouldn’t he be given the chance to apply his talents to a cause greater than himself? It never occurred to them, so habituated were they to self-sacrifice, that he might have plans of his own.
Though, beyond keeping company with the rabbi beside the reliquary of his packing crate, Ruby had none. But what was Palestine? He had only the vaguest notion: something about a country without a people for a people without a country: He’d heard the slogans. But to his hibernal mind it sounded as if each side of the equation might exclude the other, and then the Jews would be nowhere at all. Of course, reasoned Ruby, if he belonged anywhere it was nowhere. He knew also that Avner Blochman, proprietor of the facility wherein he was quartered, was fed up with his unwanted tenant, and had finally screwed up the courage to evict Ruby along with his frozen charge. “This ain’t no spookhouse,” the hangdog Avner advised, for such had been the reaction of his clients, whom reports of the rabbi and his custodian were driving away. Out on the tree-shaded Parkway, having gotten wind of Ruby’s dilemma, Marvin Karp’s guests elicited the last ounce of their host’s goodwill, prevailing on him to make room for his brother Shmerl’s bequest. Ultimately Marvin did agree to store the ghoulish memento in an old laundry tub in his wine cellar, but with the understanding that his benevolence would end upon the repeal of Prohibition, when the memento could be replaced by a case of sauvignon blanc. He also made it clear that his charity did not extend to the rebbe’s grim-visaged guardian.
Ruby received the news of his imminent eviction with a shrug. Separation from the rabbi would deprive him of his last excuse for staying put, a prospect that alternately calmed and discomfited him. The cold had in any case permeated his insides to a degree that suggested he now carried the essence of Ezekiel ben Zephyr in his bones. As for his mother, Ruby had visited her once or twice in her bower, only to discover that he had no filial feeling left for her at all. With her lick of cinereous hair and her klunky, unfeminine movements drained of the grace that once informed them, he hardly recognized her. Absently pinching his cheek or brushing the frost from his scalp before returning to her ice-making apparatus, she resembled (a chilling notion) her dead husband more than herself. In the end he concluded that, as befitted a son who’d destroyed his entire family, he was no more to her now than the cats that padded in and out of her apartment. He was cast out from everything that in theory he ought to hold dear, a situation he appreciated as heartbreaking, even tragic, the way he might have viewed some schmaltzy photoplay. Moreover, there was a fitting justice in Ruby’s being dragged by his broad-backed uncles to some godforsaken desert environment, where his anaesthetized sensibilities risked thawing in the heat of the sun.
“I’ll think it over,” he told the twins, who told him he could think it over during the voyage to the Holy Land. For having dipped into the donations they’d collected for the National Fund, the brothers had already booked passage on a cattle boat sailing from the port of New Orleans, and had taken the liberty of purchasing a ticket for Ruby as well.
THAT WAS HOW he came to find himself, some ten years later, standing on a watchtower beside an amber searchlight in an oasis reclaimed from a swamp called Tel Elohim. It was the same communal settlement folded among the foothills of the Upper Galilee to which Ruby and his uncles had retreated after the the Arab uprising of 1929. This was the slaughter that had greeted them at the moment when Ruby first set foot upon the Land; so that it was clear to the newcomer from the outset that the country without a people was already populated, and its population not eager to share its beggarly streets, moon-dusted dunes, camel tracks, and waterless wells with the people without a country. Nevertheless Ruby did what he was told by the twin brothers, who seemed to belong both everywhere and nowhere. Since categories of right and wrong existed only for those parties with something at stake, the finer points of the situation were of no concern to the recent immigrant. Just off the boat, he was interested in little more than putting himself in the way of bodily harm (the only outlook that could stimulate his sluggish brain), and Palestine looked as if it would afford him ample opportunities to do just that. Confronted with death, however, he repeatedly cheated it. This was not so much because he wanted to live as that he thought he deserved to prolong his pain—though who was he fooling? There was no pain, nor fear, or thrill of engagement, only action and the boredom between actions that was the real dread; because, while most of his senses were unresponsive, Ruby’s memory persisted, and it haunted him with unkind reminders. In the event, he’d waived his independence, placing his fate in the hands of the veteran campaigners Yig and Yez, as he called them. They saw to his formal training in arms and explosives, areas in which he already had a head start, and in stealth, which he came by naturally. They coached him in husbanding the anger that he was still able to call upon at will, although it was now entirely impersonal, which made Ruby an even more perfectly tuned instrument for redressing the offenses to the Yishuv.
Not once during the succeeding years did he relax from participating in the relentless cycles of bloodletting. Despite the end of the so-called Arab Revolt and the monotony of terror and counterterror that intervened before the beginning of the next so-called Arab revolt, Ruby never gave up his part in the general effort to turn the Promised Land into a slaughterhouse. Of course there were interludes along the way, during which Ruby’s edgy impatience caused others to keep their distance. As he and the twins moved from safehouse to smallholder farm among the ranks of the maverick irregulars, the immigrant earned not only the fear and respect of his fellows but a reputation as a solitary of forbidding countenance. The Baal Shatikah, his comrades called him (though never to his face), the Master of Silence: “Silence, too, is sometimes a midrash.”
Over time he picked up enough of the language to follow orders and conversations, though never enough to respond to questions with any exactitude. He figured that the lashon hakodesh, the holy language, albeit secularized, might sear his tongue if he spoke it, and his failure to master even the rudiments of Hebrew often left strangers to conclude he was mute. All of which contributed along with his monkish aloofness to the legend he was unintentionally cultivating as a man apart. He was perceived by the superstitious (and there were many among the settlers fresh from the rustic culture of Eastern Europe) as quite possibly inhuman, a creature fashioned from clay to avenge all affronts to Israel; it was a notion that caused his uncles to worry that they had perhaps created a golem, though who could argue with success? And over the years, as the tit-for-tactics of terror and reprisal became almost routine, Ruby’s notoriety grew, his sketchy identity further subsumed by the numerous masquerades he was forced to adopt. In the end, fabled among the Jews, to himself he was no one at all: the Master of Silence had become a symbol referred to in secret circles as Ruben ben None,
and his heartlessness among a people attempting to shed millennia of acute sensitivity and guilt was universally extolled.
Ruby’s unvarying silence, so conspicuous in places where talk was a mania, was sometimes construed as endorsement, sometimes disapproval, according to the attitude of the beholder. But the truth was he neither approved nor condemned, but was finally indifferent, just as he was indifferent to the life of the k’vutzah itself—which, with its religion of labor, was identical to the dozens of others that proliferated all over the Yishuv. Nevertheless, since not even the guardians were exempt from the work of the collective, Ruby became mechanically proficient at the chores he was assigned. Though he would ultimately settle into the loner’s occupation of tending sheep, he also milked goats, dug trenches, drained septic tanks, and erected stockades; he repaired roof girders and laths and even demonstrated some ingenuity in doctoring the commune’s capricious three-phase dynamo, called ironically Ner Tamid, the Everlasting Light. His uncles, though they praised his industry, compared the facile work of the current settlement to the herculean hardships of its primitive beginnings during the time called the Second Aliyah. Ruby had arrived during the Fourth, a piece of history for which he gave not a fig. Uninspired by the labors he conducted with due diligence, neither was Ruby aroused by the festivals that were the rigorous calendar’s only breathing spells. Shabbat, when the settlers allowed themselves a thimbleful of sweet Carmel wine, was as unremarkable as Purim, when they donned costumes and flogged an effigy of Haman. They sang patriotic anthems (“Yesh Li Kinneret” and “God Will Rebuild Galilee”) and danced the hora in concentric circles, the outer circle whirling as in a game of crack the whip. Then even Yehezkel and Yigdal, still agile for all their bulk, would join in, and girls with strong thighs—wearing the shorts that caused the Mussulmen to call them whores—might approach Ruby where he sat with his back against a eucalyptus tree. These were strapping girls bred to flirting with danger and tempting fate, but when they tried to draw him into the dance, Ruby only eyed them dispassionately and waved them away as he waited for the next summons to action.
