by Carl Reiner
Now that I read what I had delivered seventy-seven years ago to the “worthy assembly” that had come to celebrate my thirteenth birthday, two things strike me. I don’t think that either the writer or the deliverer of the document believed most of what was written. I did not feel at all “prepared for this honorable day,” and I had no idea what it meant to be “a good Jew.” Certainly, not attending synagogue did not qualify either me or my father for that honor.
On that honorable day, I had the opportunity to deliver the speech twice—first at the synagogue and then at a reception that was held for me in the empty apartment next to the Fishmans’. At the party, my family was joined by my friends Lenny, Davey, Marty, Mutty, Shlermy, and Vic, who were served a slice of birthday cake on paper plates and ginger ale in paper cups. The party lasted for half an hour before all “us guys” left to play a game of stickball in the street, using one of my presents, a “Spaldeeen,” the high-bouncing rubber ball my friends had chipped in to buy.
One Saturday morning, soon after my bar mitzvah, I found myself on the verge of losing a battle I had won every week for the past year. After turning thirteen, I became a most-sought-after young Jew. A group of old men who worshiped at a sad little synagogue directly across the street needed my body for the evening prayers. “It is written” that all ritual prayers intoned in a temple will not reach God’s ear unless a minyan—a quorum of at least ten Jewish men—was present.
Very often, before my bar mitzvah, when a minyan was needed, my friends, who all were a year older than I, were often pressed into service. Even after I became eligible, I managed not to be around when an extra body was needed. One Saturday morning, two “men,” a ninth and tenth man, were needed for the minyan, and I was pressed into service. Besides not wanting to spend my time in a synagogue, I harbored a guilty secret that I have never revealed to anyone—until I wrote the following chapter, whose title tells it all.
CHAPTER TWO
Because of Me, the Prayers of Ten Jews Fell on Deaf Ears
My best friends during my pre-teenage years were, as I have mentioned, Lenny, Shlermy, David, Marty, and Mutty. In their tenth, eleventh, and twelfth years, after a full day attending public school, they spent a good part of their afternoons going to Hebrew school. There, by learning how to read, write, and pray in Hebrew, they prepared for their bar mitzvahs. Happily, my parents did not require that I get this education; however, every day I waited impatiently for my buddies to finish their schooling and come out and play. All became proficient at reading prayers from the holy book they carried to the synagogue every Sabbath. For two years, on Friday nights and all day Saturday, rather than sit alone on the stoop, I accompanied them to the synagogue and hung out with them while they observed the Sabbath and, sometimes, horsed around. Had their parents not been Orthodox Jews, it is likely they would have preferred to spend their weekends in the street playing, rather than in temple, praying.
Often, the six of us were invited to leave the synagogue and not return until we could behave like menschen. One old man’s admonition has stayed with me through the years. I had been particularly talkative that day and, after not heeding his warnings, the annoyed old man exploded. Speaking with a thick Yiddish accent, he shouted at me, “Hey you! Didn’t I once told you to be ‘shut up’! How many times must I told you?”
On one occasion, I might have goaded him, just to hear him say, “Didn’t I told you to be shut up!”
My days of successfully ducking the responsibility of being tapped as the tenth man were waning. When I was a few months shy of my thirteenth birthday, my father sought out a rabbi who would be willing to teach me the prayers I needed to recite at my bar mitzvah. All I can remember about the rabbi was his long, white beard, his healthy paunch, and the dirty toothpick he took from his vest pocket at the start of each lesson. He used the weathered toothpick to pick his teeth and to point to letters and words in the prayer book. He would tap a Hebrew letter or a word on the page and bid me to pronounce it as he did. I quickly memorized the alphabet and, almost as quickly, learned how to singsong the short but important Hebrew prayer that I had to deliver at the altar before “becoming a man.” I never learned to read the prayer, but I memorized it. I was then, and still am, a Hebrew illiterate—and not proud of it.
After my bootleg bar mitzvah, I allowed myself to be conscripted for the minyan and spent every Sabbath praying with my religious friends. I feigned reading whatever prayer was being offered by using my ability to “double-talk” Hebrew. That ability stood me well years later when I joined the great Sid Caesar, using French, Italian, and German double-talk in satirizing foreign films on his television show.
My friends were aware that I was praying in gibberish, but they kept my secret. I feared that if the elders discovered this, they would throw me out, leaving me to fend for myself on the weekend. I was happy to be a member of the minyan, but I suffered tremendous guilt each time I was the tenth man praying. I knew the old men felt that unless ten adult Jews entreated God with the prescribed holy words, God would not be able to hear them. I worried that because I was not using the Bible’s words but Hebrew double-talk, I was keeping the prayers of nine good Jews from reaching God’s ear.
I know that the statute of limitations may have run out on my adolescent crime, but not so my guilt.
CHAPTER THREE
The Thirty-Five-Year-Old Silver Filling
(Adapted from the chapter, “Perpetual Papa” in My Anecdotal Life)
Irving Reiner made his living as a watchmaker and, for diversion, played the violin and flute. He was self-taught and mastered both instruments well enough to perform regularly in amateur symphony orchestras—all this before he married my mother. I recall his practicing both instruments on Sundays. Often he would put my brother and me to sleep by playing lullabies on his flute, and he always obliged me when I begged for “one more, one more!” I actually remember my eyelids droop whenever he favored us with a Brahms lullaby.
My father stood five feet three inches tall and would, by any standard, be considered a short person. However, for the first five or six years of my life, he was twice as tall as I, and for the next few years, I continued to look up at him. It was not until my teen years that I became aware I had grown taller than my father. He did have the best posture in our family and possibly in the neighborhood. He strode down the street with his head held high, his shoulders squared back, and at a pace that was quick and decisive. More often than not, his head was filled with some invention he was in the process of developing—the battery-operated clock being one. My mother told of the time she passed him on the street when she sensed he was preoccupied. She playfully said, “Good morning, Mr. Reiner!”
He doffed his hat, mumbled, “Morning, ma’am,” and continued on.
My brother Charlie, My Papa and myself
As far as I was concerned, my father always stood ten feet tall. He married my mother, Bessie Mathias, who measured an even five foot two. My brother Charlie and I grew to be over six feet, and we asked our science-minded father how he might explain that.
“It’s genetics,” he informed us. “You two carry not only genes from your mother and me but from all your forebears.”
“Well, who among them was tall?” I asked. “Where did our height come from?”
“From my father, your grandfather!” he stated proudly. “He was almost five foot six.”
What my father lacked in height, he made up for in patience, in musicality, inventiveness, and stoicism—a double helping of stoicism.
For as long as I can remember, my father worked at home in the living room of our three-room apartment. He had set up a workbench at the window that overlooked a public school yard. My brother and I slept in the living room on a convertible couch that opened into a double bed. When we became teenagers, our parents decided that all of us would be more comfortable if Charlie and I slept in their twin-bedded be
droom and they shared the convertible couch in the living room.
I was about fourteen when, after school one day, I found myself sitting on that couch and reading the sports section of the Bronx Home News. My father was at his workbench repairing a watch and, at one point, I heard him utter a quiet, “Tsk tsk!” There were actually two occasions when I was seated on that couch and heard a “tsk tsk” escape from him. The second time I heard my stoical Pa’s “tsk tsk,” it was quite a bit louder. I will return to it, as I feel it deserves a chapter of its own.
That first “tsk tsk” was followed by his saying, “Will you look at that!”
Naturally I looked up and saw my father examining a small, metal object that he held in his hand. “You know, Carl, this silver filling,” he said thoughtfully, “has been in my tooth for thirty-five years.”
He did not seem to be in any kind of discomfort, so I asked the question that any good straight man would: “Pa, how do you know how long that filling has been in your tooth?”
“Because I put it there!” he said, pointing to a bottom molar. “This is the tooth I filled when I lived in Vienna!”
Incredible as it may sound, my father had actually filled his own tooth. Before explaining how this came to pass, he fished out a small hand mirror from his workbench and examined the hole left by the departed filling.
“Now this is something!” he said, grinning.
My father uncharacteristically allowed himself to feel pride in something he did three decades earlier and eagerly told me the story of how circumstances had forced him to take on the dual role of patient and dentist.
When he was a mere fourteen, he received his credentials as a master watchmaker and left his home in Czernowitz to ply his craft at a large jewelry store in Vienna. He was employed there for a few years and dutifully used part of his paycheck to support his aging parents.
He told me how when he was eighteen, he had awakened one morning with a severe toothache. A local dentist examined him and discovered cavities in two of his bottom molars and recommended that relief would come if the decay were drilled out. Without using an anesthetic, the dentist proceeded to drill into the first tooth. My father admitted that, in his life, he had never experienced anything as excruciatingly painful. After the first tooth was drilled and filled and the dentist’s drill was poised to start the second one, Pop said that he handed the dentist some money, bolted from the chair, and ran out of the building.
The following morning, the pain was still there but tolerable. It was at this point my father, the watchmaker, decided to become his own dentist.
He visited the public library, found books on dentistry, and from them, learned how to drill out decay, how to prepare a tooth for a filling, and how to compound that filling by using an amalgam with proper amounts of silver and mercury. Not having any anesthetic, he used his delicate jeweler’s drill for only seconds at a time, stopping immediately when the pain was less than bearable. It took many hours to complete the work, but he did it.
My father now looked at the small silver filling lying in the palm of his hand, shook his head and sighed, “Thirty-five years is not bad, but fifty would have been better.”
CHAPTER FOUR
The Louder of the Two “Tsk Tsks”
Not too long after I heard my father mutter “tsk tsk” and learned how capable he was of doing his own dental work, I heard a second and louder set of “tsk tsks.” I expected to see him holding another silver filling, but when I looked up, I saw something that would have provoked any regular person to shout, “Holy shit!” or “Damn, damn!” or “Call a doctor!”
Instead of shouting, I saw my father calmly examining his left hand, where the shaft of a small screwdriver had pierced through the tip of his index finger and was lodged up to its hilt. It seems that while reassembling a watch, my father had attempted to screw a small screw into a newly tapped hole, when the screwdriver slipped from the groove. The “tsk tsks” came a beat after the shaft of the screwdriver went right through the fleshy part of his finger. As I looked on, my Pop was already contemplating how best to remove the bloodied tool from his finger. I suggested that he “Just pull it out!” and he quietly explained why he would not “just pull it out.”
“If I did that,” he explained, “it would just tear more of the flesh.”
He then placed a small cutting pliers against his finger and snipped off the lower shank of the screwdriver and then, without causing any more damage, he gently lifted the nub out, after which he deftly applied some drops of iodine to his wound. Instead of screaming or flinching—as I and most mortals would when applying iodine to an open wound—he remained impassive. He deftly placed a small piece of adhesive tape on his finger, clenched and unclenched his fist, popped the jeweler’s loupe back in his eye, and went back to work.
My Pop continued to work at his bench for many more years— unperturbed by little accidents or the chattering of children that wafted up from the public schoolyard below his window.
CHAPTER FIVE
Irving Shoots Irving Playing Irving
In 1906, my father bought a beautiful, Bohemian-made violin for five hundred dollars. Today, I understand those five hundred dollars would translate to many, many thousands. At that time, my father was an unmarried twenty-one-year-old who had just immigrated to America from Vienna, where he had worked as a master watchmaker. He had never played the violin but loved the music it could make in the hands of a virtuoso. As a three-year-old, he had watched with envy as his six-year-old brother, Harry, took his weekly violin lesson. My father vowed then that one day he would buy an instrument and learn to play it.
To this end, he bought the violin and two books of instructions, one on how to master the instrument and the other on how to read and transpose music. Within a few years, he mastered all three, reading, transposing, and playing well enough to join a couple of orchestras. One, I think, was conducted by Walter Damrosch and another funded by the City of New York and private charities. These orchestras performed free concerts in the city’s parks, concert halls, and public schools. My father spoke of how receptive and grateful the inmates of Ossining Prison were to see and hear a live orchestra playing classical music.
Soon after mastering the violin, my father bought a flute and, once again using books, he learned to master it well enough to be play first flute in these city-sponsored bands.
One of my father’s earlier hobbies was photography. As a youngster, he built himself a pinhole camera, and later, as a young adult, he bought a Daguerreotype camera that photographed images on glass plates. On one such plate, the iconic image of President Abraham Lincoln was captured by the great Civil War photographer, Mathew Brady.
At this moment, if I turn my swivel chair 180 degrees and open a small drawer, I can produce four of these Daguerreotype plates my Pop shot almost a hundred years ago. One has on it an image of my mother, Bessie, nursing my one-month-old brother, Charlie.
My father, having the expertise and the equipment, was always considered by friends and family as the designated photographer.
During his young life, he took many photos of friends, relatives, and one that I possess of his co-workers in a large jewelry store in Vienna, Austria.
One day, years later, when someone asked my father for a photo of himself, he realized he had none and went about getting one. He did this by inventing a self-timing device that could be attached to his camera. The hand-crafted metal device contained a watch spring, which he wound to give himself a few seconds to get into place before it triggered the shutter to snap his image. In 1907, he applied for a patent, and while the patent was pending, he learned that six months earlier, a similar device had been developed and patented in Japan.
Pop’s still-shining, silver-plated device now sits proudly on a shelf in our den. The timer’s spring is still intact, and from time to time, I wind it, just to hear my Pop’s invent
ion tick.
Except for photos I took of my father and my mother when in later years they visited us, I have but one good photo of him as a young man. He is seated in a chair, wearing a single-breasted suit, white shirt and tie, and is playing his violin. As far as I know, this is the only picture that exists where my father is both the subject and the photographer.
I feel confident, however, that I can make the following outrageous claim and not be challenged.
I claim that my Pop is the only person on Earth who has taken a plate-glass Daguerreotype photograph of himself while playing a violin and also had successfully drilled and filled his own tooth.
When my father passed away, he entrusted me with the safekeeping of his violin. It was safely stowed in the living room, next to a large, wooden armoire, where it languished for many years. One day, my dear friend, Leon Kirchner, suggested that a musician colleague of his, the eminent violinist and teacher, Eudice Shapiro, could make good use of it. She had many students who needed a fine instrument to play until they could afford to buy one of their own. My father would have been happy to know that dozens of young violinists, in their developing years, had used his violin, including his great-grandnephew-in-law, Daniel Shapiro, who, like himself, has a scientific bent which led him to become a marine biologist and a tenured professor at Cal State University at Monterey Bay, where he teaches ethics and social justice.
My father would have been ecstatic to know that today, the young student who is now playing his violin is his great-granddaughter, sixteen-year-old Livia Reiner. Livia started using it a few years ago and is now playing it in her school orchestra. He would also be surprised to learn, as I was, that tucked in the bottom of her violin case, Livia keeps a copy of the Daguerreotype photo that her great-grandfather snapped of himself.
