We could talk. That, at least, was allowed.
He kicked off his shoes, put his hat on my desk, and draped his suit jacket over the doorknob. His white shirt was missing a button and his collar was stained from sweat.
Then he lay down on my couch. He hadn’t been there for weeks.
“So what happened?” I asked him finally.
“What happened?” he repeated. “I fell.”
“I know you fell. But why?”
He shrugged.
“Are you sick?”
He shook his head.
“It can’t be the heat this time,” I said. It was a gorgeous eighty-degree day, the kind Washingtonians long for all summer.
Another shrug. This wasn’t going to be a heartfelt dialogue, I could tell. It was more like pulling teeth.
I asked the rabbi if he wanted a glass of water. He said no.
I asked the rabbi if he’d eaten anything. He said no. He’d forgotten.
I told the rabbi I’d get him something from the sandwich shop. He said no. It was forbidden to use money on Shabbat. Besides, everything in that shop, he said, was treyf.
“They have veggie subs,” I said. “Mrs. Goldfarb says those are kosher.”
“She is wrong,” he said.
I’d forgotten about the thousand degrees of kosher. For some Jews, the ingredients had to be kosher; for others, the pots and pans and dishes had to be, too. Some were concerned only about the food, while others demanded certification of the entire restaurant from a central authority. No matter where you fell, one person would think your rules were unnecessarily strict, while another would consider them too lax.
I’d been eating bacon cheeseburgers so long, I’d forgotten about how, when I was growing up, my family had our own mishmash of rules, not unusual for a Conservative Jewish household. We checked packaged goods for a “K” certifying they were kosher, bought meat at a kosher butcher, and never had pork in the house. But Chinese food containing shrimp was granted a special exemption as long as it was eaten directly from cardboard carryout containers with plastic forks. And while my mother would never mix meat and dairy on the same plate, she’d serve kosher ice cream for dessert after a kosher chicken dinner. When I mentioned all this to my sixth-grade Hebrew school teacher, she told me that there was no such thing as “sort-of” kosher, so my mother might as well have served us pork chops and pepperoni pizza. What would the rabbi have said about that? What would he say if he knew I’d eaten sausage just hours before, as part of a pork-laden breakfast sandwich I bought at the drive-through at the very Temple of Treyf, McDonald’s? I didn’t want to know.
“You have to eat something,” I said. “That’s why you’re feeling weak.”
“I’m not hungry,” he said.
“What’s wrong?”
He wouldn’t look at me.
“Why aren’t you eating?” I asked.
“My Sophie used to cook for me.” He sighed.
I wondered: This is an explanation? I looked at him and realized that it was.
He took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes, and rolled away from me on the futon, his back to me. Were there tears in his eyes? I could not see.
He rested, perhaps ten minutes, long enough to stop that conversation from going any further. Then he rolled back over, opened his eyes, and said, “It is time to go home.”
“I’ll get the car and drive you,” I said.
“It is Shabbat,” he said. Driving—even riding in a car—was forbidden.
“You’re not strong enough to walk up that hill,” I said. “I think God will understand.”
“It is Shabbat,” he repeated. Translation: God will most certainly not understand.
So I helped the rabbi put on his suit jacket, handed him his hat, took him by the elbow, and walked him out the door. Past my Corolla, which had a folder filled with semiporno-graphic photos on the passenger seat, and clear across the parking lot. I walked him up the hill, slowly, stopping periodically so he could lean against a street sign and catch his breath. It took almost fifteen minutes to walk the four blocks to his house.
When we got to his door, we both went inside, and I made him a sandwich.
Sitting next to the wall at his small kitchen table, under a plastic wall clock that had Hebrew letters instead of numbers, Rabbi Zuckerman ate slowly. Perhaps he wanted some company and figured I’d stay as long as he was eating. Or perhaps the sandwich I’d prepared left him unimpressed—prepackaged salami was the best thing I could find in his refrigerator.
At least the rye bread looked good. From a bakery.
“My father was a baker,” the rabbi told me between bites. “To this day, I only buy fresh bread. Never from a supermarket.”
I asked about his father, and he told me how his parents had come to the States after the First World War, with a young son and an infant daughter who had been born in Poland. They settled in Jersey City, where his father opened a bakery. And then, a few years later, came Jacob, the baby who would one day become a rabbi, the only member of his family born in America.
“My brother and sister didn’t remember anything about Europe—they came as tiny children,” he explained. “In the house, we spoke Yiddish with our parents, but we all spoke perfect English, too. Still, I used to tease them and tell them I couldn’t understand their accent. I called them ‘my brother and sister from Poland.’ ”
Seated across from me at his kitchen table, he was looking past me, out the window and into space, pausing for a moment to remember. “They are both gone,” he said. “My brother for many years already. My sister just a year before my Sophie.”
I didn’t want the sad memories to lead him back to silence, just when he was starting to open up. I got up and fetched a glass of water, hoping I might get him back on track.
“You should drink something,” I said, putting the glass in front of him. It worked; he snapped out of his trance and looked up at me. Grabbing the opportunity, I tried to get him back to the happier memories: “What was the name of your father’s bakery?”
“Zuckerman’s Bakery,” he said. “Our stores did not have such clever names back then.”
The rabbi’s bookstore was called Glenbrook Books and Judaica. I thought: This is clever? Why not People of the Book? From Right to Left: Jewish Books from Aleph to Tav?
“You didn’t want to follow in your father’s footsteps?” I asked.
“When I was young, yes. But after high school, when I thought I would start work in the bakery, my parents sent me to study in a yeshiva in Brooklyn. And there I studied instead to become a rabbi.”
He never had a congregation, he explained. He taught at a boys’ school in Brooklyn while he continued his own studies. And then he met Sophie. They were soon married. She left the home where she’d lived with the soldier’s family—her adopted American family—and moved into the rabbi’s basement apartment in Brooklyn, and they continued to work at their respective jobs: He taught at the yeshiva while she worked as a nurse at the girls’ school across the street.
One of the soldier’s brothers was transferred to Washington for work in the early sixties, and it was he who suggested that there was a business opportunity there for the rabbi and Sophie. The Jewish community in the Maryland suburbs was booming, he said, but there were few businesses to serve them. A quick look in the Yellow Pages found no Jewish bookstores at all between Washington and Baltimore.
“It was a big move,” the rabbi said, “and a big risk. Not just professionally—there is a risk in any business—but personally. We didn’t know anything about living in the suburbs. I didn’t know how to drive a car or mow a lawn. I had never lived so far from my family. And for Sophie, she had already lost one family and was quite frightened to lose another.”
But they moved, and they learned about cars and grass and fireplaces, and how to run a business.
“You know, Benji, marriage is sacred. But this does not mean that every marriage is perfect. This was a difficult test for us.
When we finally made this decision, to leave our families behind and start a new life here, we only had each other to depend on. But we did it together. And this is how I knew, looking back, that Sophie was the woman I was meant to marry.”
I held up a finger to get him to pause while I got the black-and-white photograph from the mantel and laid it on the kitchen table.
“Yes, we had just moved here,” he said, running a finger around the edge of the picture. “Look at our faces. Big, hopeful smiles. But inside we were scared. We didn’t know what we were doing.”
The suburban Jewish community grew, he explained, especially in the late sixties, when Jews fled Washington after the riots. The business thrived, expanded, diversified beyond books to include jewelry, posters, yarmulkes, and ritual objects from wineglasses to prayer shawls.
As the rabbi spoke about his wife, sweet memories framed in melancholy, his spirit lifted slightly. He spoke in paragraphs, gesturing with one hand while the other held the sandwich he kept forgetting to eat.
“Every day, Sophie was with me,” he said. “We ran the store together. She would work in the mornings, and then come home in the afternoon to cook dinner and take care of the house. I couldn’t make it through one day without her.”
“You were the only ones in the store?” I asked.
“For the first several years, yes,” he said. “We couldn’t afford any help. But we were fine on our own. Just the two of us.”
“And you and Sophie never had kids?” I asked.
He paused, and his expression fell. “No.”
“How come?” I asked.
Wrong question. As soon as I saw his face, I knew I shouldn’t have asked.
He stopped and put his salami sandwich back on the plate.
“We could not,” he said, his eyes growing suddenly heavy again.
He pushed his plate away from him and stood up from the table.
“They did horrible things to her,” he said.
And he left me in his kitchen, alone, listening to the sound of his clock ticking.
Walking back down the hill to retrieve my car, I saw firsthand what the Sabbath looked like in Glenbrook. It was quiet.
Glenbrook wasn’t a ghetto, exactly—there were certainly non-Orthodox Jews, and even non-Jews, living there. In truth, the Orthodox probably made up only half of the residents of this otherwise unremarkable suburban neighborhood. And since they were Modern Orthodox—dressing in “normal,” if abnormally modest, clothing—the area might not even draw a second look from a casual passerby. People who lived nearby drove through Glenbrook every day: past its rows of medium-size brick-front houses graced with oaks and maples in the yards, past its standard-issue sixties shopping center with a supermarket and a video store and a dry cleaner, past its utterly ordinary crosswalks and traffic lights and sidewalks and playgrounds. Most of them never realized that Glenbrook was an Orthodox enclave.
But if they looked closely, they’d notice the mezuzahs on every other door. They’d notice that the local pizza parlor was a kosher pizza parlor, that the local Dunkin’ Donuts was a kosher Dunkin’ Donuts, that most of the stores in the shopping center closed early on Friday night. If they were driving through around noon on a Saturday, they’d see the stream of families walking home from one of the neighborhood’s three Orthodox synagogues; if they were driving through an hour later, they’d notice how few cars there were on the side streets. It’s not that the Orthodox set the rules for the entire neighborhood. But they did set the tone.
Few towns in Maryland were officially incorporated, so their exact boundaries were always subject to debate. For an area like Glenbrook—which was really a neighborhood rather than a town—its very existence was sometimes erased. The Asian families in Glenbrook liked to say they lived in Wheaton, which was home to large numbers of first- and second-generation immigrants from Korea and China, and had a more obvious Asian flavor in its restaurants and shops. Working-class families, black and white, said they lived in Silver Spring, the older and more urban area where many of them had moved from, leaving crowded apartment buildings in search of detached homes with private driveways. Jewish residents of Glenbrook—those of the non-Orthodox variety—said they lived in Rockville, which was a way of saying they aspired to live in Rockville, since it was already home to their temples and their shopping malls and their Jewish Community Center; on maps, Rockville was right next to Potomac, a sylvan suburb of stone mansions with Lexuses and Land Rovers in the garages and enough acreage for a horse out back, where these same people hoped one day to claim to live if they were ever lucky enough to actually live in Rockville proper.
The Orthodox had no such problems. They lived in Glenbrook. It didn’t matter if Glenbrook didn’t appear on maps, that it was basically a no-man’s-land between several other vaguely defined neighborhoods with equally ambiguous boundaries. Their aspirations were not to have bigger homes or closer department stores or easier access to public transportation. They wanted to live in an Orthodox area, where they could live among other Orthodox Jews in an Orthodox community, within walking distance of their Orthodox synagogues. The Orthodox didn’t pretend they lived somewhere else; in their world, the name Glenbrook had great cachet.
Walking down the hill, I wondered if Rabbi Zuckerman ever left Glenbrook. He lived, worked, and prayed there. Where else would he go? He couldn’t get far without a car.
I knew there had been a time when he traveled out of the neighborhood, or across the country—he had his souvenir frame to prove it. But for now, his entire universe was right here. Peaceful, stable, safe.
My apartment wasn’t far away, just a couple of miles from the shopping center, but I went into Washington a lot, to watch Brazilian films or eat Ethiopian food or admire French paintings. As a gay man, I needed the city; no matter how many gay people lived in the suburbs, and there were more than a few, all the gay bars and restaurants and bookstores were in the District. So that’s where I spent a lot of my time. I didn’t hate the suburbs; I grew up in the suburbs and I appreciated things like having a car, living in a safe neighborhood, and saving on rent. But I needed the city, too, as an escape from the dullness that the suburbs invariably bred.
Not Rabbi Zuckerman. It took just a few minutes for me to walk the four blocks from his house back down to the parking lot where my car waited. In that brief time, I realized, I’d walked clear across his shrunken world.
“I know that I lost some aunts and uncles, but I never really knew much about them,” Michelle said. “They were my grandparents’ brothers and sisters.”
In the years I’d known Michelle, we’d had numerous Jewish bonding moments, comparing notes on Hebrew school, holiday traditions, summer camps, family trips to Israel. But we had never talked about the Holocaust, at least not in personal terms.
Now, after I came home with stories of Sophie on my mind, we sat together on the floor around our coffee table, splitting a pepperoni pizza with Dan, sharing what little we knew of our own families’ recent history,
“I think my family’s pretty much the same,” I said, slicing up the pie with a pizza cutter. I knew that some of my distant relatives had died during the war. My father had aunts and uncles and cousins in the Soviet Union who couldn’t get out in time; my mother’s family had all immigrated to the States long before Hitler came to power.
“It’s weird that you guys don’t even know this stuff about your own families,” said Dan, taking a slice and shaking on extra Parmesan cheese.
“Well, it’s not like it just happened,” said Michelle. “We weren’t even born yet. Our parents weren’t even born yet. It was a long time ago.”
“It wasn’t that long ago,” said Dan. Both of his grandparents on his mother’s side were survivors, so he was well aware of his own connection to the Holocaust. “It’s not like they ever talked a lot about it. They didn’t want to freak us out when we were little, I guess. But I knew. It wasn’t a secret. They still had tattoos on their arms.”
&nbs
p; “Wow,” said Michelle. “How old were you when they first told you?”
“I can’t remember. Maybe six or seven.”
“I don’t think I really learned about it until later,” Michelle said. “We read Anne Frank in eighth-grade English class and my parents took me to see Schindler’s List. But that was in junior high.”
“Come on, Michelle,” I said. “You must have heard about it in Sunday school. Or do Reform Jews ignore the Holocaust, too?”
She smiled at me. It was a running gag with us: She’d grown up Reform outside Philadelphia, while I’d grown up Conservative outside Washington. Neither of us went to synagogue anymore or really observed the holidays on our own, but we still teased each other about our upbringings—I’d talk about how she was “technically Jewish” while she’d goad me by calling me “Ben-Jew-man Steiner.”
“Yeah, you’re right, I’m sure we talked about it in Sunday school,” she said. “Right after we learned about the Five Commandments.”
Dan stopped midchew and looked confused.
“We sure talked about it in Hebrew school,” I interjected, without explaining the joke to Dan. I told them how Mr. Bleyer, our principal, would hold a school assembly every year on Holocaust Remembrance Day. “He brought in his striped uniform from one of the camps, and he talked about working outside in the middle of winter with no shoes on, and watching people get beaten to death.”
“Dude, sounds pretty intense,” said Dan.
“I suppose it was,” I said. “My parents talked to me a lot about it, and they gave me a book of poetry by the children at Theresienstadt. They took the Holocaust very personally—not because they had any close relatives who were killed, but because it was such a big part of being Jewish for them.”
Still, I’d had to find out on my own that gay men were victims of the Nazis, too. “My parents never told me that part,” I said.
“They probably didn’t know,” said Michelle.
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