Matters of Choice

by Noah Gordon

  He peered at me. “Come in, come in. Bist ah Yid?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ve been waiting for you,” he said in Yiddish.

  There were no introductions. Introductions came later. “You’re the tenth man,” a graybeard offered. I understood that I made the minyan, enabling them to stop chanting the psalms and begin morning prayers. A couple of the men smiled, another grouchily muttered that Gottenyu, it was about time. Inwardly, I groaned. Under the best of circumstances I wouldn’t wish to be captive to an Orthodox service.

  Yet under these circumstances, what could I do? There were water and glasses on the table, and first they let me drink. Somebody handed me phylacteries.

  “No, thank you.”

  “What? Don’t be a nahr, you must put on the tefillin, they don’t bite,” the man growled.

  It had been too many years, they had to help me wrap the thin leather strap down my forearm, correctly across my palm, around the middle finger. And fix the box containing the Scripture between my eyes. In the meantime two other men came in and put on tefillin and said the brocha, but nobody hurried me. I learned later they were accustomed to irreligious Jews stumbling in on them; it was a mitzvah, it counted as a blessing to be able to give instruction. When the prayers started I found my neglected Hebrew rusty but very serviceable; at the seminary, in ancient days, I had been praised for my beautiful Hebrew. Near the end of the service three of the men stood for Kaddish, the prayers for the recently dead, and I stood with them.

  After we prayed, we breakfasted on oranges, hard-boiled eggs, kichlach, and strong tea. I was wondering how to escape when they cleared the table of breakfast things and brought out oversized Hebrew books, the pages yellowed and tattered, the corners of the leather covers bent and worn.

  In a moment they were studying as they sat on their unmatched kitchen chairs, but not just studying—contradicting, arguing, listening with the keenness of full attention. The topic was the extent to which humankind is composed of yetzer hatov, good inclinations, as opposed to yetzer harah, inclinations toward doing evil. I was amazed at the infrequency with which they consulted the texts before them; they plucked from their memories entire passages of the oral law redacted by Rabbi Judah eighteen hundred years ago. Their minds sped through both the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds, easily and with style, like kids doing tricks on rollerblades. They engaged in pilpulistic debate over points in The Guide to the Perplexed, the Zohar, a dozen commentaries. I realized I was witnessing daily scholarship as it had been practiced for almost six thousand years and in many places, in the great Talmudic academy of Nahardea, in the beth midresh of Rashi, in the study of Maimonides, in the yeshivas of eastern Europe.

  The discussion sometimes was waged in quicksilver bursts of Yiddish, Hebrew, Aramaic, colloquial English. Much of it I couldn’t understand, but often it slowed as they considered a citation. My head still pounded, but I was fascinated by what I was able to comprehend.

  I could identify the head man, an elderly Jew with a full white beard and mane, a fat little belly under his prayer shawl, stains on his tie, round steel spectacles magnifying intense, agate-blue eyes. The Rebbe sat and answered the questions that were put to him from time to time.

  Somehow, the morning sped. I felt that I was a captive in a dream. When they broke for lunch at midday, the scholars went to get their brown-bag lunches, and I shook myself out of my reverie and prepared to leave, but the Rebbe beckoned.

  “You will come with me, please. We will eat something.”

  I followed him out of the study hall, through two small classrooms with rows of worn desks and children’s Hebrew homework pinned to the walls next to the blackboards, and up a flight of stairs.

  It was a small, neat apartment. The painted floors shone, there were lace doilies on the parlor furniture. Everything was in its place; clearly, it wasn’t the home of small children.

  “Here I live with my wife Dvora. She is at her job in the next town, women’s klayder she sells. I am Rabbi Moscowitz.”

  “David Markus.”

  We shook hands.

  The saleswoman had left tuna salad and vegetables in the fridge, and the Rebbe deftly plucked slices of challah from the freezer section and popped them into the toaster.

  “Nu,” he said when he had blessed the food and we were eating. “So what do you do? Salesman?”

  I hesitated. To say I sold real estate would provoke awkward curiosity about what might be up for sale locally. “I’m a writer.”

  “Truly? About what do you write?”

  It was what happened when one wove a tangled web, I lectured myself. “Agriculture.”

  “There’s lots of farming here,” the Rebbe said, and I nodded.

  We ate in companionable silence. When we were through, I helped clear the table.

  “Do you like apples?”

  “Yes.”

  The Rebbe took some early McIntoshes from the refrigerator. “Do you have a room to stay tonight?”

  “Not yet.”

  “So be by us, we rent our extra room, it isn’t dear. And in the morning you will help make the minyan. Why not?”

  The apple I bit into was tart and crisp. On the wall I saw a picture calendar from a manufacturer of matzos, showing the Wailing Wall. I was very tired of being in my car, and when I had used the bathroom, it had been spotless. Why not, indeed? I thought dizzily.

  Rabbi Moscowitz got up several times during the night to go to the bathroom, shuffling on bunioned feet in carpet slippers; I figured he had an enlarged prostate.

  Dvora, the Rebbe’s wife, was a small, gray woman with a pink face and lively eyes. She reminded me of a kindly squirrel, and each morning she sang Yiddish love songs and lullabies in a sweet, quavering voice as she prepared breakfast.

  I didn’t unpack my clothing into the bureau drawers but lived out of my suitcase, aware I would be leaving soon. Every morning I made my own bed and put my things away. Dvora Moscowitz told me everybody should have such a boarder.

  On Friday for dinner there was the same fare my mother had served me when I was a boy: gefilte fish, chicken soup with mandlen, roast chicken with potato kugel, fruit compote, and tea. Friday afternoon, Dvora made a cholent for the following day, when it was for bidden to cook. She placed potatoes, onions, garlic, white pearl barley and navy beans into an earthenware pot and covered them with water. She added salt, pepper, and paprika, and set it to boiling. A couple of hours before the onset of the Sabbath, she added a large flanken and placed the pot into the oven, where it baked in low heat all through the Shabbos, until the following evening.

  There was a wonderful baked crust over everything when the cholent pot was opened, and the rich blend of aromas made me swallow.

  Rabbi Moscowitz took a bottle of Seagram’s Seven Crown whiskey from a cupboard and filled two shot glasses.

  “Not for me.”

  The Rebbe spread his hands. “No shnappsel?”

  I knew if I took the drink the bottle of vodka would come out of my car, and this house wasn’t the place to get sodden drunk.

  “I’m an alcoholic.”

  “Ah. So …” The Rebbe nodded and pursed his lips.

  It was as if I had been able to step into a story I had heard my parents relating about the Orthodox Jewish world into which they had been born. But sometimes at night I awoke and recent memory flooded in, bringing pain that made me want to reach for the bottle. Once I left my bed and walked downstairs and out into the dew-wet yard in my bare feet. I opened the trunk of the car and found the vodka and drank two great life-saving swallows, but I didn’t bring the bottle back in with me when I reentered the house. If either the Rebbe or Dvora had heard me, neither of them said anything to me in the morning.

  Every day I sat with the scholars, feeling like one of the cheder children who came to the classrooms in the afternoons. These men had sharpened their intellects throughout their lifetimes, so that the least of them was light-years beyond my own feeble scholarshi
p of the Bible and halacha, Jewish law. I made no mention to them that I had been graduated from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and ordained as a rabbi. I knew that to them a Conservative or Reform rabbi wasn’t a rabbi. And certainly not a rebbe.

  So I listened in silence as they debated about human beings and their capacity for good and evil, about marriage and divorce, about treyf and kashruth, about crime and punishment, about birth and death.

  I found myself especially interested in one exchange. Reb Levi Dressner, a trembling old man with a husky voice, pointed out three different sages who said a good old age could be a reward for righteousness, but even the righteous could meet death early in life, a great misfortune.

  Reb Reuven Mendel, stout and fortyish, with a red face, cited work after work that allowed those who survived to be comforted with the thought that in death young people often were reunited with a mother or a father.

  Reb Yehuda Nahman, a pale boy with sleepy eyes and a silky brown beard, cited several authorities who were certain the dead carried on a connection with the living and had an interest in the affairs of their lives.

  46

  KIDRON

  “So, did you spend the entire year with the Orthodox Jews?” R.J. asked.

  “No, I ran away from them, too.”

  “What happened?” R.J. said. She picked up a triangle of cold toast and took a bite.

  Dvora Moscowitz was quiet and respectful in the presence of her husband and the other scholars, but as if aware that I was different, when she was alone with me, she became chatty.

  She was working hard to make the apartment and the study house spotless in time for the High Holidays, and in between washings and polishings and scrubbings she filled me in on the history and legends of the family Moscowitz.

  “Twenty-seven years I have been selling dresses at the Bon Ton Shop. I am really looking forward to next July.”

  “And what will happen then?”

  “I’ll be sixty-two years old, and I’ll retire on Social Security.” She relished weekends because she didn’t work Fridays and Saturdays, her Shabbos, and the shop was closed on Sundays, the owner’s sabbath. She had given the Rebbe four children before she was unable to bear more, God’s will. They had three sons, two of them in Israel. Label ben Shlomo was a scholar in a study house in Mea Shearim, Pincus ben Shlomo was rabbi of a congregation in Petah Tikva. Her youngest, Irving Moscowitz, sold life insurance in Bloomington, Indiana. “My black sheep.”

  “And your fourth child?”

  “She was a daughter, Leah, died when she was two years old. Diphtheria.” There was a silence. “And you? You have children?”

  I found myself telling her, not only forced to face it, to think about it, but to put it into words.

  “So. It’s a daughter you’re saying Kaddish for.” She took my hand. Our eyes became moist, I was desperate to escape. Presently she made tea and plied me with mandel bread and carrot candy.

  In the morning I got up very early, while they still slept. I made my bed, left money and a brief note of thanks, and stole away with my suitcase to the car while darkness still hid the stubbled fields.

  I stayed drunk throughout the Days of Awe—in a flophouse in the town of Windham, in a rickety tourist cabin in Revenna. In Cuyahoga Falls, the manager of the motel let himself into my locked room after I had been drinking for three days and told me to leave. I sobered sufficiently to drive that night to Akron, where I found the shabby old Majestic Hotel, a victim of the motel age. The corner room on the third floor needed paint and was full of dust. Through one window I saw smoke from a rubber factory and through another glimpsed the brown flowing of the Muskingum River. I stayed holed up there for eight days. A bellman named Roman brought liquor whenever I ran dry. The hotel had no room service. Roman went someplace—it must have been a distance because it always took him so long—to fetch bad coffee and greasy hamburgers. I tipped generously so Roman wouldn’t roll me while I was drunk.

  I never learned whether that was the bellman’s first or last name.

  One night I awoke and knew someone was in the room. “Roman?”

  I turned on the light, but no one was there.

  I even searched the shower and the closet. When I switched off the light, I felt the presence again.

  “Sarah?” I said at last. Then, “Natalie? Is it you, Nat?”

  Nobody answered.

  I might as well call out to Napoleon or Moses, I thought bitterly. But I couldn’t rid myself of the certainty that I wasn’t alone.

  It wasn’t a threatening presence. I kept the room unlit and lay in the dark, remembering the discussion in the study house. Reb Yehuda Nahman had quoted sages who had written that the beloved dead never are far away, and that they take an interest in the lives of the living.

  I reached for the bottle and was struck by the thought of my wife and daughter watching me, seeing me weak and self-destructive in this foul room stinking of vomit. There was enough alcohol already in me to bring a sodden sleep, finally.

  When I awoke I felt that I was alone again, but I lay on the bed and remembered.

  Later that day I found a Turkish bath and stretched out on a bench in the steam and sweated booze for a long time. Then I took my filthy clothes to a Laundromat. While they were drying I found a barber and received a very bad haircut, saying good-bye to the ponytail; time to grow up, try to change.

  The next morning I got into the car and left Akron. I wasn’t surprised when the car drove me back to Kidron in time for the minyan; I felt safe there.

  The scholars greeted me warmly. The Rebbe smiled and nodded as if I were just returning from an errand. He said the room was vacant, and after breakfast I carried my things upstairs. This time I emptied the suitcase, hanging some things in the closet and placing the rest in the bureau drawers.

  Autumn became winter, which in Ohio was very much like winter in Woodfield except that the snow scenes were more open, field upon field. I dressed as I had in Woodfield, long underwear, jeans, woolen shirt and socks. When I went outside, I wore a heavy sweater, a stocking cap, an ancient red muffler Dvora gave me, and a navy pea coat I had bought secondhand in Pittsfield my first year in the Berkshires. I walked a lot, my skin roughening in the cold.

  Mornings I participated in the minyan, more as a social obligation than because prayer made full contact with my soul. I was still interested in listening to the scholarly discussions that followed each service and found that I was understanding more of what I heard. After noons, the cheder children came noisily into their classrooms adjoining the study room, and some of the scholars taught them. I was tempted to volunteer to help in the classrooms, but I understood that the teachers received payment, and I didn’t want to break anyone’s rice bowl. I read a lot from the old Hebrew books, and occasionally I asked the Rebbe a question and we talked.

  Each of the scholars knew it was God who made it possible for him to study, and they took their work seriously. When I watched them, it wasn’t quite like Margaret Mead studying the Samoans—after all, my grandparents had belonged to this culture—but I was only a visitor, a stranger. I listened hard and like the others often dove into the tractates on the table in an attempt to buttress an argument. Once in a while I forgot my reticence and blurted a question of my own. This happened during a discussion of the world to come.

  “How do we know there is an afterlife? How do we know there’s a connection with our loved ones who have died?”

  The faces around the table turned to me with concern.

  “Because it is written,” Reb Gershom Miller murmured.

  “Many things that are written are untrue.”

  Reb Gershom Miller was irate, but the Rebbe looked at me and smiled. “Come, Dovidel,” he said. “Would you ask the Almighty, Blessed Be He, to sign a contract?” And reluctantly I joined in the general laughter.

  One evening at supper we discussed the Secret Saints, the Lamed Vav. “Our tradition says that in every generation there are
thirty-six righteous men, ordinary humans going about their daily work, on whose goodness the continued existence of the world depends,” the Rebbe said.

  “Thirty-six men. Couldn’t a woman be a Lamed Vovnikit?” I asked.

  The Rebbe’s hand crept into his beard, scrabbled about as it did whenever he pondered. Through the open door to the pantry, I saw that Dvora had stopped what she had been doing. Her back was turned to my vision, but she was a statue, listening.

  “I believe she can.”

  Dvora resumed her work with great energy. She looked pleased as she carried in the salmon salad.

  “Could a Christian woman be a Lamed Vovnikit?”

  I asked it quietly, but I sensed that they felt the weight of the question in my voice and knew it stemmed from something intensely personal. I saw that Dvora’s eyes searched my face as she set the plate on the table.

  The Rebbe’s blue eyes were inscrutable. “What do you think is the answer?” he said.

  “Of course she can.”

  The Rebbe nodded without surprise and gave me a little smile. “Perhaps you are a Lamed Vovnik,” he said.

  I took to waking up in the middle of the night with a perfume in my nostrils. I remembered breathing it in when my face was buried in your throat.

  R.J. looked at David, and then she looked away. He waited a few moments before he began to speak again.

  I dreamed of you sexually and my sperm leaped from my body. More often I saw your face, watched you laugh. Sometimes the dreams didn’t make sense. I dreamed of you sitting at the kitchen table with the Moscowitzes and some Amish. I dreamed of you driving a team of eight horses. I dreamed of you dressed in the long shapeless Amish garb, the Halsduch over your breast, the apron around your waist, a demure white Kapp on your dark hair….

  In the yeshiva I was offered goodwill to a point, but little respect. The scholarship of the men of the study house was deeper than my own, and their faith was different.

  And everyone at the yeshiva knew I was a drunk.

  On a Sunday afternoon the Rebbe officiated at the marriage of the daughter of Reb Yossel Stein. Basha Stein was united with Reb Yehuda Nahman, the youngest of the scholars, a seventeen-year-old who throughout his life had been an ilui, a prodigy. The wedding was held in the barn, and everyone in the yeshiva community came. When the couple was beneath the canopy, they sang lustily: