Later that morning, Rabbi Isaac ben Reuben, the rabbi of the Chelsea synagogue where Levy davened, absorbed the arrhythmic pulse of the city as he crossed City Hall Plaza. The heat and humidity of the canicular weather gnawed at his knuckles. Although he had no memory of it, Nazi hammers had fractured and re-fractured those knuckles as if they were rocks being split apart. Now they bulged from the back of his hands like cancerous tumors whose cells had never stopped dividing. An amateur boxer who fought several fights too many was his explanation when people asked.
After the war, the rabbi healed himself by cocooning certain of his memories of the Nazi era to create an amnesia so selective that although he did not forget the Nazi era from an historical perspective, he had no memory of his having lived through it, no memory of his personal experiences. These memories did not exist for him, but they had enough of a presence in his subconscious to influence his life. He never married. He did not share the naive belief so common among American clergy, especially rabbis, that a benevolent God would somehow make things right. Nor did he question how God could permit such an evil as Adolf Hitler. For Rabbi ben Reuben, men of unspeakable evil were as much a part of the history of the Jewish people as the Covenant.
Now, the rabbi weaved between the lines of people on City Hall Plaza queued up at the pushcarts offering hot dogs and sauerkraut, gyros and Greek salads, meat pies, and cold soda, pushcarts whose prices for cold drinks rose in lockstep with the temperature. The lunch hour rush had begun, but the knish and latke vendor’s space was vacant. Snatches of conversation curled above the pushcarts. “His blood was drained,” a woman waiting for a gyro said. “I told the wife not to let the kids out of her sight,” a construction worker told the hot dog vendor.
Levy’s call to ben Reuben had come shortly after sunrise in time for the rabbi to turn on the news and hear a phrase he thought he had forever left behind in Europe: blood libel. “It’s not true,” he screamed at the announcer, but she repeated the phrase twice before moving on to a commercial for a breakfast pastry that could be heated in a toaster.
Pain detonated inside the rabbi’s skull. He staggered to his desk and collapsed into the desk chair. Blood libel. Sparks darted along the neural pathways of his brain tracing white lines against the pinkish hue of his brain tissue as shocking as the bolts of lightning discharged from the Van de Graaff generator at Boston’s Museum of Science. The white lines roamed freely until they reached an island of black engulfing the hippocampus, a barrier that dead-ended the neural pathways. The sparks piled up against this barrier like medieval soldiers against a castle wall they could not breach. As suddenly as it appeared, the pain in his skull vanished. A thought lingered in the rabbi’s mind. Something unknown lay dormant within that castle.
Later, in the synagogue, as he and Jacob Moskovitzky waited for a minyan to assemble for Shacharit, the rabbi repeated the words he had screamed at the television announcer. “It’s not true.”
“Not here, not in Europe,” Moskovitzky replied.
Aged and elderly, they gathered each day in the Chelsea shul with other refugees from Nazis or Stalinists, Bolsheviks or Communists, pogroms or inquisitions as virulent and violent as centuries earlier when Spain exiled its civilization. The slander was not true, Moskovitzky and ben Reuben agreed, but they knew it did not have to be true to be “true.” It was the nature of this peculiar and indelible slander against Jews that the truth was in the slandering regardless of the inveterate inaccuracy of what was said. After a long wait for a tenth congregant, the rabbi asked Yod. Heh. Vav. Heh.’s forgiveness and began the service with nine. Yod. Heh. Vav. Heh, the name of God expressed as a tetragrammaton since His name was too sacred to be spoken.
“I will call my grandson,” Moskovitzky said after the benediction. Moskovitzky had founded Boston’s preeminent Jewish law firm, its name sanitized as Mosca, Baruch and Cohen. On his ninetieth birthday, leadership of the firm devolved upon his grandson, Jeffrey Mosca.
“They refuse,” Moskovitzky said after completing the call. “Jeffrey says they are not criminal lawyers.”
“He’s afraid, Jacob. In Europe fear made us brave. Here it makes us cowards.”
“Jews have it too easy in this country,” Moskovitzky said. “We’ve become complacent. Forgetful of history. Our senses cauterized.”
For the remainder of the morning, Moskovitzky continued to seek legal counsel for Levy. Boston’s principal civil liberties firm, Ginsberg, Levin, and Katz, begged off, confessing that they depended on Jewish contributions to balance their budget and they feared those contributions would cease or be substantially reduced. Other firms demanded substantial cash retainers or quoted high hourly rates. One or two admitted they depended on the good will of City Hall to represent their clients effectively. Soliciting contributions to a defense fund failed. Jews who raised millions of dollars for Israel in a morning shunned Levy as if he were traif. The rabbis of wealthy suburban congregations refused to return Moskovitzky’s phone calls.
“In the old country, we were not our own enemy,” Moskovitzky said.
“Who defends the undefended?” The rabbi chewed aspirin to relieve the pain in his joints.
“Suffolk County Legal Services.”
“What do they know of blood libels?”
The rabbi went into the kitchen for water to wash down the aspirin grit coating his tongue. Curling his fingers around a plastic child’s cup with an oversized handle and four large finger notches, he struggled to line it up with the stream of water flowing from the faucet. Water cascaded around his wrist, soaking the cuff of his shirt sleeve. He leaned on the edge of the sink to steady his arm. Slowly, too slowly, the cup filled with water. Cartoon characters decorated this child’s cup, three large dogs with eye patches chasing a puppy holding a bone. As recently as yesterday, these characters had amused him; but on this morning, he could only think that somewhere there must be a cup where the puppy was caught and ripped asunder by the dogs. He raised the cup to his lips and drank, swishing the water around his mouth before swallowing it. The aspirin particles felt like crushed stone sluicing down his throat.
Now, under a midday sun hotter than the wrath of Yod. Heh. Vav. Heh. at the golden calf, Rabbi ben Reuben hobbled across a crowded brick plaza fronting Boston’s city hall that festered with the talk of blood libel. The air was so thick with heat that breathing seared his nasal passages and lungs. The stench of greasy pushcart food, intensified by the heat, made him nauseous.
He wondered whether he had smelled a similar stench before. Where? When? He did not remember. He dismissed the thought as a by-product of the heat, worrying instead that at his age, prone to heat stroke, he might not make it to the other side of the plaza.
He gagged, then dry-heaved, and leaned against the outer wall of the entrance to the Government Center subway station to catch his breath. He sucked on a mint to cleanse the funny taste in his mouth. His mind felt like a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle that had been dumped from its box onto the table, several hundred spilling onto the floor. After several minutes, he pressed on across the plaza.
In the office of Steve Frohling, Director of Suffolk County Legal Services, the rabbi shivered in the draft of the air conditioner. “Sit. Please.”
That was the same invitation the agent of the Immigration and Naturalization Service had issued to the rabbi when his turn finally came for the interview that would determine whether he would be allowed to enter the United States. Many hours he had waited in a large room which smelled of hundreds of unbathed people, the sweat of his hands staining the paper with the interview number that has been assigned to him. New York. 1946 or 1947. The rabbi did not remember which.
The nameplate on the agent’s desk identified him as Mr. Minzhe and he resembled the waiters in the Chinese restaurant across the street from the docks in London. The rabbi did not eat in that restaurant even though he was hungry because neither the food nor the kitchen was kosher. On the boat, during the long ocean voyage, he had no choice but to
eat. To absolve himself, the rabbi invoked the doctrine of Pikuach Nefesh, the principle in Jewish law that the preservation of human life overrides the restrictions of Kashrut, the Jewish dietary laws mandating what observant Jews could and could not eat. Perhaps, he would have survived the voyage without eating, but he had heard the INS turned away people who were sick. In his mind, Pikuac Nefesh applied.
“The early 1930’s,” he had replied when Mr. Minzhe asked him when he had been ordained as a rabbi. “I came to the rabbinate later in life than most.”
“And then?” Minzhe had asked.
“Now, I am here?”
“From then to now?”
The rabbi paused. “I don’t remember.”
Minzhe eyed him with the look of a judge being told by a recidivist that he would not do it again if given probation rather than a jail sentence. “Recite the Shema,” he said.
“The Shema? You know this prayer?”
“It was drilled into my head in Hebrew school.”
Because of Minzhe’s sallow skin tone and Chinese features, the rabbi assumed he was not Jewish. The rabbi knew the presence of Jews in China had been documented as early as the seventh or eighth centuries. He knew the history of the Jewish community in Kaifeng in the Henan province, a Chinese community that practiced Judaism. But, he had never met nor seen photos of any Chinese Jews. To him, they were as exotic as the black Jews of Ethiopia.
After the rabbi finished, Minzhe said, “Now, the Amidah.”
Again, the rabbi did so.
“The blessing before and after reading the Haftarah.”
“You know this blessing?” the rabbi asked.
“You fake it at your own peril,” Minzhe said. After the rabbi complied, Minzhe conceded he was a rabbi. “Normally, your memory gap would disqualify you from entry into the United States, but I will use a generic description of a typical Jewish experience during the Nazi era to answer the personal history question.”
“You will make up my history?” the rabbi asked.
“If I don’t, you’re on the next boat back to Europe.”
Using carbon paper, Minzhe made a simultaneous copy of the statement he entered on the rabbi’s immigration form and gave the copy to the rabbi to memorize in the event the INS called him in for further questioning. “Welcome to the United States.” Minzhe stood and offered his hand in friendship.
Now, accounting sheets covered Frohling’s desk, sickly yellow, sickly green, many stained with brown coffee rings. Numbers filled the columns, some written over, others blemished by erasures made by dirty erasers. “Next year’s budget,” Frohling said. “Every dollar has to do the work of twenty.” In the fluorescent light, Frohling’s skin was sickly and slack.
Frohling listened between bites of prune Danish and slurps of coffee as the rabbi explained Levy’s predicament. Crumbs gathered on the bulge of his stomach. He gulped the last of his coffee and pushed the final bite of Danish into his mouth, then brushed the crumbs away, crushed his cup, and balled the wax paper from his Danish, tossing both into the waste basket. “I thought you people took care of your own.”
Rabbi ben Reuben squirmed in his chair.
Frohling continued, “We don’t get many Jewish lawyers here. They’re too clever and amscray as soon as they figure out the way to the court-house. The one we got now, Larry Gingold, we’re his last resort. B & E, A & B, larceny under, fine; but a capital case, never.” He tapped a cigarette against his thumb nail, then lit it. Its tip glowed with each inhale. Each exhale looked like a plume of smoke from a chimney. “Levy’s little hat under the chair, you don’t need a law degree to know how damning that piece of evidence is.”
“I apologize for wasting your time.”
“We’re prisoners of the law here, obliged to represent indigent defendants. All indigent defendants. No picking, no choosing. If Pol Pot walked through that door and proved he was penniless, we’d have to defend him.”
“Pol Pot?”
“Cambodia’s Hitler.” Frohling tapped the ash off his cigarette. “I know the perfect attorney for Levy,” he continued, “someone here who has a better than even chance getting him off, the best defense attorney in the city, public or private. Maddie Devlin. Bad news is, she won’t defend him. She’s as Irish as green beer on St. Paddy’s Day and comes with more baggage than all the skycaps at Logan.”
Devlin, the rabbi said to himself. Maddie Devlin. A spark of recognition smoldered in his memory. Several years ago, he recalled, she contacted him to solicit a contribution from his congregation to a charity she had founded to provide support to victims of child abuse. The Elizabeth Fund. “We are a poor congregation,” he had told her, “but I will mention it at Friday night services.” That was his standard reply to solicitations from outside the Jewish community. He didn’t remember whether the congregation made a contribution to the Elizabeth Fund and, if it did, how much.
Frohling blew smoke rings at the air conditioner. In the rush of frigid air, they twisted and turned and tore apart. “A man in your line of work must have a pretty good read on human nature. What are your top five motivators, the five things that really make people tick tock? Maddie brings two of them to Levy’s defense. First, hatred, or more precisely, its stepsister, revenge; second, greed.” He leaned across his desk. “Bumper Sullivan’s mother’s a Devlin. There’s a blood feud between the two sides of the family what goes back to the old country. Getting Levy off would wreak a lot of revenge for her. As for greed, she’s been lusting for a break-out case since the day she got here, something to rescue her from the poverty of legal aid. Sounds good, you say? Not so fast. She never defends anyone whose victim’s a kid because once upon a time her kid was the victim and her ex-husband walked when his attorney out-lawyered the prosecution.”
Frohling brushed a cigarette ash from the budget papers. “And she’s got a chip on her shoulder bigger than an Egyptian pyramid. She thinks she’s been blackballed by Boston’s white-shoe law firms ’cause she’s a woman, Irish, divorced. Truth is they won’t go near her ’cause they think she’s a bit touched.” He tapped the side of his head with his finger. “Unhinged. They’re afraid she’ll drop off the deep end any time.”
“You’re not?”
“I am, big time; but here we take what we can get and thank God for it.”
The rabbi bit his tongue as pain radiated from his knuckles throughout his hands. “You would ask her?”
“We’d be collateral damage. I fight for every paper clip and, Constitution be damned, I never have the money to defend as zealously as possible everyone entitled to free legal counsel. If Levy’s indigent, I’m stuck, even if it means blowing the whole year’s budget on one case. And next year come budget time Beacon Hill will punish us big time. Fifty cents on the dollar if we’re lucky. One thin dime if we’re not.”
The rabbi gazed at the water tank on the roof of the adjacent building. Its copper sheathing, once shiny, was crusted with the turquoise of age. He had, he realized, as much free will as that copper sheathing had in choosing whether to be oxidized or not.
Talk of Avram Levy and Bumper Sullivan still suppurated from the bricks of City Hall Plaza, but the lines at the pushcarts were shorter and the rabbi’s passage through the stench faster. “Hey, mister,” they gyro vendor shouted. “The lamb she is tender.” The rabbi quickened his step. There was a vague familiarity to the wisps of smoke rising from the charcoal, but he couldn’t place it.
-4-
Maddie Devlin joined Suffolk County Legal Services after graduating law school. Eight years later, it had become a sinkhole, swallowing her whole, then closing over her, fossilizing her, bringing her to the edge of petrifaction. The sinkhole opened the week she was sworn in as a member of the bar, the reward for winning her first case, a verdict of Not Delinquent for a juvenile charged with B & E. Flustered at finding him under the bed in the master bedroom, the arresting officer forgot to Miranda him. Three years later, Maddie plea-bargained that juvenile, now an adult, down fro
m kidnapping to unlawful restraint, ten years to three, eighteen months to be served, eighteen months suspended. Over the years, he became one of her steadiest clients until a judge who actually read the pre-sentence report brushed aside her argument of mitigating circumstances, a broken home, an abuse victim as a child, a below-average IQ, and sentenced him to twenty years, ten to be served before being eligible for parole, for aggravated assault and armed robbery. One less file on her desk, one less predator on the streets of Boston.
After winning her first capital case by attacking the scientific validity of the fingerprint evidence, Maddie submitted résumés to Boston’s Mayflower law firms which years earlier had awakened to the fact that defending people charged with white-collar crimes such as stock fraud, tax evasion, criminal antitrust violations, currency manipulation, and other business misdeeds was lucrative and did not besmirch their images. We don’t handle homicides, one human resources director told her. Two years later when one of her murder cases rated thirty seconds on the evening news, she sent out another set of résumés. Four firms invited her for interviews; one offered her a job, indexing depositions and document discovery in complex civil litigation cases, a dead end that at best would relegate her to staff attorney status, a permanent associate never to be elevated to a partnership, never to see the inside of a court-room. Preferring to try cases, she remained with legal aid.
Boston Municipal Court one day, Roxbury District Court the next, she toured the courts of Suffolk County like a hamster running on a treadmill: Dorchester District Court, Boston Juvenile Court, South Boston District Court, West Roxbury District Court, Charlestown District Court, East Boston District Court, Brighton District Court, and occasionally courts in Middlesex and Norfolk Counties, now and then one or two in Essex. She visited them all, some more than once, in the course of a routine month.
The Fire This Time Page 2