Single Jewish Male Seeking Soul Mate

by Letty Cottin Pogrebin

  Zach tore off a paper towel, gave his mug the same treatment, and put it on the table beside hers. The professor’s desk was beginning to look orderly. “So what happens when people you respect give diametrically opposite advice?”

  “What happens in US jurisprudence when there’s a conflict among the circuit courts?” Irina asked.

  “The case goes to the Supreme Court.”

  “There was once a Jewish Supreme Court—”

  “The Sanhedrin,” said Zach with confidence. “It disbanded in the year 358.”

  Her eyebrows flew up under her bangs. “I’m impressed. You went to a good Hebrew school.”

  “My rabbi was demanding. I miss him.”

  “That’s nice,” she said. “We all miss our best teachers. Anyway, ever since the Sanhedrin went out of business, Jews have had to decide the big issues in the courtroom of our conscience. My Sanhedrin has ruled that Terrell should be welcomed into Judaism and not be defined out. Your mother’s Sanhedrin—and the chaplain’s too, I gather—would argue that the only way to preserve Judaism is to bar the door. I know it’s confusing but at least we’re all motivated by the same objective.”

  “Which is?”

  “Jewish survival. Sounds highfalutin but that’s what it boils down to.”

  “Do I have another option?”

  “You can let the boy stay a Baptist and stop fighting for Judaism.”

  “It’s not Judaism I’m fighting for, it’s Jewishness.”

  Irina burst out laughing. “You remind me of my grandson. He’s four. The other day, he asked me why Christians are Christian but Jews are only Jewish. It took me a minute to realize that he was hearing Jew-ish the way we say that something tastes ‘sweetish’ or looks ‘pinkish.’”

  Zach nodded. “He’s right. ‘Jewish’ sounds like a gradation of the thing, not the thing itself.”

  “Which actually makes sense. Most Jews do practice gradations of Judaism. I know I think of some of us as more Jew-ish than others, don’t you? A friend of mine is glatt kosher, stricter than heaven’s caterer. Another keeps kosher at home but not in restaurants. Another won’t eat meat in restaurants but will eat fish and dairy. Then there’s me: I’ll eat anything anywhere.”

  “Me too.”

  “So what you’re calling ‘Jewishness’ is really a spectrum of Judaisms. Before you tell Cleo how you’d like the boy raised, you have to locate yourself on that spectrum. You might start by making a list of your priorities.”

  Zach wasn’t sure how to set priorities when everything seemed important. He would want to share the High Holy Days and Passover with Terrell the way he and Anabelle shared Hanukkah—but would he insist on celebrating all the Jewish holidays with Terrell or was that negotiable? He definitely wanted to instill Jewish values in his son—the pursuit of justice, an advocacy for the underdog, the poor and sick—but plenty of gentiles, including Cleo Scott, held themselves to the same moral and ethical standards that he did and he knew many Christians and Muslims who had the same commitment to justice as he had. So maybe he didn’t have to couch these values in religious terms. Maybe this, too, was negotiable.

  “I’m still working on my priorities, Professor.”

  “I can sense that, but don’t overintellectualize the process. Keep it simple.” Irina Cantor opened the bottom drawer of her desk and exchanged her Birkenstocks for a pair of running shoes with Velcro straps. “I always walk to the day care center, it’s my only exercise,” she said, then hauled her Channel Thirteen bag over one shoulder, picked up the verbena plant on their way out, locked her office, and led Zach to the lobby.

  He held the door open for her. “Thank you for your time, Professor. Whatever happens, it’s been great learning from you.”

  Out on the sidewalk, the professor repeated, “Just try to keep it simple. Show your son a joyful Judaism and maybe, at the end of the day, he’ll want to join us. The magic word is ‘maybe.’ I just love that word. It keeps the door open. ‘Maybe’ can take a person to a whole new place. Now, I really must be going!” She turned east and called back over her shoulder, “Say hi to Terrell for me!”

  CHAPTER 23

  GHOSTS

  THE DAY OF RECKONING DAWNED BRIGHT, CLEAR, AND innocent of its consequence. Sleep deprivation had left Zach Levy with no strength for the exercise machines, but he was first in the pool at the gym. This time, though, instead of swimming at full throttle, he swam for serenity, his eyes on the tiled floor where the lane lines were as sharply drawn as the choices he faced: Tradition or fatherhood. Guilt or desire. His promise to his mother or his responsibility to his son.

  Pools were complicated places for Zach. His parents’ attitudes toward swimming had aroused in him a sense of danger unrelated to drowning. During the polio epidemic, they wouldn’t allow him near a public pool except for the schvitz, and even after he’d been inoculated with the newly invented Salk vaccine, they distrusted enclosed bodies of water and preferred going to Orchard Beach in the Bronx or one of the Queens or Brooklyn beaches. Rivka viewed the Atlantic Ocean as a moat of safety separating her from her former captors and would stare at the horizon to reassure herself that Europe had not moved any closer to the Rockaways or Coney Island.

  Zach raised his head from his fifth lap to check the clock on the wall. Seventeen hours and twenty-three minutes till his deadline. He flipped over and started doing the backstroke. Snapshots of childhood summers came back to him, days when he and his parents, with all their gear, made the long schlep to the ocean beaches by subway, commandeered a patch of sand (always close to the lifeguard stand), and spread out their Army surplus blanket, his father setting up the aluminum beach chairs they’d bought on sale at Woolworths, his mother slathering Zach with Coppertone and covering the cooler with a towel to shield it from the sun. True to form, Nathan would squint at his book for five minutes then nod off, while Rivka dragged her chair into the shallows, the better to monitor Zach as he dive-bombed through the breakers like a crazed porpoise. Somehow, he had never questioned the illogic of this frail, timid woman assuming shore patrol, much less imagined her rescuing him. Just as he had never seen his mother play the piano, he had never seen her swim. Only when the temperature broke eighty degrees and the sea was as calm as a lake would she wade waist deep into the water and, with the skirt of her flowered bathing suit floating around her like the pad of a water lily, pull the bodice away from her chest, and let the water in.

  “A mechayah,” she would say, a pleasure. As far as Zach could recall, that was her only expression of bliss, ever, which made it cruelly ironic that she was in the midst of a mechayah moment when she discovered the lump.

  His father’s relationship to water was more robust but no less fraught. Though Nathan had a smooth racer’s crawl and the underwater breath control of a deep-sea diver, his summer outings were complicated by his antipathy to public restrooms. He preferred to endure the subway trip home with chafed thighs, wearing a damp, sandy bathing suit under his trousers, rather than use a changing room.

  “Sue me, I’m modest,” he’d replied when Zach first questioned his habits.

  “Modest?” Zach exclaimed in disbelief. “At the schvitz, you walk around naked.”

  “At the schvitz, I’m among friends.”

  Not until he saw a Catholic boy’s intact foreskin did Zach realize that “friends” meant Jews. And not until his father confided in him did he understand that to pass as a Christian Pole while he was on the run, it was a matter of life and death to avoid public urinals and bathhouses. Even after twenty years in America, unless he was in a certifiably Jewish venue, Nathan would keep his private parts under wraps.

  Zach hoisted himself out of the pool after completing thirty laps and headed for the locker room. A couple of naked teens were slapping each other with towels. “Quit that, you little faggots!” the attendant yelled, transforming their innocent horseplay into something else.

  Watching them, Zach was flung back to his own childhood humiliation, th
e time Rabbi Goldfarb walked into the boys’ bathroom at Hebrew school and caught him and Simon Persky red handed, as it were, trying to measure themselves with a six-inch ruler. Rather than tease or shame them, the rabbi had delivered an exegesis on the sanctity of the human body and the mitzvah of human reproduction.

  “God doesn’t care how big it is, only what you do with it. Someday, it will plant the seeds of the next generation of the Jewish people, whom God has elected to be a holy nation. Use it wisely and you’ll create more children and more holiness. Now back to class.”

  No one but their esteemed rabbi could have made two frightened kids with a ruler suddenly feel like carriers of Jewish destiny and vessels of divine intent. Simon Persky had ultimately married the daughter of a diamond merchant and fathered four sons, fulfilling Goldfarb’s vision. Zach’s record, thus far, was weak. What, he wondered, as he squeezed the water out of his swimsuit and hung it on the hook in his locker, would the rabbi say about the choice he faced tonight?

  The minute he got to the office, Zach found a current Bronx telephone directory and was relieved to find “Goldfarb, Eleazar (Rev.)” alive or at least listed at the same address. A boy answered the phone, a student, maybe a grandson. Zach gave his name and seconds later, the familiar baritone was rumbling through the receiver, slightly rough edged now but as warm as ever. Instead of asking why Zach was calling after so many years, the old man simply said how wonderful it was to hear from him on such an auspicious date—the day after the shortest night and longest day of the year.

  “Come for Shabbos dinner, Mr. Levy! The sun sets tonight at 8:13 p.m. We’ll eat early and schmooze until candle lighting time. Do you think you can get here by six?”

  “I’d be honored,” Zach said, eager for his old teacher to tell him what to do, and certain that Rabbi Goldfarb would have an answer that would not have occurred to anyone else.

  Zach left his office at four o’clock to give himself time to meander around the old neighborhood. It was his first time back since his father’s funeral. His boyhood home-life having been so pinched and gray, he had little reason to romanticize it. Yet, at least in retrospect, because he’d been rescued by friends, school, and sports, his youth was bathed in a glow inseparable from his sense of place. He was curious about how the area had changed, and he was homesick, not for his hushed, gloomy apartment but for a sense of hope that could only be recaptured where it once took root.

  Emerging from the subway at the corner of Kingsbridge Road and Jerome Avenue, he noticed that the block-long armory still loomed large. Its conical towers and crenellated turrets were still intact though the building appeared vacant, its walls cracked and pockmarked. In Zach’s child mind, the armory had been the analogue to Wawel Castle. But once his father slammed the photo album on his head and ruled Kraków unmentionable, he’d never again had the chutzpah to ask about the castle where his mother stood smiling beside Yitzhak’s carriage. Yet Wawel continued to represent an idyllic time, the last place on earth, according to photographic evidence, where his mother was happy. Now, the old armory seemed a symbol of the fading vitality of the borough and of the boy within Zach Levy. Seeing it in the soft glaze of a late June afternoon, he wondered if Wawel had survived the war better than the armory had survived the peace.

  The ghosts of lost landmarks accompanied him the rest of the way: Gone were the fishmonger, tailor shop, and bagel bakery. Daitch Dairy was now a bodega. A KFC, blazing with fluorescent tubes, stood in place of the candy store where Zach and his friends twirled on the swiveling stools and drank egg creams. Sam Kranzberg’s barbershop was still there, though its striped pole no longer turned and Eddie Fisher’s autograph, “To Sam Kranzberg, A cut above,” had faded on the singer’s headshot in the window.

  Spanish and Asian lilts had displaced the Yiddish, Polish, and Italian street talk he’d grown up with. Herman’s butcher shop was gone, replaced by a Korean nail salon, and the doorstep where he and his father sat chilled to the bone twenty-seven years ago was now carpeted with plastic grass. The awning over the Jewish Home for the Aged, once the repository for Nathan’s breakfast leftovers and eventually for Nathan himself, had acquired a subtitle: “Four-Star Assisted Living.”

  Nostalgia turned bittersweet as Zach approached their old apartment building on University Avenue. The twin marble lions guarding its entrance wore a coat of greenish grime and its once majestic lobby looked like a deserted bus station. Gone were the King John armchairs and palace-size rugs, the faux fireplaces, the statue of the knight in shining armor, the tapestries and torches. Gone, too, the switchboard operator who used to greet everyone with a nasal “How ayah?” or “Who ya heah t’see?” Zach wished he could knock on the door of his boyhood apartment and be invited in, but it wasn’t the fifties anymore, it was the nineties, a different world. No one would open the door to a stranger. Thomas Wolfe had it right: you can’t go home again.

  Turning into Eames Place, Zach found the branch library looking much the same as it did when he used to check out four or five books a week. The synagogue, however, had been bisected by a painted white line that divided it in half from basement to roof. One side of the building still bore the textured facade and Moorish windows of the Eames Place shul, the other side had been stripped and plastered over, its windows and doors fitted with bars. The medallion on the lintel said “PS 307.”

  The uniformed guard at the school entrance noticed Zach staring at the facade. “May I help you?”

  “I had my bar mitzvah here in 1963,” Zach said. He must have been frowning because the security man seemed to feel he deserved an explanation.

  “You can’t blame them for selling off half the building. Most of the Jews in the neighborhood left for the suburbs years ago. The ones who stayed needed cash to keep it up, and Bronx kids needed another school. So maybe everything worked out for the best. Still, if this happened to my church, I’d be mad too. It looks awful, right?”

  Zach nodded. “Mind if I nose around?”

  “Be my guest.”

  The synagogue library had been split into two jerry-built classrooms, no more walnut paneling, leather-bound books, or brass chandeliers. The door to Rabbi Goldfarb’s study was now stenciled, PRINCIPAL’S OFFICE. Trotting upstairs to the gym, Zach found basketball practice in session and he stayed to watch. All the players were black. The boy with the nylon stocking on his head, a neck-load of gold chains, and a pierced nose was especially good, also a little threatening. Zach thought, I wouldn’t want to end up in a dark alley with that kid, until it dawned on him that someday, Terrell might look like that kid.

  What was once the synagogue’s banquet hall and redolent of gladioli and flanken, was now the school cafeteria and stank of overcooked vegetables and scorched pots. Its green walls, linoleum, and bolted-down picnic tables were a far cry from the flocked wallpaper, parquet floors, and gilded banquet chairs Zach remembered from the confirmations, Hebrew school graduations, testimonial dinners, Israel festivals, High Holy Day services, bar mitzvah parties, and weddings that he’d attended in his youth.

  Enough. Seeing the depredation of an institution he thought would last forever made his heart hurt. He went outside and walked over to the entrance of the part of the building that still functioned as a synagogue. Thankfully, the main sanctuary, though scuffed and scarred, was basically unchanged. Upstairs, however, a senior citizen’s center had replaced his Hebrew school, the small chairs had grown full-size, and the bulletin boards were plastered with notices about Medicare and free blood pressure tests, not children’s drawings and posters of young kibbutzniks. Only one sign attested to the original student population—the words BOYS ROOM on the door to the lavatory. For old times’ sake, Zach went in and took a leak, recalling with unseemly satisfaction that his had measured three-eighths of an inch longer than Simon Persky’s.

  At exactly six o’clock, he crossed the street to the Goldfarb’s modest brick house and rang the bell. A skinny, pimply faced kid in a knitted skullcap opened the door
and greeted Zach in a high, cracked voice. “Good Shabbos, Mr. Levy. I’m Avrum Katz, Rabbi’s assistant.”

  Avrum led him down the hall to the book-lined study where, every Monday and Thursday afternoon, Zach, Simon Persky, Gary Elkind, and Jerry Grumbach, had studied Torah and Talmud and practiced their respective bar mitzvah readings over and over. Zach wondered where Goldfarb’s wife was tonight. Rebbetzin Malka used to meet the rabbi’s pupils at the front door. A half head taller than her husband, with flashing eyes and a contagious laugh, she treated each boy as if he were the next Maimonides, welcomed him by name, asked after his family, and always appended a compliment—how handsome he looked in his new shirt or how beautifully he had davened last Shabbos. As soon as she’d settled all four boys at the study table, the rebbetzin would roll in a cart bearing snacks—homemade cookies, strudel, or rugelach, a basket of fruit, a pitcher of milk or juice—and then, poof, like a genie, she’d be gone.

  During every study session, one of the boys would be called on to chant his Torah portion and its accompanying excerpt from the writings of the Prophets, while the other three would listen. Which explained why Zach knew Simon Persky’s, Gary Elkind’s, and Jerry Grumbach’s Torah readings as well as his own, and they knew his. People often commented that by the time Rabbi Goldfarb’s students were thirteen years old, they had committed to memory more sacred texts than the average Jew reads in a lifetime.

  The room’s carpeting, whose floral design Zach had memorized while suffering through Jerry’s off-key cantillation, was now thatched with bare spots. Otherwise, Goldfarb’s study looked as it did nearly three decades ago, only smaller, like Goldfarb himself. The same long table formed a T with the rabbi’s desk, the same heavy-oak chairs surrounded the table, the same gauzy, straw-colored curtains filtered the late afternoon light, and Rabbi was dressed in his usual white shirt, black vest, and black trousers though today, sadly, the cuffs were frayed and the vest looked two sizes too big. Sadder still were the old man’s eyes, once a deep brandied brown, now gray as slush.