A Curable Romantic

by Joseph Skibell

  The rebbe said, “One need only ask himself this, Dr. Sammelsohn: if books are so dangerous they must be burned, then isn’t the most efficient act of sabotage the writing of a book?”

  “Sabotage?”

  Nodding, the rebbe stroked his beard.

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “Dr. Sammelsohn, this isn’t simply a book. You must understand that. Things are dire. Fewer and fewer of my people come to me on Shabbos. I can’t blame them. It’s not a pleasant thing to be out in the streets these days. A hundred souls might turn up, but these are my Hasidim. If I were to ask one or two for an opinion, what is he going to tell me? How can he criticize me? He can’t, he won’t. But a cousin, a descendant, like myself, of the seer, and a freethinker besides? Now there’s a man whose opinion might be worth a złoty or two!”

  “If we are truly cousins.”

  “But of course, we’re truly cousins! On our mothers’ sides. We’ve been over this! You know it as well as I, although perhaps what you don’t know is how deep the connection runs.”

  “If I’m understanding you correctly, you wish me to — ”

  “Sit in on my talks during the Third Meal, to which I’m inviting you as an honored guest, to listen critically to everything I say, remembering everything you hear. At the end of the Sabbath, because of the curfew, you’ll remain here, and you can sleep in my son’s room. You’ll write down everything you remember — along with any thoughts you’ve had about what I’ve said — I’ll write down all I remember, and on Sunday morning, we’ll compare notes, draw up a fair copy of the talk, after which you’ll be completely free of me until the following Sabbath or holy day, whichever comes first. And in this way, believe me, Dr. Sammelsohn, we’ll bring our enemies to their knees. So what do you say?”

  What could I say to him?

  “Are you in?”

  The enterprise sounded preposterous to me.

  “You’d be doing me an extraordinary service,” he said.

  When I continued to hesitate, he added, “Please don’t think I’m asking you to do this work for nothing. In exchange for the services you will render to me, I will do for you what a good rebbe always does.”

  “And what is that, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  He leaned forward and dropped his voice to a whisper. “Do I really need to answer that, Dr. Sammelsohn? I think it’s clear to both of us.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about!”

  “Ah!” he said, as the door opened and a young woman entered the room, carrying our tea in on a silver tray. “This is my daughter, Rekhl Yehudis. My dear, Dr. Sammelsohn is a cousin of ours.”

  The rebbe’s daughter and I nodded to each other, she demurely keeping her gaze lowered.

  “Thank you, my darling,” he said, ushering her out again. I’d already taken a bite of the mandelbrot she had brought us and had begun sipping my tea when the rebbe lifted his own cup and began intoning an elaborate blessing over it.

  “Amen,” I said when he had finally finished with it.

  “Well, Dr. Sammelsohn?” he said, putting down his cup. “What have you decided?”

  I spun my teacup on its saucer. Every fiber of my being shrieked in protest against accepting his offer. The times were perilous, and if writing a book of Hasidic theology wasn’t already an illegal act, punishable most likely by death, it soon would be. Risking one’s life for such a quixotic misadventure seemed foolish in the extreme, and yet — I don’t know why; perhaps it was the look his daughter had given me — I felt incapable of refusing him.

  “Good! Excellent!” he cried, clapping his hands. “You’ve no idea how happy you’ve made me!” He opened his desk drawer and withdrew from it ten or so sheets of paper. “These are the pieces I’ve already done. Take them with you, read them over, and tell me what you think. I’m relying on your complete and honest opinion. It’s one thing to write a book for one’s Hasidim, quite another for the entire world. And — it goes without saying — be careful with those, as they’re my only copy.”

  “Perhaps I should just read them here then,” I suggested, already beginning to regret my decision.

  “True, nothing is safe on the streets. Sit outside my study in the hallway, where you can read them in peace, and leave them with my daughter when you’re done.”

  I did as he’d commanded me, taking a seat on the hard wooden bench outside his study. There were only two sermons, both from the High Holy Days, and they were exactly the sort of tripe I’d had stuffed down my throat as a child. As I shuffled through the pages, I half-expected Reb Sender to cuff me on the ears. All the usual Hasidic malarkey was here: stories of captive princes estranged from their fathers; God forgiving our sins as a monarch might our taxes; the typical Hasidic standing on its head of who exactly is in need of repentance — God or ourselves? — all leading to one ineluctable conclusion: we must repent and, if we repent, God and man, the stars of creation’s longest-running Punch and Judy show (this is my own commentary, of course, and not the rebbe’s), will once again, or at least for another year, be reconciled.

  I dropped the pages into my lap. My head began to pound with a terrible headache. What had I gotten myself into?

  CHAPTER 4

  With their great love of regimentation, the Germans began making new laws as though they were counterfeiting money, and one never knew, from day to day, what might be newly illegal, nor what penalties these new crimes might carry. At last it was decided that Germans, Poles, and Jews could no longer live higgledy-piggledy across the city wherever they wished. No, separate peoples required separate quarters. Wasn’t this an elementary principle of life? Certainly it was! And if people weren’t inclined to obey this principle, then, of course, it had to be mandated by law. Jews must live with Jews in a Jewish quarter; Poles with Poles in a Polish quarter; and Germans with Germans alone.

  We made the trade as best as we could. Those of us living outside the Jewish Quarter abandoned our homes and piled the little we were allowed onto carts, which we hauled into apartments that had been similarly abandoned by others living in the wrong section of town. I took as many refugees as I could into the Zamenhofs’ old house on Dzika Street. (Among the Germans’ numerous small cruelties was the restoration to Zamenhof Street of its former savage name.) Though I’d originally inhabited Dr. Adamo’s childhood bedroom, most nights now I slept on the sofa in Dr. Zamenhof’s consultancy.

  Things couldn’t get much worse. At least that’s what we told ourselves. Surely, this is the end of it, we said. And when the Germans sealed the quarter, we actually breathed a sigh of relief. Walls have two sides, and though we were being walled in, it wasn’t difficult for us to imagine that they had walled themselves out. Typhus was the official reason, although as a doctor, I knew this was absurd. I’d never heard of a single case. Still, who cared what lies they told about us as long as they left us alone? The ghetto was our natural home. Hadn’t we always lived in ghettos? And weren’t we happiest there where we could more fully be ourselves? We’d set up our own housing committee, our own community kitchens, our own free loan societies and live as a free society of slaves. Why, we even had a Jewish postman, the first in Poland! Just like in Palestine!

  Or so the common thinking ran. I was less sanguine myself. Roaming the ghetto’s streets, I felt as if we’d all become trapped in Dr. Rosenberg’s dream. How many years had it been since Dr. Freud had impressed me into his Tarock game and Dr. Rosenberg, dozing in the small hours, had dreamt he was Captain Dreyfus on Devil’s Island, exiled to that fearsome place for an act of treason he hadn’t committed? Both Dr. Freud and Dr. Rie had made light of their friend’s fears. Innocent or guilty, Dreyfus is but a single man, not a representative of our race, and his tragedy has nothing to do with us, they said. Everyone knows you simply can’t trust the French!

  As I stood on Bonifraterska Street, watching the Jewish laborers place the last bricks into the wall, sealing us in, I only wished they’d been correct. But he
re I was, here we all were, a million or so Captain Dreyfuses, trapped inside our own Devil’s Island, our very existence deemed an act of treason.

  IT WAS ANOTHER castaway, however, who came to mind when I was in the presence of the holy Piaseczna rebbe. Rubinchek Cruzoe was one of the romances I read in Yiddish as a child. The diary, purportedly, of a shipwrecked Hasid, the book recounts its protagonist’s efforts at retaining his piety while cut off from all humanity, cast away upon an island. And if the rebbe were Alter-Lieb Rubinchek — such was always my next thought — who was I but his man Shabbos, the savage he hoped to turn into an observant Jew?

  I admit that the reluctance I felt in regard to the rebbe didn’t spring from any qualms I had about squandering what were surely my last days on a book I was convinced would never see the light of the printed page. Nor did the idea of dying trouble me. Nor the idea of dying as a Jew among Jews. As I’d lived exclusively among Jews, I was content to die, if I must, among them. Rather, it was the prospect of dying among the pious, irritated by their every saintly gesture, aggravated by their every reverent word, that I found intolerable, their inability, for instance, to answer even a simple question such as How are you? with anything more pertinent than a Thank God!

  The child-like reverence in which his Hasidim held the rebbe was particularly galling to me. His disciples believed him capable of the most astonishing of things. Many of these so-called miracles seemed like simple rabbinical card tricks to me: he’d saved a wealthy disciple’s London business by urging the man to make a large donation to his school; he’d been consulted by the dean of the Telz Yeshiva when the latter came to Warsaw for a delicate medical procedure. (Only in our little cloistered world would a Lithuanian Talmudist’s seeking out the medical advice of a Poylisher rebbe be a miracle tantamount to the fishes and the loaves!) The most preposterous of these stories involved a student of the rebbe’s who’d been called up for the draft. Unlike most of his fellows, among whom, let’s be honest, there might be enough muscles for the needs of one Cossack woman — or so the story goes — this young fellow was exceptionally strong. He had no chance of receiving an exemption, which meant serving in the tsar’s army for no fewer than twenty-five years.

  On the day of his physical examination, the rebbe called the young man into his study. The two sat by the stove, speaking of this and that — a bisele toyre, a bisele khasides, a bisele tsayko-analisiz — when apropos of nothing, the rebbe dipped his finger into the ashes of the stove and used it to trace a few words onto the young man’s forehead. Just as quickly, he erased whatever it was he had written there with a kerchief.

  “Listen to me,” he told the young man. “On your way into town this afternoon, do not look into the face of another human being, and in the army offices, meet the eye of no one. Do you understand me?”

  Of course, the boy didn’t understand, but he did as he was told, carrying out the rebbe’s instructions with perfect fidelity. Whatever the rebbe had written on his forehead made him appear monstrous and deformed, and as result, people in the streets fled from him in terror. At the army offices, nurses screamed and doctors fainted dead away. His fellow inductees, horrified, scrambled for cover, jumping out of windows. Finally, some higher-up was found who, clutching a kerchief to his nose, wrote out an exemption certificate before pointing the boy towards the door.

  When the young man returned to the yeshiva, he asked the rebbe what it was that he had written that made people react to him in such a way?

  “Oh, nothing extraordinary,” the rebbe said. “Just a word or two in the language the angels use.”

  Nothing bound me to the rebbe, of course. I could have fabricated any number of excuses or told him outright that I no longer wished to assist him. I could have simply stopped coming to his house on Saturday afternoons. Our lives were sufficiently precarious that any number of unforeseen obstacles might have precluded my arriving there. I’m not sure why, but every Saturday, as the sky began to drain of color above our prison of jagged rooftops, I traced my way along the few blocks between Dzika and Dzielna streets, the cityscape worsening each week, becoming more and more corpse-strewn, timing my entrance at the rebbe’s house so that I arrived well after the afternoon prayers, which I had no interest in praying, when the rebbe was already seated and lingering over the Sabbath’s final meal, his Hasidim ringed about him, one tuneless tune bleeding into another.

  Their numbers were dwindling. Each week, fewer braved the patrols and broke the laws forbidding their attendance there. Others had been starved to death or murdered. No one ever asked me what I was doing there. My presence was tolerated, I imagined, if not completely understood. I was merely the rebbe’s cousin. Or his personal physician. Or perhaps they’d been told I was assisting him with a book. Whatever the case, I’d take my seat as unobtrusively as possible and listen to their singing. I won’t say I relaxed or enjoyed myself precisely — we were all living in a state of vigilant fear — but at times their deep, sonorous voices unjangled my nerves. (At other times, their singing only increased my nervousness: God alone knew if our voices could be heard outside and who the devil was listening.) And then finally, in response perhaps to some inner prompting or a silent signal from the Heavens, the rebbe would slide back his chair, its legs scraping against the wooden floor, and standing, he’d tuck his hands into the sleeves of his kapote and begin to speak.

  It’s impossible for me to replicate his talks. Although he prepared them — mentally, at least; he wrote nothing down beforehand — while working as a slave in Schultz’s Shoe Factory, they were fiercely learned and complex. As I listened to him each week, however, I noticed a curious thing. The rebbe seemed to be addressing two audiences, alternating between the two. The first were his Hasidim, the ever-more-bedraggled captives who came to him hoping for some illumination on the wretched state of their lives. These the rebbe urged to use our desperate times as a spur towards self-reflection and repentance, in response to which, he felt certain, the Holy Blessed One would be compelled, indeed, forced by His Own Goodness, so to speak, into treating us with kindness and mercy.

  Redemption was only a matter of our asking for it, of our crying out with as much purity of heart as we could muster given the grinding circumstances of our lives.

  And of course, it was the Holy One Himself whom the rebbe’s second audience comprised. Quite audaciously, the rebbe seemed to have challenged the Holy Blessed One, Master of our Universe, to a kind of theological disputation, the high stakes of which were our immediate ransom. Drawing upon a formidable arsenal of theological weaponry, skillfully citing theolegal and scriptural precedent, he used all his cunning to arouse the slumbering conscience of our Creator. Reading the Torah backwards and forwards, turning it inside and out, spinning the sacred law on its head until, like a prism, it threw off a thousand and one new and unheard-of interpretations, he reminded the Holy One not only of His promises but of His many promises to keep those promises. Using the Holy One’s own words against Him, like a prosecutor, the rebbe returned again and again to this one incontrovertible fact: the Holy One had obligated Himself, by His own holy law, into rising up in our defense.

  I have to say, at those times, when the rebbe directed the full force of his person towards the Heavens, hurling himself against its barricades, demanding of its many offices a response to his damning list of charges, the silence of the Divine reply was as deafening as thunder.

  HE SIGHED AND dropped his glasses onto the desk before him.

  “To tell you the truth, Dr. Sammelsohn, I didn’t think it would take this long.”

  “Didn’t think what would take this long?”

  “Before the Holy One answered our pleas.”

  We were in his study, transcribing the talk he’d given the day before. Not that he seemed to need my help. On the contrary, Reb Kalonymos recalled his every word with an astonishing precision. His sterling memory made mine seem like a dull and lusterless trap. Our work was finished for the day, and he’d taken our few
new pages and stacked them beneath the older ones. The ink and paper were costing him dearly, I knew, and the manuscript was thickening at an alarming rate.

  “You think I’m mad, don’t you?” he said, “that what I’m doing, or rather what I’m attempting to do, is mad.” He waited for me to answer him, but I found nothing to say.

  The rebbe crossed his arms. “Still, we’re taught as schoolboys that the Holy One not only studies the Torah but is obligated, so to speak, to adhere to its laws.”

  “Yes, so we’re taught,” I said, and I thought: And only a schoolboy would continue to believe it.

  “Taught? What am I saying?” The rebbe waved the remark away. “It’s not a matter of our being taught, but of one’s deeply knowing. Of course the Holy One lives according to the Law. How could it be otherwise, and yet …”

  “And yet?” I wondered aloud.

  “No,” he censored himself. “We must simply push on, that’s all. There’s something more mysterious at hand, although at the moment, I cannot tell you what.”

  He fingered the manuscript lying like a brick on the desk between us, gazing upon it with a mixture of pride (it was, after all, growing proof of his accomplishments as an author) and despair (the larger it became, the more it spoke of its failure to move its Audience).

  And what a curious book it was. Given the circumstances of its creation, I often wondered if it would even survive us? And if it did, who would ever read it?

  I PROMISE YOU: I had nothing but the purest of intentions regarding Rekhl Yehudis; and when I entered the rebbe’s kitchen, in search of a cup of tea, romance was the furthest thing from my mind. Still, there she was with her back towards me and her delicate shoulders trembling, staring out through the rain-soaked windows. I saw instantly that she was crying. Only the most blackhearted of Bluebeards would have trifled with such a child, given her situation: in the wake of her mother’s death, she was an orphan; in the wake of her brother’s, a mourner; via our dubious state, a captive. Also, unlike in my own family, where the son had been a thorn in the bouquet of all those pretty sisters, Rekhl Yehudis had played second fiddle to her brother. At least in her father’s affections. Perhaps she’d been her mother’s favorite. I couldn’t know. But now, with her mother dead and her brother as well, there seemed only so much love even a magician like Reb Kalonymos could conjure up on her behalf. This thought created within me even more compassion for her: having been a hated child, I could only sympathize with one who had been the lesser loved.