Running the Books

by Avi Steinberg

  When I’d first arrived at the yeshiva that summer, I was greeted with a gift left by the previous resident of my dorm room, an Israeli high school student who had studied at the yeshiva during the year. On my bed was a brand new copy of Baruch Ha’Gever (Baruch the hero, a pun on a biblical verse), a hagiography of Baruch Goldstein, the infamous settler who had opened fire on Muslim worshippers the previous year at the Abraham Mosque down the road in Hebron, killing 29 and wounding over 150. His actions had triggered a renewed round of riots and violence.

  The debate in the yeshiva—mine and others around Israel—surrounded a cold analysis of the “theoretical” Talmudic legal basis for violently removing a leader who relinquishes Holy Land. Less than three months later, Yigal Amir, a yeshiva graduate, would gun down Prime Minister Rabin, then stand in court and proudly cite these very same arguments.

  Although I found this talk morally reprehensible, I also owed an immense debt of gratitude to my yeshiva and its rabbis: they were my teachers, my spiritual guides.

  My confusion reached a head one afternoon. Two friends and I had taken a lunch excursion to an amazing network of caves on the outskirts of the settlement. For thousands of years locals have enjoyed escaping the desert heat in these chilly, wet tunnels.

  We emerged refreshed and in high spirits. Suddenly, out of nowhere, five Palestinian boys were standing in front of us. We froze. I looked at my friends, they looked at me. We stared at the Arab boys. They stared at us. They were wearing jeans and T-shirts, one of them wore an Adidas T-shirt. One of my friends was wearing a T-shirt that depicted a keffiyeh, or Arab headdress, superimposed onto Rabin’s head. We had unwittingly trespassed right onto a Palestinian farmer’s field. And these were the farmer’s sons, who had been taking an afternoon nap in their field until it was invaded by a group of enemy boys with soup-bowl-sized yarmulkes on their heads and tzitzis, or ritual fringes, dangling out of offensive right-wing T-shirts.

  We were scared shitless. These boys’ reputation was well known to us. They were the kids who fearlessly faced off with armed Israeli soldiers, the child-soldiers of the intifada, the Palestinian uprising. They were tough and courageous. We, on the other hand, played adventure video games in air-conditioned suburban palaces.

  “Tell them that we’re American,” whispered one of my friends, who must have thought that having been born in Jerusalem, I retained some secret powers of communicating with Arabs.

  I gazed up the hill at the gleaming outdoor basketball courts of Efrat, tucked in safely behind a security fence and armed guard post.

  Ever the courageous leader, I whispered, “Get ready to run, guys. On three …”

  One of the boys, Moshe, stepped forward.

  “Let me handle this,” he said.

  My heart sank. Dear God—handle it? What could that mean?

  Before I could imagine the possibilities, Moshe, who was a few years older than I, approached the Arab boys. He did so slowly, with his palms up, to show that he came in peace. The Arab kids exchanged glances and stiffened up a bit.

  Moshe removed his backpack and took out a worn volume of the Torah, the book of Numbers, complete with medieval commentaries. Like a good yeshiva boy he never left home without a book to study. He went up to the Arab boys’ leader, opened the book and pointed to the text, and then pointed to the sky. He smiled and said, Allah. He pointed to the boy, himself, and the open book and again said, Allah … Ibrahim.

  The Arab boy look confused. He wasn’t the only one.

  What the hell is he doing? I wondered. Couldn’t he have mentioned Michael Jordan, or someone a bit more inspiring, a bit less divisive than you-know-who?

  But he persisted. He closed the book and gave it to the boy. The boy took it. Moshe indicated that it was a gift. The boy smiled. Everybody relaxed. The Arab boys laughed. We laughed—and quickly shuffled on. As we made our way back to Efrat, to afternoon prayers at the yeshiva, we didn’t dare utter a word to one another.

  We never spoke about what had happened. Giving the book as a gift was a stroke of improvisational brilliance, but still, it was a remarkably taboo act for a pious Jew. Simply put, it was a sacrilege. The book itself, which contained the name of God, was a holy object: it was to be kissed every time you closed it, or if it fell to the ground, and buried once worn beyond repair. We had been taught that Jews had given their lives before desecrating it. And yet, here we had relinquished it to an enemy to save our hides. At the time, seeing the holy book in the hands of an Arab was more than we could handle. We were all a bit ashamed.

  In later years, as I moved away from the Orthodox community, I looked back at that event with very different eyes. Moshe, I realized, was not only shrewd but wise. We should have been proud of what he did. There, on the same plot of land where Abraham himself had created a religion for all people, we, his warring descendants, had invoked his name and the name of his God in the cause of peacemaking. And next to a cave! It was all very biblical. This wasn’t a sacrilege at all, but an act of holiness. (Ironically, it took my becoming irreligious to realize that.) We had been taught to place the Other on a narrow spectrum of pity, suspicion, and hate. We were taught to view boys our age as the enemy. But Moshe had found another way. He knew that holiness of the book was in physically sharing it.

  In prison, like in the West Bank, book-sharing is taboo. Just as in the intolerant atmosphere of the West Bank there were people who said that it shouldn’t happen at all. There were a few on staff who thought it was a bad idea. More often, however, I met people outside of the prison who made it clear they didn’t want their tax dollars funding a pretty library for violent criminals.

  I could understand that. Just as I understood the misery we had felt as kids in relinquishing our holy book to the enemy. It involved crossing a very real boundary. What did we accomplish by it, or by running a library for convicts? Perhaps nothing. But there was greater danger in not doing these things—or, at least, in not being willing to try.

  Kat in the Hole

  It was in the light of Fat Kat’s shared reverence for books, and of his generally pacific attitude, that I tried to make sense of some news that came to me one afternoon: Fat Kat, I was told, had viciously attacked an inmate in the 3-2 unit. He was eventually subdued, handcuffed, and sent to the Hole. Solitary confinement. The news was gruesome. Kat and a younger cohort had severely beaten another inmate, had slammed his face against a railing, against the concrete floor.

  I found this very hard to believe. This was a man who sat quietly reading his National Geographic, a man who could barely walk because of the pain in his legs. How, I wondered, was a person so concerned about hurting paperback books able to commit such violence to another human being? I personally didn’t know too many vegetarians who were capable of that.

  I knew that Kat was no stranger to violence. But that was theoretical. In the many hours I’d known him in the library, I hadn’t seen a shred of evidence to that effect, and in fact had witnessed a good deal of counterevidence. He was done with “the game,” he always insisted. He wanted a fresh start. I had believed him.

  For days, I tried to imagine what had happened up there. I had trouble picturing this man going berserk. Had I been duped by him? Was I missing something important here? Was that calm just a front?

  The library felt different without him. His role in the daily operation, his know-how, his sense of calm, were suddenly apparent in their absence.

  I decided to visit him in the Hole. This was one of the privileges of my job: access to inmates in solitary. The officer on duty there seemed skeptical but quickly gave in to the more dominant impulse of apathy. I was let in. And I did actually have business up there. Fat Kat held a good deal of crucial information that library patrons needed: he had material on legal cases, various paperwork that he’d been helping certain inmates with. But of course I was mostly there to find out what the hell had happened.

  Since he was in the Hole, in solitary confinement for twenty-three hours a day, his
cell remained locked. I spoke to him through the steel door, through the deposit slot used for food trays. He smiled shyly when I showed up.

  “So now you know what I look like locked up,” he said.

  We conducted our business quickly. He told me which case law, which forms, what information searches he had been working on and for whom. Then I wrote a note and pressed it to the brick-proof glass: What happened?

  There was a pause. I gazed in. Kat is not a small man, but he somehow looked small in his dark isolation cell. Unshaven, tired. He was scratching his scruffy whiskers and looking around at the walls, the ceiling. He wasn’t making eye contact. I gathered he was thinking of how to answer my question. This was the very image of acting cagey.

  When he finally spoke, it was in a whisper. I couldn’t hear him. I asked him to write it down. He shook his head no. He told me to put my ear to the door. I did. The dude, he whispered, and made the hand gesture of a gun shooting. My sister, man.

  A month or so later, when Kat had somehow weaseled his way out of the Hole, he made a visit to the library, where he received a hero’s welcome by the work detail and the regulars. The men actually clapped when he walked in. Some of them stood. Fat Kat beamed his big cherubic grin and waved to his public.

  “What’s good, Fat?” asked one of the inmates.

  “I feel great, man,” he announced, dropping a fist onto the library counter.

  “I’ve been up to that mountain, son, and now I’m back. I lost twenty pounds. I’m down to 319. I had a lot time to think, to clear my head, you know? I got all my shit worked out.”

  He did look refreshed. It wasn’t the first time I had seen this phenomenon. Solitary confinement is soul-crushing, life-alteringly horrible if it goes on for a long time. But in relatively small doses, it seemed to be cleansing for some inmates. It is the first time, sometimes in years, that these men have had privacy or quiet. Boat, who did time in a super-max prison, where he was locked up in his cell twenty-three hours a day, told me that he actually preferred solitary to being surrounded by incessant noise and petty violence.

  Later, when we had a quiet moment, I asked Kat about the incident. I also told him in no uncertain terms that legit businesspeople might not want to do business with him if he continued to settle his disputes with violence. He had to remove this whiff of thugdom if he really wanted to go legit.

  He didn’t want to discuss the issue.

  “Listen,” he told me, “I’m serious about going in a new direction. I’m tired of all this shit,” he said sweeping his hand behind him to indicate the prison, and the life that led him there. “But you got to understand something. This old hood shit, man, it don’t go away. This motherfucker shot my sister. Shot her! Do you understand what that means? What would you do if someone like that shows up—”

  “You can’t get pulled into it. There’s other ways of doing things,” I protested, “it’ll never end if …”

  He shook his head. This was not debatable.

  “No, man. You don’t understand. You can change where you’re going but not where you’re from. I gotta protect my family.”

  We left it at that.

  I thought about Fat Kat, the man who refused to desecrate a paperback, but willingly beat a man’s face in. To him, there was no contradiction in this: the sacred must be defended. In my yeshiva upbringing, books were not considered mere objects but beloved living things, treated with honor and affection. When you finished studying a volume of Talmud, you recited a public prayer, which was actually a direct and personal vow addressed to the book itself: We will return to you and you shall return to us; we are not finished with you and you are not finished with us; we will not forsake you and you shall not forsake us.

  To Fat Kat, loyalty was everything: loyalty to books, to his family. He would not forsake it. Especially when it was under attack.

  The Return of Chuzzlewit

  The next week I saw Officer Chuzzlewit loitering in front of the library. I’d been told that he was transferred to a posting on a cell block. But for some reason, he had been reinstated near my turf.

  Apparently, he hadn’t faced any discipline, which was fine with me. From the outset, I hadn’t wanted any heat—and I certainly didn’t want any escalation. But I was curious what had happened, given that the administration had made a show of “taking this seriously.”

  “What happened with the whole library incident?” I asked Deputy Quinn, when I ran into him in the prison yard. “I was kind of surprised to see you-know-who right back there.”

  Quinn’s shoulders tensed. He looked as though he were about to grab me by the lapels.

  “I wanted to fire him, and not just him,” Quinn said. “But the testimonies didn’t square.”

  “I don’t get that,” I said. “I mean, something clearly happened, because Brad”—the officer who’d been on duty at the library that day—“got punished. And you-know-who himself never denied going into the library, even though he lied about what he did in there. He basically confessed to being at the scene of the incident when it happened. How hard is it to connect these dots?”

  “The inmates’ testimony was muddled,” Quinn told me. “They all ID’ed Flaherty as the person.”

  Flaherty?

  I was speechless and could feel myself sink into a gloomy comprehension. This smelled worse than the initial fart bomb and was even less amusing. Three separate inmates each incorrectly identified the same officer—this was a remarkable coincidence. Though these inmates knew precisely who was responsible, each had pointed to a second officer, a man who hadn’t even entered the library that day. What had persuaded the inmates to make these identical false statements? This was left to the imagination. Less murky was the result: The reports contradicted one another and so the whole case had been thrown out.

  And then there was the union. I’d heard of an officer still on staff who’d been a lookout for another officer convicted of raping and impregnating women inmates. The union took seriously its job of protecting members from being fired.

  But what protected me from retaliation? What would prevent an angry officer from filing a report that I sold OxyContin to inmates from my desk in the library? There was little, it seemed, to prevent such an officer from suggesting that I’d helped an inmate dispose of a weapon, as that teacher, Miller, had done (or did he?). Evidence could be planted in my desk. And my fact-checked, term-paper-style incident reports weren’t worth the price of the paper of my college diploma.

  All of this worried me, especially since Chuzzlewit now had an actual motive. I had, after all, embarrassed him in public and apparently almost gotten him fired. I had a feeling I hadn’t seen the last of Monsieur Chuzzlewit.

  Thug Sizzle

  I went into the backroom of the library to set up my class and was startled to find Dumayne already there, seated with his notebook open, prison-issue safety bendy pen in hand and two spares lined up carefully at the edge of his desk, ready, as never before, to begin class.

  Dumayne had somehow managed to slip out during lockdown, through the Trap—the loving nickname given to the guard post next to his building—and get to class early. In prison terms, this was on the order of a minor escape.

  He was motivated as I’d never seen him. This week’s theme, love, was, after all, his motivation for joining the class, and he’d been waiting patiently, or mostly patiently, for two months now.

  If he were as charming in his love writing as he was persistent about getting to this room today, he would do just fine. Though, from my perspective, it was almost cheating to teach a guy whose idea of a love poem was “I wanna make love to you nice in your heart.” Nearly any string of vowels and consonants would sing compared to that. But he was trying.

  Today he was a laser of mindfulness. When I walked in, his hand went up. I couldn’t help but laugh.

  “Really, Dumayne,” I said, “you don’t have to raise your hand. Class hasn’t even started.”

  “Oh,” he said.


  “Was there something you wanted to say?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “We’re doing love shits today, right?”

  “Yes, love shits, and related topics.”

  Dumayne brightened up and said, “I’m gonna get started right away.”

  He began writing furiously. The combination of his hastiness and his continued inability to properly grip writing implements sent his bendy pen catapulting onto the floor. Without missing a beat, he picked up a spare and continued the effort.

  The other inmates began to file in. As usual, Chudney arrived last. His fake limp was even more pronounced today. He strutted directly to the front of the class, picked up a marker, and wrote Today’s Lesson. LOVE. With the Master, Dr. Chudney Franklin.

  I took a seat and said, “Okay, professor, let’s see what you got.”

  Ever the extrovert, he launched into a tirade, “Okay, it’s like this, y’know what’m sayin’, chicks be coming in all shapes and sizes, so you got to be able to bend and twist yourself into all kinds of shapes in order to, um, fill that space, ya know what I’m sayin …” And in case we didn’t know what he was saying, he began gyrating and grinding.

  “Thank you, Chudney,” I said. “Have a seat.”

  Chudney collapsed into a chair, and said, “Seriously, fellas, I’m gonna hit y’all real hard on my opinions and views on love. You’ll see.”

  “We all look forward to that,” I said.

  But, I had to admit, Chudney’s love poem was probably the best thing that came of the next twenty minutes. At his turn to read, he stood up and dramatically recited a recipe for chocolate chip cookies. He had memorized it from the back of a bag of Nestlé’s chocolate chips.