by Noah Gordon
“Does it taste like chicken?”
“A little bit. But not really.”
“Does it taste like fish?”
“A little.”
“What does it really taste like?”
Finally one Saturday afternoon he came home carrying a large, damp paper bag. “Here,” he said to Dorothy. “Ess gezunteh hait.”
She took the bag and then squealed as she dropped it onto the kitchen table. “There’s something alive in there,” she said.
He tore open the bag and roared with laughter as he watched his wife’s face when she saw the lobsters. There were three of the creatures, large and green, with small dark eyes that protruded, raising gooseflesh on Dorothy’s arms. When it was time to drop them into the pot of boiling water it became apparent that Abe was more than a little afraid of the waving tentacles and the cruel claws himself, and it was her turn to laugh. She would have none of the lobster meat. Although she had rebelled against her father-in-law’s sternness and had started the family’s insurrection against the things he stood for, there was a great deal of difference between mixing dishes in the cupboard and actually chewing and swallowing flesh which all her life she had been told was forbidden and disgusting. Shuddering, she ran out of the room. But she came to like crisp bacon when Abe brought it home and fried it for her himself, and soon she was serving it with eggs at breakfast several times a week.
Michael’s father was one of the first of the girdle-makers to package his product in colorful narrow tubes, and the enthusiasm with which his customers greeted the innovation made him dream of expansion and a highly upgraded line. One day he came home and made Dorothy take off her apron and sit down.
“Dorothy,” he said, “what would you think if I changed your name?”
“Mishugineh, you did that fourteen years ago.”
“Dorothy, I’m serious. I mean change it from Rivkind. Legally.”
She looked at him in alarm. “To what? And what for?”
“Rivkind’s Foundations, Inc., that’s what for. It sounds like just what it is. A loft outfit that will never be a leader in the corset industry. These new packages deserve a classy name.”
“So change the name of the company. What does that have to do with our name?”
“Look. All you have to do is cut our name in half.” He showed her the slogan typed on a piece of stationery. “Be KIND To Your Figure.” She looked at him and shrugged. So because the word fit into an advertising slogan on a slim tube, but most important, because something within Michael’s father made it imperative that he be Mr. Kind of Kind Foundations, the Rivkind family’s name was legally changed by the courts.
Reform, even in personal matters, is difficult to contain in tight bounds. Several of their neighbors had moved to new sections of Queens, and finally Abe listened to Dorothy’s urging and they bought an apartment in a yellow-brick building that had just been raised in Forest Hills.
When Isaac heard that they had moved away from Brooklyn to a neighborhood that was miles from the Sons of David Home he appeared unaffected by the news. Their visits to him had become less and less frequent, and when on occasion Abe, haunted by a sudden storm of conscience, took Michael to see his zaydeh, the three of them had little to talk about. Zaydeh had succeeded in having Mr. Melnick’s Solly examine him and write a prescription, and Abe gladly paid for the bottle of medicinal Canadian V.O. that occupied a place of honor on his father’s dresser at all times. Rye whiskey and the deep study of the Torah now filled Isaac Rivkind’s life, and the visitors soon ran out of conversation about both of these subjects.
One visit they made to the Home soon after their exodus to Queens provided Zaydeh with something to talk about, however. Sukkos was approaching, and as always at that season Michael thought a great deal about his grandfather. He had begged his father for weeks to take him to see Zaydeh, and when the day arrived he had a bundle of crayon drawings that were his special gift to the old man.
When Isaac sat on his bed and looked at the pictures, one in particular caught his eye. “What is this, Micheleh?” he asked.
“That’s our building, where we live,” Michael said as he pointed to a tall blob of color. “And that’s a tree with chestnuts on it, and a squirrel. And that’s the church on the corner.” It was the latter, adorned with a cross that was the drawing’s most lifelike representation, that had captured Isaac’s interest. The cross, and Michael’s carefully printed new signature.
“Don’t you know how to spell your name?” he asked.
“Papa,” Abe said quickly, “he’s spelled it right. I had it legally changed.” He expected a burst of the old thunder, but Isaac scarcely blinked.
“Your name isn’t Rivkind any more?”
He listened without comment to his son’s long explanation about the business reasons for the change, and then to an enthusiastic description of the new line of girdles and bras. When it was time for them to go, Isaac kissed Michael on the cheek and shook his son’s hand.
“Thank you for coming, Abraham.” Then he stopped short. “Your name still is Abraham?”
“Of course it is,” Abe said. All the way home he snarled at Michael whenever the boy opened his mouth.
Two days later Abe received a letter from his father. It had been written on lined paper in smudged, penciled Yiddish by a hand made tremulous by age and alcohol. It took Abe hours of cudgeling his memory to translate the letter, and much of it turned out to be pure Talmudic reference that meant nothing to him. But the main message in the letter came through. Isaac indicated to his son that he had given up hope for everyone in the family save his grandson, Micheleh. Two-thirds of the letter was a fervent plea that Michael should be given a Jewish education.
Dorothy laughed and shook her head when her husband read her as much of the letter as he could turn into English. But to Michael’s unpleasant surprise his father seemed to take the request more seriously.
“It’s time. He’s of an age for chedar,” he said. And so, the chosen person, Michael began to attend Hebrew school every afternoon following his release from public school. He was in the third grade at P.S. 467 and he had absolutely no desire to learn Hebrew. Nevertheless he was enrolled in the Talmud Torah of the Congregation Sons of Jacob Synagogue. Sons of Jacob was located half a mile from the public school. It was an Orthodox synagogue, but this played no part in the choice of its school. He would have been enrolled had it been Conservative or Reform. It happened to be the only Hebrew school to which he could walk from P.S. 467 every day. The fact that the walk to Hebrew school would take him through one of the toughest Polish neighborhoods in New York had been given no consideration by the adults who controlled his destiny.
On the third day of Hebrew school he met Stash Kwiatkowski as he walked homeward. Stash was in his class at P.S. 467. This was his third year in the third grade. He was at least two years older than Michael, a broad-faced blond boy with very large blue eyes and a half-ashamed grin that he wore like a mask. Michael knew him in class as a boy who made a lot of humorous mistakes during recitation, and when he saw Stash he grinned.
“Hi, Stash,” he said.
“Hi, kiddo. What you got there?”
What he had there were his three books, an “aleph-bez” from which he was learning the Hebrew alphabet, a notebook, and a storybook history of the Jews.
“Just some books,” he said.
“Where’d you get ’em. The lib’ry?”
“Hebrew school.”
“What’s that?”
He could see that the idea intrigued Stash, so he explained that it was a place to which he went when all the others in their class were released from public school for the day.
“Let me see ’em.”
He looked dubiously at Stash’s hands, which were grimy with the dirt of three hours of after-school play. His books were new and immaculate. “I’d better not.”
Stash’s grin grew wider as he clamped a hand on Michael’s wrist. “Come on. Let’s see ’em.”
He was at least four inches shorter than Stash, but the other boy was slow-moving. Michael tore out of his grasp and leaped away. Stash chased him a surprisingly short distance and then dropped out of the race completely.
But the following evening as Michael walked homeward he suddenly appeared, stepping out from behind a billboard where he had set his ambush.
Michael tried smiling at him. “Hi, Stash.”
This time Stash made no pretense at friendliness. He grabbed the books, and the aleph-bez fell to the ground. One of the things that had made an impression upon Michael a few days earlier was the sight of a young rabbi who had dropped a pile of prayer books to the floor, reverently kissing each book as he picked them up. A short time later he was to learn to his deep embarrassment that the practice was reserved for books containing the word of God, but at the time he thought that it was something which Jews did to any volume printed in Hebrew. Some perverse stubbornness caused him to pounce upon the alphabet book and press it to his lips while Stash stared.
“What did you do that for?”
Hoping that a glimpse into another way of life would ease Stash’s belligerence, he explained that the book was printed in Hebrew and therefore had to be kissed whenever it hit the ground. It was a mistake. Recognizing a source of endless amusement, Stash dropped the book to the ground as fast as he could pick it up and kiss it. When his hand closed into a fist Stash whipped it behind his back and twisted it until he cried.
“Say ‘I’m a dirty Yid.’”
He was silent until he thought his arm would break, and then he said it. He said that Yids gobble shit, that Yids killed Our Saviour, that Yids cut the ends off their pricks and ate them in stew on Saturday night.
For good measure Stash tore the first page out of his alphabet book and rolled it into a ball. When he stooped to pick up the crumpled paper Stash kicked him in the buttocks with stunning force that made him whimper in pain as he ran away. That night in the privacy of his bedroom he smoothed the page out as best he could and taped it back into the book.
In the days that followed, the inquisition in Queens became a routine. Stash largely ignored him in school, and he was free to laugh as loudly as any of the others when the older boy made a shambles of a recitation. When the final bell rang Michael dashed out in order to get through Stash’s neighborhood before he arrived. And on the way home from Hebrew school he tried varying his route in an effort to evade his tormentor. But if Stash missed him for a couple of days the big boy would move out a block or two, trying a different position each afternoon until inevitably Michael walked into one of his traps. Then he would add a little extra torture, to make up for the fun Michael had made him miss through his evasive tactics.
But he had problems other than Stash. The Hebrew school had turned out to be a place of no fun and swift discipline. The teachers were laymen who were given the honorary title of reb, a word that gave them status approximately halfway between that of the rabbi and the janitor. The reb who taught his class was a thin young man with spectacles and a brown beard. His name was Hyman Horowitz, but he was never called anything but Reb Chaim. The gutteral ch of his Yiddish first name fascinated Michael, who mentally dubbed him Chaim Chorowitz the Chunter, because he habitually sat back in his seat behind the desk, his eyes closed and his fingers forever wandering through his bushy beard, as if continually chunting, chunting for cooties. Chooties?
There were twenty boys in the class. As a new boy Michael was given a seat directly in front of Reb Chaim, and he soon learned that this was the worst seat in the room. A pupil never stayed in it for any length of time unless he was stupid or an archcriminal. It was the only seat in the room in which the victim could be reached by Reb Chaim’s rattan. Slender and supple, a cross between a switch and a bastinado, it lay before him on his desk. Any infraction of civilized behavior, from whispering to poor recitation, brought it whistling through the air to land—whomp!—on offending shoulders. Despite underwear, shirt, and sweater to cushion the effect of the blow, the rattan was as wicked a weapon as any of the pupils had ever met, and they held it in justifiable awe.
Chaim the Chunter gave Michael a taste of the rattan at the end of the first lesson, when he saw him glancing around the battered old classroom instead of paying strict attention to his studies. One moment the teacher leaned back in his chair, apparently about to doze off with his eyes closed and his fingers chunting, chunting through his beard. And the next moment, a brief whistle like the sound of a dropping bomb compressed into one-tenth of a second’s time, and then—whomp! He didn’t even open his eyes, but the rattan hit Michael dead center on the left shoulder. He was too overcome with admiration for the Reb’s performance to cry, and the sound of the muted ripple of laughter which swept his classmates took some of the personal tragedy away from the punishment.
The blow had been standard operating procedure, and he did not become listed as a Public Enemy until his fifth day at Hebrew School. Reb Chaim was charged with teaching his pupils religion as well as Hebrew language, and on that day he had just finished telling them the story of Moses and the burning bush. God, he informed them solemnly, was all-powerful.
Michael was seized by a fascinating thought. Before he knew what he was doing he had raised his hand. “Do you mean that God can do anything at all?”
Reb Chaim stared at him impatiently. “Anything,” he said.
“Can He make a great big rock? One so heavy that a million men can’t move it?”
“Of course He can.”
“And can He move it?”
“Of course.”
Michael became excited. “Then can He make a rock so heavy that He can’t move it Himself?”
Reb Chaim beamed, happy to have stimulated so much zeal on the part of his new pupil. “Certainly,” he said. “If He wanted to.”
He was so excited that he shouted. “But if He can’t move it Himself, then He can’t do everything! So He’s not all-powerful!”
Reb Chaim opened his mouth and then closed it. His face grew flushed as he looked at Michael’s triumphant grin.
Whomp! Whomp! Whomp! The rattan fell on both of the boy’s shoulders in a shower of blows that must have been as exciting to watch as a tennis match, but which was terribly painful to receive. This time he did cry, but nonetheless he had become a hero to his class and Public Enemy Number One to his Hebrew teacher.
It was very discouraging. Between Stash and Reb Chaim his life became a series of nightmares. He tried playing hooky. In the afternoon when he got out of P.S. 467 he went to a bowling alley four blocks from the school and sat for three hours on a wooden bench, watching the players. It wasn’t a bad place to wait. He did this for four days, and on each day he sat behind the alley used by the same fat woman with massive breasts and great haunches. She raised the big bowling ball as though it were a bead, and she moved forward on the tips of her toes in mincing steps that caused her to shake and tremble so that you knew she could profit immensely by wearing some of his father’s products. She chewed gum steadily and without expression, and when she released the ball and sent it cannoning down the alley she suspended chewing until the pins were exploded and had stopped falling. Usually this meant that she stood on one foot with her mouth open, like a statue made with too much clay by a mad sculptor. She was interesting and educational to watch, but his nerves gave out, and besides, when she sat down on the bench in front of him, her body odor nauseated him. On the fifth day he returned to Hebrew school, having forged a note from his mother saying that he had had an attack of sinus trouble, the symptoms of which he knew because his sister Ruthie suffered them vociferously most of the year around.
The pressure began to tell on him. He grew increasingly tense and nervous and he lost weight. At night he thrashed in his bed, unable to sleep. When he did sleep he dreamed of being beaten by Reb Chaim, or he dreamed that Stash waited for him outside the door, his figure rising three feet taller than his actual height.
One afternoon wh
ile he was in Hebrew class the boy behind him handed a piece of paper over his shoulder. Reb Chaim’s back was turned to the class as he wrote the next day’s grammar lesson on the blackboard, so Michael glanced at the paper without worry. It was a crude caricature of their teacher, unmistakable because of the beard, the glasses, and the skullcap. Grinning, Michael added a wart to his nose—he actually had one there—and drew in an arm with the hand hunting, hunting in the beard, neatly printing Chaim Chorowitz the Chunter beneath the picture.
The fact that the Reb was standing above him and gazing down at the paper on which he wrote was conveyed to him by the awful stillness of the classroom. It was a stillness that transcended the quiet demanded even by Reb Chaim. No pencil moved, no foot shuffled, no nose was blown. Only the ticking of the clock was heard, loud and slow and grimly portentous.
He sat and waited for the rattan to descend on his shoulders, refusing to look up into the brown eyes behind the shiny spectacles. Reb Chaim’s hand slowly came into range of his downcast eyes. It was a long-fingered, slender hand with freckles and crisp black hairs on the wrist and below the knuckles. The hand picked up the piece of paper and took it out of his sight.
And still the rattan did not strike.
“You will remain after school,” Reb Chaim told him quietly. There were eighteen minutes until the lesson was over, and each one stuck to the afternoon as if fastened with glue. Finally they were gone, however, and the class was dismissed. He could hear the other boys running and yelling as they left the building. The room was very quiet. Reb Chaim arranged some papers and put an elastic band around them and put them away in his second drawer. Then he walked out of the classroom and down the corridor to the teachers’ john. He shut the door behind him but the building was so quiet that Michael could hear him urinating, a drumming like a tiny machine gun over in another sector of the front.