The Rabbi

by Noah Gordon

  Michael left his seat and walked up to the teacher’s desk. The rattan lay there. It was brown and varnished-looking, but he knew that the gleam was a polish that had been achieved through constant application to the tender skin of young Jewish boys. He picked up the rattan and flexed it. It took surprisingly little effort to make it cut viciously through the air, making a noise like corduroy knickers rubbing together. Suddenly he began to tremble, and to cry. He knew that he could not take any more pain either from Reb Chaim or from Stash Kwiatkowski, and he knew that he was going to quit Hebrew school. He turned on his heel and walked out of the room, still holding the rattan and leaving his books on his desk. He left the building slowly and walked home, planning how he would take the rattan to his mother and pull off his shirt to show her the mottled marks on his shoulders, the way Douglas Fairbanks had lowered his shirt to show his sweetheart the marks of her father’s lash in the picture he had seen the preceding Saturday afternoon.

  He was relishing the way his mother would cry over him when Stash stepped from behind the billboard and blocked his way. “Hello, Mikey,” he said softly.

  Michael didn’t know that he meant to hit Stash until the rattan sang through the air with the sound of bees and caught him across his right cheek and his lips.

  He let out an astonished yelp. “You little kike!”

  He rushed blindly and Michael hit him again, reaching up to get his arms and shoulders.

  “Stop that, you little bastid,” Stash screamed. Instinctively he raised his arms to protect his face. “I’m going to kill you,” he raged, but as he half turned to evade the zipping switch Michael cut the rattan across his fat, fleshy behind.

  He heard the sound of someone crying and realized incredibly that it was not himself. Stash’s face was screwed up until his chin looked like a wrinkled potato, and tears mingled with the blood that trickled from his lip. Every time Michael hit him he let out a little scream, and Michael hit him again and again as they ran, until finally he stopped chasing him because his arm was tired and Stash ran around a corner and was gone.

  He spent the rest of the walk home thinking about how he should have handled the situation better, how he should have stopped hitting him long enough to make him say that Jews didn’t kill Christ or gobble shit or cut off their pricks and eat them in stew on Saturday night.

  When he got home he hid the rattan behind the furnace in the apartment house basement instead of taking it up to his mother. The following morning he took it from its hiding place and brought it to school. Miss Landers, his teacher at P.S. 467, noticed it and asked him what it was, and he told her it was a pointer his mother had borrowed from the Hebrew school. She stared at it and opened her mouth, but then she closed it again as if she had changed her mind. After public school he ran to Hebrew school until he was out of breath and had a stitch in his side, and then he walked as fast as he could.

  He got there fifteen minutes before class. Reb Chaim was alone in the classroom, correcting papers. He kept his eyes on Michael as he walked toward him holding the rattan. Michael handed it to him.

  “I’m sorry I borrowed it without your permission.”

  The Reb turned it over in his hands, as if seeing it for the first time. “Why would you borrow it?”

  “I used it. On an anti-Semite.”

  Michael could swear that his lips twitched behind the camouflage of beard. But he was not a man to be diverted from the business at hand. “Bend over,” he said.

  Reb hit him six times across the behind. It hurt a lot and he cried, but all the while he was thinking that he had hit Stash Kwiatkowski a lot harder than Reb Chaim was hitting him.

  By the time the rest of the class came in and sat down he wasn’t crying any more, and a week later he was moved out of the front seat and Robbie Feingold took permanent possession because he was a silly kid who always got the giggles during recitation. Reb Chaim never hit him again.

  6

  At 3 A.M. on the day he was to be bar mitzvah, nervous and unable to sleep, he sat in the kitchen of the apartment in Queens and touched the imaginary fringes of an imaginary tallis to an imaginary Torah and then to his lips.

  “Borchu es adonoi hamvoroch,” he whispered. “Boruch adonoi hamvoroch l’olom voed.”

  “Michael?” his mother shuffled groggily into the kitchen, her eyes slitted against the light, one small white hand to her hair. She wore a blue flannel robe over pink cotton pajamas that were too short. She had recently begun to have her hair dyed a passion-red that made her look like a fat female clown, and even through his nervousness he felt embarrassment and love wash over him in successive waves as he looked at her.

  “Are you sick?” she asked anxiously.

  “I wasn’t sleepy.”

  The truth was that while lying awake in his bed he had run through his part in the bar mitzvah ceremonies, as he had been doing at least fifty times a day for the past few months, and he had found to his horror that he could not say the brocha, the short blessing that preceded the longer Torah reading called the haftorah. He knew the brocha as well as he knew his own name, but some part of his mind, tired of being hammered at by a single set of sounds, had rebelled and had wiped his memory clean of the words.

  “You’ve got to get up in a few hours,” she whispered fiercely. “Go to bed.”

  More asleep than awake, she turned and shuffled back to her mattress. He heard his father question her as the spring creaked under her descending weight.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Your son is crazy. A real mishugineh.”

  “Why doesn’t he sleep?”

  “Go and ask him.”

  Abe did, walking barefoot into the kitchen, his uncombed black hair dropping over his forehead. He wore only pajama bottoms, as he did throughout the year because he was proud of his body. Michael noticed for the first time that the curling hair on his chest was beginning to be frizzled with gray.

  “What the hell?” he said. He sat down on a kitchen chair and dug into his scalp with both hands. “How do you expect to be bar mitzvah tomorrow?”

  “I can’t remember the brocha.”

  “You mean you can’t remember the haftorah?”

  “No, the brocha. If I remember the brocha the haftorah comes out fine. But I can’t remember the first line of the brocha.”

  “Jesus Christ, son, you knew the damn brocha when you were nine years old.”

  “I can’t remember it now.”

  “Look. You don’t have to remember it. It will be up there in the book. All you have to do is read it.”

  Michael knew that this was true, but he didn’t feel any better. “Maybe I won’t be able to find the place,” he said weakly.

  “There’ll be more old men on the platform with you than you’ll want to look at. They’ll show you the place.” His voice grew crisp. “You get to bed, now. That’s enough of this mishugahss.”

  Michael went back to bed but he lay awake until the shades on his window were rimmed with gray light. Then he closed his eyes and drifted off, only to be awakened by his mother after what seemed a split second of sleep. She peered at him anxiously.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I guess so,” he said. He stumbled off to the bathroom and threw cold water on his face. He was so tired he hardly knew what was happening as he dressed, ate a hasty breakfast, and accompanied his parents to the synagogue.

  His mother kissed him good-by at the door and hurried upstairs to the women’s section. She looked frightened. He accompanied his father to a place in the second row. The synagogue was crowded with their friends and relatives. His father had few kinfolks, but his mother came from a great and sprawling clan, and it seemed as though they were all there. Many men whispered hello as they walked to their bench. His lips moved in response, but his voice said nothing. He was encased in a suit of fright that moved with his body when he moved and from which there was no escape.

  Time passed. Dimly he was aware that his father had been
called to the bema, and from far away he heard Abe’s voice reciting in Hebrew. Then his own name was called in Hebrew—Mi-cha-el ben Avrahom—and on legs that had no feeling he mounted the platform. He touched his tallis to the Torah and kissed the fringes, and then he stared at the Hebrew letters on the yellowed parchment. They wriggled like snakes before his eyes.

  “Borchu!” hissed one of the old men by his side.

  A quavering voice that couldn’t have been his picked up the chant.

  “Borchu es adonoi hamvoroch. Borchu—”

  “BorUCH.” The old men all grunted or growled the correction at the same time, the brusque chorus of their voices slapping him across the face like a wet towel. He looked up dazedly and saw that his father’s eyes were desperate. He began the second sentence again.

  “BorUCH adonoi hamvoroch Tolom voed. Boruch ahtoh adonoi, elohainu melech hoalom.” Huskily he finished the brocha and began the haftorah. For five minutes he quavered on, the thin piping of his voice sounding hollowly in a silence which he knew was caused by the congregation’s conviction that any second now he was going to get hopelessly lost in the complexities of the Hebrew passage or in the ancient tune. But like a wounded matador whose training and discipline refuses to let him squirm into merciful oblivion beneath the horns of the bull, he refused to die. His voice steadied. His knees ceased their trembling. He sang on and on, and the congregation sat back in their seats, half-disappointed in the knowledge that he was not going to create a fiasco for their diversion.

  Soon he had even forgotten the ring of bearded critics who surrounded him, and the large audience of friends and blood relations. Caught up in the melody and in the tone poem of the wildly beautiful Hebrew, he swayed to and fro in rhythm to his own chanting. By the time the passage was finished he was enjoying himself immensely, and it was with regret that he drew out the last note as long as he dared.

  He looked up. His father’s face looked as though the First Lady had just told him personally that he was official bra-maker to the White House. Abe started toward his son, but before he could reach him Michael was enclosed in a forest of hands, all reaching to grip his wet palm, while a chorus of voices wished him mazel tov.

  He walked with his father up the central aisle toward the back of the synagogue, where his mother waited at the foot of the balcony stairs. As they walked they shook hands with a dozen people, and he accepted envelopes containing money from men whose names he didn’t know. His mother kissed him tearfully and he hugged her fat shoulders.

  “Look who’s here, Michael,” she said, pointing. He looked up to see his grandfather making his way down the aisle of the synagogue toward them. Isaac had slept at the nearby apartment of one of Abe’s pressers, in order to be able to walk to the synagogue and thus avoid violating the Sabbath law prohibiting riding.

  It wasn’t until years later that it occurred to Michael how shrewdly his grandfather had waged his war against Dorothy or how victorious he had been. His strategy had required patience and the passing of time. But having utilized these, without once having raised his voice, he had vanquished his daughter-in-law and turned her household into the observant place he wanted it to be.

  Michael had been his agent, of course.

  The overthrowing of Stash Kwiatkowski had provided him an impetus that for months made him eager to walk to Hebrew school and back each day. By the time this pleasure had worn thin and he no longer felt like Jack the Giant Killer, he had been caught up in the rhythm of a learning process. Reb Yossle followed Reb Chaim and Reb Doved followed Reb Yossle, and then for two ecstatic years he bathed each afternoon in the warmth emitted by the electric blue eyes of Miss Sophie Feldman, pretending to soak up knowledge and trembling every time she spoke his name. Miss Feldman had honey-colored hair and a sprinkling of freckles across the bridge of a deliciously retroussé nose, and during each class she sat with her ankles crossed, the toe of her right foot turning, turning in a lazy circle which he watched with a fascination that somehow allowed him to recite when he was called upon.

  By the time she had become Mrs. Hyman Horowitz, and had waddled pregnantly from the classroom for the last time, he had little leisure to waste in such luxuries as jealousy, because he was in his thirteenth year and the bar mitzvah loomed before him. He spent each afternoon in the special bar mitzvah class of Reb Moishe, the school principal, studying his haftorah. Every couple of Sundays he took the subway to Brooklyn and sang the haftorah for his grandfather, sitting in Isaac’s room next to him on the bed, both of them wearing skullcaps and tallises, tracing the words in the book with a perspiring finger as he chanted them slowly and with far too much self-importance.

  His grandfather would sit with his eyes closed, not unlike Reb Chaim, and when Michael made a mistake he would spring to life and sing the correct word in an old weak voice. After Michael had recited Isaac would ask subtle questions about life at home, and what he heard must have filled him with satisfaction. Michael’s exposure to the environment of the Sons of Jacob Synagogue had turned the tables on the spirit of reform that had permeated the Kind household.

  Dorothy Kind was not suited to be a revolutionary. When Michael began to question the presence in their home of meats and seafood which his rebs at the Hebrew school told him were forbidden to good Jews, his mother seized upon the excuse to ban them from the house. Challenged by her father-in-law, she had fought wildly for her right to be a free thinker. Questioned innocently by her son, she conformed with meekness and a quickened conscience. The shabbos lights came to be kindled in the apartment each Friday evening once more, and milk was milk and meat was meat, the two were not to be mingled.

  Now, when his grandfather had made his slow way to them through the crowded synagogue, Dorothy amazed him by kissing him with affection. “Wasn’t Michael wonderful?” she demanded.

  “A good haftorah” he conceded gruffly. He kissed Michael on the head. The service was over and the congregation began to pour toward them. They accepted the congratulations until the last person had shaken their hands and departed for the vestry, where tables were laden with chopped liver, pickled herring, kichles, and bottles of bootleg Scotch and rye.

  Before they joined the guests his grandfather removed the boy-sized prayer shawl from around Michael’s neck. Isaac took the tallis from around his own shoulders and wrapped the silken folds around his grandson. Michael was familiar with this tallis. It was not the one Isaac wore every day. This prayer shawl he had bought soon after coming to America, and he wore it only on the high holidays and other special occasions. It was carefully cleaned each year and wrapped and stored away after each wearing. The silk was slightly yellowed but well preserved, and the blue stitching was still strong and bright.

  “Papa, your good tallis,” his mother protested.

  “He’ll take care of it,” his zaydeh told her. “Like a shayneh Yid.”

  7

  On a bright, cold Saturday morning in the winter of his thirteenth year he became a member of the working masses. He drove into Manhattan with his father, leaving the house before the rest of the family was out of bed. They breakfasted on orange juice, cream cheese, lox, and crusty rolls, dawdled pleasantly over thick mugs of coffee, and then left the cafeteria and crossed the street to the old loft building, the fourth floor of which contained Kind’s Foundations.

  The dreams Abe had enjoyed when he had changed the firm’s name, and their own, had never materialized. Whatever constitutes the ingredient that transforms a healthy business into a rich enterprise had eluded Abraham Kind. But while the business had not mushroomed it continued to supply them with a good living.

  The plant consisted of sixteen machines bolted to an oily wooden floor and ringed by wooden tables bearing supplies of cloth, cups, stays, garters, and the other bits of materials that went into corsets, garter belts, girdles, and bras. Most of his father’s employees were skilled workers who had been with him for many years. Michael knew many of them, but his father took him from machine to machine and in
troduced him gravely.

  A white-haired cutter named Sam Katz removed the stumpy cigar from his mouth and patted his round belly.

  “I’m the shop steward,” he said. “You want I should negotiate union business with you or with your father, Sonny?”

  Abe grinned. “You gonif, stay away from this boy with your union propaganda. If I know you you’ll put him on the negotiating committee.”

  “It ain’t a bad idea. Thanks, I think I will!”

  His father’s grin faded as they walked away together toward the front office. “He makes more money than I do,” he said.

  There was a wall separating the front office from the machines. The reception room was carpeted, softly illuminated, and had been furnished well in the days when Abe had still had grandiose illusions about the future. By the time Michael started working there the furniture was shabby but still attractive. A glass cubicle in the corner contained two desks, one for his father and one for Carla Salva, the bookkeeper.

  She was seated behind her ledgers, doing her nails. She flashed them a smile with her “Good morning.” She had incredibly white teeth and a mouth that nature had made thin-lipped and Max Factor had redesigned in red lushness. Next to her thin, flared nostrils was a large brown birthmark. She was a large-bosomed, slim-hipped Puerto Rican girl with creamy skin.

  “Any mail?” Abe asked. She jabbed the freshly carmined nail of her forefinger, as sharp and red as a bloody stiletto, at a pile of papers on the far side of her desk. His father picked them up and carried them to his desk and began to separate the orders from the bills.

  Michael stood there for a few minutes and then cleared his throat. “What do you want me to do?” he asked.

  Abe looked up. He had forgotten that the boy was there. “Oh,” he said. He took him to a small closet and showed him where a battered Hoover vacuum cleaner squatted. “Clean the rugs.”