The Rabbi

by Noah Gordon

  “That’s all you’re carrying?” the cop asked gently. “No wallet?”

  He shook his head.

  “They’d kill you for your last nickel,” the policeman said.

  “I’m taking a cab home,” Michael said to the bearded man. “Let me drop you.”

  “No, no. It is only two short blocks. On Broadway.”

  “I’ll walk with you then, and take my cab from there.” They thanked the policeman and walked through the snow in silence, feeling their bruises. When finally the man stopped it was in front of an old brick building with an unreadable wooden plaque on the door.

  He grasped Michael’s hand. “I thank you. I am Gross, Max Gross. Rabbi Max Gross. Will you join me, please? A cup of tea?”

  Michael was curious and he agreed, introducing himself. As they entered Rabbi Gross stood on his toes in order to touch a mezuzah placed high on the doorframe, then he kissed his fingertips. From his pocket he took the yarmulka, now sodden with melted snow, and clapped it on his head. A small cardboard carton contained a heap of other skullcaps, and he pointed to them. “This is God’s house.” Michael put one on, thinking that if it were so, God needed a handout. The room was small and narrow, more of a hallway than a room, wide enough to accommodate only ten rows of attached wooden folding chairs set before the altar. A crumbling linoleum covered the floor. At one end of the room a tiny vestry contained a battered office table and some scarred cane chairs. Gross removed his coat, dropping it on the table. He wore an unpressed suit of navy blue. Michael couldn’t tell if there was a tie beneath the beard. The rabbi was very clean, but Michael got the impression that if he had no beard he would walk around all the time needing a shave.

  There was a rumble that shook the whole building and the naked yellow bulb at the end of its striped cord leaped, sending large shadows swaying on the ceiling. “What’s that?” Michael gasped.

  “Subway.” At the soapstone sink he filled a dented aluminum pot with water and set it to boil on an electric hotplate. The mugs were thick and cracked. He colored both cups of water with one tea bag. They used lump sugar. He said a brocha. They sat on the cane-bottomed chairs and sipped.

  The bruise on the rabbi’s face was turning purple. His eyes were large and brown and soft with innocence, like a child’s or an animal’s. A saint or a fool, Michael told himself.

  “Have you been here long, Rabbi?”

  He blew on his tea. He thought a long time. “Sixteen years. Yes, sixteen.”

  “How many members do you have in your congregation?”

  “Not many. A few. Old men, mostly old men.” He simply sat and drank. He showed no curiosity about Michael, asked him no questions. They finished the tea and shook hands, and Michael put on his coat. At the doorway he turned and looked back. Rabbi Gross seemed unaware that he was not alone. His back to his visitor, he swayed and bobbed, finishing the evening Shema that had been interrupted on the street: Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One. The subway rumbled. The building shook. The lightbulb leaped. The shadows swayed. Michael fled.

  One night just before midterms he sat in the Student Union drinking coffee with two other students, one of whom was a desirable woman. All three of them were having just a little trouble with American Philosophy. “What about Orestes Brownson and his disillusionment over the Enlightenment?” Edna Roth asked. She had a small pink tongue that flickered as she licked Danish-roll stickiness from her fingertips.

  “My God, all I remember about him is that he converted to Catholicism,” he said, groaning.

  “I’ve been thinking about your father,” Chuck Farley said out of the blue. “Small capitalists like your father are the workingman’s greatest enemies.”

  “Most weeks my father has trouble meeting his payroll,” Michael said shortly. Farley had never met Abe Kind. A couple of times he had asked about Kind foundations and Michael had answered his questions. “The union is giving him an ulcer. What has that to do with American Philosophy?”

  Farley raised his eyebrows. “Everything,” he said. “Can’t you see that?” Farley was very ugly, with a prominent, freckled nose and ginger-colored hair, lashes, and brows. He wore octagonal frameless glasses and was a fussy but drab dresser. Whenever he gave a talk in class he pulled from his pants an enormous cartwheel of a gold watch and set it on the desk in front of him. Michael drank a lot of Student Union coffee with him because Edna Roth was always sitting by his side.

  Edna was a soft, dark brunette with a beauty mark high on her left cheekbone and a slight swell to her underlip that made Michael want to try it between his teeth. A trifle fat, just slightly dowdy, neither pretty nor unpretty, she wore her femaleness comfortably in her brown eyes and she exuded a bovine heat and a faint, puzzling smell like milk.

  “From now on no happy little drunkies,” she said, although Michael had never bar-hopped with them. “No forty winks, no tiddlywinks, no Cecil B. De Mille’s extravaganzas. We need a lot more studying for that exam.” She blinked at Farley anxiously. She was nearsighted; it gave her face a dreamy, slightly out-of-focus look. “Will you have enough time to study, honeybun?”

  He nodded. “On the train.” He was commuting to Danbury, Connecticut, where he was helping to picket the hat industry. Edna was very understanding about these activities. She was a widow. Her late husband, Seymour, had also been a Party member. She knew all about picketing.

  Farley left, after touching his thin lips to her full mouth. Michael and Edna finished their coffee and retired to a cubicle on the third floor of Butler, where until closing time they wrestled with Brownson and Theodore Parker, the transcendentalists, the cosmic philosophers, the radical empiricists, Calvinism, Borden Parker Browne, Thoreau, Melville, Brook Farm, William Torrey Harris. . . .

  On the stairs outside, he blinked his burning eyes. “There’s too much, too many details.”

  “I know. Look, honeybun, want to come to my place and study for another hour or two?”

  They took the subway. She lived in an old red-brick apartment building in Washington Heights. She opened the door with her key, and he was surprised to see a thin young Negro girl seated by the radio, doing her math homework, which she started to gather together as soon as she saw them.

  “How is he, Martha?” Edna asked.

  “Fine. He’s just a darling boy.”

  The girl left, carrying her books. He followed Edna into the small bedroom and bent with her over the crib. He had thought that all Seymour had left her was enough money to return to Teachers College to pick up her meal ticket. But here was a different legacy.

  “He’s a handsome guy,” Michael said when they had returned to the living room. “How old is he?”

  “Thank you. Fourteen months. His name’s Alan.” She went into the kitchen and started putting on a pot of coffee. He looked around. There was a picture on the mantel. He knew without asking that this was the late Seymour, a somewhat handsome man wearing a ridiculous mustache and a strained smile. The furniture was Colonial borax. With luck it would last until she began to teach or remarried. When he looked out the window he saw the river. The building was nearer to Broadway than the Drive, but the land dropped away sharply toward the Hudson, and Edna’s apartment was on the eighth floor. Warm little lights that were boats crawled slowly over the water.

  They had coffee in the tiny kitchenette and then they studied without moving from their places at the table, his knee finding her thigh. Before forty minutes had passed he was through and she had closed her book, too. It was warm in the kitchen. Her milky smell was there again, faint but distinct.

  “Well, I guess I’d better be going.”

  “You can stay if you want, honeybun. I mean tonight.”

  He used the telephone while she cleared the coffee dishes. His mother answered, her voice foggy with sleep, and he told her he was studying late and would sleep with a friend. She thanked him for calling so that she wouldn’t worry.

  The bedroom adjoined the baby’s, and the door was op
en. They undressed back to back by the light of the baby’s nightlight. He caught her underlip gently between his teeth, the way he had promised himself. In the bed, close to her, the faint, milky smell was very real. He wondered if she could still be nursing the baby. But her nipples were dry, hard little buds. Everything else was soft and warm, no shocks or surprises, a gentle rising and falling, the steady rocking of a cradle. She was kind. When he fell asleep, her palm was holding the back of his head.

  The baby started to cry at four A.M., a thin rope of sound that pulled them into wakefulness. She yanked her arm from beneath his head, leaped out of bed, and ran to heat a bottle. Viewed naked from the back her buttocks were large and slightly drooping. When she took the bottle from the pan of hot water the milk-smell mystery was solved, she shook a white jet into the soft, sensitive flesh in the bend of her elbow. Satisfied that the temperature of the milk was all right, she put the nipple into the baby’s mouth. The wailing stopped.

  When she had re-entered the bed he leaned over her body to kiss the place where the milk had fallen. It was still damp and warm. He let the tip of his tongue explore the softness inside her elbow. The milk was sweet. She sighed deeply. Her hand reached for him. This time he was more confident, she less maternal. When she slept he got out of bed carefully, dressed in the dark and let himself out of the apartment. Downstairs, outside, it was dark; a wind blew from the river. He turned up his coat collar and began to walk. He felt weightless and happy, relieved of the burden of innocence. “Finally,” he said aloud. A kid pedaling by in the gutter, his deep bicycle-basket loaded with packages, shot him a look hard and shining as a marble. Any other place in the world would still be sleeping at 5:05 A.M. Manhattan was alive. People on the sidewalk, taxis and cars in the street. He walked for a long time. It had been light for several minutes when he recognized one of the buildings he was passing. It was the little shul where the subway shook the lights, the synagogue of Rabbi Max Gross.

  He approached the door and put his eyes inches away from the almost-obliterated lettering of the small wooden plaque. In the gray light of dawn the faded Hebrew letters seemed to twist and squirm, but with difficulty he made them out. Shaarai Shomayim. The Gates of Heaven.

  15

  By the time he was four years old in the Polish town of Vorka, Max Gross could read portions of the Talmud. At the age of seven, when most of his small friends still were mastering language and the stories of the Bible, he had plunged deep into the complexities of the law. His father, Chaim Gross the wine merchant, rejoiced that his storekeeper’s seed had produced an ilui, a Talmudic prodigy who would bring the blessings of God on the soul of Soreleh, his late wife, who had been sent to Paradise by influenza while her son still crawled. From the time Max could read he accompanied his father and the other Chassidim when they gathered before their leader, Rabbi Label. Each Sabbath evening, the Rabbi of Vorka “presented his table.” The pious Jews would dine early in their own homes, knowing that their leader awaited them. When they had gathered around his table the elderly Rabbi would begin to eat, from time to time handing a tidbit—a piece of white chicken, a sweet marrow bone, a small portion of fish flesh—to a deserving Jew who nibbled it blissfully, aware that food from the Rabbi’s hand was food that had been touched by God. Max the prodigy sat in the midst of his elders wearing a white velvet caftan, skinny and large-eyed, even then small for his years, with a perpetual frown on his face as he tugged at one of his earlocks while he strained to hear the Rabbi’s words of wisdom.

  He was a boy in addition to being a prodigy, and he gloried in the festivals. On the evening of any holiday the Chassidim gathered to celebrate. The tables would be covered with bowls of the boiled chickpeas called nahit, platters of cakes and kugels, and bottles of schnapps. Women, being lesser creatures, did not intrude on the scene. The men ate sparingly and drank frequently. Aware that evil could be overcome only by joy and not by sorrow and believing that ecstasy brought them close to God, they allowed happiness to flood their souls. Soon one of the bearded Chassids would rise and beckon to a comrade. Hands on each other’s shoulders, they would start to dance around the floor. Others would pair off and begin to dance, until the floor was filled with bearded couples. The tempo was swift and triumphant. The only music was the voices of the dancers, chanting over and over again a single biblical phrase. Someone would give Max a swallow of fiery schnapps as a joke, and someone would choose the little boy for his dancing partner, perhaps even the Rabbi himself. Head light and feet unsteady, propelled by large hands which gripped his shoulders, he would whirl around the room in breathless joy, his small feet flying in imitation of his partner’s kicking and stamping, while the deep voices of the bearded men boomed a rhythmic repeated chorus: “V’tahhair libanu l’avd’choh be-ehmess”—“Purify our hearts to serve Thee in truth.”

  He became a community legend years before he was bar mitzvah. As he plunged deeper and with increasing power into the sea of Talmud, he was singled out frequently for choice morsels at the Rabbi’s table, and his father’s friends would stop him in the street to pat his back or touch his head. At the age of eight he was taken from the chedar where the rest of the boys went to school and placed for private instruction with Reb Yankel Cohen, a tubercular scholar whose eyes shone with sick brilliance. It was almost like studying alone. The boy recited for hours on end while the gaunt man sat and coughed endlessly into a large rag. They did not converse. When Max’s tired voice strayed into false philosophy or faulty interpretation, the man’s clawlike hand would dart out and fingers like pincers would squeeze the flesh in his forearm. His arms wore purple sploches until after Reb Yankel had been buried. Four months before the teacher died he informed Chaim Gross that he had taught the ten-year-old all that he knew. From that day until Max was bar mitzvah he went each morning to the community Study House, where he sat around a table with men, some of them graybeards. Each day they studied a different portion of the Law, arguing hotly about interpretation. After Max had assumed Jewish manhood at thirteen, Rabbi Label himself undertook the responsibility for the prodigy’s education. It was a singular honor. The only other student in the Rabbi’s home was his son-in-law, a man of twenty-two who was awaiting ordination as a rabbi.

  Chaim Gross thanked God daily for the benediction he had received in his son. The boy’s future was assured. He would become a rabbi and his brilliance would enable him to gather around him a distinguished rabbinical court, bringing him wealth, honor, and fame. This, from the son of a seller of resinous wines! Dreaming of Max’s future one winter night, Chaim Gross died of heart failure, smiling.

  Max didn’t question God for having taken his father. But standing at the open grave in the little Jew’s Cemetery, saying the kaddish, he felt for the first time the cut of the wind and the gnawing of the cold.

  At the advice of Rabbi Label he hired a Polish clerk named Stanislaus to tend the wine shop. Once a week Max carelessly checked the books in order to keep Stanislaus’ stealing at a reasonable level. The shop gave him far less money than his father had earned, but it enabled him to continue his life of study.

  He was twenty years old, preparing to be a rabbi and keeping his eyes open for a suitable wife, when hard times began to grind Poland. The summer that year was fiercely hot, with no rain. In the fields, the peasants’ wheat and barley burned in the sun until the plants cracked instead of bending when the wind blew. The few sugar beets that were harvested that fall were soft and wrinkled, and the potatoes were small and bitter. With the first snows the peasants flocked to the textile mills and the glass and paper factories, where they competed to work for lower and lower wages. Soon savage fighting marked the changing of work shifts, and mobs with hungry bellies began to form in the streets, listening to sullen men who waved their fists when they shouted.

  In the beginning, only a few Jews were beaten. Soon, however, regular raids were made on the ghettos, the Poles forgetting their children’s hunger cries in the momentary thrill of striking down the men w
ho had killed the Saviour. In Vorka, Stanislaus realized that as manager of a Jew’s shop it would be difficult to convince a marauding mob that he was not a Jew. He fled the shop one afternoon without bothering to lock the door, taking with him a week’s receipts in lieu of notice. His exit was timely. The following evening a laughing pack of drunkards swept into the Vorka ghetto. In the streets blood flowed like wine; in the shop of the late Chaim Gross wine spilled like blood. What they could not drink or carry away they wasted and smashed. The next day, while Jews tended their wounds and buried their dead, Max realized that the shop was gone. He accepted the loss with a feeling of relief. His real work lay with his people and with God. He helped the Rabbi conduct four funerals and he prayed with his brethren for God’s help.

  After the crisis had passed, Rabbi Label supported him for two months. He was ready to become a rabbi with his own flock. But when he began to look for a congregation, it became clear that the Jews of Poland had no need for new rabbis. Jews by the tens of thousands were leaving the country, mostly for England and the United States.

  Rabbi Label tried not to show his worry. “So, you will be my son. What we eat, you will eat. Times will grow better.”

  But every day Max saw more Jews leaving. Who would help them find God in strange surroundings? When he asked Rabbi Label the teacher shrugged.

  But the pupil already knew the answer.

  He arrived in New York during an August heat wave, wearing his long, heavy gabardine and a round black hat. For two days and two nights he stayed in the two-room flat of Simon and Buni Wilensky, who had left Vorka with their three children six weeks before he had left for America himself. Wilensky had a job in a loft factory where small American flags were made. He was a stitcher. He assured Max that as soon as Buni stopped crying she would like America, too. When Max had listened to Buni cry for two days and could no longer stand the sounds and the smells of the Wilensky children he walked out of the tenement and wandered through the East Side until he came to a synagogue. Inside, a rabbi listened to him and then put him in a taxi and took him to the Union of Orthodox Rabbis. They had no congregations open at the moment, a Union rabbi told him sympathetically. But there were many requests for cantors to sing the High Holiday services. Was he a chahzen, a cantor? If so, they could send him to Congregation Beth Israel in Bayonne, New Jersey. The shul was willing to pay seventy-five dollars.