by Noah Gordon
The moment he began to sing in Bayonne the worshipers looked at him in amazement. He had committed the service to memory while a young boy, and he knew each note of the melody like a friend. In his mind the music ran true and clear, but what came from his mouth could not be called singing. He had the voice of a learned frog. Following the first service, a stern congregation treasurer named Jacobson beckoned him with an imperious finger. It was too late for the shul to get another chahzen. But in a brief conversation Max was informed that he would not get seventy-five dollars for singing during the holidays. He would get ten dollars and a place to sleep. For ten dollars, nobody could demand a nightingale, Jacobson said.
His performance as a cantor was so wretched that most of the people in the synagogue avoided him. But Jacobson grew friendlier. He was a fat bald man with pale skin and a gold front tooth. From the lapel pocket of his checkered suit three cigars always peeped. He asked a lot of personal questions and Max answered them politely. Finally the Amerikaneh revealed that he was a shadchen, a marriage broker.
“The answer to your troubles is a good wife,” he said. “‘For created He both male and female.’ And said he, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth.’”
Max was receptive. As a young scholar of reputation he had expected to marry into one of the wealthy Jewish families in Vorka. With a pretty girl to make him a home, and with influential in-laws to provide a large dowery, life in America would be much more pleasant.
But Jacobson looked at him closely and spoke aloud in English, which he knew Max did not yet understand. “You greenie you, you dress like you’re inviting a pogrom. You ain’t a giant, no girl is going to feel small next to you.” He sighed. “Your face ain’t pocked, that’s the nicest thing a person can say.” In Yiddish he explained that in America the market for Polish Jews was not nearly so good as in Poland.
“Do your best,” Max said.
Leah Masnick was five years older than Max. An orphan, she lived with her uncle Lester Masnick and his wife Ethel. The Masnicks conducted a kosher chicken business. They treated her tenderly, but the girl imagined that their bodies smelled of blood and feathers even when they were freshly bathed. A second-generation American, she would never have considered marrying an immigrant if it were not for the fact that it had been years since a man had asked her anywhere. She was not ugly, although her eyes were small and her nose was long, but she lacked femininity; she did not know how to smile at a man, or how to make him laugh. Of late, she had felt even less like a woman. Her pancake breasts seemed to her to be growing flatter. Her periods became irregular and she skipped several months; sometimes she imagined wildly that her tall, slender body was turning into a boy’s for lack of use. She had twenty-eight hundred forty-three dollars in the New Jersey Guarantee Trust Company. When Jacobson came to her uncle’s house one evening and smiled at her over his coffee cup she knew that whoever he had for her would be all right, that she could not afford to waste any chance. When she heard that the man was a rabbi she felt a thrill of hope. She had read English novels about ministers and their wives, and she pictured her future life in a small but neat English parsonage with mezuzahs on the doors. When she saw him, a little shrimp of a man, bearded and wearing funny unpressed clothes, with odd, girl-like curls dropping in front of his ears, she forced herself to talk pleasantly to him, her eyes bright with tears.
Even so, she became hysterical ten days before the wedding and screamed that she would not marry him unless he got an American haircut. Max was shocked, but he had noticed that the American rabbis he had met did not wear earlocks. Resignedly he sat in a barber’s chair and let an Italian get the giggles as he slashed off the payehs Max had worn all his life. Without the earlocks he felt naked. When Leah’s Uncle Lester took him into a department store and bought him a gray double-breasted suit with square padded shoulders, he felt that he could now pass as a genuine goy.
But his appearance caused no undue excitement when he returned to the office of the Union of Orthodox Rabbis. His visit was fortunately timed, they told him. A new congregation was being started in Manhattan, and its members requested that the Union obtain the services of a rabbi for them. Shaarai Shomayim was small, with only a few members and one rented room in which to hold services, but it would grow, the Union rabbis assured him. Max was overjoyed. He had his first rabbinate.
They rented a four-room flat two blocks from the shul, spending a large portion of the dowry on furniture. It was here they came on the night they were married. Both were tired from the overexcitement of the day and weak from lack of food, having been unable to eat the wedding chickens cooked by Aunt Ethel Masnick. Max sat on his new sofa and fiddled with the dial of his new radio while his new wife disrobed in the next room and got into the new bed. When he lay down next to her he was aware that the top of his head touched her ear while his cold toes rested on her trembling ankles. Her hymen was tough as leather. He strove mightily, muttering quick prayers, intimidated by the fact that it would not give and by the shrill little cries of fright and pain which came from his bride. At last he succeeded and the membrane tore, accompanied by a piercing shriek from Leah. When it was over she lay alone at the far edge of the bed and wept, partly because of the pain and humiliation and partly because her strange little husband lay sprawled naked on two-thirds of the bed singing triumphant songs in Hebrew, a language she did not understand.
At first everything pressed on Max Gross, threatening him. The sidewalks were filled with unfamiliar people who pushed and shoved, forever hurrying. In the streets, motor cars and buses and trolleys and taxicabs blared their horns and filled the air with the stink of gas exhausts. Everywhere there was noise and dirt. In his own home, where there should have been peace, there was a woman who refused to speak Yiddish to him, although she was his wife. He never spoke anything but Yiddish to her; she never answered in anything but English: it was a tie. Amazingly, she had expected conversation during meals, weeping when he insisted on studying while he ate. One night soon after the wedding he told her gently that she was the wife of a rabbi who had been raised by the Chassidim. A Chassid’s wife, he explained, must cook and bake and sew and clean and pray and bench licht instead of forever talking, talking, talking about nothing and everything.
Each day he went to shul early and stayed late, finding peace. God was the same as He had been in Poland, the prayers were the same. He was able to sit all day and study and pray, losing himself in contemplation while the shadows of the day grew longer. His congregation found him learned but aloof. They respected his knowledge but they did not love him.
When they had been married almost two years, one afternoon Leah packed her clothing in an imitation-leather valise and wrote a note telling her husband that she was leaving him. She took a bus to Bayonne, New Jersey, where she moved into her old room in the Masnick’s house and once more began to keep her Uncle Lester’s books at the chicken market. After she left, Max found that he had to get up half an hour earlier every morning in order to get to the shul in time for kaddish. He ignored the apartment. Ropes of dust grew on the floor and dishes piled up in the sink.
Leah had forgotten about the blood-and-feathers smell of the chicken shop. Her uncle’s books had been kept haphazardly in her absence and the ledgers were hopelessly in error; they gave her migraine headaches as she sat at the old desk in the rear of the shop and struggled to balance the accounts while the hens cackled and the roosters crowed. At night she could not sleep. The strange bearded bantam she had married was strong and lusty and for two years he had used her body at will. She had thought that she would feel free without him. But now she lay in the bed of her former maidenhood and discovered to her amazement that when she dozed her hand found its way between her legs and she dreamed of the small tyrant in shocking detail.
One morning, her fingers flying busily over the keys of the adding machine while she tried to ignore the odor of chicken droppings, she began to vomit. She was ill for hours. That afternoon a doct
or told her that her baby would arrive in seven months. When Max returned from the synagogue late the following evening he found his wife working in the kitchen. The apartment had been cleaned. Alluring smells came from pots that bubbled and steamed on the stove. Supper was almost ready, she told him. She would see to it that nothing disturbed his study afterward, but during the meal there were to be no books on the table or she would go back to Bayonne immediately.
He nodded happily. At last she was talking to him the way a Jewish wife should, in Yiddish.
Congregation Shaarai Shomayim did not grow into a large, powerful synagogue. Max was not an administrator, nor was he the kind of rabbi who saw the synagogue as a social institution. Shaarai Shomayim had neither a Brotherhood nor a Sisterhood. It held no annual picnic. It showed no movies. Families which sought this kind of synagogue were quickly disappointed. When several other congregations were founded in nearby neighborhoods most of these families one by one transferred their allegiances and their annual dues. Eventually what remained in his flock was a handful of men who wanted their religion undiluted.
Most of his life was spent in the small, dark room with the Torah. The prophets were his family. Leah had given birth to one child, a son they had named Chaim. He lived for three years before being killed by a ruptured appendix. Holding the boy in his arms during the final hours, feeling the life fluttering away as the small face burned under his lips, Max had told his wife that he loved her. He never said it again, but Leah would remember always. It was not enough to make up for the loneliness that never left her, for the grief, for the emptiness of her days, for the realization that she could not compete with God; but it was something.
As the years passed and the shul grew shabby and then decrepit, the old men of the congregation came to regard him with a loyalty that surprised him because it contained love. He never thought of seeking a more prosperous pulpit. The pittance they raised for his annual salary satisfied him. Twice he infuriated Leah by refusing small increases, telling the shul president that all a Jew needed was food and a fringed garment. Finally Leah went to the congregation and accepted the increase for him.
He felt loneliness only when he thought of the Chassidim. Once he heard of some families from Vorka who were living in Williamsburg. He took the long subway ride and sought them out. Happily, they remembered him, not as a face or as a person but as a legend, the ilui, the prodigy who had been the favorite of Rabbi Label, may he rest in peace. He sat with them and the women served nahit and some of the men still wore beards, but they were not Chassidim. They lacked a leader, a great rabbi at whose table they could gather to hear wisdom and eat tidbits of holy food. They did not dance man with man, or feel joy, but simply sat and sighed, talking of how it had been in der alte hame, in the old home they had abandoned long ago. He never visited them again.
Sometimes he argued spiritedly over the Law with the old men of the congregation, but he held his best debates when he sat alone in the shadowy little shul, a bottle of whiskey uncorked on the table by his open books. By the third or the fourth drink he would feel his spirit lighten and his mind would rise happy and unleashed. Presently he would begin to hear the voice. His opponent always was Rabbi Label. Max never would see the great man, but the wise, slow voice was there, in his mind if not in the room, and together the two of them pitted their intellects in the old way, the voice supplying parry and riposte for each philosophical lunge by Max, complete with biblical sources and legal precedents. When he was thrilled but exhausted by the argument the voice would fade away and he would drink until the room began to spin and whirl, and then he would lean back in his chair and close his eyes and become once again a small boy, feeling large grown-up hands grasping his shoulders as he flung himself around the room to the quick thunder of a biblical chant. Sometimes the music in his mind would put him to sleep.
One afternoon, opening his eyes after just such a slumber, he thought with a surge of joy that for the first time he could see the presence of Rabbi Label in the room. Then he realized that it was a tall young man standing over him, someone he had met before.
“What do you want?” he asked. There was something about the boy’s eyes. The boy’s eyes could pass for the eyes of the Rabbi of Vorka. He stood in front of Max’s table, holding out a cake in a box from a kosher bakery as if it were a ticket of admission.
“Tell me about God,” Michael said.
16
In the small empty hours of the morning Michael had begun to have doubts about God’s existence, at first idly and then with a wondering desperation. Tossing and thrashing until the sheets were twisted, he lay and blinked into the blackness. Since his childhood he had prayed. Now he wondered where his prayers were directed. What if he prayed only to the singing quiet of the sleeping apartment, spoke his ambitions and fears into millions of miles of nothing, or gave thanks to no greater power than the cats that made soft, shuffling sounds as they scraped their claws against the clothesline posts in the alley beneath his window?
After his questions had grown too persistent and the sleeplessness had driven him to Max Gross, he fought bitterly with the rabbi, hating his calm certainty. The two of them sat at the scarred table and stared at one another over steaming glasses of tea, aware of impending combat.
“What is it you want to know?”
“How can you be sure that man didn’t imagine God, because he was afraid of the dark and the lousy cold, because he needed the protection of anything, even his own stupid imagination?”
“What makes you think this is what happened?” Max asked calmly.
“I don’t know what happened. But I do know that for more than a billion years there’s been life on this earth. And always, if you look into every rude culture, you find something to be prayed to, a mud-smeared wooden statue, or the sun, or a mushroom, or a big stone whang.”
“Vos ment whang?”
“A potz.”
“Ah.” To a man who argued with the voice of Label of Vorka, this was hardly an exercise. “Who made the people that worshiped the obscene idols? Who created life?”
A physics major at Columbia could answer that one easily. “A Russian named Oparin says life could have begun with the accidental generation of carbon compounds.” He looked at Gross, expecting to see the annoyance of the nonscientist being dragged into a scientific discussion, but all he saw was interest. “In the beginning, the atmosphere of the earth lacked oxygen, but it had plenty of methane, ammonia, and water vapor. Oparin believes that bolts of lightning sent electricity through these things, creatting synthetic amino acids, the stuff life is made of. Then organic molecules developed in ancient pools for millions of years, and natural selection resulted in complicated creatures, some that wriggled, some that had webbed feet, some that invented God.” He looked defiantly at Rabbi Gross. “Do you understand what I’m talking about?”
“I understand enough.” He stroked his beard. “Let us assume that this is so. Then let me ask you: Who furnished the—what do you call it—the methane, yes; and the ammonia and the water? And who sent the lightning? And the world in which this marvelous thing could take place, where did it come from?”
Michael was silent.
Gross smiled. “Oparin, oshmarin,” he said softly. “You really don’t believe in God?”
“I think I’ve become an agnostic.”
“What is that?”
“Someone who is uncertain whether or not God exists.”
“No, no, no, then call yourself an atheist. Because how can anyone be certain that God exists? By your definition we are all agnostics. Do you think I have scientific knowledge of God? Can I go back in time and be there when God speaks to Isaac or delivers the Commandments? If this could be done there would be only one religion in the world; we would all know which group is right.
“Now it happens to be the way of all men to take sides. A man has to make a decision. About God, you don’t know and I don’t know. But I have made a decision in favor of God. You have made a
decision against Him.”
“I’ve made no decisions,” Michael said a bit sullenly. “That’s why I’m here. I’m full of questions. I want to study with you.”
Rabbi Gross touched the books piled on his table. “A lot of great thoughts are contained here,” he said. “But they don’t hold the answer to your question. They can’t help you decide. First you make a decision. Then we will study.”
“No matter what I decide? Suppose I decide that God is a fable, a bubbeh-meisir.”
“No matter.”
Outside, in the dark hallway, Michael looked back at the closed door of the shul. Goddam you, he thought. And then, in spite of everything, he smiled at his choice of words.
17
Michael’s sister Ruthie turned into someone with whom he could no longer exchange verbal torturings. At night the sound of her pillow-muffled weepings became almost a routine background noise, like the hum of the refrigerator motor. Her parents tried tempting her with subsidized ski week ends, psychiatry, and the handsome sons and nephews of friends, to no avail. Finally Abe Kind sent a money order and a long letter to Tikveh le’Machar, Palestine, and six weeks later Saul Moreh walked into the commercial continuity department of the Columbia Broadcasting System, causing Ruthie to rise up, scream, and faint with great sincerity. To the family’s disappointment Saul turned out to be a foreigner; he was smaller than they had imagined from his pictures, very British with briar pipe, heavy tweeds, accent, and University of London B.A. and M.A. But they liked him well enough as they grew accustomed to him, and Ruth lost her wilt and regained her bloom. On Saul’s second day in New York he and Ruth told her family they would be married. There was no question of their staying in the United States. German Jews who could afford to escape were finding their way into Palestine. It was not a time for a Zionist to desert Eretz Yisroel, Saul said; they would return to the kibbutz in the desert in three weeks.