by Pete Hamill
“Yiddish,” the rabbi said. “The language of the people. The ordinary people. Not the rabbis. The ordinary people.”
“What are the books about?”
The rabbi stood before the bookcase.
“They are about the everything,” he said, lifting a volume. “Religion. The history of the Jews.” He hefted a volume. “But also Balzac. You know Balzac?”
“No.”
“Very good, Balzac. A very smart Franceman. You should read the Balzac. He knows everything. And this, this is Henrich Heine. Very good poetry. And here, Tolstoy, very great.”
Michael squatted down, took a dusty book off a bottom shelf, and opened it.
“Is this Hebrew or Yiddish?”
The rabbi perched the glasses on his nose.
“Yiddish.”
“What’s it say?”
“Is a very funny story. Very sad too. Good Soldier Schweik. A Czech soldier, he knows the war is crazy. I am sure all are in the English books too.”
The rabbi turned away and found two glasses on a shelf above the sink. He poured the tea. Then he folded the newspapers and moved them aside and set the glasses on the table and gestured for the boy to sit down. Michael had never had tea in a glass before. The rabbi then placed a sugar bowl and a spoon between them. Suddenly he reached forward awkwardly, offering his hand. Michael shook it.
“I am Rabbi Hirsch,” he said. “Judah Hirsch.”
“Michael Devlin,” the boy said.
“You are kind boy,” the rabbi said, rhyming kind with kin. Michael repeated the word, rhyming it with rind. Then the boy lifted the tea and sipped. The glass was hot in his hand.
“This is great,” he said, putting the glass down to let it cool.
“Is hard to get the good tea in America,” the rabbi said. “Maybe the water?”
So he was from Europe, where the water was different. Michael remembered the blue books and said: “Are you from Poland?”
“No. From Prague. You know where is Prague?”
“I know about the Infant of Prague. It’s a statue of Jesus that’s supposed to work miracles or something. They sell little copies of it up at Sacred Heart. But I’m not sure exactly where Prague is.”
“In Czechoslovakia,” he said. “Beautiful city, Prague. Shain. Zaier shain…. Most beautiful city in all of the Europe.”
Sadness surged in his voice then, and he seemed guarded, and Michael thought of his mother when she would sing certain songs about the Ireland she’d left behind. The Old Country, she would always say. While living in the new country.
“Why you think I am Polish?”
“I read in a book that before the war there were three million Jews in Poland.”
“True. Now? None left. All dead.”
Abruptly, he shifted his eyes to the newspaper.
“English, very strange language.”
“Are you going to school to learn it?”
“No. No. Teaching myself. But is very hard.” He held up the back page of the Daily News and pointed at the headline. “Look, what is this mean?”
The headline said: FLOCK SIGNS ROBBIE.
“Well,” Michael said. “It’s about baseball.”
For the first time, and not the last, Michael began to explain the mysteries of baseball to the rabbi from Prague. He started with the word flock, which meant the Brooklyn Dodgers. The reason they were called the flock, he said, was that years ago they were called the Robins. And robins were birds. So even after they changed their name they remained a flock of birds.
“But nobody ever calls them the flock,” the boy said, “except in the newspapers. Here we just call them the Dodgers. Or dem Bums.”
The rabbi’s eyes looked quizzical.
“Dem Bums?” He paused. “What it means?”
“Well, a bum is like a tramp, a worthless person.”
“So they don’t like them?”
“No, we love them. But when they lose, here in Brooklyn, we call them dem Bums. Dem is a Brooklyn word for them. We should say ‘those Bums,’ but—You see, Rabbi, it’s like a Brooklyn way of saying things. In the movies or on the radio, they talk different…”
Michael’s voice dribbled into frustrated silence; in some ways, baseball was really too hard to explain. He could never explain any of it to his mother. You probably had to be born to it. The rabbi stared at the boy, his brow furrowed, as if he were realizing again that learning English would not be simple. Then he pointed at the other word.
“What is Robbie? Is a Bum?”
“We don’t know yet.”
Michael explained that Robbie was a baseball player named Jackie Robinson. He was a colored man, a Negro, and there had never been a Negro player in the big leagues before. So the headline meant that the Dodgers had signed a contract with Jackie Robinson and if Robinson got through spring training he should be playing in Ebbets Field by the middle of April. This year. Nineteen forty-seven. The first Negro in the big leagues.
“What is the big leagues?” Rabbi Hirsch said.
“Well, there are two major leagues, which is another way of saying big leagues. The Dodgers are in the National League. So are the Giants, who are over in Manhattan in a place called the Polo Grounds. But the Yankees, who are up in the Bronx, they’re in the American League. Then there are a lot of minor leagues. The best players are in the major leagues, especially now that the war is over….”
He struggled to make all of this simple. But the rabbi’s face became a tight grid of concentration.
“I must to learn all this,” he said, shaking his head. “If I am to be in America, I must to learn.” He looked up at Michael. “Maybe you can teach me.”
“Aw, gee, Rabbi, I don’t know. I’m still learning it myself.”
“No, no, you speak good. You could teach me. I know this.”
Michael felt suddenly trapped; the rabbi was asking him to do something a lot more complicated than turning on a light switch.
“Money, I don’t have, to pay you with it,” the rabbi said. “But Yiddish I could teach you. You give me English, I give you Yiddish.”
Michael glanced at the bookcase. The rabbi looked poor. This room was as poor as any room on Ellison Avenue; by comparison, Sacred Heart was a palace. If the rabbi had a secret treasure, he certainly wasn’t using it for himself. But he did have this other treasure, right here in front of him: these mysterious books with their strange alphabets. For a moment, Michael felt people rising from the books, bearded men and dark-haired women, a soldier who hated war, a Frenchman who knew everything, all of them speaking languages he had never heard. They rose from the bookcase like a mist.
He wanted to speak to them and for them to speak to him. And perhaps that could be done. In this deep and endless Yukon winter, there was nothing much to do in the afternoons, no ball games to play, no aimless journeys around the parish with his friends. He had time on his hands. Too much time.
“You really think you can teach me Yiddish?” he said.
“Sure thing,” the rabbi said, pleased with his use of the American phrase.
“Well, we could try,” Michael said.
The rabbi smiled broadly.
“Good! Very good!” He drained his tea, then wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “Yiddish is very great language, but not hard. Not hard like the English is hard. You can learn.” He slapped Michael on the back. “How you say it? Is a deal!”
Michael finished his tea and looked around for a clock. There was no clock. There was no radio either. He glanced at the heavy door in the corner.
“Is the church out there?” Michael said, feeling like a spy.
“Yes,” Rabbi Hirsch said. “But not a church. We say—” He leafed through the dictionary, ran his finger down a page. “Sanctuary.” He pronounced it sank-TOO-uh-rye. Michael said sanctuary for him. The rabbi repeated it several times.
“Can I see the mass, or whatever you call it? I mean, it’s not secret or anything, is it?”
“Yes, yes
, is not the secret. You come sometime.”
So it was not a door to a treasure house, with gold ducats spilling from chests, and rubies and emeralds gleaming in the dim light. It was just a church. All he had to do now was convince Sonny. He turned to go and then saw the picture of the woman again.
“Is her name Judith?”
“No.” The rabbi paused. “Leah. Her name is Leah.” He stared at the framed photograph for a long time. “My wife.”
“She’s very beautiful.”
“Yes,” said Rabbi Hirsch. “But she’s dead.”
“I’m sorry, Rabbi,” the boy said.
“Is hard for a boy to understand, death.”
“My father’s dead too,” Michael said. “He was killed in the war.”
The rabbi turned away from his wife’s photograph.
“Excuse,” he said. “I am a fool. I think I am the only person with someone dead.”
“It’s okay, Rabbi,” Michael said.
“No. Death, is not okay for someone so young. At least I, I…” He couldn’t find the words. “I am very sorry.”
“Forget it,” the boy said. “I’m sorry about your wife, you’re sorry about my father. So next week we start English lessons.”
“Yiddish lessons,” the rabbi said.
“Both,” Michael said.
“Yes, both.”
8
January was full of storms.
In the first week, Michael saw a truck arrive outside Mister G’s candy store, its narrow hard-rubber wheels lurching over the scabbed ice, and fresh snow. Mister G’s sons carried out cartons, a table, suitcases, clocks, a bed, and a couch and then climbed into the truck with all that had belonged to them and drove away. They did not look back, nor did Frankie McCarthy come around to say goodbye.
A few days later, Unbeatable Joe assembled some of the regulars from his bar and produced ladders and planks and a winch and started the process or raising his sign to its former glory. The men worked. They drank whiskey. They heaved and groaned and cursed. They drank more whiskey. Michael, Sonny, and Jimmy watched from a warm vestibule across the street, snickering and making remarks. Unbeatable Joe and another man climbed to the planks and examined the steel rigging that was to hold the sign. Unbeatable Joe gestured down at the other men. Then the sign was raised on high, like a declaration of triumph.
But the wind began to blow hard, as it always did on Collins Street, and the men cursed and pulled on their ropes and backed up and rushed forward, and then the giant sign flew up in the air and came down with a tremendous crash, bringing the ladders, the planks, and Unbeatable Joe with it. The boys laughed and left the warmth of the doorway to watch Unbeatable Joe hopping on one foot and holding the other. The rest of the men were cursing and drinking whiskey from a bottle to stay warm.
And then Unbeatable Joe limped out of the bar with a huge fire axe and began to chop at the sign in a maniacal rage, his eyes wide, his hair rising in spikes, his nostrils flaring, and when he was exhausted, he handed the axe to one of the other men and that man chopped at the sign and passed it to another, who gave it to another, and back to Unbeatable Joe, and now there was a crowd, all cheering, guys from the factory across the street, women with shopping bags, kids from over on Pearse Street, urging the men on, raising fists. A police car came along and stopped and the cops got out, but the men just kept battering and smashing and splintering the sign until there was only a pile of broken pieces left, and the crowd roared, even the cops.
“Get me a broom,” Unbeatable Joe said. “We gotta sweep up this fuckin’ sign.”
When Michael told Rabbi Hirsch about this a few days later, his blue eyes danced and he laughed from his belly.
“The goyim are crazy,” he said.
Michael didn’t tell Rabbi Hirsch that some of the goyim were crazy in a different way. On the day of the destruction of Unbeatable Joe’s sign, Michael sat in the hallway beside the roof door with Sonny and Jimmy. It was too cold now to play in the streets. And Michael had begun to understand what Jack London meant when he described cabin fever.
“So what’s the story?” Sonny said.
“What do you mean?”
“The synagogue. What’d you find out?” Michael sighed.
“There’s nothing to find out,” he said. “The rabbi’s poorer than we are, Sonny. He’s got no telephone, he’s got no radio, he lives in one small room like a goddamned pauper.”
“That could be a, whatta you call it, a disguise.”
“Come on, Sonny. If there was a treasure, he could just take it over New York, sell it, and go somewhere that’s warm. Florida or someplace. What’s he need to be in the synagogue all day in his overcoat for?”
“To fool us,” Jimmy said.
“You mean fool me,” Michael said. “He doesn’t even know you and Sonny are alive.”
“It’s the same difference,” Jimmy said. “All for one and one for all, right?”
“Right, but…”
Sonny leaned forward.
“Maybe he don’t know there’s a treasure there.”
Michael and Jimmy looked at him.
“Maybe… it was buried, or put in the fucking walls or something, and the last rabbi, he knew where it was, or had a map, or some secret code, and then that rabbi died before he could pass it on. Maybe that’s why he acts like it ain’t there.”
Michael stiffened. A week ago, he was thinking the same thing.
“But if that’s the case, what do we do?” he said. “Tear the building down?”
“Nah, nothing drastic.”
“Then what?”
“Keep your eyes open, that’s all. Wait.”
He said this as if Michael had agreed to a conspiracy, and Michael did not object. This silence made him feel treacherous. He had come to like the rabbi. He liked his accent. He liked what seemed to be his good heart. He liked the way he didn’t treat him like a kid and the way he was unafraid to make mistakes in his new language. But he didn’t say this to Sonny Montemarano. He didn’t want to be forced to choose between the rabbi he barely knew and someone he’d known since first grade. He said nothing, but he knew that Sonny would take his silence as an agreement. The way he had agreed, without words, to Frankie McCarthy’s reminder that he had seen nothing in Mister G’s candy store. So he said nothing. He would keep his eyes open anyway, as he got to know the rabbi, and in that way he could keep his word. But if he saw nothing, he would have nothing to report to Sonny.
Later, when he saw the rabbi to begin their lessons in Yiddish and English, Michael didn’t discuss Sonny and the rumors of hidden treasure. Instead he made the rabbi clap his hands in delight by counting to five in Yiddish. He told the rabbi about his schoolwork and the rabbi said study, study, study, and Michael thought about his mother explaining that the Jews always did their homework and maybe that’s why they were hated.
The rabbi listened carefully when Michael told him about his mother and how she had come to New York from Ireland after her mother died, long ago in 1930, and how she had met Tommy Devlin at a dance a few years later, which was about all that Michael knew about their story. His father, Tommy Devlin, was from Dublin, but he loved America so much he joined the army before he got drafted. He was an orphan too, the boy explained, just like his mother; and so Michael had never met any uncles or aunts or cousins.
“In the world, all over, there are people with no cousins and no uncles,” the rabbi said. “But your mother you got. You are lucky.”
Michael didn’t speak about Mister G or Frankie McCarthy either, or some other things that happened on Ellison Avenue. One Saturday night the snow came down hard again, although not as hard as it did during the great blizzard after Christmas. By early afternoon the parish men were drinking and singing in Casement’s, which Michael’s mother told him was named for an Irish patriot named Roger Casement (just as Collins Street was named for Michael Collins, another Irish martyr). Before he went to bed that night, Michael glanced down at the yellow l
ight of the saloon and saw a blur of men through the glazed windows. There were no women there. And he thought: My mother has no man and those men have no women. Somehow the arithmetic doesn’t add up. She’s pretty. She’s smart. She works hard. Why won’t one of them ask her to go to a movie down at the Grandview? Why can’t one of them take her to a goddamned dance?
In the morning, there was a great crowd on Collins Street and a police car with its doors open. Michael ran over. One of the uniformed cops told him to stand back, and a woman grabbed him by the arm and jerked him aside and said, “Don’t look at this.” But he looked anyway and saw the frozen body of an old man, wedged between two snow-covered cars. Michael could see rotten brown teeth in the man’s open mouth. The eyes were wide and scared and had no color. Snot was frozen in his nostrils. Someone said, “Name’s Shields, Officer. Jack, or Jimmy, I can’t remember. A wino from down the Hook.” The cop wrote this in a notebook. Michael stared at the dead man, whose arms were half-raised, his clothes too frail for the snow that covered them, and wondered if he’d had a wife or children.
Then in his mind he put his father’s face over the face of the dead man and he left Brooklyn. He saw his father sprawled in the snow in a frozen forest in Belgium. The trees around him had no tops. Ruined tanks were everywhere, covered with snow. Other soldiers were leaning down to look at his father’s face. Don’t look at this, a woman’s voice said in the snows of Belgium, but there were no women to be seen. Michael stared at his father’s eyes. They were seeing him, knowing him, full of need, as if he were trying to say words. And then he was gone and Michael was back in Brooklyn.
At Sacred Heart School, he could not explain to Brother Donard that image of the dead man in the snow and the way it was mixed up with the face of his father. He did not even try. Nor did he decide to mention it to Rabbi Hirsch, who had heard enough about death. Instead, he worked hard in class, doing homework during study periods, making notes while Brother Donard spoke. Most of the other kids didn’t bother with notes. They stared out the window. They drew airplanes. They made faces at each other, trying to provoke laughs. But Michael had discovered that making the notes helped him to remember things. If he wrote down a word, then a memory of it was stamped in his brain. When he needed it, the word appeared. He didn’t know why. The brothers didn’t teach them to do it that way. But it worked for Michael. And besides, when the time came to study for a test, he could look at the notes and all the words would come back to him. It was a form of magic. The words were gone, vanished, disappeared from the world, and then suddenly—Shazam!—they were there when he needed them.