by Pete Hamill
“You prick,” Michael said out loud, using all those words he’d heard on the streets and almost never used. “You fucking shithead. You cocksucker.”
All the way home, he wished he could summon the Golem.
13
At their afternoon sessions, Rabbi Hirsch said the words quickly in English and Michael returned them in Yiddish.
“Yes!”
“Yoh!”
“Thank you!”
“A dank!”
“You’re welcome!”
“Nishto… nishto…”
“Nishto far vos.”
“Nishto far vos!”
Rabbi Hirsch smiled. “Good, not too goyish.”
“It has to be goyish,” Michael said. “I’m a goy.”
“Maybe it’s true, that the Irish are the lost tribe of Israel.” Then deadpan: “What?”
“Vos?”
“This!”
“Dos!”
“Where?”
“Vu?”
“Here.”
“Doh.”
“When?”
“Ven?”
“Now.”
“Itzt.”
“Who?”
“Ver?”
“Now the numbers,” the rabbi said, holding up fingers as Michael said the words.
“Ains, tsvai, drei, fir, finf, zeks, zihen, acht, nein, tsen, elef, tsvelf, dreitsen…”
“Wait, wait, my shoes already I have to take off!”
The rabbi didn’t take off his shoes to count, of course; he made tea. Michael was wearing a yarmulke, a satiny black skullcap that the rabbi had given him, explaining that some head covering must be worn in the house of God. This did not make him a Jew; Rabbi Hirsch made clear that he had no interest in converting Michael to Judaism. Wearing a yarmulke was just a sign of respect for the rules of this particular house of God. Michael told the rabbi that at Sacred Heart only the women were made to cover their heads, while the men held their hats in their hands throughout the services, and the rabbi shrugged. This made Michael wonder again why God had different rules for different people, but he didn’t say this to Rabbi Hirsch.
“Tai?” the rabbi said, gesturing at the teapot.
“Zaiergut,” Michael said. “A dunk.”
While the rabbi prepared tea, Michael went to the bookcase and examined some of the volumes, but he still could not read the alphabets. Rabbi Hirsch had explained some of the basic characters, but they would not stay in Michael’s mind. This was a frustration, because after hearing the tales of the Golem, he had come to feel that the books in their ancient scripts contained secrets he must learn. The alphabets of God, he called them. The alphabets of the world.
He loved opening the volumes and seeing the beautifully designed pages; they were like the huge missals from which the priests at Sacred Heart sang Gregorian chants at high masses. They gave him a similar sense of order and perfection and mystery.
“Later, you can learn to read,” the rabbi said, bringing two glasses of tea to the table. He moved an open letter out of the way. “First, speak. Men first speaked, uh, spoke, and then later they wrote.”
“In the Ten Commandments, did Moses write like this?”
“Nobody know,” the rabbi said.
“Knows,” Michael said. “With an s at the end. Present tense.”
“Nobody knows,” the rabbi said, scooping three sugars into his tea, then handing the spoon to Michael, who did the same. “The original tablets, they have not survive. They might be just, how do you say? A legend. Like the lost tribe…. Some say Moses spoke Egyptian. He definitely didn’t speak Aramaic. That is the language Jesus spoke. We know that for sure. Aramaic…”
So it went until they had finished the tea. Then the rabbi glanced at the letter and said he had to go into the sanctuary to recover a book. Michael followed him. The room was much smaller than the downstairs church at Sacred Heart, but to Michael it had an even more powerful sense of the sacred. A few weeks earlier in this basement sanctuary, Rabbi Hirsch had shown him the Ark, which contained the Torah scroll. That, he explained, was the symbol of the Tradition, a word he often used to describe the kind of Jew he was: a follower of the Tradition. When he said the word, Michael always heard it with a capital letter.
“All the centuries of the Jews?” the rabbi said. “Thousands and thousands of years? To this place, they are connected. That’s what we Jews mean by the Tradition. That is what we have in a synagogue. Everything that ever happened.”
“Is the word synagogue Hebrew or Yiddish?”
“Neither,” the rabbi said, moving slowly through the pews, lifting prayer books, opening them to scan names, closing them. “It’s Greek. This fact even most Jews don’t know. Synagogue is Greek! Amazing! It means, uh, uh, place of assembly in English. I looked up it.”
“Looked it up,” Michael said.
“Yes: looked it up.”
Michael loved these moments. The rabbi was a grown man, but he was always learning something new and becoming as excited as a ten-year-old when he passed the new thing on to Michael. One afternoon, he spoke in an amazed way about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Another time he discussed the building of the Brooklyn Bridge in the 1880s and how it changed New York, linking Manhattan to Brooklyn forever. Knowledge made his eyes twinkle, his face seem younger. He paced about the tiny room, he motioned with his hands, waving his fingers gracefully to describe music, making fists to express anger or passion. About some things, of course, Michael was the teacher. American things. Baseball. Movies. Comic books. But most of the time, the rabbi led the class.
On an afternoon like this one, Michael wished he could tell his father about the things he was learning. His mother always listened patiently to his reports, but his father might have been even more excited. If Tommy Devlin had come home, he could have gone to college on the GI Bill, which Michael heard about from the rabbi.
“Imagine,” the rabbi said, “the son of a carpenter, a farmer, a policeman, he can go to the university! Like any rich guy! Is a great country, boychik.”
Michael imagined his father sitting in the kitchen, studying his college books at the same table where Michael was doing his homework. They could talk about how Judaism was the father of Christianity. He could tell his father about the synagogue and its three purposes. It was a house of worship, just like Sacred Heart. It was a house of the people, where Jews could spend time together. And it was a house of study. He wished he could explain all this to his father and let him know how sad Rabbi Hirsch looked when he talked about it.
“Almost nobody to this synagogue comes anymore,” the rabbi said, waving a hand. “The Jews from around here? Dead. Moved away.” That was why the upper sanctuary was kept closed, its doors locked and sealed. Michael had never seen it. “We have services there? Everybody is lonely. And another thing: we don’t have the money to heat it up.” Most of the congregation now was composed of older people, he said, who could not come easily to synagogue through the snow. “About Florida they are thinking more than about God,” the rabbi said, “and who blames them?” He worried, he told the boy, that some Shabbos he would not have a minyan. The Tradition insisted on a minyan—a minimum of ten males—before worship could begin. “Nine men and one woman? Not enough. Not even one beautiful, intelligent woman. An old man with no teeth and a very little brain is okay, but not a woman. Sometimes…”
He sighed in the face of God’s mysterious ways. Years ago, before Rabbi Hirsch came to Brooklyn, the upstairs sanctuary had been filled. “The old people telled me this.” There were services on Wednesdays too, and the synagogue was packed all day on Saturdays. “How wonderful it must have be. Like Prague when I’m a boy. Now? Not so wonderful. Not in Prague. Not here. I pray and pray but this does not become a house of the people. Not full of singing. Of praying. Of laughing. And you and me, we are the only ones who study.” He shook his head. “The rabbi and his Shabbos goy.”
Now Michael wandered to the back of the sanctu
ary, where double doors opened under the stoop on MacArthur Avenue. There were three locks and a plank wedged into two angle irons to keep the doors from being forced open from the other side. Hebrew tablets were cemented into the walls. And in the right-hand corner there was a narrow oak door.
“Where does this door go, Rabbi?”
“Upstairs.”
“Can I see it?”
“No, is closed,” the rabbi said. “Well, someday maybe.” Then he stopped, a book in his hand. “Ah, here is the book. Greenberg, Yossel.” He smiled. “Just like the Golem.”
Michael came over, his stomach suddenly queasy.
“What’s his name?”
“Greenberg.”
“That’s Mister G.”
“You know him?”
“I was there when he was beaten up.”
“You were there?”
“Yes,” Michael said, and then realized he might have said too much. He turned away.
“Is very sad story,” Rabbi Hirsch said. “His son writes to me a letter. He says his father is in—the word is coma? Yes. But maybe also he is given up on the life. He says Greenberg just lies in the hospital in the dark. The hospital, it don’t help. His head is broke and hurts all the time. Tubes are in his arms. They give him medicine. They feed him. But Greenberg never says nothing. The son, to me he writes a letter that says maybe his father’s old prayer book will help. The son, he says maybe the book will make Greenberg open his eyes.”
Michael remembered the old man holding his head, the blood slippery on his fingers, the cash register held in the air, the breaking sound when it landed, and the shards of broken glass and ruined Captain Marvels on the floor. He remembered Mister G lying in his own blood. He remembered Frankie McCarthy’s sneer. The rabbi stared at him.
“Did you tell the police who done it, this beating to Greenberg?”
“No.”
“Why?” the rabbi said softly.
“Ich vais nisht.”
“You don’t know why?”
Michael tried to face the rabbi, but gazed instead at the walls and the low ceiling.
“I can’t tell the cops,” Michael said. “Around here, you don’t tell the cops anything. They’re like, I don’t know, the enemy. And I’m Irish, Rabbi. I talk to the cops, I’m an informer, and my mother says they were the worst people in Ireland.” He struggled for control, pushing the image of Mister G’s bloody face from his mind. “Around here, they call an informer a rat, or a squealer. I talk to the cops, and I get found out, they give me the mark of the squealer. They cut your cheek all the way to your ear, they—”
“You can’t tell the police in secret?”
“No! I tell them and don’t give my name, they do nothing. I give my name, they make me a witness, and then everyone knows my name. Look, I gotta go.”
He started to walk out past the low railing. The world was suddenly blurry. Michael trembled, afraid he would cry, afraid he was about to lose Rabbi Hirsch.
“Wait!” the rabbi called after him.
Michael paused, and the rabbi came to his side.
“I didn’t tell you go to the police,” he said. “I want just to know why you didn’t.” He paused. “Now I know. You’re, what’s the word? Scared.”
“Yes.”
“Of the man who did this to Yossel Greenberg?”
“Not just him.”
“Who else, then?”
“Everybody.”
“Your mother?”
“No.”
“Me?”
“No.”
“So there’s two people. Already we know it’s not everybody.”
Michael tried to smile, but his eyes were full of tears.
“Michael, you are a very good boy,” the rabbi said. “You are kind. You are a worker, I can see. But you are young. You have not already learn some of the hard things in the life. One very hard thing? You keep quiet about some crime, it’s just as bad as the crime.” He paused. “Believe me. I know.”
14
For two days, Michael walked on other streets to avoid the synagogue. The rabbi’s words moved in and out of his mind, even while he sat in classes at school. You keep quiet about some crime, it’s just as bad as the crime. He thought about talking it over with his mother. If he told the cops, would he really be an informer? He answered himself: Yes. Besides, if he talked, she’d be in trouble too. They might try to hurt her. They’d have to move. To go somewhere else. Maybe she’d even take him with her back to Ireland. Far from Sonny and Jimmy and games on the street and the Dodgers in Ebbets Field. Far from home. But suppose someone in Ireland heard about what he’d done? They might end up in even worse trouble.
At night, in his dark room, there was a jumble of images as he tried to sleep: Frankie McCarthy’s knife, Mister G’s broken head, Rabbi Hirsch’s steady gaze as he asked him to explain his silence. What was done to Mister G was a crime. No doubt about it. So what was his own silence? To get rid of the faces, he tried to conjure other images, from comics or movies. But Frankie and Mister G and the rabbi kept returning. And then Custer appeared in his mind, right out of the West, and he sat again with his father in the balcony of the Grandview, and wished Tommy Devlin could be there to tell him what to do.
Walking to school in the morning, he thought about what it would be like if he never saw Rabbi Hirsch again. He was certain the rabbi was disgusted with him. After all, Mister G was from his synagogue and he sure couldn’t afford to lose any more people. And maybe I can’t fix Mister G’s head, but I can help teach Frankie that crime does not pay. Just as the comic books said.
Except I can’t be a squealer. Can’t. I just can’t. But I don’t want to stop learning the rabbi’s language, or hearing his stories either. If I never see him again, it’s like finding half the pages in a book are blank. I need to know about Leah—how she died. And how he came to America, to Brooklyn. Maybe I can ask him all that, and then say goodbye and thank him for everything he taught me and tell him how sorry I am for the way it turned out. Yes. I have to see him. I can’t just disappear. I can’t be a coward.
That afternoon, after school, Michael knocked on the door of the synagogue. For a moment, he thought of running. But the rabbi opened the door and smiled broadly.
“Good, good,” he said. “Today we learn the words for food.”
It was as simple as that. There was no mention of the cops. There was no mention of Mister G, or crimes, or justice. The rabbi told Michael that bread was broyt and butter was putter and proper Jewish food had to be kosher. They had resumed their routine. Everything was as it had been. Except at night, when Michael saw faces in the dark.
Michael did not spend every afternoon under the tutelage of Rabbi Hirsch. Nor did his every waking vision turn on the menacing figure of Frankie McCarthy and his knife. As the snows melted and a chilly spring eased in, he and his friends were increasingly absorbed with the coming of Jackie Robinson. For Michael, such talk was a relief, a way to avoid discussing the images that stole his sleep.
“This is screwy,” he said one afternoon, as they moved together through the raw weather of the Brooklyn streets. They were still wearing their winter clothes. “The Dodgers are training in Cuba this year, instead of Florida. Because of Jackie Robinson.”
“How come?” Jimmy Kabinsky asked.
“Because he’s a Negro, Jimmy,” Michael said, using the word that his mother insisted was the polite way to describe colored people. “They don’t let Negroes in the hotels in Florida.”
“I don’t know how they could get away wit’ that in Florida,” Sonny Montemarano said. “There’s colored people all over Florida.”
“How do you know?” Jimmy said. “You never been to Florida.”
“My brother told me. He was down there durin’ the war. He says, some places they got more colored people than white people down there.”
“So where do they stay if they’re driving someplace?” Michael said.
“They have colored hotels
, I think. You know, only colored people.”
“So how come Jackie Robinson can go to a hotel in Cuba?” Jimmy asked.
“Because they have a lot of colored people in Cuba,” Sonny said. “I guess there’s so many of them in that Cuba, they can go anyplace.”
And so it went, as they wandered through the parish, avoiding the Star Pool Room, crossing the street if they saw a group of the Falcons moving along the avenue with their pegged pants billowing in the breeze. Michael noticed something about himself on these wanderings: when he was with his friends, he had to talk and act older, which was to say, tougher, more cynical, more knowing; when he was with Rabbi Hirsch he could act his own age. He even walked differently with his friends, falling into the rolling gait that Sonny had adopted from some of the Falcons.
This often made him feel like two people. He assured his friends that he was still keeping his eyes open at the synagogue, while teaching English to the rabbi, but so far there was no sign of treasure or a map. Technically, he was being truthful; there was no treasure to be found, except in the stories told by Rabbi Hirsch and in the books on his shelves. But Michael wasn’t being completely truthful. He didn’t tell them how much he liked Rabbi Hirsch. He didn’t tell them about Prague and Rabbi Loew, Brother Thaddeus and the Golem. Those were his possessions: private, special, as alive in his mind as Sonny and Jimmy Kabinsky, but kept in separate boxes. They even rose from those boxes in his mind and came to him now in dreams. Besides, if he told his friends too much, they might suspect him of going soft, of shifting loyalties. They would treat him as if he were different. He could not imagine what they would do if they ever saw him in a yarmulke.
Baseball was easier to talk about. There was little argument about whether Jackie Robinson could hit big league pitching. All the sportswriters thought he could. They knew he could run too. And field. On Ellison Avenue, they talked about the color of his skin.