by Pete Hamill
For an hour, he and his mother examined suits and rejected them. Too expensive. Too cheesy. Too small. Too big. They went slowly up one side of Orchard Street and back down the other. At the corner, Michael gazed down Delancey Street and saw the dark, ugly outline of the Williamsburg Bridge, its towers crowned with knobby pronged spires. He thought: Prague. Rabbi Hirsch must have seen the spires of St. Vitus this way, as he walked from the ghetto toward Old Town Square. Except our tunnels are subway tunnels. Not the evil tunnels of Prague, where fanatics seethed and babies were strangled in the dark. Here on Orchard Street, Michael thought, he was even safer than a Jew in the ghetto. Here, Frankie McCarthy would never find him.
Then his gaze fell upon a dark blue suit hanging just above sidewalk level in a small store across the street. Neat lapels, dark buttons. That was the suit he could wear when he was twelve. It would be fine for Easter, but it would be better after he turned twelve. In that suit, he would look older: thirteen, maybe even fourteen. In that suit, he could start looking like a man.
“Look at that one, Mom,” he said, and led her through the crowds, suddenly anxious that someone else might find it first. A young clerk came out. His face was very thin, framed with red hair; he was wearing a yarmulke. Kate Devlin touched the fabric and asked the price.
“For you, fourteen dollars,” the young man said, in an accented voice.
“It’s very dear,” she whispered to Michael.
“Es iz zaier taier,” Michael said.
The clerk looked startled.
“You’re Jewish?”
“No,” Michael said. “Irish.”
“Irish? Ah, ains fun di aseres hashvotim. One of the lost tribes.” The clerk laughed.
“Three dollars off!” he said, lifting down the suit.
“You’re kidding,” Kate Devlin said.
“Three and a half,” the clerk said. “You are die mutter?”
It sounded like mooter, but she understood.
“Yes,” she said, and smiled uneasily. “Can he try it on?”
“Yes, yes. In there.” He pointed to a dark niche burrowed among clothes. Then to Michael: “Your mother wants ain glazel tai?”
“Mom, you want a glass of tea?”
“That’d be nice,” she said.
“Mit tzuker?” the clerk said.
“Bitte,” Michael said, knowing his mother took sugar with her tea. “Zait azoy gut.”
While Michael changed, the clerk pushed through the bunched clothes and disappeared into a deeper part of the shop. Michael emerged first. The suit fit almost perfectly. His mother made him turn around, and nodded approval. He pushed aside some clothes and saw himself in a cracked mirror. It was like gazing at a stranger. Maybe even a sixteen-year-old stranger.
“I love it,” he whispered. Kate smiled. Then the clerk returned, holding three glasses of tea. A wooden clothes hanger was tucked under his arm. He handed one glass of tea to Kate.
“Azoy shain!” the clerk said. Beautiful. “You look like a man.”
“We’ll take it,” Kate said.
“The hanger is free,” the clerk said, smiling and handing a glass of tea to Michael.
“A dank,” Michael said.
They clinked glasses in a toast.
“Lang leben zolt ir,” Michael said. Long life to you.
“God bless America,” said the clerk.
“Up the Republic,” said Kate Devlin, hugging her American son.
20
Back in the parish, Michael hurried to see Rabbi Hirsch to brag about his Orchard Street adventure. It was like a story out of a library book: he said the magic words and—Open, Sesame!—something amazing happened. It wasn’t Shazam! The words were Yiddish. Words that came from Rabbi Hirsch. But they had worked.
The synagogue on Kelly Street was locked. The front door remained sealed. He hoped the rabbi was all right, but the day was so fine, with the sky blue and the streets washed clean by the spring rains, that it didn’t seem possible anything bad could happen to anyone.
He walked around the front of the armory and looked at the bronze statue of the World War I hero with his small tin hat and wrapped leggings and wondered why there were no statues for the men who died in the Battle of the Bulge. Maybe it was too soon. Maybe they were making them in some studio or foundry, in Washington maybe, or in Paris, France, where the artists all lived. He sat on the steps and gazed at the green buds on the elm trees, and the sparrows chattering in the pale green branches, and wondered how far it was from Paris, France, to Prague. There must not be a ghetto anymore in Prague. The Nazis must have killed everybody who lived there. Then images of the camps unspooled in his mind, those newsreels he’d seen in the Venus, of hollow-eyed men and scrawny, skeletal women and bodies piled like the junk in Jimmy Kabinsky’s uncle’s yard. How could they have done that? How could anyone do that? And why didn’t anyone help? And where was God? How could He let so many people die? Men. Women. Babies.
And suddenly he thought: They must have killed the rabbi’s wife.
They must have killed Leah.
Of course! Those goddamned Nazi momsers must have taken her to the concentration camp. They must have put her in the gas chamber. Or starved her to death. Or shot her. Or buried her alive.
Of course!
That’s why Rabbi Hirsch sometimes glances at Leah’s beautiful face in that browning photograph and seems to feel such an awful sadness. And maybe that explains another thing. He told me once that when he was young, he tried to live without God. Then he went back to God and became a rabbi. He didn’t make a big deal about it. But it must have meant something to him, or he never would have mentioned it. Maybe now… maybe because of what happened to Leah, what happened to millions of other Jews, maybe now he has changed his mind again. Sometimes, the look on his face is… well, it’s not exactly confused. It’s not even unhappy, because in a minute he can change back again and teach me a new word in Yiddish or talk about Ziggy Elman. No: in that little flash, that glance, he looks… bitter. Like he’s pissed off at God. Or maybe even worse, like maybe he’s a rabbi who doesn’t believe in God.
Michael stood up, his stomach churning, wondering how he could have been so stupid, not to have thought of this before. He knew now that he had to ask Rabbi Hirsch about more than words, about more than distant Prague. He had to know what had happened to the woman named Leah, the rabbi’s wife. Had to find out her story. And the rabbi’s, too.
And then he saw Rabbi Hirsch in the distance, trudging heavily under the spring trees on Kelly Street in the block leading from the park. From that distance, he seemed small and vulnerable, in his black coat and black hat. Michael started to run to him. He wanted to tell him how sorry he was for failing to understand about his wife, Leah. He wanted to tell him a lot of things. And then he saw that Rabbi Hirsch was carrying two shopping bags. The rabbi’s face brightened as he saw Michael running toward him.
“Hello, Michael. Vos makhst du?”
“Okay, good. Zaier gut, a dank,” Michael said, taking the first shopping bag and reaching for the second. The rabbi pulled the second bag away, saying they could each carry one.
“You’ll never believe this,” Michael said in an excited voice, “but we saved three and a half dollars on a suit today because of Yiddish!”
He told the story while the rabbi unlocked the door. The rabbi was chuckling, asking Michael to repeat the Yiddish phrases, as they went to the kitchen and placed the shopping bags on the table. The boy glanced at the photograph of Leah, but he could not ask about the way she had died. The rabbi seemed too happy. They unpacked two bottles of wine and boxes of matzoh and three cans of soup.
“What’s all this for?” Michael asked.
“Pesach. How you say it in English? Pissover?”
“Passover,” Michael said. “Pissover, well, piss is the word for, uh, urinate. And—”
They briefly discussed the phrases taking a piss and pissing in the wind and being pissed off. And when they finishe
d laughing, the rabbi told Michael about Passover. He explained about the time when the Jews were slaves in Egypt and how God sent a series of plagues against the Pharaoh to convince him to free the Jews. The tenth plague was the last one, and the worst of all. It killed only the firstborn children of Egyptian families. But the Angel of Death passed over the homes of the Jews. The angel knew which homes were Jewish because they had been marked on the doorposts and lintels with the blood of a lamb. Michael was thrilled at this tale; a magic sign had saved them. When this happened, the pharaoh finally got the point and decided to let the Jews go free. Michael tried to picture the Angel of Death, soaring above Egypt, with black wings and a ferocious, stern face, like the statue of Moses he saw in the encyclopedia. He pictured the weeping Egyptian mothers. He saw the Jews gathering at dawn, to head north to the land of milk and honey.
“Ever since, we gather on the… anniversary? Yes, the anniversary, to celebrate and to give thanks to God. Eight days it lasts. A big dinner we have the first night: a seder. The family, the friends, everybody eats and prays. Pesach—Passover, the great feast of the spring. The feast of the free.”
“Maybe Jackie Robinson will have the same kind of dinner next year,” Michael said. “A seder.”
“If he lives in Brooklyn already, we tell him, Jackie, come here.”
“Wouldn’t that be great?” the boy said.
The rabbi tapped the Brooklyn Eagle. “See, he is coming to the other land of milk and honey. Brooklyn!” He balled his hands into fists and held them together as if gripping a bat. “This year in Jerusalem!”
They both laughed. The rabbi hefted the package of American matzohs.
“To Egypt, everything goes back,” he said, opening the package, sliding out a matzoh, and handing it to Michael. “The matzoh, for example. The Jews, when they get the news from the Pharaoh they can leave, they don’t want to give him time to change the mind. But they don’t have time for the bread to—” He made an expanding gesture with his hands. “To get fat?”
“To rise.”
“Yes: to rise. So they grab what’s there already. Bread that haven’t rise. This.” He held up the cracker. “Matzoh.”
Michael took a bite of the long, wide cracker. It was dry and tasteless.
“A Hershey bar it’s not,” the rabbi said.
He opened a cabinet and lifted a brown paper bag off a shelf. He placed it on the table in front of Michael.
“For you,” he said. “For your mother.”
Michael looked puzzled.
“Bread,” Rabbi Hirsch explained. “Regular bread. What we find in the store here in America. Hametz, we call it.”
Michael peered into the bag and saw some rolls and slices of rye bread.
“The Torah tells us to take away—what is it called?—leavened bread, or hametz, from our houses during the eight days of Pesach. You don’t do this, you don’t really observe Pesach. And to make matzoh even more important, the Torah tells us to find every scrap of hametz and scrub clean every part of the house. Some holy men, they say hametz is like pride: bread that’s all big and empty, like—what’s the word?—puffed up.”
He smiled in a mild way.
“Not me,” he added. “Bread is bread, except at Pesach.”
He handed the bag to Michael.
“So this is a bag of hametz,” he said. “Still good. Give it to your mother.” He paused, as if trying to gauge the feelings of the Irish woman he’d never met. “Or you can do something else with it, if your mother, she would be insulted.”
“She’s always worried about insulting you,” Michael said. “And she loves rye bread.”
“What a meshuggeneh world,” the rabbi said.
“Full of meshuggeners,” Michael said, preening slightly as he used the Yiddish in a casual way.
As the rabbi cleaned the stove and the floor, with Michael helping him move the furniture to get at hidden shmootz, he told him about the fine seders they would have in Prague, at huge oaken tables crowded with generations of the Hirsch family. Michael could see the old people belching and farting on the couches and the children running back and forth, playing a game about hidden hametz, and cousins flirting and friends courting. All that, as the rabbi talked: and the reading of the Haggadah and the Four Questions and the dipping into the bitter herbs, all of them close and thinking they would go on for many more generations, the young burying the old forever.
“That was a happiness,” the rabbi said. “All gone away.”
“Will you have a seder here?”
“Maybe next year,” he said. “We save up some money, maybe. Your mother could come, and you, and who knows? Maybe some from the synagogue even.”
He tried to explain to Michael about how the last members of the congregation, old and bent, would wait at home and be picked up by their cranky children, the children embarrassed by the old people, and then be taken to strange places. Some of them would be flown to Florida. Some taken by car to New Jersey. Some would go by train to Long Island. But they would not be here. They would not be where they were needed.
“Nu, by coming for a seder, they make all the hard part okay, the hard part of a year, the hard part of a whole life,” the rabbi said. “We are all together, means we survive again another year.”
But nobody was coming this year, and Michael could feel the loneliness seeping through the room like a fog.
“Maybe you could come to our house, Rabbi,” he said. “Have a seder with us.”
“No,” Rabbi Hirsch said firmly, and then sighed and grew lighter. “Next year, here we have seder. And we send to Jackie Robinson a note too.”
They talked a while longer, the rabbi scrubbing and dusting while Michael, for the first time, prepared tea.
“How come Passover and Easter come around the same time?” the boy asked. “You know, just before Opening Day?”
The rabbi smiled.
“Opening Day, I don’t know about,” he said. “But the other is simple. The Last Supper? You know, the famous painting? The supper that it happened just before Easter?”
“Sure.”
“Well, the Last Supper, it was a seder,” the rabbi said. “Jesus and his friends were together to give thanks for the freeing from Egypt.”
“You’re kidding!”
“No. So you better take this hametz home. The cleaning I got to finish.”
Michael lifted the grocery bag and went to the door. He paused with his hand on the doorknob and turned to the rabbi, who was opening a box of steel wool.
“Rabbi?”
“Yes.”
“I have a question.”
“Yes?”
Two questions. Not one. Two. Ask. No, don’t ask. Yes, go ahead. Ask. Ask.
Michael took a deep breath, exhaled slowly, and asked his first question.
“If God sent a plague against the Pharaoh to save the Jews,” the boy said, “why didn’t he send a plague against the Nazis?”
The rabbi was very still. His hands were limp against his sides.
“I don’t know,” he whispered in a voice powdery with despair. “I don’t know.”
He sounded like a rabbi who didn’t like God very much, and certainly didn’t love Him. And maybe didn’t believe in Him at all anymore. Michael did not ask his second question. He did not ask what had happened to the rabbi’s wife.
21
On Easter Sunday morning, Michael kept looking at his reflection in the store windows as he walked along Ellison Avenue. The priests told them at church that Easter was about Jesus rising from the dead, proving His immortality; everybody in the parish knew better. It was about new clothes. And in his new blue suit, white shirt, striped tie, and polished black shoes, Michael thought he looked older, more mature, whatever that vague word meant. Not yet a man, but no longer a boy.
He saw a girl named Mary Cunningham coming out of her building across from the factory. She was thin, with long brown hair, and was dressed in a light blue coat and a straw hat with plastic
flowers around the crown. She smiled at him in what he felt was a new way. She was in his grade at Sacred Heart, but since the boys were separated from the girls at school, they only saw each other in the schoolyard or on the street.
“Happy Easter, Michael,” she said, smiling. Unlike some of the other girls in his grade, she didn’t wear braces. Her teeth were as hard and white as Lana Turner’s.
“Yeah, same to you,” he said.
“That’s a great suit,” she said.
“I like that hat too,” Michael said. “You going to mass?”
“Of course,” she said. “We have to go, right? But I gotta wait for my father and mother.”
His own mother had gone to the eight o’clock mass, which was all right with Michael. He didn’t want her walking him to mass as if he were a first grader.
“See you there,” Michael said to Mary Cunningham, and moved along more lightly in the bright spring morning. Suddenly Mrs. Griffin was calling to him from across the street. She was dressed in a tan coat and high heels and laughing hysterically.
“Michael, Michael, hey, Michael Devlin,” she shouted, looking both ways for traffic, then scurrying across to him. “You heard the news?”
“What news?” She was more excited than she had been when the war ended.
“Your mother didn’t tell you?”
“No.”
“My horse came in!” she said. “What’d I tell you? You gotta have faith! And it was all because of you, Michael. You told me your dreams, right? And we figured out some of them. But I couldn’t figure out that damned bowler hat. I thought about it for days and nights. Then yesterday I’m looking at the charts in the Daily News, I see there’s a horse running in the third at Belmont, and get this: his name is Bowler Hat! I say to myself, I say, God used Michael to give me a winner! I knew it in my bones. I knew it in my heart! God says to Himself, That Mrs. Griffin, she needs a few bucks, she needs a gas stove, she needs some nylons. So He sends a dream through you to me. I run across the street, and I put five bucks on Bowler Hat with the bookie, and son of a gun if it don’t come in by a lengt’ and a half and pays twenty-two to one. I’m rich, Michael!”