by Pete Hamill
Kate was suddenly alert. She switched off the radio, as if to hear better, then took a carving knife from the drawer beside the sink. Michael lifted a chair and shifted his weight to his good leg in order to swing it better. There were two more knocks.
“Who is it?” she said.
“Me. A friend of Michael.”
When he heard the voice, Michael laughed and put down the chair and snapped the lock. He jerked open the door.
“Rabbi Hirsch!” he squealed.
The rabbi stood there in his black suit and black hat, his bearded face nervous and concerned. He had flowers in one hand, a small box from the bakery in the other.
“Hello to all,” he said, and bowed deeply to Kate from the doorway. She sighed and laid the knife down on the sink.
“Mom, this is Rabbi Hirsch,” Michael said. “Rabbi, this is my mother.”
“Nice to meet you, Mrs. Devlin.”
“Come in, come in, Rabbi,” she said, offering a hand. He bowed stiffly again and handed her the flowers and the package from the bakery. She took the package by its thin white string.
“Thank you, thank you,” he said, stepping into the apartment. Michael locked the door behind him, but the rabbi stood there awkwardly. His eyes took in the kitchen, but he avoided looking at Michael’s bruised face.
“Have a seat, Rabbi,” she said. “We were just having tea, and I know you like tea. Michael told me so.”
“Thank you,” he said again, taking one of the chairs. Michael sat facing him.
“Pound cake!” Kate said. “My favorite!”
Her voice is a little high, Michael thought; she’s actually nervous. She started a fresh kettle, ran water into a cheap vase, stacked the flowers in the vase, placed it on the table, and then found a plate for the cake, a knife, a cup and saucer for the rabbi. All in a nervous rush. Very few men came to this flat, and absolutely no rabbis.
“It’ll be just a minute,” she said.
“Forgive me, I don’t mean to have you troubled,” he said. The fragrance of the small purple flowers filled the kitchen, giving Michael a reminder of summer.
“Oh, it’s no trouble, Rabbi. Michael always—did he tell you what happened in Orchard Street? With the suit?”
Rabbi Hirsch smiled. A summery smile.
“Yes, yes. That was very good. Another language, it’s sometimes a good thing.” A pause. “Always a good thing.”
He still wouldn’t look at Michael.
“Michael says he now has three languages: English, Latin, and Yiddish,” Kate said, her back to the rabbi as she worked at the stove.
“He is a very good boy,” the rabbi said. “He will learn many more languages. A diplomat, he could be.”
“Wouldn’t that be lovely,” she said. “Maybe he could help unite Ireland.”
“Or make Palestine the land of milk and honey.”
She was smiling as the kettle whistled. She lifted it off the gas and poured water onto the black leaves in the teapot.
“You make tea the way in Prague we made it,” the rabbi said.
“The tea leaves are cheaper,” she said. “It’s not a matter of principle.”
He smiled. “Yes, but the balls of tea in America are very strange. The taste is not the same.”
“How long have you been in America, Rabbi?”
“Nine months.”
Michael looked at him now. This was news. Nine months? He had assumed that the rabbi had come here during the war.
“Michael says you are from Prague,” she said. “Did you come here straight from there?”
The tea was steeped now, and she was pouring it into the cups. Michael thought: Keep asking questions, get the story, the whole story, the story of Leah. His wife’s story. Ask the questions I can’t ask.
“No,” he said. “Another way, a long way to here.”
Now, for the first time, he gazed directly at Michael’s face. He removed his glasses and rubbed his right eye with a knuckle as if to focus it more sharply. His mouth turned down in a pained way. His eyes watered. Michael wanted to hug the man and ease his pain. But that pain also proved to Michael that he mattered to Rabbi Hirsch, even if he didn’t come to the hospital. He had learned on Easter morning that the rabbi didn’t cry easily.
“They did a terrible thing to you, Michael,” he said hoarsely.
“It’s getting better,” Michael said. “A couple of days ago—in the hospital?—it looked terrible. Right, Mom?”
“Awful.”
The rabbi turned away, clearing his throat, then sipped the tea.
“Three times, I comed to the hospital,” he said softly. “But the police, they don’t let me in.” His eyes moved to the gas stove, then back to Michael. “I thought, maybe a Jew they don’t see here much. But, no, is serious, the police said to me. Big case. Very serious. So I went to Kelly Street and said my best prayers.”
Michael turned to his mother, as if for confirmation.
“I guess the police weren’t taking any chances,” she said, turning to Michael. “Those buggers might have come there to get you.”
Michael stirred with a kind of elation.
“Maybe that’s why Sonny and Jimmy didn’t come,” he said.
“Maybe,” she said, but Michael felt the pressure of words she preferred to leave unspoken. Rabbi Hirsch spooned some sugar into his tea, and nodded when Kate placed a slab of pound cake on his plate. The rabbi glanced again at Michael, and then his eyes drifted to the walls and the framed photograph of Michael’s father.
“This is your husband, Mrs. Devlin?” he said. She turned, following his gaze.
“Yes. That’s Tommy Devlin.”
“Michael, he has the chin and nose of his father, and your eyes,” he said. Michael felt a sudden dull ache, deep in his head, like a memory of someone moving through dark rooms. He sipped his tea.
“That’s what they say,” Kate agreed.
“A good man he must have been,” the rabbi said. “And you, too, Mrs. Devlin. A son like yours is no accident.”
“Thank you,” Kate said, and smiled. “Do you have children, Rabbi?”
“No.”
Don’t stop, Michael thought. Go on, Mom, get it all from him.
“But you were married?”
She heard me!
“Yes,” the rabbi said.
A pause. Michael moved his chair to be able to see the rabbi without staring. The ache eased in his head.
“His wife’s name was Leah,” Michael said. “She died during the war.”
“That damned war,” Kate said.
A vagrant piece of music drifted from the yards. Bing Crosby, singing about faraway places with strange-sounding names, far away over the sea. Then Kate said: “Tell me about her.”
Rabbi Hirsch stared at his tea the way Michael had often stared at the photograph of Leah. Small beads of perspiration appeared on his forehead. He held the teacup in a clumsy way.
“Forgive me,” Kate said. “I don’t mean to be nosy.”
“Nosy, no, no, that you are not. But… a hurt, a bad hurt, maybe better we shouldn’t talk about.”
“Sometimes it’s better to talk about things, instead of holding them all inside.”
He glanced at her and exhaled.
“True,” he said.
His eyes grew cloudy with the past. He stared into the teacup.
“Well… it’s in another life.”
And then in the warm Brooklyn evening, with the sound of foghorns drifting from the harbor through the open window, the rabbi told the story to the widow from Ireland and her American son. And perhaps even to himself.
“We met in Prague in 1937,” he said. “A Zionist she was, full of, how do you say it? Passion? She was from Warsaw. Eighteen years old. You know what is a Zionist?”
While Rabbi Hirsch tried to explain Zionism, Michael slipped again into Prague, a city where automobiles and trolley cars moved, where Rabbi Lowe and Emperor Rudolf once held secret meetings in the fog. Michael
could see Leah Yaretzky, slim and dark-haired, a student from Poland, speaking German and Yiddish and a little Czech, her eyes blazing. He stood beside young Rabbi Hirsch as he watched her at a crowded meeting at Charles University, everybody smoking, eyes intense, full of alarm and fear.
“It goes back before that night I seen her first time,” the rabbi said. “It goes back to 1923, when the swastika we saw for the first time, in pictures from Munich,” he said. “Hitler’s name we heard in the wireless radio and the newspapers and the magazines, and in Italy, Mussolini already has came to power. Hitler, a putsch he tried already in November, out of a beer hall, and failed and everybody laughed at him. He’s a Charlie Chaplin, who cares? But some smart people said: He is the future. My father said I would have to choice.”
“Choose,” Michael said.
“Choose. I can become more of a Jew, he said, or I can be no Jew at all. I choosed to be more of a Jew.”
Before the end of the year, his father was dead. Michael could see Judah Hirsch at his father’s hospital bed, promising to become a rabbi. Saw him in school. Studying holy books and listening to white-haired old rabbis explain Torah and Talmud. Working as an assistant in a modern synagogue in Prague. And then it was 1937, when Michael was two years old and his father was still alive and waltzing with Kate Devlin in the Webster Hall. And Michael could see Rabbi Hirsch going to the meeting where he first heard Leah Yaretzky speak.
Her words meant little to him. “A Jewish homeland, in Palestine, it was like a myth,” he said. “Like something in a song. Nothing it meant to me. Jews had been in Prague for a thousand years. We were doctors, lawyers, businessmen. Jews were artists. Jews were writers. Why go to the desert to be farmers?”
But when Leah Yaretzky rose, she did not deliver a polite speech. Nor a sentimental speech. Certainly not a religious speech, and definitely not the kind of speech you would expect from a woman. Michael heard her speaking in beautiful Yiddish, silencing the crowd with talk about Hitler, who was in absolute power now in Germany. Hitler was not a Charlie Chaplin. She warned the audience about what was certain to come with Hitler to all of Europe, including Prague. Michael could hear her, as he stood beside Rabbi Hirsch, and Leah Yaretzky spoke about death and destruction. Her hands were waving as she insisted that they all must leave Central Europe for Palestine, so that the Jews could survive. She talked about Israel. She talked about Zionism. She talked about guns. Rabbi Hirsch had never heard a woman speak this way. Neither had Michael.
“She said if Jews were going to live they must be ready to die,” he said. “And she was right.”
“She wanted to use guns against the Nazis?” Michael asked in a thrilled whisper.
“Yes. And the British too, in Palestine. The British, she said, they never understand anything unless you shoot them.”
“Well, she was right about that,” Kate Devlin said, with a faint smile.
The tea was finished now, and Kate Devlin stood up and went to a closet and took down the bottle of wine from the top shelf. She placed it on the table.
“A glass of wine, Rabbi?”
He peered at the label of the pint of Mogen David.
“You keep kosher?” he said in a pleased way.
“I like the sweet taste,” she said, taking two clean water glasses from the rack on the sink. “Most wines are too sour. But this, I like this.”
“Me too.”
She poured the dark purple liquid into both glasses. The rabbi nodded and sipped, and his tongue grew even looser, the past more powerful, as he told about how he kept returning to the meetings, more to see Leah Yaretzky than to learn about Zionism. In private rooms, after the great meetings, Michael saw her charting the secret routes to Palestine. He saw her handing frightened men and women the lists of contacts along the way. He heard her arranging jobs in Tel Aviv. And he saw her late at night, rushing along the fog-slick streets, holding hands with Rabbi Hirsch, moving closer to him.
“It was, how do you say? A great love,” he said, groping for words, but surprisingly—to Michael—not embarrassed. “For me, there was no mystery why I love her. She was good. Beautiful. She have, had, what I don’t have, that passion. Still I don’t know why she love me, a poor rabbi, who didn’t believe what she believed.”
“Nobody has answers to such questions, Rabbi,” Kate Devlin said.
“No. We don’t never know.” He paused. “But there was one thing we could not to do. I saw her, I heared her, I loved her, my Leah. But I have in my head this one thing: to dance with her. Before I am a rabbi student, I love to dance. I love the cabaret, the music. I love when on the radio from Vienna we hear Strauss, a waltz. I love the jazz we hear too, Bix Beiderbecke? Paul Whiteman.… So I want to go with her to some place, not in rabbi clothes, some place with music and laughing and no worry about time and Hitler. Just to dance. Just that. To dance with Leah Yaretzky, to dance with my woman I love.”
Kate Devlin’s eyes watered. She sipped her wine.
“Could you waltz?” Michael asked, picturing his father at the Webster Hall.
“Of course, boychik! We are only a day from Vienna, the world champion of the waltzes.”
Judah Hirsch and Leah Yaretsky never found time to waltz. And Michael pictured the rabbi at a newsstand in Prague, reading that Hitler’s troops were moving into the Saar. He saw him rushing about with Leah to meetings, dodging spies and informers. He was with Rabbi Hirsch on the steps of the synagogue as frightened Jews arrived in Prague from a place called the Sudetenland, to sleep on floors or in wagons, and together they heard Hitler ranting on the radio that the Sudetenland was German. Everybody wanted visas to America, like Ingrid Bergman in that movie Casablanca. But Michael heard them saying that the Americans didn’t want any more Jews. And wondered if this was because in America there were also people who painted swastikas on synagogues.
Then there was a meeting of all the Jewish leaders in Prague. Michael listened as some of them said that they had survived all sorts of Jew-haters, all the way back to Brother Thaddeus; they would survive Hitler too. Besides, the major powers, England and France, they wouldn’t allow this clown Hitler to have his way. And Hitler wouldn’t risk a world war over such a small country.
“On some days, even I believed this stupidness,” Rabbi Hirsch said. “Only Leah refused to believe any of it.”
Now Michael was watching newsreels with Rabbi Hirsch and Leah, in a dark, smoky theater in Prague, seeing Hitler taking over Austria, then watching a guy from England in striped pants standing beside a Frenchman in the city of Munich, saying that Hitler could have the Sudetenland. Everybody in the movie house was silent, except Leah. “Cowards,” she was yelling. “Fascist bastards!” Now she was smoking furiously. Now she was sleeping on desks in grubby offices. Now she was jittery and irritated. Now she was losing weight. Michael saw her going away, two days here, three days there, to make speeches, to raise money, and there was Rabbi Hirsch, alone. Michael helped him pack his most precious books for shipment to an address in Palestine. He walked with him past a dance hall where the orchestra played and nobody danced at all.
He imagined the rabbi alone at night in his synagogue. Praying to God to deal with Hitler. Praying that the Jews would be saved. Above all, praying for Leah Yaretzky.
“You were married by then?” Kate Devlin said.
“Yes,” he said. “On March 7th, 1939. But a very small ceremony. No party, no joy. We did not dance. She said such things—dancing, lakhn, uh, laughing—they are wrong when Jews are in danger. She said when together we are all safe in Israel, we will have a great party and dance for a week.”
Then it was the day after their wedding. As Rabbi Hirsch spoke, Michael could see him at the door, as Leah said goodbye. She had to go to Lublin in Poland for five days of urgent meetings, and now she was asking Rabbi Hirsch to make a brief trip to Austria to deliver a package. They would meet again in Prague and then leave together for the south. To make their way to Palestine.
He saw Rabbi Hirs
ch arguing with her. This is foolish, he was saying. The Nazis are in power in Vienna. And Hitler is moving troops on the Czech borders. Open your nose, he was saying to Leah. You can smell death. And in such a time, he tells her, I want to be with my wife.
But Leah insisted. Rabbi Hirsch would go by car through the mountains to a certain hamlet. He would be met at a certain place by a certain man, would turn over a thick envelope, and then retrace his steps, back to Prague.
“I say, ‘Leah, even a donkey takes one look at me and knows I am a rabbi.’ She says, ‘Not if your beard you shave off. Not if your clothes you change. Please,’ she says to me, ‘on this envelope, the money inside, depends hundreds of lives.’”
He paused. Michael leaned forward, his head full of James Cagney in 13 Rue Madeleine.
“What did you do?” he asked.
“My beard I shaved,” he said. “My clothes I changed.” He paused. “We say goodbye. A joke she makes that with my shaved face and clothes from the university, she feels she’s kissing another man. I kiss her again and say when we are safe, I never shave again.”
And then Michael joined the beardless Rabbi Hirsch in a car driven by a blond Jew who spoke German. Racing through backroads, climbing into mountains, plunging into forests, until at last they reached a hunter’s cabin. Two members of the underground were waiting, holding machine guns. Rabbi Hirsch turned over the package of money. The driver went on alone, to Vienna, and when he was gone, Rabbi Hirsch learned Hitler had marched into Czechoslovakia. Not a shot had been fired. The Wehrmacht was in Prague. The Nazis were securing the borders, including the border with Poland. And Leah Yaretzky was across that border, in Poland.
Now Michael could see Rabbi Hirsch turn and walk straight into the forest. Saw him as he walked and walked, avoiding the main roads, sleeping under bridges and in train stations and even in a chair in a public library. He walked with Rabbi Hirsch as they crossed together into Czechoslovakia and then saw thousands of German troops moving in trucks on main roads. Billowing in the wind were those scary black-and-red flags adorned with swastikas.