by Pete Hamill
Then at last, Rabbi Hirsch was in Prague. He called the apartment across the street from the synagogue, the small flat where he was to live with Leah Yaretzky. Nobody answered. He saw men in black Gestapo uniforms driving around in polished black cars. An old man told him that some Jews had already been arrested, their names on Gestapo lists. He went to the post office, which was guarded by men in SS uniforms, but was told that nobody could place calls to Poland. From a café on Wenceslas Square, he called some other members of Leah’s network. Nobody answered the first three calls and a German voice answered the fourth. The network had vanished, and so had Leah.
He finally risked going to the apartment. There were no Germans to be seen. A sign on the door of the synagogue across the street said that it was closed, but there were no guards posted on the steps. In the apartment, he packed a small canvas bag with pictures of Leah and his father, along with clothes and his basic documents. He burned the Zionist literature. Then he made two final packages of books, carried them to the synagogue, entered through a side door, and placed them in a storeroom in the basement. He rolled the Torah scroll and took it to the home of Mr. Fishbach, the beadle, who left immediately for the mountains, where the scroll would be hidden from the Germans.
“I wanted to go, right away to leave,” he said, as Michael imagined his movements through Prague. “But Leah, she was out there, someplace. I knew this, I believed this, I hoped this.”
Before leaving, Mr. Fishbach had told him there would be a final meeting at the Old-New Synagogue at four in the morning. The doors were locked, but there was a tunnel in the basement of a house down the street. Then Michael was moving through the fog with Rabbi Hirsch, dodging Nazis, avoiding streetlamps, wary of informers, plunging into the ghetto, along the streets he knew so well. They went into the modern apartment house that had been erected on the site of the old Fiinfter Palast. Then into the basement, where a man was waiting, showing him the hidden door, and then through tunnels, dripping and dank, and into the Old-New Synagogue. Rabbis were praying. Young rabbis were making disguises. Old rabbis stared at the walls. The leaders began making frantic arrangements to smuggle out the most holy artifacts from the Old-New Synagogue, to hide them in the mountains, or somehow move them to Palestine. Michael thought about the attic, the sealed room, the two tiny coffins, the silver spoon.
And then a young man from the underground appeared, explained what they all must do to escape, and at the end, called Rabbi Hirsch to the side.
“He tells me at the Polish border, Leah has been arrested. Leah and two others. By the Gestapo. They find two guns and Zionist writings.”
He was quiet for a long moment. As if imagining what had been done to his wife.
“I never see her again,” he said.
Kate Devlin reached out and touched his shoulder, to steady him. Then she quickly withdrew her hand, as if the rabbi might think her gesture inappropriate.
“Later, we heared that she died in a camp.”
“Good God,” she said.
“No, Mrs. Devlin. God was not good.”
Michael thought: He doubts God. Here it is again. He’s a rabbi and he doubts the goodness of God. Michael realized that he had been holding a piece of pound cake in his hand for a long time. He eased it toward his mouth. Thinking: how can he still be a rabbi if he doubts God?
“And you, Rabbi Hirsch?” Kate Devlin said. “How did you get away?”
“Very simple,” he said, without pride. “I ran.” Then he shrugged. “Or better, I walked. I walked to the mountains and traded my clothes with a woodcutter. I shave the hair off my head, so that now I am bald and without a beard.” He turned to Michael. “Like Brother Thaddeus.” A small smile. “Everything black, I throwed away. My identity papers I burned. My father’s picture, this too. Anybody looking at him, he’s a Jew. All I have is in my little bag, a picture of Leah, a few shirts, a toothbrush. I walked and hid, like an animal that is lost.”
He walked through Romania. He walked through Yugoslavia. He walked all the way to Greece. In Piraeus, he eventually boarded a ship going to the Dominican Republic, where a dictator named Trujillo was accepting Jews, because he thought there were too many black people in his country. Rabbi Hirsch lived in the Jewish colony the Dominicans called Sosua. He was one of the rabbis. The sun was hot. The beaches were white. He stayed for the duration of the war.
“And that’s it, the story of my life,” Rabbi Hirsch said. He smiled in a tentative way and sipped his wine. “Or like they say in Sosua, la historia de mi vida. Some Spanish I learned there too. I built some houses. I fished in the sea. I read all the time, newspapers in Spanish and English, Time magazine. My books, most of them were sent from Palestine, and so I have them there too, have Prague in the books.” He tapped his forehead. “And here too.”
He ran his tongue over his lips as if cleaning the residue of the wine.
“The colony in Sosua? A failure. City people, we are not good farmers. When the war ends, most of the Jews leave. I stay a little longer, but last year I camed here, when from Brooklyn the synagogue put a notice in the paper for a rabbi.” He shook his head slowly. “How do you say? That’s all there is to it. The ball game is over. Nada más.”
Michael glanced at the clock over the stove. Almost midnight. He was exhausted, but he wanted the night of confession and disclosure to go on and on.
“Are you absolutely certain, Rabbi, that your wife is dead?” Kate Devlin said calmly.
The rabbi was slumping now, his face drawn.
“One guy, I met him in Ellis Island, right out there,” he said, motioning with his wine glass to the window and the distant harbor. “He tells me he is in the underground with Leah. And he says she shot three Nazis when they try to arrest her, and so they don’t kill her. Killing her is like mercy. They keep her alive, in the Gestapo building. And when they are finish with her, they send her to the camps. Maybe Treblinka. Maybe Auschwitz. Nobody knows.”
“But there must be some records,” Kate said.
“After the war, letters I wrote to the Americans, the British, even the Russians,” he said. “In German I wrote, in Czech, in my not good English.” His body slumped lower in the chair. “To nobody I wrote in Yiddish. Nobody is left alive to read it.” He took a deep breath, then let it go. “To Prague I wrote, to Vienna, to Warsaw, to the Jewish agencies in Tel Aviv. Everywhere, I wrote. All have her name on the same lists, just one name with millions of others. Dead, they say. No details. Just one word. Dead. In different languages. Same meaning.”
The rabbi looked at Michael’s face and touched his blackened skin and shook his head. Kate got up and went into the bathroom, closing the door behind her. Michael stared at the older man.
“Rabbi?” he whispered.
“Yes?”
“When you went to the meeting in the Old-New Synagogue?”
“Yes?”
“Why didn’t you make the Golem?”
The rabbi turned his head and gazed out the open window at the nighttime city and the distant skyline of Manhattan.
“This I think about all the time,” he said softly. “Maybe…”
He didn’t finish the sentence because Kate returned from the bathroom and sat down facing him. Her eyes were swollen and pink. The pint bottle of wine was almost empty. She shared the last inch with Rabbi Hirsch.
“Your wife was a hero, Rabbi,” Kate Devlin said in a consoling way. Michael noticed a slight crack in her voice, a tremble.
“Yes. You said it. A hero.”
“And if you ask me, you are too,” she said.
“No.”
“Yes, you are.”
“Leah, yes. Your husband, yes. But me? A hero? Neyn. Keyn mol. No.”
She sipped the wine, her eyes full of concern and doubt, but in some way holding back. It was as if one question had been rising to her tongue across the long evening and she couldn’t let Rabbi Hirsch leave without asking it. Michael watched her, waiting for her to speak.
�
��Do you still believe in God, Rabbi?” she said at last.
His face looked drained and pale. He shook his head from side to side.
“I believe in sin,” he said, and finished his wine. “I believe in evil.”
28
At the door, before setting out on his return journey through the parish, Rabbi Hirsch suddenly stopped and searched through his pockets. “Vart a minut… wait a minute. Ah, here!” He waved a small envelope, smiled, then removed two tickets. To Ebbets Field.
“For us,” he said. “To see Jackie!” The rabbi’s face brightened as he remembered a song from the radio. “We will buy peanuts and Cracker Jacks, and I don’t care if we ever get back!”
Michael could only mumble his thanks, unable to speak up. The rabbi had told him that he’d never seen a baseball game, not even in the Dominican Republic. But Michael had never been to a professional game either; most kids in the parish saw their first game with their father. The boy had played ball. He had watched sandlot games at the Parade Grounds, on the far end of Prospect Park. But the great ballplayers of the Dodgers lived in newsreels, on the radio, on the other side of the gates of Ebbets Field. He had thought he would finally see the Dodgers with Sonny and Jimmy, once school was over. But things had gone wrong. He might never even see Sonny and Jimmy again. Now here comes Rabbi Hirsch. This wonderful man. With tickets to Ebbets Field. Together we’ll see the Dodgers. And Jackie Robinson. Oh, jeez. He turned his head, afraid the rabbi would see the tears in his eyes.
“What a grand thing to do, Rabbi,” Kate Devlin said, smiling in a beautiful way. Michael wondered if the rabbi saw her as beautiful too. She examined the date on the tickets and gave them back to the rabbi. Two weeks away. “But you know, he’ll still have the cast on his leg.”
“We’ll get there, Mom,” Michael insisted. “Don’t worry.”
Then he asked Rabbi Hirsch for one final favor: to sign his cast. The rabbi smiled and wrote on the smooth, hard plaster in chiseled Hebrew lettering. Michael thought: No ironworker has that on his cast. And they said good night.
“Please, Rabbi,” Kate Devlin said, “be careful.”
“Thank you.”
“Mom, he got away from the Gestapo. He should be able to get away from the Falcons.”
The rabbi smiled in a tired, knowing way and was gone.
“He’s a good man,” Kate said, as she locked the door behind him. “And very sad.”
In the morning, Michael began his own version of spring training. He went to the roof and packed two Campbell’s Soup cans with pebbles and taped the ends and started doing curls to build up his arms. He lay on his back and pedaled his legs in the air. The cast on his lower right leg was very heavy; he could only pedal it six times at first. Then eight. Then ten. After a few days, the weight of the cast lessened; he then tied the packed soup cans to his good left leg, to even out the weight. His foot sweated heavily inside the cast, and he had to scratch himself with a school ruler or a butter knife. But he was getting stronger. He could feel it.
Each day when his mother left for work, he laid out his schoolbooks on the table and studied, made notes, drilled himself in math and catechism and history. The radio played all day long, but he was able to concentrate on the schoolwork. He would take the exams soon; he wanted to do better than he’d ever done in the past. To hit singles and doubles. To race home, like Jackie Robinson. He even reviewed all the goddamned rules of English grammar and stopped himself when his mind wandered into the more adventurous terrain of Yiddish. In some weird way, trying to learn Yiddish made him understand English better. Grammar was like the frame of a building, he thought, the structure, what you had to build before you put in the floors or the walls or the roof. Maybe it was boring, but it was necessary. It was like playing baseball. The sportswriters kept talking about how Robinson knew the fundamentals. The basics. The rules. They really meant he’d learned how to play baseball the right way. Not like it was a goddamned hobby. For Robinson, baseball wasn’t stamp collecting or model airplanes or something. It was his life.
There was so much to learn. Not just to pass tests, but to get ready for his life. Rabbi Hirsch had said to him once, translating a proverb from Yiddish: “The sea has no shore, learning has no end.” Now, in his solitude, Michael knew what he meant. He looked up the proper nouns he’d heard from Rabbi Hirsch during the long night in the Devlin kitchen: Munich, the Sudetenland, Piraeus, Trujillo, the Dominican Republic. None of them were in his schoolbooks and only the Dominican Republic was in the blue books. The entry explained that this was where Columbus was buried, on an island shared with Haiti, where everybody spoke French. It said that a guy named Trujillo was the dictator, just as Rabbi Hirsch said, and that he had brought the country good government.
He also found an entry in the blue books for Antonín Dvoák, who died in 1904 and wrote a masterpiece called the New World Symphony, which used music from Negroes and American Indians. But there was nothing on Mahler or Smetana. They were out there, in the sea without a shore. He wanted to know everything about them, but with the cast on his leg he still could not risk a trip to the library on Garibaldi Street, where there was a much larger encyclopedia. He would wait. And use his time in other ways. And when they finally got a phonograph, he would save up to buy the New World Symphony.
He did not go down to the street. News of the parish was filtered through his mother, or Mrs. Griffin, who stopped by every few days to talk about dreams. The worst news was that a fire burned out the orchestra section of the Venus and the disgusted owner just gave up and closed the place. There was talk that the Falcons had set the fire because the owner threw Tippy Hudnut out for exposing himself to a twelve-year-old girl. Nobody could prove it. Not the exposure. Not the arson. And Michael imagined a roundup of all the characters who had passed across the screen in the dark: Gunga Din and Dr. Cyclops, Ken Maynard and the Durango Kid, Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney, Bing Crosby and Edward G. Robinson, along with Tarzan, King Kong, Superman, the Masked Marvel, and Dick Tracy. He pictured them all together, coming off the screen, riding horses, driving cars, swinging from ropes in the jungle, and saying their goodbyes. All of them. Even Dracula. Even Dr. Frankenstein and his monster.
But there was no farewell, and from the rooftop Michael could see the marquee and the letters he knew said CLOSED. Sometimes, sweaty and tired after lifting weights, he would lie on his stomach on the raised canopy that rimmed the roof and gaze down into Ellison Avenue and his lost summer. He often saw Sonny Montemarano and Jimmy Kabinsky walking with other kids, drinking sodas, pitching pennies against the wall of the diner. He could see part of their ball games. They never looked up. He did not call down.
Other times, he would lie on his back on the canopy and gaze at the clouds. He watched them shift and change, as if in the hands of magicians, immense gauzy sculptures in the blue summer sky. One day he saw Winston Churchill there, smoking his cigar. He saw CúChulainn shaking his fist at the English. He saw Indians peering from cliffs and soldiers holding hand grenades. He saw Pilgrims, lions, trucks, mountains, the bodies of women, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, huge galleons in full sail, deep-sea divers, dogs, igloos, and the mushroom cloud of the atom bomb. Once, in late afternoon, with the sun dropping toward New Jersey, and the clouds all mauve and lavender, he saw the Golem.
Immense.
Faceless.
His arms outstretched.
Waiting to be called.
One afternoon, after reading about Dvoák, he tried to imagine the New World Symphony. He had never heard a note of it, but he would try to make it up. He closed his eyes, and could see Columbus on the Atlantic, the waves higher than his masts, and the music was full of danger and the sounds of crashing waves, dark music full of fear too, for they must have been terrified, going where nobody had gone before. The fear of drowning. The fear of sea serpents. And then the music softened in his head. The sun appeared. The sea was like glass. And in the music he could hear birds. Calling them all. Gathering on the
masts. Coming from land. Coming from America. The music was happy then and full of the sun and thick green jungle foliage and the sound of flutes and Indians coming to see them in canoes, bringing water and flowers. The New World!
Michael hummed his imaginary symphony, seeing fights with Indians then and arrows in the air and blood on the ground and more white people coming, from Spain and England, bringing colored people after them in chains, and then there were drums in Michael’s head: drums from Africa; the drums of Indians; drums while Cortez conquered Mexico, and drums when the Pilgrims came to Plymouth Rock, and drums during the Revolution, and snare drums for the Civil War. He made the drum sounds: BUM bum bum bum, BUM bum bum bum, adding a trumpet to make the screams. And invented bugles for George Armstrong Custer, who died on the Little Big Horn and came back to life in the RKO Grandview, only to die there forever. He made great ooooohhhhhhing sounds and awwwwwing sounds when the land filled with wheat and corn and cattle and schoolhouses, when he could see the Grand Canyon and the Rockies, the sound of majesty, right out of all the cowboy movies when the wagon trains came to the Promised Land, to what Rabbi Hirsch called the land of milk and honey. He gave a sound to the sunsets, a little sad, and a happy sound to the sunrise, like Louis Armstrong. He tried to imagine the sound of the color red. He made a whooshing sound for a fast river, and threw in a train whistle as the railroad pushed west, and then the blues, sad and melancholy, and jigs and reels for the Irish arriving and “O Sole Mio” for the Italians, and was trying to imagine music from the Jews, when he saw Bing Crosby, as he wandered over yonder just to see the mountains rise. Let me be by myself in the evening breeze. Listen to the murmur of the cottonwood trees. Send me off forever but I ask you please.… And ended in Ebbets Field. The music for the color green sounded like buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack. I don’t care if I ever get back.