The Boys Across the Street

by Rick Sandford

  “It’s too hot,” I called back.

  Another boy asked me where my yarmulke was.

  My hair was getting so long that you couldn’t see it unless you were behind me. I bent my head forward so that they could tell I had it on. It was just the slightest puncture in their potential self-satisfaction at my not being able to hack it as a Jew.

  While I sat there and continued reading I noticed an attractive boy come out from the building and begin talking to some of the other guys, who were leaning out of their dormitory windows. He had some white sweatpants on, a light blue tank top, and over that his tzitzis. I picked up my binoculars and watched him in discussion with his friends, and realized it was the Serious Young Man. One of the guys he was talking to, a slim boy with short curly hair, told him what I was doing, and the Serious Young Man looked back across the street at me. He gave me the finger, and at that I got up and dashed across the street.

  “Are you doing something wrong by wearing your tzitzis without a shirt over them?” I asked.

  “No,” the Serious Young Man answered, but somewhat bewildered by my question.

  “It’s okay,” said one of the boys looking out of the windows. “He’s not going anywhere and he’s about to take a nap.”

  Two other boys arrived about that time with suits on and the old-fashioned black hats. I’d noticed that they usually wore the hats when they were dressed up. I asked them if they had their yarmulkes on under the hats. They said no.

  “Hey, Rick, you’re bothering me,” the curly-haired boy said. “If you don’t get out of here I’m going to call the police.”

  I pointed to the sign that had just recently been put up on the wall next to their windows.

  PRIVATE PROPERTY

  NO TRESPASSING

  P. C. SEC. 602 (L)

  NO LOITERING

  P. C. SEC. 647 (G)

  NO DRINKING

  P. C. SEC. 647 F & G

  VIOLATORS WILL BE

  ARRESTED & PROSECUTED

  “That was put up because of me, wasn’t it?”

  The curly-haired boy just smiled at me, and I backed up across the street. The other boys still wanted to talk and were calling out to me, but I ignored them and continued on home.

  I went in my apartment, put on my tzitzis, and came back outside.

  As I returned to my chair, the tzitzis waving about me in the breeze, a kind of shouting started up from the boys. I wasn’t sure what they were actually yelling, or if they were really saying anything at all, but occasionally I could hear the word “tzitzis” ringing out in loud exclamatory tones.

  The sound rose in volume and I began to feel as if I had just vanquished all irreconcilable differences.

  It was a victory cheer.

  Later, as I sat reading amid the lengthening shadows of the day, my tzitzis now on under a regular white shirt, I heard the sound of running bodies behind me. A moment later I was aware of two little boys standing on either side of me. I recognized them from the Orthodox family that lived in the apartment building next door. I guessed they must be about eight or nine years old. I said hello. They said hi. I asked them what was up, and they said they were just playing.

  “Is it wrong to wear your tzitzis without a shirt over them?” I asked them.

  The slightly taller of the two boys said no. Then they both explained that when they wore an undershirt, their tzitzis went over it, but when it was hot their tzitzis served as the undershirt.

  “Do you say something in the morning when you put your tzitzis on?”

  “The blessing.”

  “How do you say it? Is it very long?”

  The boy standing behind my right shoulder said it wasn’t long, and recited it.

  “How does it go?” I asked, indicating I wanted to say it after him.

  “Baruch.”

  “Baruch.”

  “Atah.”

  “Atah.”

  And then I realized I’d better write this down. I grabbed a section of the paper I was reading and started writing: “Baruch, ” and I spelled it the way it sounded to me.

  My instructor supplied me with the next word: “Atah.”

  I wrote it down, saying it out loud to guide my spelling.

  “Adonai. ”

  I didn’t repeat that word, but as I wrote it down I translated it for him: “God?”

  His reaction almost immediately crossed itself out, a surprise that I knew what a Hebrew word meant and a self-accusation answering that, of course, anybody would know God’s name.

  “Elo-haynu. ”

  I repeated the word to him. That sounded to me like another name for God, and I asked if that was so. He said it was, momentarily considering the two separate words and then deciding the difference wasn’t worth going into, at least not now.

  “Melech.”

  “Melech. ”

  “Haolam. ”

  Long “i.”

  “Ash air.”

  Astaire.

  “Kidishanu.”

  This was the funniest-sounding word to me: Kiddy-shan-oo. As I spelled it out I explained to my teacher that I didn’t know how to spell the words, I was just going by the way they sounded. He was watching me, and the words I was writing, and he nodded to me that he knew that. He hadn’t corrected me.

  The next word was difficult also: “Bimitzvazum.”

  I made a big guess at the sound of that word and the way it might be spelled.

  “Vitzivanu. ”

  “Vitzivanu.”

  “Al.”

  “Al.”

  “Tee-lass. ”

  “ Tee-lass. ”

  “Tzitzis,” and, with a sense of conclusion, he indicated to me the strings hanging at his waist.

  I looked at what I had written, and read aloud: “Baruch atah adonai elo-haynu mellah hilam ash air kidishanu bimitzvazum—” And here the boys interrupted me. I hadn’t got it right. I asked them to repeat it, and wrote what I thought I heard: “ Vimitz—”

  But my teacher interrupted me. “No, it’s a ‘b,’ ” he said.

  “It sounded like a V to me,” I explained and changed the “v” back to a “b”: “Bimitzvoisum.”

  Voi instead of va and sum instead of zum.

  I went through the blessing again, this time with the corrections, and all the way to the end. I then asked them what it meant and above each word wrote in small letters in separate parentheses the meaning: (Bless) (you) (God) (God) (king) (world) (that) (holy) (for) (on) (the blessing) (tzitzis).

  The boys seemed to be satisfied with this performance, explaining particularly how you take all four strings together in your hand when you say the prayer, and then kiss them as they sprout above your hand when you’re finished.

  While we were talking, two little girls and a smaller boy they had been playing with came up to us. The girls didn’t say anything, and that sense of propriety was pleasing to me: as men, the boys and I spoke of the absolute in abstract terms, which had nothing to do with them; their obligation was to just be quiet and listen.

  “Do you have to say a blessing when you put on your yarmulke?” I asked.

  “No,” he said, “but there are other blessings and prayers . . .”

  His younger brother suddenly spoke up. “So many ...” and then seemed to falter at the sound of his own words.

  My teacher affirmed this, nodding his head and repeating the words: “So many ...”

  And like his brother before him, with the utterance of these words he fell away into a profound silence, the space around us suddenly filled with those infinite possibilities.

  “But this is enough to start for a beginner,” he said, using my ignorance to regain his bearings.

  I was a “beginner.”

  How delicious that was, to sit there surrounded by children, an unborn thing in the cocoon of their presence. They stood around me, quietly, without any apparent inclination to do anything else, as if they were waiting for me to open my wings and reveal myself as the butterfl
y they knew I must inevitably be.

  But then someone called them, our little group broke up, and the spell was broken.

  11 / gentleman’s agreement

  The sound of breakers kind of lulled us into a state of laziness, when, suddenly, very loud there was a shot.

  David yelled, “Oh, fuck,” real loud. It was loud at first, then dwindled out as he fell limp in my arms.

  An American voice yelled something. I heard another voice yell. “They’re Americans, for Christ’s sake. What German would yell ‘Oh, fuck’?”

  People were running around us. They helped me carry him to the fire and I prayed to God he wasn’t dead. In answer I heard some soft mutter from David.

  “It’s the kike,” someone yelled, as his features could be discerned by flashlights.

  We laid him by the fire. His eyes were open and he seemed trying to say something, although his lips didn’t move.

  “Hey. Anderson shot the kike.”

  “Did I shoot the kike?” Anderson said and came into the fire’s light.

  David looked at Anderson for a second, then closed his eyes and he was dead.

  —Rick Sandford, “The Place of Sunlight”

  (October 1967)

  When I was a teenager I wrote several stories about anti-Semitism, invariably from the outraged sensibility that such prejudice could exist. I’d seen the movie Gentleman's Agreement and it had seemed completely mysterious to me: How could you tell someone was Jewish by his last name? How could someone be “partly Jewish”? And why would people not want Gregory Peck to stay at their hotel just because he asked if it was “restricted”?

  The hook of both the book and the movie of Gentleman's Agreement was the idea of a newspaperman pretending to be a Jew for a story he was writing on anti-Semitism. Now, as I was dressing up as a Jew day after day, with my yarmulke and sometimes my tzitzis—although never saying I was Jewish if asked— I began to wonder about this early influence of mine. After searching the book out in a number of used-book stores I finally found a 1947 edition (eighth printing) with a dust jacket.

  I’d read the book by Laura Z. Hobson when I was a kid because it was on my very first self-imposed reading list: all the works that were made into Academy-Award-winning movies (a list which, eclectically enough, included Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Tom Jones by Henry Fielding, Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence, and Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis). Now, more than twenty years later, I read Gentleman's Agreement in a couple of days, finishing the bulk of it in one long sitting on the first Sunday in May.

  For the most part it was a joke, skirting all the real issues of anti-Semitism, and coming forward with standard propaganda: Judaism is a religion, not a race, and Jews are just like everybody else. Why anyone would be anti-Semitic is never gone into, and the people in the book who are anti-Semitic are so without any kind of rationalization. It all seems to be about some unspoken code of etiquette, and the only real reason even obliquely hinted at is the hoary cliché that the Jews killed Christ: “Nobody ever says, ‘The Americans killed Lincoln.’ ” Near the beginning, when the writer is trying to explain what Judaism is to his son, as his mother looks on, the most important question in the book is raised:

  “Oh, they talk about the Jewish race, but never about the Catholic race or the Protestant race. Or about the Jewish people, but never about the Protestant people or—”

  “Why don’t they?”

  Phil searched his mother’s face. It was now impassive and definitely not helpful. He glanced at his watch, and a wave of relief rewarded him.

  “Hey, it’s eight-forty.”

  The question “Why don’t they?” is never answered.

  The main character is defined as an “agnostic” whose parents and grandparents were Episcopalian. He’s regarded as a Christian by others, and although “he’d always been deeply moved by certain parts of the Bible,” you don’t really get the impression that he’s ever read the whole thing.

  The most profound thing in the book is the recognition of the attraction of Judaism—its martyr sensibility—although that is admitted only as a cover-up for its racialism:

  They both laughed, and then Phil grew thoughtful. “There must be millions of people nowadays,” he said, “who are either atheist, agnostic, or religious only in the vaguest terms. I’ve often wondered why the Jewish ones among

  them, maybe even after a couple of generations of being pretty free of religion, still go on calling themselves Jews.” Now Lieberman became serious.

  “I know why they do . . .”

  “Why?”

  “Because this world still makes it an advantage not to be one.”

  The description of the physicist Lieberman becoming “serious” is a revelation of self-righteousness, although it is not presented as such by Hobson. She cloaks with nobility that most despicable of human characteristics—self-pity—just at the point where she must defend Judaism as religion.

  The real mystery of the book is the question of the author’s own identity: Is she Jewish or not? In the book, “religion” is never conceived of as racial or political, in and of itself: it is just a personal, individual experience, more or less determined by upbringing. That read to me as a defensive Jewish position.

  Jesus is never hinted at as being a Jew—in fact, the words “Jesus” and “Christ” are used exclusively as swear words. But then, maybe that’s not a particularly Jewish prejudice: a Catholic acquaintance of mine once told me Jesus couldn’t be a Jew because he was the Son of God.

  But what really made me think Laura Z. Hobson was Jewish was the background she provided for her main character’s father. This man, only briefly alluded to, didn’t believe in interest and each year sent the money his money made to something he did believe in: an organization defending Russian political prisoners, a group fighting the Ku Klux Klan, and, finally, the Civil Liberties Union. With this description I sensed autobiography and the leftward leanings of an American Jew.

  And so I sat outside, reading, with my yarmulke on.

  Later, when it got hot, I put on my tzitzis.

  It was pretty quiet for the most part, but in the middle of the afternoon I noticed some of the boys on the roof across the street, in particular a rather muscular boy with curly hair, whose yarmulke was so near in color to his own brown hair that he could almost “pass.” I picked up my binoculars and watched. In a few moments he and another boy were over near the front of the building, taking off their shirts. This was unprecedented. They didn’t seem concerned at all. The boy with the brown yarmulke had a nice body, but his friend was grotesque: the soft, white, muscleless skin haplessly containing his ill-regarded guts. Looking at him, I felt that his misshapen physique wasn’t so much the fault of his body as of his mind and its creed: a perfect indictment of that myopic self-conscious thing peeping out through the lenses of his glasses, that thing that elevated “man,” even as it denigrated “animal.”

  Sometime later another boy, also fat and self-conscious, came to the edge of the roof and called down to get some suntan lotion handed up to him. As he was taking the bottle from a boy on the balcony below him, he noticed me watching him with my binoculars. He turned and called back to his sunbathing friends and the muscular boy got up and joined him at the edge of the roof.

  Their naked, immodest bodies were being observed by a known homosexualist.

  The fat boy was truly stymied. I don’t think it had ever occurred to him that his body could be considered a desirable thing (nor was it: it was a curious thing), but the muscled boy, almost “passing” as he did and attractive as he was, rather liked my attention. I think he felt it was his due. Holding himself erect, he stood at the edge of the roof looking back at me and my binoculars without flinching: he wanted me to see what he was.

  Later, when they were dressing, he turned his back to me, pulled down his pants, and mooned me.

  I yelled across the street to him, “Thank you!”

  Late in the afternoon, as I was
nearing the end of Gentleman's Agreement, I came across a passage that confronted me with my sixteen-year-old self, confiscating ideas in his desire to be a storyteller:

  “. . . There was a boy in our outfit, Abe Schlussman, good soldier, good engineer. One night we got bombed, and he caught it. I was ten yards off; this is straight. Somebody growled, ‘Give me a hand with the goddam sheeny—’ Before I got to him he was dead. Those were the last words he ever heard.”

  12 / yaakov

  My unemployment checks came out to $133 a week. With that I could just barely pay the rent. If I wanted to eat, or go to the movies, or do anything else at all, I would have to get some work, so bright and early Monday morning, after a good workout and sauna at the gym, I got on the bus and went over to Burbank to have a new picture taken at Central Casting.

  I wore my yarmulke and tzitzis, and had my picture taken in them. Of course, the picture is from the waist up, so you can’t see the tzitzis, and I am facing the camera, so you can’t see the yarmulke, but as I made my way among the casting people one of them (Jewish) asked me, “What did you do that you have to be a Jew?”

  When I got home I took off my clothes, all except my shorts and yarmulke, and sat outside and started going through my unread newspapers. I made some headway, and late in the afternoon I brought my blanket out and took a little nap. It was a very hot day with the Santa Anas blowing, and it was wonderful to feel that wind without a breath of coolness in it.

  I was lying on the blanket when a little boy who’d just moved into the apartment building next door came and sat beside me. We’d passed each other a couple of times and said hello. His name was Yaakov and he was ten years old, swarthy and rather pugnacious. He offered me some gum, which I turned down, since I’d just put one of my teeth back in that morning with Krazy Glue, but I did accept his offer of a large red cherry-flavored candy.