“Bye.”
After that I made a point of greeting Avraham whenever I saw him, always addressing him by name. Occasionally we would have short conversations, and I soon learned that his parents were from the Soviet Union and that both he and Yaakov were born in Israel. Although they had only been in the United States a few years, they both spoke English very well.
“Why did you leave Israel?” I asked.
“Because it’s not religious,” he replied.
I looked at him incredulously. “And Los Angeles is?”
Avraham shrugged.
Little Yaakov, seeing these friendly encounters between me and his brother, began to regard me a little less suspiciously. I might not be Jewish and I might be a faggot, but apparently I wasn’t the devil incarnate, and his disdainful silences slowly turned into shy hellos and eventually he was hollering my name out with excited recognition whenever he saw me.
Late in the afternoons when all the other kids were inside or had gone home, I began to notice two little boys playing by themselves. Sometimes they would be playing in the deserted playground across the street, and other times they would just be wandering around together. The smaller of the two was the shy boy I’d noticed the other day, the one who’d defined for the others what I was doing: “He’s pretending to be Jewish.”
A few days after that, when they saw me sitting by myself, they came over to talk with me. The taller boy addressed me. “Is your name Rick?”
“Yes. What’s yours?”
“My name’s Moshe,” he said.
God, I thought, it’s too bad they only have ten names to choose from. I looked at the little boy standing beside him. “What’s yours?”
“His name’s Yitzchak,” Moshe answered for him.
I tried to say the name, but I couldn’t get my mouth around it. “You can say Isaac,” the little boy told me.
“No, I want to get it right,” I said, and we went through several practice sessions until I could approximate the sound. There was something they did with the “ch” that I just couldn’t get, however.
“Are you brothers?” I asked them.
“Yes,” Moshe answered curtly, and then immediately turned the questioning back on me. “Are you Jewish?”
I shook my head and exchanged a look with Yitzchak. “Then why are you wearing a yarmulke?”
“I’m pretending to be Jewish,” I said, and when I looked at Yitzchak he smiled shyly at my quoting him.
Moshe was not to be so easily appeased. “Why?”
“Well, I’m writing a story about the Jews and I wanted to know what it feels like.”
“So, how long are you going to be Jewish?”
“Well, I hope I’m done by September,” I said. “That’s when my first story is getting published. It’s about the Jews, too.” Moshe thought about this for a moment, and then before he could ask me anything else, I asked him how old he was.
“Eleven,” he said brusquely, obviously much less enthusiastic about answering questions than asking them. “All right, we have to go now. Bye.”
He took off down the street, with his little brother trailing behind. Moshe was slim and had straight brown hair with just the slightest hint of red in it. There was a gap between his teeth, and he didn’t seem anything like a blood relation to his dreamy-eyed little brother. I wondered if they had a different father or mother.
________________
As the spring progressed and the days got longer, I found myself engaged in longer and longer conversations with Moshe and Yitzchak. Moshe would interrogate me about my life and motivations but would only reluctantly reciprocate with bits of biographical information. I did learn that there were seven kids in their family and that Moshe was the oldest. And while we spoke, little Yitzchak would sit still and watch us, some interior monologue dreamily but astutely taking place behind his eyes.
One day Avraham told me that Moshe and Yitzchak didn’t have a father. When I asked them about this, they said he was in Israel, but it remained unclear to me if it was because he was working there or because their parents were separated.
Between the end of school and seven-thirty at night they didn’t have anywhere to go or anything to do, and so they would come and see me and we would talk and it was very pleasant. Unlike Dovid and Yossi next door, and Avraham and Yaakov, whose parents I occasionally saw in passing, I began to perceive Moshe and Yitzchak as lonely children starved for affection, with a mother whose attention must be all taken up with their younger siblings and without a father altogether. I found myself feeling strangely paternalistic toward them and, instead of being a bit put out when they came around, I offered my undivided attention.
One afternoon some of the boys and I were sitting around and talking in front of my apartment when Moshe asked me how old I was.
“How old do you think?”
They started calculating. I nodded to Avraham, since he was the oldest. “How old do you think I am?”
“Twenty. Twenty-five.”
“Moshe?”
“Thirty-three.”
“Yitzchak?”
“Forty-two.”
“Yaakov?”
“Thirty-seven.”
“Forty,” I told them, and pointed to Yitzchak. “He wins.” Avraham was really shocked. He thought I was much younger than I was. I don’t know how much the differing ages meant to the others, but it was interesting that Yitzchak, who I assumed to be the youngest among them, had come closest to getting mine right.
“Why don’t you become Jewish?” Moshe suddenly suggested.
I shrugged my shoulders. “I don’t believe in God.”
Yaakov was amazed. “How can you not believe in God?”
I shrugged my shoulders again.
“Do your parents believe in God?” Avraham asked.
I nodded. “And my sisters. One of them turned into a Mormon and the other one became a born-again Christian.”
“Do you have any brothers?” Yitzchak asked.
I shook my head. “I wish I did, though. I envy you guys having each other.”
The boys sat there quietly for a moment, this desire of mine for their life just as it was embarrassing them a little, and yet filling them with a strange kind of awe, that their relationships with each other were perceived by me to be something special. “You have your sisters,” Avraham said.
I shook my head. “It’s not the same thing. My younger sister was born when I was ten, and I knew my parents would never have another baby, and I wanted a little brother so bad, and when it was a girl I hated her. I never forgave her for that.”
“It wasn’t her fault,” Avraham said.
“I know, but whenever I saw her I just saw the little brother I’ll never have.”
“Do you see her very often?” Avraham asked.
I shook my head. “I haven’t talked to anyone in my family in about five years.”
“Why not?” Yaakov asked.
“Because they believe in God.”
Yaakov was incredulous, and hit his chest with his hand. “We believe in God and you talk to us!”
“But you’re not my family,” I told him.
The boys were silent a moment as they tried to make sense of this.
“Well, actually my mother is dead. She died a couple of years ago, but I hadn’t spoken to her in about five years. The last time I spoke to my parents I forgave them for the way they raised me, but I told them I could never forgive them for having had me in the first place.”
Avraham was incredulous. “But if they didn’t have you, you wouldn’t be here!”
I looked at Avraham directly. “Exactly.”
Yaakov couldn’t comprehend what I’d said. “You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t born!”
“I know. And then I wouldn’t have to pay rent, or go to work, or go to the bathroom ...”
“You couldn’t read, then,” Moshe said, tempting me with what he knew I loved.
“That’s okay. I’d sacrifice ge
tting to read if I didn’t have to be alive.”
“Why don’t you just kill yourself?” Avraham asked.
“I’m curious,” I said. “You know, that’s what the people who survived the concentration camps said, the ones who survived when they felt there was no reason to go on living—they said they were curious to see what was going to happen.”
We sat quietly for a long moment, contemplating this meaning of life. I decided to pontificate.
“Everything that’s wrong with the world today is because there are too many people. We’re destroying this planet and it’s all because there are just too many people. I feel sorry for you boys. I’m forty years old and I’ve had a pretty good life and I don’t think it matters very much if I die or not, but I think you’re going to see some really horrible things in your lives and I’m sorry for that. And every horrible thing you experience is going to be because there are too many people.”
Yitzchak spoke up. “But the Torah says ‘Be fruitful and multiply.’ ”
I looked at Yitzchak with his lovely dreamy eyes and their deep contemplative intelligence, and my heart went out to him.
“I know it does.”
16 / the first day of shavuot
The conversations I had with the boys after school invariably ended up about God and Scripture. I had the Tanakh (the Old Testament), and I assumed the next important book to read was the Talmud, but the boys said before I read the entire Talmud, I needed to read just the Mishnah.
I had received my state tax refund, paid my rent and my union dues, and had sixty dollars left over, so I went to the Bodhi Tree, a local religious bookshop, and bought the Mishnah, translated by Jacob Neusner, for $37.45. I probably shouldn’t have spent that much money on a book, but I really did want it, and I especially wanted it so I could show the boys I’d bought it.
I set myself up outside, in front of my apartment, with my chair, my binoculars, and a cup of coffee. I’d just started reading the introduction to the Mishnah when a service let out across the street. A few minutes later I noticed Moshe and Yitzchak playing together in the deserted compound.
They didn’t seem to notice me at first, but after a while Moshe left the playground and crossed the street to me. Yitzchak didn’t come with him as usual but remained behind, wandering around among the various jungle gyms by himself. I asked Moshe how it was going and he said okay. I showed him my Mishnah. He wasn’t impressed and I was a little disappointed.
I asked him if today was something special, since everybody was all dressed up like it was the Sabbath. He said that this was the day when the Jews celebrated Moses giving them the Commandments on Mount Sinai.
Moshe suddenly changed the subject. “When did you get married?”
“I’m not married. Who told you that?”
“I know. I mean, why don’t you want to get married?”
“I don’t like women, and I don’t want to have children. I think having children is awful, it’s sadistic—”
“I know, I’ve heard this before,” he said. “But I’ve never met anyone, not in my whole life, that didn’t want to be alive.”
“I didn’t say that. I said I wish I hadn’t been born; it’s a different thing.”
“Other people—I don’t agree with that.”
“I know you don’t.”
We continued talking and I asked him if he was going to the parade today, to “welcome home” the troops from the Persian Gulf. He didn’t know about it. I told him they were going to have old airplanes fly in the parade, including some from World War II.
“You know,” he said, “there are some people who say that World War II didn’t happen.”
“Those are stupid people,” I told him; “they’re not worth paying attention to. You can go up the street to the bookshop on La Brea and probably get a hundred books about World War II. I’ve got one whole bookshelf on World War II alone.”
“You do? With pictures? Show me.”
I went into the house and brought out two picture books, Steichen at War and The Auschwitz Album. I started with the Steichen book, photographs of the war in the Pacific. I showed him my favorite pictures, the ones under the heading “Rest and Recreation.” The first picture in that section is of a bunch of guys sitting on the deck of a carrier talking, reading, playing games, and sleeping.
“That’s one of my favorites,” I told him.
“Why?”
“Because I like to see them just sitting around and reading,” I told him, and turned to the picture two pages later of four guys lying on deck with the ocean behind them: they are all leaning against one another, three of the men looking at a letter one of them is holding, while the fourth guy reads a book. “I love this picture.”
Moshe was interested in my value judgments, and as I turned the pages, occasionally commenting on one picture or another, I showed him a photograph of Gerald Ford playing basketball and paused over another of two guys sitting next to each other, one of them closely examining the other’s tattoos.
Then I opened The Auschwitz Album, a collection of photographs found after the war, the only pictures of Auschwitz while it was in operation, apparently taken with the permission of the SS, and showing the arrival of the Hungarian Jews in June 1944. We started at the beginning and went through every page. The first two pictures in the book were of old men with beards; one of them, the only “studio” shot in the book, was of two old men without any head covering. Moshe was really struck by these pictures, instantly recognizing these men as worthy of veneration and respect, and when I was about to continue turning the pages, he stopped me for a moment in order to look at them longer.
The next photograph is of the trains just before the unloading, and the only people in the picture are soldiers.
“Nazis!” Moshe exclaimed. I glanced at him and he explained, “I could tell by the uniforms.”
We went through the rest of the book, and I added explanations where I remembered some particular detail. I pointed out Stefan Baretski, a notorious guard at Auschwitz (and minor character in my concentration camp story), and compared the pictures of one man who was photographed just after his arrival and then later in prison garments after his head had been shaved. I showed him which buildings were the crematoria and explained that the gas chambers were underground, while the ovens were on the main floor right behind the windows. In the final section, called “Birkenau,” I pointed out one picture in particular: among a group of people in the little birch grove there is a woman who is reaching a hand across her breast in a kind of exhausted discomfort, while a little boy just in front of her is scratching himself, a painful distress in his features. I told Moshe I thought it was the saddest picture in the book.
“Why didn’t the Jews fight back?” he asked.
“Because they didn’t know what was going to happen,” I told him. “They couldn’t believe what would happen, and they didn’t want to believe it. They’d just been in trains without food or water and they were hungry and thirsty. Their lives had been destroyed and they were depressed. They didn’t know this was the last time they would ever have a chance of fighting back.”
While we were talking we were joined by Dovid from next door, and Yossi, and then Avraham from in back. They took turns looking at the pictures in the books and we talked about them, and finally even Yitzchak joined us from across the street, ignoring the books and picking up my binoculars to look at the world from that point of view.
In the Steichen book I showed them what I think is an amazing photograph: a Japanese prisoner of war is bathing himself on the deck of the USS New Jersey before the watching eyes of hundreds of men. When Avraham first saw the picture he was appalled and said they were evil, thinking the naked prisoner a Jew and the soldiers Nazis. When I explained the soldiers were Americans and the naked man a Japanese, he reversed his decision and said the soldiers were good and the prisoner was bad.
Apparently Moshe felt that our previous conversation had not been resolved properly, a
nd while I was still talking to Avraham, he again asked me why I didn’t want to be alive.
“I didn’t say I didn’t want to be alive,” and I explained again, “I said I just wish I hadn’t been born. And that doesn’t mean I want to kill myself.”
This frustrated Moshe; he couldn’t see the distinction I was making.
“The Greeks used to say it: the best thing is never to have been born,” and then I added, “It’s in the Bible.”
“We’re not interested in that,” Moshe said, emphatically discounting what he perceived as Christian lies.
I amended my assertion. “It’s in the Tanakh.”
“No it’s not,” he said; no such thing could be in the Tanakh. Avraham agreed, and said the Torah would never say that to be born was bad.
Okay, I thought. Where was it? Where had I just come across it? Where was it written down?
How could I find it?
“Born.”
My concordance!
I ran in the house and got my Cruden’s Complete Concordance, turned to “born,” and found some references in the New Testament. But that didn’t do me any good, not with these kids. I went through the Old Testament listings again, more carefully, and came across this under Jeremiah: “cursed be day wherein I was b. 20:14.” I turned to the passage in my Tanakh: “Accursed be the day/That I was born! /Let not the day be blessed/When my mother bore me!”
I presented my evidence to the jury. Moshe, Avraham, and Dovid were shocked. Something was wrong. This couldn’t be the real Tanakh. It wasn’t right. Then they decided to check the real Scriptures, and in a flash the three boys were off—running across the street to the yeshiva, climbing over the fence, and racing inside.
Yossi returned to his yard to play with his sisters, but Yitzchak stayed, sitting quietly on the low wall across from me, the binoculars in his lap. I opened my book to read, but when I looked up I caught him staring at me with that dreamy look on his face.
“How old are you?” I asked him.
“Nine,” he said.
The Boys Across the Street Page 11