One Hundred Philistine Foreskins

by Tova Reich

  But the greater portion by far of her learning Tema acquired on her own, through personal diligence and will, by applying herself and cracking the codes, her inner being drawn naturally to the material. Nevertheless, to create the illusion of normalcy, every morning her mother put on her weekday wig and makeup, and, holding Tema’s hand, they walked together the several blocks to the kindergarten operated by Mrs. Moskowitz in the dark basement of her home near Fiftieth Street under the elevated tracks, which set the entire building quaking and shuddering whenever a train rumbled by overhead or jolted to a stop. There the little girls were taught the letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the vowels, some blessings and basic prayers for specific occasions, upon waking up and going to sleep, for example, or setting out on a journey or finishing your business in the bathroom, and so forth, a few holiday songs along with a warning not to sing them out loud when boys or men are within earshot, as well as instruction on how to help their mothers in preparing the special dishes and cleaning the house for Sabbaths and festivals. They were also given guidance in personal hygiene, such as the importance of wiping one’s nose in a ladylike fashion with the handkerchief they wore fastened to the bodice of their dresses with a safety pin.

  At story time, they would sit on an old piece of carpet on the floor in a circle flowing from Mrs. Moskowitz in a wooden folding chair holding a bundle that contained her newest baby with her toddlers at her feet as she read inspirational bible tales and legends to them in Yiddish from the Tzena Urena, her eyes gleaming with emotion as she recounted Mother Rebekah’s exemplary behavior in offering water from the well not only to quench the thirst of the weary traveler Eliezer just arrived at Padan-Aram where he had been sent by his master Abraham to find a suitable wife for his son Isaac, but also to draw bucketful after bucketful of water for all of his camels as well. “And he had plenty of camels, girls, Avraham Avinu was a very rich man. Do you girls have any idea how much water each and every camel needs and how long it takes for them to drink because they have to store so much up for marching across the whole desert? Girls, I want you to remember how Rivka Imeinu right away ran to feed the camels also even without being asked if you want to find for yourselves a good husband some day.”

  At play time, they molded hallahs from brown clay giggling behind their hands at the resemblance between their works of art and little turds, they drew holiday pictures and fashioned decorations from construction paper and paste, they dressed up as brides in white sheets, enacting the high point of their future wedding day, after which the rest of their lives would funnel down as expected.

  More and more often, Tema held back when it was time to set out for school. For a full week she cried the entire way as they walked there and had to be dragged down the cement steps, weeds sprouting from the cracks, to Mrs. Moskowitz’s cellar door where she clung to her mother like a sinking person clawing for solid ground. Then one morning she simply sat down full stop on the floor in the foyer with her arms crossed over her chest, shook her head in a slow flinty rhythm from side to side, her lips clamped tight, and refused absolutely to step out the door and leave home.

  “What do you mean she won’t go?” Reb Berel Bavli hissed to his wife in their bedroom that night. “Who does she think she is—her majesty the queen or some other fancy lady? Hutz-klutz, Miss Maggie Putz! In this department, she’s your daughter, one hundred percent. Since when do you ask a kid if they want or if they don’t want? Do I ask a chicken what it wants? You just pick her up and take her there, even if she’s kicking and screaming bloody murder the whole way. Don’t worry, she’ll get used to it, I give you my word. Human beings can get used to anything, just like animals.”

  But her mother took her in another direction. On the morning that Rosalie Bavli did not paint her face or put on her everyday wig but instead wrapped her head in a dark scarf drawn forward with the ends draped over her shoulders and concealed her eyes behind sunglasses, Tema accepted the hand extended down to her and allowed herself to be led out of the house. The two of them walked together in silence until they came to a hardware store directly across the street from the synagogue of the Oscwiecim Rebbe. They flattened themselves against the shadowy depths of the windowed alcove that led to the store’s entrance showcasing different color variations of linoleum samples in a confetti pattern, timers for Sabbath lights, pressure cookers, and so on, their eyes fixed on the Oscwiecim shtiebel opposite above which the Rebbe and his family lived.

  When they spotted the rebbetzin coming out pushing her shopping cart and making her way up the street and around the corner, Tema’s mother signaled by squeezing her daughter’s hand that she was already holding tensely. Together they crossed the street and briskly walked down the alley along the side of the Oscwiecim shtiebel, entered through a door in the middle, and climbed the staircase that led directly into the Rebbe’s dining room where he sat enthroned in his usual place to receive his Hasidim at the head of the great mahogany table covered with an embossed burgundy-colored velvet cloth with the heavy volumes spread open before him. Tema was not quite seven at the time, her hair in its long braids had never been cut, her existence on this earth had been a loan from God in answer to her mother’s prayers, and now the loan was being repaid.

  Her mother clicked open her black leather purse with the gold clasp, releasing a familiar, embarrassingly private puff of sour aroma, and drew out a fat sealed envelope that she handed to Kaddish stationed at his usual post a few paces behind his father. “Mazel tov,” Rosalie Bavli murmured. Kaddish tore open the envelope, counted the cash stuffed inside by flipping through the bills without taking them out, gave a receipt in the form of an acknowledgment nod, then slipped the whole package somewhere inside his black jacquard satin kaftan. He had turned eighteen a few weeks earlier and his marriage to the sixteen-year-old daughter of the Kalashnikover Rebbe had just been celebrated with candlelit processions and rapturous dancing in the closed-off streets of Boro Park and a caravan of ambulances with engines running standing ready to speed away revelers overcome by the press of the crowd and palpitations of the heart brought on by exultation at the union of two such illustrious Hasidic dynasties. Tema observed closely how her mother, still standing, leaned in slightly toward the Rebbe, and with commendable modesty and deference, in the softest of voices, practically a whisper, uttered such words as A special child, A gift from God, You know the situation, You were there when I prayed for her, all of which the Rebbe acknowledged by nodding his head sagely, bunching his beard and caressing it in contemplative downward strokes. Then her mother pushed forward with her request—that Tema be allowed to study with the boys, Talmud, Mishna, Gemara, Halakha, Law, Philosophy, Kabbala, Midrash, Rabbinics, the works, she was a special case, a way must be found, perhaps a partition could be erected in the study hall, maybe a thick curtain hung up in the beis medrash behind which the girl would be invisible, but from where she could sit and take it all in.

  “Come here, child,” the Rebbe beckoned to Tema. A brief silence followed after she approached while he rummaged inside his kaftan and came up with a hard red candy wrapped in cellophane flecked with lint and shreds of snuff. “This is for you, child.” He held out the sweet. “But before you eat you must say a brakha. So tell me, daughter, which blessing would you say?”

  Tema answered at once that she would say a Shehakol.

  “But my Kaddish here”—and the Rebbe jerked his head in the vicinity of the son behind him—“he tells me you should say a Borei Pri Ha’etz, because it is a cherry candy, the fruit of a tree.”

  Tema shook her head. No, a Shehakol. The cherry candy is very far away from the cherry tree. Maybe it was never even near a cherry tree. Maybe it is only cherry-flavored. A Shehakol—the all-purpose brakha.

  “Gut gezugt. Well said. In this matter, I must admit I hold with the female.” The Rebbe cast an apologetic glance over his shoulder at his son. “But if you happen to have already said Borei Pri Ha’etz, that is also good—and you can go ahead and eat gezunt ahe
it. Better just to eat in such a case than to say another brakha, so you would not be taking God’s name in vain.”

  The Rebbe smoothed his tea-stained mustache with the pad of his forefinger and gazed at Tema through lowered lids dripping with skin tags like stalactites. “So tell me, child, the Hebrew word for name is shem—am I right?” She indicated her agreement. “Is it masculine or feminine?” “Masculine,” Temima replied. “Even though the plural is shemot, which is the feminine form?” “Masculine,” she repeated unwavering. “Gut gezugt,” the Rebbe said again, and bobbed his approval. “But why do you think this masculine word has such a feminine sound in the plural?”

  At that point in her life, Tema did not yet possess the arsenal of terms and vocabulary to set out her case, so as best she could she responded that the simple answer was there was no reason; that’s just the way language and all things were, there were exceptions. But then she went on to offer a kind of commentary. Maybe because since we say HaShem, The Name, as a substitute for God’s real name, which we’re not allowed to say, maybe the substitute also becomes holy—so how can it be anything but masculine?

  The Rebbe’s eyes crinkled and, to check the laugh he felt heaving up in a surge of subversive appreciation, he pinched his nostrils between two fingers and ejected a loud snort into the napkin upon which the two lumps of sugar had rested for his glass of tea with the half-moon of lemon floating inside. “Gut gezugt—very clever. Your voice is the voice of Jacob. You know how to fool and flatter the old man for the sake of the blessing. The blessing is learning.”

  After that, ignoring her completely as if she had dissolved and lost all substance and faded into the wall, he addressed himself exclusively to the mother. The girl was to be brought early the next morning to the side of the building where his Kaddish would await them. His Kaddish would then direct her into a small room with an entrance in the backyard and a shared wall with the study hall on the inside. Although this room had once been a toilet—it had in fact been an old wooden outhouse to which pipes had been extended when it was annexed to the building—it had not been used for this purpose for many years, the plumbing had long ago been disconnected, and therefore the Rebbe ruled that it was permissible for her to sit in there and listen through the cracks in the wall to words of Torah coming from the adjacent study hall and even to consult in that once-polluted space whatever holy books his Kaddish could collect and set out for her in advance. Since it was wintertime, she should be dressed in a heavy coat and gloves and hat as there was no heat in that room; there was also no electricity, the only light she would receive especially as the short days darkened was the light of Torah filtering through the crannies from the study hall.

  “We shall see if her desire to learn is as strong as Hillel’s who was found frozen under the snow on the roof of the yeshiva of Shemaya and Avtalyon listening with such concentration to the lecture when he didn’t have enough money to pay the fee and enter through the door,” the Oscwiecim Rebbe said to Tema’s mother, as if he had just finished proposing to a collaborator a scientific experiment to be performed on a monkey in a laboratory cage.

  The aspiring sage Hillel, later renowned for his tolerance and leniency, was rewarded for his devotion to learning with a scholarship, free admission to the yeshiva. But when Tema was smoked out after five months of faithful attendance beginning in the icy days of February and ending in the scorching June heat (in the midst of which, on the seventh of Adar, also the birthday of Moses Our Teacher, she turned seven years old), she was banished from the study hall forever. During those five months she sat six days a week on a plank laid across the blackened cracked toilet bowl in the tiny cubicle filmy with cobwebs, steeped in the acrid smell of ancient urine, and followed along in the tattered books that had been provided for her—Talmud, Mishna and Gemara. An egg that is laid on a festival, is it permissible? The house of Shammai says, Yes, you may eat it on that day. The house of Hillel says, No.

  She strained to peer through the chinks to identify her classmates. Boys sat in pairs at each table, study mates, an older more advanced boy coupled with a younger one, none yet a bar mitzvah judging from their prayer sessions, the youngest perhaps eight. Their teacher, a refugee from Vilna known to have once been a prodigy at the Slabodka yeshiva, slight with a scraggly gray beard and pale bulging eyes and an uncontrollable reflex that never ceased to amuse the boys of flinching like a startled rabbit whenever a car honked or backfired outside in the street, paced up and down the aisles snapping the ruler in his right hand against the palm of his left, now and then bringing it down upon the back of one of the boys caught raising his eyes from the page. The house of Shammai says, A man may divorce his wife only if he has found her to be unchaste. The house of Hillel says he may divorce her if she spoils his dish.

  Soon it was no longer necessary to peer through the cracks. She knew all the characters, she could distinguish their tones, she could absorb just by listening. A heavenly voice was heard: The house of Shammai and the house of Hillel are each holy, but the law is in accordance with Hillel. When the school day ended, or if physical urgency forced her to leave early, her mother was awaiting her in front of the hardware store and signaled when it was safe to cross the street. There was never a time during those five months when her mother was not at her station waiting for her; her mother was always faithfully there then with the same certainty as she was not there later on. Anyone who might have noticed the girl coming or going dismissed her as a daughter of the house attending to a domestic chore in a broom closet.

  If the spirit moved him the teacher would raise his voice and offer a brief lesson or pose a question in Lithuanian-accented Yiddish. When no one came forth with the answer, he would turn to the back of the room with the exaggerated flourish of scholarly disdain for the ignorance of the rabble. “TAIKU?” he would call out, and point with his ruler to a small boy, the only one sitting alone, who would unfailingly provide the correct answer in a soft voice. The boy’s name was Eliyahu, which rendered this the running joke of the study hall, since it was common knowledge that TAIKU was the acronym for letting an unresolved issue rest in peace until the messianic age and the resurrection of the dead, when the prophet Eliyahu the Tishbite would return to explain all outstanding questions and problems. But this study hall was blessed with its own Elijah, still present and accounted for, the smartest boy in the class.

  On an afternoon in May during a pulsing heat wave, as Tema was standing on the toilet peering out of a small window from which she had scraped off some gelid grime, watching the teacher, the former Slabodka genius, reduced to squirting the younger boys with a water gun to cool them off in the yard during recess, her eyes met Eliyahu’s. The next day at recess time he opened the door to her cell and entered. Without a word, he sat down cross-legged on the floor. He was a year or two older than she by her estimation, though he was about her height, small and dark like she was, he could have been her brother, the son her father had been denied. He took out a pocket chess set and lined up the pieces as she sat down on the floor opposite him. Without uttering a single word, he showed her the moves. Thereafter, almost every recess, he came into her place and they played.

  On a blistering day in June, as they sat on the floor of the outhouse with the chessboard between them, Eliyahu moved a pawn, then unbuttoned his white shirt and took it off, revealing his talit katan, his personal fringed garment. Tema moved her piece, shed her blouse and exposed her undershirt. It continued in this way in complete silence, move after move, shoes, socks, stockings, pants, skirt, underwear, until they were sitting cool and naked opposite each other. The game then went on but in reverse, they did not speak but with each move he put on one article of her clothing and she one of his, until checkmate, when she braided his sidelocks and secured them with her rubber bands and stuffed most of her own hair under the great bowl of his black velvet yarmulke with two ringlets dangling down on each side for payess, and then the whistle blew, recess was over, he remained in the outhouse wh
ile she stepped outside and into the study hall with the other boys and took her place in his seat in the back of the room and lowered her head over his Gemara, open to Sanhedrin 111a, and read to herself how God rebuked Moses: I am El-Shaddai Who appeared to your forefathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, yet you alone insist on knowing My true and ineffable Name and you alone question My ways and accuse Me of harming My people.

  “Is it possible that Moses Our Teacher, the greatest of all prophets, sinned through lack of faith in the Almighty, by doubting God?” the teacher raised the question as boys sank their heads lower over their volumes so as not to catch his eye and be called on. “TAIKU?” he finally bellowed, and turned toward Eliyahu as to a colleague, a soul mate, the only one in the room who could understand him.

  Tema raised her eyes to meet his. “Moshe saw terrible things in Egypt, just like you saw in Europe,” she said. The teacher recoiled as if shocked by a bolt from another world. He began to advance toward her with his ruler pointed straight out in front of him like a drawn sword. With its tip he lifted her chin, like an alien specimen dredged from the mud that would befoul you if you touched it with a bare hand. “For your information, I am not at the level of Moshe Rabbenu to question the ways of the Almighty despite all the terrible things I have witnessed, and even more so I have never questioned the Almighty’s abhorrence of a female who puts on herself the things that belong to a man,” he spat out, referring to the prohibition in the book of Deuteronomy. “Beged-ish on a woman is an abomination to God, so it is written,” the teacher went on grimly as Tema sprang from the seat of Eliyahu and lurched out of the study hall, past Kaddish smoking a cigarette on the stoop in front of the synagogue, into the arms of her mother who had spotted her at once in her boy’s apparel and burst across the street from the hardware store and swept her up as she sobbed desperately, caressing and comforting her and warbling over and over again, Don’t cry, Tema, everything will be all right, your father will never find out, nobody will ever know.