THE GHETTO
MATTHUE ROTH
For the longest time, Reb Chaim never got sick. When people asked him how, he said he did it so that he could serve G-d with all his faculties, that there was nothing worse than a half-done job. ‘No, really,’ they’d say, ‘what’s your secret?’ There were a thousand things it could have been. He woke every day between four and six, always an hour before sunrise. He never ate in restaurants, and he cooked all his own food – his wife used to, but Henya got hit with arthritis when she turned 60, and he liked cooking better than she did, anyway. ‘No secret,’ he would say. ‘I just got a good deal with G-d. Hashem takes care of me, and I take care of Hashem.’
Then one day, Reb Chaim’s rabbi, Rabbi Danzig, suggested to him that maybe he should reconsider. ‘After all,’ he said, ‘you have six grandchildren living in your home, and two dozen others stop by every day to visit. Who are you to deprive them of the commandment to visit the sick?’
Reb Chaim had never looked at it that way before. Still, something bothered him about the equation. ‘They eat my food,’ he protested. ‘If I am sick, and I cannot cook, nobody will be able to make a blessing on my food. How many commandments will that deny the world?’
‘Pride!’ Rabbi Danzig shrilled at him. ‘Excessive boastfulness! You think it’s your cooking that keeps the world in motion? See what happens if you don’t for a week make your miso vegetable soup. Commandments will still be obeyed. The sun will still rise in the morning.’
Rabbi Danzig’s voice grew from shrilling to growling to a roaring inferno. Of all his students, of all the Jews in Crown Heights, Reb Chaim was one of the only ever to incur his full wrath. He held nothing back. In a way, it was a compliment. Embarrassing someone, in Torah law, was the equivalent of killing him or her. Over years, over decades, Rabbi Danzig and Reb Chaim had pushed each other to their respective limits, reduced each other to pure, holy nothingness, discovered new limits. So when Rabbi Danzig flew in Reb Chaim’s face and insulted him, it was, in a way, a compliment.
Reb Chaim was thoughtful. ‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘It’s a good proposition.’
So the next week he fell sick. Nothing drastic, just a runny nose and some sporadic coughing. But because of his age, they didn’t want it to grow into something bigger, so Chana, his oldest great-niece, made him a bed on the living-room sofa, and kept a pot of fresh green tea by him so he could receive guests, but he still had his own semi-private bedroom to retreat to when he needed.
People came from all over Crown Heights, his students and friends, his relatives and in-laws, his former boarders, his future boarders. The house was packed; it was like a party. The walls swelled and stretched like the Leviathan-skin walls of the Great Sukkah, which the Talmud teaches will hold all the righteous during the destruction at the End of the World. They brought in a Torah and held morning prayers; they brought in pillows for Reb Chaim and prayed the evening service late at night, almost after midnight, when the gangs of cousins had finally trickled out from the place.
And yes, it was strange that Reb Chaim had a rabbi. Reb Chaim was, after all, the doyen of 770, the largest synagogue in Crown Heights, the regular reader of the Torah and the most prominent storyteller at the gatherings that followed services. He was as close to a de facto rabbi as that house of anarchy would ever get. But the Torah teaches: find yourself a rabbi to guide you and a student you can teach; and even Reb Chaim still had things to learn.
His rabbi, Rabbi Danzig, fulfilled the commandment of visiting Reb Chaim that Thursday morning. He prayed the afternoon prayers with the rest of the visitors, and in the wake of the group’s dispersal, he took a private audience with Reb Chaim. The yeshiva boys around them spoke louder in deference to them, so nobody would appear to be eavesdropping.
‘All right, all right,’ said Rabbi Danzig. ‘You’ve made your point to G-d; you’ve let many people wish you a speedy recovery.’
‘Five hundred forty-three,’ said Reb Chaim, brightly, but without a taste of pride. ‘The cheder brought by the youngest classes today.’
‘But it has got to stop,’ Rabbi Danzig said. ‘We all have our mission in this world, and it is time for you to get back to yours.’
Reb Chaim’s marble-small eyes popped open, and his white tendrils of beard bobbed up and down. ‘I will pray for it,’ he said. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’
By Thursday afternoon he was walking about, and Thursday evening he had recovered almost entirely – and a good thing too, for it was almost Shabbos and they were way behind on cooking. Auntie Sima had started on the cholent, but then her arthritis flared up; Reb Chaim had gently tried to suggest to the boys staying in the spare bedroom that they might prepare the week’s Sabbath dinner. They took it as a practical joke, Reb Chaim’s sense of humour on the path to recovery. That’s what he deserved for being so casual in his everyday speech. When he was a child, learning in the court of the Frierdiker Rebbe, school would let out early on Friday and he would go – both Reb Chaim and the Rebbe, that is – to prepare for the Sabbath. Today, these kids were accustomed to having all the real work done for them, no earthly concerns at all. Perhaps this was a blessing. This way they could study Torah till the very last moments before the sun went down and Sabbath set in.
And so, shortly after nightfall on Thursday night, Reb Chaim swung his feet to the ground for the first time that week. He called to Sima that he would be back shortly. He collected a handful from their stash of canvas grocery bags, and he set off to market.
Going out at night was not his first choice. He liked to be out early, catch the world by surprise. Already he was dreading the fruit bins filled with picked-over citrus and strawberries squashed between boxes. But what choice did he have? This was the hand G-d dealt him.
He also had to buy meat, which he could do in the Jewish area. For produce this late, however, there was only the supermarket, where everything was old and tasted like packing peanuts. It was also twice as expensive – as if anyone had heard of a kosher banana, a kosher butternut squash. What would people have done in Russia? Starved!
It was the kind of night that made you wary. Hot like day, but with a rumble in the air that gave you shivers. A gang of young black children scurried in front of him, brushing up close and knocking him halfway off the sidewalk. Insolent kids! He didn’t hold it against them, but rather their parents, or whoever it was that raised them. In Crown Heights, his Crown Heights, kids were as rude as they came, but they respected their elders. He could ask a five-year-old great-grandson to buy a quart of milk, and the boy would, no questions asked. Not for Shabbos shopping, of course – this was too complicated – and he would never send them to this part of town, but there was an obeisance, an underlying morality, that these kids lacked. There was a sort of fear that normal people had, a holy fear, that nobody had ever taught them.
In the store were more black kids, a lot of them. Not buying anything, merely standing around. In the halogen glow it felt like midday. A lone fan blew uselessly, streaking a single trickle of air across the store. On the front door he had read a sign, hand-printed and misspelled, ‘ON SCHOL OURS ONLY 2 CHILRUN IN SIDE AT 1 TIME’. What, he thought, about at eleven in the evening? How come the shopkeeper wasn’t enforcing the rules he himself had laid out? He looked and learned why. The clerk was himself merely a teen, the minutest drizzle of facial hair only starting to blossom on his chin, no bigger than Reb Chaim’s cheder nephews. The poor boy: forced to work this graveyard shift, kept up half the night.
That was the problem of coming here – outside the Jewish area, to a place that had no rules. They didn’t have tradition to guide them, nor did American law hold any authority. Growing up without any rules of their own, how would they ever learn to respect anyone else’s?
He brushed past the children to the tomatoes. They lay in a loose pyramid, stacked inside an upturned barrel, one of the shop’s few concessions to fashionable design. It actually looked nice. He sorted through the offerings and found a dozen
or so that weren’t too hard or bruised. Then he turned to the lemons. The blessing of these long hot days was the multitude of ways to relieve oneself of the heat: turning on the air conditioning for an hour or drinking some cold lemonade. He would make a batch of lemonade for Shabbos, famously tart, and pour it into a cooler in the fridge. By Shabbos afternoon it would be wonderfully cool.
The lemons were a perfect ethereal yellow, like the golden cherubs in the Temple, like the sun itself. His thumb ran along the turf of skin, massaging the pores, testing its hardness. Behind the fruit’s small pupik, he sensed another set of circles. He looked up into a pair of eyes, a child’s: bright, supernaturally big, wild, dancing with intelligence.
‘You got a problem?’ the girl said when Reb Chaim noticed her.
‘No problem,’ said Reb Chaim. ‘I am only searching for lemons.’
Instead of replying to him directly, the girl turned back over her shoulder, yelled to her flock of playmates. ‘This cheap crazy Jew!’ she said. ‘He’s hunting for the biggest lemons so he don’t have to pay as much!’
His face burned. He didn’t know whether to explain that, no matter what the size, harder lemons yielded more juice; or that lemons in this store were priced by weight, not quantity, and it didn’t matter if he picked out the biggest lemon in the barrel, he’d still be charged more for it than a smaller lemon, and he was not in fact being a cheap Jew.
It was too late, though; her friends had assembled, all of them. They surrounded him, laughing like monkeys, one of them with a can of black beans in her hand, imitating his every movement with the lemon. She scrutinised the label. She weighed two cans of beans in her hand, one against the other. Others were laughing. One boy was doubled over. Another was bouncing up and down, shrieking out, ‘He should shoplift them things in his beeerd!’ and the rest of them howling in agreement.
A jolt of pain rocked his stomach. It embarrassed him that anyone would think these things, about him or any other Jew. He turned around. He tried to run away, but they were everywhere. He did a full-circle turn. Face-to-face with his original antagonist, he said: ‘I would never! Stealing is against the Ten Commandments.’ He thought that would help, drawing a bridge between their two religions.
Instead of helping, though, it only fed their spirits. They threw their heads back. Their mouths were wide, white, full of teeth. They rocked with laughter, laughter like an earthquake. ‘You,’ he growled. ‘You paupers.’
Now, in Judaism, being poor is no great tragedy. Certainly it’s better to be comfortable, or even rich – there’s no commandment against indulging in the permitted luxuries of this world, such as fine food or a trip to Hawaii – but poverty is not a condition that should be disparaged. You can try to make money or you can go with the flow, but ultimately pay and poverty are both up to G-d.
Reb Chaim knew this, and he knew it better than most. At various points in his life, he’d been a successful businessman, investing in a Passover matzo factory that, due to a series of bizarre episodes one year, became unexpectedly the only operation in town whose supplies were unspoiled by a series of freak water leaks. And he’d been basically a pauper himself, after the factory went broke and Reb Chaim was unable to find another job. He was too old to attend a kollel, and too learned in Talmud already. Not to say that he couldn’t learn more – you can always learn more – but Reb Chaim was beyond that point in his life. He was too respected to do anything but be a rabbi, but he was too respected to be given anything but the highest rabbinical posts, and they were all filled.
Embarrassing someone was like killing them. Reb Chaim had been alive for 80 years, in Crown Heights for 69 of them – enough time to have been killed several times over – and in Russia before that. Most of his life in Russia, he couldn’t remember. But he remembered this. His mother had taken him to the grocery store, unable to hold his hand because she feared dropping her food tickets, and so both her palms were stuffed tight with them. He had held onto the bottom hem of her coat. They stood waiting for hours, long enough for his skin to grow cold and then hot and then numb, a puffy and blustery shade of red. And then men came along. Younger than his mother, older than him. They shouted at them. They started pushing his mother. When little Reb Chaim wouldn’t let go, they started on him. Calling him names. Saying things to him. He didn’t understand what they were saying, or what these things meant, but he knew he was meant to be hurt.
He cried. The other people in line looked away from the pair, willing them to not exist. His mother picked him up, though he was too old to be carried, and she ran, all the way home, twelve long blocks. Maybe that was the first day he died. Or maybe it was only the first time he remembered. And now he had done the same thing. Half a world away, in another grocery store, he had committed murder.
Then he was falling. He was floating. He was a million miles away. He saw all the esoteric reasons for the irrational commandments they obeyed, listed like graffiti on a wall in front of him. He saw the winter constellations and the summer constellations at the same time, both sides of the sky like a giant sphere observed from the inside.
Now in front of him were Moses, David, the Baal Shem Tov – one a charlatan with a birth defect, born into a princehood he did not earn; one an abused shepherd, forced to run from his murderous brothers; one a teacher to the ignorant masses, who said that singing and dancing was more powerful than prayer, and was attacked by the leaders of the Jewish people, who made their money charging people for prayer. Their faces and bodies danced in the flames. They, too, were dying horrible deaths.
He zoomed back and he saw the whole of Earth, the whole history of humanity. Nations burning. People killing people. And behind it all, so faint that Reb Chaim could barely make them out at all, were the children from the store, the ones he’d so grievously wronged.
He twisted his head. He could barely move – it was like twisting through a block of Silly Putty. From the absolute corner of his eye, he could see the cashier, that boy, floating in the air, hovering above his register, his mouth wide open like he was screaming, no sound at all. Slowly but constantly, he was floating over the counter. Assembled around him in a loose circle were half a dozen tall, thin men. They all wore neat little grey suits. They were all bald.
They had big, prominent buggy eyes that seemed to eat up the whole room, yet saw nothing at all. It wasn’t like they couldn’t spot Reb Chaim and the children – it was more like, he felt, they just didn’t care. Three or four of the men began to guide the cashier along, nudging him in the air like a giant balloon. One of the others tramped ahead. Two more came in their direction, one towards the children, one towards Reb Chaim. The man held up a small grey sphere. It was coated in the same colour as their uniforms. Already Reb Chaim could feel his memories peeling off like paper, flitting away on the night wind. The sickness that he’d let enter his body. His childhood, first in Vilnius, then the boat, then Brooklyn. His home and synagogue address. The first dinner he’d ever cooked his wife. The creature in front of him. The horrible embarrassment of the children and their laughter.
He stopped.
When you get older, your body betrays you. Certain things that used to work perfectly don’t work any more. Your memories, which have always been stored in your brain like a well-ordered library are suddenly out of order, dust covers rearranged, pages swapped around, pages ripped out.
But there are certain things, other things, that you discover how to do, like muscles you’ve just used for the first time. You gain mastery over certain things – the chemicals, in your stomach and over your eyes, that do cleaning and digestion; how the wind smells before spring rain rushes in; the feeling of a lunatic moon; the involuntary spasms and knee-jerk reactions that your body was born with, that you, after 80 or so years, now can override. That was how Reb Chaim learned to make himself sick.
And that was how he grabbed onto his memories now: forced them back into his brain, yanked them with the utter force of his own belief, not because of any particula
r desire or melancholy but because he needed the embarrassment of being laughed at. It was a sign from G-d, a sign that he wasn’t perfect yet. He still had things to work on. No one in Crown Heights – the Jewish Crown Heights, the proper Crown Heights – would ever dare laugh at Reb Chaim. And if he forgot what it was like, if he let the memory expire and float away, then he would have nothing. It would be like he’d never gotten that gift from G-d.
And he couldn’t only keep his own memory of it, either. The children had to remember – of that, he was sure. Once the memories rushed back into his head, the creature stumbling toward him reeled back as if slapped, and the other creature, the one working on the children, was similarly shaken.
Reb Chaim used the last of his physical strength to hurl himself at the second creature. The first one was doing a good enough job on his own, shuddering wildly, collapsing against the ice-cream freezer. Both toppled over, and the memory device fell from the creature’s hand.
The children shook themselves awake. They stared at each other, into one another’s faces, as if relearning forgotten alphabets. Some of them walked over to the fallen creatures, prodded their unmoving bodies, retreating when they felt the soapy consistency of their skin. Then one of the kids looked at Reb Chaim and gave him a squinted-up face, as if trying to remember where she recognized his silvery mane.
Her attention was diverted by a scream from the door.
‘They got Jesse!’ she cried. ‘They floatin’ him away in the air!’
That was all the kids needed. They shook themselves into action, dashed through the door, screaming and fiery, in a stampeding pursuit of the creatures and their friend.
Reb Chaim walked to the door and leaned against its mezuzah-less frame. The metal was smooth, but he missed the feel of hard plastic jutting into his back – it had been ages since he’d stood in a doorway with no mezuzah. Out on the street, people were frozen in mid-walk, mid-conversation, mid-fight. The world was peaceful and still. Only the children from the store, the children who’d laughed at him (the children he saved, the thought sprung up in his mind, and was immediately banished) were in motion. They had found the grey men, and were presently engaged in jumping on them, beating them, tearing the creatures away from their friend, the boy at the cashier’s booth. Perhaps Reb Chaim should tell them to go lightly. That the One Above punishes evildoers and those who deserve it; that it was not in our province to mete out justice without a fair trial.
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