One American Dream

by Bernard Beck

  The third event began that night, as soon as my parents left. Harry, who had been impatiently waiting in the coffee shop across the street for most of the afternoon, carried his two big suitcases to the building and rang the bell. I nearly flew down the three flights to let him in. Together we struggled to get Harry’s heavy suitcases up the three flights. At the top, just outside the door, Harry put his suitcases down and lifted me in his arms and carried me across the threshold. He kissed me while I was still in his arms, and then gently put me down, back on my feet.

  We stood together surveying the small apartment. It looked, we quickly agreed, like my parents’ house in Brooklyn.

  “This is awful,” I said, laughing. “We’ve got to get those shmatas off the windows and let some light in.”

  Together we removed the drapes that my mother had hung, and we moved the furniture so that it was in a conversational grouping rather than the decorative way my mother had set it, and we removed the decorative shawls that my mother had placed on the back of the chairs to hide where the fabric was worn. Then, we put all of Harry’s and my books in the bookcase, and we rearranged the kitchen. When we were finished, tired and sweaty, we fell back, laughing onto the sofa. Harry kissed me, gently at first and then more aggressively.

  I put my hand under Harry’s shirt, and I scratched his back—hard. Harry reacted in pain and then smiled in pleasure. He reached his hand under my dress and inside my underwear cupping my buttocks and then reaching further between my thighs. I made an involuntary yelp and squeezed my legs together, trapping Harry’s hand, and then I moved them apart, welcoming him. The softness of my inner thighs seemed to surprise and delight him, and he caressed them as far as he could reach. I moaned and bit his lip. We had had no idea how stimulating it could be to see and feel your partner respond. We had no idea how much raw emotion we had suppressed. We tumbled off the couch and feverishly tore at each other’s clothes until we were sufficiently exposed to make love, which we did violently and ravenously. Satisfied and breathless, we laid next to each other, sprawled on the floor amid the discarded clothing.

  “That wasn’t the way I had planned it,” I said, still gasping for breath. “I bought a new, sexy negligee, and I wanted it to be romantic.”

  “We’ll have to do it again tonight, more romantically,” Harry said. “Did it hurt much?”

  “No, not at all—it felt great. But I could be pregnant. You didn’t use a condom, did you?”

  “No, I wasn’t quite sure if we should stop so that I could put it on. Sometimes passion and spontaneity supersede prudence and sensibility.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t stop.”

  That night, we made love—romantic love. Harry got into the bed naked, and I went into the bathroom and put on my negligee (which Harry commented on and then removed), and we made slow wonderful love. We discovered new, unimagined pleasures that were both physical and aesthetic.

  We slept naked in each other’s arms, and we awoke at dawn in each other’s arms. We investigated and discovered the sources of pleasure on each other’s body. This time, for the first time, we made love in the daylight, and this time, for the first time, we looked and explored and experimented, and enjoyed.

  I made breakfast for Harry, and he went to work, and I went to City College to meet some of my teachers and to start the registration process.

  Chapter 16

  After the rejection by Harry’s parents, we realized that we had to win my father’s approval to make our relationship legitimate. Although we were now happily living together in illegitimate bliss, we realized that this could only be a short term solution and that the only avenue left open to us, if we wanted to have a family in the near future, was to win my father’s blessing.

  We attacked the problem of Harry’s lack of an Orthodox religious education with manic intensity. It was now midsummer, and we only had a few months until the Chanukah deadline. Harry began studying every weekday night with the Rabbi of the Orthodox synagogue in our neighborhood, and he studied with me on the weekends. We attended services together at the synagogue every Saturday morning—Harry sat among the men on the main level, while I sat among the women upstairs in the balcony.

  Harry was learning to read Hebrew so that he could read and recite the prayers properly. In addition to language and ritual, he was also learning the history and meaning of the prayers, and it was making a great impression on him. When we went to synagogue on the Sabbath, Harry was increasingly able to participate, and I, looking down from the balcony, was proud to see him sing with the other men.

  One Sunday morning, Harry announced that the Rabbi would be showing him how to put on tefillin that week. “He recommended that I buy a set in a special store on the Lower East Side,” Harry said proudly, “and I was thinking that going down there might be a fun excursion for us.”

  “We should ask my father to come with us,” was my immediate response. “It will help convince him that you are really serious about your studies. Besides, I don’t think he’s been back there since my parents were married.”

  We agreed to meet my father on Houston Street and then to walk downtown together. The streets were teeming with immigrants—mostly Jewish immigrants—they seemed to be shouting in Yiddish and English simultaneously, and the noise was overwhelming. There were pushcarts everywhere, each one jostling the other for space. In my eyes, it was crowded and dirty. To Harry, it was exciting, and to my father, it represented everything that he had gladly left behind. There were food stands, each with its own unique smell, and dozens of shops and carts selling everything from shoelaces to furniture. Everything seemed negotiable, and everyone was negotiating. As we made our way through the jungle of pushcarts and shoppers to the store that Harry’s Rabbi had recommended, my father was obviously resisting the seductive, and, for him, familiar, warm feeling of inclusiveness of the immigrant Jewish community, and, instead, he responded with revulsion to their aggressiveness and squalor.

  The proprietor of the Jewish book store, who introduced himself as Reb Shmuel, was huge, friendly, and informative. He spoke English with only a slight accent, and Harry was immediately impressed by his vocabulary.

  “Before I show you anything,” Reb Shmuel said, “I want to talk to you about Kavanah—intention. Do you know where the commandment is in the Torah about tefillin?”

  “Yes, it is in the Shema prayer,” Harry answered hesitantly with a glance at my father.

  “Yes! You know your Torah!” Reb Shmuel shouted enthusiastically.

  “The paragraph in the Torah talks about love—loving your God. And it says that the act of putting on tefillin is an act of love.”

  “Nobody, my young friend,” he said with a wink, “embarks on love without testing the water.”

  My father, who was listening uncomfortably to the conversation, walked over to the door, to take himself out of hearing. The shopkeeper looked at him suspiciously for a moment and then continued. “Every set of tefillin has its own personality. For a child becoming a bar mitzvah, it doesn’t matter what personality the tefillin has, but for an adult, a man who has experienced love,” he said, glancing at me, “choosing a set of tefillin is very important.”

  The shopkeeper encouraged Harry to try each set on to see how it felt. When Harry indicated that he didn’t know how to, the man, with apparent, great care, showed him. After a few tries, Harry chose a used set because he said he felt that it had a greater spiritual history. Before we left the store, I ordered a velvet bag for the tefillin inscribed with Harry’s Hebrew name.

  Harry said that he felt that this proprietor had a special sort of intensity that was both spontaneous and compelling, and he was reluctant to leave the store. He said that this intensity seemed different—more authentic—than the material education that he had been getting from the Rabbi. He resolved to return to the store sometime in the future to learn more about Jewish spirituality.

&
nbsp; My father was unusually quiet on our walk back to Houston Street. He told me, while we were waiting for our train, that the Lower East Side had been too familiar, too comfortable, like an old shoe that was out of style but still felt good. He was very tense, and I knew that he was carefully protecting, in his mind, the separation between what he was then and what he had become.

  “The peddlers,” he said, “were just the same as they had always been: poor, illiterate immigrants. Soon,” he told me with conviction, “if they work hard enough, they would no longer be immigrants, they would be Americans. Real Americans.”

  I asked him how it felt to be back on the Lower East Side.

  “That was in the past, a long time ago,” he said. He had been there, he said, more to himself than to me, and he had left. He had moved on.

  __________

  Every morning, from that time on, Harry carefully put on the tefillin. The Rabbi had taught him the ritual. First he slid the loop with the box onto his upper arm, then wrapped the strap around once, and then seven times around his forearm and then once around his hand. Then he put the other box over his forehead, hanging in the front, and then he went back to his hand and wrapped the remaining strap so that it spelled out the word Shaddai, in Hebrew—a name for God. The purpose of the tefillin, Harry explained to me, is to connect your head, your heart, and your hand—symbolically uniting intellectual, emotional, and practical human activity.

  At first, Harry put the tefillin on, said the blessings, and then took it off. He was very careful to put it on correctly and equally careful to wrap it and put it back in its velvet bag.

  He said that putting on the tefillin made him feel good. He couldn’t explain it. Just that he felt some sort of connection, like a pipeline to the past. Sometimes he would read his prayer book slowly, asking me to help him with the Hebrew. Sometimes he would just sit by the window in the bedroom and rock quietly.

  “You know,” I said to him gently one day, “you don’t need to know the prayers in order to communicate with God. Rabbi Nachman, who was a Jewish philosopher a long time ago in Poland, said that you don’t have to know how to pray in order talk to God, that God understands every language and even understands when you don’t say anything at all. You just have to believe. Really, really believe, and then God will hear you and answer you. One time, when I was very depressed, I got very angry at God, and I screamed at Him in my head, and he listened to me, and he made everything work out OK. That’s how I came to met you.”

  At these moments, I felt that Harry was in my world, and that we were one. I could sense his Jewishness growing within him, and I encouraged it as much as I dared. He would rub his hand up and down his left arm, feeling the tefillin. Then he would put his hand over his closed eyes and just sit. I was impressed and proud.

  My grandfather and my father put on tefillin every morning, but they did it mechanically in the privacy of their room. It was nothing special for them, but for Harry it was different. It was all new to him, and it had an incredible impact. He said he actually felt the tefillin and the tradition in his soul.

  I helped Harry pray as much as I could. And as his Hebrew got better, he started adding prayers until he was able to pray the entire Morning Prayer service by himself. When he felt sufficiently confident, he started going to synagogue on Monday and Thursday mornings, the days when they read the Torah. The weekday congregational prayer service started at six in the morning and lasted about an hour, so Harry was back home a little after seven to have breakfast and go to work. Eventually, Harry began attending services every morning.

  We fell into a nice, comfortable routine. Harry got up early and went to services. I made the bed and had breakfast ready on the table when he got back. He always brought the newspaper up with him, and we read the paper together silently during breakfast. Then, like an old married couple, we rinsed the dishes together, and we walked down the stairs together. Harry walked downtown to the subway that took him to his office, and I walked three blocks uptown to the college.

  The gothic towers of the City College campus exuded academic excellence, and I was initially intimidated by the grandeur of the campus and the seriousness of the students. I was a year older than most of the other freshmen, and I also considered myself an accomplished author. These two factors made a big difference in my attitude. And, as I already considered myself married, I stayed out of the social interaction that was a major part of life on the campus. I was going to be twenty-one at the end of my freshman year, so, if necessary, Harry and I could get married in a civil ceremony without my parents’ permission. We believed, however, that once my father realized the solidity and longevity of our relationship, as well as Harry’s very real commitment to Orthodox Judaism, he would consent to the marriage. If he was not willing to give us his blessing by Chanukah, the date that we had set, we planned to wait until the end of the spring semester to confront him again. Although we hoped to marry with my father’s blessing, we were certain that no matter what, we would be married within a year.

  Chapter 17

  Life, unfortunately, has a way of intruding on even the best laid plans.

  On October 8th, five weeks after Ruthie started College, and two days after Yom Kippur, my father, Ben-Zion Perlman, had a stroke.

  It was a minor stroke, if there are such things. He had complained of indigestion at the dinner table, and then he collapsed on his way back to his room. We rushed him to Israel Zion Hospital, where they had difficulty determining the cause of the stroke. They assumed that there had been some sort of blockage in the arteries going to the brain, and they treated him with blood thinners. After a few days, he felt better, but he was not able to put any weight on his left leg. Every time he tried to walk, his leg would collapse, and he was relegated to a wheel chair. The doctor thought that the condition was temporary and recommended that he go to a rehabilitation hospital for physical therapy.

  The best such hospital was located on the East Side of Manhattan, but they did not have a kosher kitchen. So every night, I brought my father a kosher dinner, and every night I sat with him, and we ate together, and he told me about his day. In the beginning, I didn’t pay much attention. As it turned out, although I was his daughter, the most important part of his day, in his opinion, was spent with Ruthie’s boyfriend, Harry. I listened, usually without comment.

  Although the hospital was a train ride and a walk from Brooklyn, it was only about ten minutes walk from Harry’s office. So, starting on the second day that my father was there, Harry visited him nearly every day at lunch time. Unfortunately, Harry did not speak Yiddish, so the first day he just sat next to my father’s bed to “keep him company.” On the second day, my father said to him, “Zi Ihr Reden Yiddish?”

  Harry looked at him blankly. “Do you speak Yiddish?” my father repeated, this time in English.

  “No, sir, I don’t,” Harry replied, surprised.

  “Then we will have to speak English. What shall we talk about?”

  Harry was dumbfounded. He had not expected my father to be able to speak English, and he was surprised at his fluency.

  My father smiled. “I have lived in this country for more than forty years. Why shouldn’t I speak English? So, you didn’t answer me. What shall we talk about?”

  “Ruthie told me that you are a great teacher,” Harry said. “She and I are hoping to get married, and I would like to learn the Jewish laws of marriage.”

  “Good idea. We can start now,” my father said enthusiastically. “One thing though, in Jewish learning, the student has to ask questions and debate the response. Can you do that?”

  Harry laughed. “It’s not the way I was brought up, but I’ll try.”

  “OK. First of all, Jews are required to get married. A man is considered incomplete until he gets married. As I told Ruthie, in a Jewish marriage, the husband and wife’s souls merge into a new soul. If a person is not married his soul
is considered incomplete.”

  “What about children?”

  “The Torah commands us to multiply, but the success of a marriage should not depend upon the children. It is more important for the man and woman to create a relationship in which God is directly involved.”

  My father and Harry enjoyed these sessions immensely. They became instant friends and conspirators. When other members of the family were present, my father only spoke Yiddish, and Harry sat quietly. Because of this close relationship, my father was able to use Harry to influence the course that his and Ruthie’s life together would take, and he chose the topics that they discussed carefully in order to have the greatest impact on her future. He had been concerned that Jack and I had allowed Ruthie to become too liberal—too American. My father told me that he believed that Jack was so focused on being “American” that he had lost all perspective. He was still a Jew, my father said, and Jews have to maintain both their unique character plus their ties to the old country.

  “How,” he sneered, “could a man be a Jew and not speak Yiddish?”

  My father believed that Ruthie was too free—too adventurous—and he told me that too much freedom, especially for a young girl, is dangerous.

  “A Jewish girl should look like a Jewish girl,” he said, “and more importantly, she should behave like a Jewish woman.”

  Some days my father and Harry studied together, some days they talked about current events, some days Harry helped my father do his therapy, and some days they didn’t talk at all. But Harry was there nearly every lunch hour, as often as he could.