Abe’s parents had given Walter’s address and Abe’s whereabouts to several friends and pleaded with their friends to seek Walter out, should they perish. Uncle Walter heeded their wishes, extricating the five-and-a-half-year-old Abe from the abbey, bringing him to America and adopting him. Abe grew up American, a survivor of the catastrophe. He graduated from Midwood High School of Science and from Brooklyn College certified to teach high school, and met and married Minnie Brooks, who gave birth to Shmuel, their only child, named after Abe’s father.
All his life Abe taught history at Jacob Schiff High. An excellent teacher who loved his students, who came from all over the world, he devoted himself to helping their Americanization—for he worshipped the American public school system that represented the great promise of this country.
Abe believed in the public schools. Yet he wanted his son educated in a traditional Jewish school. Jewish education, he thought, conveyed compelling values that created a mensch. To make his only child a scholar, a humanist, and a Jew, Abe sent Shmulie not to Jacob Schiff High, but to the Yeshiva of Midwood.
Shmulie and I met there, a meeting that forged my destiny.
CHAPTER 4
MY MAN
ONE DAY IN LATE summer before ninth grade, my father came into my bedroom. He proclaimed that I would attend the yeshiva around the corner. This announcement traveled from well beyond left field, far outside of the stadium.
I liked my public school. I had friends. We weren’t religious. I hadn’t had a bar mitzvah. We ate bacon every Saturday morning. Attending Jewish parochial school lay nowhere on my horizon.
“Why?” I asked my father, appalled.
“The Rebbe told me I should send you,” he said.
“The Rebbe?” I mused.
“The Kobliner Rebbe, Reb Dovid Schmeltzer, the greatest spiritual leader of our time. I attend his classes for Jewish mailmen Tuesday afternoons after I finish my mail route. A bunch of us from all over Brooklyn meet at the Kobliner Center. He’s terrific.”
“That’s why you’ve been coming home late on Tuesdays?”
“Yes. He’s brilliant. He brings us to the light.”
“Light? What light?” I surmised this had nothing to do with AC or DC current or bulb wattage.
“The Light, Nicky,” he said, and I could hear the capital L. “The Light God placed in the world on the first day of Creation, the light our foggy minds cannot see without help.”
Now, understand, my father practiced a respectable trade. His livelihood put food on the table, paid the mortgage, and enabled much else. But nothing in his work or background suggested the hint of an interest in spiritual matters. That he took this class stunned me. My father, a man who spent his days walking the neighborhoods delivering bills, love letters, and unwanted adverts, had become a religious fanatic. I became the first victim of his fanaticism.
As if he read my mind, he added, “Don’t worry, Nicky. I haven’t become some nutjob and entered into a cult, God forbid. I just heard from some of the guys that he did this, the Rebbe, teaching Jewish mailmen. He runs a class for Jewish cops, too.”
I must have looked skeptical—my father going to Hebrew school for grownups. He said, “When Uncle Teddie died last year, it hurt the family bad. Ted and I were real close. You know that.”
My mother’s brother, Teddie Hurvitz, died in a car accident on the Long Island Expressway. Sixty years old with a wife and two sons. His death devastated everyone.
“It bored a hole inside me and I wanted to know.”
“Know what, Dad?”
“I don’t know. Why did something like that happened to such a good man? Something like that.”
“And the Rebbe talks about this stuff?”
“And more.”
Just before he came into my room, I had been sitting at my desk meditating on my newly discovered primary interest in life—whether girls liked me. One in particular. I had my eye on Priscilla Liebowitz, on her wire-rimmed glasses, her long, straight, auburn hair and a new pair of breasts she had mysteriously grown that summer. This interest led to a growing curiosity in erections, one of which I’d been entertaining the moment my father came to speak with me. Fortunately, he knocked.
“Dad,” I said, trying to absorb this news and my father’s desire I go to a yeshiva. “I miss him too. Really. But this is not a good idea.”
Do they have girls in yeshiva? Do yeshiva girls have breasts?
“The Rebbe guessed you’d say that.”
This Rebbe had never seen Priscilla, with or without her breasts.
My father sat on my bed and leaned toward me. “He understands. Very insightful, this rebbe.”
Insightful as a stone.
With a keen look in his eye I’d never observed, my father said, “You don’t know the half of it, Nicky.”
Neither do you, Dad, I thought, the wilting beneath my boxers now complete. I glanced at my pants, making certain I had pulled up my zipper. “Before this is over, I suspect I’m going to know the whole of it,” I said.
My libido rebelled at this decision. I’ll flee to Philly and live with my mother’s cousin. Priscilla could come with me.
“The Rebbe told me you needed to study the Torah.”
The Torah? Yes, I’d heard of the Torah. What Jew living in Brooklyn hadn’t?
“Okay, then. Buy me one of them and I’ll read it if that’ll make you happy, Dad. Can’t be any harder than Huckleberry Finn.”
“It’s not that simple. Believe me, I’ve seen how deep and wide the Torah is.”
“So, then you go to yeshiva, and I’ll deliver the mail.”
Perhaps Priscilla’s house was on his route.
“Nicky, I’ve decided. You have to go.”
And so, I wilted. As did my erection.
On the first day of eighth grade, I joined my new classmates at the Yeshiva of Midwood for lunch. The room hummed with noise and commotion as friends who hadn’t seen one another all summer had their first free moment to catch up and chatter, replete with tales of discovered sexuality.
I was wretched. Everyone else was in sync with the knowledge and rituals of Orthodox Judaism. The boys’ yarmulkes were knitted by their moms or grandmas with their names embroidered on them in Hebrew and sat just right on their heads, held down by metal clips. My black cloth beanie, stolen years before from a synagogue, kept sliding down my head and into my eyes or onto the floor. All the boys sported tsitsit, ritual fringes emerging from a garment boys wore. They’d all mastered Hebrew slang and jargon. I knew shalom.
I sat alone at a table that seated eight, staring morosely at my peanut butter sandwich, praying for invisibility, and straightaway realized no one saw me anyway. I had no old friends to boast to about how I pawed this breast or touched that crotch in the woods at camp that summer. No one acknowledged my existence. I received not even a token nod of recognition that I, too, walked planet Earth.
I wished an alien from a very distant world would pull me out of there with a magic beam and take me far away for them to learn about the tragic life of an earthling teenager.
Amid this dark fantasy, a tall, pudgy and clunky guy wearing an enormous bright-blue yarmulke with a white Star of David on it dropped his ass next to me. He clutched a green sack as big as a garbage bag and wore a smile so radiant you could have roasted chicken on it.
“Bet you’re new here, too, aren’t you?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I answered. “How’d you know?”
“Jesus Christ, man, it’s written all over your face.”
I looked at him. “I feel like crap,” I said. “I’m a complete stranger here. I don’t know a word of Hebrew. I have no idea what the hell the rabbis are talking about. What am I doing here? I’d rather be on my way to Mars.”
He gave me that smile again. “That’s a lot of don’ts, man.” He paused and sca
nned the room imperiously. In that one gesture, he declared his invulnerability to teenage angst. He pulled his chair closer to me. In a conspiratorial whisper, he said something unforgettable.
“Look, I’m about to teach you something that’ll change your life.” He paused, took a breath, leaned closer still. “Here it is. Fuck it, man, just fuck it. That’s all. Just fuck it. It’s all trash. All of it.”
“All of what?” I asked.
“It, man, it. All of it.” As I absorbed this wisdom, he reached into that lunch bag and withdrew a thick sandwich. He unwrapped it and gobbled each half down in four mammoth bites in what seemed like seconds. I looked at his lunch.
He was ingesting a ham and cheese on rye.
The chutzpah, the astonishing nerve he showed by bringing that treyf, that unkosher, meal, within the walls of a yeshiva cafeteria, to eat it in the presence of the other students and our teachers—this was staggering. I nodded in shock and admiration at this gesture of rebellion against the heavens so powerful that I had to catch my breath, as I am sure did the angels above.
My man.
I heaved my peanut butter sandwich into a garbage pail. “You got another one of those?” I asked. And damned if he didn’t produce another ham and cheese out of his bag just as big and treyf as the other. He slid it my way.
“Go to town, man,” he said. And I devoured that sandwich like a starving man just rescued from a desert island.
He pulled out a third one, unwrapped it and took a bite in the middle. In the midst of decimating it, he ceased chewing and looked me in the eye. With a mouth filled with food and mustard on his cheeks, he said, “Oh yeah, name’s Shmulie Shimmer.” And he offered me a hand thick as a gorilla’s.
“Nicky,” I said, attempting to crush his hand in return.
We hung together for the rest of the day, the rest of the year, and the rest of our time at the Yeshiva of Midwood, five academic years. We were inseparable until just before graduation. Then our relationship ceased forever.
CHAPTER 5
SMART BOYS
ABE SHIMMER AND I walked toward my apartment, my bike to my right, Abe to my left. “I see you’ve become a big-deal professor,” he said.
“I’m a professor. Not much of a deal, big or little.”
“You must have students and write books and articles and give lectures. I hear you’re an expert on the Kobliner Hasidim.”
“These days I meet most of my students online. I haven’t written a book in over ten years. I haven’t published an article in the last two or three. Ever since the Kobliners became the Schmeltzerites, there’s little interest in the old world. Everyone’s focused on those wackos.”
“Still, you work at a great university.”
“Since the Great Debacle, it’s not so great.”
“You have children?”
“A daughter. Lorraine.”
“Very nice. Shmulie never had children.”
Thank God. What monsters would that bastard have spawned?
“I was sorry to hear about your wife,” I said.
“Shmulie was at her side when she died, you know. Part of him always did his best to be a good son.” Abe sighed. Another sigh turned into a sob. “It’s hard when your only child goes bad.”
“I’m sure that’s true. I guess at least there’s some comfort that it wasn’t always that way.”
Abe knew what I meant. A faint lilt entered his voice. “Yes. Yes. The two of you at that yeshiva on Fourteenth Street. A pair of great learners, you two.”
I put my hand on his shoulder, and he looked at me. The contact was electric. The whole chapter came rushing back and for a moment washed over me like a warm spring rain. From two outliers eating ham and cheese on rye we became, as Abe said, quite great learners.
Perhaps the third week after school began, I went over to Shmulie’s house. We sat at the kitchen table. Abe made us tea and placed a few sugar cookies on a plate. He asked us about school. We grumbled that we didn’t understand Talmud class, that the teacher expressed no interest in helping us.
Abe became incensed. “That’s a terrible teacher. Who doesn’t stand up and help his student? Me, I would never ignore a student who didn’t understand. I’m going to call this guy and talk to him, one teacher to another. What did you say his name is?”
“Uh, Rabbi Kramer, Dad. But I don’t think you should call him up to yell at him just yet,” Shmulie said.
“Yelling I’m not going to do. Just talk very quiet, but stern. Why not? I pay a lot of money to send you to this Jewish school. You shouldn’t get help from your teachers when you need it?”
“Dad, can you maybe wait a couple of weeks?”
“A couple of weeks? That’s forever when you’re drowning in class. You want you should drown?”
Shmulie looked at me, eyes pleading for help.
“Maybe you could request a tutor,” I suggested. “I’ve heard they might do that.”
“Okay. Good idea,” Abe whispered.
He complained to the school, and we got ourselves a tutor—paid for by the yeshiva. We not only got a tutor, we got Reb Avram Pinsky, the biggest and baddest Talmud tutor in all the Five Boroughs.
Reb Avram had nine kids, so the extra money put meat on the table on Friday night. Symbiosis happened. Tutoring helped him a little with the bills. Tutoring helped us—a lot—with grades. Collective obstinacy got us through that year and drove us to the head of the Talmud class.
Every spare moment, we’d sit with our Talmud texts struggling to grasp the argument on the page. Reb Avram, a man of piety as well as potency, grasped our passion and pitched in, frequently giving time beyond his wages. Every week, including summer, for no fewer than six hours, these two kids, now sporting proper knitted yarmulkes and tsitsit, ritual fringes, would sit with their tutor, working through the language and argumentation of the talmudic text.
By the end of August before ninth grade, Shmulie and I could handle a page of Talmud better than any other student in the entire school. I kid not. If you’ve never studied a page of Talmud, understand I am not talking about a day at the beach.
A page of Talmud consists of different patterns of thought developed over a millennium and a half concerning one or more questions expressed in two languages, neither of which is English, written without vowels and lacking anything as courteous as punctuation. To understand what is happening on the page, you have to master the languages, the terse syntax, and follow several simultaneous arguments, remembering what you learned last week, because you never know when the text will return to some obscure point you thought the text was finished with but from which it has only taken a digression of astonishing magnitude. Then you have to know every other talmudic tractate because every tractate assumes knowledge of every other tractate. Then you have to master more than nine centuries of commentary literature consumed with the proposition that all of this material makes exquisite, logical, divine sense.
And when you are finished with the tractate, you throw a party and continue to another as difficult as the one you just left behind.
That is the Great Jewish Conversation—reaching across miles and years to access what has preoccupied Jews throughout the millennia.
By the end of the ninth grade, Shmulie and I shared a prize for excellence in Talmud, consisting of twenty-five dollars each and a cheap certificate filled out on a manual typewriter. Every other student and a couple of teachers as well were forced to eat our talmudic dust. That certificate, with its uneven typed m’s, accompanied me throughout my wanderings and still hung beside the diploma acknowledging my doctorate. Earning a PhD was a sleepover at Grandma’s compared to the work we did that year to earn a yellowed twenty-five-cent certificate.
I still fondly remembered those endless hours bent over tractates of the Talmud, a youthful time this bent-over old man’s presence brought back to me in a rush
of memory.
“So, Nicky, are you still a talmid hacham?” Abe asked. A talmid hacham possessed an extraordinarily high degree of learning in the Talmud.
“No, Abe, I gave that up a long time ago.”
“I know you did, but you could have been. You and Shmulie could have been two of the great Talmud minds of your generation. Many, many times that Pinsky fellow said so. I loved sitting with you and Shmulie. Good times, no?”
The Abe Shimmer of my yeshiva days would regularly interrupt Shmulie and me during our nightly talmudic disputations. He would bring us tea and something sweet. He’d squeeze into one of the chairs around the Formica kitchen table on which we had spread our texts and study aids. Dipping a sugar cookie into his glass of tea, he’d ask us to explain the problem we were wrestling with. We’d tell him, and he’d jump into the water as best he could. Together we would go at it, occasionally so late I’d stay over.
Once, we were studying the talmudic tractate Baba Metzia, “The Middle Gate.” We came upon a short problem: Two men find themselves in the desert lost with one canteen of water between them. One owns the canteen, while the other was foolish enough to find himself caught in the desert without a drop to his name. There is insufficient water for both to make it back to civilization. Who gets the water?
Rabbi ben Patura claimed the owner must share the water, while Rabbi Akiva, perhaps the most famous of the ancient rabbis, argued the canteen belonged to the one who brought the water.
“Akiva’s wrong,” Abe said. “The two must share.”
“Even though both die?” I had asked.
“It doesn’t matter. They have to share. It’s a basic principle of community. We don’t abandon someone in danger, even if it’s dangerous. Those nuns risked their lives when they allowed me to live with them. They shared their water, even though we all would have died if we got caught.”
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