A Curable Romantic (14 page)

(The starchy smells of those books sent my head swimming, and most mornings I could barely keep down the breakfast of groats Reb Sender’s wife made for us.)

Hoping for a commutation of my sentence, I finished the year’s work in a matter of weeks, mastering both reading
and
writing, demonstrating in this way, I hoped, that I’d repented of whatever crimes had placed me in his care, that my character had been reformed, and that I could be safely returned to my former life.

This strategy backfired. Though I was the most docile of his students, as well as the most helpful
and
the most learned, I wasn’t forgiven, but rather laden with extra responsibilities and doubly burdened with Reb Sender’s loathsome praises. “Yankele, I don’t know how I’d ever run things here without you,” he told me repeatedly, his words throwing me into a panic. If I’m indispensable, I told myself, I might serve out my sentence and never be returned home!

I devised a new and desperate strategy: if I demonstrate to them that I am the worst lunkhead of all, disruptive and incapable of further learning, certainly they’ll ask me to leave, as they did Ze’ev, a wild boy who peed into Reb Sender’s hat, but my daydreaming and rude remarks only brought my teacher’s attentions more virulently down upon my small
person. There was no fooling Reb Sender. He was up to date on the most modern of pedagogical methods, and when he screamed at me or cuffed my ears, I learned my lessons fast.

Every day I tried a new scheme, and every day it failed; and in the end, I succeeded only in convincing everyone how appropriate school was for me, until finally there was nothing to do but fold my hands and sit at the table like the other boys and read aloud from the books when I was asked to. The dark swirls of the curly alef-bais were no longer the evocative Rorschachs they had once been. No, somehow, they’d become the very sounds they symbolized, and no matter how hard I concentrated, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t unremember what they meant.

I’d been tricked, I realized. I’d been tricked and there was no way back to the happy, illiterate savagery I’d known before.

FORBIDDEN BOOKS WERE
only the beginning. I began to smoke a pipe as well, and I knew no greater pleasure than hiding in my father’s cherry orchards, lying on a bench in one of his gazebos, smoking bowl after bowl while reading the illicit books Avrum supplied me, versions of Tolstoy, Gorky, and Shakespeare, expanded and improved upon (
, as their title pages attested) by our Yiddish writers, as well as several Hebrew novels written by these same wicked men. I took precautions, of course, hiding my contraband beneath a loose plank in the gazebo’s flooring and concealing whatever book I was reading inside a folio of the Talmud, so if anybody chanced upon me, all he would see would be a young scholar absorbed in his learning, teasing out the arguments of Rava and Abaye over whose donkey should go first in a procession of scholars.

On the day Sore Dvore discovered me, I was reading a novel by Mapu. Even more entranced than usual, hidden inside a fine cloud of tobacco smoke, I didn’t hear her calling me until she was only a foot or two away. Though I’d taken my usual precaution of concealing the forbidden novel inside a larger volume of Talmud, I’d lain on the bench with my head towards the house, so that all she to do was look over my shoulder for the charade to be exposed.

She had no choice but to report everything to our mother, of course,
who had no choice but to report everything to my father, of course, who had no choice but to prepare for me whatever punishment I had forced him to conceive. After all, nothing less than my place in the World to Come was at stake!

Spewing forth a litany of curses (cf. Deuteronomy 28:15–68), Father dragged me to the rebbe, and I was made to sit between them as they hurled verse after verse of psalms over my head. (Though he’d married into an Hasidic family, Father was not himself a Hasid. He treated the rebbe of Szibotya with respect, but without reverence, and this was pleasing to the rebbe. The most learned men in our community, the two literally spoke each other’s language and could converse in it for hours.)

Save me from this lion’s mouth
(Psalms 22:22), my father pleaded.
My heart is melancholy
(13:3).
Have truthful people vanished?
(12:2)

I’m perfectly innocent.
I quoted a verse (18:24), attempting to give testimony at my own trial.

He has raised his voice?
(46:7). The rebbe looked at me critically.

my father whispered.
Desist!
(37:8).

It was decided the best thing Father could do was to marry me off — certainly at age twelve, I was old enough — and in this way saddle me, like a goring ox, with a wife and, may God smile upon us, with children, and quickly, too (my father emphasized), before I’d permanently deranged my mind with vile literature written by godless men who wanted only to destroy our people’s name, and also (the rebbe emphasized) before rumors of my conduct circulated widely enough to destroy all chances of a suitable match with a good, pious girl, under the obligation to care for whom, he was certain, I would return to my former self.

Father shook his head.
The boy is sick
(1 Kings 14:5).

the rebbe counseled him.
Pick up your son
(2 Kings 4:36).

After burning the books and the pamphlets they’d found in my possession, the two negotiated my marriage contract with a family from a distant town.