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Authors: Noah Gordon

The Rabbi (6 page)

BOOK: The Rabbi
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“Who saved you, Zaydeh?”

“Also waiting near the gate were two beautiful
Yiddisheh
girls.
Shayneh maydlach
. And behind the border gate were two red-faced German soldiers. The
maydlach
went to the soldiers and whispered and laughed with them. And they opened the gate to let the girls in. And then all of us, Jews and Poles and Germans and Russians and Bohemians and Rumanians, your grandmother and her big belly and I—all of us together, like the cattle that you see running in the moving pictures—we shoved and pushed through the gate until we were across the border, and then we kept mixing, mixing with the crowds in the station until we were lost to the soldiers. And in a little while a train came and we got on and it took us away.”

Michael wriggled, because the best part was yet to come. “And why did the soldiers open the gate for the girls, Zaydey?”

“Because they promised the soldiers something.”

The taste buds in his mouth began to manufacture saliva. “What? What did they promise the soldiers?”

“Something sweet and warm they promised them. Something the soldiers wanted very much.”

“What was it, Zaydey?”

His grandfather's belly and chest would begin to tremble. The first time he had told the story Michael had asked the same question, and searching desperately for a suitable answer to give a small boy, he had hit upon exactly the right one. “Candy. Just like this!”

In his pocket he always carried a wrinkled brown paper sack, and in the sack, inevitably, was candied ginger. The fiery root was sugar-coated. Until you sucked through the sugar it was sweet, but then it was so strong it made your eyes water. Michael loved it as much as his grandfather did, but whenever he ate too much of it he suffered on the following morning, his
tush
burning so badly when he went to the bathroom that he sat there and wept in silence, afraid to let his mother hear lest she forbid Zaydeh to give him any more ginger.

As he ate the ginger in the store he would beg for another story. “Tell me about what happened after the train, Zaydey.”

And Isaac would tell him how the train had taken them only as far as Mannheim, where again they had waited, sitting in the hot spring sun. The railroad yard was on the Rhine River. Isaac had struck up a conversation with a Dutch bargeman who with his stout, broad-shouldered wife was loading his barge with bags of coal. The bargeman had refused when Isaac had asked to buy passage for two down the river. Itta, sitting on a tree stump nearby, her skirts dragging in the gritty mud, had burst into tears. The riverman's wife had looked at the Jewish girl's swollen belly and pale face. She had spoken sharply to her husband, and although his eyes were annoyed he had motioned them aboard with a silent movement of his coal-blackened thumb.

It was a strange way to travel, for them, but they found it very good. Despite the coal cargo, the living quarters were very clean. The bargeman's mood changed as soon as he saw that Isaac was willing to work as well as pay for his passage. The days were sunny, the river flowed green and clean. Isaac saw color come back into Itta's cheeks.

In the morning he would stand alone on the dew-covered
deck next to the bags of coal with his
tallis
wrapped around his shoulders and his phylacteries on his forehead and bared arm, softly chanting, while the quiet barge floated past great stone castles that turreted into the blue-white sky, past gingerbread houses in which Germans slept, past villages and cliffs and rolling pasturelands. On the fourth morning he finished intoning the prayers and looked up to see the Dutchman leaning against the rail, watching him. The man smiled respectfully and filled his pipe. After that Isaac felt at home on the barge.

The castles of the middle Rhine disappeared. When they reached Bingen Isaac worked like a deckhand, obeying the bargeman's shouted commands as the boat hurtled through the rapids. Then the river turned into a sluggish stream, and for two days they drifted slowly. On the ninth day the Rhine turned westward into the Netherlands. Presently the river became the Waal. Two days later it carried them to the waterfront of Rotterdam. The boatman and his wife went with them to the wharf where the transatlantic steamers docked. The Dutch customs man looked closely at the young emigrant when he saw the age—fifty-three—listed on his passport. Then he shrugged and stamped it quickly. Itta wept when the Dutch couple walked away. “They were like Jews,” Michael's
zaydeh
told him every time he related the story.

Unless a customer came into the grocery, Isaac would next tell Michael the story of his father's birth on the high seas during a wild Atlantic storm, with waves “high like the Chrysler Building,” and of how the doctor on the ship had selected that night to get sodden drunk, so that his trembling grandfather pulled the baby from Itta's body with his own hands.

A customer during one of the stories was a catastrophe, but if the shopper were Italian or Irish and they were close to the end, Isaac kept him waiting and finished the narrative. The Borough Park section of Brooklyn was predominantly Jewish, but there were whole blocks of Irish and whole blocks of Italians. Their Jewish block was set between two such Christian nests. There was a market run by a man named Brady in the Irish block and Alfano's Grocery in the Italian block, and for the most part each ethnic group traded with its own supplier. Occasionally, however, one of the groceries was out of an item, forcing the customer to go to one of the other two, where he was waited on
politely but without warmth by a proprietor who knew that the custom was temporary and born of emergency.

Michael's grandfather had bought his Borough Park grocery after his Itta had died, when the boy was three years old. Before that Isaac had owned and operated another tiny grocery in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, where he and his wife had settled upon coming to the United States. The block in which he had lived in Williamsburg was a cockroach-infested slum, but it was as Orthodox as any European ghetto, and probably for that reason he loved it and didn't want to leave. But to Michael's father the thought of his aging parent living alone and untended had been intolerable. At Abe Rivkind's insistence Isaac sold the Williamsburg store and came to live in Brooklyn with his son's family. He brought with him his prayer books, four bottles of whiskey, a feather bed made by Itta's own hands, and the great brass bed that had been their first purchase in America, and in whose gleaming surfaces, he convinced his grandchildren, they might see their souls if they were free from sin.

Isaac could have retired at that time, since Abe Rivkind was making a fine living as a small manufacturer of ladies' corsets and girdles. But he wanted to buy his own whiskey and his son and daughter-in-law gave in before his fierce eyes; he bought the small grocery around the corner from their Borough Park apartment.

For Dorothy Rivkind, the day her father-in-law moved into her home must have been an unhappy one. She was a plump, peroxide-blonde woman with placid eyes. In theory she kept a kosher home, serving neither pork nor scaleless creatures of the sea, but her conscience never kept her awake nights if by mistake, while cleaning up after dinner, she slipped a meat dish into a pile of dairy china in the cupboard. Isaac, on the other hand, was a man to whom the Law was the law. Beneath the counters of his store he kept a stack of dog-eared and annotated commentaries, and he observed the religious statutes just as he breathed, slept, saw, and heard. His daughter-in-law's infractions at first filled him with horror and then with wrath. None of the family was spared. The neighbors grew accustomed to the sound of his voice, thundering in righteous and indignant Yiddish. On the day he moved in with the family, Michael and his sister Ruthie came to the dinner table, on which lay a roast of beef,
carrying pieces of bread-and-butter which hunger had dictated that they make for themselves in the kitchen.


Goyim!
” their grandfather screamed. “To a
fleishig
table you bring butter?” He turned to their mother, who was growing pale. “What kind of children are you raising?”

“Ruth, take the bread-and-butter from Michael and throw it away,” Dorothy said quietly.

But Michael was a little boy, and he liked what he was eating. He struggled as his sister tried to remove the bread from his grasp, and a lump of butter fell upon his plate at the table. It was a meat plate, and their grandfather's fresh bellows sent Ruth racing with him to his room. They fearfully hugged one another and listened in fascination to the magnificence of their grandfather's rage.

The experience set the pattern for life in the Rivkind household with Zaydeh. Each day he spent as many hours as possible in the grocery. He prepared his own lunch, over Dorothy's protests, on a small electric hotplate in the back room. When he came back to the apartment in the evening, the hawk's eyes would catch them in tiny ritual transgressions, and the eagle's cry, ancient and fierce, would destroy the peace of their home.

He knew that he made them unhappy, and the knowledge made him sad. Michael realized this, because he was his grandfather's only friend. For several weeks after he came to live with them, Michael lived in fear of the bearded old man. And then one night, when the others slept while Isaac could not, he came into his grandson's room to make sure the boy was covered. Michael was awake. When Isaac saw this he sat on the edge of the bed and stroked the boy's head with a hand made horny by years of carrying crates of canned goods and bushels of vegetables.

“Did you talk with God tonight?” he whispered hoarsely. Michael hadn't prayed, but sensing that it would please his grandfather he nodded shamelessly, and when Isaac kissed his fingers he could feel the old man's lips smiling. With his thumb and the knuckle of his forefinger Isaac pinched the young cheek.


Dos is gut
,” he said. “Talk with Him often.”

Before he crept back through the silent house to his own room he reached into the pocket of his faded flannel robe. Paper
rustled and then the blunt fingers held the bit of ginger to young lips. Michael fell asleep in bliss.

The bond between Michael and his
zaydeh
grew stronger during the early fall, when the days began to shorten and the autumn feast of Sukkos drew near. Each autumn during his four-year stay with the Rivkinds Zaydeh built in their postage-stamp back yard a
sukkah
, or ceremonial hut. The
sukkah
was a small house of wooden planks covered with boughs and sheaves. It was hard work for an old man to build it, especially since hayfields, corn shocks and trees were not plentiful in Brooklyn. Sometimes he had to go deep into Jersey for raw materials, and he badgered Abe for weeks until he was driven to the country in the family Chevrolet.

“Why do you bother?” Dorothy asked him once when she brought a glass of tea to where he strained and perspired to raise the hut. “Why do you work so hard?”

“To celebrate the harvest.”

“What harvest, for God's sake? We're not farmers. You sell canned goods. Your son makes corsets for ladies with big behinds. Who has a harvest?”

He looked pityingly at this female his son had made his daughter. “For thousands of years, since the Jews emerged from the Wilderness, in ghettos and in palaces they have observed Sukkos. You don't have to raise cabbages to have a harvest.” His big hand grasped Michael behind the neck and pushed him toward his mother. “Here is your harvest.” She didn't understand, and by then Zaydeh had been living with them long enough not to expect understanding from her.

But if his mother wasn't gladdened by the
sukkah
, Michael was thrilled. Zaydeh ate his meals within its thatch walls, and when the weather permitted he slept there, too, in a folding cot placed on the dirt floor. That first year Michael begged so hard that his parents gave in and let him sleep with his grandfather. It was Indian summer, a time of warm days and crisp nights, and they slept under a thick feather bed that had come with Zaydeh from Williamsburg. Years later, when Michael slept out of doors in the mountains for the first time, that night came back to him vividly. He remembered the sound of the wind rustling the dry corn stalks in the
sukkah
roof, the patchwork pattern
made by the light of the harvest moon shining through the network of boughs and casting their shadows on the dirt floor. And, incongruously but somehow beautiful, the traffic noises, muted and fairylike, floating into their back yard from 13th Avenue, two blocks away.

It was the only night they had like that, an unhappy old man and a wondering small boy huddling warmly together against the night air and pretending they were in another world. They tried to sleep outside once more that Sukkos but it rained. And every other year until his
zaydeh
went away, his mother decided it was too cold.

It was inevitable that Isaac should leave. But when it happened, his grandson couldn't quite understand. The final straw was a nine-year-old Italian named Joseph Morello. He was in the fifth grade at P.S. 168 with Ruthie, and she was in love with him. She came home from school one afternoon ecstatic with the news that Joey had asked her to his birthday party on the following Saturday. Unfortunately, she made the announcement to Michael at a moment when Zaydeh was at the kitchen table having a glass of tea and reading the
Jewish Forward
. He looked up and pushed his steel-rimmed spectacles to his forehead.

“On
shabbos?
On
shabbos
this boy has a party? What's the matter with his people?”

“Oh, Zaydey,” Ruthie said.

“What's his father's name, this Joey?”

“His name is Morello.”

“Morello? An
Italiana?
” He moved his glasses back to his nose and shook the
Forward
. “You don't go.”

Ruthie's anguished wail split the air, bringing her mother hurrying in from her bedroom, bandanna around her head and drymop in hand. She listened as her daughter sobbed and then she put the mop on the floor. “Go to your room, Ruth,” she said.

BOOK: The Rabbi
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