He was a tall, stoop-shouldered boy from Brooklyn with a heavy face and dull gray eyes. His name was Irving Besser. I came up to his chest in height.
“Who are you calling an ignoramus?” he said, folding his newspaper and putting it under his arm.
The class had gathered around us, blocking the corridor.
“You are an ignoramus in Bible,” I said, using the Hebrew term am ha’aretz. “That’s your privilege. I’m not asking you to study Bible. I’m asking you to be quiet so I can study Bible.”
He put a thick strong finger on my chest and pushed ominously. “I don’t like to be called an ignoramus.”
“Then don’t behave like one.”
“Look, Lurie”—he poked me hard—“you better—”
“Rabbi Akiva said that Song of Songs is the holiest of all the books of the Kesuvim. How can you sit there fooling around while we study it?”
“Where did he say that?”
“Rashi brings it into his commentary on the first verse.”
There was subdued laughter from the group around us. Irving Besser’s face went dark. He was one of the best Talmud students in the high school and rarely did a day go by when he did not prove that in class; but he was indifferent to all his other studies and in constant difficulty with his secular courses. He called his secular studies the “goy part of the day.” He would get his degrees with minimal energy. I did not like him and had stayed out of his way until this afternoon.
“You know something else, Besser?” I said. “Someone once said that one third of our study time should be given over to learning Bible. What do you think of that?”
“Who? One of your apikorsishe grammarians?”
“Yes. The Rambam.”
The laughter was loud this time.
His face went very dark. “Where does the Rambam say that?”
I gave him the source in the law code of Maimonides. He fidgeted uncomfortably, embarrassed and frustrated.
“You’re making fun of me,” he muttered, readying his finger for another prod. “You’re shaming me.”
“I’m sorry if I am. Don’t make fun of the ones who are trying to study Bible.”
Yaakov Bader, tall, heavy-shouldered, pale blond hair and handsome smiling open face, suddenly slid between us.
“Peace,” he said in Hebrew. “Peace, peace, to those far and near.” Then in English, “It’s time for lunch and not for fighting.”
“Why don’t you let skinny fight his own battles?” Irving Besser said.
“Because his battles are my battles,” Yaakov Bader sang in his toneless voice to the tune of an old melody with similar words. “Besides, you’re bothering me also, Irving, and I don’t think I want you to do that anymore. Come on, Davey. I’m hungry.”
Downstairs, as we waited on line in the crowded school cafeteria, Yaakov said, “Why do you bother with guys like that, Davey?”
“He bothers me.”
“The world is full of Irving Bessers. You can’t let them all bother you. They can give you ulcers with their righteousness.”
We selected our food and took our trays over to a table that had just been vacated.
“What do you hear from your uncle?” I asked.
“The word is that he’s in Istanbul.”
“Is he going to be away the whole war?”
“I don’t know. I’m not even sure what he’s doing. No one talks about it. He’s saving Jews.”
“I miss him.”
He gave me a sober smile and bit into his tuna sandwich.
“Are you all set for the history exam?” he asked.
I nodded and picked at my baked fish.
“You memorized the index?” He smiled around his sandwich.
“Try me,” I said.
“I believe you, I believe you. I wonder how many guys are going to pass that exam today because of your skinny shoulders.”
I shrugged. Often those who sat near me in an exam copied my answers. I did not care and would not stop them.
“I really miss your uncle,” I said moodily. “Especially on days like today. My worst days are Irving Besser days.”
He made a face and went on eating.
Irving Besser sat quietly with his New York Post during our next session with Song of Songs. But the general level of noisy indifference continued. The few of us who studied attempted to ignore it. The Bible class was discontinued the following semester and we returned to the all-encompassing world of the Talmud.
But I did not entirely abandon Bible, for I was teaching my brother the Torah reading for his bar mitzvah. He cared not too much for Bible and even less for grammar. He studied the Torah reading to please my father and on the spring day of his bar mitzvah in his yeshiva synagogue he read flawlessly, and then muttered when he was done, “Thank God that’s over with.” He read books and remembered most of what he read. But, save for his school texts, he read only stories and novels. It was clear he did not intend to study Bible seriously or read too often from the Torah.
I said to him one night as I watched him reading a novel by Dickens, “Why do you waste your time reading stories, Alex?”
I had to ask it again before he heard me. His face, so much a duplicate of my father’s, looked hurt.
“They’re great books, Davey. I’m not reading junk. The librarian is helping me find what to read.”
“But there’s nothing in them. You don’t come away with any facts or anything.”
“I don’t read them for facts. I read them to find out about people and the different kinds of worlds they live in.”
“You find out more about people from a page of Gemara or Chumash than you do from a story.”
“But it’s not the same thing, Davey.”
“Okay. It’s not the same thing. Are you going to sleep?”
“When I finish the chapter.”
Late one night I looked up from my Talmud and listened to a strange soft choking sound and saw my brother crying. He was sitting at his desk near the window, reading Oliver Twist and crying. I stared at him in astonishment. He sat there, hunched over his book, and I could see clearly three-quarters of his face and the tears that flowed down it. He turned a page and wiped at his eyes and went on reading and crying. I could not understand it and went back to my Talmud.
He was rarely without a book in his hands from that time on; and it was almost always a novel or a collection of stories. He read as he ate; he read as he walked in the streets; he read as he rode the buses to and from school; he read in the bathroom.
He told me one night that he thought he might like to teach English literature. I was astounded.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because I like it.”
“Why don’t you teach Hebrew literature? Why English literature, for heaven’s sake?”
“There is no Hebrew literature. It’s only fifty years old and it has one or two great novelists and two or three great poets. English literature is a thousand years old and has a library of great novelists and great poets.”
“I wonder how overjoyed the goyim will be having a Jew teach English literature.”
“It’s mine if I make it mine,” he said firmly and somewhat cryptically. “I won’t ask them to do me any favors.”
He was only thirteen and I thought his remarks presumptuous. I envied him his fervor, though I was certain he would change his mind a dozen times before he decided finally on what he would do with his life. Thirteen and he was talking about teaching English literature!
Saul came over with his parents one cold Shabbat afternoon early in January. We talked for a while about the war. He looked tall and gaunt and was still having trouble with his eyes. He was now studying in the highest Talmud class in the school. His teacher was Rav Tuvya Sharfman. “A phenomenon,” Saul called him, his thin voice rising excitedly. His pale hands and long thin expressive fingers danced and gyrated and described circles in the air as he spoke. He dressed sloppily—tie awkwardly knotted, shirt collar unbutto
ned, brown hair uncombed, shoelaces trailing behind him. “Everyone said he was great,” he went on in solemn rapture, “but you have to study with him to know how great he really is.” At this point he swiftly pulled a handkerchief from a pocket, placed it in front of his nose, and sneezed loudly. Alex, who lay propped up on his bed with a book, read on undisturbed.
The two of us looked at him. He lay with the upper half of his chunky frame resting upon his pillow, which he had placed against the wall near his bed. His squarish face was fixed upon the book that lay before him on the twin hillocks formed by his knees. He had spoken a brief greeting when Saul had first entered the room, then had slipped back into the world of his book. He was reading Great Expectations. He had been reading Dickens all that fall and winter. He had also begun to write sketches and stories in a pad which he carried with him to school, concealed somewhere in his desk, and showed no one.
“You used to look like that when you studied Chumash,” Saul said. “If a bomb fell in the street he wouldn’t hear it.”
I looked away and was quiet. From the living room came the sounds of our parents’ voices. They were talking about the war.
“Anyway,” Saul said, returning to our conversation, “I’m staying on and will probably end up teaching Gemara there. Hints have been dropped.”
“That’s great, Saul.”
“I have about three more years to go after I graduate and then I’ll have smicha.”
“Rabbi Saul Lurie. It sounds wonderful.”
He squinted at me through the lenses of his glasses. Then he looked again at Alex. “The Rambam didn’t trust the human imagination,” he said. “Where does he get it from?”
“Mama says she used to write poetry when she was a little girl.”
“Does he have to read all that for school?”
“You went to the same school. Did you have to read all that?”
“Novels are for women.”
“According to the Rambam?”
He smiled and squinted his eyes. Then he rubbed his eyes wearily and I saw the tobacco stains on the index and middle fingers of his hand. I had a sharp image of him sitting in the large study hall of the yeshiva, his table piled high with volumes of the Talmud and commentaries. He studied from a standing position, in his shirt sleeves, stooping over the folio volumes, shuffling pages, smoking, murmuring to himself, straightening his thin body, staring off into space, then stooping again over the volumes. All around him was the din of more than one hundred rabbinical school students studying Talmud; he was oblivious to it. Wreathed in cigarette smoke, alternately squinting and staring, he carved out of the books on the table his own world of the mind. I would pass by the study hall on my way to a class or out of the building and look in on him and see him studying, and I would carry that picture of him inside my eyes for a long time. But he looked very tired and I told him so now and he smiled wryly and said, “Most of one’s knowledge is acquired at night.”
“Also the Rambam?”
“Of course.”
Alex stirred on his bed, rearranged his pillow against the wall, fluffed it up, and settled into it again—all without taking his eyes from his book.
“We are sure Dickens did not write with divine inspiration?” I asked.
“There aren’t many things in this world I’m sure of,” Saul said. “But that I’m sure of.”
“You’re lucky Alex hears no evil when he reads. Listen. Is it still forbidden to ask what your father does when he travels for the Revisionists and my father?”
“He organizes.”
“What does he organize?”
“The organization.”
“Do you know what he does, Saul? Seriously.”
“He gives talks in private homes, raises money, and organizes youth groups.”
“Everybody is so busy doing things,” I said. “Everybody.”
He looked at me. I gazed out my window at the alleyway and stone wall. A train rushed by along Third Avenue, rattling the windowpanes.
“Busy,” I said. “Busy, busy. Everybody has a job.”
He squinted his eyes at me and was quiet.
“You want to go to the movies after Shabbos?” I said. “Is there anything at the Blendheim or the Luxor?”
“I have a date tonight, Davey.”
I gazed out the window, tipping my chair back.
“Davey?”
I looked at him.
“What did Dr. Weidman say?”
“He said quote soon unquote.”
“Will you have it when he says?”
“I don’t want to think about it.”
“Some of the girls, when I talk to them—”
“All right,” I said. “You told me.”
Sometimes the mother or father of a date would open the door to my ring. I would see their eyes alight on my face, then circle nervously away. They would be very polite. The girl would be sweet and chatty. Sometimes girls would even take my arm as we walked through a subway station or along a street and I would feel a tightening in my groin. We would sit in a movie or a theater and afterward we would have coffee and cake and I would listen to their talk and watch the way their eyes kept brushing across my face. Then I would take them back home and, later, lie awake in my bed, remembering their closeness, feeling their fingers on my arm. I would sleep and wake wet from strange fearful dreams. None of the girls I took out on blind dates would go out with me again.
“I’m thinking of your good, Davey,” Saul said.
“All right,” I said. “All right. What does the Rambam say about surgery for a flattened nose that makes you sick with fever ten days out of every month?”
“The Rambam says to listen to your doctor.”
“I’m scared, Saul. I don’t even want to think about it. Weidman says they have to go into the sinus cavity pretty close to the brain.”
“He said that? Why did he say that?”
“I asked him to tell me the truth.”
“Who says it’s good to know the truth all the time?”
“I’m so scared I can’t even dream about it yet.”
Alex sighed, stirred faintly, and was quiet. We looked at him.
“Just the way you were,” Saul said after a moment. “Exactly the same way.”
“Yes,” I said, bringing my chair forward and staring out the window at the oncoming night. “I seem to remember.”
My mother was also remembering, but in dark silences that were like descents into a void. After the letters had stopped coming from her family in Poland, she began occasionally to sit in the living room near the canary and reread old letters. Sometimes I would come out of my room after a night of studying and find her asleep in an easy chair, her head fallen forward, her mouth slack, a letter crumpled in her hands. She looked pale and thin, her hair long and loose and already threaded with strands of gray. I would wake her gently and she would be startled at first and I would hear a sharp intake of breath and see her eyes go very wide; often I had the impression I had brought her back from memories and dreams far more pleasant than the world upon which she opened her eyes. She would swallow the saliva that had accumulated in the pools of her slack mouth as she had slept; then she would manage a shamefaced smile.
“Your mother fell asleep again in the chair.” She said it as if apologizing and asking for understanding at one and the same time. “I was reading letters.” Then she added, “I can’t write to them anymore, so I read. What time is it, David?”
I would gather up the letters and help her to her bedroom door. I was only a little taller than she. At the door she would raise her dark eyes to me and smile wanly. “My little David.” She stroked my hair and the side of my face. Her fingers were dry and rough. She would kiss me and I would return her kiss and she would go into the room, opening the door wide enough for me to see my father asleep in his bed. One night I woke her in the chair and walked her to the door and she murmured, still not fully awake, “What have we done to you, my darling?” then turned and wen
t into her room. I stared at the door and for some strange reason was seized by a moment of uncontrollable shuddering.
My parents rarely spoke together now in the kitchen or living room during the early nights. My father repaired watches in the bedroom; my mother read old letters or wrote new ones to her cousins in Palestine.
In the weeks that followed the German conquest of Poland, my mother’s silences grew longer and deeper. She continued doing the housework, preparing our meals, washing, ironing, baking for Shabbat, scrubbing floors, changing the bed linen; but she spoke very little and often not at all. And as Europe was swiftly consumed by the German army, as Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, and France fell, as the Battle of Britain raged and waned, as the Germans began their race through Russia, she ceased to read her old letters and, for periods of time that were often days in length, simply would not utter a word. If we spoke to her she would nod or respond with a yes or a no or an expression on her worn face. But she initiated no conversations, participated in none of our table talk. She moved about the house like a cloud of silent darkness.
I found her asleep one cold winter night in the living room long after our radiator had died. The air was chill; when I touched her hands they were icy. She stirred and woke, startled, and gasped loudly. She seemed for the very briefest of moments a frightened little girl.
“It’s very late, Mama.”
“I’m sorry, darling. I fell asleep again in the chair.”
“Let me help you up.”
She held my arm as we crossed to her door.
“Why does Papa let you fall asleep here?”
“I tell him to go to sleep. I can’t sleep. I have dreams.” We stood at the door and she smiled weakly and gazed up at me. She pulled her robe close about herself and looked around the room. Then she looked at the doorway to the hall, as if expecting someone. After a moment, she shivered and her dark gaze fell upon the reflection of her face in the large decorative wall mirror, a remnant of our previous ornate style of living. She shuddered visibly.