The students’ essays are all the same; transcriptions of his lectures, some more and some less accurate, some more and some less detailed. Jeremy is sweating. He leans over the boxes against the wall and stretches to open the windows. He can barely do it, and strains to pull the windows up. Suddenly, he has had enough. He overturns the boxes at his feet and dumps the old books on the floor. He dumps them all together in piles, the theology and the German poetry, the old history books. The dust flies up at him, as he throws the tomes onto the carpet. Bindings crackle. White pages fall open, exposed. He dumps the books until his arms hurt. A hundred and two hundred more, until they lie there like a pile of junk, and he is not angry anymore.
He picks some up again, just a few from the top of the pile, a volume of Plato and a collection of poetry, some Goethe, and Moses Mendelssohn, and he sets them on his desk. It is a kind of apology for the act. Jeremy touches them. He opens one and then another, and then he sees with a shock of surprise and recognition, not his father’s, but his mother’s signature on the inside of each cover. The handwriting perfect and small, the signature constant, tightly curled in every volume in black ink.
He opens more books. Quickly he checks each flyleaf. There, in almost half the volumes, the inscription reads Sarah Kirshner.
What a fool he is. What a fool he had been, sitting at his desk and pondering what his father meant, puzzling over his father’s will. Half these books were hers. It was obvious, if he had only opened them and looked. Jeremy opens the books and then stacks them up, neatly in tall towers. He opens the thick Shakespeare volumes with their pages edged in slippery gold, and there, inside, his mother’s name is inscribed. He opens the two volumes of Aristotle in German, the leather Tocqueville, the romantic poets, and the German commentaries of their religious contemporaries, the first Kirshner rabbis. These were all his mother’s. They have been given to him, as he is his mother’s child. The son she took for herself to educate in the literature of the rest of the world, the vast empire of art outside his father’s yeshiva.
Jeremy sits at his desk and looks out at his parents’ shared library. He is tired. He puts his head down on his arms, but his eyes are open. He gazes at the ruined pinnacles and minarets of books stacked on the floor. He looks at them with clear eyes.
Jeremy’s parents had been only partly happy together. They lived and worked together, and even enjoyed each other in conversation and in their partnership leading the community. His parents were joined in their mission; they shared their strict belief in Jewish law, and the desire to establish the Kehilla in America. But Janus-faced, they looked in opposite directions—his father always turning toward the future in his insistence on transmitting to coming generations the exact letter of the law, and his mother turning always back to the life in Germany, the houses and the music there, the riches of European literature. The Rav was establishing a new order based on the ancient and medieval sacred texts. But Jeremy’s mother was nostalgic for the recent past, for the modern languages and for eighteenth-century philosophy. Always, she missed the paintings of Vermeer and Rembrandt, always she was remembering the Enlightenment. Jeremy was her instrument, not simply his father’s prisoner. His elaborate education was her singular achievement, his learning her triumph of self-expression.
Jeremy looks intently at his legacy piled on the floor. He stares down at the inheritance toppled at his feet. He does not want to be, nor is he, the vessel of his mother’s dreams. Nor can he be anymore his father’s tragedy. His parents are gone, and his place between them is gone too. His father’s objections have been silenced, as has his mother’s praise. All his father’s rebukes have not effaced the learning the Rav nurtured in him. And all his mother’s books, all her poetry and German theology, cannot now shape him into her idea of a man.
7
AT THE end of May a delivery truck’s passing darkens the windows of Grimaldi’s store, and Elizabeth looks up from her work, reconciling the books with pencil, paper, and an ancient adding machine. She looks around the shadowy room cluttered with packages. The jars of Swiss jam shine like jewels in the low light, gooseberry, raspberry, blueberry. “We should get some better light fixtures,” she says to Grimaldi.
“You buying?” he asks.
Elizabeth turns back to the adding machine. She is thinking that Grimaldi should sell jars of herring. He could sell herring as well as anchovies and sardines. There is a brand sanctioned by Rav Isaiah that would sell well in the neighborhood and Grimaldi should carry it. He should think about his customers. Different kinds of herring, and some good crackers. And he should sell some Jewish articles along with his figurines. Some porcelain seder plates. Some mezuzahs, the Lenox porcelain ones with fourteen-karat gold. Those are pretty. Some menorahs. Those would sell. He should work on attracting younger customers. His regulars are quite old. They speak German still and buy the Swiss jam and chocolate. He could sell some Barton’s candies, packaged. That would work well for the holidays. And the boxes of marzipan. The little baskets of marzipan fruit, the tiny marzipan challahs. The ideas come to Elizabeth in spite of herself. Despite the fact that the store is not hers. Perhaps someday she will have her own store, maybe even buy out this one. Then again, Elizabeth would not want to set up shop on this very street, right here in the neighborhood with its tight line of stores and bitter politics.
Just three doors down Edelman’s Bakery briefly lost Rav Isaiah’s hechsher because of a perceived laxity about closing for Pesach. The scandal is over now, but it was a great shock to the community and, Elizabeth thinks, a deft show of force by Rav Isaiah. The Rav is establishing his standards in the Kehilla, his public persona, meticulous, efficient. Not just Rav Isaiah, but his wife, Rachel, presents herself this way. Elizabeth remembers Rachel’s officious voice on the phone in Kaaterskill. The rebbitzin is zealous in support of her husband’s severity. Rachel’s ideas are played out in her husband’s actions, the giving and the swift taking away, the hard and almost royal granting of favors, patents, and permissions. The Kirshner family and their school and synagogue administrators are like a Tudor court in Washington Heights: the king and his queen, their favorites. Elizabeth sees it that way now, the clever and dangerous politics of the neighborhood, the shows of force and fealty. The aristocrats of the community, like the Rav’s cousin, Joseph, at once allies to Isaiah and potential threats.
Isaac would never accept this view of things. After all, it omits the central point of Rav Isaiah’s rule. That he is no king, but simply a scholar in the service of God, simply more knowledgeable and discerning in the law. A judge, not a dictator. The Rav’s authority is not a matter of politics to Isaac. And following the Rav is, and always will be for Isaac, an issue of aspiring to the best life. Elizabeth had been innocent like this, but curious. She envies her husband his devotion.
She wonders, even now, what her daughters will inherit and discover. Whether they will shake themselves and venture out, even if only to touch the larger world; the city with its thousand neighborhoods and businesses, its traffic, its steel bridges, pointing to far places. Whether they will take exotic paths, researching in libraries or entering law school, learning languages, and she doesn’t know what else. Or whether, like their father, they will absorb themselves in the life and turn, heart and mind, toward the Kehilla. And there is beauty in this. Such observance is ordinary to her mind, but there is something beautiful in the constant conscious and unconscious work, the labor of it, ornamenting each day with prayer, dedicating each month, and season, and every act, to God.
WHILE her mother works, Chani walks the baby in the stroller. She has already brought her sisters home from school. They trooped home together in their pleated skirts and white blouses, knee socks and scuffed-up shoes. They were wearing backpacks and carrying homework papers. Chani brought home her graded Social Studies essay, laboriously written out in cursive, on every other line: President Jimmy Carter is going to give the Panama Canal back to Panama on December 31, 1999. Why? Some people said it
is really theirs. Some people said, “Save our canal, and give Carter to Panama!” It’s a big machlochet. She took her sisters upstairs and gave them milk and oatmeal cookies.
Now Malki is watching the little ones up in the apartment, and Chani walks up and down the block pushing the baby’s stroller through the familiar neighborhood, the buildings of brick and shabby cement. She doesn’t go far, not beyond the Kirshner buildings, the synagogue and the school and the cluster of stores. Every afternoon she walks up and down, repeating to herself her verses for the Bible contest: “Va-yomer Moshe el Adoshem: Bi Anoni lo ish dvarim….” And Moses said unto the Lord: O Lord, I am not a man of words, I am slow of speech, and of a slow tongue. “Ha lo Aharon achicha halevi? Yadati ki daber yidabber hu vigam hinei-hu yoztei likratecha….”Is there not Aaron your brother the Levite? I know he can speak well…. And he shall be to thee a mouth, and thou shalt be to him in God’s stead. She repeats the words over and over into memory. The Bible contest is not until next January, but she is training in the off season. She recites for her father in the evenings, and he follows along in his Tanach, checking for mistakes. Next year Chani will enter the high school competition, and she wants to win.
In the stroller Chaya peeks out at the world, but Chani scarcely notices the familiar shops and streets. Even as she recites her verses, Chani is thinking about Israel. She is imagining the place with its mountains and stone cities, the wells and gnarled old trees, as she has seen in pictures. She is imagining hiking there, up to the tops of the mountains, or walking in the desert. She will grow up and become an archaeologist. She will uncover the places that the ancient words describe, the camps and the passages, the old walls. Or she will work in the orchards. She will grow grapes, and, as it is written, she will sit under her own fig tree. She will make the words come true. The place will be like the map of Fairyland come to life. The verses will become real. She will dig up their original vessels and find their source in the dry wells. She will grow up and be a nature guide in the desert, follow along the wadis, tracing their meandering paths.
In her long skirt and long sleeves, her feet clomping along in dirty white running shoes, Chani walks on, down the street. Of course Chani doesn’t say these things aloud. She hasn’t said anything to her parents, but when she graduates from high school, when she grows up, she will convince them about Israel. First her mother and then her father. She will find a way. They will worry, and protest. Still, she cannot imagine that they will refuse her. She will argue with them and persuade them to let her go there. She will be grown up, seventeen, old enough to marry. By then, for all she knows, the Meshiach will be here on earth, the Temple rebuilt, all of them in Israel together. She walks on with the squeaking stroller, dreaming as she repeats the words, settling them in memory: “Vediber hu licha el ha-am ve-haya hu yihye lecha le-fe ve-attah.” And he shall be your spokesman unto the people.
She looks up. A moving truck is blocking the street, its engine heaving. Chani pushes the stroller closer and sees that a crowd has gathered. There are people from school, and young men from the yeshiva. Neighbors stick their heads out of upper-story windows. They are watching the truck standing there with its ramp down right in front of Rav Isaiah’s building. Two men are wheeling handcarts into the open doorway. They move rapidly, wheeling towers of boxes into the building, five boxes in each trip.
Inside, hidden from sight at the entrance to the Rav’s old first-floor apartment, Isaiah and Rachel are watching the deliverymen. They stand side by side, the two of them. They cannot speak. There was no word from Jeremy, no explanation. Only the call from the delivery company, the men at the door. The boxes flow down the ramp, hundreds of them. They come continuously without a break. They have all come back. Not some, but all. Every single volume of the Rav’s collection returning. A river of books flowing back smoothly into the Rav’s shadowy apartment.
From the rising of the sun to its setting, let the Lord’s name be praised.
—PSALM 113:3
IN JUNE, the longest Shabbes of the summer, Andras and Nina sit at the dining table with Eva and Saul, Maja and Philip. Nina has cleared away the lunch dishes and the wineglasses, and she brings out cups of tea and more rugelach.
“Have another,” she urges her sisters-in-law.
“I can’t,” Maja says.
“I’ve had too many already,” says Saul.
Eva tastes one more. “My last,” she says, smiling. And she turns to Nina. “I never knew what a fine baker you were. Andras, I didn’t know we had such a baker in the family.”
Nina says modestly, “It’s because I didn’t often have a chance. You did so much and so well.”
Eva accepts the compliment in silence. She just sips her tea.
“Andras, I don’t know why you complain, the garden looks green,” Maja says, looking out the window.
“The grass is too long,” Andras says. “I’m actually quite aggravated about it. I didn’t like the job the Curtis boy was doing and I went out to mow it myself yesterday.”
“I told him to wait,” Nina says.
“Your allergies,” Maja says, concerned.
“It doesn’t matter now,” Andras tells them, “I’ve managed to break the tractor mower.”
“Look, we’ll get someone else to take care of it,” Nina says in her quick way. “There are services, yard services. You don’t need to go out there exhausted and do yet another thing. You shouldn’t take that big mower out yourself.”
“I can handle a lawn mower.”
“A tractor!” she says. “This is a dangerous machine. You could have had an accident. You were lucky no one was hurt.”
“Would you like to see the roses in back?” Andras asks Eva.
Eva looks at Saul. “Another day,” she says. “I’m a little tired. I need to rest.”
“They’re lovely,” Nina says.
“I really should go home,” Eva tells them.
“We’ll go too,” says Maja. It does not occur to any of them to go out to the garden without Eva.
“Thank you for the delicious lunch.” Saul rises from his chair.
“Thank you, thank you,” Eva and Maja call back as they walk down the porch steps.
“They really were good, the rugelach,” Nina tells Andras as they walk back inside.
“They were perfect,” says Andras.
Nina looks at him, surprised and pleased.
“They were. It was a perfect lunch.”
“I didn’t think it would be,” Nina says. “I was worried the kugel would be too crisp in that pan—”
“But it was perfect,” he says again. He doesn’t just mean the food. Sitting down together at the table, and having Eva with them, is the purest joy he has ever known.
Nina washes the dishes in the kitchen. She rinses out her crystal goblets, while Andras sits on the porch with his Commentary. After a bit he puts the magazine down and walks along Maple. There is the Curtis place, the long, narrow prefabricated house, adorned with window boxes now. Next to it the Birnbaums’ house stands, white and quiet without Cecil and Beatrix. It is rented for the summer to the Landauers and their five sons. Cecil is going to sell the place, but he is waiting for the right offer, and a strong dollar. Across the street he sees some of the Shulman girls in their small and leafy yard. Still wearing their Shabbes dresses, they are running in and out of the yellow bungalow with old soccer balls, swinging on the tire swing. There is Knowlton’s red bungalow with its chimney still unfinished, where Stan ran out of flagstones. Kaaterskill is all the same. Andras does not take the road all the way up Mohican. He loops back toward home.
He walks back into his garden through the long grass. There are leaves scattered over the back lawn. Even some weeds. He’ll pull them up tomorrow. If he did it now, it would scandalize Nina and the neighbors. Working in the garden is forbidden on Shabbes.
He walks out to his arbor of lilacs and looks at the strawberry plants that grow underneath. Firm green strawberries cover the vines. The
fruit is beginning to ripen, and a few are red. Andras plucks one and eats it. The strawberry is small and tart. In a bowl with sugar, that’s the way his sisters serve them to the children. His tongue loves strawberries with sugar, the sweetness crunching and then melting away. Eva would be delighted by these plants. If she were still baking, she would buy rhubarb and mix together a strawberry rhubarb filling. “This will be a good pie,” she would say if she were well, and she would make pies and load up the sideboard with them. She would serve them in the evenings in the garden. Pies and mandelbrot and prune cake.
In her kitchen Eva offered him rugelach filling on her spoon. Andras had laughed at her then, his older sister offering him the raspberry-and-walnut filling as if it had powers to change or cure. Now, to his surprise, he tastes what she means. Only that it is sweet to grow strawberries, and to eat them when they are just ripe. That it is good to rest in gardens and to sit in lawn chairs, the Sabbath lasting late as the long summer day. That it is good to serve and to eat, to sit and to receive the work of the baker’s hands.
Andras walks through the garden and looks at the cascading lilacs growing over their trellis. He looks at the Japanese maple and the dogwood trees. At last he walks into the house. Quietly he walks into his bedroom to change his clothes. He is startled by the shape on the bed. Nina lying there asleep. He had assumed she was still in the kitchen or on the front porch. She almost never sleeps during the day. She tired herself out from all the cooking, from entertaining his sisters. Of course, they are not the easiest women to bake for. Polite, but critical. Quick to judge. Nina must have exhausted herself yesterday preparing everything, trying to meet, even to exceed, his sisters’ standards.
Andras stands and looks at Nina lying there on the bed. She is curled up with her face against the pillow and her red hair flaming out around her. He looks at her and feels how beautiful she is. He has walked and walked, trying to outwalk the impulse to join himself to his wife, young and necessarily ignorant, unknowing, and, of course, confused by his history. It is his fault, choosing and then blaming her. He has blamed her and accused her in his mind, blamed her for being young. He kneels down next to her sleeping there. He wants to speak to her. He wants to ask her forgiveness, except that it would wake her. She would wake up, and she wouldn’t understand.