A Curable Romantic (11 page)

As incredible as it may seem, those who knew my father as a young man claim that though he never uttered a word that couldn’t be found in the Torah or the Talmud or the Commentaries or the Codes, he was a chatterbox who never ceased talking. However, as he grew older, the fear that he might tarnish the holy tongue through everyday use took hold of him, and by the time I was born, he’d ceased speaking in complete sentences and only whispered one or two phrases to make his will known. If our mother pleased him, for example, he might say,
(Who can find?)
or
(greater than pearls)
, and we understood that he was showering his abbreviated praises upon her.
Who can find a noble wife? Her price is beyond pearls
(Proverbs 31:10). Or if, on a cold winter’s day, I raced out to skylark with friends in the snow, he might block my path and hold out two woolen scarves to me and say,
and I knew he meant
Bind them
as in
Bind them about your throat
(Proverbs 3:3). On Sabbath evenings, after we children had been put to bed, we’d hear him, through the thin walls of our house, crooning
Song of Songs
to our Mother. Indeed, he did this so regularly that, after many years, if, in her hearing, speaking of agricultural concerns, he happened to mention “a flock of goats” (6:5) or, in looking at our ceilings, muttered something about “the beams of our house” (1:7), she was helpless to control her blushes.

My sisters — Gitl, Golde, Rukhl, Reyzl, Feyge, Khayke, and Sore Dvore — all older than I, understood him perfectly. Perhaps their education, occurring at home, had been more thorough than mine; perhaps, having known him when he’d spoken in complete sentences, they could decipher his shorthand more easily; perhaps they simply loved him better than I did and found it easier to indulge him. Whatever the reason, I couldn’t understand a word he said. Taking pity on me, my sisters and sometimes even my mother translated his remarks into a warm and womanly Yiddish, and as a result, I seldom bothered listening to him at all, nor did I take seriously the obligation to learn the Torah backwards and forwards in order to understand what he was saying.

(A word of caution here: as my father’s eccentricities were explained
to me when I was a small child by my sisters, it’s possible they thought to cast it all in a wondrous fairy-tale light, suspecting that I, a stubborn child, might be more amenable to the polylingual demands placed upon our family by our father if I could believe in their tales of talking bears and jabbering angels. It’s also possible that I’m misremembering —
perhaps even intentionally!
— what was in fact no more than my father’s not unusual penchant, given the time and place, for peppering his speech with scriptural quotations.

Be that as it may, when he towered over me that day in his office and said,
You shall be holy, as I, the Lord your God, am holy
(Leviticus 19:2), I understood from his tone that the preamble was over and the specifics were now to be addressed.

He sighed unhappily.
he said.
Stand erect and prepare yourself
(Jeremiah 46:14).
A virgin girl will lie in your bosom
(I Kings 1:2).
Be calm, fear not, let not your heart grow faint
(Isaiah 7:4).
Blood may be dashed
(Ezekiel 43:18)
on the day of a man’s entry into the inner courtyard
(Ezekiel 44:27).
The place is tight
(Isaiah 49:20).
It is hidden
(Judges 13:18).
For as it is written
:
Between her legs, he knelt, toppled, lay
(Judges 5:27).
One fell against the other
(Jeremiah 46:16).
He sat on her lap
(II Kings 4:20).
Joy and gladness shall be found there
(Isaiah 51:3).