In the Catskills: A Century of Jewish Experience in "The Mountains" (11 page)

He recalled firing strikes at the apple trees with pebbles when Harry had come to tell him that it was time that he became a Jew.

“What do you mean become a Jew? I already am a Jew.”

“You still have to become one.”

“Even if I am one?”

“Even if.”

“Would you explain that?”

“No. Nothing to explain.”

“But I have baseball practice. The team needs me. It’s an obligation.”

Douglas had him there. As he learned both new words and Harry, he tried mixing intelligences. Harry was big on duty, morality, obligation.

“No,” his father said.

Harry was short on explanation. The shorter the explanation the shorter the next argument.

“That’s not right, Harry. I went to
shul
with you last Yom Kippur. Doesn’t that make me a Jew?”

Harry walked toward him with one of his here-we-go-again looks.

“Yom Kippur wasn’t for you. It was for me. My sins. You haven’t been around long enough to have your own. Except for when you play these … games, but that’s small potatoes.”

“C’mon, Harry, what kind of sins could you have?”

But it wasn’t all sham. It had never occurred to him that his father was composed of the same inferior material as the rest of mankind. Douglas continued to stare at his father, surprised at his own surprise. Thomas Jefferson owned slaves; Babe Ruth could be traded to Boston when the Yankees decided that he was of no further use. It was that level of disenchantment.

“Do I have to become an American, too?”

“Not the same thing.”

“Why? Tell me why.”

“I got something else to do.”

“Isn’t this important, too? Just because you don’t make any money from it …”

“You know, you’re giving me a headache with this damn rube routine of yours. I’m too busy for games. Case closed. Personally it doesn’t matter to me one way or the other, but I promised Stella, I promised your mother to have you bar mitzvahed. That should be enough. For both of us. You’re going and you’re going to do it with the least amount of noise. With
no
noise. From now on no discussion and no having fun at my expense. You want to resist, do it passively, like Mahatma Gandhi.”

“Do I go there or does he come here?”

“You’ll go there.”

“Where is there?” Douglas asked. Now it was about ninety percent question and ten percent mosquito biting.

“Starting Monday and every day until it’s over, except Saturday, you’ll go up the road to the Foremans.’ Go into the kitchen and ask for Ben’s father-in-law. His name is Mr. Baum. Ask civilly, now, none of your intellectual card tricks. You’ll also make sure you’ve washed up. I don’t want you touching the books with dirty hands. You’ll sit down with Zaida, that’s what everyone calls him, and you do what he tells you. Simple. No fuss, no noise. Easy as cracking an egg. You do it until August and I won’t bother you. About that.”

“What about my chores?”

“You idiot, if I take you away from your chores then I
intend
to have them done for you. Give me credit for some intelligence.”

Harry had an immobile gray face with gray eyes that could convince you that you just didn’t exist and jet-black hair combed straight back in a no-nonsense fashion. A policeman’s face or a bill collector’s. When provoked it rubberized and became animated, unused blood vessels suddenly swelled and ran red. Douglas knew how to bring life to Harry’s face but only at the risk of triggering his tongue. He hated his father the most when that happened.

Times like those he felt defeated, alone, worthless. It made him wonder if the sharp edges they faced each other with would have been rubbed smooth by now if his mother were the buffer between. They needed a translator and Stella spoke both their languages. Harry had been changed by her death. Douglas did not remember if Stella could move Harry. Maybe she might have convinced him that their son wasn’t just another day laborer on the farm.

Genuinely surprised, he remembered saying to Harry, “I didn’t know the old man was a rabbi.”

“He’s not.”

“He’s not? Then I guess he’s a teacher of bar mitzvahs, if there’s such a thing.”

“No, he’s not a teacher of anything. Just an old man, a very religious old man who happens to be handy. That’s credentials enough for me.”

Harry walked Douglas up the steep hill to the Foreman place. It was raining that day. Douglas was not prepared to begin. He needed sunshine to start new things. Harry wouldn’t listen.

“So you’re finally joining the flock,” Ben said with a broad peasant grin that always infuriated Andy. “
Mazel tov
.”

Douglas looked at him vacantly.

“The Jewish people, the Jewish people,
boychik
,” Ben added.

He’s been with his chickens too long, Douglas thought, talking about flocks. And he wasn’t joining anything, just submitting to Fascist pressure like the Czechs.

The house was old, older than anyone who was living in it, and like the elderly it had begun to bend into itself. The porch sagged in the middle and little puddles of water had formed there. The roof had buckled, too. In the rear, behind the parlor, was a large old-fashioned kitchen with the highest ceiling Douglas had ever seen. An enormous woodburning stove, like a metal dragon, covered the back wall. It breathed fire and belched smoke intermittently. He heard hissing and crackling noises escape from its bowels. Something strange and delicious was cooking on it.

The long wooden table and six chairs near the stove were simple and rough. Hanging from a fuzzy white cord, thumbtacked into a ceiling beam, was a circular staircase of flypaper. It, too, was in poor condition due to exposure to light, heat and the rigors of the previous winter.

Old Mr. Baum sat in the far corner of the room on a small bench that was bleached of all color. He was slumped over a nondescript table, his head supported by an arm, reading the Torah, his lips moving with an uneven regularity. The presence of visitors meant little to Zaida. Douglas looked out the window at the steady, perpendicular rain and knew that there would be difficulties.

“Zaida,” his son-in-law called, the way you do to someone you wish to awaken without frightening. The old man turned up his hand like a traffic cop to silence yet hold Ben while he finished the page. Then he closed the book and looked at them. Douglas swore that the old man actually looked through, and past them as if they were clear glass statues of no particular merit.

He was short and shaped like a barrel. Possibly if he arched his back he could manage five feet. A yellowish shredded-wheat beard hung from his face like a shade on a window. Above it was a pair of eyes unlike anyone’s he had ever seen before. Maybe once. His mother had taken him, long ago, to the Bronx Zoo, where he had watched a sick old elephant who had great difficulty in rising. An attendant told them that the animal was to be destroyed soon. She told Douglas that someday he might meet people who had eyes like the elephant and carried the pain of the world in them. He now looked into Zaida’s eyes and knew what she meant.

Zaida finally stood up and seemed no taller. He and Ben spoke in a strange language Douglas thought was Yiddish.

“He says he’ll be ready in a few minutes, he’s got to take a leak,” Ben said. “You should be so kind and wait.”

“Would you ask him please if he might speak English,” Douglas said when Zaida had managed a slow, laborious exit.

Ben shrugged. “Zaida speaks some nine languages. Can you imagine that, nine languages? Hebrew and Yiddish and Polish and Russian and German. A little Hungarian, too. I forget the rest, but English ain’t one of them. I figured you knew.”

Douglas thought he caught Harry looking a little puzzled for a second, the way the first American Indian might have looked when he felt the first Caucasian’s bullet. No matter, Harry had quickly readjusted.

“No big deal,” he said. “You’re not here for polite conversation. Just get started and stick with it. That’s how things get done.”

Without looking, Zaida motioned him to sit down next to him with a short, flyswatting slap. Douglas complied cautiously, uncomfortably. The old man smelled of musty wood and mildewed rooms, of dried tobacco and deeply ingrained sweat. His beard had indistinct particles trapped in its mesh. Under a maroon sweater that had begun unraveling a long time ago at the cuffs he wore suspenders. Douglas saw the outline of the buckles on each side like tiny square breasts.

Shifting his weight to one side Zaida dug an amputated stub of a pencil from his pocket. It was pointless and withered with age—like the crap he’s going to make me learn, Douglas thought. As if unused to writing, Zaida smothered the pencil with stumpy, nicotined fingers. He turned to the end of the book which was its beginning and fell on a small group of mysterious symbols that bore no relationship to any of the twenty-six letters in Douglas’s alphabet.

“
Baruch
,” Zaida growled, and it could have come from some wounded animal deep within its lair.

“Pardon me?”

The old man repeated the growl and tapped impatiently waiting for its echo.

“
Baruch?
” Douglas replied, disoriented. He couldn’t see how the old man could get
that
sound from
those
symbols.

Zaida advanced to the next cluster, showing neither satisfaction nor disappointment in his pupil. Showing nothing.

“
Attoy
.”

“
Attoy
,” Douglas repeated shakily. He lifted his head when something flew across the corner of his eye.

Andy strode into the kitchen without the basic salutations and sat in a rocking chair next to the stove. He opened a book of crossword puzzles, then got up to fill his Parker pen from a hexagonal bottle of ink in the cupboard. After finding the right puzzle he settled back comfortably in the rocker and threw a nod in Douglas’s direction, which Douglas quickly snapped up and returned.

“
Baruch
,” Zaida grunted when those symbols reappeared again, which Douglas failed to recognize and felt stupid about.

“
Baruch
—that’s a six-letter word meaning blessing, which the next few months ain’t going to be,” Andy volunteered from his place by the fire. He chuckled and reburied himself in the puzzle.

The old man ignored the chuckler. He continued to point and growl—sometimes waiting a second for Douglas to return the growl, sometimes not. But the pattern was clearly established that first day. Either Douglas would follow closely or he would fall hopelessly behind.

The first session depressed Douglas. His eyes thumped and he had a nauseous headache. It was education by echo, religion by rote. It was neither education nor religion, but it elated him, too, because Andy was there to witness the stupidity of it all even though he expressed his opinions to no particular audience. They were brothers, now, so to speak.

As one day dissolved into the next Douglas repeated the words of Moses and Solomon, Joseph and Isaac, not knowing what they meant or who had said them. And forgot even the simplest of phrases. Yet Zaida plowed on unaffected by his student’s gross failures or small successes, when, at last, a few did come. He never turned back to look.

Andy snickered, hooted and peppered with buckshot every chance he could from across the huge kitchen. Unruffled, with four thousand years of patience, Zaida moved his pencil across the pages that were on the verge of disintegration through age and use. Douglas remembered wondering, that last spring before the war, why the old man kept silent, as Andy’s steady barrage of abuse grew more intense, its dispenser more animated, more involved. It took little intelligence to realize that it was no mere coincidence that Andy was in the rocker while Douglas studied with Zaida. And if Douglas knew, then surely the old man must know that his grandson was not sending him bouquets even if he spoke none of Zaida’s nine languages. But it never varied, those two hours a day, listening to Andy’s undirected atheism, watching Zaida’s indifference.

“God, and I use the word the way I use ‘shit,’ is this boring! How can anyone stand it? And from
him
? How do you drill it into his thick head that there is no God? God is a cartoon character the capitalists invented to entertain and police the masses. At least those idiot Reds are right about that. Now look at this damned fool. He pissed his whole life away on a book of fairy tales. Just like they expect me to piss away my whole life on a two-by-nothing chicken farm. I’ll be goddamned if I will. First chance I get it’s up and out. Anyplace, anywhere but here.”

Douglas decided that it was exciting to watch and see how much the old man could take before he would finally react. He was constantly braced for a clap of thunder or a bolt of lightning from a God they both denied since Zaida refused to defend himself or how he spent his life.

Nothing happened. It was all so strange. Yet something was occurring that he did not understand, like a card game in which he was the dummy. Neither of them spoke to him, but bar-mitzvah lesson aside, he was providing some twisted, arcane line of communication between a bearded lunatic and a ranting, raving maniac. And after August the two of them would probably never sit in the same room again. If that blessed month ever arrived.