One Hundred Philistine Foreskins (51 page)

In the Oscwiecim
shtiebel
on Sabbaths, Reb Berel Bavli kept his daughter at his side during prayers in the men's section, which took up three quarters of the front portion of the synagogue until the floor-to-ceiling opaque screen partition behind which the women sat on folding chairs in cramped rows smelling of bodily secretions and talcum powder and chicken fat. It was acceptable for Tema to sit with the men as she was still a very young child, not yet even seven years old, the age of the princess Snow White when the magic mirror broke the news to the wicked stepmother that she no longer was the fairest in the land, the age at which, according to Rashi the commentator-in-chief, a female is at the peak of her beauty. How do we learn this? From the extraordinary delineation of Mother Sarah's age at the time of her death as specified in the opening of the portion “The Lives of Sarah” (this was a woman who had no life, only lives)—one hundred years and twenty years and seven years. Why the breakdown and repetition of years? To teach us that at one hundred years Mother Sarah was as pure as a twenty-year-old girl who is not responsible for her actions and therefore it is as if she had never sinned, and at twenty years she still retained the perfection of beauty of a seven-year-old girl.

Tema was already reading Hebrew fluently by then. Throughout the services as she sat among the men her father instructed her in the protocol of prayer ritual—when to rise and when to sit, when to bend your knees and bow your head, when to take three steps backward and forward, when to say Blessed Is He and Blessed Is His Name and when to say Amen, when to pray out loud and when in silence, how to keep up with the cantor as he marks the completion of a passage by chanting out loud the last few lines, how to
shuckle
and sway, how to
daven
in a low murmur moving your lips never reading silently to yourself as if the Siddur were some kind of story book, how to stand with your feet pressed together oblivious to all distractions during the Eighteen Benedictions silent meditation and especially during the
Kedusha
sanctification that the angels themselves sing to God on His heavenly throne, and so on and so forth.

Tema grasped every point instantly, swiftly committing the entire liturgy to memory. Reb Berel Bavli could not refrain from caressing the top of her silken head and giving a proprietary tug to one of her two thick long braids, grinning with pleasure at the men seated around him and muttering, “If it was a boy this is what you would call a one-thousand-percent return on your investment. Nu, so tell me? Am I right or am I right?”

On the occasions when the Oscwiecim Rebbe would rise and lean on his wooden lectern to offer in Yiddish some words of Torah, Tema would listen closely, often posing questions provoked by his talk as she walked home with her father after shul. She also asked questions about the weekly Torah portion, following along with the reading attentively in her Tanakh, including the sections skipped over in most children's classrooms such as the accounts of Lot's daughters impregnated by their father, the rape of Dina, Reuven sleeping with his father's concubine, Judah taking as a prostitute his son's widow, and so on—the dirty parts. She deciphered the cantillation signs and accents above and below the letters like musical notes and rests to aid in the memorization of entire blocks of text that soon she was singing. When they read the portion opening with Jacob's flight to Haran and his dream of a ladder with angels ascending and descending, she turned to her father and asked, “But aren't the angels in heaven? Shouldn't they be going down first?” Reb Berel Bavli beamed. “You hear that?” he boomed to his bench mates. “The very same question Rashi asks. The mind of a man—such a pity!”

Above all her father stressed the obligation to say every word, not to skip a single word of the prayers, though all around her, Tema had already observed, men were
davening
by rote, itching to get it over with for the thousandth time so that they could go home, unbuckle their belts, and stuff themselves with the Sabbath
cholent
stew that would knock them out cold like a sledgehammer for the rest of the afternoon. Her father repeated this instruction so regularly that the men in their orbit would chant the refrain along with him like a chorus, Every single word! No skipping!—until the day they were clutching their bellies with painfully suppressed hilarity, and when Reb Berel Bavli glared at them, an expression of confusion and hurt mixed with fury in his eyes, they pointed to the little girl. Tema was reciting the Kaddish. “See how nice she listens to you?” one of them commented, the only man among them who had no business dealings with Reb Berel Bavli. “Such a good girl, she doesn't skip a single word, just like you said—including the Kaddish. Watch out, Reb Berish, already she has you dead and buried. Either a gold digger or a Dumb Dora—but any way you look at it, the mind of a female after all.”

But the greater portion by far of her learning Tema acquired on her own, through personal diligence and will, by applying herself and cracking the codes, her inner being drawn naturally to the material. Nevertheless, to create the illusion of normalcy, every morning her mother put on her weekday wig and makeup, and, holding Tema's hand, they walked together the several blocks to the kindergarten operated by Mrs. Moskowitz in the dark basement of her home near Fiftieth Street under the elevated tracks, which set the entire building quaking and shuddering whenever a train rumbled by overhead or jolted to a stop. There the little girls were taught the letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the vowels, some blessings and basic prayers for specific occasions, upon waking up and going to sleep, for example, or setting out on a journey or finishing your business in the bathroom, and so forth, a few holiday songs along with a warning not to sing them out loud when boys or men are within earshot, as well as instruction on how to help their mothers in preparing the special dishes and cleaning the house for Sabbaths and festivals. They were also given guidance in personal hygiene, such as the importance of wiping one's nose in a ladylike fashion with the handkerchief they wore fastened to the bodice of their dresses with a safety pin.

At story time, they would sit on an old piece of carpet on the floor in a circle flowing from Mrs. Moskowitz in a wooden folding chair holding a bundle that contained her newest baby with her toddlers at her feet as she read inspirational bible tales and legends to them in Yiddish from the Tzena Urena, her eyes gleaming with emotion as she recounted Mother Rebekah's exemplary behavior in offering water from the well not only to quench the thirst of the weary traveler Eliezer just arrived at Padan-Aram where he had been sent by his master Abraham to find a suitable wife for his son Isaac, but also to draw bucketful after bucketful of water for all of his camels as well. “And he had plenty of camels, girls, Avraham Avinu was a very rich man. Do you girls have any idea how much water each and every camel needs and how long it takes for them to drink because they have to store so much up for marching across the whole desert? Girls, I want you to remember how Rivka Imeinu right away ran to feed the camels also even without being asked if you want to find for yourselves a good husband some day.”

At play time, they molded hallahs from brown clay giggling behind their hands at the resemblance between their works of art and little turds,
they drew holiday pictures and fashioned decorations from construction paper and paste, they dressed up as brides in white sheets, enacting the high point of their future wedding day, after which the rest of their lives would funnel down as expected.

More and more often, Tema held back when it was time to set out for school. For a full week she cried the entire way as they walked there and had to be dragged down the cement steps, weeds sprouting from the cracks, to Mrs. Moskowitz's cellar door where she clung to her mother like a sinking person clawing for solid ground. Then one morning she simply sat down full stop on the floor in the foyer with her arms crossed over her chest, shook her head in a slow flinty rhythm from side to side, her lips clamped tight, and refused absolutely to step out the door and leave home.

“What do you mean she won't go?” Reb Berel Bavli hissed to his wife in their bedroom that night. “Who does she think she is—her majesty the queen or some other fancy lady? Hutz-klutz, Miss Maggie Putz! In this department, she's your daughter, one hundred percent. Since when do you ask a kid if they want or if they don't want? Do I ask a chicken what it wants? You just pick her up and take her there, even if she's kicking and screaming bloody murder the whole way. Don't worry, she'll get used to it, I give you my word. Human beings can get used to anything, just like animals.”

But her mother took her in another direction. On the morning that Rosalie Bavli did not paint her face or put on her everyday wig but instead wrapped her head in a dark scarf drawn forward with the ends draped over her shoulders and concealed her eyes behind sunglasses, Tema accepted the hand extended down to her and allowed herself to be led out of the house. The two of them walked together in silence until they came to a hardware store directly across the street from the synagogue of the Oscwiecim Rebbe. They flattened themselves against the shadowy depths of the windowed alcove that led to the store's entrance showcasing different color variations of linoleum samples in a confetti pattern, timers for Sabbath lights, pressure cookers, and so on, their eyes fixed on the Oscwiecim
shtiebel
opposite above which the Rebbe and his family lived.

When they spotted the rebbetzin coming out pushing her shopping cart and making her way up the street and around the corner, Tema's mother signaled by squeezing her daughter's hand that she was already holding
tensely. Together they crossed the street and briskly walked down the alley along the side of the Oscwiecim
shtiebel
, entered through a door in the middle, and climbed the staircase that led directly into the Rebbe's dining room where he sat enthroned in his usual place to receive his Hasidim at the head of the great mahogany table covered with an embossed burgundy-colored velvet cloth with the heavy volumes spread open before him. Tema was not quite seven at the time, her hair in its long braids had never been cut, her existence on this earth had been a loan from God in answer to her mother's prayers, and now the loan was being repaid.

Her mother clicked open her black leather purse with the gold clasp, releasing a familiar, embarrassingly private puff of sour aroma, and drew out a fat sealed envelope that she handed to Kaddish stationed at his usual post a few paces behind his father. “Mazel tov,” Rosalie Bavli murmured. Kaddish tore open the envelope, counted the cash stuffed inside by flipping through the bills without taking them out, gave a receipt in the form of an acknowledgment nod, then slipped the whole package somewhere inside his black jacquard satin kaftan. He had turned eighteen a few weeks earlier and his marriage to the sixteen-year-old daughter of the Kalashnikover Rebbe had just been celebrated with candlelit processions and rapturous dancing in the closed-off streets of Boro Park and a caravan of ambulances with engines running standing ready to speed away revelers overcome by the press of the crowd and palpitations of the heart brought on by exultation at the union of two such illustrious Hasidic dynasties. Tema observed closely how her mother, still standing, leaned in slightly toward the Rebbe, and with commendable modesty and deference, in the softest of voices, practically a whisper, uttered such words as A special child, A gift from God, You know the situation, You were there when I prayed for her, all of which the Rebbe acknowledged by nodding his head sagely, bunching his beard and caressing it in contemplative downward strokes. Then her mother pushed forward with her request—that Tema be allowed to study with the boys, Talmud, Mishna, Gemara, Halakha, Law, Philosophy, Kabbala, Midrash, Rabbinics, the works, she was a special case, a way must be found, perhaps a partition could be erected in the study hall, maybe a thick curtain hung up in the
beis medrash
behind which the girl would be invisible, but from where she could sit and take it all in.

“Come here, child,” the Rebbe beckoned to Tema. A brief silence
followed after she approached while he rummaged inside his kaftan and came up with a hard red candy wrapped in cellophane flecked with lint and shreds of snuff. “This is for you, child.” He held out the sweet. “But before you eat you must say a
brakha
. So tell me, daughter, which blessing would you say?”

Tema answered at once that she would say a
Shehakol
.

“But my Kaddish here”—and the Rebbe jerked his head in the vicinity of the son behind him—“he tells me you should say a
Borei Pri Ha'etz
, because it is a cherry candy, the fruit of a tree.”

Tema shook her head. No, a
Shehakol
. The cherry candy is very far away from the cherry tree. Maybe it was never even near a cherry tree. Maybe it is only cherry-flavored. A
Shehakol
—the all-purpose
brakha
.

“
Gut gezugt
. Well said. In this matter, I must admit I hold with the female.” The Rebbe cast an apologetic glance over his shoulder at his son. “But if you happen to have already said
Borei Pri Ha'etz
, that is also good—and you can go ahead and eat
gezunt aheit
. Better just to eat in such a case than to say another
brakha
, so you would not be taking God's name in vain.”

The Rebbe smoothed his tea-stained mustache with the pad of his forefinger and gazed at Tema through lowered lids dripping with skin tags like stalactites. “So tell me, child, the Hebrew word for name is
shem
—am I right?” She indicated her agreement. “Is it masculine or feminine?” “Masculine,” Temima replied. “Even though the plural is
shemot
, which is the feminine form?” “Masculine,” she repeated unwavering. “
Gut gezugt
,” the Rebbe said again, and bobbed his approval. “But why do you think this masculine word has such a feminine sound in the plural?”