The Rabbi (20 page)

He was a boy in addition to being a prodigy, and he gloried in the festivals. On the evening of any holiday the Chassidim gathered to celebrate. The tables would be covered with bowls of the boiled chickpeas called
nahit
, platters of cakes and kugels, and bottles of schnapps. Women, being lesser creatures, did not intrude on the scene. The men ate sparingly and drank frequently. Aware that evil could be overcome only by joy and not by sorrow and believing that ecstasy brought them close to God, they allowed happiness to flood their souls. Soon one of the bearded Chassids would rise and beckon to a comrade. Hands on each other's shoulders, they would start to dance around the floor. Others would pair off and begin to dance, until the floor was filled with bearded couples. The tempo was swift and triumphant. The only music was the voices of the dancers, chanting over and over again a single biblical phrase. Someone would give Max a swallow of fiery schnapps as a joke, and someone would choose the little boy for his dancing partner, perhaps even the Rabbi himself. Head light and feet unsteady, propelled by large hands which gripped his shoulders, he would whirl around the room in breathless joy, his small feet flying in imitation of his partner's kicking and stamping, while the deep voices of the bearded men boomed a rhythmic repeated chorus: “
V'tahhair
libanu l'avd'choh be-ehmess
”—“Purify our hearts to serve Thee in truth.”

He became a community legend years before he was
bar mitzvah
. As he plunged deeper and with increasing power into the sea of Talmud, he was singled out frequently for choice morsels at the Rabbi's table, and his father's friends would stop him in the street to pat his back or touch his head. At the age of eight he was taken from the
chedar
where the rest of the boys went to school and placed for private instruction with Reb Yankel Cohen, a tubercular scholar whose eyes shone with sick brilliance. It was almost like studying alone. The boy recited for hours on end while the gaunt man sat and coughed endlessly into a large rag. They did not converse. When Max's tired voice strayed into false philosophy or faulty interpretation, the man's clawlike hand would dart out and fingers like pincers would squeeze the flesh in his forearm. His arms wore purple sploches until after Reb Yankel had been buried. Four months before the teacher died he informed Chaim Gross that he had taught the ten-year-old all that he knew. From that day until Max was
bar mitzvah
he went each morning to the community Study House, where he sat around a table with men, some of them graybeards. Each day they studied a different portion of the Law, arguing hotly about interpretation. After Max had assumed Jewish manhood at thirteen, Rabbi Label himself undertook the responsibility for the prodigy's education. It was a singular honor. The only other student in the Rabbi's home was his son-in-law, a man of twenty-two who was awaiting ordination as a rabbi.

Chaim Gross thanked God daily for the benediction he had received in his son. The boy's future was assured. He would become a rabbi and his brilliance would enable him to gather around him a distinguished rabbinical court, bringing him wealth, honor, and fame. This, from the son of a seller of resinous wines! Dreaming of Max's future one winter night, Chaim Gross died of heart failure, smiling.

Max didn't question God for having taken his father. But standing at the open grave in the little Jew's Cemetery, saying the
kaddish
, he felt for the first time the cut of the wind and the gnawing of the cold.

At the advice of Rabbi Label he hired a Polish clerk named Stanislaus to tend the wine shop. Once a week Max carelessly
checked the books in order to keep Stanislaus' stealing at a reasonable level. The shop gave him far less money than his father had earned, but it enabled him to continue his life of study.

He was twenty years old, preparing to be a rabbi and keeping his eyes open for a suitable wife, when hard times began to grind Poland. The summer that year was fiercely hot, with no rain. In the fields, the peasants' wheat and barley burned in the sun until the plants cracked instead of bending when the wind blew. The few sugar beets that were harvested that fall were soft and wrinkled, and the potatoes were small and bitter. With the first snows the peasants flocked to the textile mills and the glass and paper factories, where they competed to work for lower and lower wages. Soon savage fighting marked the changing of work shifts, and mobs with hungry bellies began to form in the streets, listening to sullen men who waved their fists when they shouted.

In the beginning, only a few Jews were beaten. Soon, however, regular raids were made on the ghettos, the Poles forgetting their children's hunger cries in the momentary thrill of striking down the men who had killed the Saviour. In Vorka, Stanislaus realized that as manager of a Jew's shop it would be difficult to convince a marauding mob that he was not a Jew. He fled the shop one afternoon without bothering to lock the door, taking with him a week's receipts in lieu of notice. His exit was timely. The following evening a laughing pack of drunkards swept into the Vorka ghetto. In the streets blood flowed like wine; in the shop of the late Chaim Gross wine spilled like blood. What they could not drink or carry away they wasted and smashed. The next day, while Jews tended their wounds and buried their dead, Max realized that the shop was gone. He accepted the loss with a feeling of relief. His real work lay with his people and with God. He helped the Rabbi conduct four funerals and he prayed with his brethren for God's help.

After the crisis had passed, Rabbi Label supported him for two months. He was ready to become a rabbi with his own flock. But when he began to look for a congregation, it became clear that the Jews of Poland had no need for new rabbis. Jews by the tens of thousands were leaving the country, mostly for England and the United States.

Rabbi Label tried not to show his worry. “So, you will be my son. What we eat, you will eat. Times will grow better.”

But every day Max saw more Jews leaving. Who would help them find God in strange surroundings? When he asked Rabbi Label the teacher shrugged.

But the pupil already knew the answer.

He arrived in New York during an August heat wave, wearing his long, heavy gabardine and a round black hat. For two days and two nights he stayed in the two-room flat of Simon and Buni Wilensky, who had left Vorka with their three children six weeks before he had left for America himself. Wilensky had a job in a loft factory where small American flags were made. He was a stitcher. He assured Max that as soon as Buni stopped crying she would like America, too. When Max had listened to Buni cry for two days and could no longer stand the sounds and the smells of the Wilensky children he walked out of the tenement and wandered through the East Side until he came to a synagogue. Inside, a rabbi listened to him and then put him in a taxi and took him to the Union of Orthodox Rabbis. They had no congregations open at the moment, a Union rabbi told him sympathetically. But there were many requests for cantors to sing the High Holiday services. Was he a
chahzen
, a cantor? If so, they could send him to Congregation Beth Israel in Bayonne, New Jersey. The
shul
was willing to pay seventy-five dollars.

The moment he began to sing in Bayonne the worshipers looked at him in amazement. He had committed the service to memory while a young boy, and he knew each note of the melody like a friend. In his mind the music ran true and clear, but what came from his mouth could not be called singing. He had the voice of a learned frog. Following the first service, a stern congregation treasurer named Jacobson beckoned him with an imperious finger. It was too late for the
shul
to get another
chahzen
. But in a brief conversation Max was informed that he would not get seventy-five dollars for singing during the holidays. He would get ten dollars and a place to sleep. For ten dollars, nobody could demand a nightingale, Jacobson said.

His performance as a cantor was so wretched that most of the people in the synagogue avoided him. But Jacobson grew friendlier. He was a fat bald man with pale skin and a gold
front tooth. From the lapel pocket of his checkered suit three cigars always peeped. He asked a lot of personal questions and Max answered them politely. Finally the
Amerikaneh
revealed that he was a
shadchen
, a marriage broker.

“The answer to your troubles is a good wife,” he said. “‘For created He both male and female.' And said he, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth.'”

Max was receptive. As a young scholar of reputation he had expected to marry into one of the wealthy Jewish families in Vorka. With a pretty girl to make him a home, and with influential in-laws to provide a large dowery, life in America would be much more pleasant.

But Jacobson looked at him closely and spoke aloud in English, which he knew Max did not yet understand. “You greenie you, you dress like you're inviting a pogrom. You ain't a giant, no girl is going to feel small next to you.” He sighed. “Your face ain't pocked, that's the nicest thing a person can say.” In Yiddish he explained that in America the market for Polish Jews was not nearly so good as in Poland.

“Do your best,” Max said.

Leah Masnick was five years older than Max. An orphan, she lived with her uncle Lester Masnick and his wife Ethel. The Masnicks conducted a kosher chicken business. They treated her tenderly, but the girl imagined that their bodies smelled of blood and feathers even when they were freshly bathed. A second-generation American, she would never have considered marrying an immigrant if it were not for the fact that it had been years since a man had asked her anywhere. She was not ugly, although her eyes were small and her nose was long, but she lacked femininity; she did not know how to smile at a man, or how to make him laugh. Of late, she had felt even less like a woman. Her pancake breasts seemed to her to be growing flatter. Her periods became irregular and she skipped several months; sometimes she imagined wildly that her tall, slender body was turning into a boy's for lack of use. She had twenty-eight hundred forty-three dollars in the New Jersey Guarantee Trust Company. When Jacobson came to her uncle's house one evening and smiled at her over his coffee cup she knew that whoever he had for her would be all right, that she could not afford to waste any chance. When she heard that the man was
a rabbi she felt a thrill of hope. She had read English novels about ministers and their wives, and she pictured her future life in a small but neat English parsonage with
mezuzahs
on the doors. When she saw him, a little shrimp of a man, bearded and wearing funny unpressed clothes, with odd, girl-like curls dropping in front of his ears, she forced herself to talk pleasantly to him, her eyes bright with tears.

Even so, she became hysterical ten days before the wedding and screamed that she would not marry him unless he got an American haircut. Max was shocked, but he had noticed that the American rabbis he had met did not wear earlocks. Resignedly he sat in a barber's chair and let an Italian get the giggles as he slashed off the
payehs
Max had worn all his life. Without the earlocks he felt naked. When Leah's Uncle Lester took him into a department store and bought him a gray double-breasted suit with square padded shoulders, he felt that he could now pass as a genuine
goy
.

But his appearance caused no undue excitement when he returned to the office of the Union of Orthodox Rabbis. His visit was fortunately timed, they told him. A new congregation was being started in Manhattan, and its members requested that the Union obtain the services of a rabbi for them.
Shaarai Shomayim
was small, with only a few members and one rented room in which to hold services, but it would grow, the Union rabbis assured him. Max was overjoyed. He had his first rabbinate.

They rented a four-room flat two blocks from the
shul
, spending a large portion of the dowry on furniture. It was here they came on the night they were married. Both were tired from the overexcitement of the day and weak from lack of food, having been unable to eat the wedding chickens cooked by Aunt Ethel Masnick. Max sat on his new sofa and fiddled with the dial of his new radio while his new wife disrobed in the next room and got into the new bed. When he lay down next to her he was aware that the top of his head touched her ear while his cold toes rested on her trembling ankles. Her hymen was tough as leather. He strove mightily, muttering quick prayers, intimidated by the fact that it would not give and by the shrill little cries of fright and pain which came from his bride. At last he succeeded and the membrane tore, accompanied by a piercing shriek from Leah. When it was over she lay alone at
the far edge of the bed and wept, partly because of the pain and humiliation and partly because her strange little husband lay sprawled naked on two-thirds of the bed singing triumphant songs in Hebrew, a language she did not understand.

At first everything pressed on Max Gross, threatening him. The sidewalks were filled with unfamiliar people who pushed and shoved, forever hurrying. In the streets, motor cars and buses and trolleys and taxicabs blared their horns and filled the air with the stink of gas exhausts. Everywhere there was noise and dirt. In his own home, where there should have been peace, there was a woman who refused to speak Yiddish to him, although she was his wife. He never spoke anything but Yiddish to her; she never answered in anything but English: it was a tie. Amazingly, she had expected conversation during meals, weeping when he insisted on studying while he ate. One night soon after the wedding he told her gently that she was the wife of a rabbi who had been raised by the Chassidim. A Chassid's wife, he explained, must cook and bake and sew and clean and pray and
bench licht
instead of forever talking, talking, talking about nothing and everything.

Each day he went to
shul
early and stayed late, finding peace. God was the same as He had been in Poland, the prayers were the same. He was able to sit all day and study and pray, losing himself in contemplation while the shadows of the day grew longer. His congregation found him learned but aloof. They respected his knowledge but they did not love him.