More Stories From My Father's Court Read online

  Chaim then realized that he had fallen into a den of missionaries but he was afraid to abandon his meal and flee. Suddenly the convert appeared. It seemed that he lived there among them.

  Yes, Jews had driven him away and he had gone over to the missionaries. “I’m a Jew. A Jew!” the convert asserted. “But the Messiah is already here. You’re waiting in vain. Jesus is the Messiah … Jesus of Nazareth!”

  When this story was repeated back in the shtibl, the Jews there declared, “That’s the problem with goyim. They don’t have the patience to wait.”

  A CHUNK OF DARKNESS

  The door opened and an old woman with a cane entered. She was not white but black: she had a black, disheveled marriage wig; a dark, wrinkled face; black eyes; a little black beard on the tip of a prominent double chin—and she wore a black shawl and a black dress so long it seemed to sweep the floor after her. Old age is usually associated with repose and quietude, but the old age of this woman was as dark as a witch’s. She was full of beardlike tufts of hair and warts.

  But, in fact, she spoke about Jewish matters. She was old, she said. She had saved a little money, which she would not use up during her lifetime. Since she was childless, she wanted to hire a fine man who in a hundred years would say Kaddish in her memory. She proposed that my father should do this and she was prepared to advance him one hundred rubles. The rest would be paid after her funeral.

  We needed the money, but my father declined. He said that nobody knows whose tomorrow it will be. How could he take money from her? No one has a contract with the Master of the Universe. I sensed that Father had other reservations. He did not want to derive income from somebody else’s death, even if it was an old woman’s. The whole matter was distasteful to him.

  But the old woman did not relent. Who could help her if not the rabbi, she exclaimed, banging her cane on the floor. Father considered who should assume this responsibility and quickly found the right person. In the Hasidic shtibl there was a small man with a little gray beard, a florid face, and young eyes. Although he was no longer young, he still had a lively gait. He often drank, spun stories, and joked around. It was clear that he was healthy, thank God, and had many years left to live. He had been a small-time merchant, but now his son-in-law, a wealthy fruit wholesaler, supported him. Father sent for this man. When Father informed him of the old woman’s request, the man immediately agreed. Rubbing his reddish hands, he said, “Why not? Kaddish is Kaddish.”

  The old woman glared at him darkly. Her black eyes seemed to drill into him, probing his innermost secrets. After a moment she called out, “I also want him to lead the prayer service in my memory.”

  “Why not? I’ll lead the service.”

  “An entire year!” the old woman blurted out angrily.

  “Certainly, all year long.”

  “And on the anniversary of my death I want a memorial candle lit and I want you to study Mishnah.”

  “I study Mishnah anyway …”

  “I want a contract and a handshake.”

  Here Father finally intervened: “We can have a signed agreement, but a handshake is not necessary. When a Jew makes a promise he keeps his word, God willing.”

  “You, Rabbi, would keep your promise, but I don’t trust him!” the woman said with a vigor that belied her age.

  “If you don’t trust him, then it’s no good,” Father said. “In such a matter one must trust the other person to keep his word.”

  “Rabbi, you I’ll trust.”

  The gray man stood all the while with an expression that said, Whichever way it goes, I can manage without her … He wore a cotton-lined gray gaberdine, a little plush hat, a red scarf around his neck, and a pair of leather boots that looked indestructible. His red cheeks, lined with little veins, bore witness that he enjoyed his drink and was full of life’s juices. He took out a little snuffbox, poured a bit of snuff onto the palm of his hand, and then drew it deeply into his hairy nostrils. He did not even sneeze. We cheder boys used to say that not sneezing is a sure sign the snuff has gone straight to your brain …

  Eventually they drew up a contract and the man signed it. When he suggested that they seal the deal with a glass of brandy, the old woman sent me down to buy a bottle and some egg biscuits. The man poured himself a large drink and the woman took a glass herself. Father did not drink. The man, the Kaddish sayer, raised another large glass and called out, “Now that you have somebody to say Kaddish after you, may you live to be one hundred and twenty!”

  The old woman shook her head. “What’s the good of my life?”

  She had been prepared to give my father one hundred rubles in advance, but gave only twenty-five to the old man, promising the balance after her death. The old man acquiesced to everything and then left.

  The woman stayed; she went into the kitchen and insinuated to my mother that she wasn’t satisfied with this deal. She had no trust in this person. My mother heard her out and said, “The best thing is to say Kaddish for oneself.”

  “How, my dear, can one say Kaddish for oneself?”

  “One does deeds of charity. One prays. One observes Yiddishkeit. One does not speak ill of other people. All of this is better than the best Kaddish.”

  The old woman pondered this, then left.

  A couple of months passed. Suddenly the door opened and the old woman limped in, black as a crow. Even her nose resembled a crow’s beak.

  “Rebbetzin, I’ve been hoodwinked.”

  “What happened?”

  “The shmendrick’s getting married, of all things!”

  Apparently the old man, her Kaddish sayer, was preparing to marry a hunk of tripe who sold rotten apples in the marketplace.

  At first Mother was surprised; then she asked, “What’s the harm in that? Since he promised to say Kaddish, he’ll say it.”

  “His wife won’t let him.”

  “Why wouldn’t she let him?”

  “Because she’s a bitch.”

  The woman stubbornly insisted that we send for her Kaddish sayer. I didn’t have to run too far, for all of this took place in our courtyard. The man was sitting in the shtibl telling stories. He came right away. As soon as he saw the old woman, his eyes twinkled.

  “What does she want now?”

  The old woman maintained that since he was getting married she regretted the entire deal.

  “Regret is not businesslike,” the old man responded.

  The old woman wanted her twenty-five rubles back, but the man said he had already spent them. He impatiently shuffled his thick-soled leather boots, then yelled, “What a shlimazel!”

  It was not an easy lawsuit. The man denied nothing. He had already eaten up the money. He had made no agreement with this old woman that he was not allowed to marry. There was no room for compromise here because the man was unwilling to return even a broken kopeck. Father said that the man’s marriage was no obstacle to his saying Kaddish. How is one thing connected to the other? But the old woman was angry. Her muttering and mumbling portended no good. She glowered darkly at the man. It seemed to me she wanted to give him the evil eye and was casting a spell over him to destroy him.

  “I’ll have to hire another man,” she called out.

  “Why another? I’ll say Kaddish for you.”

  “I don’t want your Kaddish.”

  “Then no is no.”

  “That money of mine will make him miserable,” the old woman predicted gloomily.

  The old man got married. A couple of weeks after the wedding he came to the shtibl. His red cheeks had yellowed. He was hunched over. His boots now seemed much too big for him.

  The men in the shtibl joked with him: “Well, how’s our young man doing?”

  The man spit on the ground. “No good.”

  “What’s up?”

  “A witch, everything rotten you can imagine.”

  “What does she want?”

  “Who knows? She torments me. She doesn’t let me sleep at night with her yapping. She wa
kes up the neighbors. People come knocking on the door.”

  “So what does she want?”

  “I’ll be darned if I know. She talks like a madwoman, may it not happen to us!”

  “So what will you do? Go back to your daughter?”

  “My daughter won’t let me in.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “She’s angry that I married.”

  “So what will happen?”

  “It’s not a good situation.”

  The man had quarreled with his daughter and son-in-law, and married a half-crazy market woman. His little gray beard had turned entirely white.

  He stopped telling stories. He sat in the shtibl and mournfully chanted psalms, as if for a dangerously ill person. On several occasions he did not return home to sleep. The shamesh would find him in the morning stretched out on a bench with a no-longer-usable tallis under his head.

  After a while people heard that he had divorced the market woman but that his daughter still refused to let him enter her house. He had exchanged her mother for a vulgar market harridan—and for this his daughter could not forgive him. The old man began making efforts to be admitted to the old-age home but there was told he was too young. Moreover, one also had to bring a dowry like—forgive the comparison—a nun who wants to enter a cloister.

  Then the old woman with the little black beard reappeared. She began to cook grits for him, darn his socks, and launder his shirts and his long johns. She became his protector. This woman, for whom he was supposed to say Kaddish, had started to act like his wife.

  It didn’t take long for the inevitable to occur. The old woman came to us and announced that she was prepared to marry this man who should have said Kaddish for her and was surely twenty years her junior.

  As she spoke she pounded the floor with her cane. Her little beard shook. The warts on her face bobbed quickly. It isn’t hard for a woman to be alone, she maintained. Why does she need a man? She cooks some food in a little pot, does a bit of laundry, sweeps her apartment, and everything is the way it ought to be. When she gets an occasional bellyache at night, she heats up a pot lid and places it on her stomach. But a man is like an abandoned child. He can’t cook, he can’t do laundry, he can’t clean up. If one doesn’t tend to him, he neglects himself completely. Since he would say Kaddish for her anyway, he might as well become her husband. She had an apartment and a bit of money. Surely he wouldn’t starve. “The couple of years I have left to me, let’s live them out decently,” she added.

  Mother listened to her and was silent. The old man came also. He wasn’t overly anxious for this match, but he said, “Do I have a choice? My daughter doesn’t want me, so somebody has to take pity on me … and I no longer have the strength to sleep on a hard bench.”

  He married—but apparently did not strike gold. Once again he sat in the shtibl and mournfully chanted psalms.

  The youngsters began questioning him. They wanted to know if he had dallied with the witch, but the old man snapped, “I’m not obliged to give you any reports!”

  “How old is she?”

  “I didn’t count her years.”

  “Does she have a bundle?”

  “Rascals! Back to your books!” the old man shouted.

  One winter evening, between the Afternoon and Evening Services, the old man complained that he had a bad cold. He went home but did not return for prayers the next morning. The following morning he didn’t come to the shtibl either. The Jews there began saying that they ought to pay him a sick call. But it was already too late—the Kaddish sayer had died.

  At the funeral a quarrel broke out between the widow and the old man’s daughter. After the shiva period, the old woman came to Father requesting that a new Kaddish sayer be found for her. Another thing: since her husband had left no son and since his son-in-law was a roughneck, a boor, a scoundrel, she was prepared to pay a few extra rubles for someone to say Kaddish for him.

  The old woman stood in the kitchen, black as coal, with a distorted face, a drooping mouth—a chunk of darkness. She exuded a demonic power. My mother usually welcomed people amicably, but she displayed a repugnance toward this old murderer. Father said that he knew of no other Kaddish sayers and hinted that she leave him alone. But she did not leave right away. Her gaze radiated a fierce stubbornness, the eerie self-confidence of those who have lived too long and no longer have any fear of the Angel of Death. I was still a little boy at the time, but I clearly sensed that the old woman had in some secretive manner done in her Kaddish sayer. Like a spider she had enmeshed him in her web and destroyed him.

  A RABBI NOT LIKE MY FATHER

  From time to time a certain rabbi would come to visit my father. He looked nothing like Father: tall, broad, and stout, with a pitch-black beard and black, burning eyes, he was also better dressed. He wore a fur coat with tails during the winter—and a wide silken topcoat in summer. He always had a new hat and was never without a parasol. He also smoked cigars. He brought into our house the prestige of a successful rabbi for whom everything was going well.

  But things were not going as well as they appeared. He had once been a rabbi in a rather large city, but for some reason he had been relieved of his rabbinic duties. Now he lived in Warsaw and was for all intents and purposes no more than a small-time rabbi like my father. But the rich man’s bearing stayed with him nevertheless. He wore chamois half-boots with rubber soles. He smoked his cigars through an amber cigar holder. His parasol had a silver handle. And his hands were thickly grown with hair, which by itself was a sign of wealth.

  How different he was from my father! He came in softly, slowly removed his galoshes (which had brass monograms), put his umbrella in a corner, and the kitchen was soon filled with the smell of his cigar. He cast a sidelong glance at my mother. In the study he sat down warily, as if the chair were not sturdy enough. Father welcomed him warmly, as he did everyone, and asked Mother to bring in tea and biscuits. The rabbi took off his hat, under which sat a high yarmulke.

  “How are you doing?” Father asked.

  Those were about the only words that Father managed to utter during the entire visit. The rabbi began talking and continued for several hours. He spoke only of himself and his greatness. He neither praised himself openly nor spoke ill of others, but all his remarks had only one meaning: that he, the rabbi, was the greatest scholar of their generation and that all the other rabbis were either total or half ignoramuses who didn’t understand what they were studying and merely skimmed the surface of issues. The rabbi spoke only about his books, his new interpretations, his accomplishments. His sharp eyes emitted the contempt and mockery of someone who knows everything better than everyone else but feels that the world begrudges him his success and refuses to acknowledge it out of envy.

  I stood behind Father’s chair and listened. Sometimes Father tried to say something, but the rabbi wouldn’t let him speak. He made a hand motion that seemed to say: What do you know? What could you possibly have to say about such matters? It’s enough of an honor for you that I come here and speak to you.

  The rabbi did other things that surely must have irked Father. When referring to a certain passage in the Talmud, he would translate every single word, as though my father were just a little cheder lad. My father had by then written several scholarly commentaries and had already been a rabbi in a city. There was surely no need to translate anything for him. Often, this conceited rabbi translated passages from the Talmud for my father which even I, a little boy, understood. I blushed with embarrassment. I thought that Father would stand up and tell him to go to the devil, but I saw no sign on my father’s face that he took offense. He listened to that man’s exegesis with curiosity, as though he, my father, were a simple man for whom everything had to be spelled out. It actually seemed that Father took particular delight from the way the other man was translating everything into Yiddish.

  Once, after the rabbi cited a Talmudic passage and immediately began to explain it, Father interrupted: “I�
��m afraid you’ve made a mistake.”

  The rabbi turned red, then paled. “I made a mistake?”

  Father quickly began justifying himself. “Well, we ought to look at the text. Sometimes one can make a mistake.” And Father quoted the Biblical verse: “Who can understand errors? … Everyone can make a mistake.”

  I thought that the rabbi would go to the bookcase, take out a Talmud folio, and look up the passage—but he did not do this and changed the topic instead. Evidently it wasn’t appropriate for him to admit that my father could have caught him erring. He continued to sit there, speaking about himself while smoking his cigar. Every once in a while Mother brought in more tea and lemon.

  It was very awkward when women entered the study to ask a question about kashrus during his visit. The housewife had come in to see Father, of course, but it was the other rabbi, the guest, who immediately took up the question. He turned to the woman, asking how big the soup pot was and how much milk had fallen into it. In another instance, when there was some doubt about a chicken, he waited for Father to cut open the navel where the woman had found a nail, or to inspect the guts, which were pockmarked. When Father had completed this “unsavory task,” the rabbi took over and rendered his decision. I saw this as an act of great impudence, and it annoyed me, the little boy, terribly. I hoped that Father would say, I am the rabbi on this street, not you. But once again Father revealed not the slightest sign that he was annoyed. On the contrary, he amicably nodded his head to everything the rabbi said. When the woman left and bade them goodbye, only Father answered. Evidently it was beneath the rabbi’s dignity to respond to an ordinary housewife.

  Later, I looked up the mistake my father had caught. I showed Father that it was he who was right, not the rabbi. Father said, “Even the greatest people can make mistakes.”

  “Father, is he really such a genius?” I asked.