Single Jewish Male Seeking Soul Mate Read online

  “This bittersweet novel captures the struggle to honor one’s ancestors and fulfill one’s promises while recognizing the power, beauty, and burden of history as it shapes our lives and our choices about love.”

  —MARCIA ANN GILLESPIE, former editor in chief of Ms. and Essence

  “Pogrebin masterfully explores issues of race, gender, ethnicity, and religion through her characters who struggle with conflicting moral imperatives in a sea of clashing cultures. Her exceptional intelligence shines on every page.”

  —HELEN FREMONT, author of After Long Silence

  “This novel confronts unflinchingly the issue of Jewish continuity in a diverse and changing America. Most of all, though, it is a love story, delicious and sweet, and a book to be read with pleasure and savored long after the last page has been read.”

  —ANNE ROIPHE, author and journalist

  “Pogrebin is a writer of great depth and soulfulness, and with this book she catapults herself into the ranks of novelistic royalty. Her lovely prose gets to the very heart of what the heart wants, while also mining the legacies and commitments that define the rich history of African Americans and American Jews.”

  —THANE ROSENBAUM, author of Second Hand Smoke and How Sweet It Is!

  Also by

  LETTY COTTIN POGREBIN

  How to Make It In A Man’s World

  Getting Yours

  Growing Up Free

  Family Politics

  Among Friends

  Deborah, Golda, and Me

  Getting Over Getting Older

  Three Daughters

  How to Be a Friend To a Friend Who’s Sick

  Stories for Free Children (editor)

  Free to Be, You and Me (editorial consultant)

  Published in 2015 by the Feminist Press

  at the City University of New York

  The Graduate Center

  365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406

  New York, NY 10016

  feministpress.org

  Copyright © 2015 by Letty Cottin Pogrebin

  “To have without holding” is reprinted from The Moon is Always Female © 1994 by Marge Piercy (Knopf). Reprinted with permission from the author.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, used, or stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the Feminist Press at the City University of New York, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  First printing May 2015

  Cover and text design by Drew Stevens

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Pogrebin, Letty Cottin.

  Single Jewish male seeking soul mate : a novel / by Letty Cottin Pogrebin.

  pages; cm

  ISBN 978-1-55861-893-0 (ebook)

  I. Title.

  PS3616.O35S56 2015

  813'.6,—dc23

  2015002123

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Praise for Single Jewish Male Seeking Soul Mate

  Also by Letty Cottin Pogrebin

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1. Secrets and Scars

  2. Promises to Keep

  3. Details

  4. Not Quite Perfect

  5. A Father in Winter

  6. A Nice Jewish Girl

  7. Taking Sides

  8. Cleopatra’s Needle

  9. The One I Feed

  10. The Difference That Makes All The Difference

  11. Playing For Time

  12. The Last Picnic

  13. New Year’s Resolutions

  14. Getting Ahead of Himself

  15. Performance Art

  16. The Evil Tongue

  17. To The Playground

  18. A Church in the Sandbox

  19. Imagine

  20. Advice and Counsel

  21. Running Out

  22. Advanced Research

  23. Ghosts

  24. The Long Way Home

  25. The End

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also Available from Feminist Press

  About Feminist Press

  For

  Bert

  Abigail, Robin, David

  Ethan, Benjamin, Maya, Molly, Zev, Arlo

  Learning to love differently is hard, love with the hands wide open, love with the doors banging on their hinges, the cupboard unlocked, the wind roaring and whimpering in the rooms rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds that thwack like rubber bands in an open palm.

  —Marge Piercy, “To have without holding”

  CHAPTER 1

  SECRETS AND SCARS

  ZACHARIAH ISAAC LEVY GREW UP IN A FAMILY OF SECRETS, of conversations cut short by his entrance into a room, of thick-tongued speech and guttural names and the whisper of weeping. His parents spoke in short, stubby sentences, as if words could be used up, and often in a language they refused to translate. From the grammar of their sighs, he came to understand that Yiddish was reserved for matters unspeakable in English and memories too grim for a child’s ears.

  Zach’s father had a remarkably light tread for a man of six feet with broad shoulders and rope-thick muscles; however, once you knew that he’d spent the war years disappearing himself in the forests of Poland, his bearing, and everything else about Nathan Levy, made sense. Like most Jews, Nathan revered education and intellect, but he put even more stock in strength, speed, and stealth, the attributes responsible for his multiple escapes from the SS. After he and Zach’s mother immigrated to the Bronx, Nathan steadfastly maintained a fitness regimen of extreme rigor so he would be ready to defend himself and his family if—or rather, when—Jews once again became prey. On weekdays, Nathan hiked from their apartment at the corner of University Avenue and Kingsbridge Road, to the hat factory in the Manhattan garment district where he labored over a cauldron of scalding steam, shaping felt into fedoras. When inclement weather impeded his outdoor journey, he whipped through thirty minutes of calisthenics before taking the subway to work. Walking the city, playing schoolyard handball, and spending time at the schvitz—the Russian baths—were Nathan’s preferred physical activities. For quiet pleasure, he read the Forverts, the Yiddish Daily Forward, with a glass of warm milk at his side, or listened to broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera on the radio, always with the volume turned down low, in deference to his wife.

  Zach’s mother, Rivka Levy, was a piano teacher who hated music. Though the piano enabled her to contribute to the family income, she treated her Baldwin upright like a threat, as if its potential for sound was itself a kind of clamor. The instrument stood against one wall in the vestibule, locked most of the time, and draped in a peach shawl with long silky fringe, an incongruous luxury accent in an apartment whose palette ran from beige to brown. Only when one of her young pupils arrived for a lesson did Rivka retrieve the key from the pocket of her house-dress and unlock the keyboard. Before she opened it, Zach noticed, his mother had a ritual: she hugged her rib cage, gazed upward, and murmured something he couldn’t hear. Then she placed her straight chair slightly back from the piano bench and instructed the pupil on the proper rendition of “Moonlight Sonata” or “Für Elise,” without ever touching the keys. For as long as he lived at home, Zach never heard his mother play the piano.

  The world beyond his hushed apartment unspooled against an ordinary sound track—blaring phonographs, crying babies, women calling children in for supper. Kids roller-skated in the b
uilding’s cavernous marble lobby, couples bickered in the elevator, American-born adolescents argued with their immigrant parents. Zach could hear them through the walls begging for more allowance or pushing their curfews. He associated other people’s families with sound, his with silence. All it took to make his mother flinch was the scrape of a drawer or the ring of the phone. Zach’s whistling brought a finger to her lips. When he wanted to listen to The Lone Ranger on the radio, he would press his ear to the mesh-covered speaker; still, his mother would insist that he wait until she went down to the laundry room or left to go grocery shopping to avoid “the noise.”

  From the time he was a small child, he knew his mother was not like others. Other mothers wore red lipstick, dangling earrings, flowered blouses. They got dressed up in netted hats, soft kid gloves, and high-heeled shoes, painted their fingernails, gave themselves Toni home permanents. And their hair was any color but white. For as long as Zach could remember, Rivka’s hair had been yellowish white, like the strands that clung to cobs of corn. In his friends’ apartments, the women talked and laughed as loudly as the men. They listened to soap operas on the radio, or sang along with Kate Smith or watched quiz shows and yelled out the answers while they did their housework. In Zach’s apartment, his mother was a voiceless wraith adrift in a sea of half-done chores. Dust motes swirled on bars of sunlight while her feather duster rested on her lap like a sleeping hen. Smudges of jam evaded her sponge and strange ingredients turned up in her stew—a rubber band, a scrap of butcher paper, the stringy tip of a turnip. Once, her Hoover swallowed Zach’s socks.

  He was six years old that day in 1956 when the accident happened. His mother was ironing his father’s shirts while Zach, having pestered her for a grown-up assignment, was folding towels. With considerable effort, he had produced a neat stack and carried it intact to the linen closet, but when he tried to push the pile into one of the shelves, something hard was in the way—a flowered pillowcase with an album inside, its cover scarred. He set the towels on the floor and sat on top of them with the album on his lap, turned its black pages and studied the faded snapshots, each held in place by four corner brackets. Finding no one he recognized, he was about to put the album back in the linen closet when his eye was snagged by a picture of a beautiful woman standing in front of an enormous castle, her light hair arranged in a crown of braids, a flower tucked behind one ear. Her fingers rested on the handle of a great tub of a carriage in which sat a baby with a mop of blond ringlets. Years later, when Zach Levy thought about what made him try to decipher the caption handwritten on the border of the photo, he wasn’t sure if it was the castle, the woman’s radiant smile, or the baby’s riotous curls.

  Zach had learned to read in kindergarten and now he was in first grade, but he’d never seen such strange words—“Zamek Wawelski, Czerwiec”—so he carried the album back to the kitchen, propped it against the ironing board, and asked his mother what they meant. Before her brain could register what her eyes had seen, Rivka translated, “Wawel Castle. June.”

  “Can we go there, Mama? Will you take me to the castle?” His eyes riveted to the picture, Zach didn’t see the color drain from his mother’s already wan cheeks or notice her grip tighten on the iron’s handle and her thin shoulders pitch forward. “Where is it? Where is Wawel?”

  Finally, she whispered, “Kraków.”

  Zach had heard of that place; it was a city in Poland, which was in Europe, which was where his parents used to live before the “Notsies” murdered all his relatives.

  “Who’s that?” he asked, pointing to the woman. He thought she might be one of his dead aunts or cousins. When his mother didn’t answer, he looked up and saw that her face had collapsed like one of his father’s wrinkled shirts and her full weight was bearing down on the handle of the steam iron. As if in protest, the appliance hissed and snorted while the shirt beneath exuded the acrid stench of scorched starch.

  Rivka breathed out, “Me.”

  Impossible. The woman in the picture was smiling. She was beautiful. She had a flower in her hair. “Then who’s the baby?” Zach asked.

  Rivka threw back her head and rasped, “Yitzhak. Mayn kleine yingele. Mayn zisseh tataleh.”

  Summer nights, when the windows were open and he could hear stray mutts howling in the alley below, Zach had a hard time falling asleep because the animals’ mournful calls sounded human. Today, his mother sounded like the dogs. Rivka cried frequently but not like this and she usually confined her breakdowns to his parents’ bedroom where her sobs were muffled by a pillow or muted by the reassuring thrum of his father’s voice. This time he was inches away and her cries were feral wails and his father wasn’t home to comfort her and make them stop. Scarier still, she was oblivious to both Zach and the smoldering triangle that had spread beyond the rim of the iron and produced glittering orange embers that seemed to be eating up the fibers of his father’s shirt.

  Mayn kleine yingele. That much Yiddish Zach understood: the baby in the picture was her little boy. But how could that possibly be? Zach was an only child. How could his mother have a son who wasn’t him?

  It took a tongue of flame licking up from the ironing board to shock Rivka back to the room. Raising the iron and wielding it like a cudgel, she smashed it against the board until every spark was extinguished then slammed it onto its metal cradle. When, in her panic, she grabbed the cord to yank it out of the wall socket, the board overturned and sent the iron hurtling toward Zach, its pointed snout splitting his right eyebrow before it struck bone; the gash, which took eight stitches to close, would later heal into a thin white scar that bisected his brow as neatly as if it had been the purposeful result of a rite of passage. He waited months for the missing hairs to grow back but they never did. What remained was a scar that marked him as the imperfect second son, a poor substitute for his parents’ blond angel, and whenever he saw himself in the mirror, the split in his brow reminded him of the dividing line between before and after, between knowing and not knowing why his mother cried so much and spoke so little, and why she could not love him.

  After the accident, from age six until his bar mitzvah day, he was obsessed with his brother and wanted to know everything about him, when he learned to walk and talk, his cute sayings, and what traits, if any, they had in common. In order to compensate his parents for their loss, Zach was determined to achieve twice as much as any other boy he knew. Yet when he brought home an A or a trophy, his mother’s sorrow seemed to deepen, as if his triumphs reminded her of all the schooling and sports that Yitzhak had missed and everything he might have accomplished had he lived. Sometimes Zach felt guilty for growing up.

  He revisited the album a few times a week from then on, retrieved it from the linen closet, took it to his room or stretched out on the living room floor, and pored over every photograph. There were only six of his brother—two taken in infancy, a snapshot of Yitzhak on a pony, another in a bubble bath with a young Rivka shampooing his hair, a studio pose of him wearing a sailor suit, and the mesmerizing picture taken at Wawel Castle. Zach had dozens of questions about each picture but the mere mention of his brother’s name started Rivka weeping.

  “Quit upsetting your mama! You’ll give her a stroke,” Nathan scolded.

  At six, Zach took words literally, so he stopped directing his questions to his mother but continued to pester his father. After dinner, or after finishing his homework, he would carefully remove the album from the flowered pillowcase and ask about various photographs. He wasn’t curious just about Yitzhak but about other people in the pictures, their relationship to his parents, who they were, what they did, where the shot was taken, what happened to them, each query a step in his self-assigned journey to learn all about his parents’ lives in Kraków, each a preamble to the question he was afraid to ask but most wanted answered: “How did Yitzhak die?”

  Zach’s nightmares, however, all seemed triggered by the first photograph he’d seen: He is pushing his brother’s carriage around the castle
grounds when, as if grabbed by an invisible hand, the carriage pulls away from him and starts rolling down the hill, picking up speed, and he can’t catch it. No matter how hard he runs, it’s always just beyond his reach until, at the bottom of the hill, it tumbles into the river and instead of diving in to rescue the baby, Zach, in his dream, skids to a stop on the bank and stands there horrified as Yitzhak’s soft yellow curls sink below the surface of the water.

  Hoping to short-circuit the nightmare, which had recurred several times the first year after he learned Yitzhak existed, Zach decided to avoid looking at the Wawel Castle picture and, to ensure that he didn’t turn to it accidentally, he paper-clipped that page to the preceding one. Nonetheless, a few weeks later the nightmare returned, his helplessness more vivid and terrifying than before. He awoke trembling and ran to find his father.

  “You have to teach me to swim, Papa!” he exclaimed to Nathan, who was in the bathroom shaving.

  “Swim? What are you talking about? It’s February.”

  “The Talmud says every father must teach his son to swim. It’s a commandment. Rabbi says so.” Because he knew the strictures of Jewish law did not carry much weight with his father, Zach had cited the authority of the family’s long-time rabbi, Eleazer Goldfarb, who, having traded a thriving law practice for a life of service to the Eames Place Shul and its congregation of refugees and Holocaust survivors, was so revered in the Levy household that Nathan simply referred to Goldfarb as “Rabbi.”

  “Okay, okay!” Nathan said, gliding the razor over the ledge of his jaw and up the slope of his cheek. “Next summer, at the beach.”

  “I can’t wait until next summer, Papa.” Zach kneeled on the lid of the toilet seat and planted his elbows on the sink. “I have to learn immediately!”

  “So when we’re at the schvitz, I’ll teach you.”

  “Not in that pool!” The boy shivered in his pajamas. “I’ll freeze to death.”

  Nathan gazed into the mirror. “It’s good training, cold water. Once, in the High Tatras, winter like now, two Krauts on my tail, I’m racing through the woods, way out in front of them, thinking, ‘Nazi bastards’ll never get me.’ Then—oy, gevalt! Up ahead I see a big stream with rocks sticking out. The rocks are shiny with ice, so I know the water’s cold. What are my choices, Boychik?”