A Curable Romantic (9 page)

He picked up his tea and peered into the cup. His mouth an ugly gash, he sniffed at the drink, as though at the scent of curdling milk, before returning it to its place. He cleared his throat and rubbed his papery hands together, clapping once.

he said.
Don’t worry, for I won’t embarrass you
(Isaiah 54:4).
Come closer
(Genesis 27:21).
Now, my son, listen to me
(Genesis 27:8).
I’ve called you for a righteous purpose and have taken hold of your hand
(Isaiah 42:6).

He seemed to be listening to his own words — they seemed to hover in the air between us — scrutinizing them as a jeweler might a string of
diamonds, searching for a secret flaw. Finding none, he proceeded.
Only be strong and courageous
(Joshua 1:7)
and listen to me without interruption
(Isaiah 41:1)
for a son will show honor to his father
(Malachi 1:6).

How may I explain these linguistic peculiarities of my father’s?

By the time I was born, he refused to speak in any but the holy tongue. What were his choices? Yiddish was a mongrel pidgin, suitable only for women and illiterates. German — a barking, braggart’s tongue — belonged to the children of Esau, and Father would have never dreamt of sullying the holy vessel of his mouth with its guttural frothings. As for Russian, it wasn’t even a human language. Rather, it had been taught to the ancient Varangians by bears (hence the Russian proclivity for laziness and violence). French, something Father had picked up in his youth, my grandmother Sammelsohn having harbored unrealistic dreams of a diplomatic career for him, was, on the other hand, an all-too-human patois: curling the tongue, it trained it for duplicity. Why else did everything in it — taunts, curses, even the blackest of threats — sound like the sweetest of psalms?

For all his fanciful glossologies, Father might have languished in silence, had it not been for the holy tongue, although Hebrew presented its own problems: the language in which the angels beseech one another for permission to chant their unceasing praises, as well as the language in which these praises are unceasingly chanted, Hebrew was the language with which the Holy One had spoken the Heavens and the Earth into being. This troubled my father. How could he, mere ashes and dust (Job 42:6), speak the language of the Lord? Fearing the Holy One’s sacred places (Exodus 19:30), he would have preferred the distant dove of silence (Psalm 56:1) to defiling the sacred tongue by straying from its words (Proverbs 4:5).

Fortunately, God Himself had commanded us to speak it, viz.:
My words, which I’ve placed in your mouth, shall not be removed from your mouth or from the mouth of your children or from the mouth of your children’s children, thus saith the Lord, from now until forever
(Isaiah 59:21). Still, painfully aware of his dismal humanity, Father leavened this
celestial vocabulary with the earthier Aramaic of the Oral Law, hoping in this way to keep his feet rooted to the ground.

And did our Father find his powers of expression limited by this peculiar choice?

Not at all, not at all! On the contrary:
he’d say:
Turn it and turn it for everything is in it
(Avos 5:26). Indeed, father’s knowledge of the scriptures was so complete he was able to carry on lengthy conversations on a wide range of topics, once, for example, discussing his gastric pains with our family physician.

Dr. Kirschbaum asked him, in Yiddish, of course.