A Day of Small Beginnings (20 page)

“Look,” Nathan said, “I don’t deny that people retell myths about their past, it’s just that I want to find out more about
my father’s life.” But he was shaken at hearing the word
Gottenu
again. The last time he’d heard it was at Holy Cross Church in Warsaw.

Rafael wound his fingers into his beard. “Then listen to what I will tell you, Leiber. The boy, the one they say had the devil
in him.
Him,
the Zokofers remember especially. His name was Itzik Leiber.”

Nathan stared. “My father?”

“Yes. He was here! Your father.”

“In this cemetery?”

“In this cemetery. On the night Jan died. Yeh. The only question to ask now is, is there any truth in it? I told you the Polish
story. Now I will tell you the Jewish story, as it was told to me.”

Nathan, not knowing what else to do, sank onto the bough of the fallen tree and waited.

“The Jews always began the story like this.” Rafael held up his hands, as if about to conduct an orchestra. “When Itzik Leiber’s
father abandoned his family, the boy drove the rabbis from his mother’s house. People said it was because the father, Mordechai
the Ragman, beat his wife for the whole town to see, but made a
tsimmes
of his piety. In time, they called the boy Itzik the Faithless One.”

“That’s him!” Nathan said, proud that his father had earned a nickname in town, although he couldn’t imagine Pop actually
throwing a rabbi out of the house. The man he knew ranted and railed against rabbis, put on a real performance for the family,
but only behind closed doors.

Rafael again studied the tips of his shoes. “Everyone knew the Leibers didn’t have two kopeks to put together. But after Mordechai
left, Itzik refused help for his family from the shul. Imagine!”

Nathan may have been shocked that his grandfather was a wife beater, but he was not surprised that his father would not take
help from the shul. When Nathan was a boy, his father had refused help from the shul during a bakers’ strike. His mother had
to accept the money in secret and put it into her “private account,” as she called it. Nathan had called it her “protection
from Pop” money.

Rafael looked at him. “Now, my legal scholar from Harvard University, tell me, what
should
a Jew think of a man like Mordechai the Ragman, who boasts of his devotion to God but violates his obligation to his family?”

Nathan thought about it. “I’d think he was a hypocrite. But”—he frowned—“I’m not a religious man. It would be my guess that
religious people would think his first obligation was to God.”

“Then they’d be fools, like your grandfather,” Rafael retorted. “Listen to me, Leiber, pride in piety is a sin in the eyes
of God. A Jew’s obligation to his fellow man is higher than his obligation even to God! God is not diminished by your failure
to observe His Sabbath or to keep a kosher home. If a man sins against his children, who is made unholy? God?”

“That’s a Jewish belief?” Nathan asked. He’d never given much thought to the relationship a man was supposed to have with
God.

Rafael nodded. “There is a proverb. Proverb twenty two. It says, ‘Teach a child in the way he should go, and even when he
grows old he will not depart from it.’”

Four or five caws echoed overhead. Rafael stroked his beard. “Mordechai Leiber practiced the worst kind of impiety,” he said.
“He made his son hate God. A child learns more from deeds than words.”

“Actually, he made Pop an atheist,” Nathan said.

“Your father was no atheist, Leiber. He was angry. His father was a hypocrite. But he didn’t deny God.”

Nathan was incensed. “How do you know? He was
my
father. As long as I can remember he always said there is no God.” Of this, he was certain. But he was no longer sure what
Pop may have secretly believed. The image of him slumped tearfully at the Seder table haunted him now. He put his finger on
the bridge of his nose and adjusted his glasses, trying to ward off the sense that he had been dragged into a slow-motion,
underwater world that was fissuring and crumbling the pillars of his life. He opened his mouth and tried to pull more air
into his lungs. Deeds, not words, he thought. The word
hypocrite
kept coming back to him. When he was young, Pop used it so often he’d assumed it was Yiddish.

“What are you, a hypocrite rabbi?” Pop would say when he found the young Nathan lazing around the house on Saturdays.

“What’s wrong with a day of rest?” his son would say, defending himself. “You had one when you were a kid.”

“Rest? What rest? You think my father let me rest on that day? My father dragged me to the shul to sit with the
alter kockers
with garlic on their breath and chicken bones in their mouths. Even on Yom Kippur they ate the chicken bones.”

“Weren’t they supposed to fast on Yom Kippur, Pop?” Nathan would tease, knowing Pop would go for the bait.

“Of course they were supposed to fast. And the rabbis, the
hypocrites,
were supposed to love God. They
davened
plenty. A regular show they made with their praying. But while they were carrying on, they had their hands in hardworking
people’s pockets.” Pop would slide his hand into Nathan’s pocket and grab his leg until he screeched, delighted at the unexpected
attention. “Took money for
schnapps,
money to build shuls, to make themselves important.
Bah!
” And with that, Pop would retrieve his hand, snatch up his newspaper, and drop into the old brown upholstered chair by the
window.

The lesson Nathan learned from these encounters was that making fun of rabbis was a sure way to please his father.

“I’m no hypocrite,” Pop had said a few years later, when his wife had insisted Nathan be called to the Torah as a Bar Mitzvah.

“Don’t you argue socialism with
me,
” she’d said. “This has got nothing to do with you and your ideas. A tradition is a tradition, and I’m not going to be the
shame of the whole neighborhood just for Mr. Marx’s sake.”

So week after week Nathan toiled over his Torah portion, without comprehension. To his every question about the text, the
sour Rabbi Menken would respond, “Your job is to recite, not interpret.” Filled with a newfound sense of solidarity with his
father about rabbis, Nathan had pleaded, “Pop, do I have to become a Bar Mitzvah?”

“It’s important to your mother. So you do it. That’s all,” Pop had answered, cutting short a rebuttal with the flick of his
open newspaper.

On the day Nathan was recognized as a man before the whole community, it was Pop’s face he looked for in vain among the congregation
as he plodded flawlessly through the Hebrew. But Pop had stayed home in protest, just as he’d promised. “I’m no hypocrite,”
he’d said.

Rafael squinted at him. “What do any of us know about what goes on in the privacy of a man’s heart? But one thing I know is
your father was a believer. Not because of what he said, but because of what he did.”

“What did he do?” Nathan wanted to know.

“The Jews said that on his last night in Zokof, he scrambled on all fours through this cemetery, in fear for his life. His
cries were so terrible they could be heard even by the souls of the dead. Next to the walls that used to surround this cemetery,
the souls of suicides and criminals heard him. Itzik’s cries were hard as rock, flint. They lit a holy spark in him.”

“Why did he come here in the first place?” Nathan asked, barely able to contain his shock, to reconcile the boy in the story
with the man he’d known all his life, a man who moved with the slowness of pulled dough, a man who avoided the troubles of
others if at all possible. This Polish Itzik Leiber and the man he knew as Pop didn’t match.

Rafael held up his hand, signaling that he would not be moved off course. “That holy spark lit Itzik’s way to the grave of
a woman named Freidl Alterman,
aleha ha sholem
—may she rest in peace.” He turned his head and looked off into the cemetery for a moment. “Itzik held on to her gravestone.
It was a new one, unsteady in the earth, you understand? And in his terror, it was to God that Itzik the Faithless One turned
to plead for mercy.”

Nathan was so overcome with this strange image of Pop that everything slowed. His world became very quiet and heavy. Lifting
his hand was an effort; he felt as if he were being carried away, unable to control where the story of his father’s childhood
was going, much less what its consequences might mean for him. “Why did he have to plead for mercy?” he asked.

“Because that night he had committed a sin so great he knew he had to repent immediately and with complete sincerity. Without
excuse. Without anger at his father or the rabbis.” Rafael brushed some bark from his coat. “The story is told that Itzik
the Faithless One prayed so hard for mercy, he pulled Freidl’s stone over. Broke it in two.” Rafael gestured with his hands
as if breaking something. “They were after him that night. They chased him all the way here. But she protected him. She scared
them away.”

“The menacing old Jewess spirit?”

Rafael nodded. “Freidl. She left her grave for him and became a wandering soul. She knew he needed her, and she, a childless
woman, needed him.”

A tractor made its way down the road outside the cemetery.

“But what sin did my father commit?” Nathan asked. He ached with frustration at having to interpret the facts of his father’s
life through the superstitious prism of a religious imagination.

He asks what sin his father committed? He knows nothing, the past is blotted out? I flew from tree to tree, upsetting the
crows.

17

R
AFAEL WAITED FOR THE CAWING BIRDS TO SETTLE.
H
E SEEMED PERPLEXED
by Nathan’s question.”Itzik never told you why he left Poland?”

Nathan shrugged. “I always thought it was because he wanted a better life.” He ran his fingers through his hair, searching
for more of an answer. “My father said he’d been like a slave here, that he’d worked sixteen hours a day.”

“
Ptuh!
That had nothing to do with it. He left because of Jan Nowak.”

Nathan was aghast. “You mean to tell me there really was a Jan Nowak?”

Rafael narrowed his eyes, assessing the effect the name Jan Nowak had had. “Yeh, Leiber, those stories I told you don’t lie.
There
was
a Jan Nowak in our town. The night your father left us, Jan and his wife were in their wagon, on the road where your driver
is parked.” Rafael indicated the entrance of the cemetery with his head.

“They saw three of our
kinderlach
on their way home from cheder, and Jan started in with that crazy laugh of his. The children were so afraid of him they didn’t
move. Then it was too late to run. He brought the whip down on their feet to make them jump. His wife yelled he should do
it faster, and he did, laughing with the blows, I tell you.”

He shook his head with a heavy sadness that made Nathan wonder why in the world this man had remained in Zokof.

“Your father was coming home at that time, and he saw what Jan Nowak was doing to those children. He ran to the wagon, grabbed
Jan by the arm—a
chutzpah
for a skinny stick of a boy when the peasant was two heads taller than him and strong as an ox.”

Nathan flushed, surprised and impressed that daring had once accompanied Pop’s rage. “How can you know that this happened?
What proof is there?”

Rafael raised his palms upward and shook them meaningfully. “I know what I know. It’s not often that God intervenes in the
lives of men, Leiber. But that night, God intervened. Jan Nowak slipped on a handful of grass and fell from his wagon. His
horse went
meshuggeh.
That’s what killed him. The wagon rolled over his head.”

Nathan could not think of a way he could combat Rafael’s certainty. Instead, he became alarmed. “But the man’s death was an
accident, wasn’t it? No one could accuse my father of murder.”

“
Ptuh!
This is Poland, Leiber! In Poland, a Jew who gets caught in such a business, they call a murderer.”