Kaaterskill Falls (44 page)

In the next few days, open boxes all around him, Jeremy forces himself to grade his students’ final exams. He wades through their looping handwritten essays, the pale ballpoint and the sputtering black ink, the smooth round cursive, and the words that knot together on the page.
In what way does Machiavelli appropriate and transform the literary tradition of the courtier prince?

The apartment is hot. Jeremy hates this time of year, the first
muggy days, the end of the semester. As always in May he is tired of his students. He is sick of his class and his apartment, and the city. At this time of year when Jeremy was a boy, the family packed up to go to Kaaterskill.

The students’ essays are all the same; transcriptions of his lectures, some more and some less accurate, some more and some less detailed. Jeremy is sweating. He leans over the boxes against the wall and stretches to open the windows. He can barely do it, and strains to pull the windows up. Suddenly, he has had enough. He overturns the boxes at his feet and dumps the old books on the floor. He dumps them all together in piles, the theology and the German poetry, the old history books. The dust flies up at him, as he throws the tomes onto the carpet. Bindings crackle. White pages fall open, exposed. He dumps the books until his arms hurt. A hundred and two hundred more, until they lie there like a pile of junk, and he is not angry anymore.

He picks some up again, just a few from the top of the pile, a volume of Plato and a collection of poetry, some Goethe, and Moses Mendelssohn, and he sets them on his desk. It is a kind of apology for the act. Jeremy touches them. He opens one and then another, and then he sees with a shock of surprise and recognition, not his father’s, but his mother’s signature on the inside of each cover. The handwriting perfect and small, the signature constant, tightly curled in every volume in black ink.

He opens more books. Quickly he checks each flyleaf. There, in almost half the volumes, the inscription reads
Sarah Kirshner.

What a fool he is. What a fool he had been, sitting at his desk and pondering what his father meant, puzzling over his father’s will. Half these books were hers. It was obvious, if he had only opened them and looked. Jeremy opens the books and then stacks them up, neatly in tall towers. He opens the thick Shakespeare volumes with their pages edged in slippery gold, and there, inside, his mother’s name is inscribed. He opens the two volumes of Aristotle in German, the leather Tocqueville, the romantic poets, and the German commentaries of their religious contemporaries, the first Kirshner rabbis. These were all his mother’s. They have been given to him, as he is his mother’s child. The son she took for herself to educate in the
literature of the rest of the world, the vast empire of art outside his father’s yeshiva.

Jeremy sits at his desk and looks out at his parents’ shared library. He is tired. He puts his head down on his arms, but his eyes are open. He gazes at the ruined pinnacles and minarets of books stacked on the floor. He looks at them with clear eyes.

Jeremy’s parents had been only partly happy together. They lived and worked together, and even enjoyed each other in conversation and in their partnership leading the community. His parents were joined in their mission; they shared their strict belief in Jewish law, and the desire to establish the Kehilla in America. But Janus-faced, they looked in opposite directions—his father always turning toward the future in his insistence on transmitting to coming generations the exact letter of the law, and his mother turning always back to the life in Germany, the houses and the music there, the riches of European literature. The Rav was establishing a new order based on the ancient and medieval sacred texts. But Jeremy’s mother was nostalgic for the recent past, for the modern languages and for eighteenth-century philosophy. Always, she missed the paintings of Vermeer and Rembrandt, always she was remembering the Enlightenment. Jeremy was her instrument, not simply his father’s prisoner. His elaborate education was her singular achievement, his learning her triumph of self-expression.

Jeremy looks intently at his legacy piled on the floor. He stares down at the inheritance toppled at his feet. He does not want to be, nor is he, the vessel of his mother’s dreams. Nor can he be anymore his father’s tragedy. His parents are gone, and his place between them is gone too. His father’s objections have been silenced, as has his mother’s praise. All his father’s rebukes have not effaced the learning the Rav nurtured in him. And all his mother’s books, all her poetry and German theology, cannot now shape him into her idea of a man.

A
T THE
end of May a delivery truck’s passing darkens the windows of Grimaldi’s store, and Elizabeth looks up from her work, reconciling the books with pencil, paper, and an ancient adding machine. She looks around the shadowy room cluttered with packages. The jars of Swiss jam shine like jewels in the low light, gooseberry, raspberry, blueberry. “We should get some better light fixtures,” she says to Grimaldi.

“You buying?” he asks.

Elizabeth turns back to the adding machine. She is thinking that Grimaldi should sell jars of herring. He could sell herring as well as anchovies and sardines. There is a brand sanctioned by Rav Isaiah that would sell well in the neighborhood and Grimaldi should carry it. He should think about his customers. Different kinds of herring, and some good crackers. And he should sell some Jewish articles along with his figurines. Some porcelain seder plates. Some mezuzahs, the Lenox porcelain ones with fourteen-karat gold. Those are pretty. Some menorahs. Those would sell. He should work on attracting younger customers. His regulars are quite old. They speak German still and buy the Swiss jam and chocolate. He could sell some Barton’s candies, packaged. That would work well for the holidays. And the boxes of marzipan. The little baskets of marzipan fruit, the tiny marzipan challahs. The ideas come to Elizabeth in spite of herself. Despite the fact that the store is not hers. Perhaps someday she will have her
own store, maybe even buy out this one. Then again, Elizabeth would not want to set up shop on this very street, right here in the neighborhood with its tight line of stores and bitter politics.

Just three doors down Edelman’s Bakery briefly lost Rav Isaiah’s hechsher because of a perceived laxity about closing for Pesach. The scandal is over now, but it was a great shock to the community and, Elizabeth thinks, a deft show of force by Rav Isaiah. The Rav is establishing his standards in the Kehilla, his public persona, meticulous, efficient. Not just Rav Isaiah, but his wife, Rachel, presents herself this way. Elizabeth remembers Rachel’s officious voice on the phone in Kaaterskill. The rebbitzin is zealous in support of her husband’s severity. Rachel’s ideas are played out in her husband’s actions, the giving and the swift taking away, the hard and almost royal granting of favors, patents, and permissions. The Kirshner family and their school and synagogue administrators are like a Tudor court in Washington Heights: the king and his queen, their favorites. Elizabeth sees it that way now, the clever and dangerous politics of the neighborhood, the shows of force and fealty. The aristocrats of the community, like the Rav’s cousin, Joseph, at once allies to Isaiah and potential threats.

Isaac would never accept this view of things. After all, it omits the central point of Rav Isaiah’s rule. That he is no king, but simply a scholar in the service of God, simply more knowledgeable and discerning in the law. A judge, not a dictator. The Rav’s authority is not a matter of politics to Isaac. And following the Rav is, and always will be for Isaac, an issue of aspiring to the best life. Elizabeth had been innocent like this, but curious. She envies her husband his devotion.

She wonders, even now, what her daughters will inherit and discover. Whether they will shake themselves and venture out, even if only to touch the larger world; the city with its thousand neighborhoods and businesses, its traffic, its steel bridges, pointing to far places. Whether they will take exotic paths, researching in libraries or entering law school, learning languages, and she doesn’t know what else. Or whether, like their father, they will absorb themselves in the life and turn, heart and mind, toward the Kehilla. And there is beauty in this. Such observance is ordinary to her mind, but there is something beautiful in the constant conscious and unconscious work, the labor
of it, ornamenting each day with prayer, dedicating each month, and season, and every act, to God.

W
HILE
her mother works, Chani walks the baby in the stroller. She has already brought her sisters home from school. They trooped home together in their pleated skirts and white blouses, knee socks and scuffed-up shoes. They were wearing backpacks and carrying homework papers. Chani brought home her graded Social Studies essay, laboriously written out in cursive, on every other line:
President Jimmy Carter is going to give the Panama Canal back to Panama on December 31, 1999. Why? Some people said it is really theirs. Some people said, “Save our canal, and give
Carter
to Panama!” It’s a big machlochet.
She took her sisters upstairs and gave them milk and oatmeal cookies.

Now Malki is watching the little ones up in the apartment, and Chani walks up and down the block pushing the baby’s stroller through the familiar neighborhood, the buildings of brick and shabby cement. She doesn’t go far, not beyond the Kirshner buildings, the synagogue and the school and the cluster of stores. Every afternoon she walks up and down, repeating to herself her verses for the Bible contest:
“Va-yomer Moshe el Adoshem: Bi Anoni lo ish dvarim….”
And Moses said unto the Lord: O Lord, I am not a man of words, I am slow of speech, and of a slow tongue.
“Ha lo Aharon achicha halevi? Yadati ki daber yidabber hu vigam hinei-hu yoztei likratecha….”Is
there not Aaron your brother the Levite? I know he can speak well…. And he shall be to thee a mouth, and thou shalt be to him in God’s stead. She repeats the words over and over into memory. The Bible contest is not until next January, but she is training in the off season. She recites for her father in the evenings, and he follows along in his Tanach, checking for mistakes. Next year Chani will enter the high school competition, and she wants to win.

In the stroller Chaya peeks out at the world, but Chani scarcely notices the familiar shops and streets. Even as she recites her verses, Chani is thinking about Israel. She is imagining the place with its mountains and stone cities, the wells and gnarled old trees, as she has seen in pictures. She is imagining hiking there, up
to the tops of the mountains, or walking in the desert. She will grow up and become an archaeologist. She will uncover the places that the ancient words describe, the camps and the passages, the old walls. Or she will work in the orchards. She will grow grapes, and, as it is written, she will sit under her own fig tree. She will make the words come true. The place will be like the map of Fairyland come to life. The verses will become real. She will dig up their original vessels and find their source in the dry wells. She will grow up and be a nature guide in the desert, follow along the wadis, tracing their meandering paths.

In her long skirt and long sleeves, her feet clomping along in dirty white running shoes, Chani walks on, down the street. Of course Chani doesn’t say these things aloud. She hasn’t said anything to her parents, but when she graduates from high school, when she grows up, she will convince them about Israel. First her mother and then her father. She will find a way. They will worry, and protest. Still, she cannot imagine that they will refuse her. She will argue with them and persuade them to let her go there. She will be grown up, seventeen, old enough to marry. By then, for all she knows, the Meshiach will be here on earth, the Temple rebuilt, all of them in Israel together. She walks on with the squeaking stroller, dreaming as she repeats the words, settling them in memory:
“Vediber hu licha el ha-am ve-haya hu yihye lecha le-fe ve-attah.”
And he shall be your spokesman unto the people.

She looks up. A moving truck is blocking the street, its engine heaving. Chani pushes the stroller closer and sees that a crowd has gathered. There are people from school, and young men from the yeshiva. Neighbors stick their heads out of upper-story windows. They are watching the truck standing there with its ramp down right in front of Rav Isaiah’s building. Two men are wheeling handcarts into the open doorway. They move rapidly, wheeling towers of boxes into the building, five boxes in each trip.

Inside, hidden from sight at the entrance to the Rav’s old first-floor apartment, Isaiah and Rachel are watching the deliverymen. They stand side by side, the two of them. They cannot speak. There was no word from Jeremy, no explanation. Only the call from the
delivery company, the men at the door. The boxes flow down the ramp, hundreds of them. They come continuously without a break. They have all come back. Not some, but all. Every single volume of the Rav’s collection returning. A river of books flowing back smoothly into the Rav’s shadowy apartment.