The Beautiful Possible (3 page)

The following morning Paul spies Walter in the market, inhaling peppercorns.

“Getting off on the ambrosia again?” asks Paul.

“I asked you to leave me alone.”

Paul reaches out and grabs Walter’s shoulders. “Staying here is a mistake.”

Walter pushes away his hands.

“Suit yourself then. Disappear as if you had never been saved. One day your fingers will turn yellow from turmeric and your skin will harden into citrus peel.”

Walter pulls a shawl over his head and begins to sway.

“You look like a crazy Jew, shuckling in prayer.”

“I don’t pray.”

“You’re not like the Jews I know,” says Paul. “Not at all.”

“How would you know what kind of Jew I am? I wrote a damn paper on the Song of Songs. And I’m not dead. So what am I?”

“Smart and lucky.”

“Neither,” whispers Walter.

“If you come to America with me I’ll set you up for a brilliant career. Students will admire your erudition; you will enlighten the world about the burning heart of theology.”

Walter adjusts his shawl and closes his eyes.
You will become a professor of world religions. It is your destiny,
Sonia had said.
But, Sonia, my love, what is destiny when the future has been rendered into ash? What now for us? What now?

“First stop New York,” says Paul. “The Jewish Theological Seminary of America.”

“That’s ridiculous. I’m not religious. And I’m not looking for the Bible.”

“Beyond the Bible, Walter! You will study with rabbis.
Wissenschaft:
the science of plumbing ancient texts. Your fingers will touch the words you need to learn. You will weave yourself into the story, morph yourself into my Jewish protégé.”

“Don’t label me.”

“Agreed. No labels for the young man with boundless potential.”

Walter scans the market stalls and alleys that are beginning to feel like home. He doesn’t have to give in. He has Kavita and
Rohan. He has spices. He has charcoal and a sketchbook. He has lost everything and now he has quite enough.
Dream on, Professor.

“Look,” says Paul. “I give up. If you change your mind, prepare yourself for a long train ride and find your way to Shantiniketan—Tagore’s ashram. It’s the only place where history won’t intrude on you, a sanctuary of respite where you can heal, wipe yourself clean.”

“How long do I have?”

“Forever, Walter! You can squander your life here or you can come to America and climb the steps of scholarly achievement. Write your own ticket.”

“And you?”

“I come to India every year. I will find you.”

Walter pulls the shawl from his head and drapes it around his shoulders. “Why me?” he asks. “Am I really of such benefit to you?”

“Just consider my offer.”

“You haven’t answered my question,” says Walter.

Paul turns. As he ambles off, he reaches into his pocket, pulls out the brown felt hat, and places it on his head.

Walter reaches into the barrels of spice and picks up palmfuls of fenugreek and saffron. He replaces the shawl on his head and inhales, then looks up and scans the horizon for Sonia. The back of her dress appears before his eyes, the fallen hem, her strong calves wrapped around his. Walter stands and sways in the middle of the market, praying in no words and to no god, searching for the outlines of her face.

Walter will stand and sway during his years at Shantiniketan, where he will live until the war is over. He will study Eastern philosophy with dreamers and seekers in an adobe house where the words of the Koran mingle with the Upanishads and he will learn the verb forms and idioms of English and Sanskrit. He will meditate on the myth of the eternal return and wonder if Sonia will ever come back to him. He will study the Bengali words that Kavita sang for him, and he will translate them into English.
I don’t know if I’ll go back home tonight or not. I have the feeling I’m going to meet someone. And sure enough, where the footpath crosses the river, there is a boat. Floating in the boat is a person whom I’ve never seen, playing a flute.

In the hot afternoons, Walter will venture out to the plain behind the adobe and cool himself in the shade of date palm trees. In the monsoon season, he will place a shawl over his head and stand out in the rain and cry for all he has lost. And when the rain stops Paul will arrive and tell him the war has ended and it is time for them to go to New York so he can begin learning with the rabbis—all because Walter once wrote a paper on the Song of Songs to impress the woman he loved.

November 1946

Rosalie Wachs pulls her father’s books off the shelves and sorts them into piles: Mishnah here, Maimonides over there, Hasidic commentaries placed in a box for his students. Shakespeare, Freud, and William James on one side of the living room floor; journals and clippings from Yiddish papers in a carton. She places the torn prayer books in a shopping bag labeled
SHAIMOS
—
FOR BURIAL
for the man who will collect the defective volumes to be laid to eternal rest. One at a time, she blows the dust from the books that she is saving for Sol, her fiancé. Rosalie opens a volume of Talmud and pictures her father’s hand resting on top of hers, coaxing her finger toward a word he wanted her to understand.
This way, Rosalie. Up in the corner
. Rachmones
. Compassion. A good word for you to know.

Her mother leans against the doorway.

“Be careful,” says Ida. “Your father’s heart lived in these books.”

“You don’t need to tell me,” says Rosalie. “I know everything about Tateh.”

“You understand so little. Old enough to be a bride, far too young to be a rabbi’s wife.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You have so much to learn.”

“Like?”

“Like you won’t always come first.”

“So I’m selfish, Ma?”

Ida folds her arms over her chest. “You’re still a child, that’s all.”

Rosalie shrugs.

“Your father used to describe you as a beautiful colt, ready to break out of its pen and gallop. Does this sound like a rebbetzin to you?”

“Sol understands me,” says Rosalie.

“Thank God,” says Ida. “A marriage needs at least one who keeps watch.”

Rosalie returns to the books. Her father’s Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Pushkin. How could her mother pretend that her own marriage was fixed by tradition? It was anything but. She opens her father’s prayer book and riffles through the pages. The Ashrei prayer he taught her to recite in a singsong melody. The Shema he taught her to recite slowly, because, he said,
you want each syllable to feel sad when it departs from your lips
. She was five when he taught her those prayers; it could have been yesterday.

Ida stands next to Rosalie and pulls a thin volume off the shelf, tucks it under her arm.

“Something I shouldn’t see, Ma?”

“Every marriage has its secrets.”

Rosalie knows the contents of her father’s library by heart but she can’t figure out which book her mother is hiding from her.

“The Spinoza, Ma?”

“Guess again.”

“The
Mei HaShiloach
?”

“Of course not. I already put that one in the
shaimos
pile.” Ida smiles. “Tateh’s students won’t understand the Ishbitzer’s teachings, and it’s not a suitable book for a young rabbi and his beautiful bride.”

Rosalie remembers her father sharing his interpretation of the Ishbitzer Rebbe’s work.
God is in all things, even in your doubts and desires. So let your heart be your master; let your life become a sacred story.
He insisted she tell no one that he was teaching her a nineteenth-century Hasidic book considered so heretical that Polish Jews would keep it hidden in an outhouse.
I can’t teach this to my students. They will learn the language of transgression before they understand their own boundaries.

Ida carries the book into the kitchen.

“You hid the Spinoza with the blue cover,” shouts Rosalie. “Right?”

“Oh, that Spinoza. His writings nearly destroyed our marriage. These books aren’t so innocent. None of them. I carried faith in my bones, from Lublin to Brooklyn, I never wavered. But he—”

“Tateh was a Hasid, Ma. His doubts only brought him closer to God.”

“Whatever he was he was. We survived each other and it worked out.”

Rosalie doesn’t know whether to cry or laugh. She spent her childhood watching her parents’ separate orbits grow distant and then even more remote until something realigned and they began to revolve around each other like the earth circles the sun. Rabbi Shmuel and Ida Wachs, spinning celestial objects. Rosalie would lie in bed at night and listen to her father talk to his students in the living room while her mother hummed in a singsong voice in the bedroom. It wasn’t until after her father died that she found a tin filled with notes he wrote to her mother.

My head is in the books but every word reminds me of our kisses.

Buy a chicken and remember to ask the man for some livers on the side. And then pick out a pastry for us. One bite for you, one bite for me, my sweet butterfly.

While her mother seemed to uphold the wheel of tradition, blessing every morsel of food before she took a bite, Shmuel played with the edges of his beliefs, testing the parameters of his faith. When Rosalie was small, he experimented with keeping Shabbat on a Tuesday, just to see how it would feel. He wore his silk-lined coat, blessed wine and challah, sang zemirot, napped, and meditated. When the sun set he told Rosalie it was a failed experiment.
Tuesday cannot be Shabbat. Next time I’ll try Wednesday.

After her father read a book review that quoted Saint Augustine, he borrowed
The Confessions
from the Brooklyn Public Library. Then he perused the shelves. Pascal. Rousseau. He peered at the Koran, dabbled in Sufism, considered Buddhism and Zen, but always returned to his beloved Hasidic masters. He told Rosalie that these rabbis gathered sparks from all of human experience,
packaged them up for their students so they could taste the essence of the entire world without needing to leave home.

A year before he died, Shmuel shocked his students by espousing the works of Spinoza alongside his Hasidic texts. He shaved his beard and tucked his
tzitzit
inside his pants pockets, keeping the fringes of his
tallit kattan
a secret from the outside world.
You are just like me
, he had said to Rosalie.
The boundaries of this life will not be wide enough to contain your longings.

Ida’s voice wafts from the kitchen. “It’s your turn now. Grow yourself up.”

“You mean grow up,” says Rosalie. “Use proper English.”

“Whatever. As long as you do it.”

“Why hide the Spinoza, Ma? Tateh taught me everything; I’m not such an innocent.”

“Of course you’re not. And I didn’t hide the Spinoza.”

Ida emerges from the kitchen. Her mother looks like a sparrow whose gummy beige shoes keep her tethered to the earth. Rosalie kisses her cheek.

“I didn’t mean to offend—”

“This apartment may seem small to you but your father and I lived a big life here. Faith, doubt—everything seeped into these walls.”

“What did you ever doubt, Ma?”

“More than anyone will ever know, little rebbetzin.”

Rosalie laughs. “And what book are you hiding from me?”

“That’s none of your business. Just remember that as long as you look the part you can be a secret heretic. Be as daring as you want on the inside. And on the outside, you set a nice table on
Shabbat, keep the holidays, go to shul for Kol Nidre. And keep quiet. Your life will be hard enough; don’t let anyone pin you down.”

That’s a comfort, thinks Rosalie.

“Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Of course, Ma.” Rosalie picks up her father’s prayer book, closes her eyes, and recalls their last conversation.

Don’t squander your wisdom. You may know much more than this man you found.

Sol is learned. He will be a good rabbi.

Rabbis come in different flavors, Rosalie. What flavor is your Sol?

Tateh?

Is he the God kind of rabbi or the law kind of rabbi? Which does he love more?

Both, I think.

And you. Are you in love?

I am.

There are many flavors of love too. Be free of him, be devoted to him, both at the same time. Keep your soul open; dream beyond your marriage.

“Finish up already,” says Ida. “The shaimos man is on his way.”

Rosalie closes the last book and places it on top of a pile. What she had with her father has ended. She had learned from him, yes. And now she will learn with her new rabbi. Sol will lead her fingers across the page and point out the words that will help her comprehend the mysteries of this life.

Two months before he died, Rosalie’s father had insisted she attend a lecture by Abraham Joshua Heschel.
He knows how to
translate Hasidic wisdom into the words American Jews can understand
, he had said.
Go listen and you’ll see what I mean
. At a packed YIVO Conference, Rosalie sat scrunched between an overweight man who reeked of sauerkraut and a handsome rabbinical student whose arm brushed against hers. At first the student edged away from her, but as Heschel spoke she leaned close enough to inhale his aftershave. Rosalie’s comprehension of Yiddish was spotty but when Heschel said, “Books are no more than seeds; we must be both the soil and the atmosphere in which they grow,” the student turned to her and smiled. “Sol Kerem,” he whispered. “Rosalie Wachs,” she whispered back. For the rest of the lecture, she thought only of the man named Sol who sat beside her and decided that he was her
bashert
, her soul mate.

Rosalie places Sol’s books in a shopping bag and carries them down to the subway. Her wedding is eight months away. She still has time to find a white flapper dress, just like the one she saw in a bridal magazine, and time to convince Sol that a traditional gown would not suit her at all. She has eight more months of sleeping alone in her childhood bed, plenty of time to consider the ways she loves Sol (how he leans his ear close to her lips when she speaks, how he shuckles in prayer and raises his arms as if to touch God, how he gazes into her eyes whether they speak of China patterns or theology). Even when they disagree over wedding plans, Rosalie feels a quiver behind her knees every time he says her name.

She glances at the ring on her finger: a large diamond he could barely afford. When he asked her to marry him, she said,
You will be the Humphrey Bogart of the rabbis
. He laughed and said,
And you will be the Lauren Bacall of the rebbetzins. Together we’ll build a pulpit fit for the silver screen
. She carries the bag of books tightly, ready to hand it off, father-in-law to son-in-law, rabbi to rabbi. She will find a way to live as a secret heretic, inventing new ways to spool out everything she was taught as a girl: the cycle of the six-day week that links one Shabbat to the next, the holidays with their distinct flavors and outfits—cheese-filled blintzes in the springtime, pungent etrogim for Sukkot, white clothes for Yom Kippur, and stained shirts on Tisha b’Av. Ritual is the clock with which Rosalie measures time; her bones ring with the reliable thrum of the holidays coursing through the seasons.

Paul Richardson and Walter Westhaus arrive at the Seminary during a late November snowfall. Walter wears his green kurta pajamas from Shantiniketan, with Paul’s tweed jacket draped over his shoulders for warmth. His cloth shoes are caked with snow. As they enter the seminar room, a rabbi hands each man a black satin yarmulke. The rabbinical students slouch around a table, their arms crossed over their narrow ties. Paul talks about his research in India and how one spiritual tradition is porous to another.
We are all connected in the unending chain of belief and doubt. Together we can answer each other’s questions.

Sol wrinkles his nose and turns to his friend Morris. “Welcome to the Seminary Clown Show.”

“Or a new class in practical rabbinics.”

“Who’s the sidekick?” asks Sol.

“A German Jew by way of India,” says Morris. “Testing our tolerance for guilt.
Your final exam, gentlemen. In this corner we place a guru and in this corner a Jewish survivor. How will your teachings hold up now?
”

Sol stares at Walter. This man with high cheekbones has come dressed for a Purim party. He hopes someone will bury the yarmulke that covers his long brown stringy hair; surely he picked up microbes on the streets of Bombay. To Sol, Walter does not seem like a Jewish refugee at all, but like a character who stepped out of a storybook he read as a boy. Sol shuts his eyes and wonders if this man is a figment of his imagination, but when he opens them Walter smiles at him.

Morris turns to Sol. “The refugee likes you,” he whispers.

Sol gazes down at the table as Paul explains the myth of the eternal return. “Everything cycles back to its cosmic origins,” he says. “Even the Bible considers this, yet much is imperceptible to us. We misread so many cues. How about a line of poetry, Walter?”

“We cross infinity with every step; we meet eternity in every second.”
Walter looks up and smiles. “Rabindranath Tagore.”

Morris turns to Sol. “What the hell is that supposed to mean? And who is Rabbi Tagore?”

“I’m guessing Hasidic,” says Sol.

The Seminary rabbis stand in the back of the room and cast awkward glances at one another. After he finishes his remarks Paul announces that Walter will be joining the rabbinical students for the remainder of the academic year. “Teach my student Hebrew and Bible. Show him how to wander through a text and uncover meaning. One day you will be proud to have known him.”

Sol Kerem’s father was a Warsaw-born yeshiva student who rose to American prominence as the owner of Kerem’s Brooklyn Kosher Emporium. After he died of a sudden heart attack, his wife Lotte would say,
What Chaim could not provide in progeny, he made up for with flanken and braised beef.
On Shabbat the Kerem house swelled with visitors who could not afford to buy their own meat. Chaim would sit at the head of the table and pontificate about some minute aspect of Jewish law to the guests who had only come for the food. As a boy Sol stayed at the table for a short time, preferring to sit alone in the kitchen, immersed in an adventure book. On a Shabbat afternoon when he was seven, Sol warmed himself beside the stove while the guests crowded around the dining table, relishing the assortment of cold cuts, stuffed cabbage, and tongue. He was alone in the kitchen when the gas oven exploded and lifted him from his stove-side chair and threw him on the floor, momentarily unconscious, then awake and stunned, leaving him deaf in one ear for the rest of his life.