To Rise Again at a Decent Hour (29 page)

“I already know all this,” I said. “He told me himself.”

Mirav looked from me to Stuart. “Should I continue?”

“Please,” he said.

On one such trip from the grocery to her house, they took a detour so that they could continue talking. He said he didn’t know how anybody could be Jewish because of everything you had to know. You had to know the Bible. You had to know the Talmud. You had to know the laws—so many laws. You had to know the
history. You had to know how to say the blessings and the prayers. And if you really wanted to do things right, you had to know Hebrew. He had thought Hebrew was just an old language the Bible had been written in, but the rabbi told him that Hebrew was the language of Israel, the language of the Jews. And then there was Yiddish. He asked Mirav if she knew Yiddish. He asked her what the difference between Yiddish and Hebrew was.

“They’re just two different languages,” she said.

“Do you see what I mean? You have to know two different languages
and
study the Old Testament
and
know all the holidays
and
how they started
and
why they’re important—that’s a lot.”

“You don’t have to know Yiddish,” she said.

“That’s okay, I’m going to learn it.” He pointed to a bungalow on the corner. “I live there,” he said.

It sat up on a little slope of lawn. Azaleas bloomed below the front windows. Flagstones rose from gate to door flanked by rows of tulips. It was a grown-up’s house.

“With your parents?” she asked.

“No.”

“With anyone?”

“No,” he said. “Just me.”

“How old are you?” she asked.

“Nineteen,” he said.

It would take her three months to gain the courage to walk there on her own and ring the bell. By then there would be a mezuzah by the door. In the meantime, there were more walks from the grocery, more detours, longer detours, questioning looks from her mother when she finally made it home. She knew not to utter a word. This was not the kind of boy they had in mind for
her. Her father was only going to approve of someone born south of West Hollywood or north of Wilshire or on a kibbutz in Kinneret. She confided in her cousins, whose lies and complicity helped her keep him a secret for longer than anyone would have imagined.

“We were a close-knit community,” she said. “You could say closed off, or even closed minded. And look where I am now!” she said, and she laughed at herself. “Right back in it!” She laughed again. “But it was different then. You have to remember the times. A generation of shtetl Jews was still alive. They didn’t mingle with too many John Travoltas. They had that ‘once-a-goy-always-a-goy’ mentality that we no longer have, even here in Crown Heights. They didn’t know what to make of converts.”

He began to call things by their proper names: not “church” but “temple,” not “Old Testament” but “Torah.” He changed out of his street clothes and bought a plain black suit. He stopped shaving. He wore a
kippah,
and later the
tallit katan
. After she graduated from high school, she worked for her uncle in the office of the grocery store, while he spent his days reading Torah and the commentary. He proved to be a quick study. One day he greeted her in Hebrew. He had changed rabbis—he was now studying with Rabbi Repulski of Temple Elohim, who was a better fit and who talked to him about Israel. He was fascinated with the country, wanted to visit, wanted to live there. He couldn’t comprehend how it had willed itself into being in such short order. But that’s what happens, he supposed, when you lose six million people in a holocaust.

“It’s like how you drive down the highway,” he said, “and you see this enormous thing tied down to a big rig, with the sign on back, you know, that says
OVERSIZE LOAD,
and it’s hard to believe,
but as you get closer, you realize, that’s a
house
they have on that truck, an actual house, and they’re driving it down the highway! That’s Israel—the house they drove down the highway.”

“I haven’t seen one of those,” she said. She had never once, even in Los Angeles, been on a highway.

A few days later, after more study, he said to her, “But, Mirav, the Holocaust wasn’t the reason for the state of Israel. Israel got started a lot earlier than that. And not even as a religious movement. It was secular Jews, intellectuals, who saw the importance of it. They knew haskalah was a death sentence. Do you know about haskalah? It was guys like Moses Hess who started Israel—Hess and Pinsker and Herzl.”

She had heard of Herzl, but not the others. She had spent seventeen years under the tutelage of Osher Mendelsohn, but in a matter of a few short months, Grant Arthur knew more history than she did.

“The fact of the matter is,” she said to us thirty years later in the commons room, “the man was brilliant. I honestly think he was fluent in Hebrew in six months. I was simply amazed by that, and I remember saying so, and I remember his reply. He said, ‘If Ben-Yehuda can invent it in a year, I can learn it in six months.’ He had been to exactly one Shabbat dinner in that time.”

She couldn’t invite him over. She couldn’t introduce him to her parents. No matter how long he studied Torah or how well he mastered Hebrew, he would never be a Jew. The liberals, the congregations with mixed seating, they could convert him. But in the eyes of Osher Mendelsohn, the rabbi of Shalom B’nai Israel, a man of tradition, with a long memory of Europe’s madness, and born into that generation when the chasm between Jew and non-Jew
had never been greater, Grant Arthur would never be a Jew, because he hadn’t been born a Jew.

One day Grant Arthur said to her, “I’m going to become a rabbi.”

By then she had entered the house. She had seen his bedroom (from the doorway only) and the mattress that lay on the floor. There was a white sheet thrown over it. That sheet was the only sheet, that mattress the only bed. He had a lawn chair in one room and a beanbag in the other, some mismatched dinnerware. The cabinets were bare, the closets were empty. She could manage to adjust only slowly to the evidence before her eyes that this was how a person her age might live. Without linens, without china, without furniture, without siblings, without a dozen cousins always in the kitchen. The curious maturity of his owning a home coupled with his complete ignorance of how to properly make one could bring tears to her eyes in an offhand moment. So it was left to her to smuggle in what little touches the house would acquire: lace curtains, a menorah for the mantel, a coverlet, a serving bowl, a pair of matching wineglasses. For her trouble he cried and kissed her. He had never been loved, he said, and she expected some addition or qualification, but that was it: he had never been loved. She cried and kissed him. Whenever she left him in that house, that set of rooms, in that hermitage of books, she took with her the rhythm of his breathing. It was the closest she had ever come physically to someone else; it felt as if he were breathing from within her.

It was the house with nothing inside until one day she walked in to find a painting on the wall mounted in an ornate frame. It was a Marc Chagall. There was a cow and a fiddle, goats’ heads, a dark blue sky, the moon and its halo, a knockabout set of curving,
teetering, upsloping houses, a fallen chair, a curled-up woman on a cloud. She knew nothing about painters or their schools or styles, but she knew Marc Chagall. She knew him from her father. She also knew that Marc Chagalls lived on the walls of museums.

“What’s it doing here?” she asked.

“Do you like it?”

“Is it real?”

“Of course it’s real.”

“Where did you get it? What did it cost?”

“My grandmother bought it,” he said. “Well, my grandmother’s dead. But I used the money she left me. Do you think your father will like it?”

He had, said Mirav, trying to express the shock of walking in and seeing an original Chagall, about fifty dollars in furnishings scattered around that house and then a priceless work of art on the wall. She knew he was unusual; she hadn’t known he came from such crazy wealth. His father was a lawyer in Manhattan, and his mother was a socialite. He hadn’t spoken to either of them in over a year.

“He was very heavy into the history by then,” she said. “The shtetls, the Pale. Cossacks and Tartars. He was deeply affected by them in a way I found hard to understand. They filled him with revulsion, and with pity—and with something… I think the word might be romance. Not for Jewish persecution, I don’t mean to suggest he romanticized that. But he had a strange affinity for that time. I think the Chagall was his way of owning part of it.”

And of impressing her father. By then he had spoken to Rabbi Blomberg of Yad Avraham about going to seminary after his conversion. He was keeping kosher, observing the Sabbath, and following the 613 mitzvot maintained by traditional practicing Jews.
He thought that his conversion and his course of study, his sympathies and his Chagall, would prove his devotion to the man he wanted for a father-in-law. He may not have been born a Jew, but even among the Orthodox, according to the law, a convert was an equal in the eyes of God.

“But it doesn’t matter what the law says,” Mirav told him, “or what’s right in the eyes of God. He’s not going to approve.”

They were sitting at the far corner of a dining room table that had been recently delivered, made of cherrywood and large enough to hold sixteen, upon which he had promptly rested not only the menorah but the dream of a thousand Sabbath dinners, with his bride beside him, and all his court.

“So to God, and the state of Israel, I qualify as a Jew, but to Rabbi Mendelsohn, father of Mirav, I was born a Gentile and a Gentile I will die? It doesn’t make any sense, Mirav. Does the man have no respect for Halakhah?”

“Halakhah! But you aren’t listening, Grant. It has nothing to do with the law. You want to marry his daughter. His
daughter.
My father will want that man to be born a Jew. And if you want the law to weigh in, I guarantee you he will quote the mitzvah that forbids intermarriage with a Gentile.”

“I’m no longer a Gentile,” he said.

“Until you go before the Beth Din,” she said, “you’re a Gentile.”

It had been almost a year, and while he was not yet a Jew, he had the beard of one greatly devout, covered his head everywhere he went, and had had himself circumcised. He spoke as if he had been one all his life, a life whose sole purpose was its devotion to Judaism.

“So it doesn’t matter,” he said to her calmly, “that I do this of my own free will, that I do it eagerly, that I do it lovingly, that I
love nothing on earth as I do the Jews, that I am happier nowhere more than in shul, and that I came to Judaism because of its wisdom and beauty and swear to live by those things until my last day? And it doesn’t matter,” he continued, “that I want to bring more children into the world, more Jews, grandchildren for your father, who I will raise according to the custom and law of the Jews? I elect all of this, but you’re telling me in your father’s eyes it would be better for you to marry some Jew-by-the-numbers, so long as he was born a Jew?”

“Do you know the men he stands in front of during service?” she asked him. “Some of them just barely made it out of Europe before the Nazis marched in. One of them survived the camps. These are people who remember their villages being attacked just because they were Jews. My father came here from Kiev—”

“I know he came here from Kiev.”

“He saw things happen to his family—to his father, to his uncles. He was just a boy. You know the history, Grant, but they’ve lived it.”

“That shouldn’t disqualify me.”

“In the eyes of my father and the men of his congregation, it does.”

“And in your eyes?”

“In my eyes, no,” she said. “We’ll go to Israel. We’ll raise a family.”

“But lose the one you have?”

“What does it matter if we have our own?”

“No invitation to your house,” he said. “No Shabbat. No Seders. No holidays with your aunts and uncles. No place for me at Shalom B’nai Israel.”

“I know him,” she said. “He won’t allow it.”

“What’s it all been for, then,” he asked, “if we don’t have that?”

She wasn’t at all sure what he meant, and it confused her. Was he worried about her losing her family, or about it being lost, somehow, to him? But how could he lose something he never had? Aside from two complicit cousins, he’d never met any of them.

Then one afternoon Rabbi Mendelsohn appeared outside the house on the corner, rang the bell, and asked to see his daughter.

Despite the time they had had to prepare for the confrontation, neither of them was ready. Her father asked Mirav to introduce him to the young man who’d answered the door. Then he asked the young man if his parents were at home.

“My parents live in New York, sir,” he said.

“You live here alone?”

He nodded.

“Would you be kind enough to invite me in?”

“Of course.”

Osher Mendelsohn stood in the foyer and complimented the boy on the house. He gave no indication of what he thought of its spare interior or of the Chagall that hung conspicuously from the living room wall. They watched silently as he peered into the room with the fireplace, at the beanbag and the books on the floor.

“Do you mind if we sit down?” asked the rabbi.

“Only the two of us, sir? Or Mirav as well?”

“Would you care to join us, young lady?”

“If you want me to, Papa.”

“Yes,” he said. “I think you should.”

They had a seat at the new dining room table while Grant Arthur raced off to the kitchen. He wanted to offer the rabbi a variety of things to drink. If he knew anything as intimately as Mirav knew the traditional women’s prayer at candle lighting, it
was how to host a party. That was
his
inheritance, the legacy given him by his parents. But there was only a little milk in the fridge. So he left the house through the back door and ran down to the grocery that belonged to the rabbi’s wife’s brother, where he bought three kinds of juice, two kinds of soda, and tea and coffee. But on his run home he found that the back gate had fallen shut, locking him out, and he had to enter through the front door, to the surprise of Mirav and her father, who were sitting in silence, waiting for him to return from the kitchen. He excused himself once more, unpacked the groceries, and returned to the doorway to ask what they would have to drink. Mirav wanted nothing, and her father asked only for a glass of water.