Chapter 57

Seeing his mother was both harder and easier than Sam expected. Harder because he hadn’t felt so guilty since Tomasio’s death, which he could at least partly blame on illness or accident. Easier because Rivka didn’t faint or scream accusations. In fact, no sound came out of her, although she shook so hard that Dev slipped a chair underneath her for fear she’d fall.

Rivka stared into Sam’s eyes as he spoke. By now, the story of his absence sounded hollow to own ears. Only after she’d gulped two glasses of water did his mother cry.

“Are you too angry to forgive me?” Sam choked out the words.

“I’m not angry at you for leaving,” she said, “or letting me think you were dead. I’m angry that I missed seeing you grow from a boy into a man. It’s a mother’s right.”

“I’m sorry, Mama.” Sam knelt beside her. “How can I give you back what I took away?”

“You can’t, but God willing, I’ll have the rest of my life to see you become a mensh.”

“That’s what I came home to try to do,” Sam said. His mother, more than his sister, would let him make amends. The older you were and the more limited your future, the less willing you were to write off the past. Sam grieved over Rivka’s wrinkled brow, knowing he was both responsible and powerless to reverse time. Yet he also stirred with hope. His life lay ahead. Avram had turned into an old man while he was still young. Sam would not make that mistake.

It was his mother who suggested where and when Sam should meet his father. “Wait for him after Torah study, next Sunday night, at the synagogue. He’s calmest then. The sessions take him back to his childhood in the shtetl, and he forgets the long days of sweating at the factory.”

Sam was doubtful. “I don’t know if catching him when he’s thinking about the past is such a good idea. What if seeing me reminds him that he left Lemberg for nothing?”

Rivka wiped her eyes. “There’s never a good time, but facing your father after he’s been talking about something he knows, and that for him never changes, is a better time than others.”

“When does the study session end?” Sam’s nerves buzzed like they had as a boy during Friday night dinner, knowing Avram would quiz him on the Torah as soon as the meal ended.

“Between nine and eleven,” Rivka said with a chuckle. “Depending on how long it takes your father to convince a quorum that his interpretation is right. He won’t allow it to break up before then.”

“I’ll get there at nine and wait,” said Sam.

***

So there he was, at 10:30 the next Sunday night, pacing in the vestibule of the Eldridge Street Synagogue. At last he heard footsteps mounting the stairs. A dozen men walked out the front door, some glancing at his long hair and Navy pea coat with curiosity, but none questioning his right to be there. A man Sam recognized as an old neighbour appeared, asking someone behind him, “Why did God choose Abraham, not Noah, to be the first Jew? Wasn’t Noah also called a righteous man?” Sam realized they were discussing Lech L’Cha, the Torah portion in which God tells Abraham to leave his father’s house and go to a new land that God will show him.

Behind the neighbour came Avram, speaking impatiently. Sam felt the urge to flee, yet he was riveted, staring at the face that had aged while the body still held itself stiff and erect. “Because Abraham understood there was one true God and that He alone ...” The book Avram held clattered to the floor. The neighbour paled at seeing what he thought was a ghost and stumbled outside, leaving Sam and his father gaping at each other. Avram picked up the fallen prayer book and kissed the cover, a sign of respect. Trembling, he eyed a nearby bench, but remained standing.

“You’re dead,” Avram said. “I sat shiva when you left.”

Sam gulped. Had his father dismissed his life that quickly? “According to Jewish law, halakah says that without a body or eyewitness, a family should never give up hope.”

“Even your mother gave up hope.”

“Not until three years later, when Onkel Gershon found out I’d probably died at sea.” Sam bit his tongue. Avram would know that he must have talked to his mother or his uncle.

“So I’m the last person in the family to know you’re still alive?”

Sam nodded.

“Your mother I can understand, but Gershon ...” Again Avram’s gruff voice trailed off.

Sam shivered. The vestibule’s heat had leaked out when his father’s study group opened the outer door. Sam walked into the sanctuary, dark save for the Ner Tamid hanging above the Ark and illuminating the shul’s oldest Torah scroll. He sat in the second row, wondering whether Avram would follow him or leave like the others. After two minutes, the Eternal Light flickered under the shadow cast by his father’s entry. Avram took a seat at the far end of the pew.

“I saved you for last,” Sam said, “knowing you’d be the hardest to talk to. I haven’t completely figured out for myself why I left, so I’m not sure if I can explain it to you.”

Avram sat in profile, but Sam could see his eyebrows bunched in concentration. “Try.”

Sam gripped the oily seat back in front of him. “I knew you wanted more than anything for me to be a rabbi, but it wasn’t right for me. Studying Talmud I loved, but not arguing over minute points of law. When you grew up in the shtetl, where one day was the same as the next, the old laws still made sense. Here things change all the time. I couldn’t tell a congregation how to lead their own lives, when I was so confused about mine.”

“Life in America is not so different from life in the shtetl. Poor there, poor here. Both places, Jews and Catholics want nothing to do with one another unless it’s to exchange money.”

“Separation is not so easy in America. In Lemberg, peasants had the country, you had the village. Their farms, your shops. Here on the street, boys fight for every inch of territory. I didn’t know how to fight, only how to be smart in school. I got picked on. In the shtetl, scholarship was a mark of pride. Here it was a liability. I just wanted to fit in, to be tough like the other kids.”

“God demands we be tough obeying His laws, not imitating those who disobey them.” Avram’s shoulders twisted, as if wrestling with himself. “Why didn’t you tell me how you felt?”

“I tried, but I couldn’t make you listen. So I ran away. I told myself I was going to fight for my country.” Sam spoke quickly to rid himself of the words. “To be honest, I was escaping you.”

Now Avram turned an ashen face toward his son. In the light that was never extinguished, Sam saw his father’s frayed shirt collar and the sweat-carved creases in his neck. A blood vessel throbbed in Avram’s temple while Sam’s blood pulsed through the strawberry mark beneath his ear. He’d never told his father how self-conscious it made him, or how he was bullied because of it. Was there any subject, other than Torah, that wasn’t taboo for them to discuss?

“So why did you come back? Unless you changed your mind?” A ray of hope.

“No.”

Avram rested a thumb and forefinger on his closed eyes. “Then what’s the point?”

Sam took a deep breath. “In the Navy I discovered my voice as a teacher. When the war ended, I taught ruined men to use their hands, but I wasn’t reaching their souls. They were lost.” Avram’s head was bent, listening. Sam continued. “They lacked even the will to get off their tiny island. Immigrants found the courage to leave, but they struggle in the new world, confused about what to keep and what to change.”

“They keep nothing and change everything. Isn’t this what you just told me? That change, all the time change, made growing up here bad?”

“I didn’t say it was bad. Only that it was different from the shtetl, which made it hard for you to understand what I was going through.”

Avram sniffed. “You think you can do something for these lost souls, as you call them?”

Sam slid down the bench, narrowing the distance between them. “I keep going back to an idea I had in boot camp to open a school, a cheder, where I’d teach boys to apply ancient lessons from the Talmud to life in America today. A marriage of the spiritual and the practical.”

“I still don’t understand,” Avram said. “Give me a for instance. Dietary laws?”

“There’s room for some degree of choice.”

Avram scoffed. “What? Pork? Shell fish? Meat with milk?”

“If it was that or starve, yes.”

“No Talmudic passage justifies such an exception.”

“Jews two thousand years ago weren’t faced with these decisions. But Talmud allows eating on fast days in order to save a life. I would apply the same reasoning here.”

Avram threw out another challenge. “What about working on Shabbas?”

“Yes, if it is necessary to get a job. And feed your children.”

“I didn’t work on Saturday and still I managed to feed you and Dev.”

“Things are different now than when you arrived here. Business is booming since the war ended. If workers refuse to come in on Saturdays, they won’t get hired or they get fired.”

“Wearing leather on Yom Kippur? Hanging teffilin from your tzitzit? Saying a hundred prayers of thanksgiving every day?” Avram peppered Sam with Jewish laws, without giving him the time to answer “I don’t know yet” or “That’s why I need to study” between questions.

Sam was ready to admit defeat and slink away as he’d done years ago, when the memory of Mikovski’s impossible demands made him defiant. He turned the tables on Avram. “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Do you honour this commandment, Papa?”

“One must obey the law in a civilized country. You can exact retribution symbolically.”

“So you agree that some laws are not meant to be taken literally?”

Avram was silent. Sam allowed himself a glimmer of satisfaction as his father squirmed.

“And would you have Dev stoned to death because she disobeyed you and went to college instead of marrying Bernie?”

Avram raised his eyebrows.

“See, Papa. Some questions are not so easy to answer. I still think Torah holds the truth and Talmud offers solutions, but they are buried in the past. The words must be examined and interpreted for today. That’s what I hope to do with the pupils in my cheder.”

“You would become a rabbi to do this?” Avram’s voice was again hopeful.

“I would go to seminary to learn and become a teacher, but not necessarily be ordained.”

Sam inched another foot closer to his father but when Avram pulled back, he stopped. “I don’t want to be the kind of absolute authority that being a rabbi conveys. I want to be a teacher who learns as much from his students as they do from him, an egalitarian teacher.”

“I never heard of such a thing.”

Sam smiled. “It’s a Dev word.”

Avram stiffened at the second mention of his daughter.

“Don’t worry, I won’t be like Bernie, abandoning tradition to raise money. I can manage on my savings from the Navy and the workshop.” Sam said this to reassure his father, once more realizing too late that he’d confessed to seeing his friend, not just other family members, before seeking out his father. He braced himself for another wave of anger.

Instead, Avram asked quietly, “You know that Bernie ... studied with me?”

“I know you kind of adopted him after I left.” Sam paused. “I might have done the same.”

Avram considered the idea before shaking his head and returning to Sam’s plans. “How is merely studying at the seminary different than what I and my neighbours do when we meet every week? You may learn a little more, but in the end you’d still be a labourer, like me.” Sam opened his mouth to protest, but Avram talked over him. “You wouldn’t even be better than Gershon, who for all his wealth, still kowtows to others for money and power. Only a rabbi earns the full respect of his community. If you’re not ordained, I might as well have stayed in Lemberg.”

Sam was about to give up until, seeing the Torah illuminated on the reader’s table, he had an idea. He mounted the bima, opened the scroll, and spoke to Avram in the pew below. “In this week’s portion, God tells Abraham to leave his father’s house and go to a new place. Leaving for a new place is a way of life for Jews.”

Avram leaned forward as he’d done when impressing a point in Sam’s mind as a boy. “God has a destination in mind, ‘the place that I will show you,’ He says, meaning the land. When the Jews leave Egypt after four-hundred and thirty years of slavery, it is to return to that same land.”

Shmuel, the child, would have accepted his father’s explanation. A grownup Sam argued. “For two thousand years, since the second temple was destroyed, Jews have been exiled to many lands. The Diaspora is central to our identity.”

“True, but the title of this portion, ‘Lech L’cha” means ‘Take and Go.’ You can’t speak of the second part without honouring the first. Jews are a people of exile, but always we must take with us our past. The laws—the commandments of Torah—travel with us wherever we go.”

“Not when we leave Egypt. We don’t even have the commandments yet. We receive them later, at Sinai, after wandering in the desert for two months. Only then does God deem us ready.”

Avram shook his head. “The rabbis teach that there is no earlier or later in Torah. The moment we read the last word, we roll the scroll back to the beginning and start again. Whatever happens has always been so. God’s ways are fixed, whatever the time, wherever the place.”

“You could just as well interpret the rabbinic principle to mean that we must live in the present while respecting the past, not that the past should follow us unchanged into the present.”

“Torah is a circle, not a line. Past and present are one and the same.”

“Past and present are a never-ending cycle, not a fixed point. The Mishnah has volumes interpreting every law. Doesn’t this teach us that each time we read Torah, we are bound to learn something new?” Sam lifted the yad and read God’s promise urging Abraham to set forth. “I shall make of you a great nation.” He held out the pointer to Avram, who mounted the bima to accept it. Together, they finished chanting the verse: “And your name shall be a blessing.”

Sam considered the line. God intended Abraham’s name to be a blessing through his son and those who followed, until his offspring were “as numerous as the stars in the heavens and the grains of sand on the shore.” To be fruitful and multiply on that scale, Sam knew, people had to prosper in the land where they betook themselves. Would Avram, named for the Jews’ patriarch, allow the fulfilment of that promise to happen here, in a faraway land, with his own son?

The scroll of his own history unwound in Sam’s mind. If he’d talked to Avram one more time and not run away, would he have listened? Had tonight’s Talmudic arguments persuaded Avram that Sam’s school could fulfil a son’s dreams without dishonouring a father’s?

Avram’s face was unreadable. Sam would have to leave again to find the answer. He was his own man now. Avram would survive, or perish, on his own too. Buttoning his coat, Sam went through the icy vestibule and was opening the door to the chill night air when he imagined footsteps behind him. He paused, but heard only silence. Walking outside alone, Sam pictured Avram still reading Torah, lit by the eternal, never changing light.