TALL TALES

Bubbie, my grandmother, proud of her English, would often on winter evenings read to me from Oliver Twist, usually those passages in which the boys were physically abused. She loved that book & marveled at the cunning of its elderly hero. When at four I learned to read she felt belittled & rarely spoke to me during the ensuing forty-one years. My grandfather, a tiny dapper man who loathed Bubbie, could read only Yiddish but rarely did. In order to entertain me he invented his own sagas the hero of which was also Jewish, a gigantic Siberian husky named Tommy Doggy. Tommy was amazingly resourceful &, unlike Bubbie, totally incorruptible. Whenever the Cossacks approached his village he would employ his wiles to misdirect them or frighten their horses. If need be he would take them on in hand-to-paw combat & though cruelly outnumbered he always won. One late-July evening of my seventh summer while sitting out under the stars, I asked Zayde how he knew Tommy was Jewish. We were at Walled Lake escaping the bruising heat of the city. With a snifter of Hennessey beside him, Zayde explained: like a good Jew, Tommy wrapped tfilim every morning, like every Jewish male he was circumcised, &—the clincher—on Shabbos he would bark only in Hebrew.