An Orphan’s Tale

Every year, just before the World Series began, Sol would leave his apartment in Brooklyn and go around the country by train to visit his old boys. He would arrange his trip so that he would arrive in Los Angeles in time for the Rose Bowl, and Charlie remembered, when he had been a boy at the Home, how he and Murray had followed the cross-country trip by tacking the postcards Sol sent them to a large wall map of the United States.

But where was Sol now? For two days and nights, using the list of names and telephone numbers Murray had given him, Charlie had been unable to find a trace of him. His failure only intensified his desire to go through with his plan—to buy the house for the two of them—but what he feared was that, just when he would get in touch with Sol and present the idea to him, the house would be sold out from under him.

In Mr. Plaut’s jewelry store Charlie telephoned again, charging the long-distance call to his office phone, and when a woman answered, he explained that he had been trying to reach her husband for two days, that he had been given their number by Murray Mendelsohn, that he was trying to get in touch with Sol, and that—like her husband—he too had grown up in the Home. She replied that they had returned late the night before from a family camping trip to the Grand Tetons and that she knew nothing of Sol’s whereabouts. He had not stayed with them for at least five years. She was certain, though, that her husband would want to reminisce with Charlie about Sol. Could she have his number?

He stood in front of the store window, his back to the jeweler, watching the children play inside the schoolyard across the street. He wasn’t surprised that he couldn’t discover Sol’s whereabouts. In fact, he knew that his instinct about buying the small house had been connected somehow to his instinct about Sol’s trips—to his sense that, except for Murray and one or two others, there were fewer and fewer boys who would take him in.

If he couldn’t find Sol, he knew he would have to let the house go. He didn’t want a whole house for himself. Who would take care of it? He looked across the street at the children and he tried to see himself as he was when he had been a boy, but he couldn’t. He never could. He could see the faces of the others—Murray and Slats and Morty and Irving and Herman and Louie and Jerry and Stan—but he could never see his own, not even when he imagined photographs of himself. He saw Sol’s face instead, and Sol was smiling at him. Sol was younger and wore a soft tan-and-gray-checked, tailor-made suit; he was standing in the courtyard of the Home waiting to take Charlie out for the day with some of the others. They were going to a restaurant and a Dodger game at Ebbets Field. Sol knew the reporters, the owners of the restaurants, the players….

He had been Sol’s favorite, though. He knew that. When he had told Murray about his idea, Murray had told him he was nuts, but Charlie tried not to care about what Murray said. Why shouldn’t he and Sol live together if they wanted to? Charlie had thought of explaining his reasons to Murray—of trying to make him see that he wanted to do it not in order to pay Sol back, but because, simply, when he had come to the small two-bedroom house in the middle of the night, he had seen himself and Sol living in it together and enjoying it.

But how would Murray ever understand a thing like that? Murray always wanted reasons for things, and while Charlie could name the things he and Sol shared, what made him want to do it was, quite simply, that it was the kind of thing people told you you couldn’t do. It was the kind of thing Murray called impossible.

I have dreams and needs too, Charlie thought, and he smiled, remembering the astonishment in Murray’s eyes when he had used the same words in Murray’s study two nights before. He checked his list, tried another number, but received no answer.

In the schoolyard the children were all packed to one side now, their faces pressed against the wire fence. They jeered and shouted as a group of boys walked past them along the sidewalk, struggling with an enormous king-size mattress. They carried it over their heads, their necks and backs bent, one boy at each corner, one fat boy in the middle where it sagged. A tall boy walked ahead of them carrying a long stick with nails in it, and he shook it at the children inside the schoolyard. They screeched back in Spanish.

Charlie turned to Mr. Plaut. “But listen,” he said, “I was remembering just before when Murray held me by the ankles once, upside down into a sewer—that was down the street from the Home where they used to have a firehouse. You still live near there, right? I don’t know what’s there now. I haven’t been back for years.”

Charlie laughed. “I get pictures like that in my head sometimes, of myself as a boy, but do you know what?” he said. “I can never see my own face.” He walked to the back of the store and sat down next to Mr. Plaut. Short and thin, with a smooth round head, Mr. Plaut worked a pair of silver tweezers inside the back of a small gold watch. His white shirt billowed lightly around his arms and shoulders. “I remember that Murray was holding me that way so I could get a hardball that had fallen in. I can see the sewer cover, the hole, the ball, even Murray’s hands on my ankles—but I can’t see my own face, or what it looked like down in there. Maybe it’s because it was so dark. Tell me what you think.”

“I think it’s the first Monday of the month and you want your envelope, yes?”

Mr. Plaut removed the magnifying lens from his left eye and handed Charlie an envelope. “What do I think?” he said. “I think you’re a good boy and that you should have a nicer job than working for Max Mittleman. I’ve told you before.”

Charlie laughed again, easily, and patted Mr. Plaut on the back. “Don’t worry about me, all right?” he said, standing. “I have a plan. This isn’t forever.”

They stood at the front door. “Max and I used to be good friends,” Mr. Plaut said. “He was very good to me when I first came to America from Antwerp….”

“I know the story by heart,” Charlie said, and he stepped from the store onto the sidewalk.

Mr. Plaut had one hand cupped over his right ear, as if to protect himself from street noise. His bald head was freckled with sunspots. He held on to Charlie’s wrist with his small soft fingers, but said nothing. Charlie told him that he’d tell him more about his plan the next time he saw him, if things worked out, and Mr. Plaut released him.

Charlie crossed the street and walked beside the empty schoolyard, running his fingers along the cold metal fencing. He looked up and, squinting, saw a Puerto Rican boy and girl sitting on the edge of the roof, kissing. A second boy—waiting his turn, Charlie imagined—sat several feet away from them, his feet dangling over the edge of the four-story building. He was tossing stones down into the schoolyard.

In the street, despite his irritation at not being able to reach Sol, Charlie felt good. The truth, which he didn’t ask Mr. Plaut or anyone else to believe, was that he enjoyed his work. He enjoyed being away from Mittleman and the office; he enjoyed being in the city and walking in the old neighborhood; he enjoyed the pictures and sounds that would fill his head when he went on his rounds; and—most of all-he enjoyed handling the money.

He touched his inside jacket pocket, where the envelopes bulged. Behind him, a young boy with straight sandy-colored hair was staring into Mr. Plaut’s window. Charlie wondered where the boys with the mattress were. At the corner, in front of the BMT subway entrance, he pictured them trying to bend and fold it so they could lug it down the steps and through the turnstile.

He walked along the street, going from store to store, and then from apartment building to apartment building, and the boy followed him, a half-block behind. Charlie didn’t look back.

In the apartments of building superintendents he tried numbers from Murray’s list, but without success. He called Mr. Mittleman at the office in New Jersey, and Mr. Mittleman told him that the house had not yet been sold. Mr. Mittleman didn’t ask him why he wanted the house for himself. Charlie imagined that he thought it was purely for the bargain. It wasn’t too often that you could take over somebody’s mortgage at such a low rate. But the guy needed the cash and Charlie had it.

“I’d get up in the middle of the night to take a listing,” Charlie had said to Mr. Mittleman.

Charlie sat in the basement apartment, listening to the 70-year-old superintendent tell him about his 91-year-old mother, who lived with him. For the first time in years, she had not been sitting on the stoop when Charlie had come to the building. “The sun’s no good for her eyes,” the superintendent said. “She got big cataracts and got to stay in the dark now.”

The superintendent circled horses’ names in The Morning Telegraph and, in his head, Charlie saw the other guy, in New Jersey, pacing the small living room, one cigarette in his mouth, one between his fingers. The man was exceptionally small and wiry, like a jockey, and when he wasn’t smoking or talking, he ground his teeth against one another and cracked his knuckles. Charlie had seen his chance at once and had explained to him how long, given the high interest rates, he might have to wait for a buyer. And then—especially if it was FHA or GI—how much longer he might have to wait until the buyer could get a new mortgage approved.

The man said he’d paid twenty-four thousand for the house and was asking forty. He had bought it six years before at 6% percent interest. Charlie said that he might be able to offer to buy the house himself in a day or so—he could give him the difference in cash and take over the mortgage. They could close the deal within a week. The man said he’d take thirty-eight—he needed fourteen in cash—and Charlie said he’d let him know within a day. But he had been unable to get the guy to give him an exclusive listing, and, short of buying the house outright before he’d spoken with Sol, he had no way of keeping Mittleman—or some other realtor—from finding a customer.

He was confident that Sol would like the idea, but he couldn’t take the chance alone. He didn’t want to tie up that much cash—and the monthly payments—in a house. It wasn’t the kind of investment he believed in. He heard Mr. Mittleman’s voice, telling him that property ate three meals a day: principal for breakfast, interest for lunch, and taxes for supper.

He finished his rounds by early afternoon and walked back to his car, which he’d parked behind the school. He drew fresh air in through his nostrils. His pockets were full. He got into his car, and, driving toward the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, he thought of his money, expanding endlessly, and he wondered how much Sol had left.

Mrs. Mittleman had packed a corned beef sandwich for him, and Charlie ate it as he drove, to save time. He smiled, thinking of the loaves of unbaked bread in the bakery at the Home. When he thought of his money he always thought of those loaves—he saw the pale oblongs of dough rising under damp cloths near the ovens. He remembered how much, as a boy, he’d looked forward to being on night shift—had even volunteered for it—just so he could have the chance to lift the corners of the cloths every half-hour and see the difference. His money grew that way.

He smiled, remembering once again the time, almost twenty-five years ago, when he and Irving, working the night shift, had plotted their famous adventure. It had taken them nearly two months just to save enough money from their weekly allowance of twenty cents—they had forgone snacks in the nearby luncheonette—to buy a bottle of cheap wine for the baker. Irving had been the salesman, convincing the old man that they were skilled enough to do the work by themselves and that when it was all done the director himself would praise him for having taken the initiative in designating responsibility.

While the old man had been drinking and sleeping on a stool behind the ovens, Charlie and Irving had twisted and carved the dough into the shapes of penises and vaginas and breasts and they had watched all night long—peeking under the cloths and into the ovens—as their creations swelled to magical proportions. When the breads were done, they had packed them into baskets and had delivered the baskets to the dining room tables, covering them with cloth napkins. Then, too excited to return to the dormitory for their usual two-hour nap before reveille sounded, they had waited on a bench, side by side, saying nothing.

When the three hundred boys tumbled into the dining room for breakfast that morning and discovered the breads, the place had gone wild. Charlie could still see Irving, standing on a table in the middle of the room and biting off huge chunks of bread as the others cheered him on. He saw Jerry and Herman leading a parade of bread-eaters across the tabletops—loaves in hands, like scepters—chanting: “Some like it hot… Some like it cold… Some like it in their mouths nine days old!”

By the time the director and the counselors arrived, the boys had divided themselves into two camps and, with tables turned on their sides for barricades, they were flinging chunks of bread and pitchers of milk and juice across the room at each other. He and Irving had been banned from all evening activities for three months, he recalled, and their allowances had been docked for six months, but neither of them had ever really minded.

It was a story, Murray announced at the time, that would probably be passed down in the Home from one generation of boys to the next. He’d been right about that, and Charlie already had the item on his list: tell Murray about KC + 2; three of the guys he’d telephoned—including one in Kansas City he’d never met—had wanted to talk about it on the phone during the past two nights.

When Sol first heard the story, Charlie recalled, he’d agreed with Murray, but he had refused to intervene and ask the director to lift the punishments. “Character,” he said then—and in his head Charlie saw Sol wink at him—“develops from loyalty to a cause. That’s what your Uncle Sol believes.”

Today I saw him. I recognized him from his pictures and I was glad he wasn’t looking my way when I realized who he was because I must have been gaping. His hair is still black and curly and it crawls down the back of his neck and into his collar. I thought of Samson and how he went blind and I smiled.

This is what I thought: Now that I see him before me I know that everything will be all right and that I’ll be able to get out of here.

Once he turned and smiled at me and when he did I stared into a store window and I don’t think he was really paying any special attention to me. I think he likes to smile at everybody.

When I first awoke this morning before the others I had the feeling that something would happen today that would change my life. I dressed quietly, checked the lock on my locker and I didn’t put my shoes on until I was outside the dormitory. I went to the neighborhood where I lived until I was 7. I always go there when I want things to happen.

A question: If I had the same feeling last week and had come then, would I have met him today or would he have been there last week also?

He looks the same as in his pictures, only older. He’s 20 years older than when he left. When I came back I looked at his pictures on the walls. There are more pictures of him than of anybody else.

This is what I’ll do tomorrow: Leave before breakfast again and try to see him before the stores open. But if it rains I’ll stay here and rest and read and memorize things.

I know he’ll be surprised at how much I know about him. When he walks on the street people turn to notice him. I had to hurry just to keep up with him and while he was inside stores and houses and I was outside waiting, this is what I thought about: Can anyone ever really know what goes on inside another person? If you talked to somebody you loved forever and he talked back to you forever, would you ever be able to tell one another everything you thought and felt, or would each new thing you told and heard change what you were up to that point so you could never finish?

I wonder what he would think if I asked him a question like that. He doesn’t look like he ever thinks of things like that so it might mean that he does.

Here’s Danny Ginsberg’s brand new THEORY OF OP-POSITES: I am the opposite inside of what I seem to be outside!

When he drove away I couldn’t stop myself from taking a chance and waving to him, but he didn’t see me from his rear view mirror. My heart is pounding now just like it was then.

The other boys are working on their secret room in the basement now but they didn’t invite me to come.

They’re having movies in the dining room now so I’m in my bed writing with the lights on instead of by flashlight. When I hear noises I jump so that tells me how frightened I really am, but nobody misses me downstairs or cares.

I was there before the stores opened but he never came. I waited until 12:30 and followed the same route he took yesterday. I wish I had the courage to ask somebody he spoke to about him and when he might be coming back.

I got back here early but I didn’t want to see anybody or go to Dr. Fogel’s Hebrew class so I went to sleep. Somebody was touching my combination lock while I was gone and trying to read what I write.

A SPECIAL MESSAGE TO WHOEVER MAY BE READING THIS: DANNY THE ORPHAN SAYS, “ALL ORPHANS ARE LIARS.”

Because I’m an orphan my statement must be a lie. But if it’s a lie then all orphans could not be liars. But if all orphans are not liars and I’m an orphan, then All Orphans Are Liars is a true statement. But it cannot be true because I am an orphan.

Today I stayed here and asked if I could work in the office and Mr. Gitelman let me. They let me do anything I want here because they’re grateful to have me in comparison with the others. Mr. Gitelman said he’d be in the maintenance shed working but he winked at me and he knew that I knew that he and Mr. Levine and George and Ernie would be playing cards.

His file is very thick, but even though nobody would ever know the difference I didn’t remove anything or copy out anything. I like to read about what he was like when he was a boy before he got to my age. All the reports say he would have been a Leader others looked up to even if he wasn’t such an athlete. When he was my age he was only an inch taller than me.

I went through the letters on Mr. Gitelman’s desk and found out that the rumor about closing the Home is true. There was a letter from the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies to Mr. Gitelman giving the reason: There aren’t enough Jewish orphans anymore because of the new abortion laws!

I remembered not to feel guilty about spying and this is what I imagined: If I was on an airplane and it was hijacked and if the hijackers asked all the Jews to stand up, I wouldn’t do it. If they murdered all the Jews in front of my eyes and if the FBI came and killed the hijackers in a shoot-out and if I walked off the plane by myself I still wouldn’t feel guilty!

Today Larry Silverberg came up to me and said I could come visit their clubhouse but that they voted not to give me a key. I told him what I knew about the Home closing and he smiled and squeezed my shoulder muscle, next to my neck, so that it hurt until I almost screamed. He whispered that they were making plans already. He said that if Mr. Gitelman found out they would know who the rat was.

What will Dr. Fogel do if the Home closes? Where will he go? From the photos he’s been here since before Charlie or his group. The 1st photo of Dr. Fogel is from 1932 but he might have been here before that. Even though his face was softer then it looks the same as now, with his skin being full of folds like a bulldog’s. 1935 is the 1st year with him in the pictures with the football teams.

I worked in Mr. Gitelman’s office again in the morning. I told him he could have the day off and he laughed to hear a sentence like that from a boy like me. I’m a mystery to him.

I typed out names and addresses I need and I tried some letters, giving the reasons I’m being transferred. I liked writing about myself. I made up different life stories for myself and I thought: I could make up my whole life’s story before it happens and present it to Charlie and he could see how beautifully our life would turn out together!

At 11 o’clock Larry and Marty came into the office carrying Steve between them and screaming that he was having a heart attack. I telephoned to the shed and told Mr. Gitelman that Steve was having another fit and he came and took care of things.

Mr. Gitelman and I stood in the hallway together after looking at the photos of former orphans which go all the way down the corridor. There are photos from as far back as 1904. There are photos of all the Home’s football, baseball and basketball teams. There are photos of members of the Board of Directors and officers of the Maccabee Clubs and Bar Kochba Clubs and the Thespian Society, and there are signed photos of great Jewish athletes sending their best wishes to us. There are 5 locked glass cases with trophies and cups and medals.

BENNY LEONARD HAS DONE MORE TO CONQUER ANTI-SEMITISM THAN A THOUSAND TEXTBOOKS!

Mr. Gitelman saw me staring at photos of former orphans and this is what I said to him then: “They don’t make orphans like they used to.”

Even though we don’t have enough boys to have teams anymore, on the 1st day of the school year each of us is required to choose a famous Jewish athlete after whom we’re supposed to model ourselves. It’s something they’ve been doing here for over 40 years. Mr. Levine the gym teacher calls it a tradition. Dr. Fogel laughs at him!

These are the athletes I have chosen since I’m here: Johnny Kling, Herman Barron, Dolly Stark, Jackie “Kid” Berg. This year Mr. Levine told me to be Moe Berg, the major league catcher who could speak 6 languages and was on a radio program called “Information Please.”

People think I’m smarter than I am just because I don’t say so much out loud.

After Mr. Gitelman left I decided that my favorite photo of Charlie is the small one where he has his arms around the shoulders of 2 other boys. They’re in the country with their shirts off and 2 other boys are sitting on the grass in front of them. Next to the boys is an elderly man in a suit. He’s very handsome, with skin that shines, and he’s wearing a straw hat and holding a football under one arm. Under the photo it says, “Uncle Sol and His Boys. Spring Valley, 1947.”

What I think Charlie was thinking when the photo was taken: He wishes he could know all the people in history who will ever be seeing him in this photo of this single moment! When I think of the photo now I see light coming from his eyes.

In the photo of him with the football team when he was 12 years old he didn’t have any scar on his bottom lip. Then when he was 13 years old you can see a new scar running sideways even though the photo of his face in the picture is as small as a dime. Then the next year the scar is almost gone. But in the photo I like best, when he’s smiling, it makes the scar show again!

I saw a page in LIFE magazine of a man who took a photo with his daughter and himself in front of his house, standing in the exact same position every year for about 40 years from the time she was a little girl until he was an old man and she had grown children of her own.

After supper it was my turn to work in the kitchen. I like to watch the trays of glasses go through the suds machine. I like the noise of pots and silverware, and I like to be inside the steam. I laid out all the leftover bread on trays and covered the trays with damp towels. I filled the salt shakers and sugar bowls and ketchup containers. I sorted silverware and stacked dishes.

At supper I counted. There are 14 of us left now, and counting the Puerto Ricans who work in the kitchen and clean the buildings there are 19 staff members.

The courtyard, with connected two-story buildings on three sides and a brick wall and wide iron gate on the fourth, was a rectangle of dirt, 230 feet wide and 160 feet long. A boy stood on top of the brick wall that was beside the gate and, in the dull yellow light that came from the lampposts beyond the Home, he gestured frantically to somebody on the street below. Suddenly—Danny felt his heart stop—the boy turned and leapt from the wall, rolled in the dust, then scampered to the iron gate and pulled it open.

Three boys came through the entrance, carrying a large stuffed sofa, upside down, above their heads. “Turn around,” Steve said. Danny turned and faced the building from which he’d come. All lights were out. Steve tied a handkerchief around Danny’s eyes and, one hand on his shoulder, Danny followed him across the courtyard and into one of the unused buildings. He heard the other boys grunt and curse as they bumped the sofa down the metal staircase ahead of him. They passed through two rooms, then went down a second staircase and along a dirt-floored corridor before they stopped. Another door opened.

When the blindfold was removed, Danny saw eleven boys sitting on the floor, in a circle. They were all dressed in street clothes, and, the only one in pajamas and slippers, Danny could not keep from shivering.

Larry Silverberg put an arm around his shoulder and told him they expected to come across a good electric heater in the next few days. He told Danny they had invited him down because they thought he might be able to help them with strategy. Larry gestured to the room. “Not bad, huh?”

Danny said nothing. He looked around at the calendars and posters on the walls—naked girls with large breasts, horses pulling sleighs through snow-covered landscapes, sailboats dipping in peaceful waters—and he tried to smile back at Larry. The walls were paneled in a golden-colored wood, and there was a double porcelain sink built into one wall, with glass-doored cabinets above and below it. A large pink water-stained mattress took up about a third of the floor space. There were wooden chairs, three stand-up lamps, the sofa he had seen in the courtyard, an oval Formica table, and cartons of paperback books and comics.

As always, the others said nothing to Danny, and he said nothing to them. Larry sat at one end of the circle and talked about making plans. He announced that Danny had heard from Mr. Gitelman that the Home was definitely going to close and that all of them would be separated and shipped out to different institutions. He told Danny to tell them that what he said was true and Danny nodded, but he did not move toward the circle.

While Larry talked about battle plans and defenses and assignments, Danny tried to see pictures of Charlie in his head, but instead he saw a supermarket in Charlie’s neighborhood, where he had stopped two days before, and he saw himself in one of the antitheft mirrors on the ceiling, watching an old Jewish man stuff cans of food into his coat pocket. Danny had looked away at once—had felt, somehow, as if he had done something wrong. When he was in supermarkets, he played a game he called “shopping for Jews”—he tried to guess which customers were Jews by how they looked and what they bought. Women and men who bought no meat were Jews. Those who turned cans around in their hands, looking for a Kosher

, were Jews.…

Two boys rolled around on the mattress, punching and cursing, and Larry yanked one of them by the hair. He glanced at Danny and talked about how the Jews had been outnumbered one hundred to one by the Arabs and had defeated them because they were smarter. He talked about recruiting the Puerto Ricans from the neighborhood to help them when the time came in exchange for letting the Puerto Ricans sneak into the clubhouse as a place to take their girl friends in the winter.

“But I thought we got this place ready so we could hold out here when the spies attack us!” Steve yelled.

“Burn the jerk, Larry!” a boy yelled, offering a cigarette. “C’mon, let’s burn the jerk!”

Then—Danny had not even seen them shift from their positions—Larry was punching and shouting and grabbing, trying to get the boys back under control. Three of them held Steve down on the mattress, threatening to burn his bared stomach with a lit cigarette. Two boys slouched around the room, their right arms swinging limply from their sides, mimicking Dr. Fogel. Two of the younger boys were on top of each other on the new couch, moaning and giggling, a calendar of a naked girl between them. Danny backed to the door and waited. “I didn’t want you to see them like this,” Larry said to him. “It always ends up this way.”

He wrapped a beer-soaked handkerchief around Danny’s eyes and Danny squirmed slightly, but stopped the instant Larry put pressure on the back of his neck.

When they were outside in the courtyard Larry spoke to him again. “You’re a real smart boy,” he said. “You tell me what you would do if you were me, okay? You think about that.”

They walked across the courtyard, then up the stairs, and the stone steps were colder under Danny’s feet than the dirt had been outside. Marty stood guard at the hallway window outside the dormitory. “Nothing to report,” he said.

“You think about what I said and give me a good answer tomorrow,” Larry whispered to Danny.

Danny went into the dormitory and got into his bed. There were pillows and rolled-up bundles of clothes under the blankets in the other beds, but it didn’t really matter, he knew. The night watchman, an elderly black man who worked full-time at the Post Office during the day, spent his shift sleeping in Mr. Gitelman’s office. Danny waited awhile. Then, when he was warm again, he tiptoed to the other end of the room, out into the corridor, and unlocked his metal locker. He sat on the stone floor and wrote by flashlight.

I just got back from seeing their secret clubhouse. I’m not sure exactly where it is because they blindfolded me to take me there, but it’s a room that was probably once used for special meetings of trustees or alumni, with beautiful wood walls and sinks and cabinets and counters for serving drinks.

Larry Silverberg wants me to help him plan what to do to stop the Home from sending us away but I couldn‘t say anything to him!

All the others didn’t have the patience to make plans with him and they went crazy the way they always do, wrestling and imitating boys and girls making love to each other. They have beer and wine hidden in their room.

What I kept telling myself: I can‘t get involved in their plan because it will get in the way of mine!

I just kept saying nothing and trying to show nothing in my face and that kept Larry from getting angry with me. I’m the only boy here he’s never really tried to hurt but I have to remember not to trust anyone, whether it’s him or Mr. Gitelman or even Dr. Fogel!

I hear some of them coming back across the courtyard now, trying to keep their voices low. I’ll tell you more tomorrow.

In the morning Mr. Gitelman asked me why I didn‘t go out to public school since I was the only boy from the Home with the right to go and I told him that a group of Puerto Rican boys there had threatened to beat me up because I was a Jew.

I didn’t have to say anything else. Mr. Gitelman’s children are in private schools. He used to be a public school teacher.

But this is what really happens: When I go to the school they leave me alone. I’m in all the special classes and the teachers always give me a lot of attention, but what I like to do most is just sit in the school library and memorize things. Most people leave me alone most of the time. When groups of blacks go through the subways and gang up on people they never choose me. I can look at you in a way that doesn’t make you feel anything.

They can take me out of the school or send me away from the Home or change teachers on me or transfer me to a different school, but they can’t take away the words I have inside me! When you have enough facts and know when to use them people believe you’re strong. That’s why the boys don’t bother Dr. Fogel the way they do the other teachers who come here, even though he’s an old man who’s smaller than I am, and has a right hand and arm which are no good.

I went to his class in the afternoon and there were 3 other boys there. Dr. Fogel sat in the front with his head on his good hand, resting his eyes. I chanted the Haftorah for my Bar Mitzvah and he listened without saying if I was good or bad.

Then he sent the other boys away and asked me if I wanted to chant the Maftir also on my Bar Mitzvah day. The Maftir is the portion from the Torah that comes just before the Haftorah. I said yes.

I followed him from the room and across the courtyard. Larry Silverberg was sitting with his back against a wall, carving a pointed stick, and he waved to me. We walked down 3 steps and Dr. Fogel went into the Shul. The room is small and the only time we ever use it anymore is when one of us is Bar Mitzvahed.

My Haftorah is

from Ezekiel and it lists the sins of the Children of Israel and how they murdered and committed adultery and incest and did not observe the Sabbath.

Why I believe Dr. Fogel likes it: because of what Ezekiel makes God say about his own hand.

This is what it says: “Thou has greedily gained of thy neighbors by oppression and has forgotten Me, saith the Lord God. Behold, therefore I have smitten My hand at the dishonest gain which thou hast made and at thy blood which hath been in the midst of thee.”

I helped Dr. Fogel take a Torah from the Ark. He took off the velvet cover and rolled the scroll from one side to the other until he found my portion.

A question I thought of that I didn’t ask: If God believes He is the only God why is He always jealous of other Gods who don’t exist?

Dr. Fogel unlocked the door next to the Ark and we went into a small dark room called the GENIZAH. The smell there was beautiful, from the dust and old leather. Dr. Fogel explained to me that old prayer books, because they contain the name of God, can never be destroyed. When a Torah is too mutilated to be used anymore it’s buried in the ground like a man, wrapped in a Talis.

I wanted to ask him to tell me everything he remembered about Charlie, but I didn’t. He might get suspicious.

There were old Tephillin bags piled in boxes and he gave me one, and also a white and black Talis that still has some silver threads in it. He gave me a copy of PIR-KAY AVOS which has the Hebrew and the English and I told him it was my favorite book, but he didn’t react. Even though I’m the only real student he has left I don’t believe he really cares about me.

We walked back to the classroom and I told him about the Home being closed and that they’re going to use our buildings as a halfway house for Jewish mental patients. I gave him the reason I saw in the letter, about the supply of Jewish orphans drying up and he only laughed. He got angry and said that the real reason was always the same: the lack of religious observance. The Home was failing because it was failing God. Our kitchens were no longer Kosher, our Shul was unused, our boys received no real Jewish upbringing.

He said that the Home was like the state of Israel because its real purpose was to lead the Jewish people away from religion and God!

I never saw him speak with so much passion before and I wondered if Charlie ever heard him speak like this. He stood in front of the blackboard and waved his good hand in circles above his head. He said the Zionists were willing to sell all of Jewish history for a nationalist “mess of pottage.”

He said that Zionism represented the greatest heresy of all time. He looked at me with great anger and told me to remember his words because nobody else would ever tell me the truth. I didn’t say anything but I concentrated as hard as I could.

This was what he said: “ZIONISM IS AN ATTEMPT TO ESTABLISH A JEWISH KINGDOM ON EARTH WHICH WAS AND ALWAYS WILL BE THE PRIVILEGE OF THE MESSIAH ALONE.”

He got so excited that he began to choke and his face turned from red to gray but I still didn’t say anything or move from my desk. Marty and a 10 year old boy named Norman were peeking through the window with their eyes bulging. Dr. Fogel punched his own chest with his fist and his color began to come back. He gave me a piece of paper and told me to write out a receipt for the Talis and Tephillin and book.

Larry Silverberg was very friendly to me today but he forgot to ask me for my answer.

What I want to know: more about Israel and its history, so I can refute Dr. Fogel!

Today was visiting day so I went into the Shul with my new book and stayed there all day, memorizing and sleeping.

This is what I told myself: The Sabbath is a day of rest and a day of study and I am doing both!

I stood in front of the Ark and chanted my Haftorah. I opened the Ark but I was afraid that if I tried to lift a Torah out by myself I would drop it.

There were only 6 boys at supper, and the Puerto Rican cooks and dishwashers ate with us and talked in Spanish about baseball players. After supper I took out my Tephillin and sat on my bed and unwound the leather straps. I wondered if the boy who once used the Tephillin was still alive somewhere and if he had a son who was putting on Tephillin.

When the lights were out and time had gone by the guys got into each other’s beds and whispered about things they would do to girls and movie stars when they had the chance.

buy new batteries for my flashlight
withdraw money from bank
telephone Charlie’s home
buy sack for carrying notebooks and Tephillin +
put aside extra set of clean underwear

The narrow line of colored glass that ran along the top of each section of the wall shimmered in the sun. Danny sat on a chair by the window, his tephillin bag in his lap, and watched the courtyard below. When the police car had appeared fifteen minutes before, Danny had been surprised to see Mr. Gitelman step out of it, but he had not, he realized, been afraid.

The boys stood huddled in a group, at a safe distance, watching Larry Silverberg being handcuffed. Danny felt nothing, except relief: he would not have to give him an answer.

A group of Puerto Rican boys stood on the other side of the street, outside the gate, watching. Larry Silverberg stepped toward the car, then raised his handcuffed hands above his head and looked up toward Danny. Danny moved away from the window, put his book and tephillin in his locker, and took out some of his money.

When he came to the window again, the police car was gone and only three boys were left in the courtyard. They played catch with a football. Danny left the dormitory, walked downstairs and along the main corridor. Mr. Gitelman’s office door was open.

Danny went in and, nobody there, he telephoned Charlie’s home in New Jersey. A woman answered and said that he would be back later in the day. Danny left his name and said he was from the Maimonides Home for Jewish Boys.

Then he walked from the building, showed his pass to the guard at the gate, and stepped onto the sidewalk. He stared back through the iron bars at the boys left inside the courtyard, and he wondered what—not being friends with any of the boys he himself had been growing up with—he would have to share with Charlie when they were together. What stories of the Home could he bring to him?

He looked at the bronze plaque on the wall next to the gate and wondered if Charlie would remember it.

THE MAIMONIDES HOME FOR JEWISH BOYS

Founded: 1897 “Give me Friendship or Give me Death.”

Moses Maimonides 1135–1204

He took the IRT subway to Grand Army Plaza and went into the public library, to look things up. Afterward he walked in Prospect Park and thought about what he’d read. He wondered what Charlie and his friends had done evenings in the Home years before, and decided that having had more boys then made the difference. In the year Charlie had left the Home there had been 326 boys enrolled.

He took the bus to the neighborhood in which he’d seen Charlie, and he walked along the streets. Most of the stores were closed, but in a used-clothing store he bought a green cloth sack for $3.49, and in a drugstore he bought batteries and candy bars. He returned to the Home in time for supper and he listened to the boys at his table compare things Larry had done to them. Steve was proudest because he still had large purple marks on his arms and legs. They talked about running away and hiding out in movie theaters and getting jobs as delivery boys. One of them said he knew where a summer cottage his aunt and uncle owned was, and the boys became excited about going there. Danny didn’t ask them if the cottage was heated for the winter.

Mr. Gitelman came into the dining room while they were eating and announced that Larry was going to have to go to court because the mothers of two young boys had brought charges against him. He had been forcing the boys to steal things for him by doing things to them that Mr. Gitelman would not mention. He warned all the boys to be careful and to report to him personally if they wanted to tell him anything. They would never get in trouble for telling him things, he said. “You don’t know how good you have it here until you get sent to the kinds of places he’s been in,” he added. “Believe me.”

Danny left the room while the boys were eating dessert, went upstairs, and wrote.

This morning the police came and took Larry Silverberg away. Now they’ll have nobody to rally them when the time comes. I think I was glad that he was gone because it makes it easier for me to get ready to leave.

The word Zionism was first used in 1892. In Europe at that time there was still a head tax on “Jews and cattle” that moved from town to town.

There have always been Jews living in Jerusalem! Jews tried to create a state there in the 16th century and at other times too!

A saying I found for Dr. Fogel: “It is better to dwell in the deserts of Palestine than in palaces abroad.”

A question I thought of for him: If we had a place to call our own in 1941 would 6 million of us have died?

I looked at pictures of Jewish children frozen to death in the snow in the Warsaw Ghetto and I was surprised because instead of making me cry the pictures made my body go stiff. A girl sitting near me saw the way my fists were clenched with anger and she moved to another table.

A question for Danny Ginsberg: Why do I care so much about a Jewish Homeland? Is it because I never had a real Jewish home of my own, or is it because it’s really something worth caring about?

Here are the last words of my Haftorah: “Thus saith the Lord God, Because ye are all become dross therefore behold I will gather you into the midst of Jerusalem.”

I read a story about a great Zionist named Michael Halpern who was being mocked by a group of Arabs at a circus, so he entered the lion’s cage unarmed and sang the “Hatikvah.”

What that proves, according to Danny Ginsberg: True strength comes from imagination.

Danny handed Dr. Fogel his tephillin and Dr. Fogel told Steve to come to the front desk and show Danny how to put it on. Steve did as he was told. He made the blessing for the box and strap which go on the arm and he slipped the leather loop over his elbow and onto his biceps, so that the small black box containing the Shema faced in toward his heart.

He wrapped the strap that came from the box around his forearm seven times, for the seven blessings. He rolled the end of the strap around his palm and held it there while he picked up the second tephillin box. He kissed the top, said a prayer, and placed the leather loop that came from the bottom of the box around the crown of his head and under his yamulka. Danny thought that the box looked like a miniature square hat with a narrow black rim. Two leather straps hung down from the nape of Steve’s neck to either side of his shoulders, and Marty and Heshy giggled, watching.

Dr. Fogel glared at them and pulled open the drawer to his desk. Inside, Danny knew, there were nipples for baby bottles, and even though it was silly, it scared the boys to think of Dr. Fogel handing them one to suck on.

Steve unwound the strap from his left palm and drew it through the spaces between his fingers, three times, so that on the back of his hand the straps looked like the letter “shin,” representing the name of God.

Dr. Fogel told him to take the tephillin off and he did, winding the straps carefully around the black rims of the boxes and kissing the tops of the boxes lightly before putting them back into the bag.

Danny realized that, except for playing ball, putting on tephillin was the only thing Steve knew how to do.

Dr. Fogel asked Danny to come to the front of the room, and he asked him what the meaning of Bar Mitzvah was.

Dr. Fogel asked him how he would be different after his thirteenth birthday and Danny said that in the eyes of the Jewish people he would be a man.

“I can be counted among the ten men necessary for a minyan without which a service cannot be held and mourner’s Kaddish cannot be said,” Danny recited. “I will be considered responsible as an adult for all my actions. I will put on tephillin every morning. I will—”

“Yes, yes,” Dr. Fogel interrupted. “But in what way will you be a man?”

Behind him, the boys had their heads on their desks, hands over mouths, to keep from laughing out loud. Dr. Fogel kept his eyes on Danny. Danny said what came into his head: “I’ll be a man by taking care of Jewish orphans.”

Danny saw Dr. Fogel’s smile, and it seemed unnaturally large, so that he could not see the man’s eyes above the smile. He felt confident suddenly. “What I want to do is be a doctor on a kibbutz in Israel,” he went on. “So I can take care of Jewish children whose parents have died for God.”

I couldn’t write anything last night about what happened yesterday because Mr. Gitelman made the night watchman check on us every 15 minutes. He must know we all know about the Home closing and the boys whispered in bed about being afraid he’ll find their hideout.

Yesterday in Hebrew class Dr. Fogel made Steve show me how to put on Tephillin and he asked me questions about being Bar Mitzvahed and I answered him. Since the class ended the boys look at me in a new way because I’m the only one of them who ever spoke back to Dr. Fogel.

They might ask me to take Larry Silverberg’s place but I won’t do it in the way they think!

Now it’s just getting light outside and I see the gate open for delivery trucks the way it is every morning. I went to the savings bank yesterday morning and closed my account. With the money left in my locker I have $72.54. When you become Bar Mitzvahed they give you a $25 Savings Bond but I won’t wait for that.

I followed Dr. Fogel from the Home in the afternoon so I could see where he lives if I ever need him. He walks quickly and it doesn’t bother him at all when dogs bark at him. I think the Puerto Rican boys in the neighborhood don’t make fun of him because they’re afraid of his arm.

When we came to a street where a group of Chasidic Jews were standing around a mobile van, he crossed to the other side. Chasidic Jews try to make Jews more Jewish by taking them into their vans and teaching them things about Judaism, but Dr. Fogel told us to beware of them. He said they were like gypsies who love to steal children! He said they worship their Rebbes more than God.

But I like to watch them move around and talk to each other anyway. When women go by the Chasidic Jews look the other way. Dr. Fogel calls them cowboys because of their big black hats and their long beards.

From where I was almost a block away I could see their eyes sparkling in their faces and I wondered what they talked about to each other when they weren’t talking about God and Torah. I wanted to get near them just so I could touch their long black silk coats.

By the time I made myself stop staring at them Dr. Fogel was gone and I couldn’t find him again so I came back here.

What I was thinking last night before I fell asleep: that my mind contains tunnels, boxes, corridors, caverns, mazes, layers, webs, and grids. In one second I can think something more complicated than my words can ever show, even if I had all the time in the world and I could write out all the details and relationships.

After I took my money out I worried that the bank might telephone the Home to tell them and that Mr. Gitelman will tell everybody to be on the lookout.

Danny was surprised at how gently Dr. Fogel was treating him. Dr. Fogel had told the others to go outside and play and he had taken Danny to the shul again. He touched Danny’s shoulder lightly with his good hand and asked him to put on his tephillin, and when Danny did things in the wrong order, Dr. Fogel did not get angry.

Danny remembered that Orthodox Jews did everything in an order, even to the point of putting the left foot out of bed in the morning before the right foot.

After Danny removed his tephillin and put the boxes away in his tephillin bag, he chanted his Haftorah for Dr. Fogel. Then they took out the Torah and went over the Maftir portion several times. Dr. Fogel told him he was doing very well, and Danny wondered if Dr. Fogel was changing because of his knowledge about the Home’s closing.

When they had returned the Torah to the ark, Dr. Fogel told Danny that he was a very wealthy man.

Danny wanted to please him, so he recited from the Pirkay Avos: “Who is the wealthy man? He who is content with his portion.”

Dr. Fogel sat down. “No,” he said softly. “I have land. Do you know how much?”

Dr. Fogel laughed. “Guess again,” he said. “You’re a bright boy. Guess again—I have land enough for Leviathan.”

Danny stood in front of the ark, facing Dr. Fogel, and he imagined that he was a rabbi and that Dr. Fogel was the only other Jew left in the world. He told himself that he could say anything he wanted because, after the next day, he would never see him again.

Dr. Fogel clucked inside his mouth. “I have over three thousand acres,” he said, and smiled. Danny said nothing. “Do you want to know how I come to have so much land?”

Dr. Fogel patted the chair to his left with the palm of his hand. “Come. Sit next to me and I’ll tell you the story.”

Danny sat next to Dr. Fogel and Dr. Fogel, his good hand touching Danny’s arm occasionally, started telling him about his father, who had escaped from Poland as a boy in order to settle in Palestine. But the man to whom he had given his money had tricked him, and at the age of thirteen and a half Dr. Fogel’s father had awakened one morning to find that he had arrived in America.

Danny asked no questions. He wondered if Dr. Fogel was telling him of his father’s trip because he knew of Danny’s own plan. And if he knows, Danny wondered, does he want me to escape or does he want to keep me here with him?

Danny felt dizzy. He pressed his fingers tightly against the seat of his wooden chair, between his knees. He did not hear everything Dr. Fogel said, but he saw Dr. Fogel’s hands moving toward his own, the limp fingers of the man’s right hand kneading the good fingers of the left. Danny jerked his hands upward and let them rest in his lap. Dr. Fogel was talking about a Jewish settlement his father had established on one of two large tracts of land. The settlements existed to train Jews who wanted to go to Palestine.

Danny tried to make his own mind go backward, so he could hear again about what Dr. Fogel’s father had done in New York to earn enough money to buy the land, but he couldn’t recapture the words. Danny thought that it had to do with buying and selling notes, and that the notes represented money. Dr. Fogel said that his father would search out wealthy Jews from New York who had come from his city in Poland—his landsleit—and would get them to donate money to him for his settlement.

He said his father could talk anyone into anything but that he had never been able to talk his own son into believing in the settlement. Dr. Fogel’s voice remained gentle even as he insisted with his eyes that Danny pay full attention. Danny stared at Dr. Fogel’s right hand and he believed that Dr. Fogel wanted him to touch it. Dr. Fogel was saying that he was certain a bright boy like Danny knew the words to the psalm: How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning….

Dr. Fogel laughed to himself, gurgling slightly, and said that he had disobeyed his father and run away when he was nineteen, but that his father had, in his bitterness, willed the land to him anyway. It was his joke, Dr. Fogel said. Danny thought that the fingers on Dr. Fogel’s right hand were growing red and scaly, but he knew it was all in his imagination and so he concentrated on Charlie’s face and imagined himself telling him who he was and where he had come from. He saw Charlie smiling the way he had when Danny had been looking into the store windows.

Danny looked up. Dr. Fogel was no longer sitting next to him. “Come,” Dr. Fogel said, standing at the door. “Enough. I shouldn’t bother you with such tales. Come.”

Danny wanted to stand but he couldn’t. Dr. Fogel asked Danny if he knew that the great Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism, had wanted to buy land in Argentina or Uganda for his Jewish Homeland? Did Danny know that Herzl had advocated having all Jewish children baptized?

Dr. Fogel’s back passed through the doorway as Danny spoke and Danny thought Dr. Fogel felt bad because he had told more of his story than he had planned to, even though Danny didn’t believe he had done anything to force him to.

He sat for a while, looking at the faded blue velvet curtains that covered the ark. How much, he wondered, would he need to know to be able to feel completely what it would have been like to have been Dr. Fogel’s father when he was just past thirteen being smuggled on the wrong ship across the Atlantic Ocean?

I read in the library that the end of the world will come not from war or starvation or radiation or overpopulation but because man’s creation of energy will add too much heat to the earth’s atmosphere.

If you were the only Jew left on the face of the earth would you contain in your genes the entire history of all the Jews who ever lived, and if you found one Jewish woman and started all over would you be able to repeat all of past history? But if you could, wouldn’t it mean that because the past is finite and you were multiplying into the future based on the past that the future would be finite also?

I spent my last evening in the Home watching TV with the other boys. Years from now will I become somebody so that they’ll want to say they knew me now? Will they remember what I looked like today?

DANIEL GINSBERG HEREBY DECLARES THAT THE MAIMONIDES HOME FOR JEWISH BOYS IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR HIS ACTIONS. ANYTHING WHICH MAY BEFALL HIM, GOOD OR ILL, IS DUE TO THE EXERCISE OF HIS OWN FREE WILL.

I am grateful to the Home for having fed, clothed, and educated me for the past 5½ years of my life.

Possessions left in my locker if and when it is opened shall be divided among the other boys with 100% orphans getting 1st choice and those with 1 living parent 2nd choice.

Yesterday Dr. Fogel told me about land he inherited from his father who was a Zionist. He said that he and his father agreed on only one thing about land, that it was the only thing God wasn’t creating more of!

What I’d like to do: learn to play a musical instrument, either the flute or the violin. I don’t think I’m too old to start. Years ago they used to have bands in the Home but I didn’t see Charlie’s picture in any of their photos.

I was born near the spot where I 1st saw him but I’ve never been outside of New York City in my entire life as far as I know.

Now that I’m leaving I can say what my great desire is someday: to have friends who will be like brothers! Since my stay here was only temporary and the Home itself will soon be gone, it’s a good thing I didn’t become attached to anyone here who I might not see again for years and years. It got easier to say nothing to them as the years went by.

It’s easy for me to figure out why I want friends like brothers, but the reasons don’t matter to me. I believe that my chance will come soon and that when it does I will have a great deal more to offer another person because of the way I’ve been saving myself.