An Orphan’s Tale

Danny sat at a table in a corner of the small cafeteria, sipping from his glass of tea. As disappointed as he had been at not finding Dr. Fogel at home, he was surprised at how good it felt nonetheless simply to be in Brooklyn again. He had been foolish in those thoughts also: imagining himself living in the country all the time with Charlie.

He had even, during his walks around Dr. Fogel’s property, sometimes imagined an entire colony of orphans there, living new lives. In Danny’s dreams Charlie had, of course, been the director of the colony, one that contained hundreds of Jewish boys, including refugees from all over the world. There had been classes and workshops and teams, good meals and singing and parties and dances. On Saturday nights, busloads of beautiful young girls had been brought in (blindfolded, so they could not return on their own), and Danny had fallen in love with one of them….

Danny felt comfortable in the cafeteria, among old Jewish men. Next to the counter two bearded men were playing chess, and two others, looking like their twins, sat behind them, watching the moves. This, Danny thought, remembering Charlie’s phrase, was probably their home away from home.

Through the window Danny watched a Puerto Rican fam ily moving their possessions. The father had ropes around his chest and, as he pulled a dolly loaded high with boxes and clothing and furniture, he strained forward like a workhorse, steam billowing from his nose. At the very top, a large green stuffed easy chair was turned upside down. A boy wearing sneakers pushed the load from behind, one hand stretched high, on the leg of the green chair, to keep it from toppling. The mother walked behind the boy, pushing an enormous black baby carriage that overflowed with pots and clothing and clothes hangers and plastic dish drainers and toys. She carried an infant in a pack on her back. A small girl in a red flowered coat walked at her side, sucking her thumb and pulling a wagon filled with shoes.

Danny had intended to pay Dr. Fogel for his room and board. In his situation, the best thing would be to keep all arrangements aboveboard; he did not want anything for nothing. What he did want—and what he had intended to explain to Dr. Fogel—was to live in an Orthodox Jewish home during the weeks preceding his Bar Mitzvah. Dr. Fogel was the only person he knew who had a home that was both kosher and located near a synagogue.

If Dr. Fogel had been unwilling to take him in he would have asked to be sent somewhere else—another Jewish home, a Yeshiva that had sleep-in facilities, a hotel or rooming house that catered to Orthodox Jewish men. Whatever else Dr. Fogel might have been capable of, Danny had reasoned, he could not have knowingly kept another Jew from the performance of a mitzvah.

Danny warmed his hands on the outside of the glass of tea and bent over it to sniff in the steam. He’d had the passage ready for him, should he have needed it. Had not Simeon the Righteous said that the continuance of the Jewish people depended on three things—the study and practice of Torah, religious ritual, and acts of loving-kindness?

Danny took out his notebook. None of the men in the cafeteria seemed to question his presence. He wondered what they would say were he to go to each of them and tell them his life story and then ask for theirs. He would stand in the middle of the room and ask who would be the first to teach him Yiddish, and who would be the first to tell him about his childhood, and who could remember a story his father’s father had told him when he had been a child….

I’m in Brooklyn again and I’m sitting in a room called Skulsky’s Dairy Cafeteria with 8 other Jewish men, and I know I made the right decision in leaving. They’re old men and I could probably make them happy by telling them about myself and making them tell me about themselves, but the best thing is to do nothing.

I have no obligation to bring joy into the lives of others at every moment of my life. I still believe in Simeon the Righteous’s doctrine of Torah, ritual, and acts of loving-kindness, but the important thing for Danny Ginsberg right now is to consider his situation and to make New Plans!

That’s what the Rabbis mean when they say “There is no Torah without bread.”

Despite all my setbacks, what surprises me is how good I still feel, as if I’m ready for any experience which may befall me!

There was a sign on Dr. Fogel’s front lawn saying his house was sold. I looked in his windows and all the rooms were bare. Even the curtains and Venetian blinds were gone. The Mezuzah was gone from the front doorpost.

But this is what I thought: Even if he flew to Israel to spend the rest of his life on a Zionist kibbutz, my life would stay the same! If night becomes day and day becomes night, my fate still remains in my own hands.

What I still have to do, no matter what: find a place to stay until I can face Charlie and say to him: “THIS IS WHO I AM AND THIS IS WHAT I WANT TO DO WITH MY LIFE AND THESE ARE THE THINGS YOU CAN HELP ME WITH IF YOU WANT TO.”

It’s all right for Ephraim to live in the country because he was born there, but if Charlie asked me I would tell him he should come back to the city so he can be in touch with his early life.

Also: It would be all right with me if Sol lived with us too, since he’s so old already.

Danny put a teaspoonful of strawberry jam into his tea, as he had seen one of the old men do. The sweetness caused him to close his eyes and sigh with pleasure. If Charlie should refuse him, he wanted to be able to allow that to make no difference either. If there were no records of him anywhere, then he wanted to be ready to demand that new ones be created. He wanted to be ready to go to whomever he had to go to—whatever civil liberties groups or legal aid groups or Jewish groups—in order to receive a true accounting of his origins: the names of his mother and father, and of their mothers and fathers; his real date of birth; and his rights, under law, concerning his future.

But until such a moment arrived he had to be careful. He could not, for example, as he had considered doing, spend his nights in bus terminals or on the subways, for if a policeman were to question him, and if someone else were to discover that he had no actual identity before he himself demanded that his identity be returned to him, then he would lose control. They would be able to do with him whatever they wanted to.

His secret wish—not so secret, really, since he had been prepared to discuss it with Dr. Fogel—was that he be sent to a Yeshiva where students lived in, if such a Yeshiva existed. In Yeshivas, he knew, students spent half the day studying Jewish subjects and learning Hebrew, and half the day studying what students in regular schools studied. So long as the Home had been alive, he supposed there had been technical reasons for keeping him there—but if there was no one place any longer into which a Jewish orphan had to be placed, and if he could demonstrate to them his potential for becoming a contributing member of the adult Jewish community when he would reach that age, he did not see how or why they could deny him. To do so, he told himself, would be to deny all of Jewish history and practice.

What I am: a good investment. If somebody were to support me now, he would be paid back many times over in the future.

What I need to do more of: Decide which talents to cultivate. There must be boys and girls my age somewhere who already practice musical instruments or study mathematics or science or Torah 5 or 6 or 7 hours every day. If you do anything that much every day you will eventually know things nobody else knows.

Like the men who are sitting around me right now he has observed ritual and studied Torah all his life and knows no other way of living. His devotion to the Home must be counted an act of loving-kindness no matter what his reasons were, even if rituals are to him like water to a fish!

What interests me as soon as I write down what the Rabbis say more than why they say it is this: Why, sitting here at this moment of my life, did the question about Dr. Fogel come into my head? If I didn’t write it down, would the rest of my life be different than what it’s going to be?

My conclusion: If I followed all my thoughts forever, to the ends and beginnings of their trails, I would never have time for living!

Coming into the city on the bus I saw what would have happened if I stayed on the land: I would have caught a chill. Each night I would have slept half-awake, worrying. My head would have become heavy with fluid and I would have been afraid to go to a doctor for fear he would have to know who I was or send me to a hospital and then they would have disposed of me through some agency that would have placed me with morons and delinquents and retards and retreads.

I looked at my reflection in the window of the bus coming here and I saw a scene with myself stumbling into a synagogue. People stared at me as if I was an old dwarf. I was shouting to them that it was my Bar Mitzvah. I saw clean-shaven men in Yamulkas and suits coming down the aisles to carry me away. I saw myself screaming that I was Jewish and that it was my Bar Mitzvah day and that I was in the House of God. I began chanting my Haftorah even as they carried me down the aisle above their heads. My nose was dripping and my eyelids were stuck together with phlegm. My ears were stopped up. Yet my voice, when I heard myself singing, was pure and sweet like a child’s!

Outside in the lobby of the synagogue they laid me on the marble floor, which was made of large black and white squares. They wrapped me in an army blanket and telephoned the police but I rolled away from them out the door, down the steps and into the street, and I got up and ran deliriously until I found another Synagogue! I went inside and saw that the Ark was open and they were taking out the Torah. The Cantor and Rabbi wore long black robes and the Torah glistened with its silver breastplate and silver crowns. I smelled cloves. I hid behind the back row where nobody could see me and when it was time for the Bar Mitzvah boy to be called to the Torah I marched down the aisle, my eyes on the Eternal Light, and summoned myself to the Bimah. I could smell my own foul odors as if my flesh was already rotting! I had the army blanket wrapped around me to cover my body where it showed through the slashes in my clothing.

I stopped, realizing that I could not in summoning myself for the Aliyah give the name of my father. A thick crowd of men in black suits was blocking my way to the Bimah.

The real Bar Mitzvah boy was holding his mother’s hand and giggling and pointing at me. I demanded that the men let me through but they pushed me backward and walked over me. Then they lifted me above their heads again and I floated out of the sanctuary. The Rabbi stood above me, and when my blanket was torn away, he looked at me and then said, with disgust, just like Dr. Fogel: “Do you call yourself a Jew?”

Here’s a beautiful new one I memorized from PIRKAY AVOS on the bus: “If love depends on some selfish end, when the end fails then love fails. But if it does not depend on a selfish end, it will never fail.”

This is why: If you love a woman because she’s beautiful and she becomes sick and loses her beauty, then the love is gone too. But where love is for the sake of God, as when a disciple loves his master in order to learn, then the love never vanishes because the cause endures forever!

Danny went to the counter, bought a cheese Danish, and asked that his glass of tea be refilled. The old man who served him looked past Danny and said, as if to no one, “It’s snowing.”

Danny sat at his table and watched the large white flakes fall. He saw himself, on the ground, with flakes falling on his own cheeks and covering him. He saw Charlie and Dr. Fogel finding him there, on the forest floor, hard and cold, and he saw the tears in Charlie’s eyes—and then, what thrilled him more, the anger.

He saw Charlie raise his fists to the sky and curse God. Dr. Fogel walked away, into the woods. I’ll be with you soon, Charlie, Danny said to himself as he sipped his tea. We’ll be together again. He saw Charlie walking into a strange synagogue. Charlie sat, without praying, for hours—through an entire service—until the time came to say the Kaddish. Then he rose. Yisgadal v’yiskadash… Would Dr. Fogel have stopped him if he were sitting in the same shul? If Danny had no blood relative living after him, who would the Rabbis say would be allowed to say Kaddish for him? What was the Law?

He saw Charlie sitting on a tree stump, his head in his hands, snow resting like a fine net on his black curls, and then he saw his own body rise from its mound of snow, shake the flakes away, and he heard himself shout: “Surprise!”

Each error I make leads me closer to the truth, for I know better the things I cannot do! I could not stay with Charlie without any definite arrangement, but I did not have to leave him the way I did. That was an error. But once I left him and forced him to make a decision I could not simply return and say I made a mistake because that would have made him think I was too weak a person for him to want to live with permanently!

The question now is how can we continue to live together if he’ll have me if my official identity has been destroyed? I have to know how old I really am! I have to be Bar Mitzvahed because of what I believe about being Jewish!

I can’t live in fear from day to day that at any moment I can be taken away from him.

What I’m doing about it: I’m narrowing my “options.” I can’t stay with Charlie for the above reasons and I can’t stay with Anita because he would know and because they might think I was trying to come between them if they have plans, and I can’t stay on Dr. Fogel’s land because of the people who come there and because I might become ill, and I can’t stay with Dr. Fogel because I don’t know where he is. I have $13 left and some change but I can’t go to a YMHA because they might demand identification even if they believe the age I give them.

Danny looked up and saw, through the window, a tall boy in a green silk shirt and black silk pants striding along, no more than five feet away. The boy wore a wide-brimmed white hat, had a silver toothpick in his mouth, and was surrounded by a circle of Puerto Rican teenagers, who kept pace with him. Around the boy’s neck, on a heavy chain, was an enormous silver Star of David, with what looked like a diamond in its center. Danny exhaled in awe and looked into the boy’s face: it was Larry Silverberg!

He saw Larry look toward the cafeteria—right at him—but he didn’t know if Larry could see more than his own reflection. Danny found himself rising from his chair and waving at Larry to come in, but Larry was already gone.

Should he follow him? Danny sat and tried to know what the right thing to do was. He didn’t trust his feelings. His head filled with questions. Why was Larry wearing a Jewish star? Had he changed? How had he been released from jail so soon? Where was he living? Danny wondered, for an instant, if Larry had in some way been sent to lead him to safety, but as soon as he thought such a thought, he laughed to himself: why would God bother to joke with him in such a way?

He saw himself inviting Larry to sit at the table with him in the cafeteria, and he heard them talking to each other. Larry would slap Danny’s back and say something like “Fancy meeting you here!” and Danny would tell him how good he looked.

“So tell me, Danny,” he heard Larry say, fingering his Jewish star and sighing, “how’ve you been?”

Danny saw Larry inviting him home, so that they could live together. He heard them reminiscing about the Home, and he heard Larry praising him for having run away.

Just a moment ago, while I was wondering where I would spend the night, LARRY SILVERBERG walked by right outside the window, almost close enough for me to reach out and touch him and I wondered for an instant if he had been sent as my Deliverance!

I saw us talking about old times at the Home like Charlie and Murray and Irving, and I heard Larry asking me if I remembered the time they let a boy stay with us for a few days before they realized he was in the wrong place and should have been sent to a different place, with other Mongolian children. The boy was Jewish. Samstag was his name but I remembered his nose was so pushed in like an Irishman’s that we called him O’Hara.

This is what I heard Larry say to me: I wouldn’t want to be like that. If I had a kid born like that I’d flush him down the toilet first thing and tell them they couldn’t do nothing to me without the evidence. You see people walking in the streets sometimes with idiot kids who are 50 years old and what good does it do for anybody?

What surprised me: He wore an enormous Jewish star on his chest with a sparkling diamond in its center. He said that O’Hara had bad blood and tried to kill Heshy with a pair of pliers by pulling his teeth from his head but that he caught him and beat him up. I told him I never heard the whole story.

I imagined us living together and me helping him in his work. This is what I made up that he does: He sells welfare documents and social security cards. He caters to a Puerto Rican trade and he told me he could get passports and draft cards and driver’s licenses and he said he would get me a new birth certificate in the name of Charles Fogelstein but I said I wanted my real birth certificate in the name of Daniel Ginsberg, so I can know when my Bar Mitzvah is.

I was too confused when he passed by in front of me to do anything except stand and wave at him when he was almost gone from sight. But he didn’t see me, or if he saw me he didn’t recognize me from the Home. He wore a white hat like a cowboy.

I feel very relieved that I didn’t see him because if I went to live with him, what would my life turn out to be like? Also: Why did he wear the Jewish Star? What happened to him after he left the Home and was in jail? Was he the only Jew there? Did they do to him what he did to others, or worse things?

This is what worries me about the way my mind works sometimes: that I can see myself living with him and becoming his slave! He would make love to me the way he did to the boys at the Home and I would be too weak to stop him and too grateful to run away!

This is what he would say to me: Let’s face it, Danny, who ever gave a shit about us, right? So if we don’t give a shit about each other where will we end up?

Can I put living with another orphan I knew from the Home on my list of solutions that won’t work even though I didn’t think of it before, and then cross it off my list the way Charlie does?

If Larry did see me but didn’t show it because of the boys who walked in a circle around him, will he come back later to find me? What will he want of me? If he comes back later to try to find me, how will I refuse him without being able to tell him where I’m living and what I’m doing?

Danny glanced up and found himself looking into the eyes of a policeman, two tables away. Even though the policeman was sitting down, Danny could tell at once that he was the same height as Charlie. The policeman wore his blue winter coat, open, and his hat. A slender pink scar that ran diagonally from the man’s lip to his chin was moist and seemed to shimmer. Danny felt his own right hand move, wanting to touch the delicate line. The policeman glanced at an old man who was snoring, and he winked at Danny. Danny nodded, smiled, and told himself to move slowly so as not to arouse suspicion.

Being in a Jewish cafeteria and wearing a yamulka helped him, he knew. With all the Negroes and Puerto Ricans and winos in the neighborhood, why would the policeman be interested in him? Danny tried to look at the policeman in a way that would make him feel nothing. The policeman was eating a sandwich and drinking from a cup of coffee. Danny did not want to have to answer any questions. He closed his notebook and watched the policeman bite a chunk from a pickle.

So that he would appear not to be panicking, or fleeing, Danny opened his notebook again.

A policeman is looking at me now from another table and I’m writing so he’ll think I’m doing some kind of homework or special studying. None of the old men talk to him. He’s Charlie’s age and size but his eyes are bloodshot and they look like Larry Silverberg’s eyes will look like in 20 years.

Larry Silverberg wants to go to Israel and be a machine gunner in the Israeli Air Force so he can fly low in planes and see the faces on Arabs when he strafes them.

Was the diamond real and if he said it was would he let me bring it to Mr. Plaut to check? If we sold it how long could we live on the money?

Rabbi Akiba said that suffering is good for it can lead to repentance and repentance can lead to God.

To memorize: the Song of Solomon. One passage I remember: “His locks are curled and black as a raven.”

What Dr. Fogel would believe: That when it said God chose the people of Israel it meant He chose us for Suffering, if we must suffer to serve him.

What Danny Ginsberg believes: That doesn’t make it easier to believe in God and in being a member of His Chosen People when you think of the 6 million who died the way they did!

Was he ever Bar Mitzvahed? He never said. Could he memorize enough Hebrew when he was 13, and did he do the Haftorah or just the blessings before the Haftorah, or nothing?

What I just realized: In the Epilogue that Daniel Ginsberg wrote on his last full day on Dr. Fogel’s land, he left out what happened to Sol!

The answer is he died and nobody knew who he was or who to telephone. He had no family and no permanent address and no money and nothing in his wallet said he was Jewish so they buried him in a public grave in a small town in Ohio where no Jews live and none of his boys ever learned of his death.

The policeman is eating a piece of noodle pudding now. I’m looking at him and thinking that if I had to I would say something to him like this: “I like the pieces with raisins in them best, don’t you? I like any kind of pudding if it has lots of soft raisins in it.”

I would be telling the truth if I said that and that way he would not see things in my eyes that I’m hiding.

Danny dipped his fingertips in his glass of water and said his prayers silently, his lips moving so that the policeman would see what he was doing. Then he stood, picked up his sack, and walked from the cafeteria. The policeman did not seem to pay attention.

When Danny arrived at the synagogue he was surprised, for a moment, to see teenage boys playing basketball in its schoolyard. They wore yamulkas that were pinned to their hair with bobby pins and he could see the fringes of their tsitsis flapping from under their shirts.

He felt better. Beyond the players, where there was an indentation in the building, he saw two couples, back to back, necking. Both girls had their hands in the boys’ hair, below their yamulkas. Danny smiled. A small boy, smaller than Danny, sat under the basket next to the fence, a cigarette dangling from the center of his mouth. He waved slightly to Danny, with two fingers, as if he knew him.

It seemed impossible to Danny—miraculous—that all these boys, boys who had never tasted pork or lobster or bacon in their lives, boys who had never eaten milk with meat, boys who had never worked or traveled by car or written or telephoned on the Sabbath, boys who prayed three times a day and recited blessings each time they ate or washed or went to the bathroom—that all of them should look like normal American boys. It made him see how much of a dreamworld he had, until now, been living in—how foolishly, in his imagination, his life had been led. It was as if, he thought to himself, everything that had happened to him until his return to Brooklyn had been the dream, and his real life were about to begin.

He walked toward the boy who had waved to him and stopped when he was standing above him. He slipped his fingers through the wires of the fence.

“It’s all right,” Danny said. “I mean, I don’t really know how to play….”

The boy said nothing. Danny watched a player drive for the basket, grunt, stop suddenly, and leap high in the air banking a shot off the metal backboard. “Match that shit!” the player yelled to the boy who had been guarding him. He fixed his yamulka with his right hand, to keep it from falling. “You match that and I’ll eat crud.”

Danny laughed, but the boy below him only sucked in on his cigarette. “I’m Jewish,” Danny said.

“Big fucking deal,” the boy said, and got up and walked away, toward the two couples who were necking. He tapped one of the boys on the shoulder and the boy let go of the girl and stepped aside. The boy Danny had been speaking to, six inches shorter than the girl, flipped his cigarette to the side, put his arms around the girl’s waist, and she bent down and pressed her lips against his.

Danny entered the synagogue. The lobby was dark and odorless. The sanctuary was empty and Danny stood at the back, imagining himself on the bimah chanting his Haftorah. He had never actually prayed in a real synagogue, with other Jewish men. The sanctuary was dark, with blackened wood benches, a set of wine-red velvet drapes covering the Holy Ark, and small stained-glass windows set into the walls at the sides, near the ceiling. Directly above Danny’s head there was a balcony, with a curtain in front of the first row, and Danny assumed that the women sat there, so that the men would not see them while they prayed.

Danny walked along dark corridors, looking for the rabbi’s study. He saw a lighted room in front of him, with one woman sitting in it. His decision was made.

The woman looked up from her typing. “I’m sorry, darling, but he’s at a funeral—is there something I can do for you?”

The woman rolled the page up in her typewriter, erased something, then looked at Danny again. “You’re not from our Yeshiva, are you? I don’t recognize you.”

“No,” Danny said. He spoke quickly. “I’m not from your Yeshiva, but I’m Jewish—I’m Jewish and I want to be Bar Mitzvahed.”

“Well, that’s very nice, dear, but you should be Bar Mitzvahed in your own shul.”

The woman sighed, as if she had been through the experience a thousand times before. “I really don’t see what we can do for you, then.” She brushed her erasures from the page. “You know, we get many parents with children like yourself who are unaffiliated with any synagogue and who reach Bar Mitzvah age and suddenly discover they’re

Jewish. But what do you expect us to do? We’re not your local supermarket, you know, that you come to us when you need something and forget about us when you don’t. Believe me, darling, being Jewish should be a full-time occupation.”

“Well. Today he’s at a funeral, tomorrow he has a meeting in the city, and then it’s Shabbos, isn’t it?” She glanced at a desk calendar. “I really don’t see when—but why am I even looking?” She glared at Danny and suddenly he saw Mrs. Mittleman’s face. He closed his eyes to make the image go away. “I’m really very busy, and I’m sorry, but I believe I’ve given you enough time….”

“But you’re not listening to me,” Danny said. “I told you I don’t have parents. I’m an orphan. The Torah says…” He felt dizzy from the heat inside the building, and he found that he could not look into the woman’s eyes. “I just remembered something…” he began.

“You seem like such a nice boy. I’d like to help you, believe me, but my hands are tied, don’t you see?”

He looked at her hands and saw bright red nailpolish. “I just remembered why it is I came to your shul and not another.”

“I know Dr. Fogel. He taught me my Haftorah and Maftir at the Maimonides Home for Jewish Boys. But they closed the Home.”

The woman smiled. “Oh yes,” she said. “Who didn’t know Dr. Fogel? We’re all so sorry he moved away. Such a happy man!” Her smile vanished. “I’ve listened to everything you said.”

She took his hand in hers. “Don’t you think I’d like to help you if I could? But what you’re asking I don’t have to give. We’re booked up solid for almost two years ahead with Bar Mitzvahs, and we’re still growing.” She sighed. “When I first came here we didn’t even have a Yeshiva, and now we have over four hundred students in the elementary school alone. Don’t you think that’s wonderful?”

“But how would we fit you in, darling? Can we ask one of our regular members to have his son share his Bar Mitzvah with a stranger—?”

Danny thought of the passages he knew, from the Torah, about honoring the stranger and caring for the widowed and orphaned, but he saw no point in sharing them with her. He thought his head was clear. He was eliminating another option. He spoke firmly: “I’m asking you for the last time and giving you your last chance—will you please let me see the rabbi?”

She pushed her chair back and reached for the telephone. “You’re doing what, young man?”

“The sin will be on your hands then,” he said, and, to his delight, he saw her look at her hands. He turned and walked away.

“Wait!” she called, and he stopped, saw that she had picked up the telephone receiver and had begun dialing. Her face was pale. “I’ll telephone the rabbi for you,” she said. Danny smiled—she didn’t fool him. He kept walking. She called after him: “What did you say your name was, darling? Just give me your name—!”

Danny turned and gave her his best smile. “Adolf Hitler!” he cried, and then he ran down the hall and out of the building, as fast as he could, his sack swinging at his side.

I’m sitting on the floor of the dormitory right where my own bed used to be, writing by candlelight. I stopped in a store and bought candles and Kosher baloney, potato chips, and a sour pickle for supper. I’m wearing my extra shirt and underwear for warmth in case it gets very cold.

What surprised me: how easily I climbed the wall where Larry and the others used to do it!

While I was walking around the empty building before I could hear Larry Silverberg talking to me about the 2 of us living in Israel together when I would be a doctor there (he remembered that) and about the things we would do together to girls from the Israeli Army. He said they didn’t care who they slept around with. Things are very loose in Israel.

This is the thought that came to me then: I CAN ASK CHARLIE TO SELL ALL HIS BELONGINGS AND TAKE ME TO ISRAEL WITH HIM!

This afternoon I went to Dr. Fogel’s Shul to see the Rabbi and ask him to let me be Bar Mitzvahed but he wasn’t there and his secretary told me what I think I knew before I went: that it was hopeless.

She was scared of me, from what I said to her. I wish Charlie could have seen her face when she refused me and wanted my name so she could give it to the police and I told her it was Adolf Hitler. She’ll never be able to explain me to herself.

Why I had no choice: If I want to become Bar Mitzvahed I have to go to a synagogue and tell a Rabbi. If I want to see a Rabbi I have to see his secretary and speak to her if she’s there when I arrive. If she asks me why I want to see the Rabbi I have to tell her or she’ll become suspicious. If I state my case and she refuses me the way she did today then I can never return to the same synagogue again because they might be ready for me the 2nd time.

I’ll try another synagogue tomorrow and if they won’t have me, I’ll know for certain that that option is gone also, and that means I’ll have to do what I didn’t want to do: Ask Charlie to help me become Bar Mitzvahed.

But he’ll have to account for me also, to whatever synagogue he goes to, which shows why I should come to him with my situation all planned out.

This is what my mind has been thinking: that when all my options are gone, only my true choice will be left and the way will be clear!

The answer is that I believe it when I write it but not when I’m doing things like eating in a cafeteria or talking to the secretary.

A story I thought of writing: about Charlie when he was a boy, before he came to the Home and was living with his grandmother. She didn’t speak English. He didn’t understand her when she talked to him in Yiddish. Is this why he couldn’t learn to read? I saw her with a red scarf on her head and no teeth. Remember to ask him if what I imagined was so. Did he lie to me about his mother the way I lied to him about mine?

If I become his brother and he marries Anita, then I become an uncle to Hannah! Would she love me more or less in that situation?

A conclusion: If I have no identity and no money and no food and no clothes I’ll still have my imagination. I could invent stories and live in them, the way I did with Dr. Fogel’s father, and with Ephraim and the Epilogue.

This is what I really believe: that if I concentrate and think hard enough I can always find a choice and a solution I didn’t think of before.

That’s how I have 2 more new options: 1. becoming Charlie’s brother instead of his son. 2. emigrating to Israel with him.

Sometimes I forget exactly what he looks like. I saw the dark square on the wall downstairs where the picture of him I liked most used to be. Is it more terrible to live through an experience or to imagine living through it?

Guess what? The instant I wrote down that sentence they all started to talk inside my head, sitting around the cabin and searching for solutions. I’ll know what each of them said when I write their words down. That way I can discover the truth at the same moment each of them does!

Here he is again, folks, your favorite storyteller, bringing you a new story about your favorite Jewish orphan:

THE FINAL SOLUTION

A Most Surprising Sequel by

Daniel Ginsberg

When last we encountered our young hero he had become reunited for a brief and wonderful afternoon with his dear friend from childhood, Ephraim Mendelsohn, who was himself the son of an orphan who had, a generation earlier, been raised in the very same Home for Jewish orphans as our hero Daniel Ginsberg!

But now let us journey back in time, dear reader, to an afternoon many years earlier, and to a day which Daniel Ginsberg often reflected upon, for when he considered the course of his brief life and the man he had become, he knew that the afternoon we are about to describe for you was the turning point of his existence!

If he did not hear what he heard on that afternoon and decided what he decided he might never have become the man he is, and millions of children would have been without the opportunity of reading those magical works of science fiction which he now writes under the name of Charles Fogelstein.

Knowing his true identity, we, of course, can see where the hero and heroine of so many of his tales come from—those homeless wanderers, Abra-X and Sara-Y, who, in order to save the planet Earth, dare to enter the unknown anti-universe through a black hole of space. But the ways in which they use their Imagination and Knowledge to transform those they meet, both the good and the evil, the beautiful and the horrifying, the remembered and the unexpected—especially the unexpected!—are doubtless well known to many of you, and we leave it to your discretion to interpret his tales in the light of what we are about to tell you about his life.

For there was a time when, like the hero and heroine of his tales, he too had lost his way in life, despite his numerous talents and his awesome ingenuity. There was a time when, forced to run away from the Home in which he had been raised as a Jewish Orphan, he became confused and distressed. To whom did he belong? When and where had he really been born? What would become of him if he became a ward of the state?

These were the questions which vexed him, and which moved him to set forth from the city for a sojourn in the country, during which sojourn, as you have already seen, he chanced to discover the curious document written by the father of one of Daniel’s most influential teachers, Dr. Fogel.

What immediate effect did reading this document have on our young man, lost and confused as he was?

This is the answer: He imagined Epilogues to his own life, one of which you have already had the pleasure of reading. And he imagined himself at the end of his own life, and an old man living alone in the woods and looking back over a life wasted. Even his precious Torah and study no longer satisfied him! For what had he done with his life? He recited his favorite saying from PIRKAY AVOS to himself: WHO IS THE RIGHTEOUS MAN? HE WHO DOETH RIGHTEOUS DEEDS!

He saw himself writing in a notebook just as he did when a boy, and he saw that all his thoughts and study had merely been the exercise of his own vanity!

Vanity of vanities, he chanted to himself, during his last days on earth. All is vanity and a torture under the sun, and my vanity was to have believed in the reality of my own mind!

When I am gone, he said to himself, who will ever know that my mind existed and contained what I believe it contained?

Truly, he concluded, thinking back over a lifetime of thoughts, when I contemplated my own words I was like the worm in horseradish who thinks the horseradish sweet!

Being a good Jew, and not believing in any real afterlife, he realized how futile his lonely existence had been, and even as he scoured the pages of his mind for sayings from the Rabbis, his heart was breaking in 2.

Like Jerusalem, he confessed at last, he too was lost because he had adhered too strictly to the law.

Thus, kind reader, would your young hero muse, considering his future life. Oh how unhappy he was as he walked back to his cabin from his favorite pond, for he saw how few choices in life truly lay open to him!

For if there was 1 thing that was certain about our young hero, it was that HE LOVED LIFE! Despite his harsh upbringing and the plight he found himself in, despite the sufferings he had undergone (which he knew were as nothing compared to the sufferings of others, especially of Jews throughout History!) our hero continued to love life! He wanted to live! He wanted to have those things he desired only so that new desires would take the place of the old! He wanted to explore as many of those possible lives which he had previously imagined for himself as life would allow him to! Though he had been living a strange life, apart from the ordinary world of normal boys, yet still he hungered to bring private joy and hope into the lives of others, more and less fortunate than he in these very early years had been.

But listen now to what happened: He was thinking thoughts such as these and approaching his cabin when he heard the unmistakable sound of voices. At first, like a small animal suddenly face to face with a hunter, he was startled and afraid. But then he recognized the tones of some of the voices and his heart grew warm. He walked on silent padded toes to the cabin wall and pressed his ear against the winter wood.

Inside, he soon discovered, those people whom he had loved most in life until this moment were gathered in a circle and were discussing him, wondering what had become of him, and debating what to do with him, should they find him.

He crawled under the cabin, so as not to be caught should one of them have gone to the door or window, and he listened to them through the floor.

DR. FOGEL, his former teacher in the Orphanage from which he had come, said that he could find a position for him in a Yeshiva. In exchange for cleaning rooms and making beds and such tasks, Daniel would receive a full scholarship. Dr. Fogel believed that the boy had the brains and inclination to become a great Talmudic scholar.

UNCLE SOL, an old man who had been a benefactor to the Home and the lifelong enemy of Dr. Fogel due to a conflict about how Jewish the Home should be, which fascinating story we shall tell to you presently, disagreed violently. Uncle Sol did not see why the boy, as he referred to him, should receive such special treatment. He believed that young Daniel should 1st return to the Home from which he had run away, a Home which had produced over the years some of the most distinguished doctors and lawyers and businessmen in America. Uncle Sol believed that the boy needed to be forced to face reality, however harsh it was.

MR. MITTLEMAN, a highly successful realtor in whose home Daniel had lived for a brief time, then spoke. He said they should do nothing until they were forced to. “In what way are we responsible for him?” he asked.

Dr. Fogel retorted in Hebrew, reciting the Rabbinical saying

, which meant: “All Israel is responsible for one another.”

Then Uncle Sol said, “If you believe that, why don’t you believe in the state of Israel?”

Dr. Fogel replied that the state of Israel was material and would pass away. What lived on was God’s word and commandments!

IRVING, a Professor and a former orphan in the Home with which all these individuals were associated, agreed with Dr. Fogel. He said that he and his wife had been to Israel on a tour and had found it to be terribly vulgar and materialistic. “All people care about there is clothes, property, and money,” he said. “They’re worse than Americans.”

“God bless the state of Israel!” replied Uncle Sol, and he spoke about the Second World War and of how the nations of the world, before and after, refused to allow Jews to come upon their shores. If the Jews had a Homeland before 1940 and did not have to rely on others, millions of them would have been spared the gas chamber! He challenged Dr. Fogel to prove why it was a good thing that, homeless, the Jews should be forced to wander and be massacred forever. Didn’t God command His children to love life? “Never again!” he proclaimed.

Then, before Dr. Fogel could reply, Daniel heard the voice he had been hoping to hear, that of his dear friend, CHARLES SAPISTEIN, himself a former orphan from the Home and a man who was different from all other men in ways which they did not perceive. “Why don’t you just let the kid live with me?” he asked, simply.

There was a silence for several seconds, during which Daniel heard the sounds of chairs moving, and of his own excited heartbeat.

When the other men did not answer him, Charles spoke again. “Come on,” he said. “Talk to me. It’s my life, isn’t it? It was given to me to do with what I want, right? So why can’t I let him stay with me?”

“Oh Charlie,” came the sound of a female voice, that of Ephraim’s mother, ANITA MENDELSOHN, who was then, just recently widowed, an attractive young mother whom Daniel suspected of wanting to marry Charles. “You’re such a sucker, aren’t you, Charlie?” she asked.

Then Charles laughed. “Me? Why should you think that? You don’t understand anything. I’ve lived with the boy already and do you know what? I like having him with me. You think I’m doing it just to be noble and to pay back some invisible thing for what was done for me once upon a time by the Home and Uncle Sol and everybody, but it’s not that at all!”

“You have to be willing to take chances,” Charles retorted. “To step into people’s lives if you have to!”

Daniel’s heart fell when he heard what it was that Charles next said: “What would you propose then?” Charles asked.

Daniel felt true despair! “Why don’t we pool our money—you certainly have enough—and send him to Israel, since he loves Jewish things so much,” said Anita Mendelsohn. “On the Kibbutzim lots of children grow up without real mothers and fathers. He’d be quite happy there. I’ve looked into the matter.”

“But that’s the easy way out for all of us,” he heard Charles say. “Don’t you see that?”

Daniel had to fight to hold himself back, to keep from crawling out from under the building and bursting into the room, but even as he heard them argue with Charles he sensed that the solution was in sight. “Where there’s a will there’s a way, right?” he heard Charles say to them, and he sensed how important this was for the completion of Charles’s own most strange and interesting life. He believed that his friends above him were becoming angry, for he heard the sounds of much scraping, and then the slow steady sound of something quite heavy, like iron beating steadily against wood, which he at first believed

Danny stopped writing and listened; the sound he had been writing about in his story was coming up the metal staircase to the dormitory. No! he cried to himself. Not yet! I’m not ready!

He pressed his fingers against the inside corners of his eyes, to make his dizziness go away. Then he blew out the candles, stuffed his notebook into his sack, and rose from the floor. The sound was louder. He stood rigid in the middle of the room, his fists clenched, his body trembling. He was so angry he didn’t know what to do. Why was somebody coming now?

He heard steps clicking along the hallway, toward him. For the briefest instant his anger flowed down and out of him and his heart suddenly flared; he saw the door open, with Charlie standing there, his arms spread wide for him to run to….

His imagination did not fool him. He picked up his sack and moved quickly across the floor, opened the door at the end that led to the game room, ran through the empty chamber and then down the stairs at the far end of the wing. The footsteps followed him.

Outside, in the moonlight, the courtyard was white. Danny stood in a doorway. The snow had stopped falling and had not stuck to the ground. He felt cold. He thought of Larry’s hideout, but remembered that they had never given him a key.

“This is a policeman talking to you. In the name of the law I’m ordering you to stop where you are, drop what you have, and put your hands over your head.”

Danny smiled and ducked back inside the building, running as fast as he could, feeling a strength in his legs he had never suspected was there. He pushed through swinging doors and ran down the corridor in which the photos and trophies had been, and he felt as if he were in one of his own dreams, when, running fast, he would suddenly find himself taking off and flying above the heads of the other boys from the Home.

He plunged down a staircase, into the kitchen. The stoves and sinks were already gone. He passed through the kitchen to the laundry room, and from the laundry room into the boiler room. He heard steps, slow and steady, walking from the kitchen into the laundry room, and he couldn’t understand how the policeman, without even running, was staying so close behind him.

A beam of light shone in under the door. “I’m giving you your last chance. Come out now with your hands up. This is a warning.”

Danny burst through the door and up the stairs. The shul! If he could make it there, even though he himself might not be saved, his notebooks would. He could leave them in the Genizah, wrapped in a talis. Even if the building were torn down, Danny knew, the Federation would never allow holy books to be destroyed, not only because it would be a sin, but because the old books were probably worth money and could be sold to some Yeshiva or library.

Going up, he took the stairs two at a time, thrilled by his anger and the ability it gave him to move so swiftly in the dark. The courtyard was beautiful and peaceful in the moonlight, but he knew that he hated it. He hated the courtyard and the buildings and the Home and his years in it and the people he’d lived with, and he wished only—to make the experience complete—to see his face in a mirror, to see what he looked like when he was smiling with hatred.

He walked to the shul, down the steps, and entered. The room, without chairs or the table in front, seemed larger than he had remembered it. The ark, built into the east wall, had been stripped of its worn velvet curtain. Across the courtyard a door closed, but Danny did not hear footsteps.

The Genizah was locked. Did Dr. Fogel still have the key? Did he have Danny’s receipt? Danny saw that he might be able to use the tephillin and receipt someday as evidence, if necessary, to prove he had existed and had been a boy in the Home.

A shaft of moonlight shone through the door. Danny smiled, remembering the shaft of light that had led to Dr. Fogel’s father’s letter, and as he stared at the fluttering motes of dust he saw that the light was shining on a small scrap of paper, no larger than the palm of his own hand. It lay folded, in a sitting position, half on the floor, half against a side wall.

Danny picked it up and before he had read the words he recognized the handwriting—it was a piece from one of Charlie’s lists! Then Charlie had come for him! He read: “check Fed of JP again/ buy T notes/ Call Zond/Lil/Fgl/ Gtlmn/cityman/ buy sh crm bids/ 25 G for DG/ oil chang cr/ mk new list.”

Danny slipped the piece of paper into his pocket and climbed up and into the ark, sliding the doors closed behind him but leaving a slight opening so he could peer out. He felt calm. The inside of the ark was smaller than he had expected it to be, and in it he could neither stand nor sit. His nose itched.

A few seconds later he saw the policeman standing in the doorway, silhouetted by moonlight, and without seeing his face, Danny knew it was the same man he had seen in the cafeteria.

He saw the long silver cylinder of the policeman’s gun barrel, raised in the air. He thought he smelled parchment. A tiny spider crawled across his left shoe and out the crack between the doors. The policeman yawned, stretched, and sat down in the doorway, facing the courtyard. Below ground level, he would not have been seen by anyone in front of him.

“I can wait as long as you can,” the policeman said. “I can wait forever. Your best chance is to come forward now.”

Danny let his body dip backward slowly, so that the right side of his head rested against the back wall of the ark. He was amazed at how easy it was becoming, second by second, for him to stay still in such an awkward position—his neck crooked to one side, his knees slightly bent, one foot directly in front of the other, his back hunched over, the knuckles of his left hand pressed between his left cheek and the door.

The spider’s underside passed in front of him, going from one door to the other, then back again. He remembered when Charlie had told him about how in this room, as a boy, and before anyone had known of his reading problem, Dr. Fogel had picked him up in his arms every Saturday morning when the Torah was taken from the ark so that Charlie could kiss it with his lips. We kiss the Torah and we dance with it and we decorate it with beautiful velvet covers embroidered with gold and silver thread, Danny thought. We hang silver jewelry on it and put silver crowns and bells upon it and we kiss the fringes of our talises where they have touched its words.

Danny’s left eye bulged, looking through the crack. He saw silk lines glistening—the spider was actually spinning a web across the opening and Danny could hardly believe it. He stared, hypnotized, as the insect trailed a moonlit thread back and forth, and he tried to imagine the pattern of that part of the web which he could not see. He smiled and felt his cheek rub wood.

The policeman approached the ark and stood directly in front of it, watching the spider. Danny held his breath and could not, in the shadows, see the policeman’s eyes.

He tried to imagine endings to his life. He saw Charlie finding him, asleep in the ark, and carrying him across the courtyard in his arms, out the gate, and into his car. On the way to the hospital, Charlie driving recklessly and turning toward the rear to curse at Danny for having played the fool, the car swerved and crashed. Charlie was dead.

If the policeman went out and locked the door to the shul, what would Danny do then?

The policeman had his gun raised above his shoulder, the barrel in his right fist. Danny closed his eyes and, as the gun butt came crashing down against the ark, just below Danny’s nose, he held his breath.

Danny’s mouth was open but he was not screaming because he knew that if he did the policeman might fire at him. He was pleased with his ability to control his body and his mind—to stay awake without moving and to continue to see epilogues in his head, even with his eyes open.

He saw Charlie and Dr. Fogel and Mr. Mittleman and Mrs. Mittleman and Sol and Ephraim and Hannah and Larry and Anita and Mr. Gitelman walking away from the cabin and getting into cars. Their faces were drawn. He followed them along highways and over bridges until they came to the hospital and walked up the stairs and stood around Danny’s bed, to see how well his bullet wound was healing. The policeman was there also, his hat in his hand, telling Danny that he had only been doing his job. He said he admired the Jews because they had finally learned to fight back.

The policeman and Sol talked about great Jewish boxers they’d seen—Benny Leonard and Barney Ross and Abe Attel and Gus Lesnevich and Jackie “Kid” Berg, and Danny watched them go out through the hospital door with Sol’s arm around the policeman’s shoulder.

“If you come forward now I won’t hurt you,” the policeman called. “After this I shoot first and ask questions second. I got a wife and five kids. You got three minutes.”

To keep himself awake Danny thought of the evil great men from the Bible had committed. Moses had murdered an Egyptian overseer and David had had Bathsheba’s husband killed and Saul had tried to have David killed and Cain had killed Abel and Abraham had been willing to kill Isaac and had sent Ishmael into the desert and Joseph’s brothers had sold him into slavery and Esau had been robbed of his birthright by Jacob and Noah had slept with his daughters.…

He heard a clicking sound and knew it was the gun. He believed the man, about waiting, and about shooting. If the man killed him, he wondered how anyone would ever know it had happened, or who he was. If the policeman examined his notebooks and discovered the truth—if he knew what to believe and what not to believe—he would realize the complications, and the publicity that would come for having shot a defenseless child who was also an orphan and a Jew.

Danny saw that he had no choice left, but he didn’t understand why this was so. Where had he gone wrong? What had he done to cause the policeman to follow him? And did what he was about to do mean that he should never have run away from the Home in the first place?

He couldn’t believe that. For what, he asked, would his life have become had he stayed there and never known Charlie?

He breathed in, as lightly as possible, through his nose, and decided to stop trying to imagine any life other than the one he had lived. He didn’t question the choices he had made, or even the mistakes, for they still didn’t seem to him, despite where he was now, to have been wrong choices.

He was not responsible for the policeman, he concluded, just as he was not responsible for being an orphan. The thought pleased him, but at the same time he saw that he was liable, at any instant, to move or to make noise or to fall asleep, and that if he did…

“All right,” he said, sliding open the doors to the ark. “I’ll come peacefully, Officer. I have no choice. Please don’t shoot. I’m only a boy. My name is…”

Eight