Paul Frankenthal fades off in memory after the Izzy night. In fact, he went on haunting me for years, and he’ll show up again. But the pot is boiling over again in the White House, and I may have to break off at any moment, and who knows when I’ll get back to my story? So if I seem to skimble-skamble through the next part you’ll know why. So far, I’ve narrated mainly the outside, the Aldus Street strand of my childhood. Now a brief necessary word about the inside existence which paralleled my street life. In retrospect, these simultaneous things seemed to happen on different tracks of reality.
***
We start back when I’m about six, with the half-dollar. It fell on the open book as I sat with old Mr. Horowitz, starting on my Bible studies. “In… the… beginning,” I was painfully translating, “God… created… the heavens—”
Thump, clink, roll! The big silver coin hit the page and bounced to the parlor floor. I was on it like a cat. From nowhere, in midday, my father had appeared behind the Hebrew teacher’s chair. “An angel dropped that from Heaven,” he said, slightly smiling. “Keep it, and study hard.” And back he went to the Fairy Laundry.
Did I believe the angel story? At age six, hard to say. I pocketed the half-dollar, no questions asked, and resumed the Hebrew work, highly motivated. It’s an old Jewish custom, this coin that falls from Heaven when you start learning Torah. A yet older one was a touch of honey on the Bible page, which the child got to lick off. Same idea, but in the Goldena Medina, money beat honey hands down.
Well, is it playing on the credulity of a child, the coin from overhead? Why, sure, it’s a sort of variant on the Santa Claus theme, I guess. When I found out, in the first grade at public school, about hanging up your stocking on Christmas Eve, I couldn’t wait to try it. I did hang one up, though Pop gently advised me not to bother. Next morning there was something in my stocking all right, an anonymous note: Dear David, you are a great big stupid dope to believe in Santa Claus.
Guess whose handwriting. Mama has never had a light touch. A case in point, about the same time: the incident of the window shade. It happened in the Kelly Street synagogue, on the eve of Simkhas Torah, the Rejoicing of the Law.
That was our merriest religious night of the year. It still is, among the pious. The men marched with the Torah scrolls seven times around the synagogue, singing and dancing between the circuits, and we children paraded behind them bearing paper flags. On the sticks of the flags apples were impaled, and in the apples candles were burning; an unbelievable fire hazard, since the Kelly Street shule was just a wooden store, and the dancing jostling children kept dropping burning candles all over the place. “God watches the simple,” says the Psalmist. The little store never did burn down. Maybe the spirit of Sholem Aleichem, who died in a house next door back in 1916, stood guard over the Kelly Street shule.
Now I was quite content to march around with flag, apple, and flaming candle. Naturally I yearned for a mantled Torah scroll all aglitter with sequins, or at least for one of the smaller velvet-mantled scrolls that the bar-mitzva boys carried: Ecclesiastes, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and such. But I knew I didn’t rate that, not at the age of six. Mama, however, had a great idea. The shule possessed one prophetic scroll for which nobody had as yet contributed a mantle. The long slender rolled-up bare parchment was visible in the open Holy Ark, and Mama came bustling out of the women’s section, and asked Pop why Yisroelke couldn’t carry that thing around. It was a sacred book, too, wasn’t it? So Papa got out the naked white scroll. “Here,” he said to me with not much enthusiasm, “wouldn’t you like to carry this?”
“That?” I exclaimed. “Why, that’s a window shade.”
“No, no!” He glanced over his shoulder at Mama, back in the women’s section, nodding and smiling eagerly at us over the curtain. “Take it, Yisroelke. It’s just as good as a Torah.”
He was my father, so I believed him. I fell in behind the last of the bar-mitzva boys who carried a mantled scroll, ahead of all the kids with flags, apples, and candles. The marching and singing for the next circuit began. Behind me a child’s voice—not mocking, just inquiring: “Say, Davey, what are you doing with a window shade?”
I, over my shoulder: “It’s not a window shade.”
“Oh.”
A synagogue crowds up on Simkhas Torah. The congregants line the aisles, and mothers hold their children up, and all kiss the scrolls as they go by.
“Mama,” piped one of these tots when I had hardly started out, “do I have to kiss the window shade?”
“Of course not,” said the mother, looking down in puzzlement at the little pudgy lunatic marching with this silly object.
“It’s not a window shade,” I said. “It’s as good as a Torah.”
“Go along,” she said to me, and to her child, “never mind the window shade.”
Well, so it went. Some jeered, some wondered, some whispered, some shook their heads in disbelief, but all along the line of march, there was unanimity on one point—I was carrying a window shade. Soon I was desperate to get rid of the thing, but how could I? It was holy, so I couldn’t throw it down; yet it was so ridiculous no other child would take it off my hands. I tried, but they shrank from it.
No, even when the circuit was over I still had to dance and dance and dance with that blasted bare scroll, the target of innumerable pitying or amused looks and pointing fingers. “Is he crazy, that kid? Why a window shade?” But Mama was clapping away in the women’s section, beaming around proudly with a look that proclaimed, “Look at my Davey! Six years old and with a scroll already!” Only she, of all the people in that synagogue, failed to see that, like a clown whose heart is breaking, I was dancing before God with a window shade.
***
What I’m getting at here is that, all during the Aldus Street years, I lived this other Hebraic life of which Paul Frankenthal and the kids knew almost nothing. Sure, they were Jewish, but none was a yoxen like me, stemming from a rabbi on one side and a shammas on the other. Possibly this explains—or helps to, anyway—why I’ve never had much of a hang-up about being Jewish, never felt the “alienation” which has been getting such a ride in the books and magazines nowadays.
That is, of course, old Peter Quat’s turf, alienation. There’s this heavyweight Jewish magazine that once ran an entire issue about alienation, and Peter himself generated that issue. Such a scandal broke out about a short story of Peter’s which appeared in the magazine that he wrote a long, learned defense of it in the next issue, arguing that the story was a parable of alienation. This brought on an avalanche of learned letters in reply, lauding Peter or lambasting him, and so next came the issue wholly devoted to these letters on the alienation theme. All this was marvellous for business, since Peter was just coming out with his first novel, Deflowering Sarah. The fuss got the book off to a jackrabbit start, and then with the obscenity trial in Cincinnati, which I fought and won, Peter was home free. There wasn’t a rabbi in the land, hardly, who didn’t either praise Deflowering Sarah from the pulpit as a brilliant and profound treatment of alienation, or denounce it as a mere lurid wallowing in sex. How could Peter lose? The Jews buy about half the hardcover books in America, and they went rushing out in battalions to snap up this profound novel about alienation that wallowed in sex, and Peter Quat was launched as a literary lion.
If you’re curious about the scandalous short story—mainly rabbis and professors read this magazine, so you may not have come across it—I can summarize it for you. It was called “My Father’s Farts,” and it was all about a kid on Yom Kippur eve. As everyone knows, Jews fast on Yom Kippur, starting at sundown the evening before. Prior to sundown they usually eat a huge meal; though I myself have learned down the years that the less you eat before the fast the easier it goes. Anyway, this kid’s father gorges himself, and the heavy meal disagrees with him. He drags the kid to the synagogue to sit beside him, and Peter has a lot of raw fun about the contrast between the solemn music of Kol Nidre, the rabbi’s long passionate sermon about repentance, and the father’s incessant rumbling and breaking wind, as the boy is sincerely trying to repent.
Well, we Jews love to laugh at ourselves in an acidly self-critical way, and we put up with a lot of such stuff; but somehow this particular alienation gem went too far and got nearly everybody sore. A huge ruckus ensued, and for months you heard nothing in literate Jewish households but Peter Quat, pro and con. It was the making of Peter, a real breakthrough, sort of like Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. When you think about it, old Scrooge was a pretty bad case of alienation himself. That is an absolute literary gold mine, alienation. Maybe I can work it in here somewhere, though at the moment I can’t see just how. I’m about to tell you about my own Yom Kippur experience, and it’s a far cry from Peter’s short story. But at least it’s true, and Peter just made all that up. He told me so. Awful stuff, but remarkably vivid, and ludicrous as it could be.
***
A jump to age nine and a half in my Hebraic life, about the time of the Hollooeen horror. Pop and Mr. Elfenbein, thrust out of the Kelly Street shule, had organized the Minsker Congregation and started a building. The contractor dug a big hole, but they ran out of money, so they finished off the basement as a synagogue, and above it erected a handsome facade, a stone stairway to ornate double doors that led nowhere. Behind the doors there was only the basement roof. This was supposed to be a temporary thing. I’ve mentioned that the Minsker Congregation is the last synagogue left in the desolate burned-out South Bronx. It is still a basement, topped by a facade with nothing behind it.
My father decided to lend cheer to that chill basement by forming a choir for the High Holy Days. I was the boy soprano. We practiced at the gloomy apartment of the rabbi, a forbidding old-country sort with a long black beard. He had this enchanting blonde apparition of a daughter, who would go wisping by in the hallway. During that choir practice I was a very religious boy, eager to please the rabbi, showing off my Yiddish and my Hebrew, and keeping a sharp eye out for his shadowy flitting Rapunzel of a daughter. One evening I managed to shake loose in mid-practice and corner the wraith in a bedroom. She was very shy, though clearly not unwilling to be cornered. Having nothing to talk about she snowed me a shofar, a ram’s horn, soaking in a tin basin, and explained (in Yiddish) that Satan sometimes got into the horn during services, so that no sound came out when her father blew it. The horn was soaking in vinegar. Vinegar, she said, discouraged Satan, or something to that effect.
Well, I was dying to impress this Yiddish-speaking blonde angel. My father, the backup shofar blower, had been practicing for a week at home, and he had taught me how to do it. “There’s no such thing as Satan,” I announced to her, lifting the horn out of the vinegar. “I’ll show you.” It really stank, and the first taste of vinegar puckered up my mouth, but I was in it now, and I blew—a loud, wet blubbering breaking of wind, right out of old Peter’s short story. The rabbi’s daughter vanished like a spectre at cockcrow. I never saw hair nor hide of her again. My father came and collared me, and from then on it was all choir practice and no flirting.
The choir, I must say, was a hit. We had no music to read, for from his years as a choirboy in Minsk, under the great Reb Mordechai the cantor, Pop had retained the a cappella music of an entire High Holy Day liturgy. He had been singing the melodies around the house as far back as I could remember. Sidney Gross was our baritone, Pop tenor, and a stout bearded old man called Solly the Bass, from Pop’s old Minsk choir, thundered the deep harmonies. Another tenor, a remote member of the Mishpokha named Uncle Shmuel, a thin sad little man who smoked even more than Sidney Gross, picked up Pop’s melodies and after the holidays sold his cigar store and became a full-time cantor, playing wedding chapels and funeral parlors. The choir itself fell apart after that first year. The laundry ate too much into Pop’s time and energy.
Now as to the music itself, give me a moment to tell you about it. The compositions of Reb Mordechai the Hazan are the sound track of my childhood. Not long ago I dug into the matter and found out that Reb Mordechai Shavelson’s choir music had been admired not only in Minsk but all over Russia, though there had been some purist carping at his composing waltzes, mazurkas, marches, and unmistakable love songs to set to the High Holy Day texts. But that was the very magic of Reb Mordechai’s melodic gift. His High Holy Day service was something between a Broadway musical and a grand opera. Obviously, he was a brilliant composer; but Russian Jews were shut off from the art and culture of the big cities, so he poured all his talent into the synagogue liturgy. At least he was appreciated. Pop told me that when Yom Kippur ended the worshippers would carry Reb Mordechai on their shoulders through the streets of Minsk, cheering.
My big solo came on a line from Isaiah:
And it shall be on that day
That a great shofar shall be sounded
And the lost ones shall return
From the land of Assyria
And the scattered ones
From the land of Egypt
In his holy mountain,
In Jerusalem.
That melody! That sweet, painfully yearning, long-breathing line of song, ending in a burst of joy from the whole choir behind me, on the words, “In his holy mountain, in Jerusalem!” I tell you, even in rehearsal when those male voices roared out around me my hair would stand on end; and in the packed basement of the Minsker Congregation, when my piping voice floated out above the silent mass of men in white prayer shawls and shiny-eyed women in their curtained-off section—where I could see Mama looking at me with tears rolling down her face—
And it shall be on that day
That a great shofar shall be sounded…
I rode on a wave of exaltation, of hot prickling thrills, that I feel again as I write these words.
***
Captain Abe Herz of the Israeli Defense Force reserve was at our house the other night, calling on my difficult daughter Sandra. Because he’s attending the Army Industrial College here outside Washington, he was wearing his parachutist uniform, red beret and all, which gets our Sandra all glassy-eyed, though she’s a fire-eating pacifist who once marched on the Pentagon right behind Norman Mailer, carrying a six-pack for him. I told Abe about the Minsker Congregation, the hole in the ground, and the facade above that led nowhere. “American Judaism,” Abe growled. The son of Mark Herz, an old college chum of Peter Quat’s and mine, Abe emigrated to Israel in 1968, and has since been getting more and more Israeli by the year.
Then I got to reminiscing about Pop’s choir, and Sandra urged me to sing this same Isaiah melody for him. An unpredictable screwball, she loves Reb Mordechai’s music, and can pick out a lot of it on her guitar. So she accompanied me and I sang, “And it shall be on that day.” Abe listened with a fixed, rather stony expression.
“Well?” said Sandra.
“Very nice.”
“Nothing. Very nice.”
“Don’t be like that,” said Sandra with an edge in her voice.
“Holocaust music,” said Abe Herz. “Music to march into gas chambers by. Very nice.”
***
What kind of fellow would say that? Bit of background on this young American-Israeli lawyer, who is Sandra’s current swain, though they both dissimulate about it. Abe’s father, Mark Herz, has become a high-powered, low-profile scientist; no Einstein or Oppenheimer yet, but up there among the gray eminences. Abe is his only son, from his first marriage. I first met Abe on a gloomy November morning, right after the 1968 election. He sat across the desk from me in the Goodkind and Curtis office, looking me in the eye.
“Mr. Goodkind, do you like what you’re doing?”
Now, get the picture. Editor of the Columbia Law Review, tall weedy young devil, lean bright sallow Jewish face, looking a hell of a lot more like Mark Herz, the big man on campus of 1933, than Mark himself does today. Hated Mark’s present wife, hated (and still hates) Mark. Disgusted with the swelling tumor called the Vietnam War. Cousins, aunts, uncles in Israel. One of the uncles—now retired Brigadier General Moshe Lev—was on the command staff in the terrific Six-Day War victory. This fascinated Abe Herz.
His father Mark’s opinion of Israel was—and remains—that the whole country is a Jewish mistake, preposterous and suicidal, and that the Six-Day War was a fluke; his arguments are convoluted and vehement, but that’s what they boil down to. Another reason why Abe detests his father. Or possibly he’s for Israel because Mark isn’t. Anyway, what with my being a heavy Zionist practicing law on Wall Street, I was supposed to straighten out Abe Herz. My job, to persuade him not to make aliya, that is, emigrate to Israel, but to settle down to a remunerative law career here.
“Do I like what I’m doing?”
Awkward question. Keen Herz eyes boring at me. Small room for maneuver.
“Very much, yes. I’m a happy man. The wife I wanted, the sort of children I wanted, the standard of living I wanted, challenging work.”
“The work you wanted?”
“The work that came to my hand.”
“Because you wanted to make money.”
“So will you, Abe, and there’s not much to be made in Israel.”
“Mr. Goodkind, I appreciate all this.” Honest shrewd smile. “Maybe you’re right. I just think I can do something more with my life than be a Wall Street shit-eater.”
The way he said it, believe it or not, miraculously inoffensive. A pleasant blaze of idealistic light on his face. Across the gulf between age twenty-three and age fifty-three, he pulled no punches, didn’t handle the old codger with kid gloves, talked straight. Made the candor seem a rough-edged compliment… almost.
That finished me. What did I owe Mark Herz, anyway? I stood up and stretched out a hand. “I envy you, Abe.”
And so I did then, and so I still do. But I don’t want to make aliya, any more than my wife does. If I finish this book, maybe Abe Herz will read it one day. It should answer in full his question: “Do you like what you’re doing?”
First he has to know me better. I am not just his father’s old one-dimensional college friend, the staunch UJA and Israel Bond lawyer who wouldn’t think of moving to Israel; the American Jew, in short. I am my father’s son. Elya Goodkind emigrated from Russia, not to Palestine but to the Goldena Medina. A Jewish State was then the remote dream of a few contentious idealists, most of them in Europe, only a few pioneering in Turkish Palestine. What Pop wanted was a good life and freedom. These he achieved, and so here I sit in the White House, six thousand miles from the beleaguered Jewish homeland, about to write down more of my story as fast as I can. For events both there and here threaten to run wildly out of control, if the intelligence reports are true.