CHAPTER 5

SMART BOYS

ABE SHIMMER AND I walked toward my apartment, my bike to my right, Abe to my left. “I see you’ve become a big-deal professor,” he said.

“I’m a professor. Not much of a deal, big or little.”

“You must have students and write books and articles and give lectures. I hear you’re an expert on the Kobliner Hasidim.”

“These days I meet most of my students online. I haven’t written a book in over ten years. I haven’t published an article in the last two or three. Ever since the Kobliners became the Schmeltzerites, there’s little interest in the old world. Everyone’s focused on those wackos.”

“Still, you work at a great university.”

“Since the Great Debacle, it’s not so great.”

“You have children?”

“A daughter. Lorraine.”

“Very nice. Shmulie never had children.”

Thank God. What monsters would that bastard have spawned?

“I was sorry to hear about your wife,” I said.

“Shmulie was at her side when she died, you know. Part of him always did his best to be a good son.” Abe sighed. Another sigh turned into a sob. “It’s hard when your only child goes bad.”

“I’m sure that’s true. I guess at least there’s some comfort that it wasn’t always that way.”

Abe knew what I meant. A faint lilt entered his voice. “Yes. Yes. The two of you at that yeshiva on Fourteenth Street. A pair of great learners, you two.”

I put my hand on his shoulder, and he looked at me. The contact was electric. The whole chapter came rushing back and for a moment washed over me like a warm spring rain. From two outliers eating ham and cheese on rye we became, as Abe said, quite great learners.

Perhaps the third week after school began, I went over to Shmulie’s house. We sat at the kitchen table. Abe made us tea and placed a few sugar cookies on a plate. He asked us about school. We grumbled that we didn’t understand Talmud class, that the teacher expressed no interest in helping us.

Abe became incensed. “That’s a terrible teacher. Who doesn’t stand up and help his student? Me, I would never ignore a student who didn’t understand. I’m going to call this guy and talk to him, one teacher to another. What did you say his name is?”

“Uh, Rabbi Kramer, Dad. But I don’t think you should call him up to yell at him just yet,” Shmulie said.

“Yelling I’m not going to do. Just talk very quiet, but stern. Why not? I pay a lot of money to send you to this Jewish school. You shouldn’t get help from your teachers when you need it?”

“Dad, can you maybe wait a couple of weeks?”

“A couple of weeks? That’s forever when you’re drowning in class. You want you should drown?”

Shmulie looked at me, eyes pleading for help.

“Maybe you could request a tutor,” I suggested. “I’ve heard they might do that.”

“Okay. Good idea,” Abe whispered.

He complained to the school, and we got ourselves a tutor—paid for by the yeshiva. We not only got a tutor, we got Reb Avram Pinsky, the biggest and baddest Talmud tutor in all the Five Boroughs.

Reb Avram had nine kids, so the extra money put meat on the table on Friday night. Symbiosis happened. Tutoring helped him a little with the bills. Tutoring helped us—a lot—with grades. Collective obstinacy got us through that year and drove us to the head of the Talmud class.

Every spare moment, we’d sit with our Talmud texts struggling to grasp the argument on the page. Reb Avram, a man of piety as well as potency, grasped our passion and pitched in, frequently giving time beyond his wages. Every week, including summer, for no fewer than six hours, these two kids, now sporting proper knitted yarmulkes and tsitsit, ritual fringes, would sit with their tutor, working through the language and argumentation of the talmudic text.

By the end of August before ninth grade, Shmulie and I could handle a page of Talmud better than any other student in the entire school. I kid not. If you’ve never studied a page of Talmud, understand I am not talking about a day at the beach.

A page of Talmud consists of different patterns of thought developed over a millennium and a half concerning one or more questions expressed in two languages, neither of which is English, written without vowels and lacking anything as courteous as punctuation. To understand what is happening on the page, you have to master the languages, the terse syntax, and follow several simultaneous arguments, remembering what you learned last week, because you never know when the text will return to some obscure point you thought the text was finished with but from which it has only taken a digression of astonishing magnitude. Then you have to know every other talmudic tractate because every tractate assumes knowledge of every other tractate. Then you have to master more than nine centuries of commentary literature consumed with the proposition that all of this material makes exquisite, logical, divine sense.

And when you are finished with the tractate, you throw a party and continue to another as difficult as the one you just left behind.

That is the Great Jewish Conversation—reaching across miles and years to access what has preoccupied Jews throughout the millennia.

By the end of the ninth grade, Shmulie and I shared a prize for excellence in Talmud, consisting of twenty-five dollars each and a cheap certificate filled out on a manual typewriter. Every other student and a couple of teachers as well were forced to eat our talmudic dust. That certificate, with its uneven typed m’s, accompanied me throughout my wanderings and still hung beside the diploma acknowledging my doctorate. Earning a PhD was a sleepover at Grandma’s compared to the work we did that year to earn a yellowed twenty-five-cent certificate.

I still fondly remembered those endless hours bent over tractates of the Talmud, a youthful time this bent-over old man’s presence brought back to me in a rush of memory.

“So, Nicky, are you still a talmid hacham?” Abe asked. A talmid hacham possessed an extraordinarily high degree of learning in the Talmud.

“No, Abe, I gave that up a long time ago.”

“I know you did, but you could have been. You and Shmulie could have been two of the great Talmud minds of your generation. Many, many times that Pinsky fellow said so. I loved sitting with you and Shmulie. Good times, no?”

The Abe Shimmer of my yeshiva days would regularly interrupt Shmulie and me during our nightly talmudic disputations. He would bring us tea and something sweet. He’d squeeze into one of the chairs around the Formica kitchen table on which we had spread our texts and study aids. Dipping a sugar cookie into his glass of tea, he’d ask us to explain the problem we were wrestling with. We’d tell him, and he’d jump into the water as best he could. Together we would go at it, occasionally so late I’d stay over.

Once, we were studying the talmudic tractate Baba Metzia, “The Middle Gate.” We came upon a short problem: Two men find themselves in the desert lost with one canteen of water between them. One owns the canteen, while the other was foolish enough to find himself caught in the desert without a drop to his name. There is insufficient water for both to make it back to civilization. Who gets the water?

Rabbi ben Patura claimed the owner must share the water, while Rabbi Akiva, perhaps the most famous of the ancient rabbis, argued the canteen belonged to the one who brought the water.

“Akiva’s wrong,” Abe said. “The two must share.”

“Even though both die?” I had asked.

“It doesn’t matter. They have to share. It’s a basic principle of community. We don’t abandon someone in danger, even if it’s dangerous. Those nuns risked their lives when they allowed me to live with them. They shared their water, even though we all would have died if we got caught.”

As Abe and I spoke, Shmulie had sat uncharacteristically silent.

Then he added his voice. “Dad,” he said. “The nuns, yeah, they took a risk by hiding you from the Nazis. But let’s not forget if Uncle Walter hadn’t come, today you’d be going to Mass every Sunday instead of sitting here. Altruistic they were not. Bringing you to Jesus was their vocation.”

“True,” Abe had said. “They had their motives, their faith, but that doesn’t hide the danger they put themselves in.”

Shmulie leaned back in his chair and folded his hands across his belly. He looked hard at Abe.

“If I found myself in the desert with someone without a canteen, no way in this world I’d share mine,” Shmulie said. “The stupid idiot was too much of a moron not to bring his own fucking water. What makes it my job to take care of him?”

Abe and I sat for a moment, stupefied. Shmulie’s opinion in and of itself had its adherents. Akiva agreed, as did the Jewish tradition. I found the subtext, the unexpected anger, disturbing. After a few moments, Shmulie’s composure returned, and we attended to the page, which did not further rehearse this problem. That outburst remained with me. It constituted just a small piece of Shmulie, which didn’t emerge again for a while.

As Abe and I crossed Prospect Park West to Garfield Place, he said, “All that Talmud made you and Shmulie smart boys. It made you better thinkers. It shows in what you both became.” Abe stopped speaking, possibly because he realized the double edge to what he’d said. Without Talmud, there would have been no chain of developments in Shmulie’s education that would lead to Lerbs, and without Lerbs, Shmulie wouldn’t have turned into the terrible man he became, a badness that consumed him and a very appreciable chunk of America.

Including me.