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mallorys_cameraCHAPTER 4
(iii)
Papa had been a brilliant scholar. He knew the Talmud backwards and forwards. He could write with both hands. He’d danced like a tsadik, like a whirling dervish. Gravity took a vacation when Papa danced. If only G-d had had a face, G-d would have smiled at the graceful arc of Papa’s arms, at the nimbleness and dexterity of Papa’s feet.
But Papa was not happy as a member of the Vizhnitz.
In secret, he read Hebrew newspapers from Russia. He joined the Hechalutz under an assumed name, became active in the leadership of the Zionist Society. He never liked my mother much but married her anyway: Her dowry would pay his expenses at the yeshiva in Budapest, the sparkling metropolis newly formed from the union of two ancient cities on opposite sides of the Danube, Buda and Pest. Budapest was a sufficient distance from Vizhnitsa so that it was possible—he hoped it was very possible—his two lives might never intersect.
My father was handsome in his wedding photo with a beautiful head of wavy hair, enormous dark eyes, chiseled cheek bones. Chopin miraculously cured of consumption! He towered over my mother in whose pathetically hopeful face one could sense the beginnings of the scowl that would become her one defining characteristic in adult life.
At the Yeshiva, the meanings of the texts the students studied were completely different from the meanings of the words that comprised them. The texts were injunctions; the words were spells: By transposing their initial letters into new words, by computing the numerological value of these new words, you could slowly begin to make your way in the darkness; you could see the darkness was really a canopy under which trillions and trillions of stars continuously coalesced into the face of G-d.
But this exercise in the duality of meaning became increasingly distasteful to my father who was becoming frustrated with the duality of his own life.
He began absenting himself from classes. He wrapped his payot around his ears. He bought a homburg, telling himself that should he happen to run into G-d in the dark little alley outside the Pest café where, more and more often, he spent the hours he should have spent in class, the Master of the World and All Things In It might easily mistake the hat for the Vishnitzer stovepipe my father had worn since the day of his bar mitzvah.
He took lodgings in a room above the café.
One day, he bought a razor and shaved off his beard and payot.
After that, he didn’t go back to the yeshiva.
Pest’s boulevards were named for Catholic saints, though its taverns, gambling dens, and whorehouses did their best to discourage saintly behavior. My father took up the less scandalous café life on Vörösmarty tér where he sipped Romanian tzuika, played chess, dabbled in writing poetry, and ignored the increasingly irate letters from the Vizhnitsa rebbe who wrote on his wife’s family’s behalf. I think my father had some vague notion that when my mother’s dowry ran out, he would support himself as a novelist. He admired Robert Louis Stevenson whom he’d read in French translation.
I’m not sure he ever wondered how my mother and the four children he’d dutifully sired upon her on his annual trips back home to Vizhnitsa would support themselves.
One afternoon, my father won 50 florins playing Tarok with an Austrian lieutenant. The lieutenant had no money on him; my father took his note.
That night, the daughter of the café owner pounded on my father’s bedroom door. She’d overheard the Austrian lieutenant talking: “Why, I’d set fire to that money before I’d give a thaler to that filthy zsidó swine.”
They’d be coming in the morning to conscript him.
My father fled back to Vizhnitsa. My mother’s family scraped together money to smuggle us all the way to Bremen and then to New York. I was only four years old, but I still remember the trip on that steamer, the endless glaze of the great grey sea.
In America, my father became a presser because it required no English. He spoke Jiddish, French, German, Hungarian, a smattering of Romanian, but these were not the languages they spoke in America, and English was a hard language to learn. He was a gentle man who bore no bitterness toward the destiny that had so cruelly disappointed him. He tried to keep out of my mother’s way as much as possible and when my brother Sammy turned 13, it was understood that Sammy was now the head of the family.
My father was the only person I told when I planned to move from my family’s apartment. Let my mother think she had kicked me out.
“What will you do?” my father asked.
“I’ll manage.”
“Manage, bubelah. What does that mean?”
“It means don’t ask me questions if you know you won’t like the answers,” I said.
“It will break your mother’s heart.”
“You think she has a heart? Oh, I know there’s a lump of meat contracting somewhere in her chest. You’d need a hatchet to put a dent in it.”
“Your mother has not had the easiest life,” my father said. “She looks at you, but maybe she doesn’t see you. Maybe she sees something else.”
“Fuck her,” I said in English.
My father frowned. “’Fuck’? That means what?”
“It means that something is of no importance.”
“Ah!” said my father. He took out the little notebook and pencil stub he always carried in his breast pocket to write down interesting English words. “And you spell it how?”
“That’s of no importance, either,” I said.
We were walking in the Botanical Gardens. The sun was out. The cherry trees were in bloom. Just beyond them, the classical façade of the Brooklyn Museum loomed. We could have been in Paris.
The branches of the cherry trees formed a pink canopy. People were everywhere. Sitting on the lawns, strolling along the dirt paths, sharing picnics on the benches. People. Everywhere. Their voices had an echoing quality; snippets of conversation that floated and disappeared like dandelion puffs on a child’s breath.
“I don’t want to be a Jew, Papa,” I said.
He threw back his head and laughed soundlessly. “Who wants to be a Jew? Better you should be the Tsar of Russia.”
This was my father’s way. He made gentle, foolish jokes that nobody laughed at. His eyes were sunken as an elephant’s; his ears were long and pendulous; he stooped now when he walked. What was left of Chopin’s curls sprouted round the shiny dome of his skull like a Christian monk’s tonsure.
He looked at me then with his sweet, slow smile. “You know what’s the miracle, Iulia? Each and every person in this garden has an inner life that’s every bit as compelling and every bit as involving as your own. Think about that for a moment.”
But I had more exciting things to think about.
And that was the last time I would ever see him.
Though I didn’t know it then.
(iii)
Papa had been a brilliant scholar. He knew the Talmud backwards and forwards. He could write with both hands. He’d danced like a tsadik, like a whirling dervish. Gravity took a vacation when Papa danced. If only G-d had had a face, G-d would have smiled at the graceful arc of Papa’s arms, at the nimbleness and dexterity of Papa’s feet.
But Papa was not happy as a member of the Vizhnitz.
In secret, he read Hebrew newspapers from Russia. He joined the Hechalutz under an assumed name, became active in the leadership of the Zionist Society. He never liked my mother much but married her anyway: Her dowry would pay his expenses at the yeshiva in Budapest, the sparkling metropolis newly formed from the union of two ancient cities on opposite sides of the Danube, Buda and Pest. Budapest was a sufficient distance from Vizhnitsa so that it was possible—he hoped it was very possible—his two lives might never intersect.
My father was handsome in his wedding photo with a beautiful head of wavy hair, enormous dark eyes, chiseled cheek bones. Chopin miraculously cured of consumption! He towered over my mother in whose pathetically hopeful face one could sense the beginnings of the scowl that would become her one defining characteristic in adult life.
At the Yeshiva, the meanings of the texts the students studied were completely different from the meanings of the words that comprised them. The texts were injunctions; the words were spells: By transposing their initial letters into new words, by computing the numerological value of these new words, you could slowly begin to make your way in the darkness; you could see the darkness was really a canopy under which trillions and trillions of stars continuously coalesced into the face of G-d.
But this exercise in the duality of meaning became increasingly distasteful to my father who was becoming frustrated with the duality of his own life.
He began absenting himself from classes. He wrapped his payot around his ears. He bought a homburg, telling himself that should he happen to run into G-d in the dark little alley outside the Pest café where, more and more often, he spent the hours he should have spent in class, the Master of the World and All Things In It might easily mistake the hat for the Vishnitzer stovepipe my father had worn since the day of his bar mitzvah.
He took lodgings in a room above the café.
One day, he bought a razor and shaved off his beard and payot.
After that, he didn’t go back to the yeshiva.
Pest’s boulevards were named for Catholic saints, though its taverns, gambling dens, and whorehouses did their best to discourage saintly behavior. My father took up the less scandalous café life on Vörösmarty tér where he sipped Romanian tzuika, played chess, dabbled in writing poetry, and ignored the increasingly irate letters from the Vizhnitsa rebbe who wrote on his wife’s family’s behalf. I think my father had some vague notion that when my mother’s dowry ran out, he would support himself as a novelist. He admired Robert Louis Stevenson whom he’d read in French translation.
I’m not sure he ever wondered how my mother and the four children he’d dutifully sired upon her on his annual trips back home to Vizhnitsa would support themselves.
One afternoon, my father won 50 florins playing Tarok with an Austrian lieutenant. The lieutenant had no money on him; my father took his note.
That night, the daughter of the café owner pounded on my father’s bedroom door. She’d overheard the Austrian lieutenant talking: “Why, I’d set fire to that money before I’d give a thaler to that filthy zsidó swine.”
They’d be coming in the morning to conscript him.
My father fled back to Vizhnitsa. My mother’s family scraped together money to smuggle us all the way to Bremen and then to New York. I was only four years old, but I still remember the trip on that steamer, the endless glaze of the great grey sea.
In America, my father became a presser because it required no English. He spoke Jiddish, French, German, Hungarian, a smattering of Romanian, but these were not the languages they spoke in America, and English was a hard language to learn. He was a gentle man who bore no bitterness toward the destiny that had so cruelly disappointed him. He tried to keep out of my mother’s way as much as possible and when my brother Sammy turned 13, it was understood that Sammy was now the head of the family.
My father was the only person I told when I planned to move from my family’s apartment. Let my mother think she had kicked me out.
“What will you do?” my father asked.
“I’ll manage.”
“Manage, bubelah. What does that mean?”
“It means don’t ask me questions if you know you won’t like the answers,” I said.
“It will break your mother’s heart.”
“You think she has a heart? Oh, I know there’s a lump of meat contracting somewhere in her chest. You’d need a hatchet to put a dent in it.”
“Your mother has not had the easiest life,” my father said. “She looks at you, but maybe she doesn’t see you. Maybe she sees something else.”
“Fuck her,” I said in English.
My father frowned. “’Fuck’? That means what?”
“It means that something is of no importance.”
“Ah!” said my father. He took out the little notebook and pencil stub he always carried in his breast pocket to write down interesting English words. “And you spell it how?”
“That’s of no importance, either,” I said.
We were walking in the Botanical Gardens. The sun was out. The cherry trees were in bloom. Just beyond them, the classical façade of the Brooklyn Museum loomed. We could have been in Paris.
The branches of the cherry trees formed a pink canopy. People were everywhere. Sitting on the lawns, strolling along the dirt paths, sharing picnics on the benches. People. Everywhere. Their voices had an echoing quality; snippets of conversation that floated and disappeared like dandelion puffs on a child’s breath.
“I don’t want to be a Jew, Papa,” I said.
He threw back his head and laughed soundlessly. “Who wants to be a Jew? Better you should be the Tsar of Russia.”
This was my father’s way. He made gentle, foolish jokes that nobody laughed at. His eyes were sunken as an elephant’s; his ears were long and pendulous; he stooped now when he walked. What was left of Chopin’s curls sprouted round the shiny dome of his skull like a Christian monk’s tonsure.
He looked at me then with his sweet, slow smile. “You know what’s the miracle, Iulia? Each and every person in this garden has an inner life that’s every bit as compelling and every bit as involving as your own. Think about that for a moment.”
But I had more exciting things to think about.
And that was the last time I would ever see him.
Though I didn’t know it then.
