It's safe to say that we Jews of North Main Street are a progressive people. I don't mean to suggest we have any patience with free-thinkers, like that crowd down at Thompson's Cafe; tolerant within limits, we're quick to let subversive elements know where they stand. Observant (within reason), we keep the Sabbath after our fashion, though the Saturday competition won't allow us to close our stores. We keep the holidays faithfully and are regular in attending our modest little synagogue on Market Square. But we're foremost an enterprising bunch, proud of our contribution to the local economy. Even our second-hand shops contain up-to-date inventories--such as stylish automobile capes for the ladies, astrakhan overcoats for gentlemen--and our jewelers, tailors, and watchmakers are famous all over town. Boss Crump and his heelers, who gave us a dispensation to stay open on Sundays, have declared more than once in our presence, "Our sheenies are good sheenies!" So you can imagine how it unsettles us to hear that Rabbi Shmelke, head of that gang of fanatics over on Auction Street, has begun to fly.
We see him strolling by the river, if you can call it strolling. Because the old man, brittle as a dead leaf, doesn't so much walk as permit himself to be dragged by disciples at either elbow. A mournful soul on a stick, that's Rabbi Shmelke; comes a big wind and his bones will be scattered to powder. His eyes above his foggy pince-nez are a rheumy residue in an otherwise parchment face, his beard (Ostrow calls it his "lunatic fringe") an ashen broom gnawed by mice. Living mostly on air and the strained generosity of in-laws, his followers are not much more presentable. Recently transplanted from Shpink, some godforsaken Old World backwater that no doubt sent them packing, Shmelke and his band are a royal embarrassment to our community.
Like I say, we citizens of Hebrew extraction set great store by our friendly relations with our Gentile neighbors. One thing we don't need is religious zealots poisoning the peaceable atmosphere. They're an eyesore and a liability, Shmelke's crew, a threat to our good name, seizing every least excuse to make a spectacle. They pray conspicuously in questionable attire, dance with their holy books in the street, their doddering leader, if he speaks at all, talking in riddles. No wonder we judge him to be frankly insane.
It's my own son Ziggy, the kaddish, who first brings me word of Shmelke's alleged levitation. Then it's a measure of his excitement that, in reporting what he's seen, he also reveals he's skipped Hebrew school to see it. This fact is as troubling to me as his claims for the Shpinker's airborne faculty, which I naturally discount. He's always been a good boy, Ziggy, quiet and obedient, if a little withdrawn, and it's unheard of that he should play truant from his Talmud Torah class. Not yet a bar mitzvah, the kid has already begun to make himself useful around the store, and I look forward to the day he comes into the business as my partner (I've got a sign made up in anticipation of the event: J. Zipper & Son, Spirits and Fine Wines.) So his conduct is distressing on several counts, not the least of which is how it shows the fanatics' adverse influence on our youth.
"Papa!" exclaims Ziggy, bursting through the door from the street--since when does Ziggy burst? "Papa, Rabbi Shmelke can fly!"
"Shah!" I bark. "Can't you see I'm with a customer?" This is my friend and colleague Harry Nussbaum, proprietor of Memphis Bridge Cigars, whose factory supports better than fifteen employees and is located right here on North Main. Peeling bills from a bankroll as thick as a bible, Nussbaum's in the process of purchasing a case of Passover wine.
Nussbaum winces, clamping horsy teeth around an unlit cigar. "Shomething ought to be done about thosh people," he mutters, and I heartily concur. As respected men of commerce, we both belong to the executive board of the North Main Street Improvement Committee, regarding ourselves as watchdogs for the welfare of our district. It's a responsibility we don't take lightly.
When Nussbaum leaves, I turn to Ziggy, his jaw still agape, eyes bugging from his outsized head. Not from my side of the family does he get such a head, bobbling in his turtleneck like a pumpkin in an eggcup. You'd think it was stuffed full of wishes and big ideas, Ziggy's head, though to my knowledge it remains largely vacant.
"You ought to be ashamed of yourself."
"But, Papa, I seen it." Breathless, he twists his academy cap in his hands. "We was on the roof and we peeped through the skylight. First he starts to pray, then all of a sudden his feet don't touch the floor..."
"I said, 'Enough!'"
Then right away I'm sorry I raised my voice. I should be sorry! But like I say, Ziggy has always been a pliant kid, kind of an amiable mediocrity. He's never needed much in the way of discipline, since he's seldom guilty of worse than picking his nose. Not what you'd call fanciful--where others dream, Ziggy merely sleeps. I'm puzzled he should wait till his twelfth year to carry such tales. I fear he's fallen in with a bad crowd.
Still, it bothers me that I've made him sulk. Between my son and me there have never been secrets. What's to keep secret? And I don't like how my temper has stung him into furtiveness. But lest he should think I've relented, I'm quick to add, "And never let me hear you played hooky from Hebrew school again."
And that, for the time being, is that.
"He hangs around that Auction Street shtibl," says an incredulous Ostrow, referring to the Chasids' sanctuary above Klotwog's feed store. "I ask him why, and he says, 'Papa, the Shpinker rebbe can fly!' 'Rebbe' he calls him, like an alter kocker!"
"Godhelpus!" we groan in one voice--Nussbaum, myself, Benny Rosen of Rosen's Delicatessen--having heard this particular rumor once too often.
At length we resolve to nip the thing in the bud. We pass along our apprehensions to the courtly Rabbi Fein, who runs the religious school in the synagogue basement. At our urging he lets it be known from the pulpit that fraternizing with Chasids, who are after all no better than heretics, can be hazardous to the soul. He hints at physical consequences as well, such as warts and blindness. After that, nothing is heard for a while about the goings on in the little hall above the feed store.
What does persist, however, is a certain (what you might call) bohemianism that's begun to manifest itself among even the best of our young. Take for instance the owlish Hershel Ostrow--he's taken to wearing his father's worn-out homburg; and Mindy Dreyfus, the jeweler's son, has assumed the Prince Albert coat his papa has kept in mothballs since his greenhorn days. A few of the older boys sport incipient beards like the characters who conspire to make bombs at Thompson's Cafe, where in my opinion they'd be better off. Even my Ziggy, whom we trust to get his own haircut, he talks Plott the barber into leaving the locks at his temples. He tries to hide them under his cap, though they spiral out like untended runners.
But it's not so much their outward signs of eccentricity as our children's increasing remoteness that gets under our skin. Even when they're present at meals or their after-school jobs, their minds seem to be elsewhere. This goes as well for Ziggy, never much of a noise to begin with, whose silence these days smacks more of wistful longing than merely having nothing to say.
"Mama," I frown at my wife Ethel, who's shuffling about the kitchen. I'm enjoying her superb golden broth, afloat with eyes of fat that gleam beneath the gas lamp like a peacock's tail; but I nevertheless force a frown. "Mama, give a look on your son."
A good-natured, capable woman, my Ethel, with a figure like a brick mikveh, as they say, she seldom sits down at meals. She prefers to eat on the run, sampling critical spoonfuls as she scoots back and forth between the table and the coal-burning range. At my suggestion, however, she pauses, pretending to have just noticed Ziggy, who's toying absently with his food.
"My son? You mean this one with the confetti over his ears?" She bends to tease his sidelocks, then straightens, shaking her head. "This one ain't mine. Mine the fairies must of carried him off and left this in his place." She ladles more soup into the bowl he's scarcely touched. "Hey, stranger, eat your knaidel."
Still his mother's boy, Ziggy is cajoled from his meditations into a grudging grin, which I fight hard against finding infectious.
Comes the auspicious day of Mr. Crump's visit to North Main Street. This is the political boss's bimonthly progress, when he collects his thank yous (usually in the form of merchandise) from a grateful Jewish constituency. We have good reason to be grateful, since in exchange for votes and assorted spoils, the Red Snapper, as he's called, has waived the blue laws for our district.
When the chrome-plated Belgian Minerva pulls to the curb, we're assembled in front of Ridblatt's Bakery on the corner of Jackson Avenue and North Main. Irving Ostrow is offering a brace of suits from his emporium, as solemnly as a fireman presenting a rescued child, while Benny Rosen appears to be wrestling a string of salamis. Henry Nussbaum renders up a bale of cigars, myself a case of schnapps, and Rabbi Fein a ready blessing along with his perennial bread and salt. Puffed and officious in his dual capacity as self-appointed ward heeler and committee chair, Ostrow has also prepared an address:
"We citizens of North Main Street pledge to be a feather in the fedora of Mayor Huey, I mean Blunt...." (because who can keep straight Mr. Crump's succession of puppet mayors?)
Behind us under the bakery awning, Mickey Panitz is ready to strike up his klezmer orchestra; igniting his flash powder, a photographer from The Commercial Appeal ducks beneath a black hood. Everyone (with the exception, of course, of the Shpinker zealots, who lack all civic pride) has turned out for the event, lending North Main Street a holiday feel. We bask in Boss Crump's approval, who salutes us with a touch to the rim of his rakish straw skimmer, his smile scattering a galaxy of freckles. This is why what happens next, behind the backs of our visitors, seems doubly shameful, violating as it does such a banner afternoon.
At first we tell ourselves we don't see what we see; we think, maybe a plume of smoke. But looks askance at one another confirm that, not only do we share the same hallucination, but that the hallucination gives every evidence of being real. Even from such a distance, it's hard to deny it: around the corner of the next block, something is emerging from the roof of the railroad tenement that houses the Shpinker shtibl. It's a wispy black-and-gray something that rises out of a propped-open skylight like vapor from an uncorked bottle. Escaping, it climbs into the cloudless sky and hovers over North Main Street, beard and belted caftan aflutter. There's a fur hat resembling the rotary brush of a chimney sweep, a pair of dun-stockinged ankles (to one of which a rope is attached) as spindly as the handles on a scroll. Then it's clear that, risen above the telephone wires and trolley lines, above the water tanks, Rabbi Shmelke floats in a doleful ecstasy.
We begin talking anxiously and at cross-purposes about mutual understanding through public sanitation, and so forth. We crank hands left and right, while Mickey Panitz leads his band in a dirgelike rendition of "Dixie." In this way we keep our notables distracted until we can pack them off (photographer and all) in their sable limousine. Then, without once looking up again, we repair to Ostrow's Men's Furnishings and convene an extraordinary meeting of the Improvement Committee.
Shooting his sleeves to show flashy cufflinks, Ostrow submits a resolution: "I hereby resolve we dispatch to the Shpinkers a delegatz, with the ultimatum they should stop making a nuisance, which it's degrading already to decent citizens, or face a forcible outkicking from the neighborhood. All in agreement say oy."
En route across the road to the shtibl, in the company of my fellows, I give thanks for small blessings: at least my Ziggy was telling the truth about Shmelke. Though I'm thinking that, with truths like this, it's maybe better he should learn to lie.
We trudge up narrow stairs from the street, pound on a flimsy door, and are admitted by one of Shmelke's Chasids. The dim room lists slightly like the deck of a ship, tilted toward windows that glow from a half-light filtering through the lowered shades. There's a film of dust in the air that lends the graininess of a photogravure to the bearded men seated at the long table, swaying over God only knows what back-numbered lore. By the wall there's an ark stuffed with scrolls, a shelf of moldering books, spice boxes, tarnished candelabra, amulets against the evil eye.
It's all here, I think, all the blind superstition of our ancestors preserved in amber. But how did it manage to follow us over an ocean to such a far-flung outpost as Tennessee? Let the Gentiles see a room like this, with a ram's horn in place of a clock on the wall, with Shpinkers wrapped in their paraphernalia, mumbling hocus-pocus instead of being gainfully employed, and right away the rumors start. The yids are poisoning the water, pishing on communion wafers, murdering Christian children for their blood. Right away somebody's quoting the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. A room like this, give or take one flying rebbe, can upset the delicate balance of the entire American enterprise.
When our eyes adjust to the murk, we notice that the ranks of the Shpinkers (who until now have scarcely numbered enough for a minyan) have swelled. Who should have joined them, during Hebrew school hours no less, but a contingent of the sons of North Main Street, my own included. He's standing in his cockeyed academy cap, scrunched between nodding Chasids on the rebbe's left side. To my horror, Ziggy, who's shown little enough aptitude for the things of this world, never mind the other, is also nodding to beat the band.
"Home!" I shout, finding myself in four-part harmony with the other committee members. But while some of the boys do indeed leave their places and make reluctantly for the door, others stand their ground. Among them is Ostrow's brainy son Hershel and my nebbish who has never before disobeyed.
The disciples look back to their tsadik, who God forbid should interrupt his discourse on our account. Then Hershel steps forth to confront us, a pince-nez identical to Shmelke's perched on his nose. "You see," he explains in hushed tones, though nobody asked him, "figuratively speaking the rebbe is climbing Jacob's Ladder. Each rung corresponds to a letter of Tetragrammaton, which in turn corresponds to a level of the soul...." I look at Ostrow, who's reaching for his heart pills.
Then who should pipe up but the pip-squeak himself, come around to tug at my sleeve. "Papa," like he can't decide whether he should plead or insist, "If they don't hold him down by the rope, Rabbi Shmelke can fly away to paradise."
I can hardly believe this is my son. What did I do wrong that he should chase after yiddishe swamis? Did he ever want for anything? Didn't I take him on high holidays to a sensible synagogue, where I showed him how to mouth the prayers nobody remembers the meaning of? Haven't I guaranteed him the life the good Lord intends him for?
To the papery old man whom I hold personally accountable, I ask point-blank, "What have you done to my child?"
Diverted from his table talk, Rabbi Shmelke cocks his tallowy head, aware for perhaps the first time of the presence among his faithful of uninvited hangers-on.
"Gay avek!" he croaks at the remaining boys. "Go away." When nobody budges, he lifts a shaggy brow, shrugs his helplessness. Then he resumes, his voice like a violin strung with cobweb, "Allow me to tell you a story...."
"A story, a story!" The disciples wag their heads, all of them clearly idiots.
The rebbe commences some foolishness about how the patriarch Isaac's soul went on vacation while his body remained under his father's knife. Along with the others I find myself unable to stop listening, until I feel another tug at my sleeve.
"Papa," Ziggy is whispering, Adam's apple bobbing like a golf ball in a fountain, "they have to let him out the roof or he bumps his head on the ceiling."
"Do I know you?" I say, shaking him off. Then I abruptly turn on my heel and exit, swearing vengeance.
Days pass and Rabbi Fein complains that even with the threat of his ruler he can't keep his pupils in Hebrew class. Beyond our command now, our children are turning their backs on opportunity in favor of emulating certifiable cranks. They grow bolder, exhibiting a freakish behavior they no longer make any pretense to conceal. For them rebellion is a costume party. Some adopt muskrat caps (out of season) to approximate the Chasid's fur shtreimel. Milton Rosen wears a mackintosh that doubles for a caftan; the dumb Herman Wolf uses alphabet blocks for phylacteries. My own Ziggy has taken to picking his shirttails into ritual tassels.
Our spies tell us that instead of studying (a harmless enough endeavor in itself), the Shpinkers now spend their time testing various grades of rope. From the clothesline purchased at Hekkie's Hardware on Commerce Street, they've graduated to hawser obtained from steamboat chandlers down at the levee. They've taken to braiding lengths of rope, to splicing and paying them out through the skylight, so that Shmelke can float ever higher. Occasionally they maneuver their rebbe in fishtails and cunning loop-the-loops, causing him to soar and dive. Sometimes, diminished to a mote, the old man disappears in the clouds, only to be reeled back carrying gifts--snuff boxes and kiddush cups made of alloys never before seen on this planet.
We're thankful, in any case, that the Shpinkers now fly their tsadik high enough that he's ceased to be a serious distraction. We've begun to forget about him, to forget the problems with our young. What problems? Given the fundamental impossibility of the whole situation, we start to embrace the conviction that Shmelke's flights are pure fantasy.
Then Ziggy breaks his trancelike silence to drop a bombshell. "I'm studying for bar mitzvah with Rabbi Shmelke," he announces, as Ethel spoons more calf's foot jelly onto my plate. But while his voice issues the challenge, Ziggy's face, in the shadow of his academy cap, shows he's still testing the water.
Ethel's brisket, tender and savory as it is, sticks in my gorge.
"What's wrong," I ask, clearing my throat with what emerges as a seismic roar, "ahemmm...what's wrong with Rabbi Fein?"
"He ain't as holy."
Directly the heartburn sets in. "And what's holy got to do with it?"
Ziggy looks at me as if my question is hardly deserving of an answer. Condescending to explain, however, he finds it necessary to dismount his high horse, doffing his cap to scratch his bulbous head. "Holy means, you know, like scare...I mean sacred."
"Unh-hnh," I say, folding my arms and biting my tongue. Now I'm the soul of patience, which makes him nervous.
"You know, sacred," he reasserts, the emphasis for his own sake rather than mine.
"Ahhh," I nod in benign understanding, enjoying how his resolve begins to crack.
"That's right," pursues Ziggy, and tries again to fly in the face of my infernal tolerance, lacking wings, "like magic."
I'm still nodding, so he repeats himself in case I didn't hear.
"Oh sure, ma-a-agic," I reply, with the good humor of a parent introduced to his child's imaginary friend.
Flustered to the point of fighting back tears, Ziggy nevertheless refuses to surrender, retreating instead behind a wall of hostility. "You wouldn't know magic if it dumped a load on your head!"
You have to hand it to the kid, the way he persists in his folly; I never would have thought him capable of such high mishegoss. But when the admiration passes, I'm fit to be tied; I'm on my feet, jerking him by the scrawny shoulders, his head whipping back and forth until I think I'm maybe shaking it clear of humbug.
"I'll magic you!" I shout. "Who's your father anyway, that feeble-minded old scarecrow or me? Remember me, Jacob Zipper, that works like a dog so his son can be a person?" Then I see how he's staring daggers; you could puncture your conscience on such daggers, and so I pipe down. But tempted as I am to make peace, I cuff the boy's ear for good measure and tell my wife, "I don't know him anymore; he's not my son."
At the next meeting of the North Main Street Improvement Committee, I propose that the time is ripe to act. Ostrow and the others stir peevishly, their hibernation disturbed. "Act? What act?" "Wake up!" I exhort them. "We got a problem!"
Slowly, scratching protuberant bellies and unshaven jaws, they begin to snap out of it; they swill sarsaparilla, light cigars, overcoming a collective amnesia to ask me what we should do.
"Am I chairman?" I protest. "Ostrow's chairman." But it's clear that my agitation has prompted them to look to me for leadership, and I'm damned if I don't feel equal to the test.
"Cut off the head from the body," I'm suddenly inspired to say, "and your monster is kaput."
At sundown the following evening, the executive board of the Improvement Committee rounds the corner into Auction Street. There's a softness in the air, the stench of the river temporarily overwhelmed by the smell of potted chicken wafting from the windows over the shops. It's a pleasant evening for a stroll, but not for us, who must stay fixed on the critical business at hand. We're all of one mind, I tell myself, though yours truly has been elected to carry the hedge shears--donated for the deed by Hekkie Schatz of Hekkie's Hardware. Ostrow our titular chair, Nussbaum the treasurer, Benny Rosen the whatsit, all have deferred the honor to me, by virtue of what is perceived as my greater indignation.
This time we don't knock but burst into the dusty shtibl. As it turns out, our timing is perfect: a knot of disciples--it appears that several are needed to function as anchors--are uncoiling the rope beneath the open skylight. Rising into the lemon shaft (now turning primrose), his feet in felt slippers arched like fins, Rabbi Shmelke chants the Amidah prayer.
The Shpinkers start at our headlong entrance. Then, gauging our intentions by the sharp implement I make no attempt to hide, they begin to reel in their rebbe. My colleagues urge me to do something quick, but I'm frozen to the spot; though Shmelke's descending, I'm still struck with the wonder of having seen him rise.
Disoriented, I have the sensation that the room is topsy-turvy; above is below and vice versa. Standing on the ceiling as the rebbe is hauled up from the depths, we're in danger of coming unglued, of tumbling headfirst through the skylight. I worry for our delinquent sons, who now outnumber the Shpinkers, and in their fantastic getups are almost indistinguishable from the original bunch. Among them, of course, is Ziggy, elflocks curling like bedsprings from under his cap, perched on a chair for the better view.
Then the room rights itself. Holding the handles of the hedge shears, I could say that I'm gripping the wings of a predatory bird, its mind independent of my own. I could say I only hang on for dear life, while it's the shears themselves that swoop forth to bite the rope in two. But the truth is, I do it of my own free will. And when the rope goes slack--think of a serpent when the swami stops playing his pipe--I thrill at the gasps that are exhaled ("Ahhh") all around. After which: quiet, as old Shmelke, still chanting, floats leisurely upward again, into the primrose light which is deepening to plum.
When he's out of sight, my Ziggy is the first to take the initiative--because that's the type of person we Zippers are. He bolts for the open window, followed by a frantic mob. I too am swept into the general exodus, finding myself somehow impelled over the sill out onto the fire escape. With the others I rush up the clattering stairs, reaching the roof just in time to see my son, never an athletic boy, swarm up the slippery pane of the inclined skylight (which slams shut after) and leap for the rope. Whether he means to drag the old man down or hitch a ride, I can't say, but latched on to the dangling cord, he begins, with legs still cycling, to rise along with the crackpot saint.
Then, uttering some complicated mystical war cry, Hershel Ostrow, holding onto his homburg, follows Ziggy's lead. With his free hand Hershel grabs my boy's kicking right foot, and I thank God when I see them losing altitude, but this is only a temporary reversal. Because it seems that Rabbi Shmelke, handicaps notwithstanding, has only to warble louder, adjusting the pitch of his prayer to gain height. I console myself that if he continues ascending, the fragile old man will come apart in the sky; the boys will plummet beneath his disembodied leg. Or Ziggy, whose leap I don't believe in the first place, unable to endure the burden of his companion, will let go. I assure myself that none of this is happening.
From beside me the wild Ida Kaminsky has flung herself onto Hershel's ankle, her skirt flaring to show off bloomers--which make a nice ribbon for the tail of a human kite. But even with her the concatenation doesn't end: the shambling Sanford Nussbaum and Mindy Dreyfus, the half-wit Herman Wolf, Rabbi Fein's own pious Abie in his prayer shawl, Milton Rosen in his mackintosh, all take their turn. Eventually every bad seed of North Main Street is fastened to the chain of renegade children trailing in the wake of old Shmelke's ecstasy.
I shout "Ziggy, come back! All is forgiven!" and make to jump into the air. In that instant I imagine I grab hold and am carried aloft with the kids. The tin roofs, the trolley lines, the brand new electric streetlights in their five-globed lamps swiftly recede, their incandescence humbled by the torched western sky. Across the river the sunset is more radiant than a red flare over a herring barrel, dripping sparks--all the brighter as it's soon to be extinguished by dark clouds swollen with history rolling in from the east. Then just as we're about to sail beyond those clouds, I come back to myself, a stout man and no match for gravity.
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