“Where I come from, when people want to compare somebody’s good luck to something, they say, ‘He’s living the life of God in France!’ Let me tell you, I wish all the enemies of Zion the sorry face our religion wears in this country!”
With these words Reb Issachar, “the foreman of the Kaddish Minyan” (the quorum of ten), as they used to call him in the Jewish quarter of Paris, began his conversation the last time we met, on a bench in one of the squares of that neighborhood.
He tucked in the heavy black linen cloak that he wore winter and summer, sucked in his sunken cheeks, and, scratching his sparse yellow beard with two fingers, as was his habit when engrossed in speculation, Reb Issachar continued, “Yet if you so wish, you might prove just the opposite—the contrary can be proven! You can deduce an entirely opposite conclusion from the story I am about to tell you: that is, that the Master of the Universe, so great and strong is He—His glory filleth the universe—that even in Paris, within these forty-nine gates of contamination—God preserve us!—you may find a glint of holiness, a spark . . . it calls from the depths . . . from the very depths. . . .”
For quite a number of years now I had made a habit of meeting Reb Issachar. When you sit for weeks on end in crowded libraries, or when you let yourself in for hour-long discussions about Marxism, pacifism, and such-like affairs in smoky cafes in the Latin Quarter, after a while you are suddenly seized with the passion to hear a simple Yiddish word. At such moments I would look up Reb Issachar.
Though he was no great scholar—in his time the most he had ever been was head shames, sexton, of a small synagogue in Skola, Poland—yet Reb Issachar had rubbed shoulders in the company of Jewish scholars, had listened for thirty years to a succession of Mishnaic passages, had with his own hands looked into a “Spring of Jacob,” and in the course of accepting a pinch of snuff from some solid householder had known how to pick up a good phrase, an ingenious interpretation, or some textual modification.
How does a shames get from Skola to Paris? Very simple. The brother of the bride of his younger son had stopped over in Paris on his way to Argentina. So he brought over his sister, and she insisted on bringing her husband, and the latter brought along his father—Reb Issachar, that is, who had been a widower for ten years by then, and had no wish to remain in Skola “lonely as a stone.”
But how long can a man go on rooming and boarding at his daughter-in-law’s, especially when small fry arrive to fill up cramped quarters, and the expenses keep going up? So Reb Issachar took himself off to look around for one of his former livelihoods.
For in Skola Reb Issachar had been not merely shames; he had there filled all kinds of other functions as well, such as are peculiar to a “holy vessel”: he had assisted at burials, supervised the infirmary ice-cellar, awakened worshipers to the dawn “Prayers of Forgiveness,” and, during the month of Elul, said Memorials in the Eternal Home (the cemetery).
But how much money can one make from Jewishness in Paris? True, there live in the narrow streets of the District, perish the Evil Eye, a sizable number of “our sort” of Jews; there are kosher butchers, a few synagogues and—not to be mentioned in the same breath—a Turkish bath. And the day before the Passover, Frenchified Jews drive up in automobiles to purchase matzoth. . . . But all year round the populace is sunk in the affairs of This World; in this city, with its cinemas and theaters and electricity and politics, the little there is of Jewishness is diluted one to sixty.
So that, as a matter of fact, Reb Issachar’s situation was not an enviable one. He said Psalms a few times for an invalid, engaged on the side in a business concerned with prayer shawls and prayer books, and earned a few pennies—but nothing more.
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One day it happened that Reb Issachar was walking down the street, when an automobile stopped near him. A well-dressed young man, wearing glasses on his nose, issued forth. The young man turned to Reb Issachar and asked in a strange half-German, half-French, “You’re a Jew, aren’t you?”
“What do you mean? . . . Certainly!” answers Reb Issachar, a little taken aback.
“Perhaps you can come up to my home with a minyan to say Kaddish? I’m holding a memorial anniversary for my father.”
Reb Issachar wanted to think the proposition over. But the elegant garments and the shiny auto, with the Kaddish right in the middle, so impressed him that he replied on the spot, “Certainly I can come! It’s no small thing, such a good deed!”
And before he had time to look around, the young man had placed a calling card in his hand, with an address on it and the exact day and hour of the appointment. Then he disappeared. “The child is not.”
Assembling the first minyan was not so easy. For the party concerned had left him no petty cash, and Reb Issachar had no private capital for traveling expenses. In addition, all manner of persons dampened his spirits in the synagogue: someone had been playing a practical joke on him, they said, or he had made up the story out of whole cloth, and so forth. But Reb Issachar had faith.
When the quorum arrived at their destination, they found themselves standing before a tall, splendid building on a broad avenue lined with trees on both sides. The concierge, seeing such a crowd so early in the morning, would on no account allow them into the paved corridor, which he was busy washing at that moment. It was a sheer stroke of good luck that the fine young man appeared at that very instant. It seemed that he had had a premonition of the danger that threatened the minyan. The concierge bowed before him, gave him a polite “bon jour,” and Reb Issachar’s crowd allowed itself to be conducted in by the young man. They could not stop admiring the gleaming walls with their mirrors and “alabasters,” and the expensive carpets spread on the steps. Inside the young man’s residence, they were taken through many rooms and corridors into a room where they were asked to seat themselves on soft chairs.
The fine young man extracted an old prayer book from a closet. He held it carefully in both hands. It was an heirloom from his grandfather, he told them. He had lived in Strasbourg, this grandfather.
And this was the gentleman who gave Reb Issachar his first customers. Then prosperity began.
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Reb Issachar became an entrepreneur in the Kaddish business. There was no competition to speak of—after all, whole Kaddish minyans don’t go wandering around in the streets of Paris. And the Frenchified Jews thought the world of him, as though he was the only one qualified to perform a real Memorial, and say Kaddish correctly.
There were many among these Frenchified Jews, said Reb Issachar, who had some spark of Jewishness left in them. Because in Gentile neighborhoods they somehow felt themselves not quite at ease, being neither here nor there. They were exactly like all other Frenchmen, yet somehow different; for a Gentile—no comparison!—crosses himself. They wanted to remember that they weren’t born of stone, either.
Besides: all right, yourself you can do whatever you want: you can eat tref, desecrate the Sabbath, shave your chin—but do you have to blacken your father’s face in the Other World?
Reb Issachar arranged everything in modern style, as it should be in such a metropolis as Paris. He prepared a special calendar, where every member of his minyan had a page of his own with his exact account. Each of the customers had his page, too, containing his address, the day of his Memorial anniversary, and the real Jewish name both of the deceased and of his son—for just go and try to say in the middle of a Memorial “the soul of Reb Edouard, in return for which his son Jean Paul contributes to charity.” And the Frenchified Jews all have names like that! And just try and ask them to pronounce their names in the Holy Tongue!
But Reb Issachar was skillful in social matters and quickly found the right solution. Out of Madame Renée Claude he made the matron Rebecca, the daughter of Reb Kalman; Jean Paul Francois transliterated into Reb Jacob Feivel, the son of Reb Pincus, and so on. And this was the way he wrote them down in his calendar, in order that the following year, God be willing, he need not again break his head over their uncouth names.
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In the body of the minyan itself, discipline and order reigned. In deference to the ways of the world one even trimmed one’s beard a bit; before every Kaddish it was obligatory to spruce up the linen mantles. Reb Issachar had any number of applicants who would have been delighted to join his company, but it wasn’t so easy to be so honored. First one had to be a candidate, and stand in when somebody (God forbid!) was sick. It was only when somebody died (after a hundred and twenty years!) that a new member was taken into the company.
Reb Issachar was the boss; he held possession of the memorandum pad and did the bargaining with the Kaddish customers. He had even learned a few words of French, in keeping with the injunction, “And thou shalt know what to answer them. . . .”
As proof of which, during the days of Léon Blum, when all France was seized with the fever of striking and factories were being occupied on every hand, and his little crowd began to murmur under their mustaches (why, even the shoemakers and tailors, every Tom, Dick, and Harry was striking!)—Reb Issachar called his crowd together in a special meeting and addressed them in these words: “A raise is a raise,” he said. “But what’s the point of talking about striking on a Kaddish? Can the dead wait, God preserve us?”
Afterwards Paris calmed down. Strikes may come and strikes may go, but Kaddish remains. Again, as of yore, on every Kaddish memorial day his men would gather on the comer of Rivoli and King M streets and set out on their way.
On that same corner of Rivoli and King M is a small cafe. Its long front-room has a counter for patrons who prefer to stand; in the rear there is a small room with red tables, woven chairs, and soft couches that run the length of the room, for those who want to spend time over a glass of spirits. The cafe opens early in the morning, just when the night places in the noisy quarters of the city, in Montmartre and Montparnasse, are closing. The proprietor lights up the front room only. A truck driver will drop in and gulp down a tumbler of spirits on the run, or a worker who lives in the Quarter and has to ride to work will slip in for a nip. But the main business comes from the “young ladies” who wend their way thither after a night spent in earning their living.
This cafe is a kind of meeting-place for an entire company of their kind. They come from the small streets round about: from the Street of Saint Martin, where they stand all night long at the doors of small dirty hotels and wink at passers-by; from the Halles where life is gay all night; from the nearby corner of the Boulevard Sébastopol, where they have their “Bourse,” and from the Quarter itself, where one of them can be heard crying her wares in Yiddish.
They come into the cafe all worn out from sleepless nights, with pale faces and dull eyes. Carelessly, they put fresh make-up on their faded faces, using the wall-mirrors. Then they sit down at the counter in the front room and revive their flagging spirits with a small glass of warm coffee, while they count their night’s earnings, which they draw out of their stockings.
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Reb Issachar’s men usually met on that corner, because it was an intersection point of the small streets of the Quarter, because it was a more pleasant rendezvous, the cafe being illuminated, and because, sitting there, one could tell when the nearby M6tro station opened. For one had often to ride a long time to reach the neighborhoods where the Frenchified Jews lived, and sometimes one had to walk quite a distance on foot. Sometimes it even happened that one had to travel to a villa outside the city limits. And the householders were particular about their coming very early—for fear of what people would say. Why should Gentile neighbors see such a conglomeration of Jews with beards entering one’s home?
During the summer the minyan assembled in the street and patiently waited for the first subway. But winters, especially when it was raining, it was taking one’s life in one’s hand to wait outside. So they went into the unlit back room of the cafe. They didn’t eat—Reb Issachar had struck a flat price for the season with the cafe-owner.
The first time they met in the cafe, the young ladies tried their luck with Reb Issachar’s crowd. Since they have their own peculiar point of view about men, they concentrated their attentions on Reb Aaron. Why pick on Reb Aaron? Because in the first place he was the youngest of the company, a mere stripling of fifty; and secondly he had just put on a new surtout that his son, an old-clothes man, had picked out of a bundle of garments bought at a sale.
It was still a quite handsome surtout, of gleaming black satin, and Reb Aaron, when he wore it, resembled a poet of the preceding century.
As a result, one of the young ladies sat down very close to Reb Aaron. Playfully she stroked his beard. “Come along,” she honeyed him with her sweet little voice, “won’t you come along with me, dear cabbage head?”
The young lady didn’t mean to insult Reb Aaron—that’s just the way they talk, said Reb Issachar. But Reb Aaron didn’t understand her anyway. He grew pale as the wall, and lowered his head to the floor. He saw her only out of the corner of his eyes; she was rouged, wore a black fur; and looked, as far as he could make out, something like the Gentile apothecary’s wife at home—or like one of the young gentlewomen who used of a Sunday to drive into town in their buggies from one of the surrounding estates.
And so Reb Aaron didn’t dare push his temptress away. On the other hand, it was downright dangerous to remain in that compromising position. So as not to sink into “sinful contemplations,” Reb Aaron commenced to think seriously of the severe punishments that the sinful person suffers in the Other World: how you spring from a tub of boiling water into a mountain of ice and back again; how you are transmigrated for seven years into a flea, how—
Rebuffed by a profound unconcern such as she had not expected to meet in an elderly gentleman, the girl picked herself up and went into the front-room. For a while Reb Aaron continued to smell the pungent odor of her perfume; then he opened his eyes. But his respite was short; soon there entered a second young lady, who again approached Reb Aaron, exactly as though Satan himself were trying Reb Aaron under his many notable disguises.
But Reb Aaron’s moral thoughts vanquished that one’s honeyed talk, too. The next morning the girls let Reb Issachar’s quorum alone. They no longer ventured across the threshold, for the proprietor had explained the old men’s function to them with the help of all sorts of figures of speech. Only curiously, with half-amused, half-devout glances, they looked through the glass door at the old men sitting in a corner. One of the girls, as she put her lipstick on, said to a friend, “A living like any other, n’est ce pas?”
The girls nodded sympathetically, and the proprietor, who was sorting the bottles on the shelves, summarized the situation with his customary succinctness: “Chacun défend son bifteck!” (Everyone protects his steak!).
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A whole winter passed, and none of the patrons who drank at the bar again bothered to investigate the back-room where Reb Issachar and his men foregathered. But one day—and here is where the core of the story Reb Issachar had been telling me began—the door opened and on the threshold of the back-room there appeared the figure of a woman. Though no light was burning in the room, one could distinguish the physiognomy of the unbidden guest by the vague reflection that filtered through the thick glass of the door panes.
She was not tall, quite slim, of a dark complexion, with long eyelashes that came down over half-shut eyes. There was something about the woman that set her apart from the others.
“If it weren’t for her painted lips, she would look like a bride,” was the thought that occurred to Reb Aaron, and a tremor ran through his body.
Unlike the two guests of a few months back, the girl approached Reb Simcha, who was the eldest of the company and had a long gray beard that he refused to trim under any circumstances. She remained standing before him for a moment with her head, lowered. Then she inquired in Yiddish, “You . . . you are Jews, aren’t you?”
“Mmmm” the old man snorted in his beard and turned his head in another direction. “Certainly we’re Jews,” he grumbled. “What else? . . .”
“It seems to me,” said the girl, unsurely, “it seems to me—what month is this?”
“We’re in the middle of Adar,” a voice spoke up from a corner.
“God be blessed, only three days to Purim,’” someone else put in.
“Woe is me! Alack is me!” The stranger suddenly found speech. She intoned a bitter, homely melody. “Just as though my heart had foretold me! Today is my Kaddish memorial—for my old father, peace be upon him!”
A stream of tears flowed from her eyes.
Rachel—as she was known among her fellows—felt very lonesome in Paris. True—she was successful at her trade; there was allure and charm in her fresh grace. But alone in her room Rachel often grew melancholy. “All alone . . . neither friend nor redeemer . . . neither Sabbath nor holiday.” She would bewail her lot in the very words with which her mother had commiserated upon her fate when once, many years before, Rachel had gone home for a short visit.
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Her friends had families who lived in country villages, or even in the city itself. Some wore a cross or a medallion with a “holy picture” that hung around their necks. Besides, they had their own chapel, a small church in Montmartre for the exclusive use of sinners and outcasts. The holy man who officiated at the altar was their father confessor; when one of them had some misfortune happen to her—say her lover had taken away her last penny and beaten her in the bargain because she did not earn enough for him—then she would go to the holy man, light a candle before the holy picture, and pour out the bitterness of her heart. Nor did they forget their patroness when they left the hospital, all healed.
Rachel never visited the chapel, although her friends often spoke to her about it and assured her that their patroness made no distinction between faiths. She cried her eyes out, reading the letters her mother wrote in thanks for the money Rachel sent her.
So it was that there was pain in Rachel’s heart when she was reminded that that very day was her father’s memorial anniversary. Suddenly, it became quite clear to her. Her father had appeared to her in a dream that morning; she had spent a sleepless night standing in a narrow archway under the rain. When at last she had dozed off for a moment in a strange hotel bed, she suddenly saw her father’s eyes full of pleading. The caresses of a still unsatisfied customer drove away her father’s image.
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At the outcast’s sobs the quorum grew tenderer. Even old Reb Simcha looked at her from under his thick-knit eyebrows and shook his head. ‘“Woe and alack! A Jewish daughter!” He suddenly remembered how many trials and tribulations he had had to undergo before marrying off his own three daughters.
“God is merciful,” he sighed.
Rachel lightened at such words of consolation. “Then you can make a Memorial,” she cried. She turned to the company, as though her salvation depended on them. “Then you can say the Kaddish—”
The old men exchanged questioning looks. Rachel examined their threadbare garments. “I can pay! I’m not asking it for nothing! Whatever you ask, I’ll pay!”
And Rachel bent and raised her dress above her knees. All at once she felt embarrassed. Turning her back to the company, in one swift movement she removed a few banknotes from her stocking.
“No, no,” Reb Simcha shook his head. He was speaking not so much to Rachel as to his fellows. “It is a specific writ: The gift of a whore and the sale of a dog. . . .”
It was at this point that Reb Issachar came out of hiding. What right had the old man to mix in businesses that did not concern him? Money matters were in Reb Issachar’s province, and if he wished, they would do it for nothing—his was the last word!
Reb Issachar was accustomed to look for the best in every person.
“How about those Frenchified Jews,” the thought occurred to him. “Are they any better? Is their money any more kosher?—don’t they eat tref, and aren’t they ashamed of their Jewish names? No, who is any better in this country! When Israel is in Exile, then the Presence is in Exile, too!—As the cantor sings at Kol Nidre: we give permission to worship with the transgressors!”
However, in order not to fall under the temptation of money, he ventured a proposal.
“Perhaps you can go to a synagogue? If you ask the sexton—”
“How can I wait? I’m dying for sleep!” the girl felt that she had a foot in the door. “Why, is my franc worthless? You’ll be earning a wonderful good deed, a mitzvah.”
It just so happened that the last two members of the minyan arrived at that moment. Now they could have all set out for the house of a fine Kaddish customer who lived in a distant neighborhood. But Reb Issachar issued his command: “First we’ll finish this business! This once those others can wait. It’s all right. Reb Issachar will earn a good deed, too!”
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In that instant he decided that he would accept no payment from this girl. All his life people had been putting him off with a couple of francs while others earned the good deeds. This time he would earn the good deeds—and two of them, at that. For he would both be helping a poor orphan, and performing a “true deed of mercy” for the deceased.
And so they washed their hands with water that Rachel carried from the counter; and they hung a garment over the glass doors; and they pushed the square tables into a corner—that they might not be reminded of the sinful couples that sat at them of evenings. And Reb Issachar betook himself to making a right proper Memorial.
These names he didn’t have to translate.
“. . . the soul of Reb Chayim Ber, the son of Reb Meir, in return for which his daughter—How?” he turned to Rachel.
“Rachel.” She understood at once what he was asking.
“. . . in return for which his daughter, the matron Rachel. . . .”
And, since it was growing somewhat late, they applied themselves quickly to the Kaddish.
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Curious as to why Rachel was lingering so long in the back-room, and why she had come running hastily to the boss, with tears in her eyes, and asked him for a basin of water, one of the girls stole over to the glass door on tiptoe, and softly pushed it ajar. Moving the draped garment aside, she looked into the back-room. She stood where she was for a long time, as though frozen to the spot. Soon a second girl came along, then a third. They pressed together in the narrow entrance and then singly slipped into the room.
But inside they remained standing near the door, disconcerted. In the light of dawn the room seemed transfigured by witchcraft: the tables and chairs were crowded into a corner where they stood like frightened and shivering sheep; the soft, padded couches had been undressed of their loud red weekday attire; ten frowning backs dressed in black shook to and fro, hurriedly, under extended, stiffened arms. And a ringing voice that seemed to come from somewhere far off drew out long, mysterious syllables in a mixture of song and tears.
Through the huddled bodies of the girls ran a tremor, and they caught at the crosses and holy medallions around their throats.
So standing, permeated with awe, little by little they recognized and grasped at one word, often repeated, chorused by the invisible mouths. And when the Kaddish was finished and the last word was dissolving in the air, pressing their holy images between cramped fingers, the girls repeated devoutly one after another:
Amen.
Amen.
Amen.
