In America, the story goes, anything can happen. In this case, a devout Jew struck oil and, instead of being satisfied with goldplated telephones or marble bathtubs, decided to build himself a private synagogue. His granddaughter, Grace Goldin, here recalls her childhood adventures in this synagogue.

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We had quite a Simchas Torah in Iowa City last year. The celebration of our “rejoicing over the Law” took place at night, of course—everybody had to be at work the following morning. We are a congregation of grocery owners—how better celebrate Sukkoth than among stacks of Iowa apples and squashes?—but running a grocery all day doesn’t dampen Jewish fervor at night after the store closes. Quite the contrary—though the spirit is not what it used to be. The mothers worry about the children staying up too late, with school tomorrow. Once upon a time, when the men of this Yiddish-speaking generation were younger, they did the kazatsky on Simchas Torah. Now they import a hora from the university crowd. But how they can drink and sing!

There must have been a lot of sleepy children in school next day, because the big doings went on until ten forty-five and later. At nine-thirty the occasion ceased to be an aim in itself for the youngsters and became a test of endurance, which they found even more delightful. At ten-thirty little Shirley, three years old, rendered “Ani Maamin” in an off-key soprano from the shulchan [lectern].

All in all, it was the kind of Simchas Torah my friends in New York go from shul to shul trying to find.

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We out here in lowa are not offered much choice of shuls. Either God deserts us utterly and drops us shul-less in the middle of the prairie (as happens often enough) or for some merit of our ancestors we are granted a man like Mr. M. I cannot decide whether he would like to see his name in print or not. Well, perhaps he would. Mr. S. Markowitz, then, is our chazan. He is big-time stuff—professional. He was once offered a good round sum to sing to the Jews of Rock Island over Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. He came home after the holidays so desolately homesick that we have been gladdened by his presence in Iowa City every Rosh Hashana since.

Mr. Markowitz runs a coal and oil company, but that is not his real business. You see him as he really is, doing the work God gave him to do, at Kol Nidre services and at Neilah [concluding service on Yom Kippur]. He has the temperament of a big-town chazan—and the voice; but what impresses you most is his fervor as he stands before the open Ark. There his great talent emerges—a talent for throwing himself into God. He is no more sincere, perhaps, than the religious poet who, pouring out his heart to the in-effable, still keeps his eye on untidy prepositions and ragged meters. Mr. Markowitz is aware of the effect every cadence has upon you. Yet as he davens in his white chazan’s hat, his back to everybody but the Lord, he is at the same time in the empyrean.

This Simchas Torah he was at the very top of his form. He has trained the whole congregation as his chorus. There are only about three Jewish families in Iowa City anyway—everybody has married into one of them, and all the children are first and second cousins. We had a family party with trimmings—apples and candles for the children—the candles lit the first time around: afterwards we blew them out. Mothers, I’m sure, must have been quite as terrified of burning down the Altneuschul in Prague.

This year’s crop from the university gathered round Mr. Markowitz. Leo, from the Law School, looked as pale and pious when he laughed and beat his hands—who would expect to find this in Iowa City?—as he had looked all day on Yom Kippur standing continually propped against the slightly peeling wall. Our shul itself is a bit disheveled; one shoulder strap of the white curtain over the Ark hangs broken, and the women have almost talked the back benches smooth. I am a little afraid, though, of the new shul that our townspeople are planning to build. I am afraid they will stand in awe of it, and then the younger generation might take over. And that would mean that decorum might win out, and the pepper and salt of Iowa City Judaism be lost forever—as I fear it will be anyway with the passing of its founders.

Ours is only a comer of Judaism—not a very clean corner either—but a genuine corner. No one can doubt that who has seen Mr. Markowitz before the Ark, or heard his singing from among the whisky bottles on Simchas Torah. . . .

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That evening I kept thinking of the other small mid-Western community where we lived for a number of years (let it rest nameless, but not forever). That congregation lives for me in a single symbol—its Torah. Yes, though they believed in ultra-Reform (and had heard nothing of the change of heart since the Pittsburgh Platform), they did possess one Torah, a little object approximately the size of the scrolls of prophetic books—neviim—that we used to carry about on Simchas Torah when we were children. They kept the Torah clothed in a white satin robe held together with a girdle, an actual girdle that fastened down the middle with a number of hooks and eyes. Every year the same two men of the congregation, chosen for rectitude, marched at a signal to the front of the Temple, where their Torah stood housed in a pointed, shoulder-high Ark. The signal was: “Who shall ascend to the mountain of the Lord, and who shall stand in His holy place?” It was a sort of accolade upon the business dealings of the two individuals. For their mercantile undertakings they perhaps deserved to be cited yearly; for their Jewishness, they deserved just the kind of Judaism they got.

The first year we lived there—after which we made an awful row about it—we worshiped on Yom Kippur in a borrowed church with a great cross, a black cross on a red velvet field hanging just where the bimah—platform—should have been. The bimah in that cold and marble vault stood to the left, slightly elevated, carved and also marble, with Gothic writing around its rim: “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was God.” I stared at that sentence all through Yizkor one year until I cried as bitterly as the mourners.

It was a revelation to visit the Jewish corner of the cemetery of that town. The ancestors’ names one discovered on the tombstones of all the well-known Episcopalian families! Some of their children still gave to the United Jewish Appeal “in memory of Father.” Others no longer chose to acknowledge even that tenuous link.

The year we arrived my husband made an attempt—probably the first in the congregation’s history—to read the portion of the week out of their little Torah. He unhooked its covering and tried to roll it over to the proper section, but the Torah, so rudely forced, immediately tore in two. My husband hastily gathered the two scrolls together, bound them with their girdle from bottom hook to top, and so far as we know that Torah has never since been disturbed.

That was the congregation whose high point every year was Yizkor, the memorial service, on Yom Kippur afternoon. We adjourned for lunch on Yom Kippur promptly at noon and the members would come over to us solicitously: “Aren’t you eating any-thing? Do you feel all right?” And Mrs. T. would come over, her head on one side, shaking sorrowfully: “You’re looking so well, poor thing!” Not knowing what to do with ourselves until three o’clock, we paid our annual Yom Kippur calls at lunchtime. Our friends learned, when we came, to hide the welcome-box of candy. At three we reconvened to read enlightening spiritual selections from the Hymnal. We read for an hour, taking turns: then Yizkor.

Autumn light fell through the stained-glass windows; leaves crossed the open spaces of blue sky, leaves like chips of spinning yellow glass. And from the pulpit the names of the dead were read—just names, but they produced a powerful cumulative effect. Then the congregation came nearest to religion, though I hesitate to call it Judaism.

Sometimes the effect was unpremeditated. In that town there was a very extensive family named Bing, and apparently there were even more dead Bings than living ones. One Yizkor the rabbi read slips of names for the entire family, bunched together. One Bing after another, Bing Bing Bing.

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All this brings me by strange and devious A ways to my grandfather’s shul, which for the first eight years of my life was Judaism to me.

My grandfather was an ordinary New York Jew, neither very rich nor very poor—or, if he was extraordinary, it was along the same lines as a number of other New York Jews. His wife’s father was a rabbi. His own father, after struggling for years to bring twelve children and a business to a point where he could well abandon them, disappeared one morning leaving a note for the older children on the breakfast table: “I sailed for Palestine. Send Mama and the babies after me if you want.”

My grandfather was a man of considerable Jewish and secular learning, self-taught. He also enjoyed writing verse. I do not know whether he would ever have left his family for Palestine: things turned out quite differently for him. The second of his four daughters married an oil man from Tulsa, Oklahoma (and points East European), and she moved out west with him.

It takes only one oil well to make or break a man. The nagid—rich man—of the present Tulsa community used to be our groceryman. He bought one day, instead of a stock of canned goods, a corner of a corner lot of an oil field. That was all he needed.

By exactly the same kind of purchase my grandfather, who had gone bankrupt in New York, moved to Tulsa and built himself one of the fanciest homes in town. Then he paid off his creditors—with compound interest fully covering the duration of the loans. I met one of those creditors twenty-five years later. He looked me over with profound attention and complimented me as only he could: “An apple never falls far from the tree,” he said.

When the new house was built, it contained a shul. Naturally, if he makes that much money, what does a Jew do? The town shul was too far away to walk, but that was only an excuse. This was a God-given opportunity for my grandfather to rule his own shul: an autocrat, defining policies, ;all—powerful—and single—handed.

The shul took up one whole wing of the house. Nothing but a porch was above it, and when it was explained to me that nobody should stand above a shul and be able to look down upon it, I never went out on that porch but with fear and trembling. The room was beautifully proportioned, like the rest of the house—no one felt cramped for space because one wing of the house was given over exclusively to religious use. One entered at the back of the shul, from the garden, through a double glass door. On each side of the room were three long windows; on the men’s side they looked out on the driveway, which was their hard luck: we women had the flower—beds and shrubbery. The bimah extended across the front third of the room, raised by three marble steps that also went clear across; and on those steps stood potted plants all year round. I realize now that someone must have watered them—but at that time, for me, they grew right out of the marble. On the High Holidays we had white flowers, and for weddings a greenhouse came indoors.

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Shul was separated from house by a double-door at the back of the bimah, to one side. It was such a door, I thought, as locks up only a shul or a safe. With the house side of the door open, and the shul part not yet, one stood between two worlds. Nowhere else does a door open into a door.

Sometimes we would enter the shul by the garden door, and sometimes we would come from the house and walk across the bimah. When that happened I invariably felt the faint giddiness of stage-fright, no matter how few were the faces looking up at us.

The ceiling of my grandfather’s shul was decorated with a repeating design. I don’t know what architects call it—it was a kind of double square letter “c” going on from one “c” to the next until, following them overhead around the room, one fell into a sort of trance. I heard my first Hebrew—long before I could read—to the rhythm of architectural patterns, and one phenomenon became related to the other.

But the chief delight of our shul was its silverv-Bezalel School work. The Torahs carried bells, one heard them tinkling. And since for the first seven years of my life I was near-sighted without knowing it, breastplates and crowns seemed but a great brightness to me, briefly visible when they came round to be kissed, but otherwise moving back and forth above like silver clouds.

Then what a revelation on Simchas Torah when, for once in a year, we were permitted on the bimah and could watch the Torahs being dressed! Open, they were nothing—one could see ink-writing in the siddur, or in school. But to watch their fat sides tied together with a white ribbon, their red velvet dresses slipped on, fringed in gold, and with lions!—from my seat I could never see the lions. And then over the lions clanged their silver breastplates! I could see now that they were not mere blank silver, those breastplates. They too had little crowns, with green beads bouncing from the tips. And they had two tiny doors that opened and locked on a little all-silver Torah; they had a slot where you could change the name of the holiday, each name engraved in Hebrew on a silver calling-card. And with my finger, I rang the bells—I could almost see the bells clearly, standing on tiptoe: I thought the crown like that of any Russian czar (and I was quite right). The other Torahs had double crowns that you might take up—on Simchas Torah—and shake like silver gourds.

There was a pointer, too, with filigree handle and a tiny pointing hand, like a backscratcher but ever so much more beautiful.

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I remember my grandfather’s shul as it changed its appearance and its atmosphere for many different occasions. I remember the weddings, with baskets of flowers on either side of the Persian throw rugs, looped together with wide white ribbons and bows; and the cumbersome gold-painted wood chupah loaded with boughs; the feel of rose petals, fresh rose petals in the shallow baskets we used for wedding after wedding, and my amazement—half regret—at watching whole roses hastily torn apart to fill a flower-girl’s basket. Then, when I had graduated to train-bearing, I remember rows and rows of white satin buttons: every bride’s dress in those days was fastened with innumerable satin buttons from the neck down to the small of the back.

I remember Shabbas because then the shul was slightly boring in a polite and beautiful way, like pleasant company stopping over too long. On Shabbas I had a chance to see how different leaves grew in the shrubbery and to observe the shapes of the Hebrew letters in the siddur. I would count the number of times God’s name appeared on each page—he was always easy to find. But I never realized until long afterwards that sometimes he hid there in disguise—in four letters rather than two. I only knew him in his two-letter form. And I would torment my mother for a paraphrase of longer English words until she whispered, indulgent and surprised, “Don’t you know what that means?” Of course I knew, but one had to do something.

I remember the High Holy Days only because of white drapes on ark and shulchan, and the heavy, yellowed wool prayer shawls the men wore, with black bands falling in angles and squares like the Hebrew letters. There were so many beards on the men’s side. There was my grandfather’s, white, curly, parted in the middle and bunched to either side (like Max Nordau’s, I thought later); and there was Uncle Sam’s beard—a little black pointed one.

Uncle Sam was in my eyes the embodiment of holiness. He stayed up all night on Yom Kippur. He wore slippers—I suppose some of the other men did, too, but I looked to make sure of Uncle Sam’s. He preached to us—but never having made up his mind whether to talk of holy subjects in Hebrew or English, he compromised—or vacillated—between the two. It was not until much later that I found out that a sermon can convey—indeed is often expected to elucidate—thought. A sermon in the days of Uncle Sam was an indulgence, tolerated after the Torah reading solely out of politeness. It rose to a high pitch of incomprehensibility and nobody ever took it seriously.

Nevertheless, I took Uncle Sam seriously. He always seemed to fast harder than anybody else on Yom Kippur. He always got the first glass of water afterwards. One night I dreamed about Uncle Sam—the only dream I recall from my childhood. I dreamed that he and my grandmother stood at the entrance to Heaven. It was an anteroom, rather like the dressing room under the great stairway in my grandfather’s house. At one end, where the coats were generally put, hung a curtain, a roll—up curtain like the one in the auditorium at school. Behind it lay the conviction of Heaven. My grandmother approached. The curtain did not budge; its painted trees stood stiff and tall. Then Uncle Sam drew near and immediately the roots of the trees curled inward, the whole curtain rolled up, and my uncle went his way to Heaven. I awoke with a most painful sense of disloyalty to my grandmother. What was Uncle Sam to me, that I should put his soul above hers?

Uncle Sam died twenty years after my grandfather. He died in Palestine—just. His boat docked there one day and he died the next—of starvation, having lived on orange juice all the way across because he did not consider the food on the boat to be kosher. I suppose that in the end he did bear out my dream of him.

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There were not many men in my grandfather’s shul as rigorous as Uncle Sam. As a rule, such persons attended the downtown synagogue, which they held in a grip of iron. My grandfather steered his shul with satin reins, but he had his way. With the help of the Bezalel School and the oilwells, he made orthodoxy so fashionable in Tulsa that to this day the Reform congregation there has not collected enough money to build up more than the first story of its Temple. He imported a cantor—Pinchos Jassinowsky, newly arrived in this country. My grandfather found him singing in a church choir. When they asked the boy later what he had sung, he replied that it had quite a pretty tune, and quoted the words phonetically: “Je-sus-loaf-er-off-my-soul.”

The family brought a service with them from the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, which had been just across the street from them. Whenever there was a prayer that had no tune in that service, Jassinowsky wrote music for it. He set the whole Friday night service to new music. He furnished variants which gave me some excitement on Shabbas—what tune for “Ain Kelohenu”? What length for “Adon Olam”? From another relative, a cantor in Kansas City, we took a third set of songs. Our musical versatility was amazing, and that is just what my grandfather wanted it to be.

He sought a new type of Judaism, which I may say I have never met since the days of his shul and do not consider myself likely to meet ever again. Perhaps Moses Montefiore sponsored something like this in his private chapel, but I doubt it; Montefiore was at once too literal and too orthodox. My grandfather was willing to stretch a point for effect, quite without loss of sincerity—somewhat in the manner of Mr. Markowitz. There was too much decorum in his shul for it to be Orthodox, too much familiarity with tradition for it to be Reform. We were Conservative—but with a difference. I have always thought of our brand of religion as aesthetic Judaism, since in the final analysis the test of a practice or belief was not: is it true, is it logical, is it commanded, is it traditional?—but, taking all these matters for granted, is it beautiful?

When he made enough money to do exactly what he wanted, my grandfather did exactly what any good Jew would want to do.

He published privately his own COMMENTARY on Ecclesiastes and saw his name in print—names, rather: our family runs to threes in names. My grandfather’s were Lionel Eliezer Zorah. Uncle Sam was Vivien Samuel David. And I remember how my husband stared when he inquired into my name for the ketubah and was told, “Chanah Chesna Feigel daughter of Alfred Enoch Zundel of the family Aaronson”!

L. E. Z. Aaronson built a house for each of his four married daughters and one son, all within five blocks of his own home. The congregation was filled with his tribe—on Shabbas we had twenty or twenty-five to services (all singing); on holidays, sixty. Shabbas afternoons he gathered his children round and read Perek, the sayings of the Fathers, to them. This went on for nearly ten years, and, human nature aside, there was no reason why it should not have continued forever.

But it ended—the Shabbas afternoons, the oil wells, the shul, my grandfather’s life. It ended in a family fight and lawsuit that made the front pages of the newspapers. Had that happened fifty years ago instead of twenty-five I might give details. However, the final blow-up only proved what Emerson wrote: “We were not made to talk poetry, or to be always wise.” By the same token, it is just as well we possess other brands of Judaism than the aesthetic in this country. Like every other beautiful thing, my grandfather’s aesthetic Judaism lived its moment, and passed. Wistful reminiscence is all I can summon up to protest its passing. I suppose that sort of ritual could be lastingly effective only in very small quantities, mixed with a large amount of something at once more earthy and more fallible.

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I have often wondered what memories my cousins retain of our grandfather’s shul. At least two of them have married Gentiles. Of the others, few care that there is such a thing as Judaism—except for anti-Semitism. Yet during those years their experience and mine were identical; and I know that upon me the influence was direct, permanent, and peculiar. Once when I was six, I stood out in my grandmother’s front garden on a Shabbas while the grown-ups were in shul, and watched the cars ride by. And I thought to myself with certainty: “There go the cars. In not one of those cars is a Jew. A Jew wouldn’t ride on Shabbas.” There in the street passed the rest of the world, and here in the garden stood I, amid Jews and roses. Something of that frame of mind persists, and makes it still seem odd that Jews are ever poor, are ever ugly (our family was persistently good-looking), are ever persecuted, hounded, insulted, are ever vulgar or raucous.

What reminded me of my grandfather’s shul this last Simchas Torah is that, of all the holidays celebrated there, I remember Simchas Torah most clearly. A child would. I remember the singing—my first Hasidic melodies. I do not remember drinking: perhaps my grandfather would not allow it, perhaps I didn’t notice it. We were not given candles to march with at all: we had flags for the girls, neviim for the boys. How we marched! It took exactly three choruses to take us round that bimah. I always managed so I would stop precisely on the third repeated pattern of the Persian throw-rugs. I hopped on one border with the right foot—or. the other border with the left foot. Everyone was there, all the family, all the friends; no one was at business, no one was at school, no Jew anywhere in the world was any place but at shul, with the Torah.

Judaism has never lived up to the promise of my Simchas Torahs—or rather, I would say, Jews have not done so. Whenever they approximate it, as in Iowa City this past year, the most that is renewed of old days is a piercing nostalgia for what might have been, for what I thought then would surely be. And I am sorry my daughter will never get the chance to celebrate Simchas Torah in my grandfather’s shul.

But she had a good time this Simchas Torah just the same. I saw that. Maybe she enjoyed herself just as much here in Iowa as I did in Tulsa. Maybe she makes the same thing out of what she gets.

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