When Arthur and I met Vic in 1945, soon after his election as one of the new young Labor members of Parliament, it was inevitable that one of us should say: “Wouldn’t old Tubby have been delighted?”
“Goot vine in a bad wessel,” Arthur quoted, in Tubby’s thick accent. “He always believed in you, Vic. You were his favorite.”
“He was a bastard and the son of a bastard,” said Vic.
“Maybe,” I said, “but he certainly made life interesting.”
At about this point my wife, who is French, always shakes her head sadly.
“Won’t you people ever grow up? I suppose Englishmen remain schoolboys all their lives. It would explain a lot.”
But this was no ordinary school, and old Tubby was no ordinary schoolmaster. Nor were the eight of us who lived in Dr. Taub’s house typical English schoolboys. Or if we were when we began, the atmosphere of that house must have done something to us.
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Dr. Taub’s establishment had an ancient and honorable—if bizarre—history. An English Jew named Josiah Fenner, born and brought up in the middle of the 19th century in the old English market town of Lydford, had made a sizable fortune as a tea merchant in India, and in his will had left all of it for the foundation of an academy to train Jewish ministers of religion in his native town. His family, not unnaturally, fought the will on the ground that it was self-evidently the act of a demented man, and about three-quarters of the bequest was pleasantly dissipated in lawyers’ fees during litigation that lasted about ten years. Some was left, however, and Fenner College was finally opened in 1898 in a rambling old house close to Lydford’s town park. In granting scholarships to would-be rabbis, the trustees of the College were instructed by the will to give preference to Jewish boys from Lydfordshire and India, but even this quaint combination did not apparently succeed in giving the College much character until Dr. Taub was appointed as principal in 1920.
By that time, Lydfordshire and India had been drained dry of rabbinical candidates, and the eight of us, all about fourteen years old, who found ourselves its students in 1921 had come from the four comers of England, attracted by the promise of a free secular education at the local grammar school, a thorough Jewish education under Dr. Taub, and completely free board. It was a prize which we had won by competitive examination, and we had all displayed latent talent even if our rabbinical tendencies were as yet undeveloped.
Dr. Taub was to see to that. His self-assurance in conversation about Jewish scholarship—sealed by the title of Doctor—was surely a guarantee of his professional powers, and even if his immense girth and fruity voice did not strike a particularly religious note, there was an undeniable dignity in his snow-white hair and carefully trimmed Vandyke beard.
It took us a year or two before we decided that we understood Tubby, and even that was quite an achievement for boys of sixteen. Dr. Isaiah Taub, in our theory, was probably neither a “doctor” nor was his name Isaiah. Years ago, in Lithuania, a certain Dr. Isaiah Taub had written scholarly articles in Hebrew periodicals and had died at an early age. His younger brother, who had moved in the same circles but never shown any marked gifts of scholarship, had subsequently come to England and found it convenient (this was our theory) to assume his brother’s name and doctorate. We didn’t hold this against him particularly. For all we knew, our Tubby’s bonhomie and gust for living were worth more in human value than dry-as-dust scholarship, and we found it quite acceptable that in teaching us Talmud, or even the much easier Biblical commentary of Rashi, Tubby should have to excuse himself from the schoolroom at frequent intervals to look up one of the many “cribs” which we had found one day in his study bookcases. Indeed we welcomed the interruptions, since they enabled us to get on with our games of poker or “21,” or, if that happened to be the current phase, to compose contributions for each other’s autograph albums.
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No one could deny that when Tubby was well dressed and pomaded he looked like an aristocrat, even if, as we well knew, his true forte was the running of a profitable boardinghouse. The fatal system adopted by the College Board of Trustees was to give him a fixed and quite liberal allowance for each boy. Like a good innkeeper, he was out early, most days, bargaining at the markets for damaged apples, rancid margarine, surplus barrels of herring and stale bread—anything, in fact, that would satisfy our ravenous appetites without upsetting his idea of an appropriate budget. He would stand towering over us in the large kitchen-dining-room while Gladys, the maid-of-all-work, served it up; and when we were very young, we preferred to eat it up, stale and bad as it was, rather than provoke one of the rages which alternated continuously with his smiling good humor. Gradually we developed a system of dropping food that offended us into paper bags concealed under the table, making up for it by parcels from home or meals bought in cafés during the evening. Only later did we realize that he knew all about our bags, or café haunting, and many other things. We had soon become open books to him, but we never knew whether he recognized that he had become an open book to us.
On the whole it is unlikely, for it was a long time since he had been a schoolboy, and he may never have realized that, though food and study were always in the foreground at the College, they were never as important to us as our constant fumbling researches into sex. So proud was he of his place as the principal and his reputation as a scholar that it would not have crossed his mind that we thought of him very rarely as the Reverend Dr. Taub and much more frequently as a podgy figure, sitting up in bed wearing a long union suit, a faded green robe, and a red nightcap, and being ministered to, in some indefinable way, by the sneering, bony Gladys. The thought of their relationship had first come to me when I was reciting one Sabbath in our little synagogue the scriptural reading from the Book of Kings: “Now King David was old, stricken in years, and they covered him in garments, but he gat no heat. Wherefore his servants said unto him: Let there be sought for my lord the king a young virgin, and let her stand before the king and let her cherish him, and let her lie in his bosom that my lord the king may get heat.”
Poor old Mrs. Taub—fat, waddling, and, it must be admitted, smelly—could not be expected, we agreed, to give old Tubby any heat. Gladys, on the other hand, we felt sure, was no virgin, but we agreed that she could probably warm up any man. It was true that none of us ever got near her, and only Vic and Berty could ever use easily in her presence our normal schoolboy improprieties. But gradually we sensed an understanding between old Tubby and Gladys. She grew impudent, though never beyond a certain point. He was never sharp with her, as he was constantly with Mrs. Taub. She had a cheap prettiness, and when she was dressed and scented to go out on her day off, we would all of us talk lewdly of what we would like to do to her. Sometimes we would see her go by as we sat in the schoolroom with Tubby going over a Talmud passage:—“Two men pick up a garment. If one says: I found it and the other says: I found it, they must divide it equally. If one says: It is all mine and the other says: It is half mine, then Rabbi Gamaliel says. . . .”—But it was all a little unreal, for as Gladys passed the open door she left the smell of her cheap powder in the air, for an old man and eight sex-hungry rabbinical students.
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At Lydford Grammar School we led normal schoolboy lives to begin with, usually heading our classes, since we were, after all, scholarship boys, and with Vic always outstanding for his fantastic memory, his analytical mind, and his colossal impertinence. Later, life became more complicated when a new headmaster—Sedgewick—arrived at school and began to wage with Tubby a startling, if subtle, battle for the salvation of our souls. Sedgewick—a Christian clergyman, product of Winchester and Oxford—grasped immediately the paradoxes of Dr. Taub’s rabbinical academy. The cool, grey learning of Winchester, the scrupulous humanism of the Greeks, the passion of Cimabue and Giotto, the rhetoric of Donne and Gibbon were Sedgewick’s weapons, and powerful they were. But even before Sedgewick came, the odds might have seemed to be weighted heavily against the rabbis. Our normal world ended every day at 4:30, and by 5:30 we faced, sullen and impatient, the devious boredom of Talmud and T’nach. Yet all Tubby’s pompous exaggeration, his ignorance of Jewish scholarship, and his clumsy hypocrisy could not quite kill for us his infectious enthusiasm for Hebrew as a language, nor deprive us of joys that we found for ourselves in the cadences of Isaiah, the subtleties of rabbinic debate, and the colorful accidents of Jewish history.
Many long hours we spent in the school-room playing ping-pong or poker or reading books lent to us by Sedgewick when we were supposed by Tubby to be rehearsing our Hebrew lessons. But sometimes, when studying with Tubby, one of us—usually Vic—would find himself explaining to the class a difficult point in a Talmudic passage, and, seized with the sheer beauty of the argument, would grow enthusiastic in developing its ramifications. The rabbi, he might explain, has quoted the Biblical verse in question not for its direct meaning but because of some hidden association of letters within the verse, an anagram or similar form, which reminds him of a similar anagram in some other Biblical verse where a law is enjoined which must not, of course, be taken literally, but again interpreted by analogy with a traditional explanation of another prophetical saying, itself susceptible perhaps, of three meanings, two of which are excluded because of some far from obvious logical inconsistency, while the third is the focal point of this injunction, and is valid, incidentally, because its converse is not true. Having established this first point it would become important to know if the rabbi could really have meant what he seemed to have said, since in some other book of the Talmud he is quoted by another rabbi as saying something which might be interpreted as inconsistent with it. The simplest solution to this problem is to show that both statements are untrue, which relieves the rabbi of inconsistency and allows the view to be advanced of one of the earlier “founding father” rabbis, who, according to the rules of the game, can never be accused of inaccuracy. Their “tradents,” however, can, and it is the easiest task in the world to throw doubt on the reliability of this or that reporter of an earlier rabbi’s sayings. At this point an anecdote is told, not for its own sake, but for a sting in the tail—perhaps to show that the man reporting the saying never even knew the rabbi he is claiming to report. . . .
Old Tubby would sit back listening to Vic explain all this, and nodding with happy approval. Perhaps he would be so pleased that he would let us off early and go down to help Gladys make us some cocoa. Earlier in the day, perhaps, he would have been raging at Vic for some act of flat disobedience. When he raged, he would go purple, shouting “Dat blackguard! He tinks he is master here! I vill show him de door!” And he would mutter under his breath a terrible Hebrew curse reserved, by tradition, only for Israel’s persecutors: “Yemach Shemo! (May his name be blotted out!).” But now, as we sat drinking our cocoa and chattering happily, he would look at Vic with affection and a certain wonder, and murmur: “Goot vine in a bad wessel! Goot vine in a bad wessel!”
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Tubby’s difficulty with the English language was not merely comic. It had a wider significance. English was for Tubby the symbol of an attempt on his part to meet the Western world on equal terms, and his failure at this was absolute. It was decreed, for example, in our first year that we were to study Jewish history at the college in the same way that we studied English history at school, but the ordinary product of Jewish-Russia knew as much schematic Jewish history as the average Englishman knows about Alfred the Great. Tubby therefore imported some textbooks from America written in a style like this: “On a beautiful spring day in the year 1145, the streets of Cordova, Spain, were filled with a happy throng gathered to celebrate the appointment of a new Caliph. Standing quietly under a moorish arch was a serious-looking young boy called Moses, holding his father Maimon by the hand. Little did the passers-by realize that this little boy was destined to become the greatest scholar Jewry had ever known, the philosopher and scientist Maimonides.”
We would be given a half hour for preparation, and then a test:
“Mit vot vere de streets from Cordova filled?”
Answer: “With a happy throng.”
“Vot did de passers-by not realize?”
Answer: “That Moses would become Maimonides.”
But hilarious as he was in English, Tubby could approach us in one way that transformed our relationship: when he delivered a sermon in Yiddish. In Yiddish, he threw off the mask and spoke to us not as the principal of Fenner College but as a Jew from Lithuania, his heart full of the joy and anguish of his people. For his Yiddish was not the corrupt jargon that we had heard so frequently in our childhood. It had an elevation and expressiveness that made it sound to us like Elizabethan English, and when he spoke it in synagogue, lapsing into the unearthly singsong of the true maggid, it affected his whole being, linking him with that inchoate but living background in which he had once been a real person.
On most Saturdays, his sermon to us in our little synagogue was delivered in his usual pidgin English, and we had to pass the time as best we could by discreetly playing word games, or making up parodies on familiar poems. But on Holydays, when our synagogue was crowded with visitors, he would somehow recognize an overpowering need to speak in his mother tongue, and it would transform him.
I have never forgotten the mood of his Yiddish sermon one Day of Atonement, at the closing Neila service. Dusk had set in, and with the approaching end of the twenty-four-hour fast there was a tenseness unfamiliar in our gatherings. He stood at the reading-desk facing us, his great bulk wrapped in a white kittel, his white hair and beard glistening in the light of the one lamp that had been lit.
“When the Neila moment comes,” he said, “the day grows dark; for when the time of Neila comes it grows dark in our hearts.”
And thence he went on to talk of this unique day as itself a cycle of life and death for each one of us. We understand our emptiness only when the light of life fades irrevocably away. Each prayer and each mea culpa of Yom Kippur becomes clear to us only when the obscurity of daylight vanishes, leaving us face to face with the clarity of darkness. He told us how, within an hour, we would approach the climax of the Neila service, and repeat with the holy intensity of dying men the Shema Yisrael. A dying man repeats the Shema, he said, not as a prayer, but as the most passionate expression of faith in himself as part of Israel. As he spoke of death he passed on to describe some of the martyrdoms of Israel (as recounted in the liturgy of Yom Kippur) when rabbis, thrown to the flames, wrapped in the sacred scrolls, perished with the Shema triumphant on their lips and with the holy letters of the Law flying miraculously out of the fire. .“Ossios porchos!” he cried, the tears streaming down his cheeks—“the letters flew out!”
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When the Fast was over and we had supposedly retired for the night, Vic, Arthur, and I slipped out (there was a convenient water pipe which we climbed up and down at will) for a stroll in the park. It was a lovely autumn evening, and in the distance we could see the glow from the blast-furnaces in nearby Middleton.
“Old Tubby can certainly talk in Yiddish,” said Vic. “He hit me right in the solar plexus.”
“It’s funny, though,” I said, “that the only way he can get us is to talk about death.”
“Christ,” said Vic, “I don’t mean what he said. It’s the bloody marvelous way he said it.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I kept thinking while he was speaking how similar it was to that piece from Donne that you raved about and wrote in my album.”
“Some difference,” said Vic. “Old Tubby was asking us to torment ourselves with the thought of death, and old Donne was saying: Grow up.”
And as we stood leaning on a stone balustrade overlooking the park lake, which reflected an almost full harvest moon scudding through the high clouded sky, Vic began to recite the piece from Donne’s own funeral sermon:
Is this the honor which man hath by being a little world? Is he a world to himself only, therefore, that he hath enough in himself not only to destroy and execute himself, but to presage that execution upon himself, to assist the sickness, to make the sickness more irremediable by sad apprehensions, and as if he would make a fire the more vehement by sprinkling water upon the coals, so to wrap a hot fever in cold melancholy, lest the fever should not destroy fast enough without this contribution, nor perfect the work (which is destruction) except we joined an artificial sickliness of our own melancholy to our natural, our unnatural fever. O perplexed discomposition! O ridling distemper! O miserable condition of man!
We were silent for a little while.
“Isn’t ‘miserable’ a wonderful word?” said Arthur. “Almost as wonderful as ‘misericordia.’ ‘O miserable condition of mankind, where one half lacks meat and the other stomach.’”
“Well, at least,” said I, “Donne didn’t always take it so seriously:
But since that I
Must the at last, ’tis best
To use myself in jest
Thus by feigned deaths to die.”
“That, brother,” said Vic, “was when he was parting from one of his birds. And talking of birds, what do my eyes see?”
Sure enough, three girls were coming in our direction. We walked along towards them, exchanged greetings, and spent quite a time bantering and fooling before we went home and climbed in.
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Vic always spoke, and still does, no matter to whom, with the same bluntness, and with what sounds like an affected crudity. At school, he deliberately cultivated the “bad wessel” side of his nature, or, to change Tubby’s metaphor, resisted all the efforts of his schoolmasters to polish the rough diamond that had emerged from the East End of London. He was clumsy, untidy, callous, and completely indifferent to the usual social formalities. .“That’s what you say, brother,” he would retort—unbelievably—to a schoolmaster (with the same Cockney joviality that he used later with his constituents or with company directors whose technical adviser he became), and somehow very few took offense at this odd schoolboy whose strong black hair gleamed with an overflowing virility, who spoke, as often as not, in rhyming slang, but wrote with the delicacy of a medieval scribe and the precision of a scientist.
When we slipped out at night to dance at the local Parish Hall, Vic would take the prettiest girl and dance with her all evening, while Arthur or I stood hesitantly near the door, waiting for whoever came our way. At fourteen he looked eighteen, at sixteen he was like a fully-grown man; and we took it for granted that while we bantered about sex, he spoke from a rich experience.
We shared a bedroom, and one summer night, after a long discussion through most of the evening on Keats and Shelley, whom we were reading at school, we lay quietly in bed, smoking a last cigarette and rolling over, on our tongues, the luscious stanzas of “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” At the back of my mind, for several days, had been an incident which I had half overseen and which had both aroused and frustrated me.
Dr. Taub had a young married niece—Elsa—who occasionally came to stay at the college with her rather doltish husband and small child. Though pretty in a blousy sort of way, she was a nasty, sharp-tongued busybody, and our general rule was to avoid her. She had a room on the second floor, and one day, while alone in the playroom (which was on the same floor), I heard her call to Vic as he was passing her door. I saw her open the door wider and stand there, her nightgown covered only by a robe, and that hanging loosely enough to give me a sudden jolt and send my blood pounding.
“Are you off to school?” said Elsa.
Vic looked at her quizzically.
“You ought to pull yourself together,” he said. .“You’re a big girl now.” And he touched her half-revealed breast familiarly.
“You cheeky thing,” she said. .“Come in a minute. I want to ask you something.”
Vic went in and closed the door, and I ran downstairs and out into the garden, burning and miserable. When I thought of it later, the story of Judah and Tamar came into my mind from that strange 38th chapter of Genesis. I saw Tamar, her face covered by a veil, waiting for Judah outside her tent on the dusty road to Timnath, so full of desire and yet so fearful of her harlot’s trick through which she sought to soften the pain of widowhood.
Now as Vic and I lay smoking, I said to him:
“Vic, what do you think of Elsa?”
He puffed at his cigarette before answering.
“She’s just a whore,” he said slowly. “What makes you ask?”
“I saw her ask you in to her room the other day,” I said. “I wondered what happened.”
“Nothing happened,” he said. “She’s a bitch, and I hate bitches.”
“Didn’t she want something?”
“Look, brother,” said Vic, “you know what she wanted as well as I do, but I don’t like a girl to ask me. I like to do the asking. I don’t know what difference it really makes. It all comes to the same in the end, but I just don’t like it. When I got inside her room, I just spat in her eye and left it at that. I tell you another funny thing. I felt sorry for old Tubby. He would have felt pretty low if he’d found out. . . .”
“Funny thing,” he added after a pause. .“It’s just occurred to me. I suppose that’s what stopped Joseph. He was sorry for old Potiphar. . . .They’re all a lot of bitches.” Bitches or not, I lay awake wondering how Vic and Joseph could act that way. It seemed to me that if I were in their shoes. . . .But that was just it. I wasn’t in their shoes. No one would pick me out for her favors. . . .
Would it be different, I wondered, when I went to Florence with Sedgewick and his wife for this long Christmas vacation? Why had Sedgewick chosen me anyhow? What new world lay hidden in the calm, grey gentleness of the Gentile?
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