Emergency meeting at the shul: Reedville’s Jews, a mixed but stiff-necked lot, try to deal with the complex social, religious, ethical, and possibly economic problems raised for them by the distribution of copies of the New Testament in the public school—and S. T. Hecht has another chapter for his continuing history of Jewish adjustment and maladjustment somewhere in New Jersey. (Perhaps it is still necessary to note that there is no such town as Reedville, and the personalities and incidents here described bear only a coincidental resemblance to real happenings or to people living or dead.)

_____________

In the street, under the leafless trees, small fires sent up ropes of blue that spiraled against the late November sunset. Mrs. Parker, our next-door neighbor, was making friendly conversation over the low hedge. She couldn’t, Mrs. Parker said, ever fall asleep if her doors were locked.

“And me,” said my wife, “I couldn’t fall asleep if our doors were unlocked.”

“What are you afraid of?” asked Mrs. Parker, who would have her ways become ours. “Don’t you have a dog?” (Go explain that dogs and Jews aren’t exactly in the same family.)

“I can’t understand it,” said my wife, “she seems to make such a point of it.”

“The unlocked door,” I explained, “is a goyish symbol of a fine Christian community.”

“Bosh!” said my wife, and went indoors for a sweater.

The ripening night sharpened the odor of burning leaves, and neighbors in conversation, their garden rakes scraping against the pavement, awoke a remembered prayer: “Ma tovo elo-hecho Yaahov”— “How goodly are thy tents, O Jacob!” But in lieu of “Jacob” I murmured “Reedville,” in whose pleasant homes the lights went on one by one. My thoughts wandered. The smoldering fires tossed up strange recollections, a little boy in New York calling, “Chometz, mister. Burn your chometz.” Young Waxy trying to earn a fast penny the day before Passover.

Between two worlds the homesick mind shuttled to and fro, while the ear caught, half heeding, the ringing of the telephone in the house. A car drove by. The neighbors, their fires out, called to each other hearty good nights that echoed on the incoming frost. How goodly are thy tents, O Jacob. . . .

“What took so long?” I said to my returning wife.

“Didn’t you hear the telephone? There’s an emergency meeting at the shul.”

“Tonight?”

“They want you there.”

Tell a man that he is needed, that they’re waiting for him, and he’ll roll out of a sick bed. Suddenly he feels important. In New York he was a nobody. In a small town he’s a Man of Distinction.

_____________

I arrived in the crowded shul basement and with a few others I leaned against the wall until Greenspan spied me. He waved. He stood up. He shoved. His whole soul was in motion as he demonstrated that he could make room for me.

“Is warm here,” he said, sweeping his eyes over the stale blue air. “Is the windows closed? No wonder!”

Hats and overcoats were piled high in corners. A cry went up for Gittleson. “Open the windows!”

A cigarette cupped in his left hand, Gittleson, lugging extra chairs into the basement, looked perspired and excited. “A man got only two hands!” he cried indignantly. Gittleson, as usual, wore his hat. Once on a fatal evening he had removed his hat and worn his yarmelke— the hat got lost, and such lamentations you never heard. At the next business meeting of our Men’s Club a motion was introduced, hotly debated—“You can’t set no precedents!”—but willy-nilly, a new hat came out of shul funds, and it never left Gittileson’s head again save when he went to sleep.

President Epstein—for how long can you be a president and live to tell the tale?—stood at the table, gavel to hand, behind him a clock and under the clock on the wall, a flag, a hope once, the flag of Israel now.

“A big crowd,” murmured Greenspan, “and what for I don’t know.” Of course he knew, just as well as I did. It was that Gideon Bible business. He meant that the meeting wasn’t at all necessary.

“Bang on the table, Aaron,” someone shouted to our president. The gavel came down gently, Epstein being a gentle soul.

Abe Klein came and stopped at our row. “Professor, who is this guy Gideon?”

“It ain’t a guy, Abe,” I fell into his rhythm. “It’s a society”—here the devil prompted me— “for the propagation and the dissemination—”

“Stop, stop, Professor. I got as far as ‘society.’ You mean—?”

The gavel came down again.

“He is meaning you,” said Greenspan to Abe. “Go find a place already.”

Our president at last called the meeting to order and asked us, “each and every one to be so kind and not smoke. . . . A serious question tonight. Maybe some of you don’t know what happened in the last two weeks and maybe you hearing things as didn’t happen and isn’t true. So I’m asking Mrs. Lillian Furst should please come up and speak.”

_____________

My wife and I had met Lillian at a small dinner party the Fursts had given in their apartment. I was instantly captivated by her beauty. Now, as she walked gracefully up the aisle, even Greenspan raised himself, leaned forward, followed her progress to the front of the room, broke into a quiet sigh. I was reminded of some other altischkers, the old men of Troy, watching Helen go by. “Is looking a little like a shiksa,” said Greenspan, leashing his straying thoughts.

She began in a low voice, in a cadenced English unusual for that assembly. “Two weeks ago my son Albert arrived from school with a paper that he wanted me to sign.” It had been a mimeographed form for parents to sign if they wanted a Gideon Bible for their child.

“ ‘What do you want a Bible for?’ I said. ‘You just got one from Grandma when you were Bar Mitzvah.’ ‘Oh that,’ he said, looking a bit bewildered. ‘Just sign it, Mom, that’s all.’ I said that I wasn’t signing anything, and for some reason I found myself getting angry. Everybody, Albert insisted, was getting a Bible. ‘Is Maxie Golden getting a Bible?’ I asked. ‘Everybody is,’ he said and by now my suspicions were fully aroused. I had never before heard of a Gideon Bible, so I told him to leave me his paper and I would talk to his father. ‘Gee, Mom,’ he said, ‘you’re making a whole stink!’ I told him that when he would be as old as his mother he wouldn’t think so.

“I called Mrs. Golden, and she also was perplexed. But Mr. Furst nearly blew his top when he laid eyes on that school request. ‘What do these guys want here in town?’ he said and looked at me as if I were the most ignorant woman in the world. He explained to me that the Gideons were originally a couple of do-good drummers who wanted to spread Christian ways and morals among salesmen whose desires were generally in other directions, and they hit on the idea of placing Bibles in all hotel rooms. ‘Now they’re looking for new lands to conquer!’ He was determined to see the supervising principal, but right then his company sent him on a long trip. My son wasn’t too eager next day to go to school. He didn’t want to be the queer guy, he said. ‘What do you mean being the queer guy?’ I asked. ‘Gee, Mom, you don’t understand. You went to school in New York with a lot of other Jewish kids. Here Maxie and me are alone in class. They call him “Ikie” and me “Izzie.” ’ I had to come to Reedville, I said to myself, to give my son a sense of inferiority and confusion. I was so provoked I could have cried. Of course I felt sorry for my boy, but sign that darn paper I would not. At the close of school he dragged himself in. I asked what had happened and he told me that his teacher had collected all the slips, and when she didn’t see Maxie’s and his, she said, ‘Where are your slips, boys?’ and with a bit of a snicker, ‘Don’t you Jews like the Bible?’ Mr. Furst is still out of town. In desperation I called up my husband’s buddy, Mr. Fogel, the commander of the Jewish War Veterans.”

Here she broke off and returned to her seat.

_____________

For a moment an impressive silence prevailed, but it yielded soon enough to a resentful murmur. By trickery and connivance someone, we felt, was trying to filch our children’s faith away from them. True, there were few there, including myself, who on demand could have given a clear or precise definition of our faith, but nevertheless we felt a sudden need to close ranks in order to defend it. And there was the insult to the children, the “Izzie” and the “Ikie,” the public reference to “you Jews.” . . . Hasty ones leaped to their feet. Calls for “Mr. Chairman, Mr. Chairman,” echoed from many corners.

Our chairman, as if pinned to the wall, stood helplessly by and waited until the anger subsided. Then for friendship’s sake, I presume, he called on Benny Itzkowitz.

A tall, worried-looking soul, his eyes always turned in on himself—and pious like nobody’s business—Itzkowitz arose from beside his worried wife, who kept repeating, “Remember, Benny. You got blood pressure!” She’s his bookkeeper. Not till ten on weekday mornings can she get to help him in the store, and while he’s rushing around answering the phone and delivering orders, she’s at home cleaning, and preparing a lunch for both of them to be shared in the store, and another lunch which she leaves on the table for her son Arthur, to be eaten in solitude. At night, exhausted, her feet a little swollen, she scrapes some of this and that together called “sopper” and they eat of the food of aggravation because Arthur, their only child, is sullen, aggrieved, a stranger to his father and mother who would do anything to gain his affections. “What’ll happen with my Arty, believe me I wish I knew. Nothing, just plain nothing suits him. Tears his face with the pimples and it’s getting worse all the time. I plead with him, ‘Arty dear, whatsa matter? Tell Mama! What did we do you?’ He answers like a stone would answer. I tell Benny, ‘Benny, you’re too strict with him. So he won’t be a rabbi! Must he go to cheder every afternoon?’ But go talk to Benny!”

Itzkowitz began to speak. Once during Yom Kippur prayers, wrapped in his tallis I heard him shout: H’anshomo loch v’ha guf sheloch—“The soul is Thine and the body Thine”—and the fire of his utterance chilled and inspired me and paled my poor intellectual gropings for a certitude like his. But unlike Greenspan, seated next to him, Itzkowitz was not a speaker. His tongue was tied before he began to speak, and all that this emotional mountain could bring forth was, “We be better off mitout them Bibles and mitout the goyim” and he was down to his seat.

Up rose Rappaport, the druggist, disliked by all. Why he should have elected to attend this meeting no one understood. Generally he comes to no meetings. He’s hot stuff, this Rappaport. During the depression, before the fair trade laws, he built up a cut-rate trade that earned him barrels of dough. His ads in the local papers are as needlessly loud and vulgar as his own stentorian voice on the sidewalk before his store. Who in Reedville doesn’t know Rappaport, trading as Fennimore Drugs? A thousand dollars a month is what he pays at Asbury Park, the braggart tells you, and just for rent mind you. His sporty yellow roadster has caused him a hundred arguments with our local police because he insists on parking it smack in front of his store where a limited parking sign stares you in the face. This resplendent chariot whirls him weekends to his darling wife by the sea where in equal company they outsport each other with clothes, excesses of food, and gin rummy. For a change of pace they go golfing, and at night they go to the “Pavilion” where a dance band wails to the incoming tide. Their children, Rappaport tells you, are out of the way at a camp which costs . . . and again he regales you with the sum of his extravagances.

Meanwhile he is as powerful as an ox, his brawny arms a forest of black hair, his head a curly mass, a nice straight nose, and two fierce eyes that pierce you through his fancy glasses. Come to defend Israel, has Mr. Rappaport, in its battle with the Gideons on the plains of the Hackensack.

In his raucous voice he announced that we were getting boiled up about nothing. Suppose they offer the Bibles? Must we take ’em? Must we read ’em? “I say forget the whole lousy business. Let ’em go ta hell!”

The curse fell harshly on our ears. It’s the last thing we in Reedville would wish to say to our Gentile neighbors. Chairman Epstein felt the need to speak the word of reprimand. “For why you cursing our neighbors? In the synagague yet!”

He asked Mr. Rappaport if he had seen the Bibles being offered to our children.

“A Bible is a Bible!” Rappaport retorted. He looked around for supporters but no one answered his gaze and he sat down ignominiously.

_____________

Epstein explained that he used to see a black book in his hotel room when he and his wife spent a day or two in Atlantic City. “It was always on the table, but I never look in.” Someone explained that that was the Gideon Bible in the King James Version, and that it included the Old and the New Testament.

“We don’t want the New Testament!” Itzkowitz cried, red in the face.

Now Marty Kirsch, who is halfway this and halfway that because he’s married to a shiksa and doesn’t know, poor devil, on which side of the bed he belongs, Marty rose in his confusion and demanded to be told what was wrong with the New Testament. “I’ve read it. It’s a wonderful book!”

“Keep it!” Greenspan boomed.

“Wasn’t Jesus a rabbi?” Kirsch asked, hoping to entangle us in religious dialectics. He had been reading Sholem Asoh.

“I don’t want my child to read the New Testament,” a woman’s voice shrilled.

“It’s the cause of all our troubles.”

“We can do mitout Yossele!” Itzkowitz hurled at Kirsch.

Epstein pounded the table and in the hope of restoring order he called on Harry Fogel, commander of our local chapter of the Jewish War Veterans.

The commander runs a small lumber and roofing business and walks with a limp that he calls his “Anzio.” He also raced with Patton across France, where four guys in a jeep turned over. Three were buried, but Harry exchanged a damaged kidney for a Purple Heart. He’s a tough and knowing man, mindful of his position in the community, and afraid of nothing. Short, black-haired, wiry, Fogel limped up the aisle.

He was speaking in the name of the JWV, he said, “But I also speak as a fellow Jew, new in our community, a stranger still to many of you. But the boys of our Post know what I stand for.

“I wasn’t much of a Jew before the war and I’m not ashamed to say so, even if some here might call me a Johnny-come-lately or a foxhole Jew. Today I know that for Jews there is only one rule, irregardless of how they feel about their religion—to stand up for themselves, one for all and all for one.”

A murmur whipped through the crowd, and one could sense the nervousness of the old-timers. True, they admired Harry, sang his praises, but secretly his type disturbed them. Good to have him and his boys around, these fearless ones, for nowadays, don’t you know, you never can tell when some new Joe McWilliams will appear in Reedville, as indeed he did years ago and no one to stand up to him. But what will they do to the community? They were too rough in that UJA drive—no denying, some of our Jews gave more, but only because they were intimidated. But what did these boys themselves give? Money they ain’t got. Temples they want, too, and right away they wanna fight. But they work in New York, or have their business in another town—outside Reedville. They haven’t their livelihood to lose!

Harry wound up. “This action of the Board of Education is against all American principles. We of the JWV don’t want these small Bibles. They’re just the New Testament with the Psalms and Proverbs thrown in for good measure. We don’t want ’em, and if the schools insist on giving them out we’ll get an injunction. We’re not afraid to fight.”

As Commander Fogel limped to his seat the applause was echoed by an ominous silence from the section where our elders sat.

_____________

Mac Stein, owner of the town’s thriving electrical appliance business, leaped to his no longer young feet. A veteran of the First World War, his own son a member of the younger JWV’s, he has a hard course to navigate, but he’s such a dreyer— he’ll have no trouble. He used to drink hard and he still plays a wicked game of poker, but the years have slowed him down. He’s gray now, goes to Florida and comes back red as a beet in the thick of winter. He groans, but he’ll outlast many of us. Business keeps him from dying. It’s his heart and soul, and as long as it prospers, so will Mac. His son is inclined to be bellicose, but not Mac. Mac knows that in a small town a Jewish merchant must mind his p’s and q’s.

“Mr. Chairman!” hollered Mac in his hoarse whisky voice. Everybody was in freewheeling. Epstein pounded the table and pleaded with the crowd they should please be a little more quiet.

Quoth Mac: “I’m not disagreeing with the Commander. Not at all. I admire his every word. He is a man, a credit to us all, risked his life and was hurt and thank God is yet alive and I hope up till a hundred and twenty years yet. I like how he talks and how the boys feel about him. But I must say one thing I don’t like and this is the fighting business. Is not a war in Reedville, and we don’t want start one. For many years in Reedville we living very friendly. Some say is anti-Semitism here in town. I don’t see it. Not in my store, and not where I’m living. Everybody passes says, ‘Hello Mac, hello Mr. Stein,’ and comes in the store and buys merchandise which is a good sign, but with anti-Semitism they wouldn’t come in. Is a very friendly feeling which we must be careful not to disturb. Now is this business about the New Testament, which like Mr. Itzkowitz and the rest of us Jews knows hasn’t done us no good. But it don’t make sense to go looking for trouble, insulting people which is friendly, even cursing ’em which Mr. Rappaport should excuse me certainly wasn’t the proper thing to do. Some from us who are older and you shall excuse me maybe a little wiser and has also fought in a great war, we ain’t such fools like you think. Of course I ain’t meaning that those who ain’t old is fools. I mean no insults to nobody. In business insults is out. I am meaning that we should go easy. From this Bible business can come lots of trouble if we ain’t careful.”

Greenspan, who found little to admire in Stein’s discourse, whispered as Mac sat down, “V’noimer ohmen,” which literally means, “Let be said, amen,” but with the proper twist signifies, “Thank God that’s over with!”

_____________

The meeting had quieted down and Epstein called on Ben Nathan, member of the most distinguished law firm in town, Christians all but he. How he got in is still one of those minor miracles. Once he was surrogate in East Reedville. Now he keeps his right hand in real estate, and his left hand in politics. He votes the Republican ticket, rants against labor unions, and regards the Taft-Hartley law as the saving of a nation. He entertains his Gentile friends in considerable numbers in a house that his wife keeps just short of ostentation by a deft selection of antiques. She belongs to a Gentile reading club but not to a single Jewish organization, and when it’s her turn to receive her club members Ben sits in, his lean cadaverous frame properly attired for the evening. Rowena— gebor’n Rebecca—demands that he do so. Literature is not his forte, but he has a flair for expression which, coming from the deep caverns of his chest, carries weight without content. Religion doesn’t worry him, but some of his best clients being Jews, he finds it expedient to show up on proper occasions. His private vices, women and horses, are whispered in town, but he keeps his nose clean and is not too eager to get himself involved in a Jewish-Gentile dispute.

Ben thanked Mr. Epstein for the honor of calling on him, but he would rather, he said, not be heard on the matter right now. “You know, Mr. Epstein, how we lawyers are.”

Epstein is one of his clients. Occasionally they go to the races together, and Epstein, groaning to his partner next day, says, “It cost me two hundred, and what for?”

“As a lawyer,” continued Ben, “I don’t like to render curbstone opinions. I would prefer a verbatim report of the entire Board of Education proceedings, and then perhaps I would have something to say.”

Commander Fogel jumped up.

“Mr. Chairman, I’m not a lawyer so I can shoot my mouth off. I’ve heard Mr. Stein, and now Mr. Nathan. I think there’s too much pussyfooting in both of ’em. I know the kind of Bible they’re out to distribute. It’s nothing but the New Testament. I saw them during the war. A page that can be torn out in the back asks you to sign that having read the true story of Jesus, you are prepared to accept him as your savior.”

“Don’t mention that name!” Itzkowitz cried, clapping his hands over his ears.

“How else speak of him?” Fogel asked.

“I’ll give you plenty names later.”

Kirsch leaped up. “No insults!”

Itzkowitz replied, “Maybe Mrs. Kirsch likes you should talk like that, but is not how we Jews feel.”

They traded words, began moving menacingly toward each other.

_____________

Greenspan didn’t ask for the floor. He didn’t need to.

Slowly he moved forward, a minor Churchill lost in the purlieus of the Hackensack, With his glasses low on his nose, his eyes kindled by the inner spirit, and his hands working on the buttons to set his vest and coat aright, he stood calmly before us, coughing now and then until by the sheer radiation of his personality he subdued the gathering.

“Friends and fellow Jews, this is from what I foresaw and this is from what I was most afraid. Some of you here don’t know you got a bear from the tail, but Greenspan is warning you if you ain’t smart that’s exactel what you gonna have. Mine heart is full of the Commander. I admire him. A wonderful man. My heart is also full for all the young manhood from the war which has moved into our community and which we is not able because is impossible to give them the things as is required. Mr. Stein, an old friend from mine which I like only is a little too careful and so mixes himself up, from him too my heart is satisfied. The same is for Mr. Nathan. But from Mr. Kirsch, he shall excuse me, from him is no pleasure in my heart. Is a simple thing to understand why he speaks like he does, and I say he has a perfect right to say his opinions, only in the right place. Eis l’chol chefetz— there’s a time and place for everything, the Scripture tells us. Here in the synagogue, Mr. Kirsch, is not the place to asking such questions like yours. Shall we debate here like you would like what two thousand of years hasn’t been able to settle, in this hot room where is tempers ready to explode? Bring your wife sometime, Mr. Kirsch, and yourself to mine house some night and if you wanting to discuss, will be plenty to discuss. This is Jews here. This is a synagogue. I say is not right you shall do so, but also is wrong to throw insults around.”

He paused, cleared his throat.

“What we having now is something very difficult to do, and let me say, I think is a meeting like this wrong. We having plenty time to talk over quietly by the executive board from the Men’s Club, and the same by the Sisterhood, and in all other Jewish organizations in town which has board meetings. That’s why is boards. This you can’t swallow fast. Must blow it to cool off or will burn the lining inside. If is needed an injunction we don’t need no public meeting. Also we ain’t alone in the world. Is plenty Jewish national organizations made for this purpose. Is the B’nai B’rith, the Anti-Defamation League, and others. From this meeting Mr. Chairman can come only sonim—enemies. Appoint a small committee and will take care from this, and that’s all.”

_____________

In his store a few days later, Greenspan received me happily.

“Is something the matter mit people, Mr. Waxman, in little towns. Nobody respects another. By that meeting I was sitting and busting. ‘Greenspan,’ I says to myself, ‘keep quiet!’ Is Benny’s business Mr. Kirsch is married to a shiksa? ‘Mind jerome business, Benny,’ I beg him. But nit Itzkowitz! He’s gotta give him a stock. ‘Benny,’ I says, ‘it’s the man’s own business what he done for a wife. When his children grows up, he’ll find out what he’s got. Now you can’t telling him from nothing.’ ”

When I asked him what the news was, he sighed.

“In this store is like I’m a prisoner. All day mit the customers, and by night mit the stock and figuring out what merchandise to buy and what I must get rid of so to pay the bills. But I’m not complaining. Not Greenspan! Thank God I make a living. I have my health, which is mostly good, only is too often a burning from the heart. You know what makes a burning from the heart maybe?”

A woman entered, thumbed through a style book, bought a pattern, and then we were alone again.

“What we needing now,” said Greenspan, “is a guter goy—a well-meaning Gentile.”

I thought I understood him.

“A guter goy is the story from our Jewish life. We needing always one to save us from troubles. But is no use talking about this by the meeting. Over there you seen already what happens.”

He inquired if I knew any Gentiles in town and I told him that I had met a few, and then I recalled that I had recently met the Episcopal minister, Mr. Weatherby.

“That’s him!” he cried, his eyes lighting up, and he explained that it was Weatherby who had approved the distribution of the Bibles. “He is the president from all the ministers in town.” He suggested that I call on Mr. Weatherby.

“Will it do any good?”

“Can’t harm,” said he.

He picked up his copy of our local paper, the Reedville Republican Sentinel, and he showed me a report of our meeting in the shul. We were going to seek an injunction, it said. I asked how the item got in, no reporter having been there. Greenspan sighed. “That’s how things is in this town. Nobody knows.”

But there was other news, he said. Father Michaels of St. Peter’s, he told me, was also going to ask for an injunction.

“Good!” I exclaimed. “Then we don’t have to lift a finger.”

A look of disappointment crossed his face. “No, Mr. Waxman,” he said slowly. “So all will be saying the Jews always gets others to do their dirty work. We must do this ourselves—or maybe in partner with Father Michaels.”

“With them! ”

Again that look crossed his face. “When a man is putting out a fire in your house you asking his religion?”

I felt properly chided.

_____________

The Reverend Aldous Weatherby, in black garb with a Roman collar, introduced me to his secretary, who sat in the sunny study at a shining desk behind a spread of cut flowers. The walls lined with ecclesiastical books, tables spread neatly with pamphlets and tracts, the floor thickly carpeted. The chair I sat in gave me its roomy leather arms. Something in me groaned, not the chair. It was far too sturdy. The solid pile which was the Episcopal church, with its carillon on the hour playing ancient tunes, loomed over us with all its power and majesty as I thought of our poor little shul in East Reedville. It struck me that Judaism, at least the kind on which I had been raised, had never been a comfortable religion, though many of our own people are trying to make just that of it too. Including myself, maybe, with my envy of this well-appointed parsonage.

The Reverend wanted to avoid controversy, he said, because our relations on the whole had been very good in town. I went along with him, feeling my way until it was time to say that I could not understand why he, president of the Reedville Ministerial Association, had given the organization’s official blessing to the distribution of a truncated Bible. To his credit I am glad to record that he at once confessed to not having seen what he had approved.

“They told me it was the Gideon Bible, and I assumed that they intended to distribute the complete Bible.”

Knowing that in Christian parlance the Holy Bible meant the Old and the New Testament, I said, “Then you have approved the distribution of a strictly Christian tract through our public schools.”

His eyes narrowed slightly. “I have,” he said.

“Don’t you think, then, that it would be only fair for you to meet with the authorities, explain your position, and ask them to reverse themselves?”

“They’ll never do that, Mr. Waxman.”

“Even when they have found out they’re wrong?”

“They don’t think that they’re wrong.”

He felt the need to recount the whole story, from its very start. A letter from the Gideons, he said, had been received by the Board of Education offering to distribute the Gideon Bible to school children.

“The Board asked me by telephone what I thought and I said that I saw no objection.”

Either he was too polite, was my thought, or he did not see it as a misrepresentation to offer the Holy Bible and then send out only the New Testament. “They also asked Mr. Trotter, the Board’s lawyer, for an opinion and Trotter said he could see no reason for turning the offer down.”

By now there was a slight chilling of the atmosphere between us.

“Your Jewish children, Mr. Waxman, aren’t obliged to ask for them. It’s all on a voluntary basis.”

I thought of Rappaport and I could have told Mr. Weatherby that we didn’t want our children placed in an embarrassing position before their Christian classmates, as Mrs. Furst had made evident. But realizing where this might lead I said that it was not a matter of who would and who would not ask for the Bibles. The question was, I repeated, whether the public schools in America should be used to disseminate the New Testament, and once again I called it a tract for Christians.

“Would you have given your approval had you seen what you were approving?”

“No, sir.”

I said that in all fairness he ought to retract his approval.

“But there is nothing wrong with the New Testament!”

“I didn’t say there was, Mr. Weatherby. I am speaking about retracting your approval for distribution through the public schools.”

“It’s the word of God,” he said, and when I replied that that was a matter of faith, he contemplated me with polite horror. After this the river between us broadened into a wide estuary. In a moment we were out to sea, and I felt the rising of the stormy winds of doctrine that ages ago had blown us apart and made us into separate peoples.

By way of a sop, I suppose, he promised to speak unofficially to the president of the Board of Education. “But, you understand Mr. Struthers is a devout Christian. He and many like him fail to see why the New Testament, the word of God, cannot be circulated to our own children.”

I saw where the power and the glory lay, and we parted amicably.

At Greenspan’s, to tell of my interview with Weatherby, I learned that Mrs. Furst, who was going to seek an injunction, had been threatened.

“What a shame! One of our own people! Call up a woman which is alone in the night and to make mit threats her windows will be broken if she is getting out an injunction. Is a shande un a shpot—a shame and a disgrace.”

After getting the details of my failure with Weatherby, he said, “Is hard to find a guter goy,” and he added that it was his belief that the minister might be afraid of the rich members of his church. “Maybe is a good man, but not a guter goy.”

I reminded him of Mr. Bailey who had telephoned to him during the war.

“But now isn’t war,” he said, and added that it was time to call up the Jewish defense agency. I suggested that he call a committee meeting.

“Will be arguments all over again. Even when the man from the defense agency comes, will be some Jews as will tell him to go and not make no trouble in town.”

_____________

But the Reedville authorities pulled a fast one. I had talked to the minister on Saturday and the very next Monday the Bibles were distributed.

A national defense agency representative arrived. It was early winter and snow was heavy, but Harry Fogel arrived with a company of his JWV’s. For all our efforts to persuade Mrs. Furst to go on with her injunction, she could not be persuaded, and in view of the threat she had received, no one else seemed willing to be exposed.

“We need only one with a child in school,” pleaded the defense agency man.

The young vets looked at each other.

“Six is better than one,” said Greenspan suddenly. “Let six or five ask for the injunction. Then no one will be alone.

That did it. We got an injunction and the Bibles, distributed only in one school, were recalled, impounded, and, to the best of my knowledge, lay undisturbed.

Naturally, the news of the court injunction received wide attention in the metropolitan press dailies, and brought Reedville some unwonted—and unwanted—publicity. What the Christians were saying in the privacy of home, club, or church circle, can’t be reported directly. Some I know were quietly furious, talked of fighting the issue through all the courts. Only one of many whom I met on the streets was bold enough to tell me that a handful of obstinate Jews had thwarted a Christian majority. I was tempted to repeat Greenspan’s observation that “in government and politics only is majority counts. . . . Religion you don’t vote on.” But I didn’t argue, and that entire afternoon I rambled in places like our railroad and bus terminals, restaurants, sweet shops, coffee counters, and out-of-town bars, and in all of these places I heard surprisingly few comments about the injunction, but all unfavorable.

The real stir was among our own people. The hardest hit were those few but well-established merchants who had unalterably opposed themselves to our doing anything. With the injunction a fait accompli, it suddenly dawned upon them that with the influx of young Jewish families, they had lost control of the Jewish community. A single couple, barely two years in town, had been able to stand up to them. Without a home of their own or a business in town. Not that the large majority of our merchants, once they grasped the issue, weren’t solidly for the injunction, and on the day the injunction was issued joined in celebrating the victory. We did not bestride the earth like proud colossi, but we did stir and rattle about and our telephones were in a mad scramble of gossip and congratulations that entire day.

And when the Reedville Sentinel, our weekly, hit the streets a day later, many of us drifted toward our shul basement like fish toward a warm pool.

We all arrived with copies of the Sentinel and carefully read the three-column frontpage story for possible intimations of disapproval. There were none, and we felt good. Into the thick of this self-congratulating group stalked Mr. Rappaport, uttering accusations and insults at Max Furst, who wasn’t there, and at all the young family groups who, he said, had drifted into town because of the housing shortage and would drift right out again once it was eased. Harry Fogel finally drew right up to him and for a moment it looked like real trouble, but Greenspan got up and stood between them. They were in a synagogue! He pointed to the door and said to Mr. Rappaport, “If you wanting to fight, outside is the place! This is a shul, a mokem kodesh!” The Hebrew must have affected Rappaport, he being a great scholar, and he left.

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Driving home in the night I passed a car stalled in the snow. It was Charlie Parker, my Christian buddy whose wife was so eager to induct us into her own way of life and the fraternity of the unlocked door. I yelled to him. He jumped out of his machine and greeted me like a lost brother.

After I had bucked him out of the snow and got him going again, he asked where I was coming from and I told him.

“Serve ’em right, Waxy!” he said warmly. “Where do those guys think they’re living?”

As pleased as I was amazed by this, I asked if there were many in town who shared his views, and he told me that there were at least twenty in his own church.

“We don’t need the Gideons to give our children Bibles. Our church does it!”

Briefly I told him of my interview with the Reverend Weatherby.

“That old fuddy-duddy!” he exclaimed. “He and old Struthers and the rest of that blue-blood outfit don’t know the time o’ day. Can’t see that Reedville isn’t the pure white Protestant village of their childhood. We’re growing up! We have a Catholic church and a Catholic high school. Jewish merchants have livened up Main Street and the Jewish population is growing. It’s a regular American city at last, not a private preserve of the old settlers, and it’s time they woke up to it.”

I saw him safely to his door, and as I left him my car chains bit deeply into the accumulated snow until I rolled into my own driveway. Trudging back to the front door and searching for my house key, I suddenly saw the beauty of our quiet street.

“Ma tovo elo-hecho. . ..” came back to me.

I swept the snow off my galoshes and pounded with my feet on the wooden floor of our porch.

“Is that you, Waxy?” my wife called down.

My voice assured her.

“Lock the door and come on up. It’s late.”

“I’m not going to lock the door.”

“You what!” she screamed down.

Leaving the door unlocked I went upstairs. “Listen, honey, I met Charlie Parker.”

“Did you lock the door?”

“Really, honey, I don’t think it’s—”

“Listen, Waxy, it’s late and tomorrow is another day. Please go down and lock the door and tomorrow when you come home from school you can tell me all about Charlie Parker.”

I went down. I looked up and down the quiet street, and at the stark trees and the moon, and smelled the sharp air.

Did I leave the door unlocked?

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