S. T. Hecht, our correspondent from Reedville, N. J., which lies west of the Hudson and not far from Hackensack, reports once again on the life of that far from tranquil community, where young and old struggle over which symbols and practices of the ancient faith should be observed on New Jersey soil. This time, it is a question of a succah.
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At a Men’s Club meeting a fortnight or so before our Holy Days, I had occasion to inquire after Gittleson our shammes and learned that the poor fellow was sick.
“Since when?” said I.
“Last week,” said one. “Maybe longer,” said another.
This got my dander up. Let one of your rich men crawl into a sickbed, and the whole town buzzes. Fruit baskets. Flowers. Get-well cards. The rabbi, mindful who butters the rabbinical bread, cancels engagements. His finger is among the first on the doorbell. And not only once, if you please! And when death strikes! Ben Nathan’s mother recently was gathered up for her eternal reward, and my wife, who inscribes those memorial tree certificates for the Jewish National Fund (Keren Kayemes) in Israel, had a full day’s work. “What a gimmick!” said Abe Klein, no respecter of persons, when he met me on my way to the post office with the load of envelopes. “The rich croak and trees grow in Jerusalem!”
“But when poor old Gittleson—” I got a few choice words to this effect off my chest at the meeting.
“Mr. Waxman,” said good man Epstein, still our shul president. “Seeing how you feeling, I’m appointing you shall visit brother Gittleson and wish him he shall recover from all of us.”
I had half a mind to say that “from all of us” poor Gittleson would never recover.
Now any Jew will tell you that just before New Year is no time for a shammes to get sick. Not only does he have to rise before dawn for Selihot. (A six o’clock Mass is a cinch.) He’s got to clean the entire synagogue—from top to bottom as we say. Our Gittleson, moreover, builds a succah, with his own hands. It’s mostly for himself, I agree, but it’s a job! Himself selects the freshest evergreens. Buys the palmiest palm branch for the synagogue. Rusdes up willows that grew by a brook, and finds us a citron with an unbroken stem—a true pitum— and a flawless complexion. What an array of holidays we’ve got in the fall of the year—it’s like Christmas, Easter, and the Fourth of July bundled together: not counting Selihot, a test for early risers, there are Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Hoshanah Rabba, Shemini Atzeret, and topping it off, Simchas Torah!
For a shammes, the amount of preparation is staggering. Of course, the rabbi could pitch in and help. He could. But it’s beneath his calling. This new one we’ve got—we trade ’em in every year or so in Reedville— has had his head stuffed, wherever he comes from, with notions as to what is and what is not befitting for the rabbinate to engage in. If we asked him to do a little something on the side we’d lose him even before he had taken his shoes off, so to speak. I declare, better your rabbi than your shammes in bed at this crucial season of the year. . . .
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I had never ventured into Gittleson’s home, and only once had I been at his door. Paying the sick call, I discovered that he was not so poor as I thought. He lives in a double-decker shack with himself on the upper story. From this vantage he looks out on the world and down on his tenant. He’s a landlord! Not only does the ground floor yield a better rent; besides he can’t stand anybody walking on top of him. To his wife’s complaints that she finds it hard to climb the stairs, he answers that after he’s dead she can “moof.” He’s his own janitor (or, if you will, his own shammes). He can’t stand the Italian family under him; if rents weren’t frozen, believe me he’d send them packing. Their alien (chazerishe) cooking, he complained, seeps up through the walls and into his nostrils.
As to his duties toward our synagogue and our religion, there it was with him as with Jehovah—his foot could not be moved. Question Gittleson, even in the slightest degree, on matters pertaining to our ritual, which, alas, he performs with utmost punctilio, and he answers, “Shtayt in die Toyreh —Torah commands us!” And no use asking for chapter and verse. Gittleson has a mean tongue. Even his own good Fegele trembles as he watches the precise second for the lighting of the candles.
“Who are you?” she whispered to me, partially opening the door when I appeared.
On Friday night, when she covers her eyes with both her hands and softly repeats, “God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” blessing the candles, all earthly woes fall away from her. She’s your true tsadaykeste, the image of holiness, pouring out her prayers for each of her grandchildren, her sons and daughters, and for her beloved husband, who is sick nebech. “Merciful One, send him a cure!” Image of my mother, and all our mothers! Pure was thy life, unsullied by greed. Thou gavest me the fullest measure of thy poverty and all the handicaps of thy believing heart, making me simple in a world full of cunning. If prayers were riches and learning were gold we’d all ride in Cadillacs, mother mine!
I had a time persuading her to let me in.
“Don’t you remember?” I said, recalling for her how on a Sunday morning when Gittleson had overslept I had come for the key to the shul.
“Oh! Yeh, yeh!”
She smiled, her face a little wrinkled, a little soiled, as she released the door another inch.
“What ails him?” I said, speaking Yiddish.
“God knows!”
Mark her answer! The doctor comes and the doctor looks, he knocks on his back and he knocks on his front. “Give a cough, Mr. Gittleson!” Ahhugh! “Another cough!” Ahhugh! Without God’s help, what good is a doctor?
She’d go in, she said, to see if he was awake.
“If he’s sleeping I wouldn’t daring to wake him up.”
Quietly she left me.
A white oilcloth covered the square table. A wooden bread board with bread and a knife were on top, and on an ancient gas stove was a huge blue kettle, vapor reporting it was ready for tea. Two simple kitchen chairs and an old rocker completed the furnishings of the small kitchen, and I was reminded of what Greenspan once said when we passed Kaufman’s Furniture Store, elegant with luxuries. “I’m thanking God there is so much I ain’t needing.”
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Gittleson had it different, of course, at our shul. I’ve seen him on cold evenings (dutifully he reports on Friday nights, minyan or no minyan) wrapped up to his ears in a wool muffler, in his greenish vintage overcoat and its dog-eared lapels turned up. First thing, he shoots up the steam register. Through some ad hoc dispensation it was no sin for him to fire up the synagogue on the Sabbath, paralleling no doubt the Halachic exemption for those who used to prepare the sacrifices in the Temple. Heaven forbid! It was not for his own personal comfort! There might be a minyan! Nearest the furnace he has himself a roomy wooden armchair padded to his own proportions. Into this he lowers himself with nice care and with both hands begins to tap his pockets for his glasses. One temple is bound with surgical tape, and one lens is cracked.
“Why don’t you buy new glasses, Gittleson?”
“For what I’m needing it?”
“Good eyesight, he says, he still has, not failing to praise the Almighty. “Only when to reading is I need them.”
“True, true! For the mikvah, ritual baths, glasses are a burden.”
He looks quizzically at me. The Almighty, as you know, has not granted him a sense of humor.
If before a Men’s Club meeting you’ve made it your business to remind him, then the chairs will be set out and dusted. But it’s not beyond him, not at all, to suggest that it wouldn’t harm you to do a little work on your own.
“The extra-size is good for you!”
The upstairs of the shul is fairly clean, but don’t appear in a light gray suit! You’ll trace the dear imprint of your proportions on the mahogany. Your neighbor will dust you off. “Oy! Is this a shammes!” But what can you do? He came with the building! You could no more disown your grandfather than inform Gittleson that he’s through. A rabbi—Ah! To some it’s positively a pleasure to give their rabbi the gate. But not our Gittleson!
But let’s give credit where it’s due. On the platform and at the ark, everything is without blemish. The president’s chair may creak somewhat—but is Gittleson a carpenter? One of the coiled springs has a tendency to slip, sharply reminding its occupant that the world is founded on flesh. But is Gittleson an upholsterer? “To fixing will cost like a new one!” So let the flesh be mortified. The rear benches are always cluttered with torn prayer books, orphaned talleisim, and nondescript yarmelkes— but who ever uses the rear benches? For the rest, everything is as it should be . . . so you understand, I trust, why I said it was a near catastrophe when Gittleson fell ill.
Understand, too, that our precious Gittleson had expanded the boundaries of his already vast empire to take in what in the olden days must have been within the suzerainty of the gabay— your elder or trustee. He silenced the talkers during prayer sessions; rich and poor alike, but especially the poor. He maintained a strict public observance of all Jewish rituals, and as a service to our community prior to our several holidays, he engaged in the retailing of religious merchandise. Came Chanukah and he had lights and menorahs. The Sisterhood contested for the rights to this concession. Gittleson won! For Passover he had matzos and Haggadahs. Mrs. Finkelstein, she of the little grocery with no husband and three children, wept that the bread was being stolen from her mouth. But on foot Gittleson delivered matzos at your door, for the same price. “Is a free country!” argued our Gittleson. “Then pay rent to the shul,” countered Mrs. Finkelstein, “like I’m paying rent to the landlord!” But here, too, Gittleson won.
He also made announcements. Such Yiddish and English were never so wedded before. “Der maylid— time of the new moonis falling out nexten Donnershtig [Thursday] accurat by five azeyger mit two minutes!” He also performed the penitential ritual known as malkes, though we had only one among us so extra-pious as to require his services. Our Reedville window cleaner, Mr. Saperstein, a nice little guy who wouldn’t step on a cricket, appeared each year to take his lashings from Gittleson, after which Gittleson himself got down on his creaky old fours while Saperstein did the like for him. Two devout spirits on erev Yom Kippur alone in our quiet synagogue. The afternoon sun filters in through the stained glass windows, falls on the red velvet folds that shield the ark, lifts up the twin lions of Judah between which our Ten Commandments glow with new candescence. Contrite is the heart; sublimated the pure spirit. Can you hear the echoes of the lash sighing in our house of worship?
“Forgive us, we beseech Thee, O Father! We have sinned!”
They beat their breasts, fulfilling an ancient ritual, defying time and the accidents of place, doing in Reedville, N. J., as was done wherever God has sent us to suffer and to sing His praises.
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When Fegele at last reappeared, she said praised be God that her husband was not asleep and that he was very happy to hearing I had come. Also, she said, “A shammes, Mr. Waxman, is not made from iron.”
I followed her through a shabby living room, entered a shade-drawn bedroom where on two mountainous pillows I came on the object of my pilgrimage. A yarmelke was on his gray head and a blanket that verged into a peak over his head enfolded his enfeebled frame. The birdlike nose and eyes turned toward me and his hand reached out, and when I broke into Yiddish, bringing him the best wishes of our Men’s Club, he was really overcome.
“Go, go,” he said to Fegele. “Make something.”
“A little tea?” she inquired.
He pointed to his back.
“Is something I’m not knowing from what.”
He told me that many years ago, on first coming to America, he had been a very strong man.
“I could bending iron.”
He had been a tinsmith.
“You wouldn’t believe maybe, Mr. Waxman, but I make a good living. But comes an accident. I’m falling off a roof.”
“A roof! What kind of roof?”
“Any roof is bad to falling from. Ay, ay, ay. God punished me. I’m fixing a leak on a church.”
“But that’s so many years ago!”
“Is coming back the pain again.”
“But not for the same sin.”
“Who is knowing from such things? Is my back hurts.”
His wife served tea and, in good Orthodox tradition, again disappeared. Gittleson asked what sort of cantor had we hired for the Holy Days, and it was plain to see how badly he missed the annual Men’s Club meeting where we planned for the coming of the High Holy Days.
“Is the first time in twenty-seven years.”
“With God’s help,” I offered, falling into the proper pious singsong, “you’ll be with us next year.”
“With God’s help I’ll being there this year,” he corrected me.
“Better yet,” I said, feeling chided.
He inquired who had been appointed to the several committees, and I assured him that everything was going forward in right good style.
“Can’t be!” he flatly stated. Suspicious, he began to probe.
“Who choose the cantor?”
“Mr. Bilkowitz.”
“From what is Bilkowitz knowing about cantors? Bilkowitz is a butcher, not even a shochet, and him they giving the job to choosing a cantor!”
To ease him of his anxieties I added to the Cantorial Committee our good friend Mr.Greenspan. That pleased him but still he was not satisfied.
“How much the cantor gonna get?”
“Three hundred dollars.”
“Is a hundred more from last year!”
“Costs are on the up.”
“Sure is on the up! Only not for the shammes. Him they paying the same!”
A just grievance, I was going to say to him, but was thrust out of my sympathies when he suddenly asked if rents in East Reedville had been decontrolled.
“Is a mamzer an Italyener lives under me and makes no difference how I’m trying, he will not paying a penny more!”
I UNDERSTOOD now why Gittleson’s humble job had never reduced him in his own eyes. Who else but one capitalist could stand up to another capitalist like Barney Rossman? Ah, my dear brothers in poverty! All we need to make the whole world kin is a piece of property we can call our own.
“I shall paint him the rooms yet he wants. A coffin I’ll paint him!”
With this off his chest, Gittleson returned to our synagogue affairs, but still in a fractious mood. He decried what the young were doing to our religion. As Jews, they were a worthless and profligate lot, if Jews they were at all, of which he had considerable doubt, and they were spending our shul moneys “left and right” for foolish things.
“Is a shul for dancing? Is a shul for wimmin shall come with naked arms and naked shoulders and the breasts so uncovered to tearing a man’s eyes out from his head? Jews was given the Torah so we shall being a religious people and not like bums and tramps which gets drunk and is not remembering we is chosen by God to being a holy people.”
He was referring, of course, to a masquerade ball, a bit on the undressy side, that our Mr. and Mrs. Club had tossed off to attract new members. Perhaps, I agreed, some had gone too far, but concerning the extravagance with shul moneys, I was happy to inform him that at our last meeting we had discussed ways and means of introducing some economies. “From which way?” he asked, and then I let slip that we were considering not to build a communal succah. As if jolted by a charge of dynamite under his bed, he sat up erect, and pushed aside one of his supporting pillows.
“From where comes this?” he demanded.
I repeated that the idea was only being considered.
“There is a meeting on Thursday.”
“From what day is today?”
I told him it was Tuesday.
“You shall doing me a favor, Mr. Waxman.”
“Gladly,” I said.
“From this meeting is very important I shall be there”; and he implored me to call for him on Thursday.
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Came Thursday night, and a miracle came to pass. I saw it and I speak of what mine own eyes beheld. Gittleson walked down the creaky steps. Gittleson got into my car and sat down beside me. Gittleson said with impatience, “So drive already,” and I, servant of God and Gittleson, caused my aged car to convey us to the shul. I will allow that he did drag himself somewhat, and that his voice, in the face of his cronies, was quaky with emotion, but by the time our business meeting was called to order, Gittleson was his old self.
He sat in the rear dragging on a cigarette while the Cantorial Committee, in the shape of Mr. Bilkowitz, reported that a cantor had been hired. Mr. Bilkowitz received a round of applause and somebody cried, “Mazel tov!”
Then David Deitch arose, chairman of the Ritual Committee, and Gittleson scraped his chair forward and sat up, his lips tense and tight like a new buttonhole. Trust Brother Gittleson to know that if there’s going to be any tampering, to look for David to do it. A regular goy without memory of a Jewish past or sentiment, a confused wretch who wants to be a Jew, alas, because there’s nothing else for him to be, and in a small town like Reedville you’ve got to be something. David had nothing. Beards offended him. Once in a fit of anger he told me how revolted he was each time he had to wear a yarmelke. He couldn’t stand the Litvaktwisted English of the East Reedvillers. “It’s enough to ruin your own speech!” As chairman of the Ritual Committee, his secret hope, he once told me, was to force the old Jews out and to reform the rest of us. “It’s so much more dignified.”
He and his committee had several recommendations, David announced. They did not like the chatter during services, nor did he approve of the shouting of the prayers, one member against another as if they were in competition who should appear the holiest and the loudest. God could hear us just as well if we prayed in unison and quietly. There was no need for Mr. Gittleson, our shammes, to go strutting up and down the aisle making more noise than he suppressed.
“We recommend the appointment of ushers who will lead members of our congregation to pre-assigned seats. We also recommend that Mr. Gittleson be relieved of his extra duties during the Holy Days. The ushers will maintain order.”
Gittleson’s hands were shaking.
David continued.
“Due to the heavy drains on our treasury for repairs to our sidewalk, and due to the expense of repairing our side walls where the rain seeps in, and due to the anticipated increase in the cost of a cantor, we recommend in the interest of economy that no succah be built this year.”
Up leaped Gittleson, defender of the faith.
“Who is Saying Shall be no Succah?” His voice was a tower of rage. His eyes glared and his body trembled.
But David stood his ground, outglared the glaring Gittleson and asked him, while his own glasses trembled on his nose, why we needed a succah.
“What harvests are you reaping? What fruit are you gathering? The stores are open and we all go to work and there isn’t a Jew here to celebrate the festival. We’re not farmers. Why should we pretend to be what we’re not and waste money for nothing? I don’t see any sense to it.”
“I WILL BUILDING IT!” shouted Gittleson. “I am building succahs from before you was born yet and I am building one as long as I’m living, and this year too, with God’s help.”
“And our money!” somebody yelled.
“You’re a sick man,” cried another.
“And you can’t waiting to bury me!” he thundered in reply.
Turning to our chairman, Mr. Epstein, who sat through this and wondered why at the end of his term he shouldn’t resign, Gittleson assaulted him with a lion’s courage.
“Why you sitting there, Aaron, and saying nothing? For years we is doing like is right for Jews to doing. Why you letting these goyim they shall telling us what we shall doing or not doing?”
White with rage and shaking with the fury of his agitation, he pointed to all of us young ones who sat together in a body, and he shouted, “If God must depending on them, then will be ays Yidishkayt und ays Gott— both God and Israel will perish!”
We voted—always democracy—and it was overwhelmingly carried not to build a succah. The meeting exploded with an uproar. The old-timers moved off to one side, muttering threats and calling us an infamous lot; we, the so-called young, rejoiced in our victory. Regretfully I must record that although not exactly young myself any more, I had voted with the young.
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In the car with Greenspan, driving him home, I sat very quietly at the wheel. Several times he asked me to speak my mind, and at last I confessed that I was feeling quite confused. In voting against the succah I had acted, I said, against my better self but solely to keep in the good graces of my contemporaries, so to speak. Greenspan looked at me sadly, if not with some pity, and explained that contemporaries they were indeed but not my spiritual kin.
“In you is moving something else, Mr. Waxman,” and the words were barely out of him when a tide swept me out into the stretches of my orthodox past. O miserable me, doomed to a divided existence, fed by springs whose sources lie in the deepest clefts of my being but doomed to thirst and wander over the barren soil of Reedville, itself wandering between two worlds —one dead, the other powerless to be born.
“Ki vonu vocharto v’osonu kiddashto mikkol ho-ammim. . . .” My father’s voice reciting the Kiddush in the succah. . . . “For thou hast chosen us and sanctified us from among all peoples. . . .” The wind blows fresh through the chinks of our succah. White candles wave their little flags, hearts of fire standing in liquid pools of paraffin that drips to the base of the glimmering candlesticks. See the faces in the shiny candlesticks! Distorted, crazy, comical! My father’s face is long and thin and the beard is long. My sister’s curls giggle in the light, and my own face is fat in the spread of the brass.
“Was not right for you, Mr. Waxman, to voting against a succah.”
Kiddush is over. The challah is uncovered. A slice is carved. With a dab of honey how sweet to sweeten the New Year in.
“A succah, Mr. Waxman, is from the oldest things we having. In the Bible is Succoth mentioned more from any other holiday. From such things we cannot affoder to throwing away. If is only one Jew and is wanting to eat in a succah, for him is our duty we shall build him one.”
. . . “Blessed art thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who bringest forth bread from the earth . . . hammotzi lechem min ho-oretz. . . .”
“In every which country, Mr. Waxman, where we running from our enemies we carrying with us the Torah. We building shuls; we keeping the Passover; we making a succah. Nothing, nothing important we is chopping off from our religion.”
The aged car’s engine chugged noisily on Reedville’s quiet streets. The panel threw up a dim light. A faint glow from the for ward lights fell on the black pavement. Shadows shrouded us, two Israelites in the womb of man’s civilized contrivance, discussing the same things that our forebears did on the desert shores of long ago.
Not until I was ready to leave him did it suddenly occur to me that Greenspan himself had not voted for the succah. I asked him why and he broke into a smile.
“Is no use to angervate the young people.”
“But what will Gittleson and Itzkowitz think—your friends?”
“Don’t you worry yourself, Mr. Waxman. They knowing like I’m knowing that Gittleson will building a succah. Take mine word. Will be one.”
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When the Holy Days and the festivals were over and October winds had descended on the yellow foliage and paved our Reedville streets with gold, there came the day of reckoning. In an agitated hand, Johnny Smith, our new treasurer, held up three bills. Who, he demanded to know, had been charging to the shul’s account lumber in the amount of so much and so much from the Reedville Supply Company, evergreen branches from the Reedville Nurseries, Inc., and from Main Street Hardware, five pounds of assorted nails.
In vain I looked for Gittleson. Arose Greenspan and said that these were bills for the succah.
“It was voted,” cried Johnny, and he wanted to know if votes had any significance, and if the will of the majority was to be flouted and brushed aside.
Greenspan listened patiently, and when he arose, I felt that we were going to hear things. He agreed that it had been voted, and he agreed that a majority will was important.
“But you shall excuse me, Mr. Smith, if I’m saying you mixing up things. In government and politics is majority counts. But the Jewish religion you don’t voting on. The Jewish religion is, and will be, and was never in the majority. We is a minority elected by God and what we learn to do, we doing.”
“But ninety-two dollars!” cried our treasurer.
“Is a bargain,” answered Greenspan.
“Then pay for it!” shouted David Deitch. “You enjoyed it!”
Never before had I seen Meyer Greenspan go white. His life’s habit is to avoid anger.
“If I’m enjoying or not enjoying makes no difference, Mr. Deitch. The truth is that from this time I’m not enjoying the succah. First of all fell down Mr. Gitleson almost from the top of the succah and is still in bed a very sick man.”
“God wants no mockeries!” shouted Johnny, who was a bit of a firebrand.
Greenspan paid him no attention.
“Second of all was raining all the time terrible and looks like is coming the floods from Noah’s times all over again. I make Kiddush there only the first night.”
“For that we gotta pay ninety-two bucks!” Deitch shouted.
Overcome with anger, it was with great effort that Greenspan turned to David.
“Mr. Deitch! Leave an old man, an old Jew from such as you not liking, to tell you something. Was people who giving their lives away so we can making Kiddush when we wants and when is needing and is required to do. You never hearing what means Kiddush ha-Shem, Mr. Deitch. Means, my friends,” said he, taming away from Deitch and addressing all the young group, “means is a Jew making the highest sacrifice and is dying for his religion. Dies crying the Shema, Hear, O Israel! Dies singing the Oleynu, like died Jews when they defying the Crusaders and the Inquisition. In France in the Middle Ages we was put in a tower and there we was burned alive, but we singing the Oleynu and while the flames is crackling in the night our tormentors they is hearing this song, they hearing us while we dying still shouting our belief in God! When I am making Kiddush I am thinking from such things, Mr. Deitch, and even if is only one man in Reedville as wants a succah is OUT duty he shall having it, and is very cheap only ninety-two dollars, my friends.”
O, the silence in our faces!
Greenspan’s face was still pale, and I saw him laboring to still the beating of his heart.
Again I drove Greenspan home, and he told me that it was quite a fall Gittleson had had. He advised me to call on him, which I did the very next night.
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He bitterly complained of his lot. “Is no good to getting old and be poor, Mr. Waxman. Make money now, while is time yet, because later on nobody cares on you if you living or dying.”
I assured him that he would be up and around soon enough.
“From your mouth to God’s ears,” he moaned, and then he had me sit down by his side.
“Leave me ask you something, Mr. Waxman. You a teacher and a man from which I’m liking. Please explain me. When I’m fixing the church roof and I’m falling down, from that I’m understanding. But when I’m building a succah and is almost finish, why shall God let me to falling down? From this, Mr. Waxman, is I’m very much puzzled.”
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