When the second generation breaks out of the close Jewish neighborhoods of the big city into the untamed wilderness, be it only the backwoods of four-hours-away Vermont, one must expect a certain amount of skeptical qualms on the part of its elders who were raised in a culture that perhaps admired the things of nature, but only at a safe distance. Here S. T. Hecht, who has contributed a number of sketches bearing on the differing (and conflicting) visions of the various Jewish generations in America, recounts what happens when one sets out to domesticate a piece of wild Vermont Eden. With it goes the running commentary of watching (and watchful) grandparents and relatives.
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Some years ago I bought what a real estate man in Vermont described as an abandoned farm in the southern part of his state. Considering that I myself had come a barefoot boy, so to speak, from the foothills of Flatbush, I didn’t do badly; but the price I paid in cash was nothing compared to what it cost me in argument with my relatives.
First, Uncle Harry took one look at the snapshot of my tar-papered beauty in the hills and remarked, “One thing even the hurricanes wouldn’t touch!” Uncle Itzik took a look and declared that my estate very much resembled the place whither poor Dreyfus was banished. Mother’s brother, Uncle Benny, just stared: “A Jew goes to such a place!”
Even Uncle Beryl, whose opinions had the merit of being as strong as they were wrong, minced no words: “Sam, you’re farblonjet—you’re off your base.” Now I could have told Beryl that it was really he who was farblonjet. Beryl sold goods from house to house on the installment plan and was so involved in making a buck that it left him little time for anything else. He told me that instead of my going off to Vermont and burying myself in the wilderness “where you don’t belong” he’d give me the opportunity to work for him during my long summer vacations. “You’ll learn a good business!”
Only Uncle Shloime had an encouraging word. He asked me to explain what were all those huge things sticking up in the fields, and when I told him they were granite boulders he clacked his tongue, showed his teeth in a large smile, and told me that with hard work and some capital I could become the Tombstone King of Brooklyn. “With the prices they’re getting for tombstones you could give up school-teaching altogether!”
But it was with my father and mother that we had our greatest problems—in June when we came to say goodbye, and again in September when we reappeared for inspection.
The first time we took off for Vermont, Mother said, “Suppose something should happen, God forbid?”
“Nothing will happen, Mama.”
“You got two little ones. In the middle of the night for no reason comes God forbid God knows what.”
If they’re really healthy, I said, then they’d be healthier in the good air.
“Who’s talking healthier? I’m talking, God forbid, that with children you never know. How far from a doctor?”
I said I’d find out when we got there.
“You mean you went and bought a place without first finding out a thing like that?”
My father stood by, repeating to himself, “No telephone, no lights, no running water.”
“People have lived there before, Papa.”
“Sure! But not Jewish people!”
“What’s the difference?” I demanded.
My father looked at me. “My son,” he said sorrowfully, “if a young man of thirty-five don’t know yet what is the difference between Jewish people and the goyim, then it’s sad.”
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Fortunately none of the family came to see us during the first summer and we were left to learn the difference unembarrassed. I did not cut a very brave figure the night two bears fought over the carcass of a porcupine I had felled with a club and innocently heaved over an embankment right by the house. Barricaded in the small room we called the kitchen, Sylvia and the children left me to play the irresolute hero at the door of the cabin, posed I’m afraid in the best tradition of the Flatbush neighborhood-house films, sweat oozing out of every pore in me, with a long-handled ax tightly gripped in both my hands. We spoke in terrified whispers in the dark, my ears keener than I ever knew they could be and my sight boring through the black of night so I could almost see the struggle between the two beasts. The snarling that came to me over the hushed night and the swish of their bodies brushing against the bushes that surrounded our small dwelling, and finally the snapping of the dead lower branches of the pines as the bears passed under them and away into the denser woods, still linger with me. I believe I could still detect the presence of a bear by the rank odor that settled into my dilated nostrils during that horrible night as I stood, like an embattled pioneer, at the door, for hours it seemed, wondering what kind of fool I was to have brought myself and my family into such needless danger. For many a night thereafter I slept with an ax at my bed.
That first summer I also learned that it is much easier to talk about clearing an area of unwanted trees and undergrowth than it is to do it. I suppose the Yankee real estate agent who told me with a straight face that in a matter of days I could have a lawn at my door still attends church regularly every Sunday. As for me, I am glad he hornswoggled me into a task that I would never recommend to any city man so ill equipped with tools and experience as I was. Certainly when the end of the first summer came, we were sorry it was over.
Back in Flatbush, Larry and Jerry were hauled off to the barber’s and then thoroughly scrubbed in the bathtub. Finally they were squeezed into city clothes that within a few months seemed to have shrunk.
“My! How they’ve grown!” Sylvia exclaimed, preparing for the role of daughter-in-law.
Larry was all for bringing along to show Grandpa the two snakeskins he had found, also some white porcupine quills left sticking at the end of my cudgel, which in a fit of pioneer exaggeration I had begun to call “the persuader.” He also had a chipmunk hide stretched on a small board.
“Keep them for your Cub Scout Den,” I suggested.
“How’s Grandpa gonna know what we did?”
“Never mind.” I thought of the other trophies we couldn’t show. The tumbled splendor of the hills, the feel of early morning in the woods. The sun drops in like a warm blessing. Every leaf and flower exhales its own perfume and each living thing darts into a new day with delight. The noon is cool and shaded, and as night approaches, it brings along an unmatched serenity.
“Can I tell him about the bears?”
“Positively not!”
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At my mother’s you would have thought we had returned from Mars.
“At last!” she sighed, wiping an eye. “Now I’ll sleep at night.”
She examined both our boys, feeling them for solid content as if she were buying live poultry for the Jewish holidays. Thank God, she said, they both looked good.
“You didn’t had no trouble, Sylvia?”
Sylvia said, “Knock wood!”
“So let be ‘knock wood.’ In my house we say, ‘Thank God.’”
She then sent her searching glance up and down the length of me and turned to Sylvia.
“Him something isn’t right.”
“Why, Mother! He looks wonderful!”
“Wonderful she says yet!”
“Look how straight he stands! He lost fifteen pounds!”
“And by you that’s wonderful, losing fifteen pounds? Go try find some place fifteen pounds in a hurry!”
Papa asked what I had done to get so thin.
“Worked!”
“Crazy people!” Mother cried. “Working on vacation! Who ever heard of such a thing? On vacation you sit on a porch and eat three times a day and fix yourself.”
Indignantly she began to probe at my ribs. After all, whose son was I? In a rising voice she demanded, “For this you buying a place? I don’t understand, Sylvia!”
When my mother said she didn’t understand, she really meant that you didn’t understand. It was quite apparent by now whom she was going to hold accountable for the untimely demise of her son.
“Why you want him to be a farmer?”
Sylvia stared at me, and I saw that I must make again the eternal choice between my mother and my wife.
“Who’s a farmer?” I said. “It’s just a summer camp. No barns to clean. No animals.”
“We had porcupines,” chirped Larry.
“And snakes,” added Jerry, who was not to be outdone.
“Everything that Noah put in the ark,” said my father. He called to Larry: “Did you had a good time, tatele?”
Talkative tatele conveyed the information that I had fallen from a ladder.
“Vey iz mir!” groaned my mother.
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Why Uncle Benny, of all people, should have been the first of the clan to hunt us up during our second summer is beyond knowing. I was still chopping away at the spruce and pine where there was going to be a green lawn some day. Larry was tending a fire of hard-hack, and Sylvia, in blue jeans and a brief top, had just come tearing out of the camp to tell me that the porcupine had come back in under the house and couldn’t I come and please do something or she would go crazy. In the midst of this, so help me as we say, there draws up a car with a New York license plate and at the wheel sits my corpulent Uncle Benny, surveying the wilderness with an expression of amazement such as must have been on Adam’s face when he first walked out of Eden into the vald.
“How did you find us?” I exclaimed.
“I had plenty trouble!” said he, regarding me as if I had made heaven and earth and the wilderness too.
Sylvia dashed back into camp for properer clothes.
“Who could imagine?” Benny said to Molly, and they both stared in holy horror at what they saw. To me he explained that he was on his way to New Hampshire “for the hay fever” when “it had to come to them the idea” of dropping in on us.
“But what is to drop into?” he asked, again surveying our homestead.
Before he was married to Molly he had lived in our home with my mother. Once he took me to the race track where he must have had a good day. On the way out through the gate he patted me and said that I had brought him extra good luck and he peeled off a five-dollar bill from a roll. “It’s yours, Sammy. But don’t tell Mama!” Not until my high school days did I fully understand that the world frowned on Benny’s way of earning a living. But Mother always insisted that he helped many needy people. All I know definitely is that he was good to me when I was a boy and that’s what counts, I guess. Certainly he was not fat and sup pressed in those days. When the mood stirred him he would sing the catchy music-hall ditties he had learned while he was in London, or he’d spill over into humorous cockney chatter while cutting neat economical capers in the best vaudeville manner. But his marriage changed him. Molly took him and his money in hand, and it was, I fancied, out of his blue eyes that I now saw a flash of the old Uncle Benny trying to speak to me, to say that if it were not for Molly, if he were alone, it would be different. But it was a lost effort. Molly was there beside him—Molly, one of those Jewish women with an even shrewder sense of business than her husband’s. She had taken his winnings and invested them in sound properties. In ten years she had made him fat and respectable. Without children to look after, they soon had themselves on their own hands, and were both in need of continuous medical attention. It might have been humorous, if it weren’t so costly and frustrating for them. At my insistence now he struggled out from behind the wheel, breathing hard and looking like a frightened overfed animal at the stark wilderness.
Sylvia reappeared, shook hands with Uncle Benny, and said how nice it was to see him. Then she opened the car door on Molly’s side and said to her to please come out.
“Not for no money!” answered Molly, sternly repressing her full indignation.
“Be a sport!” I cried, but she said she had high-heeled shoes and nylons and refused to budge.
Larry meanwhile offered to lead Uncle Benny into the house, so he could see the porcupine under the floor joists.
“I’ll show you where he’s eating a hole right through the floor.”
He told Benny what a time we had had in the night with that ugly beast.
“Papa tried to poke him and I held the searchlight but we couldn’t drive him out.”
Aunt Molly’s face remained frozen and Benny lost no time in turning his car around. She gave us a cold goodbye, and as the car moved off between two walls of chokecherry and sassafras she whispered something in Yiddish to Uncle Benny which was beyond my knowledge of the language.
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Some three weeks after this came the high crisis of our second summer and perhaps of all our summers. In as pleasant a day as Vermont can give, with white-bellied clouds skimming the tops of the green hills and the sun so warm you’d say it was itself enjoying the pleasantness it diffused, there appeared in a brand new Ford, soundless as if the wind had spirited him up the hill, the only one of my uncles with whom it was possible to exchange some of our enthusiasms.
He was out of his car before I got to him, and unmindful of his surroundings, he stood me right close to his new blue car and said proudly, “Nu, Sam. How you like it?”
I said it was beautiful and shouted to Sylvia to come out.
Shloime was a large person, the tallest of my father’s five brothers, with features in proportion to his body. Everything about him was huge—his nose, his eyes, his forehead. Even his voice seemed to have been given him for the proper fulfillment of his labors, which was peddling fruits and vegetables. I can remember he used to drive up to our house twice a week to sell, as he said, at cost, whatever Mama needed. Only that at times Mother very much doubted if it was at cost. “Your brother Shloime,” she used to complain to Papa, “is making a good penny on me.” “So he’ll grow rich on us,” said my father.
Shloime didn’t even own the horse and wagon he used to peddle with, yet I distinctly recall his name, SOLOMON NUSSENBENZ, on the sides of the wagon. The lettering had the N’s and the Z’s inverted, so that it was plain he had done it himself. He sat under a large striped umbrella that advertised Loeser’s Department Store, the scale at the side of the wagon swinging back and forth as the poor jade hung with bells made her jangling slow way along the quiet streets of Brooklyn. Before Easter Uncle Shloime used to walk beside his horse and holler in that raw hog-calling voice of his . . . JEWRANIUMS! . . . PAHNSIES! . . . loud enough for every woman in Brooklyn to hear him. When he visited our house with his wife and kids my mother would try to tone him down, as if it were her duty to instruct him in what his own wife Bessie had failed to do. “Shloime, you ain’t peddling now!” she would hint, and I could feel that she was being embarrassed before her neighbors. I resented, too, the doubtful tonality of her welcomes to Uncle Shloime and his family. She sounded quite different when Uncle Benny or Uncle Harry, both well-to-do, put in their appearances. “Long may I live! What a pleasure!” But Uncle Shloime was greeted with an equivocal “Nu, nu. Look who’s here.”
As if to repair all these slights I welcomed Shloime with both my hands, and when Sylvia appeared she threw her arms around him and cried, “How wonderful! How wonderful!” until Shloime’s big features were all doubled up with bright wrinkles and delightful smiles.
After the business of the new car was out of the way, I asked after Aunt Bessie.
He had driven her to Sharon Springs for the baths, he said, but on the way back—“I says to myself if I’m already in Sharon Springs, why shouldn’t I not drive to see Sam and Sylvia in Vermont? So I took a map and I drove.”
He described his solitary journey over the curving and precipitous mountain roads and the wee little villages they suddenly come out upon. He had stopped to inquire at lonely farmhouses where children run and hide at the sight of a stranger, at country stores so settled with ancient merchandise they might easier qualify as museums than places of business, at loggers’ camps where chained dogs chafed to get at him and only some half-deaf creature in the guise of a human being quieted their howling and replied to his question in a language he found difficult to understand. He traveled on and on through roads that seemed to run through forests, he said, until he felt that he was approaching the end of the world.
“But only tell me one thing. Where did you find such a place?”
Good-naturedly he looked at our small camp and said, “So that’s Porcupine Hotel!” as if he had heard all about it and in detail from Uncle Benny.
I replied that he was now looking at the only hotel in this wide America that did not practice discrimination, not only between blacks and whites or Jews and Christians, but between man and animals.
“Porcupines Welcome!” I pronounced aloud as if reading from a sign hung over our camp.
“And how’s for Jews here?” asked Shloime, searching the solid ranks of green that circled up all around us.
“For Jews here is bad,” I said, and told him that it was with much backache and other pains that we had plowed and planted a small garden in back of the house.
“We’ve got squash and cucumbers and lettuce and carrots. Even a few beans.”
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Shloime was eager to see the garden, and when we were there he kneeled down among the rows and admired each of the growing things in their flowering and tiny birth.
“So this is how pickles begins!” he said breathlessly, looking a little sadly at the yellow cucumber flowers and the prickly little things clinging to the vines. He had been handling vegetables all his life and never seen them in their first tenderness.
“So why is bad for the Jews here?” he continued, straightening up, full of admiration at what we were trying to do for ourselves and our children with our own hands.
Complainingly I told him that there were deer about everywhere and that they went into all other gardens and destroyed everything. “But they won’t come into ours!”
“So it’s anti-Semitic deer,” said Uncle Shloime.
“But on the other hand,” I said, “a porcupine has been keeping us up nights and chewing away at the floor and undermining our camp.”
“So again anti-Semitism,” declared Uncle Shloime, and he wanted to know if it was the same anti-Semite of the year before. We laughed heartily, but fulfilling nonetheless the Jewish need to discuss anti-Semitism no matter where you find yourself.
The foreground of our house had been considerably cleared since Uncle Benny’s visit. Uncle Benny, he remarked, had exaggerated the condition of things.
“How much land like this you got?” he asked, pointing toward the woods.
I told him it was close to two hundred acres. He looked puzzled.
“I’m only a peddler, Sam, not a farmer.”
So I tried to tell him what approximately was included in the size of an acre, but he said if I told him about how many trees we had he would have a better idea. Not too sure whether his tongue was against his cheek, I replied that I hadn’t finished counting all my trees yet.
“Would you say you got a million?”
I hesitated and said that there might be that many.
“So why do you need so many trees, Sam?”
At a loss how to answer, I agreed that I did have a tree or two too many for ordinary comfort and that I was trying to reduce their number by at least the few I had been chopping down right in our own door yard. He seemed to be satisfied, and then said that all his life he had never been in a woods and that he would like to see big trees.
“Real big ones!”
Meanwhile he made a rapid calculation of the average worth of a tree and came up with the astounding conclusion that some day I would be a millionaire.
“A dollar a tree times a million trees is a million dollars!”
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I tried to explain—we were now on the fringe of our woodland—that the best of the timber had been cut off before I had bought the place. We came to a pile of sawdust not far from our camp where the sawmill had been stationed. Shloime stopped short and in a voice full of astonishment and admiration cried, “Who gave it to you?”
“Gave what?”
“All that sawdust!”
Suppressing my desire to laugh, I said that it had come with the place.
“That’s worth a fortune!” he cried. “You know what you can do with sawdust?”
I confessed that I didn’t and he began telling me that in Germany, where nothing is wasted, they were compressing sawdust into wood brickettes to burn in fireplaces.
“You could sell ’em a dollar a dozen!”
“Don’t forget the matzeves, the gravestones, from those boulders, Shloime. There’s another fortune in that!”
He looked doubtfully at me, this financial wizard who turned everything he saw into solid gold.
We came to an old maple, gnarled and twisted and pruned by wind and lightning and still gigantic as it stood unfit for lumber amid the slash and devastation the choppers had left behind. Shloime backed away from its enormous bulk and asked me for an estimate of its age. I guessed about two hundred years.
“A man is like nothing,” he philosophized, sadly staring up into its tower of green. I showed him a tall tulip tree and he bent way back to see its top. Before a young birch he went into an ecstasy as he felt the soft smooth bark. His hand fondled the trunk while he gave voice to all the traditional Jewish sentiments about nature, with which he was totally unfamiliar, so that for a moment he appeared to be the symbol of our own Jewish people struggling to return to its forgotten heritage. But so strong was the habit of a lifetime, that everything he saw he valued first for the money it could bring in, and only afterwards for its own self as a force in the creation from which we as Jews had been separated for ages. Even the wild mushrooms on the floor of the woods did not escape his eye, and while he remarked on their color and bizarre configuration, he also said that if I learned to tell the edible from the poisonous I could make myself a tidy sum of money during the summer.
“The price of mushrooms is something terrible!”
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Our walk through the woods came to a sudden end when I heard Sylvia and the children calling. Their voices, loud and insistent, at first were frightening, although they themselves did not sound frightened. Nevertheless I doubled my pace, warning Shloime to watch his footsteps or he’d be snagged by branches of trees lying under the bramble that always springs up in cut-over woods. We soon saw Larry running toward us, who told us with great excitement that a woodchuck had been trapped in our garden.
“He’s ruining everything, Daddy!”
Shloime wanted to know what was a woodchuck and Larry was too excited to explain.
“He’s caught by a leg and he’s dragging the log up and down the garden trying to get away.”
We reached the garden and saw Sylvia standing on the log now and the worried animal, in a steel trap that I had nailed to the log, tugging at the chain and circling in an effort to escape.
Larry hollered he’d get the “persuader” and, dashing off to camp, returned with the long wooden club which Uncle Shloime regarded with horror.
“What are you going to do, Sam?”
“Kill him!” shouted Larry with barbaric delight.
“But what did he do you, that poor thing?” pleaded Uncle Shloime.
With cudgel upraised and my heart pounding I advanced on the trembling marauderer. Its accusing eye, filled with anger and fright, implored me for its life. But as if informed by instinct that its end was near it first poured forth ineffectual screeching noises that were supposed to terrify me, and failing to stop me it suddenly grew rigid as if in death; dying, it would seem, in order to avoid the agony of death, but inwardly still aware that it still must die.
“Give it to him on the snout!” screamed Larry.
In a harsh succession of needlessly violent blows I pounded out the life of the creature till the blood spurted from its eyes and the legs stopped twitching.
“Enough! It’s enough already!” cried Uncle Shloime and turned away from the sight. I dropped the club, but Larry rushed to pick it up and swinging at the carcass he screamed in a voice that did not resemble that of the gentle child I had raised in Flatbush, “There! That’ll teach you to eat our garden!”
Suddenly our little Jerry broke into a loud sob.
“You’ve killed him! You’re bad!” he screamed while his small fists beat at my legs.
I bent down to raise him but he ran off still sobbing into the house where he hid on his bed. Sylvia tried to soothe him, explaining that the woodchuck had been eating and destroying our food. But he kept on crying.
Uncle Shloime stood by and sighed. “This killing business,” he said. “That’s what I don’t like.”
He removed his wrist watch, his gold-framed sun glasses, and his fountain pen and bestowed them on Jerry who accepted all of them, quieted down, and fell asleep.
When I went back to free the limp body of the woodchuck from the trap in the garden, Uncle Shloime stood over me.
“God gives life,” he solemnly began.
I interrupted him, saying that I knew what he was going to tell me.
“But Sam,” said he, “on account of a few vegetables you make yourself into an Esau.”
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In those days before the war, I found it a bitter business making my own incursions into the kingdom of living creatures and deciding for myself what was needful killing and what was needless. The first time I brought my cudgel down on a porcupine, I felt just as miserable as Uncle Shloime, and it was a long time before I realized that if I lived in tranquillity it was because people before me had subdued the wild life. For each animal that I killed I had to find a new justification. It was the same even with snakes that were not harmful. Sylvia couldn’t stand the sight of them.
So I felt still impelled to explain to Uncle Shloime, as I did to myself, how at the beginning of each season it was necessary to clear the ground anew and to do a certain amount of killing to make the place habitable, to restore us, so to speak, to our place. I may also say for myself that at no time did I ever feel that the camp and all our land really belonged to us. I couldn’t hook my thumb under my vest and crow that it was mine. You just couldn’t. It was too overpowering. When we arrived early in the spring, with the dogwood and the few old fruit trees in bloom, everything seemed to be enacting a secret rite at which we felt like intruders. Not until I had chopped and hacked and shot for a week straight did we seem to wrest from nature the right to become again a part of the landscape and the life. Not until I came back from the war, where I had been taught the scientific killing of human beings, did I learn to destroy life without being each time deeply disturbed. I can recall how I used to sweep up the dead flies and spiders in the camp and how it affected me with a strange sense of mortality to find them by the hundreds on the window sills. Hunter and hunted both were dead from the winter’s kill.
“But if you believe that life is holy,” argued Uncle Shloime.
“In the woods and on the farm,” I said, “the only thing holy is your own life and the life of your family. Everything that threatens you or devours what you yourself need, forfeits its existence.”
“But it says thou shalt not kill.”
“That means wanton killing. Even hunting is necessary. If you lived here you would see it.”
I did not tell him the story of the bears for fear he would not sleep that night.
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But he did not sleep anyway.
During the night I was aroused by the sawing of the porcupine. I lay still, hoping it would not wake Uncle Shloime.
“Is that it?” he asked, quite amiably.
Our conversation, soft to begin with, soon woke up Larry, and that young Indian never learned how to suppress himself. Sylvia woke. If I didn’t get rid of that pest below, she warned, she’d go crazy.
“Three nights now in a row,” she cried. Her disposition, I must say, has never been as pleasant in the middle of the night as in the noon of day.
“So do something, Sam!” Uncle Shloime urged.
My rifle was useless and my club too short. Larry wanted to crawl in under the house but I wouldn’t hear of it.
We beat on pots and pans and stomped on the floor. Then we went out and Larry played the long searchlight under the joists and kept hollering that he saw him. Finally I said to Uncle Shloime that if he would hold the cudgel ready and if Larry would shine the light under I would try to shoot and perhaps frighten the porcupine away. Uncle Shloime took up the cudgel, and said “Shema Yisroel,” and asked what he was to do with it.
“Kill him!” shouted Larry.
The shooting did dislodge the pest. I shouted to Shloime to go after him, but it was dark except where Larry threw the light. I myself didn’t dare to fire in the dark and Uncle Shloime didn’t seem to know how to strike a porcupine. He got lots of advice from all sides.
“I see him! I see him!” he hollered and brought his cudgel down on a stone.
The camp became quiet again and we all fell asleep, only to be roused again toward dawn. This time Shloime grabbed the cudgel without being asked.
“I’ll kill that rotten face!” he uttered with surprising determination.
We repeated our attack, and this time, with daylight coming in, we rid ourselves of our nuisance.
When it lay dead Uncle Shloime stood mournfully and looked at the hedgehog.
“So that’s a porcupine,” said he, and he thanked God that in Flatbush they didn’t have porcupines.
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To my family in Brooklyn Shloime brought back glowing reports of our life in Vermont, and although my father and mother never came to see us, their anxiety was reduced. We continued coming to Vermont every summer until the war put an end to my long vacations. In North Carolina, where I trained, my Vermont experience came in handy in talking to the boys from Kentucky and Tennessee. I even met up with a West Virginian who had chopped logs for a pulp company not far from our camp.
It was five years before I was back home, and during all that time Sylvia never could get enough gasoline coupons together to drive up with the boys. We were quite excited about going back, and during my first spring vacation from school the family piled into the jeep. Expecting to find the place all overgrown we arrived with axes, saws, a new 22 rifle for Larry, and a 30-30 for me.
Never shall I forget the shock and the groan of horror and bitterness that rose up from all of us. Nothing but the chimney was left. The old iron stove stood rusty and split in the open, and the frame of our icebox was twisted. The metal beds were twisted and the wood lay charred in a circle. Hunters must have broken in and overheated the flues.
We drove back in heavy-hearted silence.
“Heaven be blessed!” cried my mother on hearing the news from us.
Never before had I been rude to her. My father moved in between us.
“You still don’t understand, my son,” he said quietly, and added that Jews had made their choice long ago.
“It’s either Esau or Jacob, and we have chosen Jacob,” he said mildly, and then without reproof but in a voice that grew steadily vibrant he assured me that because I had chosen to be like the rest of the goyim God was against it.
“We are a chosen people,” he said with mounting fervor.
“Chosen my eye!” I cried in a voice that he must have thought blasphemous. “If the hunters had not broken in!”
“God sent them,” he said firmly. “God sends everything.”
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