Inside, Outside, page 28
“I understand, Yisroelke,” he said. “But if I were on my deathbed, and I had breath enough to say one more thing to you, I would say, ‘Study the Talmud.’”
Not Zaideh’s star quality, I now realize, but Pop’s attitude, kept me going. He had yielded me into Zaideh’s hands, so that I would get more religion than he had the time or the learning to give me himself. Zaideh was a commanding personality, but in his quiet way, so was Pop. For a long time I thought of Zaideh as the one who shaped me most. Wrong. It was Pop, always Pop. All my life long, I have only been trying to be like my father.
***
Once I got used to it I rather liked the yeshiva. The students, though more religious than the Harris Jews, followed big league baseball, played street games, went to movies, swapped copies of Amazing Stories, and talked and talked about girls. Not all of them, no. A few pious ones frowned on idle chatter, but most of the fellows were like me. The pious ones and the rabbis did, however, generate something pretty new to me: guilt, a scarlet thread which ran through yeshiva life.
Take Coca-Cola, just at random. The pious few pointed out that the glue in the corks of Coca-Cola bottles could have come from horses; hence with your Coke you might consume a trace of an unkosher animal. I have no satiric intent here, I report a bizarre extreme just as it was. This contention lent to drinking Coke at the yeshiva a novel touch of bravado, of defying the lightning, and also a tinge of guilt. To these same purists, movies too were “batlonus,” wasting God’s time, when one could be learning another page of Talmud. I knew that film-going on Saturday was wrong, but that a movie on an ordinary Tuesday could be offensive to God was a surprise.
With all that, there was something warm and homey about the yeshiva; no Bronx-Manhattan distinctions, no ham sandwiches in the lunchroom, no fiendish oppressors like Mr. Langsam and Mr. Ballard. The rabbis were gentle scholars, by and large, and we students were all good Jewish boys together, talking Yiddish over the Talmud, and English the rest of the time. This bilingual ambience brought back a feeling of childhood, almost of Aldus Street. None of the fellows were gilded snobs like Monroe Biberman, or jeering skeptics like Abby Cohen. They were my sort, cloistered though they were.
But that was it, in the end. That was decisive. They were cloistered. The yeshiva was a closed world, full of fugitive shadows of guilt, and I had come in from the blithe innocent American open air. I was different.
For instance, upon Zaideh’s arrival, Mama had instituted separate dishtowels: red-striped for meat utensils, blue-striped for milk utensils, a new strict touch. It struck me as going rather far. One Sabbath I was washing up the dishes and my sister Lee was drying. She used the blue-striped towel on the meat crockery. I guess the yeshiva scrupulousness was getting to me, so I called this to her attention. It was a mistake. She was boiling over about something: Cornell, the timer, a tough exam, a romance gone wrong, a quarrel in her clique at Hunter. Something. Lee threw the dank towel in my face, screeched at me to dry the dishes myself, defied God to strike her dead for using the blue-striped dishtowel, and stormed out of the apartment. Lee was growing surpassingly beautiful, but hard to handle.
The incident troubled me. Next day at the yeshiva, I brought it up with my Talmud partner, a good-natured Brooklyn boy with whom I reviewed the lessons; no fanatic, in fact a Coca-Cola addict. “Really, will God strike me dead,” I put it to him, “if I use the wrong dishtowel? What’s the point?”
“Once you start to compromise,” he said solemnly, “the whole thing will break down. You have to stick to the rules.”
There had to be a better answer than that. I decided to approach the Kotzker Iluy.
Now the Kotzker Iluy—that is, “the genius from Kotzk”—was one fellow nobody would have suspected of drinking Coca-Cola. I doubt he had heard of the stuff. In the study hall we worked by a kind of buddy system, preparing our Talmud in pairs; but not the Kotzker Iluy. He studied by himself: a pallid chunky lad, always in black, always on his feet, swaying over a volume on a stand in a corner. He had no buddy, because nobody could keep up with him. They said he was going to finish the entire Talmud before he was twenty, a staggering mental feat. No matter how early you arrived in the study hall, there was the Kotzker Iluy, gesturing away at his book. No matter how late you left, you left him behind. He took no English subjects. He was a lone, privileged, awesome little celebrity.
Zaideh knew the Kotzker Iluy, or had known his father or grandfather. When he first brought me to the academy he introduced us. Like me, the Iluy had a hairless baby face, but his look was adult and somber. He did have a surprisingly sweet shy smile. As he shook my hand with a soft little paw, he smiled and wished me luck in my learning. That’s the yeshiva expression. The students don’t study and the teachers don’t teach. Everybody learns.
Thereafter, if we happened to encounter each other, he was likely to smile and ask me how my grandfather was; all this in Yiddish, of course. If the Iluy knew English—and I suppose he could have picked up the language overnight, if he wanted to—he never used it. Zaideh, too, would inquire after the Iluy, and say I should spend more time with him. But I wasn’t about to make friends with the Kotzker Iluy. He scared me.
I met the Iluy that day in a lineup at the water fountain outside the study hall. I was ahead of him, and offered to yield my place. He wouldn’t let me. I said, “Look, can I ask you a silly question?”
He gently answered, “No honest question is silly.”
As we walked back into the study hall I raised the problem of the dishtowels. Stroking his chin as though he had a beard, he looked at me for a long moment. “What are you learning?” he inquired.
A common yeshiva inquiry. You reply with the title of a Talmud chapter—nothing else, for nothing else ever matters—and it is always the first two or three words of the chapter.
“How the Foot,” I replied.
How the Foot is a section on the law of contributory negligence. The Talmud takes up the case of a herdsman whose cattle cause damage as he drives them along a public thoroughfare. The three words “How the foot” would need a long paragraph if expanded into English. You’ll allow me to skip that, I’m sure.
The Kotzker Iluy’s eyes lit up with pleasure. We were at his study stand. He opened his volume, and stood stroking his nonexistent beard and smiling at me. “How the Foot!” he said. “How the Foot! You’re learning a marvellous chapter like How the Foot, and you worry about dishtowels?”
And he resumed his chant and his sway.
***
Now you remember Julie Levine, the Hebrew school orator who eventually became Judah Leavis, the famous Reform rabbi. Well, as I left the Iluy, whom should I run smack into but Julie! He was a sophomore in the upper school, or college; a tall lean handsome youth, whose small skullcap floated on a thick mane of red-blond hair. I was still short and pudgy, so he recognized me first. “My God, Davey Goodkind!” he exclaimed, looking horror-stricken. “What are you doing here?”
I explained about the Regents averages. He kept shaking his head, waving his hands at me as though warding off an apparition. “No, no,” he said. “You don’t know what you’re doing to yourself. Get out. Get out! This place is hell on earth. Look, come over to my dorm room, Davey. God, it’s good to see a face from the outside.”
“It’s Friday, Julie. I have to get home soon.”
“Don’t I know it’s Friday? Come along.”
A very queer smell pervaded the dormitory. Through open doors I could see students, their faces all coated with a mustard-colored muck, scraping the stuff off with spatulas of bone. Julie Levine took me into his room and, with the door open, ostentatiously stirred up a large bowl of this gunk.
“Some stink, eh?” he grinned. “That ought to keep old Steinbach happy.”
He locked the door, put the bowl near it on the floor, and took from the bottom of his trunk a razor, a shaving brush, and a soap stick. “I have a date tonight,” he said, lathering his face slowly and luxuriously. “Davey, what the hell were you talking about with the Kotzker Iluy?”
Steinbach was an assistant dean, the enforcer of rules, the nearest thing we had to a Mr. Ballard. Razors were forbidden by strict Torah law, so the yeshiva boys shaved with depilatories. Steinbach was known to prowl the dormitory halls on Fridays, sniffing at closed doors for the right smell. The bowl on the floor gave off very powerful fumes, so Julie seemed safe enough. Still, I wished he would hurry.
“Dishtowels, eh?” Julie laughed. “And what did the Iluy tell you?” He began to shave as I repeated the exchange about How the Foot. Rinsing his razor, Julie shook his head, and scraped a long pink swath down his cheek. “The Iluy is okay,” he said. “An iluy’s answer, that was.”
“What? It was no answer at all. The fellow I learn with says that once you break a rule like that, the whole religion starts to fall apart. That’s an answer, at least.”
“Is it? Just ask yourself, Davey,” said Julie, carefully shaving his chin, “what kind of religion is it that you can disintegrate with a dishtowel?”
The door burst open. The bowl went rolling, slopping yellow all over the floor. In the doorway stood Steinbach, a little dark mustached man in a black velvet skullcap, a ring of keys in his hand. Startled, Julie cut himself near his ear. Blood trickled through the white lather as he and Steinbach glared at each other.
“So, Levine!” said Steinbach. “Again!”
Julie sighed, shrugged, and went on shaving. “Oh, go ahead and report me, Steinbach,” he said wearily.
“Shaygets!” said Steinbach. The term means unbeliever, heathen, abomination. The feminine form, with which the world is more familiar, is shiksa. “This, on top of the radio! You’ll hear about this. So will your father. Shaygets!” He slammed the door shut.
“The radio?” I started to clean up the spill with a towel.
“Thanks, Davey. Oh, he caught me listening to the fight last Friday night. That’s why I locked the door. Wouldn’t you know he’d have a skeleton key?”
“Julie, why do you stay on here?”
“Do you think I want to? It’s my father. He’s a trustee. I could raise pigs in this room and they wouldn’t throw me out. God, I damn near cut my ear off. Look at that blood!” He splashed cold water on his face. “Davey, I was valedictorian in my high school class. I had a straight-A average. I was admitted to Cornell and NYU. I was waitlisted at Harvard. And here I am, stuck in this hell for two more years. Don’t let it happen to you, Davey! Get out! Get away from this dishtowel religion!”
39
The Little Blue Books
“Pop, I want to apply to Columbia,” I told my father that night after dinner. “If I’m accepted, I’ll try to get a scholarship. Also, there are student loans.”
We were alone in the parlor. Mom and Lee were talking over crockery clatter in the kitchen. Pop looked at me thoughtfully. “You’re not happy in the yeshiva?”
“I like Talmud, Pop, but I want a Columbia education.”
“Go ahead and apply, then. You don’t have to tell Zaideh, till we see what happens.”
I already had the form. I had only to pull it out and get at it.
Under the question What authors have you read? there was a large white space. I could have put down a respectable list, but I wanted to fill that white space really full. We had in our flat a shelf of the Haldeman-Julius Little Blue Books, which Aunt Faiga had bought to improve her mind. A few readers in their dotage, like me, will recall these booklets. You bought them in Woolworth’s for a dime apiece: slim selections from the great authors of the world, easily swallowed pastilles of culture. I had gone through the lot, for you could read a Little Blue Book cover to cover in fifteen or twenty minutes. Plato, Aristotle, Dante, Spinoza, it didn’t matter, they were all there, hacked down to a few tiny digestible bits.
Well, need I say more? I crammed that white space with the name of virtually every giant of world literature, from Confucius to Kant, from Aeschylus to Shaw. You never saw such a dazzling list of classical authors, except maybe carved in marble outside a library. I asked Lee about citing those Little Blue Books as part of my literary background. She said sure, put down everything, why not? She was chronically sulky at being in Hunter College, she was painting herself up for a date, and she didn’t give it much thought. Neither did I.
Oh, that trip from the Talmudical Academy to Columbia, when I went for my interview! Just a subway ride downtown; but that train was a rocket between planets, between galaxies, between incommensurable universes: in short, between the Inside and the Outside. I passed from the crowded bet midrash full of Talmud chant to the campus of a great American university; to green playing fields, broad lawns, and stately red and gray buildings. The domed library atop a sweep of stone staircases was in itself much bigger than Yeshiva University. The students strolling the brick walks looked to me like extras in a college movie: the boys all spiffy and gentile, the girls all elegant and gentile, their clothes all collegiate and gentile. Not a yarmulka in sight! A gilt Alma Mater statue held out welcoming arms.
But were they welcoming a Bronx yeshiva boy? I went into that awesome library to find out, and I confronted my fate in a small office, in the shape of a pleasant round-faced man with one arm. I didn’t really need further unnerving by a one-armed interviewer, but that was how the ball bounced. My application was on the desk before him. I never did find out how he lost his arm, but it may well have been in hand-to-hand army combat. He went straight for the jugular.
“You’ve done some fine reading, I see, Mr. Goodkind.”
“Well, uh, yes.” Uncomfortable sense of trouble coming. Why pick on that one question?
“Aristotle, eh? Plato. Thomas Aquinas. The Venerable Bede.”
“Uh, yes. Some.”
“Fascinating. What have you read of Plato? The Republic?”
“Uh, no.”
“The Symposium? The Phaedo?”
“Uh, well—” Trapped! Down in an elephant pit, writhing on the spikes, and the interview not one minute old! Clean breast; the only hope. “Well, uh, we have this little blue book of Plato at home, you see, and I read that.”
“Ah, yes. Chaucer. Milton. Shakespeare. Beaumont and Fletcher. Molière. Ibsen. Chekhov. You’re interested in the drama, I see, Mr. Goodkind, as well as philosophy.” He wasn’t being sarcastic, he was smiling in the friendliest way. Just asking.
“Uh, yes, I acted in plays some, uh, in summer camp.”
“Really? Which plays?”
Somewhat demoralized, I truthfully spoke the first title that came to mind. “Jerry Sees the Gorilla.”
“How interesting. Jerry Sees the Gorilla.” Again he scanned my infernal reading list. “Pascal. Hobbes. Montesquieu. Spinoza.” He looked up brightly at me. “What do you think of Spinoza, Mr. Goodkind?”
Anything, anything, to jar the interview out of this track! I said, “I disagree with him.”
“You disagree with Spinoza?”
“Yes. Definitely.”
The one-armed interviewer nodded, regarding me with a tinge of new respect. Not a bad stab in the dark, at that, I thought, disagreeing with Spinoza.
“With what aspect of his philosophy do you disagree, would you say, Mr. Goodkind?”
“Pretty much all of it.”
“The ethics? The theory of God? Be a little more specific, if you can.”
“Well, see, I read this little blue book of Spinoza at home, and whatever was in it, I disagreed with it.”
Enough! You have the idea. He went through that whole accursed list of mine, wringing out of me admission after admission that I had read “this little blue book.” It was a shambles. I was staring down a straight road toward four years of the yeshiva.
“Victor Hugo?”
Ah, a lifebelt to a drowning man. “Yes!”
“Another little blue book?”
“No. Les Misérables.”
He opened wide eyes. “Mr. Goodkind, you have read all of Les Misérables?”
“I have.”
“What do you think of it?”
Well, I launched into a bar-mitzva speech on Les Misérables. I took that book from the opening scene of the bishop’s candlesticks to the death of Jean Valjean, twelve hundred pages later, summarizing the plot, describing the main characters, and expatiating on Victor Hugo’s version of the Battle of Waterloo. If I say so, it was a pretty good last flurry for a fighter out on his feet. The one-armed interviewer contemplated me in a stunned way; then he made rapid notes on my application, while I sat there panting and sweating.
“Mr. Goodkind,” he said very cordially, “you are an unusual, ah, man, if a little young for college. I wish you well.”
He offered his one hand to me, his left. I awkwardly shook it and went out, blinded by despair.
I couldn’t have been less surprised by the contents of the long white envelope I soon received from the Admissions Office. I tore it open with shaking hands. My eyes went right to the horrible handwritten number in the printed form:
Group 1 meant you were admitted; 2, probably admitted; 3, doubtful; 4, “advised to consider other possibilities”; 5 and 6 were the dustbin. I had to start considering “other possibilities,” in Columbia’s chilling words. Maybe Zaideh was wisest at that, I wretchedly wondered, and I ought to go on into the upper yeshiva. Why not? City College meant open defeat; that was where Cousin Harold was applying. Columbia didn’t want me, Manhattan didn’t want me, girls didn’t want me, but I had a stalwart admirer in my grandfather. Why not just stay on in this familiar Yiddish-English world?
