A Book of Great Worth (7 page)

“That would be fiction,” my father said.

“Lies, you mean?”

“No.” My father hesitated. He recalled a definition of fiction he had heard from a well-known novelist during a heated discussion over coffee at a crowded table at the Café Royale in New York. “Made up, yes, but in the service of truth.”

“Exactly,” Heshberg said. “You see my point exactly.”

“I see.”

“Just make them believable,” Heshberg said. “Don’t worry. In a week’s time your desk will be covered with letters. Real ones.”

My father thought long and hard, taking long late-night walks on deserted streets near his rooming house, staring thoughtfully into his glass of beer at the nearby
tavern. As it turned out, the first few questions and
answers he wrote proved to be so sensational they immediately
helped make the column a success, but one of them – the very first – also returned to cause my father some discomfort later on.

For his first column, he wrote this letter:

Esteemed editor,

Please help me!

I am a nineteen-year-old woman, in good health, well-proportioned, attractive, or so men have told me. I come from a good, religious family. My blessed parents and my precious brothers and sisters love me. But now they have threatened to disown me!

I am in love with a Red Indian man, a member of one of the Ohio tribes. He is a good man, educated in a government school, and refined, not a wild savage. He claims that his people are one of the Lost Tribes of Israel, that he is a Jew! I have no reason to disbelieve him.

He knows little of Judaism but he seeks to learn. I love this man and want to marry him and together make a good, devout Jewish family. But my family say he is a charlatan and that I will be dead to them should I follow my heart.

I cannot give up this man, but I cannot bear the thought of losing my family. What should I do?

A distraught reader.

This was followed by a painstakingly careful reply, written with Heshberg’s admonition in mind: “Avoid extremes. Take the middle ground whenever possible. Provoke but do not enrage”:

Dear distraught reader,

Your dilemma is certainly a profound and unique one, though it points to a more universal problem, namely: how shall Jewry interact with the world? Shall we seek to preserve our unique identity, as the Chosen People of God? Or should we attempt to take our part within the larger Brotherhood of Man, in which all are equal?

This is a question for the rebbinim to ponder and debate, for philosophers, not politicians, and certainly not journalists. It is an old debate, and shows no sign of abating. As to your specific problem, we can only advise you to follow your heart, and wish you well.

As he’d been instructed, he finished the letter with the words “With love, Yenta Schmegge.”

My father stood nervously beside Heshberg’s desk as the editor read his typewritten copy, filled with the inevitable XXXd-over typing mistakes. He raised his head, a broad smile on his usually placid face. He had a thin moustache that was several shades darker than his unruly salt and pepper hair, as if he had run the tip of a pencil back and forth against it a number of times.

“Brilliant, Morgenstern. Or should I call you Solomon? This is the stuff.”

On the spot, Heshberg decided to change the title of the advice column from “With Love from Yenta” to “The Wisdom of Solomon,” though the former would remain as the signature. My father went back to his typewriter with his heart soaring.

“The Wisdom of Solomon” was indeed what the column was titled when it appeared the following Monday and in days to come, always prominently dis
played on the second page, above the obituaries, al
though
within the offices of
The
World
it continued to be re
ferred to as “the Schmegge.”

The letter from the woman in love with the Indian ran that Monday and others that my father had concocted in the days that followed, but the week was not even out before the first real letters began to arrive, by hand and then through the post, and, as Heshberg had predicted, by the following week a steady stream of letters was arriving and my father no longer had to concoct lives wracked with heartbreaking dilemmas. Instead, the time allotted to this task was more than taken up by reading through the letters, selecting a couple of good ones for each day and writing the replies.

The replies, he found, were considerably easier to write than the concocted letters, but, though he had felt ambivalent about writing those letters, when they were no longer necessary, he missed them.

Many of the real letters were considerably more mundane, dealing with disputes with landlords, employers and bureaucrats, like the man who wrote to com
plain about the barking of a dog in the night. My father’s replies were instructive (“What is more important, the good will of a neighbour or a few extra minutes of sleep?” he inquired rhetorically), and thus played an important role, as Heshberg frequently reminded him, but they took no imagination or creative powers. To the question from a woman about the proper handling of garbage being put out for collection, for example, he merely telephoned the appropriate clerk at City Hall
and quickly had the answer, just as the letter writer her
self could have done, except that, perhaps, her command of English was not up to it.

“You are the reader’s agent,” Heshberg had instructed.

There were also questions relating to child rearing, education, career choices, immigration, housing and a
variety of other issues as well as, always, those of a romantic
nature. There was never any telling what the day’s mail would bring, and my father was often hard pressed
in producing answers that were both informative and
entertaining, which was what his editor expected of him.

Despite the ordinariness of the majority of the letters the column received, there were always some letters, “gems,” my father called them, that echoed those of his own creation during the first week.

“Most worthy editor,” one man, who signed himself “Tormented and Torn,” wrote, “I have been unfaithful to my beloved wife. Should I kill myself? Confess all and suffer the consequences? Or keep my own counsel and let God deal with me as He will?”

My father was delighted. “My dear Tormented, By all means, put thoughts of suicide far from your mind. But at the same time, mend your ways. Being unfaithful once does not give you licence to be unfaithful again,” he replied in a column that quickly became known and was often quoted. “Bad enough the unfaithfulness to your wife. Do not compound the sin by being unfaithful to God.”

He wrote more, jabbing furiously at the typewriter keys with the index fingers of both hands, but, on consideration, crossed the rest out. He was learning that the best answers were brief. To matter-of-fact questions, factual answers were required, of course. But with questions of the heart, my father was realizing, it was best to be a bit enigmatic.

•••

In matters of the heart, my father already had some experience
of his own. He had been involved in a love affair or two, and his heart had been broken. He had observed envy and jealousies cause rifts within his own family. He himself had been the victim of betrayal by a friend. He was no Solomon, he knew, but he felt confident and stimulated. And he felt the first stirrings of what soon would become a new novel moving within him.

•••

The envelope immediately announced itself as different from most of the others that crossed my father’s desk.
For one thing, it was neatly typed – whereas most he re
ceived were handwritten, often crudely so, and in a mixture of English and Yiddish – and addressed fully to Yenta Schmegge/The Wisdom of Solomon,
The Jewish World
and the complete address. Of even more interest was the return address: Prof. M. E. Bell, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Ohio, Columbus, Ohio. Columbus, my father knew,
was some one hundred and fifty miles away. He examined the envelope front and back and slit it open with interest.

The letter was addressed not to “esteemed editor” or “worthy Yenta Schmegge,” but to “My dear Mrs. Schmegge (or is it Miss?).” Now my father really was interested.

Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Made
laine Bell. I’m an assistant professor of anthropology here at the University of Ohio, in Columbus. Some of your columns have been forwarded to me by a friend in Cleveland, with rough English translations.

I’m particularly interested in the letter from the woman who was in love with the Indian man. Do you recall it? I believe it was one of the early letters, and your reply was indeed Solomonic. I’d very much like to know what course this woman followed. Do you know how I can get in touch with her? I’d very much appreciate any help you can give me.

My father, flabbergasted, paused in his reading to rub his eyes. Then he continued:

As it happens, I will be in Cleveland next week for several days. May I call you at The World? I realize ‘Schmegge’ may be a pseudonym, but I will call and ask for you and hope for the best.

Until then, my very best regards.

The signature intrigued my father. It was just the name, “Madelaine Bell,” with no title, neither “Professor” nor “Miss” nor “Mrs.” Bell, he knew, could be an English name, or it could be a shortened, Anglicized version of a Jewish name like Belzburg or Belowitz. In New York, he knew a number of Jewish men who called themselves Bell. He looked closer at the signature. The hand was feminine, yet clear and somehow bold, he thought. He imagined it was the signature of a woman who was independent – a professor! – who would yield to no man on matters of principle yet might happily yield to the pressure of arms and lips. This was exactly the sort of woman he himself was seeking. He read the letter again and a third time, and studied the signature further. He imagined the author of this letter was an attractive woman – but not wildly attractive – with long brown wavy hair and intelligent eyes that could hold and return a gaze. Assistant professor meant that she could not be too old, and he imagined she would be no more than thirty, perhaps younger.

Of course, what would such a woman see in a man who had dropped out of school after the fifth grade, whose education was mostly self-acquired? A man who fabricated letters for a newspaper column of dubious value? A man who she thought was a woman!

My father shook his head and chided himself for his vanity, laughed at himself. Then he took a look at the date on the letter: it had been written on a Thursday. His eyes flicked to the calendar on the wall above the city desk: it was Tuesday, next week already. He went to the front office and told them he might be receiving a call, and if so to put it through immediately. Should he be unavailable for any reason, ask the caller to come down to the paper and ask for him.

•••

Madelaine Bell turned out to be very close to my fa
ther’s ideal. She was attractive – but not wildly so – with long brown hair much as he’d imagined, except that it was done up neatly in what my father thought was called a French roll. She had an aquiline nose and dark, intelligent eyes, but her thick eyeglasses masked the intent of her look. She was shorter than my father liked, but well-built, and very well dressed in a brown tweed suit, something my father had never seen on a woman. She was, he guessed, about thirty-five, just a few years older than my father. She wore no makeup or jewelry, including no wedding or engagement ring, but her fingernails, he noticed, were long and well cared for, and covered with a purplish-red polish. She didn’t look or sound even remotely Jewish.

They sat across from each other in a delicatessen a block away from
The
World’s
offices, cups of tea in front of them.

“You really thought I was a woman,” my father re
peated, still amazed.

“You’re very convincing,” Professor Bell said.

“So convincing as to fool even someone as learned as you, a professor of anthropology! I’m pleased to know that.”

The professor explained her interest in the correspondent in love with the Indian. She was involved in a study of the integration of immigrant Jews into American society. Intermarriage between races and
faiths of course played a large part. “This woman is ex
actly the sort of person I’m most interested in. I don’t have to tell you the symbolic value of her predicament. In love with an Indian, an original inhabitant of this land. Then there’s the Lost Tribe element, the possibility that, in terms of both faith and ethnicity, there is no
actual intermarriage. This is invaluable. It could be em
blematic for my entire study.” After a moment, when my father didn’t immediately reply, she added: “And the man’s desire to study Judaism, to return to roots he didn’t even know he had...”

My father had thought hard about what to tell this woman. Much as he hated to lie, it was unthinkable to admit the fabrication. “I’m sorry to say I can’t really help you,” he began reluctantly. “The woman wrote no more than what we printed. There was no name on the letter, no return address on the envelope.”

“And she hasn’t been in touch again?” Madelaine Bell asked hopefully.