All Who Go Do Not Return (16 page)

The boys regarded me warily, as if assessing whether this plan was for their benefit or mine. They were used to being scolded and slapped and thwacked, not awarded points.

For the next two weeks, I held not a rod or a wire but a little green-and-yellow notepad, in which I marked down which student earned points for his team or incurred a penalty. In class, during prayer time, for passing the exams, for showing up on time—everything mattered. Instead of scolding or thwacking, all I had to do was get my notepad out. When Chaim Greenfeld whispered something to Shea Goldstein during
mincha
prayers, I could see Shea’s eyeballs bulging and his words hissing from between clenched teeth, “Shh, the rebbe is marking points!” Chaim Greenfeld quickly set his eyes back on his prayer book.

Mordche Goldhirsch was pleased. “I don’t know what you’re doing, but you clearly know how to hold a classroom,” he said. He knew from looking through the small window in the classroom door that the boys were uncharacteristically well behaved for a substitute. And so he offered me a regular position, teaching Mishna to fifth-graders from four to five each afternoon.

This was unlike the Gemara, the elaboration on the Mishna, which could go on for pages about why a certain law was the way it was and how it was known. The Mishna was both easy and dull, a straightforward compendium of laws.

That summer, we studied the laws of Yom Kippur as they were practiced in Jerusalem’s ancient temple. The children learned that not only must the high priest have a deputy on call in case he becomes disqualified (“In case he’s had an impure incident”) but, according to Rabbi Judah, he was also given an extra wife, in case his wife died, and he needed a backup to fulfill the commandment: “He must atone for himself and his household.”

I gave quizzes of multiple-choice answers, with the wrong ones playful and silly and obviously wrong, and the boys loved them. When they studied well, I took them on “hikes,” strolls in the nearby woods until we came to a clearing, where we’d sit in a semicircle and I would hand out half-melted ice cream pops and tell them stories of rabbis who healed the sick, spoke with the dead, powwowed with angels, and battled demons, often all at once. On occasion, I’d split the class into teams for an impromptu “Mishna Bee,” and toss candies for correct answers. Soon the children were paying attention. Sometimes too much attention.

I hadn’t prepared for this last one. How was I to explain “service of the bed” to ten-year-olds?

I moved on to the next passage:
A king and a bride may wash their faces—

“You skipped one!” Berri Neuberger cried.

“What?”

“You skipped one. You didn’t explain
tashmish hamitah.
”

I pretended not to understand what he meant, but he persisted. “There are supposed to be five things. You explained only four.”

“That last one isn’t important,” I said. “It won’t be on the exam.”

Berri narrowed his eyes, as if he were the teacher and I were the student, and he was calling me out for bad behavior.

Later, after the bell rang and the boys grabbed their bags and ran noisily to join the throngs of students crowding the corridor, I ran into Mordche Goldhirsch.

“Berri Neuberger wanted to know the meaning of
tashmish hamitah.
”

“Nu?”

“I was evasive. Told him it won’t be on the exam.”

Mordche thought for a moment. “Next time, just give him a really stern look, like this.” He narrowed his eyes, exactly as Berri had done to me in class. “You give him the kind of look that says, ‘Don’t
ever
ask a question like that again.’”

I looked at Mordche skeptically, but he gave me a knowing look and nodded gravely.

“He’ll know. He’ll understand. You understand?”

Substituting and teaching Mishna in afternoons wasn’t what I had in mind when I’d thought of teaching, but there seemed to be no opening for a full-time position. Every few weeks, I’d stop by Mordche’s office to inquire.

“Which grade did you want to teach again?” he would ask, as if he hadn’t asked the same just last week and I hadn’t told him that any grade was fine. I had no preference. I wanted a steady position, a paycheck, even the despised vouchers. We were still behind on our rent, still getting termination notices from the gas company. Freidy was beginning to walk and needed shoes. Even the vouchers eventually found their uses, and now we owed hundreds more at the grocer’s.

“Nothing yet,” Mordche would shake his head, shuffling papers on his desk or fiddling with the photocopy machine. “I’ll let you know if something changes.”

Mordche met me in the hallway one day after my Mishna class. He wanted to know if I was interested in attending a meeting.

“A meeting about what?”

He seemed surprised by the question, as if meetings were to be attended for their own sake. He waved his hand dismissively. “Just a meeting. Gavriel Stein has some ideas.”

The meeting was held on the first floor of the school, in a room that served as a conference room for village officials and, each Wednesday morning, as “village court,” where a judge ruled on traffic violations—rolling through stop signs, or parking overnight on snow days, or driving down Washington Avenue at seventy-five miles per hour to get a last-minute mikveh dip before the siren announced the start of the Sabbath.

Now we sat seven men in the room, six Mishna teachers along with Gavriel Stein, the same one who’d had us fill out
rezemays
a few months earlier.

“The government,” he said, “has a program for tutoring students.” Title something or other. “They’ll pay thirteen dollars an hour.”

“Thirteen dollars an hour?” all except me asked in unison. The others seemed to think the amount was pitiful. I thought it sounded just fine. We were getting only nine for our Mishna classes.

“Thirteen dollars an hour is what the government pays. You can set your own rate and get the rest from the parents.”

In the corner, a large American flag hung on a pole, incongruous behind this assemblage of black hats and long coats.

“Is this a scam?” I asked.

Gavriel gave me a wary glance. “Not at all,” he said. “The rebbe doesn’t allow any more scams.”

There’d been problems in the past, with fraudulent use of government programs. Four men, including Gavriel himself, were given prison sentences, ranging from several months to six years. Three other men had fled the country to avoid prosecution. We’d learned our lessons.

Gavriel looked around to make sure we all understood.

“Because this is a government program, you’ll have to fill out progress reports,” he went on, looking around at our bemused faces. “For each student, you fill out a sheet describing how the student is doing. You’ll need to be creative. Write how the student is doing in math, or in English, or social studies—”

“We’re tutoring math and English and social studies?”

Gavriel looked at me as if I were a child. “Of course not,” he said. “But the government doesn’t pay for religious studies.”

I looked at the other men sitting around the table, but none of them seemed concerned. I was terrified. In my mind, I could see it all unfold. A knock on the door at dawn. Handcuffs. An ill-fitting prison jumpsuit.

My options, however, were few, so I signed up for the program. Five boys each day, all between the ages of nine and thirteen. Laws of returning lost objects. Laws of oxen falling into pits in the roadway. Laws of the Sabbath. Laws of oxen goring cows. Laws of prayer. Laws of oxen goring cows fallen into pits during prayer.

And then I wrote the progress reports:

Mendy is improving his multiplication but still has trouble with division. Chezky’s spelling seems to have worsened.

Yanky’s penmanship has vastly improved due to the practice worksheets.

There were no multiplication tables, no practice worksheets, and no improvement or deterioration in any of those subjects. I was handing in phony progress reports, with my signature, getting paid for something I wasn’t doing.

“How can we be doing this and not be concerned?” I asked my friend Chaim Nuchem, who occupied the tutoring room next to mine with his own rotation of students. But Chaim Nuchem only shrugged.

“You think they’ll come looking?” he asked.

I looked at him dumbfounded. Hadn’t we learned? People were going to prison. Others were fleeing. Families had been destroyed. The community shamed in the papers. Clearly, someone came looking.

Chaim Nuchem laughed. “Those guys took millions. We’re making thirteen dollars an hour. You think the government cares?”

Still, I hated it. I hated that we relied on the government for so much. I hated that we skirted, just barely, the edges of legality. That we made sure never to report earning one cent more than the official poverty level so that we could keep our food stamps and our Section 8 and our WIC checks. I hated that the economics of our village were such that all matters of finance were bound up in deception. “On the books or off the books?” was the big question for every new job.

And still, the money was never enough.

It was a balmy night in mid-autumn, the night of Shmini Atzeres, at the end of the Sukkos holiday. It was nearing midnight, and the streets were empty. I was on my way to the rebbe’s Great Sukkah. The last tisch of the holiday was to begin in one hour and would go until morning. Gitty and I had finished our dinner early, and since there was time, I took a stroll down Washington Avenue. The words “Yeshiva Avir Yakov,” in gold Hebrew letters across the front of the yeshiva building, glittered against the moonlight, and I thought I’d drop in at the sukkah behind the yeshiva, where students and guests would be having their dinner. I would find a friend for a chat until the tisch began.

I heard the rush of a car in the distance. I wondered who might be driving at this time, an act forbidden on the holiday. Perhaps it was one of the Hatzoloh volunteers, rushing to tend to a heart-attack victim, a child burned from a pot of spilled chicken soup, or perhaps a woman in premature labor. Or maybe it was one of the Haitian taxi drivers from Spring Valley, come to drop off a hospice employee. Or, there was always the chance it was a driver lost among the winding suburban roads. That’s probably it, I thought. They’ll figure it out soon enough, when they head down Washington Avenue and reach the cul-de-sac at the end. Maybe the driver would need directions, I thought, and slowed my pace to look back. The car was out of sight, but I could hear it coming toward the bend in the road, and I stood still to watch for it.

When it appeared, it came zooming past the bend, heading straight toward me. Speeding was dangerous in the village: the roads were filled with children, mothers with strollers, and the elderly—especially during holidays, when people would stroll freely in the middle of the roadway.

I jumped to the curb and held out my arm, waving it slowly up and down.

“Slow down!” I shouted. But the car didn’t slow down; it only sped up, and in a flash, as it passed, I heard shouts and saw the angry, hostile faces, through the windows. Then I heard it: “FUCKING JEWS!”

Wild laughter. And then they shouted again, even louder this time, now from several yards down.

“FUCKING HASIDICS!”

I froze. I’d heard tales of this. From the very beginning, when the village was founded, there were those who sought trouble, and cries would ring through the village: “Shkutzim!” Vermin. Non-Jewish hoodlums. There would be violence, lessons taught, fists and blows and broken bones, the meek sensibilities of our ancestors making way for a people who no longer looked away in the face of aggression. I had just such an incident before me now, and I stood facing it alone.

“Shkutzim!”

I tried to raise my voice to yell, but my lungs betrayed me, as if insisting that they would not rise to the occasion. My heart pounding, I looked to the windows of the yeshiva, but they were dark, no sign of life at this late hour. From the homes across the street, I could hear fathers and sons singing, up-tempo melodies.
And thou shalt be joyful within thy festival.
Booming masculine voices mingling with young sopranos. Hands clapping vigorously, the sounds of cutlery banging against a table in rhythm.

I took a quick deep breath.

“SHKUTZIM!”

It came out louder this time but still felt ineffectual. I’d never before had to yell loud enough for my voice to reach inside people’s homes, through closed windows and locked doors.

“SHKUTZIM!” This time, heads appeared in windows and doorways. Several people came running from the yeshiva’s sukkah. The car was now almost at the end of Washington Avenue, its taillights still visible in the distance.

“SHKUTZIM!” I was no longer alone. My shouts were echoed by the dozen or so men who had gathered, and others were now running from each direction. Within moments, the call reverberated through the streets, and I no longer needed to shout. Other men now cried, angrily, hysterically, faces red and eyeballs bulging, as more and more men came running, some with their shtreimels and their
bekishes
, others in their shirtsleeves and yellowed
tallis katans
, miniature prayer shawls flapping vigorously in the night. Women and girls appeared in the windows and doorways all around. Here and there, an intrepid girl ventured to the edge of a lawn.