Hospital (21 page)

“How’s the hospital?” he asked me, and introduced me to his mother and the aide.

The two women joked with each other, both speaking with strong, if different, accents, and the aide said, “She’s happy here.”

Real or imagined, the easy affection that seemed to bond the women was so disarming I said aloud what I was thinking.

“How did you come to have such a nice mother?” I asked Hikind.

Hikind shrugged and smiled weakly at me. “A lot of people ask me that,” he said. He looked weary and vulnerable. But then, hospital rooms have that effect.

His mother lifted her head. “A writer!” she said, smiling at me. “There’s nothing to write bad about this hospital. You come in. They take care of you. Vat else do you vant ven you come in sick? I came in, they took care of me, and now I’m a new person!”

The Orthodox community had a love-hate relationship with Maimonides. The hospital could never do enough to please the 20 percent of its patients who considered it theirs. Because of the hospital’s historic ties to the neighborhood, the locals had far different expectations for Maimonides than for any other hospital. It was assumed that the food would be kosher, that the gift shop would be closed on Saturday, that the hospital would indicate with a light at the front door that someone had just died so the
kohanim,
Jews descended from the priestly line of Aaron, brother of Moses, would know not to enter the building, because they aren’t allowed to be in a room with a corpse. During the Passover holiday, all soda dispensers were shrouded and blowtorches blasted every last visible crumb of bread in the kitchen. In the gift shop, candy and chips disappeared from the shelves, replaced by Fruit Roll-Ups and kosher-for-Passover potato chips. In the cafeteria, food was served on cardboard trays and bread was replaced by little squares of matzo wrapped in plastic. Thousands of dollars were added to the budget to pay for the exorbitant markup on kosher-for-Passover foods. Yet even this was not enough for the most devout. The Bikur Cholim room, run by volunteers, posted a sign: WE HAVE A NON-GEBROKTS MENU (roughly translated as “
really
kosher for Passover”) for those not satisfied with the hospital’s purification process.

Borough Park was said to have the largest cluster of Holocaust survivors outside Israel; Dov Hikind’s sweet mother was one of them. That history of persecution was often invoked to explain the community’s behavior, but it clouded as much as it clarified, like trying to explain how one mother could produce twins who were opposites, one sweet-natured and responsible, the other squalling and self-absorbed. The Orthodox tended their own through an admirable, elaborate network of charitable and volunteer organizations like the Bikur Cholim (Guardians of the Sick) and Hatzolah, which led to charges of exclusivity and tribalism. But—when nudged—the community was willing to help others. Nishei Cares, an Orthodox charity, supplied the hospital with 130 volunteer doulas, women who offered help to any pregnant Maimonides patient—no matter what her background—during and after delivery.

Jablon accepted his role as punching bag, but he was unable to muster pure altruism. He wanted the acknowledgment from his own people that he felt he received from others. “The Gentiles come in, they love us,” he said. “There’s nothing we can do bad in their eyes.”

He sighed. “The Jews complain,” he said. “That’s how they survive. But they also give. If somebody is in trouble, they will give. A person is in trouble and needs money, even if they don’t have it they will borrow it to give to that family. If somebody needs a baby-sitter, they’ll come in the middle of the night to help you. Someone gets stuck on the highway, they’ll stop the car. But to get a pat on the back! Never!”

The mournful look on Jablon’s face had become a semipermanent fixture. “You go into places, people curse the hell out of you about the hospital,” he said. “They just have that feeling to bash Maimonides for no reason at all.” He invoked the case of the ninety-two-year-old man who was in the hospital for three months with lung cancer. “We kept him going that way for weeks on respirators; no other hospital would do that. For weeks! Passed away. Ninety-two!

Jablon paid a shivah call (Judaism requires a seven-day period of mourning immediately after a funeral). He arrived a half hour before the afternoon prayers were recited and sat down to visit while he waited. One of the sons snapped at him, “Where did the administration learn how to run that hospital? From Auschwitz?”

Jablon didn’t respond but stayed just long enough to participate in the short
mincha
service, one of the three sets of prayers observant Jews were required to repeat every day, to stay in touch with God while removing themselves from earthly concerns. Jablon couldn’t concentrate, though the service took only ten minutes. He repeated the words by rote and then walked out. Another of the dead man’s sons ran out after him. “My brother’s crazy,” he apologized.

Jablon tried not to sort and catalog the hurts, but he couldn’t help it. He recalled a family who transferred a patient to NYU from Maimonides, about the same time Peter Aschkenasy, Brier’s husband, was in the intensive-care unit there after the accident. Jablon was in the waiting room, about to go in to visit Aschkenasy, and saw the deserters. When the nurse came out and told the family members they could visit the patient, but just for five minutes, they meekly obeyed. “They came out like good little children,” said Jablon. “Over here there would have been a war. They would have said, ‘You’re a dictator! Gestapo! The problem is, the administration made this open-door policy. The community has the ownership of the hospital.”

J
ablon was one of the first people I met at Maimonides, back in the early spring. I saw him again at the cancer center’s opening, standing at the back of the tent, scanning the room like a hulking Secret Service man at a gathering of government officials. Occasionally he would seek someone out, lean down—no one was taller than he was—and whisper something, eliciting a nod or grin, and then resume his watchful post.

A few weeks later, before I’d really begun my yearlong stay at Maimonides, Jablon invited me to his son’s wedding to Chaya Gitty Green. (Yitzy Jablonsky had reverted to the family’s name as it was before his grandfather, Douglas’s father, changed it.)

As I had never been to a Borough Park Orthodox wedding, I didn’t know what to expect, so I asked Jo Ann Baldwin, the woman who had initiated my hospital adventure.

How to describe the scene at Ateres Chynka? That was the huge banquet hall on Elmwood Avenue where Yitzy and Chaya were wed on a hot night in July, in an intimate ceremony with fourteen hundred of their families’ closest acquaintances. The guest list covered those who loved Jablon or owed him or who were owed by him. There were representatives from all his communities: Jews of course, but also Chinese, Haitians, Catholics, Muslims, physicians, nurses, firefighters, politicians, and policemen.

If I’m vague, it’s because I don’t remember much. That was my first introduction to a Borough Park scene, and I was overwhelmed. I was married under a chuppah, a wedding canopy, as required by tradition, and had attended many Jewish weddings, but nothing like this. Yitzy and Chaya’s wedding—outsize, noisy, tribal, unabashed—felt authentic, the difference between white-water rafting on the Zambezi River and a ride at Disneyland (though the wedding also felt a little like both). Jablon, trying to please everyone, had followed Orthodox practice of separating men and women but wanted to accommodate the non-Jews and non-Orthodox guests— about half the people there, including much of the Maimonides administration. As people arrived, they picked up seating cards on a table in the entryway. My husband and I were seated at Table 2. Turned out, so was everyone else who wasn’t Orthodox—a few hundred people. Table 2 was an entire subdivision, separated from the rest of the party by a partition. At Table 2, genders could mix.

It was a wild party, music supplied by Yossi Piamenta and his excellent hard-rock Hasid band. They played in the all-male section but were loud enough to be heard in the women’s area and in Table 2. Jablon
had
paid the caterers extra to keep out the shnorrers, scruffy-looking religious Jewish beggars, but they sneaked in anyway and were hitting up everyone for money on the way to the restrooms. Sometime around midnight, just after the main meal had been served, Chief Joseph Fox, police commander of Brooklyn South (and Yitzy’s boss), began dancing with two of his detectives.

About then my husband and I decided to leave. But first I wanted to pay my respects to Jablon’s wife, Edy, whom I had just seen from a distance. I made my way to the women’s section and then was immobilized by the mob of women talking, eating, and dancing, and mesmerized by the sight of hundreds of perfectly coiffed heads, all wearing wigs. Suddenly Jo Ann Baldwin appeared by my side and introduced me to a tiny woman. I told them I wanted to get through to Edy Jablon, but I was stuck. A small hand that felt like a steel clamp took hold of my wrist, and I found myself being dragged away from Baldwin, through the crowd, and deposited in front of the mother of the groom. She smiled politely when I thanked her for inviting me and said good night.

I didn’t catch the name of my cavalier, the tiny, elderly warrior, armored and helmeted in her evening gown and wig, determined to reach her destination no matter whom she had to mow down. It was very noisy, and she had introduced herself in a mumble evocative of Marlon Brando in
The Godfather.

Later, I saw her now and again at various meetings in the hospital. I could see she commanded respect, but I didn’t learn exactly who she was until Alan Astrow took me to a gathering of physicians and rabbis discussing the religious protocols surrounding end-of-life matters. She pursed her lips and shook her head as someone talked about dealing with advanced directives, health-care proxies, and DNRs. “I am very against this idea,” Miriam Lubling muttered in her thick Polish accent. “A doctor should say, ‘May you live a hundred and twenty years.’ The minute you sign, the nurse gives you up. As long as you live, you should get help. Even if you are not Jewish. You have a mother; you shouldn’t sign, to give up. I don’t like it. I don’t like it. Even for goyim [non-Jews].”

In Borough Park there were many nonmedical people, most of them rabbis, who took it upon themselves to refer patients to specific physicians and hospitals. Some of them had become so powerful they could make a doctor’s career and even positively or negatively affect a hospital’s bottom line. Miriam Lubling was in a class by herself. She not only referred patients, she paid cash. If a person in Borough Park needed hospital care and didn’t have insurance, Lubling would shake down local organizations and businesses. Jablon said, “At my synagogue where I pray, they have no respect for anybody. The rabbi walks in, everybody keeps talking. All of a sudden,
she
walks in and everybody stands up.”