Pete Hamill - Snow in August

“No,” he said. “Another way, a long way to here.”

Now, for the first time, he gazed directly at Michael’s face. He removed his glasses and rubbed his right eye with a knuckle as if to focus it more sharply. His mouth turned down in a pained way. His eyes watered. Michael wanted to hug the man and ease his pain. But that pain also proved to Michael that he mattered to Rabbi Hirsch, even if he didn’t come to the hospital. He had learned on Easter morning that the rabbi didn’t cry easily.

“They did a terrible thing to you, Michael,” he said hoarsely.

“It’s getting better,” Michael said. “A couple of days ago — in the hospital? — it looked terrible. Right, Mom?”

“Awful.”

The rabbi turned away, clearing his throat, then sipped the tea.

“Three times, I comed to the hospital,” he said softly. “But the police, they don’t let me in.” His eyes moved to the gas stove, then back to Michael. “I thought, maybe a Jew they don’t see here much. But, no, is serious, the police said to me. Big case. Very serious. So I went to Kelly Street and said my best prayers.”

Michael turned to his mother, as if for confirmation.

“I guess the police weren’t taking any chances,” she said, turning to Michael. “Those buggers might have come there to get you.”

Michael stirred with a kind of elation.

“Maybe that’s why Sonny and Jimmy didn’t come,” he said.

“Maybe,” she said, but Michael felt the pressure of words she preferred to leave unspoken. Rabbi Hirsch spooned some sugar into his tea, and nodded when Kate placed a slab of pound cake on his plate. The rabbi glanced again at Michael, and then his eyes drifted to the walls and the framed photograph of Michael’s father.

“This is your husband, Mrs. Devlin?” he said. She turned, following his gaze.

“Yes. That’s Tommy Devlin.”

“Michael, he has the chin and nose of his father, and your eyes,” he said. Michael felt a sudden dull ache, deep in his head, like a memory of someone moving through dark rooms. He sipped his tea.

“That’s what they say,” Kate agreed.

“A good man he must have been,” the rabbi said. “And you, too, Mrs. Devlin. A son like yours is no accident.”

“Thank you,” Kate said, and smiled. “Do you have children, Rabbi?”

“No.”

Don’t stop, Michael thought. Go on, Mom, get it all from him.

“But you were married?”

She heard me!

“Yes,” the rabbi said.

A pause. Michael moved his chair to be able to see the rabbi without staring. The ache eased in his head.

“His wife’s name was Leah,” Michael said. “She died during the war.”

“That damned war,” Kate said.

A vagrant piece of music drifted from the yards. Bing Crosby, singing about faraway places with strange-sounding names, far away over the sea. Then Kate said: “Tell me about her.”

Rabbi Hirsch stared at his tea the way Michael had often stared at the photograph of Leah. Small beads of perspiration appeared on his forehead. He held the teacup in a clumsy way.

“Forgive me,” Kate said. “I don’t mean to be nosy.”

“Nosy, no, no, that you are not. But… a hurt, a bad hurt, maybe better we shouldn’t talk about.”

“Sometimes it’s better to talk about things, instead of holding them all inside.”

He glanced at her and exhaled.

“True,” he said.

His eyes grew cloudy with the past. He stared into the teacup.

“Well… it’s in another life.”

And then in the warm Brooklyn evening, with the sound of foghorns drifting from the harbor through the open window, the rabbi told the story to the widow from Ireland and her American son. And perhaps even to himself.

“We met in Prague in 1937,” he said. “A Zionist she was, full of, how do you say it? Passion? She was from Warsaw. Eighteen years old. You know what is a Zionist?”

While Rabbi Hirsch tried to explain Zionism, Michael slipped again into Prague, a city where automobiles and trolley cars moved, where Rabbi Lowe and Emperor Rudolf once held secret meetings in the fog. Michael could see Leah Yaretzky, slim and dark-haired, a student from Poland, speaking German and Yiddish and a little Czech, her eyes blazing. He stood beside young Rabbi Hirsch as he watched her at a crowded meeting at Charles University, everybody smoking, eyes intense, full of alarm and fear.

“It goes back before that night I seen her first time,” the rabbi said. “It goes back to 1923, when the swastika we saw for the first time, in pictures from Munich,” he said. “Hitler’s name we heard in the wireless radio and the newspapers and the magazines, and in Italy, Mussolini already has came to power. Hitler, a putsch he tried already in November, out of a beer hall, and failed and everybody laughed at him. He’s a Charlie Chaplin, who cares? But some smart people said: He is the future. My father said I would have to choice.”

“Choose,” Michael said.

“Choose. I can become more of a Jew, he said, or I can be no Jew at all. I choosed to be more of a Jew.”

Before the end of the year, his father was dead. Michael could see Judah Hirsch at his father’s hospital bed, promising to become a rabbi. Saw him in school. Studying holy books and listening to white-haired old rabbis explain Torah and Talmud. Working as an assistant in a modern synagogue in Prague. And then it was 1937, when Michael was two years old and his father was still alive and waltzing with Kate Devlin in the Webster Hall. And Michael could see Rabbi Hirsch going to the meeting where he first heard Leah Yaretzky speak.

Her words meant little to him. “A Jewish homeland, in Palestine, it was like a myth,” he said. “Like something in a song. Nothing it meant to me. Jews had been in Prague for a thousand years. We were doctors, lawyers, businessmen. Jews were artists. Jews were writers. Why go to the desert to be farmers?”

But when Leah Yaretzky rose, she did not deliver a polite speech. Nor a sentimental speech. Certainly not a religious speech, and definitely not the kind of speech you would expect from a woman. Michael heard her speaking in beautiful Yiddish, silencing the crowd with talk about Hitler, who was in absolute power now in Germany. Hitler was not a Charlie Chaplin. She warned the audience about what was certain to come with Hitler to all of Europe, including Prague. Michael could hear her, as he stood beside Rabbi Hirsch, and Leah Yaretzky spoke about death and destruction. Her hands were waving as she insisted that they all must leave Central Europe for Palestine, so that the Jews could survive. She talked about Israel. She talked about Zionism. She talked about guns. Rabbi Hirsch had never heard a woman speak this way. Neither had Michael.

“She said if Jews were going to live they must be ready to die,” he said. “And she was right.”

“She wanted to use guns against the Nazis?” Michael asked in a thrilled whisper.

“Yes. And the British too, in Palestine. The British, she said, they never understand anything unless you shoot them.”

“Well, she was right about that,” Kate Devlin said, with a faint smile.

The tea was finished now, and Kate Devlin stood up and went to a closet and took down the bottle of wine from the top shelf. She placed it on the table.

“A glass of wine, Rabbi?”

He peered at the label of the pint of Mogen David.

“You keep kosher?” he said in a pleased way.

“I like the sweet taste,” she said, taking two clean water glasses from the rack on the sink. “Most wines are too sour. But this, I like this.”

“Me too.”

She poured the dark purple liquid into both glasses. The rabbi nodded and sipped, and his tongue grew even looser, the past more powerful, as he told about how he kept returning to the meetings, more to see Leah Yaretzky than to learn about Zionism. In private rooms, after the great meetings, Michael saw her charting the secret routes to Palestine. He saw her handing frightened men and women the lists of contacts along the way. He heard her arranging jobs in Tel Aviv. And he saw her late at night, rushing along the fog-slick streets, holding hands with Rabbi Hirsch, moving closer to him.