Stanley Elkin - The Rabbi of Lud

We couldn’t tell her to go out and find a friend to play with. She was Lud’s only living child. And that’s when it occurred to me that my daughter was terrified of her hometown. And how I came to speak to her of the history of the place, to explain its odd sociology, and even, to get her out of the house and out into what we had for a world, to go strolling with her in the graveyards, reading the headstones with her and, when they belonged to people I had buried, trying to explain, to the limited extent I could, what I knew of them, their families, trying to show Connie that they weren’t just dead people, the abundant ghosts that haunted her imagination, but as real as the kings and heroes whose histories she’d been taking notes on in her copybooks all year.

“Dov Peretz Fish, Daddy?”

I peered at the dates on the stone. “1821 to 1847, Connie?”

“Sorry. Samuel Shargel. Ira Kiefer.”

“There was a Shargel in the slipcover business. Was his name Samuel?”

“1973.”

“Too early,” I said.

“You weren’t here in 1973?”

“I was here. The Shargel I’m thinking of couldn’t have died more than two or three years ago. They’re probably related. What was that other name?”

“Ira Kiefer?”

“Ira Kiefer, Ira Kiefer.”

“1982, Dad.”

“Oh, sure,” I said, “ I ra Kiefer.” I shut my eyes. “Beloved, loved, oved, ed … Brother! Beloved brother of … I forget their names. There were four boys. In their forties, in their fifties. Ira was the youngest. A single man. Divorced, I think. I could be wrong about that, but I don’t recall any surviving children. There were nephews and nieces. That’s right, I remember. That’s what it was. He was their uncle. He had all these nephews and nieces. There must have been at least ten of them. Mom told them that if they had their bathing suits they could drop by afterwards for a dip. Sure,” I said, “Ira Kiefer.”

We’d leave little stones on the tops of the monuments. “Out of respect,” I told her, “a signal to the families that others have been here.” Though once in a while I’d catch my daughter take six or seven stones at a time out of the deep pockets in her jumper where they rattled like bones, and carefully arrange them on a gravestone, ordering them in rows or neat bunches that were meant, I supposed, to suggest — not to the family but possibly to the dead themselves, fooling the dead themselves — not just individual callers but whole groups, making it up to them, placating the dead for their isolation and loneliness.

“Lewis Elkins,” my daughter said.

“How is it,” I asked, “you never read off the names of females?”

It was true. The thought of the distaff dead was more troubling to her than any idea of a dead man could have been. I assumed she was only protecting herself. For Connie, Lud was a bog, a heath, a moor. She didn’t know about her brother and had only the examples of her complacent mother and unborn sisters. Her ghosts were girls.

“Jacob Heldshaft,” Connie said, “1937 to 1968.”

“Who?”

“Jacob Heldshaft, 1937 to 1968.”

I read the details on the headstone.

The slipcover Shargel had been a myth. Also Uncle Ira Kiefer, but Jake Heldshaft I knew. He’d been one of my old minyan buddies from the Wolfblock contingent back in Chicago, and I hadn’t known he was buried in Lud or even that he’d died. A man by dint of bar mitzvah, his voice had never changed and he was still singing soprano at fifteen and sixteen and seventeen when he went off to college and when I last saw him. He was our songbird — whom he somewhat resembled with his short, stubby body and puffed-up chest — our thrush. Jake Heldshaft, the Jewish Nightingale. Jacob Heldshaft, the Puffy Pisher. The Kike Canary, we called him, and Hebe Heldshaft, the Yiddish Mockeybird. And hid in the bushes to spy on him. Ambushing him in Jackson Park where we held imaginary binoculars to our eyes or caught each other up short, pretend blocking each other’s way with an extended arm and hushing each other with great, exaggerated pantomime as if we really were birders and Jake some rare, prized sighting. Calling after him when he broke cover. “It’s Heldshaft,” we’d call, “it’s Hebe Heldshaft, the Puffy Pisher!”

“Oh, Connie,” I told my little girl, “here was a man! I knew him, darling! He was your daddy’s pal in Chicago in the old days when we were boys. What a voice he had! I didn’t know he died, I hadn’t heard. In sixty-eight? Was he killed in Vietnam? But what could he have been doing there? He’d have been too old to go for a soldier, though he might have been an officer. What a waste, what a waste! A voice like that! A gift straight from God, as your mother might say. Stilled now forever!”

My voice, more suspect than ever our old falsetto mimicry in the park when we called out after Hebe Heldshaft, the Yiddish Mockeybird, hung about my ears. And right then and there I let loose with an impromptu Kaddish and sent my solo keening, meant for Jake Heldshaft, who, could he but hear it, might have broken cover one last time and run for his life, out through the air of the Jersey summer and across the eternal resting places of the strangers, Dov Peretz Fish, Sam Shargel, Ira Kiefer and Lewis Elkins.

“We miss you, Jake,” I told him. “Norman Sachs, Ray Haas, Donny Levine, Billy Guggenheim, Sam Bluweiss, Marv Baskin, Stan Bloom, Al Harry Richmond and myself miss you,” I said, calling off his colleagues for him from Wolfblock’s long-ago, first-team minyan.

Connie stared at me, nervously paying out stones onto Jake’s monument like someone who does not know the currency of the country in which she finds herself.

“Lobsters, Daddy?” she asked later, after our walking tours of the graveyard ceased and I’d started her in on her “Know Thy Lud” lessons. “May rabbis eat lobster?”

“Well,” I said, “I wasn’t always a rabbi. Was I?”

And it was a little, I thought, like giving up the past of a priest, always more mysterious, at least to me, than the known proscriptions of his circumscribed life, all that last-fling riot and disorder, the whirlwind sexual spree and rampage of his ladies’-man, precelibate years. Maybe it was melodramatic, but I’d felt a little like that back in the cemetery explaining Jake Heldshaft to Connie, mentioning Sachs and Haas and Stan Bloom and the others to her for the first time. Now, with my remark that I hadn’t always been a rabbi, and my gratuitous digs about her mom, it seemed to me that it was as if I’d told Connie she was adopted or suggested, boasting, some prepriestly, wild-oats past. It was a wrong footing, clumsy, almost drunken.

I’d felt rotten since the Kaddish at the Puffy Pisher’s graveside and had been trying to call Al Harry Richmond in Chicago. Al Harry was the sort who kept up. If anyone did, he’d know what happened. But when you’re a professional grief administrator like myself you’re always running into problems of measurement, issues of proportion. You have to give them their money’s worth over a eulogy, touch their hearts without breaking them, as one of the holy men back in the Maldives put it. Also, you never know how much anybody knows. It’s the beginning of politics. So when I finally reached Al Harry I was all bluff, hail-fellow congeniality and cautious, red-alert pussyfoot.

“Son of a gun,” I told him, “it’s a blessing from Eternal-Our-God just to hear your voice again. Your voice is a sight for sore eyes, Al Harry. It’s been way too long. Way too long. Remember the South Side? Remember the minyan? Remember old Wolfblock? Those were the days, hah? Carefree and gay. Not like today with all our responsibilities and what-with-one-thing-and-anothers. Say,” I said, “I’m something of a Wolfblock myself now. Our-God-and-God-of-Our-Fathers saw fit to make me a rabbi in Lud, New Jersey. Maybe you knew that. Well, the other day, the strangest thing. I was walking through this graveyard and I came across a marker for a Jacob Heldshaft. Remember Hebe Heldshaft, the Yiddish Mockeybird? Well, this one out here has a birth year that would be just about the same as Jake’s and I was wondering, well, do you think it could be the same fella? You hear any talk about He-Who-Is-Most-Merciful taking him out?”