Stanley Elkin - The Rabbi of Lud

Robert even remembered how to use his tools, all that crisp cutlery of his profession — the variously weighted ball peens, chisels, bevels and gauged nibs. But had forgotten the Hebrew alphabet he worked in, and no longer knew how to use even the apprentice beginner’s open-windowed stencil, even for the least complicated Star of David or simplest ornamental menorah flame.

So Seels gave him buffers, rags and smoothers, the employee turning the employer into some benignly tolerated Jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none sort, a kind of gofer-cum-handyman, and set him to work polishing markers and sopping up and breathing into his already defiled lungs the harsh marble dust and grating stone powders. I guess we wanted Seels to buy him out and fire him already.

They’d been pals. Hershorn and Connie. When she was small, and even after he no longer recognized her and Connie had to remind him who she was every time she went over.

As I say, a town’s only child has got to be at least a little spoiled, pulling the attentions of its laborers and artisans and taking the benefit of its folklore. The lunch-pail insights and time-clock wisdoms. It was Hershorn, for example, not me, who taught my daughter to read Hebrew. But now she visited only on assignment, Shelley’s silly, envoyed charities, my own wanton occasions.

She was crying when she returned.

“Tears?” Shelley said. “What’s-e-le wrong-e-le?”

Connie scarcely glanced in our direction but moved through the hall to the stairs.

“Hold it right there, young layd-e-le. I asked you a question.”

“Ma, please.”

“Connie,” I said.

“She always does this to me, Daddy.”

“Connie, shh.”

“What did I do-de-le? I asked her a question. Did-e-le I do-de-le something so terrible?”

“Shelley, please, she’s upset. Connie, what happened?”

“I don’t know she’s upset? Who saw her tears-e-le? Who heard her sobs-e-le? I don’t know she’s upset?”

The thicker Shelley lays it on the thicker I get. (And pose myself a question, not my style, though well, I suppose, within the parameters of my mode. Am I a heavier man, I ask myself, with an erection than without? I realize it’s just a displacement of the blood, but the explanation feels wrong. I feel this perceptible increase of my meats, the sluice and slosh of barbarous, heavy chemicals. And is it a sin, I worry, to consider these questions with my daughter in the room?) But no matter. Nothing’s to be done. Connie, who has taken the offensive, has stopped crying and her mother has begun. There is anger and dejection in the room. War and wailing. (And desire petering out like the diminuendo of a siren.)

“She always does this,” Connie complained.

“What? What do I always do-de-le? My daughter comes back crying from that fascist palooka-le, I’m expected to hold my tongue?”

“Who sent me to him? You sent me to him!”

“Shh,” I said.

“Just to Hershorn, not that other-le!”

“Shelley darling, shh,” I said.

“Why? To bring him Wonder Bread? To take him jelly from the A&P?”

“Connie, shh, the neighbors.”

“What neighbors?” my daughter demanded. “What neighbors, Daddy? Our neighbors are all dead. Oh, I hate this place! I’m so scared here! It’s so grisly here! Why don’t we get out? Why do you have to be the Rabbi of Lud? Why can’t we move to a real town?”

“Shh, Connie, shh,” I comforted. “You’d miss your friends,” I said. “You really would. A lot of nice people have been very kind to you. Robert, for example. He taught you your Hebrew.”

“Off grave stones, Daddy!” she said. “Which I studied off gravestones. On the big marble monuments in his yard. Please, Daddy,” she said, “please. Let’s leave!”

“That’s absolutely out of the question,” I told my daughter. “Shh. Shh.”

HEY, I make a good living. Not what they pay in those big Riverside and Lake Shore Drive congregations. Not what I’d get along your Wilshire Boulevards, of course, or your Collins and Fairfax avenues, the spiffy, upscale, co-op, gone-condo neighborhoods where on even an ordinary Shabbes there are plenty of cops to help with the traffic and guard against the anti-Semitism and, on the higher holidays, the force’s high-up Irishmen and brightest brass, captains and colonels sent from the Commish himself, in their ribbons, dress blues and white gloves, right down to the service revolvers in the spit-polished holsters you can’t even see — to show the flag, to show solidarity and all the unsuspected, circuitous routes and ecumenical closures of good fellowship and called debt. Or those kempt temples where professional men’s kids get bar mitzvah and their gentile partners go to so many affairs they own their own yarmulkes. Not so much. But enough. More than enough. We’re not hurting. We’re simple people of the clearing here. How much do we need? For the essentials we’ve got. The cardinals and paramounts. Even for the occasional fête champêtre and once-in-a-way skylark or dinner and opening night in NYC fifteen miles off.

So we’re not hurting. Shull and Tober pay me forty-two thousand a year and lease my house to me for the taxes and utilities. Also — this is privileged information — I do maybe another ten or fifteen K a year in tips. Don’t misunderstand me, my hand ain’t out. It’s just that my pickup congregations don’t always know the arrangements. How would they? Is a bill the decorous, proper place to stick in the overhead? Would the price of the electric be listed, what it takes to run the fridges and deep freezes, the cost of the fossil fuels burned in a good, roaring cremation? Why itemize the rabbi then? Certain things you assume. You weren’t born yesterday, you know I don’t come to you because the bereaved are good company. You figure something has to be in it for me, that solace and ceremony cost. So there’s often a check already made out with a blank where my name goes, one or two hundred bucks maybe. Shull shuts one eye and Tober the other. That’s the arrangement.

So I make a good living. What with one thing and another, my salary, my tips and my perks. But that’s not it. Why I told my daughter that leaving Lud was out of the question.

The fact is, I have obligations. I’m in my rabbi mode here, talking ex cathedra. A fellow’s family comes first. I’ve got the numbers. Three of the Ten Commandments relate directly to the family. Thirty percent. You honor your parents, you don’t covet your neighbor’s wife, you don’t commit adultery. God Himself counts for another three, the graven image and name-in-vain bits, and the business about no other gods before Him. It’s an even-steven split about the Sabbath day. So a fellow’s family comes at least first.

I’m just doing my duty is the way this cleric figures it. Why I shush my dejected, scared-stiff, upset, importunate little girl, wave her from the room and go to put my arms around her mother. Family comes first and the wife takes pride of place. Husbands and wives before sons and daughters. Honor thy Mom and Dad, runs the commandment, not the other way round. If Lord-of-All-Worlds wanted us to honor the kids he’d have spelled it out. He’s a don’t-mince-words sort of God, a stickler. The last thing He is is reticent. He covers the material. “You shall not do any work,” He instructs us re the Sabbath, “you, or your son, or your daughter, or your manservant, or your maidservant, or your cattle, or the sojourner who is within your gates.” Doesn’t He even spell out the dimensions of the ark itself down to the last cubit, God like a voice from the Heathkit?