Stanley Elkin - The Rabbi of Lud

It’s for Shelley. (And how, not being that kind of rabbi, not ever on call I mean, pulled to deathbeds or awakened and hustled into an emergency presentable enough to join the eloped religious in midnight matrimony or even, for that matter, hit up by salesmen in the Torah trade, how could it be for me?)

It was for Shelley and it was the girls, her sisters in an eight-lady group of musical Jews who entertained at various affairs in northern Jersey — showers, weddings, brisses, bar and bat mitzvahs, golden and other special anniversaries and do’s. Shelley was one of the singers, though she sometimes accompanies herself on the tambourine. Only two of the women, Sylvia Simon and Elaine Iglauer, were trained musicians, checked out on guitar, mandolin and balalaika. The charter membership — Shelley is a charter member — was still intact after seven years but the group experienced odd cycles of popularity. They could be booked months in advance, then go through most of an entire season when, as Miriam Perloff, their manager and first soprano, put it, they “couldn’t get arrested.” Their bookings constituted a sort of sociological shorthand, which I supposed — I had a lot of spare time — put them on the cutting edge of Jewish culture in New Jersey. They were this really bellwether chorus and combo, absolute musts for this season’s showers and anniversaries, le dernier cri for that season’s bat mitzvahs and brisses. In a sort of idle rabbi mode — I have spare time to spare — I figured it had something to do with the baby boom.

They used their spare time for intensive, additional rehearsals and to experiment with the name of the group, thinking perhaps that by adding to their repertoire or changing their name they might goose up their popularity. They’d been “The Sabras,” they’d been “The Balebostes.” Briefly they were “The Mamas and the Mamas” but dropped that when they started getting asked to kosher stag parties. Now, and for some time past, they were “The Chaverot,” Hebrew for members of a kibbutz, or fellowship, and, in addition to Yiddish and Israeli folk songs, standards like “Tzena, Tzena,” “Havah Nagilah” and “Ha Tikva,” they specialized in vaguely Jewish songs—“Those Were the Days,” the theme from Exodus, “Sunrise, Sunset,” and other vaguely Hebrew-sounding show tunes.

Shelley had volunteered our house in Lud for rehearsals and, in accordance with her special theories of good-natured martyrdom, frequently arranged to pick these women up at their homes and deliver them back again afterwards — two hundred sixty, two hundred seventy-five miles round trip, door to door — but I didn’t object because, well, frankly, I enjoyed having them in the house. They were Lud’s only visitors not there for death. They were crisp and affluent and gave off a snug illusion of company, a suggestion of the rich, cursive icing on coffee cake. They were all quite handsome and reminded me of women shopping in department stores, elegantly stalking fashion like beasts doing prey, professional as pigeons pecking dirt. In addition to Shelley, Sylvia Simon, Miriam Perloff and Elaine Iglauer, the other members of the group were Fanny Tupperman, Naomi Shore, Rose Pickler and Joan Cohen and, to be perfectly frank, that’s what I thought they ought to call themselves—“Miriam Perloff, Sylvia Simon, Elaine Iglauer, Shelley Goldkorn, Rose Pickler, Naomi Shore, Fanny Tupperman and Joan Cohen!” That’d fetch ’em. It’d have fetched me, but then I’m my own lost tribe, this exile, this standoffish, renunciated Jew. This, I mean, time-on-his-hands outcast-in-waiting. Whatever it was I had for Shelley spilled over and I had it for these women too. (I’m in my macho mode now, speaking out of the sweet lull in my glazed-over blood, the drugged hypnotics of my engaged attentions, handled as a guy in a barber’s chair.)

Meanwhile the women bustled about me, setting up music stands, rearranging chairs, turning our rec room into a sort of studio, and I was struck by the power implicit in their team-work. Women were not like this in my day. Then they were weak sisters, wimps, the beautiful nerds of time. Then they were without gyms, home fitness apparatus. Sometimes I think Shelley and Constance are throwbacks, designed to set a Sabbath table, bensch a little licht and, in the dark of their blindman’s-buff-shielded eyes, make solemn, mysterious passes over the candles like thieves palming light.

Coffee was perking, chipper as rhythm, and Miriam Perloff, Sylvia Simon, Elaine Iglauer, Shelley Goldkorn, Rose Pickler, Naomi Shore, Fanny Tupperman and Joan Cohen were everywhere at once, pulling cups and saucers out of cabinets, spoons out of drawers, shuffling napkins, placemats, preoccupied as stagehands in darkness. Out my high kitchen window like an embrasure in a fort I could see two of their station wagons drawn up casual and unattended in my driveway as police cars on a lawn.

“Does the rabbi want milk and sugar with his coffee?” Elaine Iglauer asked me, coming into my study.

“He drinks it black, Ellie,” Rosie Pickler told her. “Don’t you, Rabbi?”

“That’s so he doesn’t have to worry about mixing dairy with meat when he’s out at a function,” Syl Simon glossed.

“Oh,” said Miriam Perloff, “but that’s so in teresting!”

“They teach us that in yeshiva,” I said. “It’s a trick of the trade.”

“Yes,” chorused Fanny Tupperman and Naomi Shore, crowding into my study with the others.

“But what about the sugar?” Joan Cohen wanted to know.

“It’s only forbidden during Passover,” I told her.

“I didn’t know that,” Naomi Shore said.

“Sure,” I said, “black coffee is a bitter herb.”

“The rabbi has a sense of humor,” Rose Pickler said carefully.

“I speak for my people,” I shrugged.

“Sometimes,” Shelley said, glaring in my direction, “my Jerry likes to tease-e-le.”

These women had been coming to the house seven years yet I was still a curiosity to them. People put us on a pedestal. Shelley, giggling, once told me they’d wanted to know about our sex life. “What did you tell them?” I said.

“I asked how they thought we got Connie.”

“What did they say to that?”

“You could have knocked them over with a feather-le.”

Yet I’d never doubted that they waged a kind of mass flirtation with me, even the dedicated fuss and bother of their preparations a pattern of honeybees, their hitherings and hoverings about our rooms some domestic cross-pollination. They treated me with an almost congregational deference which, if it wasn’t patronizing, may have been a kind of actual tilting with God — guarded, circumspect Godtease. Women, and men too, are sometimes burdened by their pious curiosities. Mystery makers, what, they wonder, do priests do with their hungers? Were they so different from Shelley, turned on by her own awful wonder? Into my holy leathers, my phylacteries and parchments, as well as the garments, the shtreimel and kittel and gartel I did not even own (let alone wear), and embracing who knew Whom in her head?

As I’ve said, these women were all attractive and I could, I knew, probably have made time with them if I’d shown more interest. Miriam Perloff and Fanny Tupperman had been divorced and were now remarried. And, according to Shelley, Rose Pickler and Naomi Shore had had affairs. (As “The Sabras” they’d entertained at both Miriam’s and Fanny’s second marriages and, during the period when Rose Pickler and Naomi Shore were fooling around, it wasn’t at all unusual for the group to work either Naomi’s or Rose’s favorite love songs into the program. Not wanting to abet immoral acts, Shelley, God bless her, was a little reluctant to go along with these practices even in the face of Sylvia Simon’s argument that supporting these lovesick ladies by singing their songs showed sisterhood. Shelley was a sucker for argument, she loved pleadings — I was privy to these proceedings, the rehearsals were held in my house, Shelley’s demurrers and Sylvia Simon’s justifications came through the thin walls of my study — and countered with an argument of her own: “My dear girls,” Shelley said, “of course we would want to show support, to come when we can to the emotional service of a sister in trouble. Why, in Old Testament, in Old Testament, didn’t Judith’s very own maidservant help her mistress chop off Holofernes’ head? Wasn’t that sisterhood? To make oneself an accomplice? If that isn’t sisterhood I’d like to know what is. But some principles outweigh other principles. That’s plain as the nose. So I ask you, if, as Sylvia Simon suggests, we went ahead and sang ‘My Man’ at Phyllis Levine’s bat mitzvah Saturday, what would that do to our artistic-e-le integrity?” Good old Shelley!) Good old Shelley! No wonder I’m uxorious. Who ever had a better, sweeter uxor?