Stanley Elkin - The Rabbi of Lud

For Connie. Needing to impress Connie. Because I meant it when I said the blood count prayers were a challenge, that my kid’s faith was riding on them. Even if what I really meant was her faith in me. (Though inevitably, down the road, this conversation — RABBI OF LUD: “Hey, kid, I gave it my best shot. You were right there beside me, you heard me. Weren’t you? Didn’t you hear me? The lengths I went to. All wheedle one minute, all smart-ass, up-front I/Thou confrontationals the next. Jesus, kid, I’m a licensed, documented rabbi. I was taking my life in my hands there.” CONNIE: “He died? Stan Bloom died?” RABBI OF LUD: “I think prayer must be like any other treatment. I think the earlier you start, the more effective it is. Al Harry didn’t even tell us about Stan until he was already down for the count.” CONNIE: “He died, Daddy? You said you could pray him back to health and — Oh, Daddy, ‘down for the count’! I get it. Oh, that’s so grisly !”)

Am I a buffoon? Some wise-guy, ungood Jew? Understand my passions then. All my if-this-will-go-here-maybe-that-will-go-there arrangements were in their service. What did I want? What did I need? To keep my job with God. To hold my marriage and family together. Who was ever more Juggler of Our Lady than this old rebbie? As much the God jerk as any chanteuse out there in my rec room tuning her instrument or vocalizing scales.

Because let’s face it, I’m no world-beater. Lud, New Jersey, is not one of Judaism’s plummier posts. It’s hardly the Wailing Wall. Hell, it’s hardly Passaic. I haven’t mentioned it but it had already begun to see its better days. There is, for example, a small airfield in Lud, hardly more than an airstrip really. Its tattered windsock no longer waves more than a few inches away from its standard even in the strongest gale, and tough clumps of rag grass have not only begun to spring up through cracks in the cement but have started to puncture actual holes in the tarmac. The landing strip had been put in long before for the convenience of people who flew their own airplanes, wealthy, high-flying bereaved from all along the eastern seaboard, New York State and the near Middle West who didn’t want to deal with the traffic controllers at busy Teterborough a dozen miles off, and who came in not only for the actual funerals and unveilings but with guests and picnic hampers for casual weekend visits to the graves of their loved ones, and who were willing, even anxious, to stay in the tiny hotel that the funeral directors had had built, also for their convenience. Now, however, the landing field was hardly ever used and the hangar was just a place where the gravediggers and maintenance men stored their tools and parked their Cushmans and forklifts in an emergency.

It’s hard times.

Shull and Tober keep telling me so.

“Rabbi Goldkorn,” big Tober called out.

“Good morning, Reb Tober,” I said, raising an imaginary cap. “Good morning, Reb Shull.”

Sometimes, when we pass each other in the street, we pretend that Lud is this shtetl from the last century, this Ana Tevka of a town.

“Yeah, yeah,” Shull muttered, “good Shabbes, l’Chaim. Next Year in Jerusalem.”

“Is something wrong? What’s wrong?”

Tober unlocked the coffee shop. It had closed its doors to the public long ago but its big stainless-steel coffee urn was still operational, its grill and freezer.

Shull stepped behind the counter. He looked oddly chic back there in his dark, expensively tailored suit. “You want something with your coffee, Rabbi? There’s marble cake in the bell. We might have some fruit in the back. I could heat soup in the microwave. I could make toast.”

“Coffee’s fine.”

“This was before your time,” Tober said. “When the hotel was still open for business. This coffee shop had one of the finest kosher chefs in all America behind the counter.”

“I’d heard that,” I said.

“Talk about your funeral baked meats,” Shull said.

“There just wasn’t the business,” Tober said. “We couldn’t justify it.”

“We had to send him packing.”

“The Association hired him for the prestige and convenience.”

Tober meant the Greater Lud Merchants’ Association. Even the anti-Semite, Seels, was a member. Even I was.

“Then, when business dropped off …”

“That’s the thing,” I broke in. “I don’t understand how business can drop off.”

“That’s because you’re a scholar, Rabbi.”

“Not so much a man of the world.”

“You busy your head with the important things.”

“Blessing the bread.”

“The candles.”

“The wine.”

“Making over dead people.”

“Making over God.”

“Look,” said Shull, “you don’t have to worry.”

“Your job is assured,” Tober said.

It wasn’t the first time I’d thought of my employers as some other rabbi might have thought of the people on the board of directors of his congregation. Trustees and governors.

They were not like the women.

They watched me like a hawk.

They listened to every word of every eulogy, professional as people at the rear of a theater on opening night, interested as backers, hanging on the sobs, waiting for the laughs and show stoppers.

“My job is assured?”

“If it’d make you more comfortable we could draw up a new contract.”

“I don’t think I—”

“Sure,” Tober said, “we could stick in a no-cut clause, guarantee you four or five more years.”

“Five or six.”

“Sure,” said Tober, “what the hell.”

“But—”

“You know what keeps us going?” Shull said.

“The perpetual care,” Tober said.

“The perpetual care and the exhumations.”

“The perpetual care and the exhumations and the deconsecrations.”

“The perpetual care, exhumations, deconsecrations and the deliveries of the disinterred we make out to the Island.”

“The perpetual care, exhumations, deconsecrations and the deliveries of the disinterred we make out to the Island and up to Connecticut.”

“Because this necropolis is dying on its feet.”

I’m a fellow whipsawed between admiration and contempt, hard men and soft women, needful daughters and loony wives, God jerks and morticians.

“Think, Rabbi. How many graves and tombstones have we dug up this year? Just this year? How many times have you found yourself having to mumble deconsecration prayers over some watertight, concrete vault?” Tober asked, emptying his cup and rinsing it in the deconsecrated sink.

“Sure,” Shull said, “that’s what keeps us going.”

“Fashion!” Tober grumped.

“Fashion and the interment customs. The laws and principles of the Funeral Code of the Great State of New Jersey.”

“We live by checks and balances, Rabbi.”

“And what if,” Shull put in, “God forbid it should come to this, the fashionable Long Island or fashionable Connecticut funerary lobby bastards ever got to our Trenton bastards and made them do away with the points in the code which keep us viable?”

“Exhumation taxes.”

“Fees for rezoning deconsecrated back into consecrated ground.”

“The ten-buck-a-mile charge, point A to point B, to move the disinterred across a state line.”

“All your prohibitives and pretty-pennies.”

“Pffft!”

“Up in smoke.”

“Gone with the wind.”

“But it makes you more comfortable we draw up a brand-new contract.”

“No cut for two or three years.”

“One or two.”

“Sure,” said Tober, “what the hell.”

Shull took an ice-cream scoop from behind the counter and hung over the open freezer, studying the flavors. “Hey,” he said, “I’m going to make myself a frappe. Anyone else? How about it, Rabbi? You up for a frappe?”