Rebecca Goldstein - 36 Arguments for the Existence of God

“Azarya belongs to a group that reveres knowledge. Okay, so maybe he won’t be a professor of mathematics, but he’ll be a rabbinical scholar. He’ll be the Rebbe someday!”

“So you’d be okay with Gauss’s going into a monastery and counting the angels on the head of a pin.”

“Gregor Mendel did okay for himself in a monastery.”

“Because they left him alone with his pea plants! The whole problem is that Azarya belongs to a sect that thinks it reveres education, but their idea of education has nothing to do with real knowledge! The kid doesn’t even know how to read English.”

“He’s only six, for crying out loud.”

“But you know that they’re never going to teach him. They wouldn’t know how to begin to teach him what he needs to learn. You heard his dad. ‘For him they’re toys, and we let him play.’ I swear I’d kidnap him if I could.”

“Roz, cut it out. It’s upsetting.”

“Why?”

“Your values are skewed. You’d take him away from a family that loves him and that he loves. The child would be miserable. Do you think genius is the only thing that matters?”

“Oh, for chrissakes, Cass. I’m not saying I’d really kidnap him. I’m making a point. But just as an aside, I don’t think he’d be miserable if I did kidnap him. Instead of giving him candy and ice cream, like other kidnappers, I’d ply him with theorems and proofs. I’d hire MIT professors who’d make him so delirious on equations that he’d forget all about New Walden.”

“Enough.”

“No, not enough, because I haven’t yet responded to your gross hypocrisy. You’re criticizing me for placing too much emphasis on genius, when that’s what you Klapperites are totally obsessed with!”

“That’s entirely different.”

“Oh yeah? You want to explain how? Other than the major difference that Azarya Sheiner really is a prodigy.”

“Before you get in touch with my mother to hold the ladder while you abscond with Azarya in a pillowcase, you might just try speaking to his family. Tell them what you think. Tell them about Gauss. Maybe they’ll see to it that he develops his talents.”

“Oh, of course. Right after my appointment with the pope, when I explain to him why celibacy is such a disaster. And in case you didn’t notice, I’m a woman, and in that community women don’t exactly have clout. Tell them about Gauss! They’ll say, sure, wasting your life on mathematics is okay for some German goy, but not for the future Valdener Rebbe. Why don’t you try to speak to the family? Or, better yet, get the Klap to do it.”

“Doubtful.”

“Yeah, you’re right there. That child is an affront to his monumental ego.”

Azarya was standing there, shyly smiling up at Jonas Elijah Klapper, who craned his neck around, looking to see who was there to welcome him.

“I remember your question,” Azarya said to him now.

“What?” Jonas stared down past the obstruction of his own kaputa- upholstered stomach at the child looking up at him.

“I remember your question.”

“To which question are you referring, little boy?”

“How many there are. The prime angels. How long does this go on? I remember your question.”

Jonas Elijah Klapper stared down at the child a little longer, as if trying to figure out what language he was speaking. He turned to Cass.

“I wonder why nobody is here to greet me. I need to take care of a few things in the short time left until licht benching.”

Klapper had used the Yiddish expression for the lighting of the Shabbes candles, the same expression as Cass’s bubbe had used.

“Come, please, Rav Klapper,” Azarya said, beckoning with his tiny finger for the professor to follow.

Klapper shrugged and marched up the stairs after the child. Cass followed along, toting the small suitcase and the blue plastic bag with the thirteen-tailed shtreimel .

Azarya led them down the narrow hallway to a bedroom, and Jonas Elijah Klapper entered and indicated for Cass to put his things on the bed and dismissed him. Azarya walked Cass back downstairs to the tiled vestibule. He reached up to open the heavy front door for Cass; he was taking his role as host seriously. Cass smiled down at him, and the child smiled back, raising his little round chin.

“Do you remember me?” he asked in a soft voice.

“Of course I remember you! You’re Azarya!”

The child’s smile spread, so that not only were his wide-spaced blue eyes lit, but his pale skin, translucent in the way of fair-haired children, glowed.

“I remember also you, Mr. Seltzer. And Miss Margolis. Is she coming also for Shabbes?”

“No, I’m afraid she isn’t.”

“She’s in Cambridge, Massachusetts?”

“No, she’s far away. In another country.”

“Not in the United States of America?”

“Not in the United States of America.”

“In Eretz Yisroel?”

“No, not Eretz Yisroel either, but another country.”

“Which?”

“Venezuela.”

“Venezuela.” He repeated it carefully, and then he smiled, a bit impishly. “Will you draw me a map?”

“I don’t think there’s time now. It’s almost Shabbes. Maybe after Shabbes.”

The child nodded, understanding that time was short, and stood out of the way as Cass moved toward the open door.

“I can read English now.”

Cass was already halfway down the sidewalk that led to the street. He turned back. The door was half open, and Azarya was inside, peeking around the side, his head at an angle, so that his side curl fell over the shoulder of his fancy white dress shirt, similar to the one Jonas Elijah Klapper was wearing under his kaputa .

“That’s wonderful!” So much for Roz’s hysteria. She was letting her pique over the Hasidic attitude toward women color her whole view. “Who taught you?”

“From the map. I learned from the map.”

Roz had told Cass how she’d felt her scalp prickling as she figured out the meaning of Azarya’s crayoned drawing. Cass had resisted her effusiveness. He understood that the child was uncommonly intelligent, but he knew better than to leap to the sort of wild romanticizing that his girlfriend was indulging in. Mathematical talent often shows itself early. Probably a good fraction of top-notch math professors at places like Harvard and Princeton and MIT and Caltech had seemed, when they were small children, like geniuses to their classmates and teachers, not to speak of their families. Not all of them-in fact none of them-had grown up to be a Gauss. The overwhelming odds were that Azarya fell into this category. He’d take the SATs when he was in sixth grade, which is how the Center for Talented Youth at Johns Hopkins tests for entrance into its summer program, and he’d score high enough to take the special classes designed for kids like him. Or, in any case, that’s the kind of thing that would happen if he weren’t a Valdener. Azarya might be at the extreme tail of the bell curve, but there were enough like him to make a program like CTY worthwhile.

Roz, pressing her case, had given Cass a short story by Aldous Huxley called “The Young Archimedes.” An Englishman, who has rented a villa in the Italian countryside, discovers that a sweet-natured peasant boy, Guido, is an untutored mathematical genius. The Englishman, kind and cultured, alone understands the prodigious nature of Guido, but has to go away. The venal woman who owns the land the peasants work has seen the Englishman’s interest in the boy and takes him away from his family, thinking she can make a performing musician out of him-Guido is musical as well-and become rich off his talents. The boy, missing his Euclid and his family, ends up leaping to his death. The conclusion has the Englishman walking back from the cemetery in Florence, where the child has been buried, the grief-stricken father beside him. They pause on a hill to look down at the inspired city laid out in the valley below. “I thought of all the Men who had lived here and left the visible traces of their spirit and conceived extraordinary things. I thought of the dead child.”