Curt Leviant - Kafka's Son

“You’ll have to ask him that.”

“I’m in no rush to meet him again. But Jiri did say you could be helpful to me, to introduce me to some people.”

Should I tell him about the magic pen? No, I thought. Why give him another excuse for sarcastic laughter?

Thud. Thud. Thud. The sudden banging in the synagogue startled us. Someone pounded with a leather paddle on a leather-covered board for silence.

“I’ll talk to you after davenning,” said the golem softly without moving his lips.

“I still haven’t fully expressed how I feel about Jiri,” I told the golem later. “Sometimes you know people for years and don’t know them and yet sometimes you meet someone and in an instant you feel you’ve known and loved them a lifetime. I can’t tell you what a loss I feel.”

The golem must have been touched by my words for both sides of his face softened.

“Let me tell you something about Jiri he never would tell you himself. He was head of archives for the Jewish Museum here just before the Germans came. Since he had a PhD the Germans chose him to head the Jewish Museum they had in mind. The Germans respected titles and even called him Herr Doktor. He was going to be the director of what the Germans would call the Museum of an Extinct Race. Of course, they never told Jiri or any other Jew that name. Every day they brought truckloads of items stolen from the Jews they were killing, and they wanted Jiri and his staff to catalog them. And for cataloging the thousands of items the Germans were pillaging all over Czechoslovakia and surrounding regions, Jiri told them he needed lots of help. This way he was able to save many Jews in Prague. He stayed up nights teaching the Jews what to do so they could prove they were useful. When the Germans complained how many people he hired, he told them, If you want to have an accurate and precise cataloging we need every man and woman here. And the children are especially useful for handling the small items. ‘Precise’ and ‘accurate’ were totemic words for the Germans and they relented.”

“Jiri never told me that.”

“And he never would. I told you that. That’s the sort of man he is, was. An unsung hero of the Holocaust, whom we call the Schindler of Prague. But, near the end, they still sent him to Terezin. But thank God the staff he created survived.”

I shook my head in wonder.

The golem clapped his hands once. “So! What brought you to Prague, tovarish?”

“A direct flight from JFK in New York.”

He laughed a crooked smile, one side of his face happier than the other.

“Rather, I meant to say, what brings you to Prague?”

“My camera. I’m a maker of documentary films. Here I’m hoping to make a film about the Jewish uniqueness of Prague, with an accent on K.”

“Uh-huh,” said the golem. He licked his lips. “And no doubt you want to begin with this old shul.”

“Yes. Starting with the attic.” Seeing who stood before me I refrained from saying golem.

“The what?” said the golem.

“The attic.”

The golem leaned against the wall and burst out laughing. But not laughing laughing. I mean laughing laughing. He laughed out of the two sides of his mouth, a sad twitching laugh on the glass eye side, and a raucous double-barreled laugh on the left side, as if making up for the lack on the right with an extra dose on the left. He held his sides. His belly shook. He was a cartoon stereotype of a laughing man.

“The attic,” he gasped. “The golem.”

“I said nothing about the golem.”

This golem showed all his teeth.

“You don’t have to say. You don’t have to say. But you said it. You said it without saying it. When you say attic you say golem. And when you say golem you mean attic.”

Maybe I’ll nickname you Attic, I didn’t say.

Then the golem called, “Shamesh! Kum aher!”

I never expected the golem to speak Yiddish, although the original golem, the Maharal’s sixteenth-century creation, did understand Yiddish; the same golem whose remains presumably lie, untouched, in the dusty attic where no human being has ascended since the Rabbi of Prague, the Maharal, put an end to the golem by plucking the shem —the little parchment with God’s holy name on it — from the golem’s mouth. And yet this tall man with the big head and glass eye and ruddy face of an Irishman, this golem surprised me by using Yiddish.

Approached now the shamesh, a small thin old man with wispy white hair straggling over and around his black yarmulke, a sad old man, a survivor, I saw. I hadn’t noticed him before. He must have been standing directly in front of the bimah, out of view when I came in. And because the wooden poles on the bimah blocked my view of him, I hadn’t seen him — it was very likely he; who else besides a shamesh bangs for silence? — when he pounded on the table before. The shamesh had survived one them during World War II, only to fall after the war into the hands of another them. But the second them were gone now too, gone three years ago, and Prague breathed freely.

“ Vos iz , Yossi?” the shamesh asked. What is it?

Aha. Finally. His name. Yossi. Of course. A diminutive of Joseph. I was right. It was a Biblical name. Yossi. Yosef. Joseph. Now I won’t forget it. Yossi.

“Shamesh…he wants…” and the golem, laughing, pointed, actually jabbed his index finger toward me, “…to see the attic. The golem.”

“I said nothing about the golem,” I repeated.

The shamesh too began laughing. Now both of them laughed together. They shook with laughter, these two, moving forward and back, the golem a bit jerkily, like an automaton, the shamesh more smoothly. They held their sides, their stomachs (each his own), tending to a quaking, laugh-shooken belly, adding titters to cackles, giggles to hysterics, until tears ran from their eyes, even the golem’s glass eye trickled a tear, and they gasped for breath.

A few of the other worshippers drew near, tentatively. For them the golem and the shamesh repeated my request. Then they too, without even looking at me, subjected me to a cacophony of laughter. They sounded like a synagogue choir for the High Holidays, a bass laugh, then a falsetto, then the entire chorus, then solo voices laughing in alternation until they all chanted their laughter together. They bent forward and leaned back in orchestrated laughter, dipping and rising in a laughter ballet.

I stood there dumbfounded, mingling feelings of anger, shame, and helplessness. I wanted to rush up to the bimah and shout for silence. But I was too old to cry, and too polite to berate them.

“Yoysher!” the shamesh suddenly cried out. He leaped up — what agility and speed for a man his age, up to the bimah, doing for me what I only dreamt of doing — grabbed the leather-coated wooden paddle and slammed it down hard on the thick red leather pad on the reading table. “Decency! Justice! What are you, citizens of Sodom? Not nice to laugh at the visitor. He just came. From thousands and thousands of miles. Not nice.” And he slammed the paddle again and again. “Shame on you. Foo! Feh! Not nice to humiliate a guest. A young man we see for the first time comes to shul and you laugh at him?”

The laughter suddenly ceased, a radio snapped off.

The shamesh called me out to the anteroom. We stood by the big arched wooden door. I regarded the ancient stone walls. This anteroom, as indeed the rest of this magnificent synagogue, was carefully built by hand, stone by stone, many hundreds of years ago and had withstood invasions, uprisings, wars, the Germans in the 1940s. We stepped outside into the little alley.

“Please accept my apologies for these boors. Bunch of fools. Congregation of idiots. Like King David says in the Psalms, ‘They have eyes but see not, ears but hear not.’ But, alas, they have big mouths. They are the real goylems, the nitwits, the numbskulls, the fools. The Psalms also says that God protects the fools — but He missed with them.” The shamesh dropped his voice, looked around. “This shul is a magnet for the mentally debilitated.” Now he brightened. “You know, don’t you, that goylem in Yiddish, just like in Hebrew, also means fool?”