Brad plays soccer at recess and has a lot of moles. There are rumors that he spends his summers at a camp for kids who take math and science classes because they want to, but Brad tells everyone he goes to soccer camp. No one believes him either.
A couple times when it’s Eliza’s turn, Sinna starts toward the podium and Dr. Morris has to remind her to wait. Waiting for Sinna to return to her seat, Eliza pretends she is a TV star during opening credits, her face caught in freeze-frame. She imagines her name appearing below her face in bold white letters.
Sinna spells
IMMANENT
without the second M. She is already walking back to her seat when Dr. Morris says, “I’m afraid that’s incorrect.” It gets very quiet, like at the beginning of a blackout before anyone has thought to fetch a flashlight. Sinna walks offstage biting her lower lip.
Brad is next, but he is so surprised by Sinna getting out that he has to ask for
POSSIBILITY
three times before he spells it with one S. Despite his assertions to the contrary, he also believes that Sinna is the smarter one. Which just leaves Eliza, who spells
CORRESPONDENCE
with her eyes closed to avoid looking at three rows of students staring at her in disbelief.
In Eliza’s fantasy she walks to the podium, which she is suddenly tall enough to see over, and begins speaking to a cafeteria suddenly filled to capacity.
A few of you might know my name, but most of you don’t even recognize me. I know you, though. And what I’m about to say is as important to you as it is to me.
It’s the lead-in to a speech from a particularly powerful after-school special. Eliza’s always thought it made a great beginning. No actual words come after that, but Eliza’s mouth keeps moving and the music swells. By the end, all the students are smiling with little tears in their eyes and Lindsay Halpern makes a place for Eliza at her table between her and Roger Pond.
Eliza stands outside Saul’s closed study door, an envelope hot in her hand. She’s not sure this is a valid interruption. She’s not sick, nothing’s on fire, and the district bee isn’t until the weekend. But if she waits for her father to come out so she can hand it to him, it might be another two hours.
Eliza considers waiting anyway. Perhaps her father will need to use the bathroom, or maybe he’ll get hungry for a snack. She puts her ear against the door but hears nothing. When she looks down she finds that her hands have unconsciously reopened the envelope and removed the letter. A few words are smeared now; the paper’s creases are fuzzed with wear. Eliza realizes for the first time that her last name is misspelled. She feels a sudden urge to tear the letter, burn it to ash, cram it down the disposal. Instead, she folds the letter back into thirds, licks the by now dissolved adhesive on the envelope’s flap, and shoves the letter through the crack beneath her father’s study door.
Saul’s study is smaller than Eliza’s bedroom in that it lacks a closet, making it the smallest room in the house not counting bathrooms. Its perceived dimensions are diminished further by the bookshelves lining its walls and piles of notes in various stages of collapse layering the floor. Notebooks of various thicknesses and binding methods protrude above the thinner strata like steppingstones. The average paper density increases toward Saul’s desk, which emerges from the tumult like a piece of flotsam tossed by the paper tide. Saul’s desk spares no room for distracting doohickey or clever calendar, covered as it is by books and notes, loose and bound. On the wall directly above the desk, framed pictures of Mordecai M. Kaplan and Gershom Scholem provide inspiration. A small desk lamp serves as one of only two light sources, both unnatural. The room’s lack of windows is for the best since the bookshelves leave no room for them.
In this room governed by disorder, the shelves are the exception to the entropic rule. Saul’s library is arranged alphabetically, recent paperbacks brushing spines with age-seasoned leather-bound volumes. English texts adjoin Hebrew and Yiddish. In Saul’s decision to mix languages, he has accorded privilege to a letter’s pronunciation over its ordinal placement. Thus, Hebrew writer Shmuel Yosef Agnon is in among the A’s alongside Aharon Appelfeld even though the Nobelist’s last name begins with an
ayin
and the novelist’s name begins with an
alef.
While the library’s overall organization might cause many a self-respecting academic to blush, to Saul the study is a paper-lined nursery in which his scholarly interests may grow and blossom by the light of two 80-watt soft white bulbs.
When Saul closes the study door behind him, he closes the book of the everyday world as well, placing it upon a distant shelf until familial duty or emergency calls him back. So it comes as no surprise that he doesn’t hear the quiet
foosh
of Eliza’s envelope. Unnoticed, it joins the morass of paper carpeting the floor of his study, invisible to anyone who doesn’t know to look.
Saul Naumann spends the first portion of his life as Sal Newman, son of Henry and Lisa Newman, decorator of Christmas trees and Easter eggs. Henry has every expectation that his only child will follow him into the car repair business. From an early age Saul has been replacing sparkplugs and changing oil. Though he dislikes the combined smells of car exhaust and sweat, the hardness of the garage floor, and the mess of wires and cold metal that compose the machines of his father’s fancy, Saul fosters these associations for the sake of the rare smiles proffered by his father in their company.
Saul is thirteen when his mother takes him into the attic and shows him the box. There is a photo of a bearded man with long sidelocks and a black hat, his hand on the shoulder of a boy. At first Saul cannot believe that the curly-haired boy with the fringes hanging past his shirt is his father, Heimel Naumann, the bearded man his grandfather Yehudah. Saul learns the word “Orthodox.” His mother shows him a pair of brass candlesticks and a wine cup. She describes a world ruled by the Book, a world with little room for change. She relates eloping with Heimel after Yehudah declared her not Jewish enough. Saul sees his birth certificate and learns of his father’s decision to renounce the faith, the shift from Heimel to Henry and Naumann to Newman occurring after Yehudah ignored Saul’s birth. Saul, who had been named for Yehudah’s brother Solomon in one son’s attempt to regain a father’s love, became Sal.
It is Lisa who sneaks her son books, occasionally taking Saul to a nearby synagogue on Henry’s Friday nights out. It is their secret until Henry comes home unexpectedly one evening to find them lighting Shabbat candles. From that point onward, Saul insists on being called by his given name.
By Saul’s sophomore year of high school, he has given up any pretense of interest in cars and his father has given up interest in him. When Lisa dies of cancer, the house becomes a lonely and divided place, the last link between father and son turning to dust in a box underground. The fights begin soon after, never violent but increasingly damaging.
Saul’s escape to a liberal arts college finalizes the rift. When Saul uses his student status to stay out of Vietnam, Henry officially washes his hands of his ungrateful, hippie Jew of a son.
Saul discovers
LSD
and Jewish mysticism at the same time, a chance concurrence that strengthens the validity of both. During his acid trips, Saul experiences the same sense of time displacement and receptivity described in the texts. On one occasion he attests to having ascended through several levels of being in a manner similar to the ancient mystics, who rode a chariot through six castles on six celestial realms to reach God at the seventh heaven. Saul becomes a campus celebrity and preferred
LSD
guide. At the end of his undergraduate career and with the war still on, it is only natural that he enter rabbinical school.
Saul enters Baruch Yeshiva on scholarship. His scholarship is revoked during his freshman year when, in the name of mental exploration, he convinces his roommate to place a tab on his tongue and the resultant bad trip leads to said roommate painting his naked body blue and white and running into the dean’s office to declare himself the new Israeli Prime Minister.
Saul returns to his alma mater to live rent-free in the attic of an off-campus house inhabited by undergraduates who know him by reputation alone. The attic is charred from a semi-recent fire, contains no electrical outlets, and is uninsulated. Saul can stand fully erect as long as he keeps to the room’s center. He illuminates the space with chains of Christmas lights running off an extension cord snaked up the narrow attic stairs from a lower-floor bedroom.
Saul spends his time in the library studying Jewish thought and history in a rigorous, self-styled curriculum that surpasses his academic efforts at any time during his official enrollment. He regularly attends religious services and adult education classes at a nearby synagogue. Alone in his attic, Saul practices the traditional songs and fantasizes about someday leading a congregation, if not as a rabbi then as a cantor.
There are drawbacks to this scavenged existence. While Saul has ample access to drugs and female undergrads in his capacity as sexual and psychoactive guide to the student body, the role has begun to wear thin. His acid trips are too déjà vu. He has worn deep grooves in the psychedelic path, falling into the same hallucinatory and revelatory ruts time after time. Increasingly, his affairs with women remind him of his age and the fact that he hadn’t pictured himself at twenty three making love to clumsy teenage coeds on a dirty twin mattress in a burned-out attic. Increasingly, Saul finds himself fantasizing about his own study, a job that gives him time to pursue his interests, and the prospect of children with whom he can share his hard-won life lessons.
On Friday nights, Eliza sits with her brother in the first row of the Beth Amicha synagogue. While Aaron recites the responsive prayers without glancing at his prayer book, Eliza focuses on a spot on the
bima
between Rabbi Mayer and her father and tries to block out the robotic monotone of the congregation reading as one. It reminds her too much of aquarium fish, the mechanical open and shut of their mouths as they stare blankly through the glass.
While the congregation drones on, Eliza turns her attention to the brown-flecked linoleum floor tiles and thinks of the biblical exodus from Egypt. She transforms each fleck into a Jew in a windswept robe, trekking forty years across the desert to reach the Promised Land. She imagines blisters from uncomfortable sandals. She pictures a tribe of Charlton Hestons looking righteous and bearded and sun-creased. Her reverie is interrupted by Rabbi Mayer’s voice telling the congregation to rise, which she manages to do fast enough to hide the fact that, moments ago, the floor had been the Sinai.
Rabbi Mayer is a tree trunk of a man with a broad forehead and bushy eyebrows that have gone gray even though the rest of his hair remains dark. He looks out at the congregation through disproportionately small eyes, which he has willed down in size to take in as little of the world as necessary. Beth Amicha would not have been his preference, but he was Beth Amicha’s rabbi of choice. With suburban rabbis outnumbering suburban synagogues two to one, Orel Mayer chose a steady salary over spiritual affinity. A Conservative Jew, Mayer disapproves of Beth Amicha’s laxer Reform tendencies. He had initially hoped to spur the congregation to new heights of observance but Saturday evenings, when he lights the braided Havdalah candle and watches the shadows flicker upon the synagogue’s walls, he is often alone. Beth Amicha tends to regard Shabbat as a Friday night obligation. Most congregants have never been to a Havdalah service, have never heard the crisp
crszh
of the Havdalah flame being quenched by the wine, the true moment of Sabbath’s end. Rabbi Mayer longs to lead a congregation that appreciates this sound. But a good rabbinate is hard to find. He comforts himself with the fact that his is not the life of the itinerant rabbi, reduced to performing the brisses, weddings, and bar mitzvahs of strangers.
Saul’s gangly arms look particularly cartoony when he leads prayers on his guitar, strumming and even thumping as he sings. On the Judaism spectrum Saul’s self-proclaimed Reconstructionism puts him left of center, an affiliation the congregation hoped would counterbalance Rabbi Mayer’s, leaving Beth Amicha’s services somewhere in the middle. By playing the strict traditionalist, Rabbi Mayer makes the congregants feel as if they are being the type of Jew of whom their parents would approve. By playing his guitar and turning prayers into group sing-alongs, Saul allows people to have enough fun to forget they’ve come largely out of guilt. Rabbi Mayer is the dentist, Saul the congregation’s lollipop reward for having kept their appointment.
English prayers outnumber Hebrew ones. The
Jewish Congregational Prayerbook
attempts to compensate for this by using “thou” and “thee” instead of “you,” and by adding “-est” to verb endings. “Mayest thou liest down and risest up” is supposed to feel more like the four-thousand-year-old language the book has largely replaced. There is, of course, some Hebrew. A gifted minority can parse the words without any idea of their meaning. For those who forgot Hebrew phonetics soon after depositing their bar mitzvah checks, there are English transliterations.
The foreword to the
JCP
claims that the transliterations are “for the reader’s ease and comfort.” This gentle lie cloaks an embittered editor’s elaborate scheme to avenge the childhood he suffered while actually learning the language. SH replaces T; a K is inserted where a G would be more appropriate. As a result, it is painfully apparent who is reading the Hebrew and who is not. Misbegotten syllables collide midair with their proper cousins, making the service more closely resemble a speech therapy class than a religious gathering.
Aaron will recite the Hebrew just a little faster than everyone else, just to show that he can. He doesn’t need to actually look at the
JCP;
he can recite the entire service beginning to end with his eyes shut. Since he was eight, people have been saying he should be a rabbi. Aaron is embarrassed by how much he still likes to hear this. Walking through the synagogue doors, he imagines heads turning to look, excited whispers of “There goes the cantor’s son.” Inside Beth Amicha’s walls, he is junior class president, football captain, and star of the school musical. In Aaron’s imaginary congregational yearbook he is Most Popular and Most Likely to Succeed, with the special added superlative of Best Young Jew. In Beth Amicha, he’s pretty sure girls smile at him sometimes. He never doubts his clothes. He is neither too tall nor too pale.