The Frozen Rabbi

FOR
CHILDREN

Hershel and the Beast

Mickey and the Golem

for Sabrina,
who makes me almost human

S
ometime during his restless fifteenth year, Bernie Karp discovered in his parents’ food freezer—a white-enameled Kelvinator humming in its corner of the basement rumpus room—an old man frozen in a block of ice. He had been searching for a slab of meat, albeit not for the purpose of eating. Having recently sneaked his parents’ copy of a famously scandalous novel of the sixties in which the adolescent hero has relations with a piece of liver, Bernie was moved to duplicate the feat. No stranger to touching himself, he hardly dared to dream of touching another, so inaccessible seemed the flesh of young girls. His only physical intimacy so far had been with his mother’s Hoover, innumerable pairs of socks, and his big sister’s orchid pink underpants retrieved from the dirty clothes hamper in the bathroom. Then he had come upon the novel he’d once heard his parents sheepishly refer to as the required reading of their youth. Not a reader, nor much of an active participant in his own uninquisitive life, Bernie had nevertheless browsed the more explicit passages of the book and so conceived the idea of defrosting a piece of liver.

Shoving aside rump roasts, Butterballs, and pork tenderloins in his quest, Bernie delved deeper among the frozen foods than he’d ever had occasion to search. That was when, having emptied and removed the wire trays, the boy encountered toward the bottom of the bin a greenish block of ice that stretched the entire length of the freezer. Scattering individually wrapped filets, tossing packages of French fries, niblets, and peas, Bernie was able to discern beneath the rippled surface of the ice the unmistakable shape of a man. It was an old man with a narrow, hawkish face, gouged cheeks, and a stringy yellow beard, his head wreathed in a hat like a lady’s muff. His gaunt body was enveloped in a papery black garment that extended to the knees, below which his sticklike calves, crossed at the ankles, were sheathed in white stockings. His feet were shod in buckled bluchers that curled at the toes, his arms folded behind his head as if he were taking a luxurious nap.

Bernie’s initial reaction was panic: He’d stumbled upon something he shouldn’t have, and thought he ought abruptly to cover his tracks. He rolled the boulders of meat back onto the ice, slammed shut the lid of the deep freeze, and tromped upstairs to his room, where he crawled into bed and tried to still his galloping heart. A solitary, petulant kid, his chubby cheeks in their first flush of cystic acne, Bernie was unaccustomed to any kind of galloping. But the next day he returned to the basement to determine if he’d seen what he’d seen, and that night at dinner, ordinarily a somber affair during which his father related his business woes to an indifferent wife, Bernie muttered, “There’s an old man in the meat freezer.” He hadn’t meant to say anything; if his parents were keeping some dirty secret in the basement, it was none of his business. So what had compelled him to blurt it out?

“Did you say something?” asked his father, unused to his son’s breaking his sullen silence during meals. Bernie repeated his assertion, still barely audible.

Mr. Karp pushed his bottle-thick glasses back onto the hump of his nose and looked to his wife, who sat feathering her spoon in her consommé. “What’s he trying to say?”

It took a moment for the fog to lift from her puffy face. “Maybe he found the thing.”

“The thing.” Mr. Karp’s voice was level.

“You know, the white elephant.”

“The wha—?” Mr. Karp grew quiet, his hands beginning to worry the loosened knot of his tie. “Oh, that.”

“It’s not an elephant,” mumbled Bernie fretfully.

Mr. Karp cleared his throat. “That’s an expression, white elephant, like a heirloom. Some people got taxidermied pets in the attic, we got a frozen rabbi in the basement. It’s a family tradition.”

Bernie retreated once again into silence, having been unaware that his family had any traditions. Then it was his sister Madeline’s turn to be heard from. A voluptuous girl, exceedingly vain of her supernormal development, she condescended to inquire, “Like, um, what are you people talking about?”

Wary of his sister, who may have suspected him of stealing her underwear, Bernie slumped in his chair, avoiding her eyes. His father seemed to do likewise, for Madeline’s looks could be oppressive in the matte gray Karp household; while Bernie’s mother, still playing with her food, offered acerbically, “He’s from your father’s side of the family; they were always superstitious.”

“He’s a keepsake”—Mr. Karp’s tone was defensive—“that they handed down from generation to generation.” He squared his weak shoulders as he tried to summon some pride for an object whose existence he had clearly forgotten till now.

Annoyed, Madeline pushed her chair from the table, blew at a wisp of primrose hair that fell instantly back into her eyes, and flounced resolutely out of the dining room. Moments later a shriek was heard from downstairs, and Mr. Karp cringed. “He came with a book, the rabbi,” he said, as if the literature conferred some official distinction. “Yetta, where’s the book?”

“There was a book?”

Heaving a sigh, Mr. Karp readjusted his glasses and got purposefully to his feet, departing the room just as Madeleine emerged from the basement, her robust complexion gone deathly pale. “I, um, no longer want anything to do with this family?” she declared interrogatively.

“Here it is,” announced Mr. Karp, squeezing past his busty daughter to reenter the dining room. “It was in the bottom drawer of the dresser, under my Masonic apron.” Proprietor of a prosperous home-appliance showroom, Mr. Karp was a joiner, an affiliate of local chapters of the Masons, the Lions, and the Elks, his enrollment dating from a time when Jews were not always welcome in such organizations. His prominence and civic-mindedness, however, had earned him the status of an honorary gentile. He had even managed to secure his family a membership in an exclusive Memphis country club, which (with the exception of Madeline, whose endowments gave her entrée everywhere) the family seldom used.

Mr. Karp handed a limp ledger book of the type in which accounts are kept to his son, who began indifferently thumbing the pages. Instead of figures, the pages were covered in an indecipherable script that resembled clef signs and fishhooks.

“The book explains where the rabbi came from,” continued Mr. Karp with authority. “My papa wrote it all down himself. Problem is, he wrote it in Yiddish.” He may as well have said Martian. Then he added somewhat apologetically, “He’s supposed to bring luck.”

What kind of luck? Bernie wondered as he carried the ledger to his bedroom, a boneyard of aborted hobbies—the unpainted husks of model cars, the broken clear plastic trunk of a Visible Man, a PlayStation gathering dust. Though his only real enthusiasms to date had been a fondness for overeating and his late penchant for erotic fantasy, he idly perused the ledger’s scribbled pages. When they refused to give up one jot of their meaning, he stuffed the book under his mattress alongside Madeline’s panties and fell promptly into a dreamless sleep.

W
hen the holy man Rabbi Eliezer ben Zephyr, the Boibiczer Prodigy, wished to get closer to God, he would sit, or rather lie, by a certain pond in the woods outside his village. There, using techniques described in Gedaliah Ibn Yahya’s
Girdle of Abimelech
, he would meditate on the letters of the Tetragrammaton until he entered a trance. In his youth he had been acclaimed for his public demonstrations of memory, his ability to recite passages of Talmud both forward and backward, and his feats of what the uninitiated called magic. But now in his twilight years he was far beyond such exhibitions, and preferred to exercise his powers in solitude. He would lie upon his back on the mossy bank of the pond, his clasped hands cradling his head as the
Girdle
prescribed, while his neshomah, his soul, ascended to the Upper Eden. There his soul sat in bliss among the archons studying Torah. Once, however, during one of his more intensive meditations—this was in the blustery month of Sivan, just after Shavuot—there came a mighty storm. With his soul aloft, his body, frail as it was, remained insensible to the moods of the terrestrial world; and so, while the storm raged and the torrents battered his meager frame, Rabbi Eliezer continued his meditations in peace. The drenched earth on which he lay turned to mud and the water of the shallow pond began to rise, inundating his legs to the waist, creeping over his chest and chin and ultimately submerging his hoary head.

Previously the sage had depended on the shulklapper summoning the faithful to prayer to signal the reunification of his body and soul, but the deluge had muted any noises from above the surface of what was quickly becoming a lake.

As their rebbe’s retreats were fairly routine, Eliezer’s small band of disciples had grown accustomed to the old man’s frequent absences, but that he should stay away for so long in the wake of such a terrible storm seemed to them a distinct cause for worry. After several days, a party of Rabbi Eliezer’s Chasidim, their earlocks streaming, gabardines flapping like crows’ wings, began combing the pastures and thickets known to be the tzaddik’s special haunts. Deracinated trees with roots like hydra heads, the bloated carcasses of drowned hogs, and roofless peasant huts were what they found, but no Rabbi Eliezer. Some of his followers even passed in the vicinity of the pond that had overnight turned into a considerable body of water, underneath which lay the Prodigy in his mystical transports. When weeks had passed without a rumor of their leader’s whereabouts, the Chasids reluctantly called off the search; they tore their garments, beat their pigeon breasts, and sprinkled ashes over their heads but refused to say Kaddish, contending one and all that their rebbe would one day return.

The seasons changed, the russet and gold autumn supplanted by an alabaster winter, while Rabbi Eliezer continued his submarine meditations. The ground was blanketed, the trees stooped like peddlers under haversacks of heavy snow, and still the rebbe’s body remained impervious to decomposition. It was the time of year when the industrious widower Yosl King of Cholera, accompanied by his feckless son, Salo, dragged his sledge across the snowfields to the banks of the Lower Bug to harvest ice. (He’d been an orphan, Yosl, whom the town had married off to another orphan during a plague in the hope of assuaging God’s wrath—hence his name.) This year, however, Yosl had heard from the cheder boys, who skated the horse pond on Baron Jagiello’s estate, that summer storms had increased the pond to the size of an inland sea. After investigating, Yosl went hat in hand to the baron and begged permission to carve ice from his lake in exchange for replenishing the estate’s own supply free of charge. An agreeable man when it served his interests, the baron gave Yosl the go-ahead, and the ice mensch set out across the fields, trailed by his son.

When they arrived at the swollen pond, a few truant Talmud Torah boys were already there, their wooden skates describing wobbly spirals and arabesques on the jade green surface of the ice. Abandoning his sledge, Yosl trod the ice in his hobnailed boots to test its thickness and then, satisfied, began to cut a trench with his axe. He called to his son to bring him the double-handled ice saw, but Salo, as timid as he was lazy, ventured only to the edge of the lake to hand his father the tool.

“Amoretz!” Yosl complained to the iron gray sky. “He puts his shoes on backwards and gets from walking into himself a bloody nose.” But that was the extent of his indictment, since Yosl had long since abandoned any real expectations of his son’s usefulness. The boy’s fear of almost everything in existence seemed to exempt him from life itself, let alone work, and sometimes his father wondered if Salo, whose mother had died in childbirth, had ever been entirely born.

While his father labored, Salo dawdled at the margin of the lake, ashamed as always to be hanging back but convinced that the ice would not support his lumpish weight. Occasionally, however, he might dare himself to rest the ball of a foot on the crusted surface, rubbing a circle as smooth as glass with the sole of his shoe. But rather than steal a glance through the polished porthole, lest it reveal something unpleasant, Salo usually turned away without even looking. At one point he did catch sight of a fish like a monarch’s wing suspended in a sunless world where time stood still. And again, unable to resist a peek after rubbing another circle, he saw the face of an old man with a yellow beard.

“Papa!” cried Salo in terror.

In no particular hurry, Yosl trudged over to find out what his son was squawking about this time. “Gevalt,” he exclaimed upon seeing the thing the boy had accidentally discovered, “it’s the rebbe!” Shaken to the core, Yosl slapped his own face to collect himself, then rounded up the other boys (his own was too slow) and dispatched them to the Chasids’ study house with the news. The rebbe’s disciples came running, arriving breathless to find that Yosl Cholera had already set about excavating their long-lost leader. The ice mensch, his jaw working like a whiskered feedbag as he labored, was dragging a large block of ice containing the rebbe onto the shore of the lake with his rope and grappling hook.