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Two yeshiva buchers went for a walk together and came to an unfamiliar village. It was Friday afternoon and Shabbos was swiftly approaching. As the sun began to set, the students realized they would need to remain in the village until the end of Shabbos. But where would they partake of their Shabbos meal? And where would they spend the night? They would need to ask the village rebbe for a solution to their predicament.
I take a deep breath and hold the pages at a distance. The story, recently sent back to me by the freelance Yiddish translator I found online, holds my attention. So simple and Chelm-like, it transports me backwards in time, to another world and another mindset.
I pick up the original handwritten pages from the table. Pages I had discovered in the attic in a box labeled ‘Father’s writings.’ The pages had not been written by my father, but rather by my paternal grandfather. I was emptying the attic because I was selling my parent’s house. Three months had passed since my father’s death, and it was time to put the past behind me. Proceeds from the house’s sale would be shared with my two sisters.
“Your grandfather wanted to be a writer,” I remember my father telling me when I was just a boy. I never knew my grandfather; he died several years before I was born. It surprised me at the time to learn that he desired to be creative, just like I had imagined one day becoming a famous author.
“When I was your age,” my father continued, speaking to me long ago, “I often found him sitting at the kitchen table, writing for hours in Yiddish that I didn’t understand. Longhand with an expensive-looking ballpoint pen. I never knew what he was writing, but when I asked, he would simply reply ‘stories.’”
Stories. Stories in Yiddish set in the old country, probably in the villages of Ukraine, land of my family’s roots. I continue to read the translation of one of those stories.
When the two yeshiva buchers arrived at the shul, at the far side of the village, the rebbe was preparing to lock the door after the conclusion of Ma’ariv. He spoke with them and gave them directions to his house. They followed the lane until they came to the rebbe’s door. When they knocked, the rebbetzin let them in and said they could sleep under her roof. She could not give them any food, she said, because everything was locked away, the cholent with the kugel.
Reading this passage makes me laugh. The name Sholem Aleichem pops into my mind. Did my grandfather intend his tale to be as humorous and entertaining as those written by the renowned Yiddish author? Would a ‘fiddler on the roof’ greet the yeshiva students on their Shabbat visit to the village?
What was my grandfather like? I asked my father long ago. All these years later, specific details of my father’s answers have been forgotten. I seem to recall learning that my grandfather emigrated to the United States in the early years of the twentieth century, coming across the Atlantic on a crowded passenger ship that docked at Ellis Island. From there, my grandfather joined his brothers in Boston, where he found work in a tailor shop. He met a young Jewish woman, a fellow immigrant from Eastern Europe. They married, moved west, and started a family. My family.
Besides a few sepia-toned photographs in dusty photo albums, nothing remains of my grandfather or his generation, except for the tombstones I had seen recently at my father’s funeral. Other than my sisters and their families, I do not have any close relatives. No aunts and uncles still alive, no cousins nearby with whom to share memories. But now, I hold in my hands a story that introduces me to my grandfather. A story that draws me into his vision of a small village where night has just fallen.
The rebbe had one single daughter and a shiksa for a maid. The two yeshiva buchers lay down in the other room, but they were very hungry. In the middle of the night, they woke to the smell of the cholent and the aroma of the kugel drifting through the house. As their stomachs grumbled, they simply could not fall back asleep. Then, one of the students came up with an idea. He would take a long rope and hold it. The other student would go through the darkness to the oven and, using the rope, would pull out something to eat.
Wait a minute, I think. Where did they get the rope? And if the rebbetzin had locked the food away, how would it be possible to pull something out of the oven?
This is just a fanciful story, I remember, a fable, a funny tale in which not everything needs to be logical or make sense. What is important, I say to myself, is that the words I am reading are a gateway into my grandfather’s imagination. He sat down, pen in hand, possibly at this very table in the kitchen of the house he had once owned and put his fiction down on paper. That was an accomplishment I had never achieved. Growing up, I abandoned my dreams of becoming a famous author and instead dedicated my career to becoming a competent accountant.
I pick up the next page of the story.
When the first yeshiva bucher went to the oven and pulled out a loaf of bread from the oven, and when he tasted it and then ate it with great haste, he forgot about his friend. He ate to his heart’s content. Satisfied, he went astray on his way back to the bed he shared with his friend. Instead, he came to where the rebbe’s daughter was sleeping.
Before closing her eyes for the night, the rebbetzin remembered that her daughter was alone in the house with the two young men. She got up and went to her daughter’s bed to lie down beside her. In the darkness, while trying to feel where her daughter was lying on the bed, the rebbetzin felt two heads. Oh, those were the two yeshiva students! She hurried away and lay down on the other bed, where she only felt one head.
The plotline of this story is as hilarious as the mad antics of a Marx Brothers film! My grandfather was indeed a humorist like Sholem Aleichem! Wait until I return to Philadelphia and share this story with my wife. The boys will also get a kick out of it!
I need to know how the story ends.
In the other room, the rebbe woke up and found that the rebbetzin was missing from her bed. He thought she must have gotten up to attend to the oven, as the tantalizing appeal of the Shabbos cholent was difficult to dismiss from his mind.
The rebbe saw someone lying on the floor, enjoying the warm heat of the oven. He lay down, not realizing that the woman at his side was the shiksa maid.
In the early morning, it was time for the rebbe to arrive at the shul for Shacharit. The minyan was waiting, but the rebbe didn’t appear. They sent the shammas up the lane to the rebbe’s house and he knocked on the door. When there was no response, he worried, so he went inside.
This is what the shammas saw with his own eyes: the rebbe lying on the floor with the shiksa near the oven. The rebbetzin in one bed with a starving yeshiva bucher. The other student in the other bed with the rebbe’s daughter. The shammas’s eyes went wide, but what he was really thinking was how appetizing the cholent smelled.
Will my wife feel the same way about this tale as I did? Will my boys appreciate its true meaning? It’s funny, in an old-country sort of way, but that misses the point. This story is the lifeline between me and my grandfather, a connection across the generations where there had been no connection before. Two yeshiva students in an imaginary village in Eastern Europe, long ago, brings me close to the grandfather I had never known.
And then, in my mind’s eyes, I see him sitting at the kitchen table. My grandfather looks just like he appears in the dusty photo album. Dark eyes behind round wire-rimmed glasses. A bald head except for strands of grey hair over his ears. Thin lips and small dimples in his cheeks as he smiles to himself. Slightly stooped, he is writing in longhand.
My grandfather looks up but doesn’t seem surprised to see me. He puts down his precious ballpoint pen, picks up the handwritten pages, and offers them to me.
“Here mein kinder. Read. My new story.”
______
Ellis Shuman is an American-born Israeli author, travel writer, and book reviewer. His writing has appeared in The Jerusalem Post, The Times of Israel and World Literature Today. His short fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and has appeared in Vagabond, Jewish Literary Journal, San Antonio Review, and other literary publications. He books are The Virtual Kibbutz, Valley of Thracians, The Burgas Affair, and Rakiya – Stories of Bulgaria.