Princess Of Passyunk Part 2

Inside Ganady Puzdrovsky's head was a baseball diamond. It was 334 feet from home plate to left field, 468 feet to center, 331 feet to right, 86 feet to the backstop. It had no spite fence and was the scene of many more home-team triumphs than the park at 21st and LeHigh.

Ganady's ballpark was always filled to its 35,000 capacity with fans wildly cheering or perched at seat's edge in the hushed, tense, expectant silence that is only experienced by those who frequent ball games. While the cantor canted and Rabbi Andrukh prayed, play commenced, with Puzdrovsky at first instead of Waitkus.

After shul, Izzy's deli might be open for conversation and refreshment. Ganady had never asked his grandmother how she was able to reconcile herself to frequenting the business of a non-observant Jew on sabes, nor would he. But he did wonder. Baba invariably had hot tea and the boys hot chocolate or cold sodas, depending. And there, Baba would open her Book of the Old World and begin to spin tales.

They did not start out as tales, to be sure; they started as reminiscences that someone-most often Izzy himself-would call up by saying something like, "So, what do you say, Irina Kuts.h.i.+nska? What do you think of such-and-such?" or "Do you remember so-and-so?"

One sabes, Esther and Isak Isaacson were at the counter arguing when they came into Izzy's, Irina and her two good Catholic boys, and Isak said, "So, Irina, you tell me-is it Rabbi Andrukh's fault or no?"

Baba sat herself down at the scarred old table by the window and arranged her shawl across the wounded back of the vinyl chair before even letting on that she'd heard. The boys were trying to decide whether it was to be hot chocolate or cold soda on this ambivalent evening in early April, when Baba said, "And what is it that you're asking is the Rabbi's fault?"

"We're losing our yiddishkeit, is what," said Esther. "We are Jews who are ceasing to be Jewish."

"Esther says it's the Rabbi," noted Isak.

Esther-all five-foot-four, 275 pounds of Esther-came rolling over to Baba's table and sat herself down there, making the chair pop like a mad fire. "Only on yonkiper does Joshua Leved (and that wife of his) come home to shul."

"Maybe they go to shul in Cherry Hill," said Baba.

"Then why come back here at all, eh?"

Baba made a broad gesture that took both hands, both eyebrows and every muscle in her wiry shoulders. "To come home," she said. "To come here. This was his home. It's so strange he should come home once in a while?"

"Only at yonkiper?"

"It's when they can expect to find the most folks in one place," said Izzy from behind his counter.

"Ah!" said Esther, half-turning and holding up a chubby index finger like it was Miss Liberty's torch. "Ah!"

"Ah, what?" asked Baba. "Why do you figure the Leveds come home at yonkiper?"

"Zey hobm meyn," said Esther in Yiddish, and Ganady, caught by the gleam in her eye, felt his scalp crawl. "They're afraid, is what. They think, 'what if the Day of Atonement steals up while we're heedless?'"

Ganady glanced sideways at Yevgeny and saw that the other boy's face had gone so pale his freckles seemed to be floating above it. He prayed to G.o.d that Yevgeny would keep his mouth shut about the Day of Atonement.

"What?" said Baba. "They got no synagogues in Cherry Hill the Leveds can face Atonement in?"

"Who knows what kind of synagogues they got in Cherry Hill? All those gansteh machers with their gelt and their big cars and houses. How does one stay Jewish with all that, I'd like to know? Folks leave here, they gehot fley in de nuz-above themselves, you know? They think yiddishkeit is something you can come rub up against once a year and carry the smell home."

"Now, now, Esther," said her husband, clucking like an old hen. "How d'you know this, em?"

"Isaacson is right," said Baba. "How do you know Leved doesn't come home just because he wants to be with folk he knows? You said yourself, Esther-people get their noses up. Maybe Leved likes to be among menschen."

"So I said. Hoping some of it will rub off, no doubt."

It was no secret, of course, that Esther had once been sweet on Joshua Leved, who had married, in her stead, a charmer from New Jersey and who had gone into practice with his new wife's father-a well-off doctor of internal medicine.

True love, Ganady realized, did not always run smoothly, and occasionally derailed. Everyone, Baba had told him once, believed Joshua and Esther were fated, but time and Manya Garudin proved otherwise. And if Esther Isaacson was love's wreckage, then so was her poor husband, who had to listen to her tirades against prodigal Jewry.

Ganady studied Isak Isaacson over the top of his soda bottle and failed to see anything in the man's benign smile but a sort of resigned fondness. There was no indication he knew that when Esther complained of Jews who only came home for the holy days, she was really complaining that Joshua Leved had fallen in love with someone else.

"And what, in all this, is Rabbi Andrukh's fault?" asked Baba, beckoning the frozen Yevgeny to bring her tea to table.

"If he was any kind of Rabbi, he'd fill the shul every sabes, not just on yonkiper or, G.o.d forbid, when someone dies. And I'll tell you one thing more, Irina Kuts.h.i.+nska, that you know better than anyone, and that's how many young people we lose to that Youth Center." Her eyes flitted to the two youths. "Take your boys here. If Rabbi Andrukh was more of a rabbi, your daughter never would have allowed her goy husband to raise her children Catholic. They'd be going to Talmud Torah instead of Saint Casimir's. If anyone should worry over the Day of Atonement, Irina, it's you and yours."

Ganady held his breath.

Baba Irina sat back in her chair and slipped her bright red and gold silk scarf from her head to settle over her shoulders, where it clashed wantonly with her purple-flowered sabes dress. She gave Esther Isaacson a long, thorough look through the steam rising from her tea.

At just that moment, with those piercing dark eyes framed in curling mist, Ganady's grandmother looked just about as he had pictured Baba Yaga might, peering at an intended victim through the vapors off her witches' brew.

Irina took a sip of her tea, opened her mouth and said, "There was this man our family knew once, many years ago now. He was a rich one-you should have what every day he threw out. Anyway, this man, he had two sons-Lemuel and Samuel, I think they were. Well, when Samuel-the youngest-got to be a man, he says to his father, 'Father, I'm never going to have the family business or the house. That's for Lem. So, give me my inheritance and let me go make my way in the world.'"

Ganady had drifted, by this time, a bit closer to the table, and pulled out a chair so as to sit next to Yevgeny, who was still standing there, dumb as a post. Both boys stayed clear of Esther.

"So, Sam took his money and goods and said goodbye to his Mama and Papa and big brother and went out into the world. Well, let me tell you, he didn't make his way anywhere but into trouble and sin and poverty. Things got so bad for poor Samuel that he was forced to sell everything he had and live off the synagogue from the pishke-the poor box-and sc.r.a.ps of clothing the rabbi's wife gave him after she'd clothed the Rabbi and their children. Things got so bad for poor Samuel that he was living, I tell you, in a barn."

Baba's veined fist glanced across the top of the table. "With pigs," she announced for emphasis, and Esther snorted. Baba ignored her. "If there was ever a soul living in fear of That Day, it was Samuel. Well, one night, when he was cold as cold could get-cold as a witch's heart-Sam thought of his family and how good life had been in his father's house. So!" She slapped her knee. "What do you think he did, Yevgeny?" she asked, courting complicity.

Yevgeny's huge, pale eyes blinked slowly (as if, Ganady thought, he were an enchanted frog) and he said, "Why...he went home."

"Exactly. And what did his wealthy father do?"

"Threw him out, is what," said Esther. "The boy's a putz."

Baba feigned surprise at this answer, her lips forming a soundless O, her eyes going wide. "What do you boys say?"

Ganady and Yevgeny eyed each other, then Ganady said, "Took him back?" It didn't, after all, take a genius to see where Baba was going with this one.

"Took him back," Baba announced firmly. "And threw him such a party."

"Putz," muttered Esther.

"Now, that oldest son of his, eh..."

"Lemuel," said Ganady.

"Lemuel. Well, I tell you he was mad-mad. 'Papa,' he says, 'why are you giving this boy a party? A hit in the head, he should have.' And what do you think his Papa told him?"

Yevgeny, still entranced, said, "He said, 'Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine. It was meet that we should make merry, and be glad: for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found.'"

Baba blinked her dark eyes at him. "Such nice language."

Yevgeny smiled fleetingly, then yanked at Ganady's sleeve. "C'mon." He headed out to the sidewalk.

Ganady followed. The two of them sat side-by-side on the curbing, sipping their sodas and s.h.i.+vering.

"How'd you know that story Baba was telling so well?" Ganady asked at length.

"It's in the Bible," said Yevgeny.

"Oh...Oh, yeah."

"In the New Testament."

The import of this was almost lost on Ganady, who was introspectively swis.h.i.+ng bubbles about in his mouth. Almost lost, but not quite. He stopped swis.h.i.+ng, swallowed, burped and said, "You mean the Gospels?"

Somehow he had managed to burp 'Gospels,' too, and was sure Yevgeny would give him the wrath of G.o.d and the angelic host for it, but the other boy seemed not to notice.

"It's the story of the Prodigal Son, and it's in the Gospel according to Luke."

"You sure?" Ganady asked, and felt immediately stupid. Of course, he was sure. Yevgeny was the darling of every priest and nun at Saint Casimir's for his knowledge of all things Biblical.

"Of course I'm sure." He was silent for a moment in a way that suggested many wheels turning, then asked, or rather, demanded, "Why would Baba read the Gospels?"

Ganady felt sheepish and did not know why. "I think she likes the stories."

"But how can she read the Gospels and..." Yevgeny's head dropped almost to his knees.

Ganady knew what he was asking, but he took a swig of soda and said, "I don't know." The two boys sat in silence for a moment, then he added, "You could ask her, I suppose."

Yevgeny nodded, but Ganady knew he never would ask, and that ten years from now it would still be eating him.

"I love Baba," Yevgeny told his kneecaps.

Ganady nodded. "Me too."

Three: Alchemy.

Baba did not steal material only from the Bible. Sometimes she stole from folk and fairytales. Ganady's personal favorites were stories in which fable and reality blended into an amorphous whole in which one was almost entirely lost in the other. Of course, so much of the history of the Slavic lands read like fairy tale anyway, it was difficult to differentiate between fact and fable.

Often, Ganady listened with only half an ear, which was the way he listened to everything but baseball games. He respected Baba and her stories, because he understood on some level of his p.u.b.escent soul that this was Baba's way of extracting magical moments from life. Perhaps it was because of this that Ganady Puzdrovsky was willing to indulge his grandmother in her more peculiar moments, which included the yearly pilgrimage to Armin the Opshprekher.

The visit occurred invariably the morning after Pa.s.sover. The pilgrims were always Baba, Ganady, and his Great-Aunt Beyle, Baba Irina's sister. That is, until Great-Aunt Beyle's death the year before this, Ganady's sixteenth year.

Ganady wasn't completely certain why he was chosen for the pilgrimage. Nikolai said he was a proxy for the rest of the family and that he had been chosen quite simply because no one else would subject him or herself to such nonsense. Nikolai wasn't about to be a proxy for anything; no one else believed in the opshprekher-it simply wasn't logical to consult an oracle or wise man or whatever Baba believed the fellow to be, or to pay for his blessing on the family. This wasn't the old country, after all.

Ganady didn't much care about any of that. It was no real trouble to visit the opshprekher and Baba always bought him a nice breakfast before and an ice cream after, if the weather was pleasant.

There was a family ritual that went with this, too, though a briefer one than the one enacted every sabes dinner. Odd, since sabes came every week and the pilgrimage only once per year. Baba would announce her intention to go-as if anyone would, after so many years, need to be reminded-and then, in quick succession, Nikolai would roll his eyes, Da would bury his nose further in the newspaper and give it two good shakes and Mama would say, "Oh, Baba, why do you do this? How do you believe in this business?"

Baba would say archly, "How do I not believe, I'd like to know? I've seen."

She would never say what she'd seen, but she would raise a finger to the heavens as if whatever it was, it had appeared in the sky.

Ganny's little sister Marija would, at this point, beg wide-eyed to go with, and Mama would shush her even as Baba said, "It's not your place to go, Marija, but Ganady's."

Nikolai would give his younger brother a look that suggested he was a chump, and that would be that.

This pilgrimage to Armin the Opshprekher was much the same as in years past except for two things: One-Great-Aunt Beyle was not here and, two-Ganady paid more attention than he had on previous visits.

It wasn't so much that he meant to pay more attention, but what usually stretched into at least an hour of small talk and "catching up" moved with uncommon speed from condolences for Great-Aunt Beyle's pa.s.sing to commiseration with Baba for having been the only one to sit s.h.i.+veh for her the entire time ("though Ravke did say yiskor in the synagogue").

At this point, a year's worth of distress broke to the surface and boiled out of Baba's soul. Beyle, she said, had been the only other Jew left in a family that had always been Jewish. Now that she was gone, there was no one but this Ganady, a Catholic, to say the prayers for their long dead. The whole family went to ma.s.s now, instead of shul, and the children attended the Catholic school and learned G.o.d-knew-what from priests and nuns, rather than the rabbis at Talmud Torah. Only Ganny, G.o.d bless him, had even set foot in Talmud Torah, and then only when Baba or one of his Jewish friends (who were sadly few) went for some weekend activity.

The entire family, thanks to her love-struck daughter and that Vitaly Puzdrovsky, had lost its Jewishness, had forgotten, even, what it was to be Jewish. The house was full of Catholic icons and alien shrines; they dined on non-kosher food. Oh, and Armin could have no idea what it meant to try to be observant of the kashris in such a house. If it weren't for the fact that shrimp and pork disagreed with little Marija's delicate digestion, G.o.d knew what Baba might be forced to eat (or starve), especially on sabes when the Catholics eschewed meat.

Armin the Opshprekher, whose last name remained a mystery to Ganady even after all these years, hummed and thrummed and nodded in agreement, his eyes sad and empathetic. By the end of Baba's recitation, he was holding her hands and sighing in precise harmony.

"I want to understand, you know, Armin?" she said after one particularly harmonious sigh. "They're my family and, of course, I love them. And because I love them, I want to understand how they, eh, how they think, you know? How they believe. So, I read."

She let that hang and gave Armin a glance from beneath her lashes that was almost coy. Ganady had never seen his grandmother be coy; he found it unsettling.

"You read?" prompted the opshprekher. "And what is it that you read?"

"This Bible of theirs. These Gospels." She said it as if it were nothing at all, and Armin's lips parted and said, "Ah."

"So what I wonder is, do I need protection from this?"

Armin the Opshprekher's lips pursed. "Do you think you need protection?"

"If I knew, would I be asking?"

Armin the Opshprekher's entire face pursed. "What do you think, when you read these Gospels? You don't think this Jesus was the Messiah!"

Baba glanced at Ganady, who meant to glance away, but could not. "I don't know about the Messiah. Maybe this is something only G.o.d knows for certain. But I'll tell you what I think. I think Jesus was a mensch-a real man. That's what I think."

Armin was thoughtful for a moment, then he patted Baba's hands and got up to get his opshprekher things. As he put on his talis and gathered his phylacteries and candles and censers, he asked, "Have you spoken to Rabbi Andrukh about this?"

"And what would he tell me about the Gospels except not to read them?"

Armin adjusted his talis about his shoulders and lit a censer. "Perhaps you should not read them, Irina, if they make you weak."

Now it was Baba's eyebrows that raised. "Weak? Ikh zen Yiddish, Armin. I'm a Jew-the last Jew in all my family. But I wonder, you see. Who is this fellow, Jesus, that he's so important to my family? I wonder, you know? Eh-if we are righteous, we Jews, then maybe one old Jew can save her Catholic family. And if they're the righteous, then surely all those Christians can save one old Jew between them."

Armin gave Baba a long, solemn look then began her yearly treatment. There was incense and prayer and recitation in an ancient tongue.

As Armin the Opshprekher's voice droned on and the incense grew thicker, Ganady wondered what magic tumbled from the old man's lips along with the alien words and what spells oozed from his censer. And as he contemplated what it meant to be a proxy in the parlor of a Jewish cabalist, his hair stood on end.

Was the opshprekher trying to exorcise Ganady and his family of Christianity, so they would convert back to Judaism? Could he do that? And if he could, what magic had Ganady, a rank amateur, to counter the workings of a professional occultist?

He thought first of the Twenty-third Psalm, but realized that it was an Old Testament verse and might not work, and besides, he could only recall a few lines of it, most notably the ones about the Valley of the Shadow of Death.