A Passion for Books by Harold Rabinowitz

Author:Harold Rabinowitz [Rabinowitz, Harold]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307419668
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2007-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

Potch

BY LEO ROSTEN

Among the score of books Leo Rosten wrote, he is probably best known for The Joys of Yiddish and The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N. Rosten considered the story of Potch—which first appearedin Look magazine in the 1950s and later in his 1970 collection, People I Have Loved, Known or Admired—to be one of his own favoritepieces. Nearly everyone has had an experience like the one Rosten writes about, an experience that sets one on a course through the world of words, ideas, and books. One of the editors of this book, in fact, marks his own entry into that world with his first reading of this piece.

We called him Potch, and he was as unprepossessing as his nickname: a sallow, humorless gnome of a boy who plunged me, at ten, into the greatest moral crisis of my life.

Potch, who was given to sucking air and muttering odd maledictions, was not popular. He was never part of our “gang.” He had no athletic skills, no dreams of glory on gridiron or diamond, and seemed actually to dislike the noble, shining hours we spent on soft-ball, basketball, handball, “pinners.” No one wanted Potch when we chose up sides for Run, Sheep, Run or Prisoner’s Base or Shoosh, which was what, in Chicago, we called punchball, played right out in the streets, with a manhole cover as home plate—and without a bat: you hit the ball with your fist.

Potch was a loner, skinny, moody, without luster. He was so non-popular that he did not even compete in our daily tournament of loyalty, each boy screaming out his own All-Time All-Star Baseball Team at the top of his lungs. Nor did Potch, upon seeing a man with a beard, spit into his left palm and jam his right fist into it, pronouncing the proper abracadabra that, we all knew, exorcised (or, at least, slowed up) the faceless demons who lurk around any familiar with a beard.

We never invited Potch to undergo the mysterious rites, performed in a cellar, of initiation into our secret club, whose sole function was to perform mysterious rites of initiation in a cellar. And whenever our volcanoes of adoration erupted, and we extolled the relative splendors of the Rover Boys or Tom Swift, the intrepid Nick Carter or the peerless Frank Merriwell, Potch merely made muffled, gargling sounds and drifted away. He never read anything, so far as we knew; and we (well, two of us anyway) were absolutely fanatical, insatiable addicts of print.

The only noteworthy thing about Potch was that he always seemed to have spending money, and more of it than any of the rest of us. I once saw him take a whole two-dollar bill out of his pocket. To me, whose allowance was five cents a week, this bordered on the supernatural.

We used to talk about Potch in front of the corner delicatessen, marveling over his readiness to buy a ten-cent bologna sandwich or a root beer, a Hershey bar or piece of halvah whenever he felt like it.

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