Hyman by Lawrence Bush

Author:Lawrence Bush
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ben Yehuda Press
Published: 2023-05-27T23:28:23+00:00

Chapter Eight

In which Elly Moskowitz, age 72 , attends her father’s 95th birthday party

May 26, 2012 (5 Sivan 5772)

Elly Moskowitz usually enjoys the rituals of dressing for her public, but tonight it’s more an exercise in discretion and concession than aesthetic expression as she prepares to appear at the Mogelyover mob’s celebration of her father’s 95th birthday. Her aim is to show up, for the first time in over half a century, as neither a submissive penitent nor a rebellious heretic, but simply as the gracious, accomplished adult child of their most ancient statesman, Rabbi Hershl Moskowitz, the last of the Alter Rebbe’s generation — or, barring a true homecoming, simply as an invited Jewish academic, Professor Leah Moskowitz of Western Connecticut State University, who has contributed an excellent essay to the festschrift published in Rabbi Moskowitz’s honor and is now obliged to eat a late-night kosher rubber chicken before returning to her own planet.

Hopefully the men will start their all-night Shvues observance early, if only to show her quickly to the door. But “early” cannot halakhically precede the end of shabbes; in fact, the party won’t even start before an hour after sunset, so there is no way (as she has calculated a dozen times while dressing) that she’s going to be back in her car and heading north to Norwich before 11 p.m.

Elly has not been invited to speak at the event, of course, but has long since fantasized her opening line: “Tyere kehilla, ikh kum tsu aykh fun a vaytn land” — “Dear community, I come to you from a far-away land.” She is still pondering whether to add, “a land where women have voices.” Then it would be the Mogelyover women who would shout her down!

Her essay about a Talmudic heroine, “Beruriah: Exception or Paradigm?” is the only one by a woman in the entire volume. Elly knows that the invitation to write it was a remarkably conciliatory gesture by her father, with whom she had resumed contact only eight years earlier, that is, some eighteen years after her divorce from Mister Monster. Facebook had been the bridge, once Elly had caught on that the old man was plugged in. Tateh, she had written, using the Yiddish word — as if he’d never cursed her, never sent goons to try to drag her out of her life, never disengaged from her and her children for the past forty years — I would like to see you when I come to New York before Rosh Hashone.

His reply, as though he had lunched with her just the previous week: Tokhter, daughter, there is a new Israeli eatery where Schneider’s Diamonds used to be on W. 47th. I will see if they take reservations.

Since then, they had shared two or three meals per year, into which she had smuggled some basic information about his grown grand- children, Daniel (musician, 44, married to a woman but childless, living in Brooklyn) and Geela (clothing designer, 41, married to a woman, mother of two, living in Tel Aviv).

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