Image Breaker by Mark E. Leib

Author:Mark E. Leib [Leib, Mark E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Vine Leaves Press
Published: 2023-07-11T11:38:10+00:00

42.

The beginning Hebrew class met at night in the synagogue sanctuary. Someone had placed a long rectangular table just past the entrance to the massive room, and when Wishnasky arrived, there were already six other adults seated around it, with Cantor Kazen, round-faced and carrot-haired, at the head. Wishnasky said a general “hello,” then took the only empty seat, between two middle-aged women, one heavyset with dyed red hair, the other short and slender with black-and-gray. The cantor smiled at him and cleared his throat.

“Tristan?” he said.

“Yes. That’s me.”

“Good,” said the cantor. “We welcome a new student: Tristan Wishnasky. Over the phone he’s told me that he’s an expert at modern languages and decided it was time to know his mother tongue. Let’s wish him hello.”

All around the table people greeted him.

“We were just beginning to learn some masculine nouns and verbs,” said the cantor. “As I mentioned at the last lesson, you only need ten nouns to read the sentences in Chapter Three, and only six verbs. Let’s start very simply on page thirty-one.” Everyone, Wishnasky included, opened their books. “Mo-sheh is Moses, Dah-veed is David, za-char is remembered, mah-lach is ruled. All right, somebody say in Hebrew: ‘Moses remembered.’”

“Mosheh zachar,” said the bespectacled man opposite Wishnasky.

“Good. Now ‘David ruled.’”

“Dahveed mahlach,” said the petite woman on Wishnasky’s right.

“Excellent. Now ‘David remembered Moses.’”

“Dahveed zachar Mosheh.”

“Very good work. Now let’s add more verbs.”

The class lasted just short of an hour and Wishnasky was pleased to find Hebrew easier to follow than French or German had been when he’d first studied them. He learned that most Hebrew verbs were based around a root of three letters, and that if you learned the word for “teach,” you were just moments from knowing the terms for “instructor,” “student,” and “Talmud.” He learned that, as in French and German, there were both masculine and feminine nouns, and one had to adjust the verb form for each gender. At the end of the class, the cantor read a short Hebrew section from Genesis—the Hebrew name of which was Bereishit, he explained—and then translated it into English. The Hebrew went “B’tselem Elohim bara oto, zachar u’nekayva, bara otam.” In English, the cantor said, it meant “In the image of God He created him, male and female He created them.” Then he explained that these Hebrew words were the basis for the Talmudic assertion that the first “Adam” was both male and female, and was eventually split into two people when God willed it. “This is the sort of overtone that you can’t get from a translation,” the cantor said. “And so much of the Hebrew of the Tanakh is like that: poetic and resonant with many different levels of meaning. I applaud you all for choosing now to learn this.”

Once the session ended, the redheaded woman to Wishnasky’s left turned to him and said, “Are you any relation to the novelist Tristan Wishnasky?”

“I’m extremely related to him. I am him.”

“Oh, I’m so delighted. My name is Bernice Chaite.

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