Snow in August by Pete Hamill

Author:Pete Hamill [HAMILL, PETE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780446569668
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2009-10-31T07:00:00+00:00

20

Back in the parish, Michael hurried to see Rabbi Hirsch to brag about his Orchard Street adventure. It was like a story out of a library book: he said the magic words and—Open, Sesame!—something amazing happened. It wasn’t Shazam! The words were Yiddish. Words that came from Rabbi Hirsch. But they had worked.

The synagogue on Kelly Street was locked. The front door remained sealed. He hoped the rabbi was all right, but the day was so fine, with the sky blue and the streets washed clean by the spring rains, that it didn’t seem possible anything bad could happen to anyone.

He walked around the front of the armory and looked at the bronze statue of the World War I hero with his small tin hat and wrapped leggings and wondered why there were no statues for the men who died in the Battle of the Bulge. Maybe it was too soon. Maybe they were making them in some studio or foundry, in Washington maybe, or in Paris, France, where the artists all lived. He sat on the steps and gazed at the green buds on the elm trees, and the sparrows chattering in the pale green branches, and wondered how far it was from Paris, France, to Prague. There must not be a ghetto anymore in Prague. The Nazis must have killed everybody who lived there. Then images of the camps unspooled in his mind, those newsreels he’d seen in the Venus, of hollow-eyed men and scrawny, skeletal women and bodies piled like the junk in Jimmy Kabinsky’s uncle’s yard. How could they have done that? How could anyone do that? And why didn’t anyone help? And where was God? How could He let so many people die? Men. Women. Babies.

And suddenly he thought: They must have killed the rabbi’s wife.

They must have killed Leah.

Of course! Those goddamned Nazi momsers must have taken her to the concentration camp. They must have put her in the gas chamber. Or starved her to death. Or shot her. Or buried her alive.

Of course!

That’s why Rabbi Hirsch sometimes glances at Leah’s beautiful face in that browning photograph and seems to feel such an awful sadness. And maybe that explains another thing. He told me once that when he was young, he tried to live without God. Then he went back to God and became a rabbi. He didn’t make a big deal about it. But it must have meant something to him, or he never would have mentioned it. Maybe now… maybe because of what happened to Leah, what happened to millions of other Jews, maybe now he has changed his mind again. Sometimes, the look on his face is… well, it’s not exactly confused. It’s not even unhappy, because in a minute he can change back again and teach me a new word in Yiddish or talk about Ziggy Elman. No: in that little flash, that glance, he looks… bitter. Like he’s pissed off at God. Or maybe even worse, like maybe he’s a rabbi who doesn’t believe in God.

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