This Is My God by Herman Wouk

Author:Herman Wouk [WOUK, HERMAN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC000000
ISBN: 9780316055529
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2008-12-14T05:00:00+00:00

“Za Rabotu”

I had had a Hebrew schooling which, for my time and place—New York City, early 1920s—was better than average. I could read and translate fairly well the narrative stretches of the Hebrew Bible. My prayers were fluent. My bar-mitzva had been a major spectacle, and I had turned in a star performance. I considered my religious learning done.

My grandfather had not been in America a week—he was staying in our apartment, of course—when he came to me carrying a vast brown book. “Za rabotu,” he said. He sat me down at a table before the book and stood over me as he opened it. I stared in stupefaction at the massive columns of meaningless consonants. “Read,” said my grandfather.

I have just taken down from my shelves the very volume from the old set and opened it to the very page. Thirty years have passed since I broke my brain over this column. I can read it now without much difficulty; but getting through a page of Talmud is still not easy for me, and never will be. I do not believe it is ever really easy for anybody. The page is quite brown, much browner than the other leaves of this old loose volume. Is it because I pored over the one page for perhaps a month or more in the shafted sunlight of a Bronx flat? There are deep brown spots all over the page. Fruit-juice stains perhaps; I may have been comforting myself with a tangerine as I wrestled with Aramaic that hardly meant more to me than Choctaw. Tears, perhaps, or do tears leave stains on a page?

When my grandfather said, “Za rabotu,” he meant it. They are the Russian words for “To work!” He started me—and I have since gathered that it is a favored starting place for budding Talmudists—on one of the most abstruse passages in the whole Talmud, the duel between Rava and Abayi over a question of proprietorship in a found object. The Talmud, with its usual curtness, poses the whole problem in three words. It must have taken my grandfather a week just to explain to me what the three words implied. But he drove me through Abayi's dozen challenges, based on a dozen analogies in Jewish law, and through Rava's ingenious refutations and final surrender; the whole debate being in Aramaic, not Hebrew. I know I reached the end, because the last words of the passage are still embedded in my memory.

To add to my woes, my grandfather spoke no English. The Yiddish I knew was the Americanized jargon, almost a different language from his. How we two managed to communicate remains a mystery to me. But on the whole, in my lifetime nobody has communicated to me more effectively than my grandfather did, starting with that terrible phrase that haunted my entire adolescence, “Za rabotu.” His main instrument was the Talmud.

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