Old Men, Old Books

Sometimes, when we still live at 110 Rivington Street,  and I am already in my footed pajamas, on a week day evening after dinner, I see Zayde walk over to the glass cabinet in the living-dining room and choose one tall, leather- bound book from a row of others, all of which look exactly alike. Then he retrieves his rectangular magnifying glass, an eight by four inch object that he uses when he reads.  A knock at the door.  Of course, one of the rabbi friends.

           

Soon the two men chose one corner of the dining room table, as tucked away as they can be in this apartment that has no private spaces except the back bedrooms. They open the book. It is not only taller, but wider and heavier than an ordinary book. Its leather spine is cracked and dry so it easily flattens onto the table. In a loud mumble, something like a chant, they read together and pour and hunch over the book, sometimes pausing to talk to each other in Yiddish. Around them the business of the household goes on as usual - Bubbie in the kitchen, maybe my mother helping her, maybe my mother reading to me on the couch across from where the two men are engrossed in the pages of the text.    

           

           

Old men reading old books, is how I define this scene then. An interpretation  I breathe in from the air of my parents' attitude. It is not an activity my mother or father would engage in during their evenings or encourage me to do; they were proud to be modern people.  "I did not want religious," said my mother about looking for a boyfriend. Not that she or my father looked down on Zayde for spending his evening with an antiquated book and an antiquated friend. Not at all. If anything, they admired the piety, the diligence, admired it but wouldn't want it for themselves. It was a remnant of the old country on its way out. 

This was perhaps a decade before Tevye the Dairyman in Fiddler On The Roof  gave old world religious activities a poignant dignity when he sings, "If I were a rich man. . . . I' d discuss the holy books with the learned men seven hours every day. That would be the sweetest gift of all."

           

Many years later, long after I graduate Hebrew School, decades after I am Bat Mitzvah, - perhaps when I see Fiddler for the first time on film and afterward burst into sobs, despite my sophisticated understanding of the extreme poverty and ignorance which dominated the real villages of Eastern Europe, but probably even later when in Jewish adult education it finally occurs to me that the two men must have been studying Talmud. Only then do I learn that studying, disputing and elaborating on Talmud is at the heart of Rabbinic Judaism as it was practiced for almost two thousand years, and is still practiced by the Orthodox and Hasidim. It is only then that I recall this scene and am touched by having several times been a witness to a working man at the end of a long day choosing sacred text study as a pleasurable leisure activity.  

           

About Talmud I have now read several books, mostly written by women trying to imagine women's lives in the pre-modern era. Also the touching and informative The Talmud and the Internet by Jonathan Rosen. On my bookshelf are several volumes of what you might call Talmud for Dummies. They are aspirational. I have never actually opened one. I keep thinking someday I will.

           

What I understand about the act of study for its own sake is that it placed Zayde, or any student of the text, in dialogue and connection with the many who came before.  A few of us - two Rosenfelds and at least one Abramowitz - continue to turn to the Talmud as a way to be rooted in both the past and the present. Most of us puzzle out how to live without the benefit of links to tradition. Yet when one appears, we grab onto it.  Perhaps the most popular of these is Fiddler On The Roof. For all the sentimentality in the musical, for all that we know life was much more desperate than it is portrayed on stage or in the film, still it connects us in love to those who came before us.  Those whose lives might have been irredeemably erased, otherwise. This connection is a small ballast when daily life gets, as it often does, too complicated. In the spirit of small ballast I also write this blog. In this spirit perhaps you read it.