The Englishman

chapter 12

LIKE A CREATURE BEING BORN, New Year pushes itself into time and space head first. Rosh Hashanah means “the head of the year,” and this year it falls on the fourth weekend in September. Like all new life it chastens those who watch its arrival and resolves them to do better in future. Purification, repentance, atonement, until, on the tenth Day of Awe, Yom Kippur, God determines whose name will remain in the Book of Life and who will be cast out. It may be a really stupid idea to give in to it, but when I wake up five hours later in the same subdued, chastened mood, I feel the pull of my past.

Freddy Katz’s synagogue is across the river and about three miles due west. There are a couple of minibuses parked on a small lot nearby, their drivers smoking and listening to the radio, and about a dozen bikes and mopeds. I can’t bring myself to park in full view of the entrance, flaunting my non-observance, so I guiltily drive round the corner and walk back. Temple Beth David has an open-door policy for Rosh Hashanah, so I have to stand in line for ten minutes to get in. The doorman narrows his eyes at me.

“Ba’alat teshuvah?” he asks.

That’s a very good question, mister!

“B’ezrat HaShem,” I reply. This doesn’t soften his expression, so I explain that I am a new colleague of Freddy Katz’s and that he invited me. This does the trick, and he points me toward the stairs. I pick up a prayer book, squeeze into a back row on the balcony, smile bravely at the women who glance over at me, and wish them L’shana tova.

The New Year prayers and their melodies are familiar to me, but it’s such a long time since I studied them, such a long time since I heard any Hebrew at all, that I well up and give thanks for the humility that made me come here today. Could not this be my home? I settle into a reverie of listening and praying and translating and meditating on the words, which totally gives me away to the frum-from-birth women around me who sit quietly chatting and nip downstairs to the restroom or to check on their children.

Hours later, when I slowly and stiffly inch out of my seat and wish my neighbors that God may inscribe them in the Book of Life for another year, the comforting familiarity of the service is superseded by the unfamiliarity of the faces. I feel overwhelmed and out of place and give up any thought I may have had of trying to find Freddy and his family in the crowd. But I’m glad I came. I feel much more grounded than I did this morning, much more confident that I will find my place in this part of the world and that the next few years, though stressful, will be a good and rewarding period of my life.

Although to an orthodox Jew this would be pointless at best and an abomination at worst, I stop at a grocer’s on my way home and buy eggs, yeast, and flour to bake a challah, the round, braided, yeasty bread eaten on religious holidays. With honey, apples and wine, this makes up my solitary, candle-lit Rosh Hashanah meal, and I even say the prayer over the apples and honey.

May it be Your will, Lord our God and God of our ancestors

That you renew for us a good and sweet year.

Physically I am tired but my mind is supple and awake, and I manage to finish the book review for which I had allowed myself the whole weekend. Sunday morning, still calm and concentrated, I write two coherent-sounding pages for my Notre Dame paper. Then I begin to wobble. I eat the rest of the challah for lunch and decide to honor the late summer day by taking out my bike.

Pretending not to have a fixed destination, I cross the main road and wind my way slowly to the suburb of Ardrossan, where I explore the side streets and keep my ears open for the sounds that waft toward me on the soft breeze from the river.

And there they are. The horns.

The secondary but historically older meaning of the New Year holiday is that of Yom Teruah, “Day of Blasts,” on which the shofarot, the rams’ horns, are blown to alert Israel to the fact that the Highest Judge is in session and will rule over their lives. Many communities combine the shofar-blowing service with the tashlikh ceremony, a symbolic casting off of one’s sins into a body of flowing water. Parents who made their children sit through the long prayer service are particularly grateful for a more relaxed outdoor activity, and the park by the stone arch bridge that connects the college and the suburb looks like an unusually leafy elementary schoolyard. The children run about, laughing, shrieking, blowing their little shofarot, some real, some made of plastic. A group of elderly people shelter on the wooden seats by the clump of trees, chatting in Yiddish. The college on the other side of the river looks magnificent in the afternoon sun, and my heart beats fast at the sight of it, but I don’t know whether it is with pride and gratitude or with anxiety and foreboding.

Freddy Katz is one of the first people who notices me; he greets me very warmly and introduces me to Rabbi Ostrowicz, the youngest of the three rabbis I saw at the service yesterday, and Cantor Young, a handsome man in his early seventies who grins at me above the din made by the children and tells me that he retired six years ago and that tashlikh is his last remaining challenge. Freddy explains who I am and bounces off, I assume to find his wife. Rabbi Ostrowicz, looking straight past my face, asks me whether I am “a beginner.”

“Oh, no, not quite,” I stutter and wonder whether I could possibly explain to this diffident young man (well, he must be my age, but he seems younger) about Anshel the Yeshiva boy. “Well, my family is not very observant, but—”

“And a Yankee,” Cantor Young decides in lugubrious accents. “We have another one of your sort.”

It takes me several mortified moments to realize that he is teasing me, and I feel a right klutz for being so slow. Freddy returns with his wife and Mrs. Ostrowicz in tow. I do not have the impression that Margalit Katz is in any way interested in making my acquaintance, but perhaps I am being unfair. There are five little Katzes to rein in, the eldest bar mitzvah’d last summer. And she is about to make associate professor at the Music department. Maybe I don’t much like her, either.

Everyone is davening and watching the children and listening to the shofar players—one of whom is proficient, the other one sucks but has a sense of humor about it. I go in for a minute of soul-searching to see whether all these little kids make me wish that one of them was mine, but I cannot in all honesty identify such a wish. Karen’s unborn baby comes to my mind, and for her I pray:

We ask for a piece of sand

And God gives us a beach.

We ask for a drop of water

And God gives us an ocean.

There is the occasional glance into my direction, one or two smiles, but one man is staring at me in a way that makes me uncomfortable. He seems to be there with his wife and young son, and I wish I didn’t have the feeling that he is more interested in me than in them. I turn my back to him and concentrate on the bread crumbs in my hand.

Our sins float on the waters of the Ouse, only to be engorged and digested by the ducks and swans that have congregated by the embankment.

Staring Guy appears next to me at the railings and stares again. And grins.

“What?” I snap, as if we were waiting at a bus stop in New York.

He flinches a little, but the grin on his face does not waver.

“Anna-Banana!” he says. “You still haven’t got any tits.”

Now it is my turn to stare.

“Oh, f*ck off, Bernie!”

It is, as they say, as if we had never been apart.

Bernie, one year ahead of me, came to Ardrossan and did the prudent thing: he joined Temple Beth David. There he met Elvira, a recently divorced single parent; last summer the three of them moved into a new house together. I am not surprised that I didn’t immediately recognize him; he is one of those rare people who are more attractive as adults than as children. Pudgy Bernie has not quite grown to six foot, but he is very fit and evidently takes care of himself.

“Ah, you found each other!” Cantor Young comes toward us.

“Better than that, Avi—we already knew each other!”

Avi Young fully appreciates the little shtick—presented by Bernie and me as a comic double act—in which we sketch our history for him, Chinese burns and all, and soon we are standing in a little huddle with Avi Young, Freddy Katz, and two friends of his.

“Who is that woman who is making all the men laugh?” one of Freddy’s daughters asks her mother.

“Never mind her, honey. She came to shul by car this morning. She’s from New York.”

Oh, and you’re straight from Lyubavichi, are you, Margele?

In contrast, Elvira—a buxom, Sephardic-looking woman who I’m guessing is a few years older than Bernie—welcomes me, literally, with open arms. And with a plan.

“Anna, would you like to come to our house-warming party? Might be nice for you, get to know a few of the locals? Danny, hmm—what do you think? Or Jake?” She turns to Bernie and gives him a significant look.

“Listen, I thank you both, but I’m not actually…I’ve only been here for a few weeks, it’s a little early for a shidduch date!” I squirm.

“Anna’s right.” Bernie nods. “Anyway, a party isn’t really a good occasion to catch up. Should we take her to Los Viejos Amigos first, after Yom Kippur, for a quiet glass of wine? That’s our favorite Mexican place here in Shaftsboro,” he informs me, as if I didn’t know that already, and as if we hadn’t already agreed to meet there in two weeks’ time. Bernie, it seems, is a bit of a heel, still. But I don’t mind. I like him much better now than when we were fourteen, and I am looking forward to knowing him a little better, too.