In response, Rabbi Altschul might’ve outlined, with something approaching modesty, his own qualifications: that he was known among his peers for his Talmudic scholarship, and had spent his entire life, first in Lithuania and then New York, surrounded by books such as these. He would’ve reassured Mr. Fleischman that the Benevolent Hebrew Aid Society had made the right choice, and that under his stewardship, Rabbi Meyer’s books would all find new and appropriate homes.
But none of this came to pass. Instead the two men faced each other balefully over the threshold, each staring in clear distaste at the top of the other’s head: the one garbed in Orthodox hat and side-curls, and the other, in the Reform manner, as bare as a Gentile’s.
Then, without a word, Fleischman stepped to one side, and Altschul saw the enormous library table beyond, its scarred wooden top buried beneath stacks and rows and pyramids of books.
Rabbi Altschul’s sigh was that of a bridegroom catching a glimpse of his beloved.
At last Fleischman broke the silence and delivered his instructions. The rabbi, he said, must sort the books into groups, based on whichever criteria he felt appropriate. Each group would then be sent to the synagogue of Altschul’s choice. The boy translated these instructions in a nervous, whispering Yiddish; the rabbi grunted and, without a word, went to the table and began his examinations.
Thus dismissed, Fleischman retreated to a nearby desk, picked up a newspaper, and pretended to read it while surreptitiously watching his guest. The boy, too, watched the rabbi—for Lev Altschul was a commanding figure, and a man of some mystery, even to his own congregation. He was a widower, his young wife Malke having died from a fever after childbirth—and yet the loss seemed to have changed him little. All had expected him to remarry, if only to provide a mother for the baby, a daughter he’d named Kreindel; but the year of mourning had long since come and gone, and still he showed no interest in finding a bride.
The truth was that Lev Altschul was a man with little patience for worldly considerations. He’d married Malke in order to fulfill the command to be fruitful and multiply, and because she, too, had come from a respected rabbinical family, which he’d thought would dispose her to the role of a rabbi’s wife. But the unfortunate Malke had been completely unsuited to the task. A mouse of a woman, she’d cringed at her husband’s every utterance, and had lived in even greater terror of his congregants—especially the women, whom she’d suspected, quite rightly, of mocking her behind her back. Altschul had hoped that motherhood might strengthen his bride, but the pregnancy had turned her even paler and more querulous than before; and at the end, she’d seemed to embrace the killing fever with a certain gloomy relief. The entire experience had been so off-putting that, having fulfilled the commandment once, Altschul had no intention of doing so again. To solve the problem of a mother for little Kreindel, he now paid an assortment of young mothers in their tenement to look after her—one of whom had just arrived for the squirming girl when he received the request from the Benevolent Hebrew Aid Society that morning, asking for his help.
He’d nearly rejected the letter out of hand. In Lev Altschul’s mind, the Reform movement and their uptown charities were an enemy second only to the Russian Tsar. He held a special contempt for their settlement workers: young German Jewesses who knocked on tenement doors, offering the ladies who answered free milk and eggs if they agreed to endure a lecture on modern hygiene and nutrition. You’re in America now, their refrain went. You must learn to cook properly. Lev had instructed Malke that no settlement woman was ever to set foot in their apartment, that he’d rather starve than accept the worm that dangled from their hook. And now that Malke was dead, he was even warier than before: for all knew that the settlement women were also agents of the Asylum for Orphaned Hebrews, the gigantic Reform orphanage uptown that stole poor Orthodox children into its bowels and made them forget their families, their Yiddish, and their traditions. In short, he was as likely to venture inside a serpent’s pit as spend an afternoon at the Benevolent Hebrew Aid Society—but in the end, the lure of an abandoned Talmudic library had worked its magic, and the rabbi had reluctantly agreed.
Now, as Altschul walked up and down the book-lined table, the character of the late Rabbi Meyer began to take shape in his mind. The books themselves were well thumbed and well cared for, the library of a true scholar. The titles, however, told him that Meyer’s theology had been far more mystical than his own, even edging toward anathema. In fact, if the two had ever encountered each other in life, Altschul might’ve had harsh words for him. But standing in this cold and alien office, with the dead man’s precious library laid out like the grubby contents of a bookmonger’s cart, Altschul felt only a deep and sympathetic grief. In this room, he and Meyer were brothers. He’d overlook their differences, and disburse the man’s legacy as best he could.
He began to sort the books into piles, while the boy waited nearby in nervous boredom, and Fleischman turned each page of his newspaper with a rattle and
