My Old Neighborhood Remembered (9 page)

And then my mother added an additional piece of information about my father that was to have a lingering effect on my sense of self and my feelings about my background. She told me he had held up a candy store and was caught. My mother said she received a call to come down to a police station and at the station was a husband and wife who owned the candy store and my father was there. My mother said she got on her knees, crying, begging the couple not to press charges, that she had young children at home and couldn't have their father in jail and they took pity on her and my father was released. So many questions arose about that incident, including the desperate state of mind he must have been in if the story were true, but the questions didn't occur to me until I was older. What I came away with was that I had a father who was a bad man who didn't love his children or he wouldn't have run off, and didn't even send us birthday cards, so bad a man that he held up a candy store. My mother concluded by saying that when she went out to work it wouldn't have looked good if she had said her husband had left her, so she told people her husband was dead. And that was what I was to say if anybody asked. He was dead. That was all anyone had to know.

You side with the parent who stays and such was my loyalty that for a few years I did maintain my father was dead. That broke open when I was about seventeen and my first real girlfriend asked me what was the saddest thing that ever happened to me. I told her when I had to bring my dog, Paddy, to the vet to be put down, and she looked at me oddly, and I knew somehow she was aware that my parents were divorced and knew I was lying, that it may have been common knowledge in the neighborhood, or she didn't know at all and just thought I was simply a total jerk for not saying the saddest thing was when my father died, which I couldn't say because he hadn't. I went home and told my mother I had lied for her that night, but was never going to lie for her again.

When my mother told me about my father she said she had learned you weren't bar mitzvah-ed at twelve, as I claimed. It was thirteen, regardless. So we were back to normal on that particular front.

Periodically, music teachers who made the rounds of Hebrew schools would come to teach us songs to commemorate holidays, songs like
I Have a Little Dreidel
and
Rock of Ages
. The music teacher at the Concourse Center of Israel was one of these roving music teachers. He was younger than our teachers, possibly in his thirties. We liked the singing, a break from the tedium. One afternoon when we were finished, he asked me to stay. He took me upstairs to the synagogue portion of the building to an alcove where there was a piano. He played a note and asked me to reproduce the note by humming it. I did and he repeated the procedure with several notes on the piano as I hummed accordingly. Then he said he wanted to see if I could sing in Hebrew and he played something I had never heard before and sang the accompanying Hebrew words. He played and sang a few times, then asked me to sing it with him and I did, as he corrected me. After a few minutes of this he told me I had a very good voice and I could reproduce notes I heard on the piano and he wanted me to be in a professional choir of his, that it was older men and some boys and they sang at weddings and bar mitzvahs and wore robes and it was a very special thing to do and if I did it I would also be paid. I was to speak with my parents at home. He would be back and we would discuss it further.

All that about my father. And now this. Everything was too complicated. And I hated Hebrew School. I wanted no part of singing in a choir. I took the siddur, the prayer book our Hebrew School teacher said was holy and I took my other Hebrew School books and I threw everything down the incinerator.

Then I started playing hooky from Hebrew School. Nobody played hooky from Hebrew School. It would be a sin. But then you had to believe in something about it to believe it was a sin and I didn't believe in anything about it, not God, not the biblical stories. I played basketball when I was supposed to be in Hebrew School, I took walks, I passed the time. My mother was working, she didn't know my whereabouts. My aunt couldn't tell I was not going to Hebrew School. I often went there without coming home first. I can't imagine what I was thinking with my fevered little brain, how long I thought I could get away with it before I was caught, what the outcome could be.

After three weeks or so, somebody called the apartment from the Hebrew School office and asked what was going on, that I hadn't been attending classes. My mother, furious, summoned me for an explanation. I said I didn't want to go to Hebrew School anymore. Every Jewish boy in the Bronx went to Hebrew School and was bar mitzvah-ed. I was confronting her with a cultural impossibility. Given the recent revelation about my father and the rebellious child before her, she made a choice. She said I didn't have to go, at least not immediately, but further down the road as it came closer to the assigned date for my bar mitzvah I would have to go back and finish up. They had told her at the school that I was a good student, which meant I would be able to return with enough time remaining to learn what I needed to learn for my bar mitzvah. I made the deal.

I didn't attend Hebrew School for the next six months or so and then as the time came closer to my bar mitzvah date, scheduled for December 1948, I returned — with one slight problem. In the time I was away, and as part of my rebellion, I could no longer identify the letters in Hebrew. I had forgotten everything. I wasn't pretending. It was all a blank to me.

My mother must have engaged in some behind the scenes discussions because I was told the son of my Hebrew School teacher, a young man who sometimes tutored Hebrew, would tutor me in what I needed to know so that I could chant properly on the day of my bar mitzvah. I relearned enough to manage the words and the chanting.

Another boy was bar mitzvah-ed along with me. In front of the congregation the rabbi took a few moments to acknowledge the other boy. The teachers spoke to us in Hebrew School about “going on,” continuing Hebrew studies after the bar mitzvah. This other boy, who had reprimanded me for opening a telegram given to me during the service, saying, “You don't tear paper in the synagogue!” he was “going on,” the rabbi proudly announced. I was not.

A small reception after the service was held in the basement of the synagogue where the Hebrew School classes met. I gave a short speech for the guests consisting of family members, among them a couple of uncles I barely knew — my mother's brothers who did not have a presence in my life — and some of my mother's business associates. My sister, who through my entire life was a supporter of mine, wrote the speech for me. As for the service in the synagogue, I did it. I performed what I needed to chant. I got through it.

I did not set foot in a synagogue for another twenty-three years. Rabbi Gunter Hirschberg of Temple Rodeph Sholom on the upper west side of Manhattan invited me to attend a Friday night service to hear a sermon he was delivering on the subject of my novel,
Oh, God!
and I attended. Inevitably, I thought back to my last time in a synagogue, to my bar mitzvah day, when I was like an ailing child prince propped up to wave at the populace.