A Walker in the City by Alfred Kazin Read Free Book Online

was tolerant in these matters, and with good-humored indifference let my mother claim me among her "brethren." When he came around to the synagogue at all, it was to exchange greetings at the New Year, and to listen, as he said, to the cantor trying for the high notes; he liked singing.
    There was another synagogue halfway down the block, much larger and no doubt more impressive in every way; I never set foot in it; it belonged to people from another province in Russia. The little wooden synagogue was "our" place. All good
Dugschitzer
were expected to show up in it at least once a year, had their sons confirmed in it as a matter of course, and would no doubt be buried from it when their time came. Members of the congregation referred to each other in a homely familiar way, using not the unreal second names so many Jews in Russia had been given for the Czar's census, but the first names in their familiar order—Dovid Yossel's or Khannah Sorke's; some were known simply by some distinguishing physical trait, the Rakhmiel lame in one foot. There were little twists and turns to the liturgy that were strictly "ours," a particularly nostalgic way of singing out the opening words of prayers that only
Dugschitzer
could possibly know. If the
blind
Rakhmiel—the Rakhmiel in the back bench who was so nearsighted that he might fairly be described as blind—skipped two lines in the prayer book, the sexton would clutch his hands in despair and call out mockingly, "
Beneshalelem; Bless the Lord!
Will you just listen to the way he
reads?
"There were scornful little references to the way
outsiders
did things—people from Warsaw, for example, who gave every sound a pedantic roll; or Galicians, who, as everyone knew, were coarse-grained, had no taste, took cream with herring, and pronounced certain words in so uncouth a manner that it made you ache with laughter just to hear them. What did it matter that our congregation was poor, our synagogue small and drab? It was sufficient to the handful of
us
in Brownsville, and from birth to death would re-gather us in our ties to God, to the tradition of Israel, and to each other. On a Saturday when a boy had been confirmed, and the last loving proud
Amen!
had been heard from the women where they sat at the back separated from us by a gauze curtain, and a table in an open space between the pews had been laden with nut-cake, fruit, herring, and wine, and the brethren had gathered to toast the boy and his parents and each other in their rejoicing for Israel, we were all—no matter what we knew of each other or had suffered from each other—one plighted family.
    Though there was little in the ritual that was ever explained to me, and even less in the atmosphere of the synagogue that in my heart I really liked, I assumed that my feelings in the matter were of no importance; I belonged there before the Ark, with the men, sitting next to an uncle. I felt a loveless intimacy with the place. It was not exclusively a house of "worship," not frigid and formal as we knew all churches were. It had been prayed in and walked through and lived in with such easy familiarity that it never seemed strange to come on young boys droning their lessons under the long twisted yellow flytrap hung from the ceiling, the
shammes,
the sexton, waddling about in his carpet slippers carrying a fly swatter, mumbling old Hebrew tunes to himself—
Ái! Bái! Biddle Bái Dóm!
—as he dashed after a fly, while his wife, whom we mockingly called the
rebbitsin,
the rabbi's wife, red-faced over her pots in the kitchen next door, shrieked curses against the boys playing punchball in the street
—bandits
and
murderers,
she would call the police!—who were always just about to break her windows. The wood in the benches and in the high desk before the Ark had taken on with age and long use such a deep rosy mirror shine that on those afternoons when I strayed in on my way back from school, I would