In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist by Ruchama King Feuerman Read Free Book Online Page A

Too paltry for Rebbe Yehudah. Ach, he was far too zealous of the rebbe’s honor.
    “Actually, it’s a kaftan,” he said mildly, and then he countered with a few stories of his own about Rebbe Yehudah, one involving an overdue pregnant lady, the second a lottery, the third a lawsuit—well-told stories from his rebbe repertoire. A few times Mrs. Edelman gazed in amazement or laughed out loud, and her wig shook alarmingly. Isaac was on the verge of relaxing into the conversation, enjoying his tea, when Mrs. Edelman leaned forward and asked, “I hardly know anything about you. Tell me, where did you grow up again?”
    “The Lower East Side.”
    “Your parents still live there?”
    “Actually”—he paused to remove his hat and set it carefully on the seat cushion beside him—“neither of them is alive.”
    “I see.” The widow nodded composedly. She pulled her navy skirt a little lower over her knees. “So what did your father do for a living?”
    His stomach muscles pinched slightly—the chill of questions to come. Or maybe the hotel’s central air-conditioning was cranked too high. “He was a scrap and salvage man,” he said. “Ran his own business.” About his father, a man with a nineteen-inch neck span and an endless supply of coarse jokes, the less said, the better. Though his father kept the basic traditions of the Torah, it had always struck Isaac that he and his father were made from different batches of dough.
    “And your mother …?”
    “A wonderful lady,” was all he would allow. Simple, devoted, and practical, but unfortunately, she hadn’t been capable of standing up to her husband’s bullying. “And you?” he tried to divert her.
    “My parents?” She touched her collarbone. “No, I’m not finished with you,” she said, now smiling, a little menacingly, it seemed to Isaac. “I heard you were a haberdasher. Somehow I can’t put that together with what you do now in the courtyard.”
    “A haberdasher, yes.” Isaac blew on both hands, cracked and scaly with eczema. He remembered his shoe box of a store on the Lower East Side. Here an Italyaner walked in; he bought some
gotchkes
. There, a passerby saw the display window and bought himself a box of T-shirts, wholesale. The storeroom was dusty and full of mouse turd. The radiator hissed in the corner from October to April. The carbon notepads kept track of the orders. Down the street was the electronics store, up the block, Feltly Hats. Sunday afternoons, they were the big time. People went to lunch at Schmulka Bernstein’s and afterward stopped over and bought some caps, a carton of socks, and underwear. The out-of-towners, they never questioned the price. From 1980, when he first opened the store, until 1998, when he moved to Israel, the rent never changed. This was how a man could make a fair living.
    “Actually,” he said, suddenly feeling a need to round himself out, “when I was younger, I hoped to teach Torah.” This, over the objections of his father who had wanted him to be an accountant or dentist, something “useful” his father would say. “And I did teach for a bit, too,” he added.
    “Really?” Mrs. Edelman sat up, hands clasped in her lap, in a posture of complete receptivity. “You taught Torah?” Her brown eyes fixed on him so encouragingly that all his thoughts and ideas about Jewish education began to spill out, his desire to reach the boys who couldn’t sit still with the books, the ones the other teachers considered beyond hope. He discovered he had a special talent as a youth leader, and people in the community recognized it, too. A few summers, he ran camps. He remembered the boys. Sammy, with the mole above his lip. Aaron, who the other boys had nicknamed Weasel. Loud-mouthed Ira who was adopted. Rough boys who in a year or two would have been unreachable or even delinquents. For reasons unknown to Isaac, they gravitated toward him. Was it because he was a good listener? Or because he could tell