The Saturday Wife by Naomi Ragen Read Free Book Online Page A

playing and respond Omeyn in all the right places. By the time the praying was over, so was the recess.
    Chaim complained to his parents, who secretly raised eyebrows and exchanged worried glances but nevertheless publicly backed the teachers. He began to wet the bed. He broke out in hives. He bit his nails to the quick, then let the ragged edges bleed.
    He tried to learn, practicing the Hebrew words. He tried to sit still. To pay attention. But when the rebbe [wham!) wished—for Chaim’s own good, of course—to ( WHAM! ) help free him of the unaesthetic and distasteful habit of nail-biting ( wham! Wham! WHAM! ), he felt a little volcano suddenly erupt in his brain. He ran to the window of the classroom and jumped down to the adjoining fire escape. Looking over his shoulder, he quickly ran down two flights to the street. Once there, he carefully spread-eagled himself on the pavement.
    Carefully, he opened one eye, just in time to see the rebbe swoon, his ruler clattering to the ground. The boys, hanging out the window, cheered.
    With his parents’ and the yeshiva’s full agreement, another school wasfound for Chaim, an Orthodox Hebrew day school, where smooth-cheeked American rabbis cracked jokes, and public school teachers in high heels and red lipstick came in the afternoons to teach them about the Statue of Liberty and the Mayflower . A place with a gym and a basketball court and vending machines.
    His grandfather was heartbroken.
    But when the boy was actually able to recite Talmudic passages in Aramaic and knew the difference between a Rashi and a tosefot, he relented. Little Chaim had taken a detour but was nevertheless on an upward path toward taking over his grandfather’s congregation. An illuy, a Talmudic genius, he wasn’t. But when he put his mind to it—or was coerced or bullied into putting his mind to it—he managed to keep up with the class, although he never rose to more than a middling student.
    He had little imagination, but he was good at memorizing. He memorized whole passages from the Talmud, which sometimes convinced a certain kind of dreamy and unduly optimistic teacher that he had a special aptitude for it. Truthfully, most of the time, he had no idea what the passage was about that he rattled off with such ease. He couldn’t decipher it and wasn’t interested in it. The give and take of Talmudic discussions he viewed with trepidation, fearing they would reveal his intellectual deficiencies. Still, he always managed to get As in Talmud, which thrilled his grandfather.
    When Chaim entered high school, his grandfather offered to pay his entire college tuition if he would consider getting smicha, rabbinical ordination. It was the old man’s fervent hope that, when his time came, his grandson would step into his shoes, shepherding and nurturing the beloved congregation he would leave behind.
    It was a generous offer, but Chaim wasn’t so sure. To put it mildly, his grandfather’s modest synagogue did not reek of enticing possibilities. His mental image of the place conjured up dusty, mostly empty pews and creaky tables laden with anemic sponge cake and plastic cups of cloyingly sweet wine, all set out to fete a congregation transferring with alarming rapidity from rent-controlled Bronx apartments to paid-up plots in Forest Lawn. The demographics of the neighborhood had changed. The building had future Baptist Temple written all over it.
    All his friends were interested in careers in computers or accounting, neither of which thrilled him either. Basically, all he wanted was something respectable, where he wouldn’t have to work too hard and which wouldprovide him with a reasonable and steady income, enough to afford a two-family house in a better section of New Jersey, a Chevy station wagon, a JC-Penney charge card, and tuition at Hebrew day schools for his children.
    What else did he need, really?
    When it came to religion, he was not a cynic, like so many of his classmates, who were only in