Princess of Passyunk (3 page)

Ganady knew that Baba imagined they were interested in Judaism—Ganady because of his heritage and Yevgeny because of his heart—but the truth was that they were both interested only in Baba.

Ganady loved his grandmother. But mixed with that love was a peculiar sadness that felt like guilt, though there was nothing to do with Baba for which Ganady Puzdrovsky should feel guilty. He was aware, however, that in Poland, faith and family had been synonymous. Here, they were ambiguously adjacent, sometimes uneasily sharing the same household. To Baba, it must seem as if the life she had so carefully packed up and carried to America had begun to dissolve, its glue lost to the melting pot.

Ganady did not know how to reassure her—how to tell her that the family was fine, really, and would endure, even if, God forbid, some of them were to become Protestants. So, in lieu of reassurances, he came to shul.

Yevgeny also loved Baba, and it was a love of wonder. Baba was a piece of a homeland Yevgeny had never seen—a place of roots and heritage and history that his parents were loath to speak of; a place whose very mention drew snickers in school.

Baba was conjurer and wise woman. She was a favorite book. The boys had learned once, by Kismet, that after synagogue that book might open and its pages give up stories filled with the sounds and sights and aromas of Poland and of times that likely never were and never would be, except in Baba's memory. Ganady didn't care and suspected Yevgeny didn't either. Baba was always a good read.

Ganady had asked Yevgeny once if he remembered anything at all of the actual sabes service. He was surprised to find that Yevgeny could not only chant the prayers, but understood them—at least, in the literal sense. If you asked him, though, what this or that meant, he would speak of candlelight and spirit and the rise and fall of the cantor's voice and the supreme sense of sorrow that filled the heart with a slow, throbbing fever and hung deliciously in the sanctuary mingled with the incense.

The sorrow was so deep and wide, it was almost joy, Yevgeny said, and Ganady, who could almost feel it, but not quite, thought that must be the meaning of ‘bittersweet.' On the heels of that epiphany came the realization that forever after, his favorite flavor of ice cream would remind him of Baba Irina's shul and the sadness of old and displaced Jews. Bitter-sweet.

Yevgeny spoke Yiddish. He spoke it as flagrantly and stubbornly as he used his given name—not ‘Gene,' not ‘Eugene,' but ‘Yevgeny.' This endeared him greatly to Baba and perpetuated her personal myth that he would someday convert to Judaism.

Ganady, who was privileged to know such things about Yevgeny, thought it far more likely that he would become a monk or a priest so he could imagine himself to be Copernicus, who was both wizard and saint in Yevgeny's cosmos. Yevgeny believed fiercely in Christ and the Church; perhaps even more fiercely than he believed Baba's tales of places and people and culture lost. Ganady thought perhaps he was a monk already, or perhaps a curator.

There were sabes when Yevgeny could not, for one reason or another, come to shul. On those Friday evenings, Ganady was surprised at how alien the service seemed and how indecipherable the experience. It was as if Yevgeny were a filter or a translation device—like a Captain's Courageous Code-O-Graph. Yevgeny, though, rarely missed synagogue—something for which Ganady was very grateful, for his own sake as well as Baba's.

Ganady was glad of Yevgeny's fixation with the homeland. It allowed him to hear of it, smell it, see it, know it, without having to betray the depth of his own interest. At home, he was expected to be American. It was as if his family's history had begun with their first footfalls upon the Philadelphia pier. What had come before was not discussed, nor were questions asked. And if, by chance, a word or two of a prior life slipped from his mother's memory into her conversation, a look from her husband would cause her to pack it away again. Everything Ganady knew of Poland, he knew from his grandmother, who did not have to be so much asked as prompted.

One Friday night, as Ganady and Yevgeny sat upon the Puzdrovskys' front stoop waiting for Baba Irina to come down for shul, Yevgeny asked, “Does Baba know the story of Jesus?”

“I suppose so,” Ganady answered, but wasn't at all sure. “Mother must've told her,” he guessed.

“I don't understand how she doesn't believe. It's like she doesn't even think of it.”

Ganady didn't suppose she did think of it. He shrugged. “She has her ways. She's had them all her life. Her parents were Jewish and their parents. It's who she is.”

Yevgeny pondered this, his freckles puckered indecisively. “Saint Peter said that God wasn't partial. That anybody who feared Him and did what was right would be acceptable to Him.”

Ganady vaguely remembered having heard this, so he nodded.

“Father Zembruski,” said Yevgeny as if the name was shoved from his open lips, “said that doing what's right means believing in Christ, not just doing what's right.”

Ganady nodded again, supposing that Father Z, who had studied these things, should know.

“Has your mother really tried to explain to Baba about Jesus?”

“I don't know,” Ganady said. “Are you afraid Baba's going to hell?”

Yevgeny's fair skin flushed and his delft eyes looked suddenly bright and watery. “She couldn't. I mean, she fears God, right?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“And that's half of it.”

Ganny nodded.

“And if Father Zembruski is wrong and what Peter meant by doing right is just doing right, then that's the other half.”

Baba came out then, arresting any discussion of what it might mean to think that Father Z had been wrong about something.

“Ah, here are my good
boychiklech
,” she said, and Yevgeny didn't mention Jesus to her, as much as Ganady knew he wanted to.

They walked to shul this evening. The weather was mild, the streets and sidewalks still glistening with spring rain. Ganady wondered if the ballgame would be rained out tomorrow. Da had said they might go.

He thought of Mr. O. “Baba, how long have you known Mr. Ouspensky?”

“Well, when we came to Megidey Tihilim for our first sabes here, there was Stanislaus Ouspensky. I've known him since that day.”

“Do you think he's a...a
meshuggener
?”

“Ganady! What sort of thing is that to say?”

“I
didn't
say it. Nikolai did. He said Mr. Ouspensky likes to play jokes on dummies like me and Yevgeny and that's why he says...” He broke off, unable to think of a way to explain Mr. O's theories of time to his grandmother.

“I know what he says,” Baba said, her mouth prim. “Perhaps that makes him a
meshuggener.
Certainly, it's not my place to say.”

“Doesn't he have any family?” Ganady asked.

“Shouldn't you ask
him
these things?”

Ganady shrugged, looking around Baba Irina at Yevgeny, who peered back owlishly. “He just said he'd been here a long time. That he came here when he was almost a kid. But not quite.”

“And he said he played baseball for some mill,” added Yevgeny.

“He came over as a young man, I think,” Baba told them. “Perhaps he left his family in Poland. Or perhaps there was no one to come with him. So, what do you boys think? Do you think he's a
meshuggener
?”

Ganady thought about that for a moment. What was he supposed to think of someone who discussed time-eddies and windows with the same conversational tone as he discussed batting averages and ERAs?

“No,” he said at last. “I don't.”

From Baba's opposite side, Yevgeny shook his head and said nothing.

oOo

Synagogue was, above all, a place where Ganady Puzdrovsky exercised his imagination. Unlike Yevgeny, whose eyes and ears never ceased external surveillance, Ganady withdrew into his own spiritual sanctuary.

Inside Ganady Puzdrovsky's head was a baseball diamond. It was 334 feet from home plate to left field, 468 feet to center, 331 feet to right, 86 feet to the backstop. It had no spite fence and was the scene of many more home-team triumphs than the park at 21
^st
and LeHigh.

Ganady's ballpark was always filled to its 35,000 capacity with fans wildly cheering or perched at seat's edge in the hushed, tense, expectant silence that is only experienced by those who frequent ball games. While the cantor canted and Rabbi Andrukh prayed, play commenced, with Puzdrovsky at first instead of Waitkus.

After shul, Izzy's deli might be open for conversation and refreshment. Ganady had never asked his grandmother how she was able to reconcile herself to frequenting the business of a non-observant Jew on sabes, nor would he. But he did wonder. Baba invariably had hot tea and the boys hot chocolate or cold sodas, depending. And there, Baba would open her Book of the Old World and begin to spin tales.

They did not start out as tales, to be sure; they started as reminiscences that someone—most often Izzy himself—would call up by saying something like, “So, what do you say, Irina Kutshinska? What do you think of such-and-such?” or “Do you remember so-and-so?”

One sabes, Esther and Isak Isaacson were at the counter arguing when they came into Izzy's, Irina and her two good Catholic boys, and Isak said, “So, Irina, you tell me—is it Rabbi Andrukh's fault or no?”

Baba sat herself down at the scarred old table by the window and arranged her shawl across the wounded back of the vinyl chair before even letting on that she'd heard. The boys were trying to decide whether it was to be hot chocolate or cold soda on this ambivalent evening in early April, when Baba said, “And what is it that you're asking is the Rabbi's fault?”

“We're losing our yiddishkeit, is what,” said Esther. “We are Jews who are ceasing to be Jewish.”

“Esther says it's the Rabbi,” noted Isak.

Esther—all five-foot-four, 275 pounds of Esther—came rolling over to Baba's table and sat herself down there, making the chair pop like a mad fire. “Only on
yonkiper
does Joshua Leved (and that wife of his) come home to shul.”

“Maybe they go to shul in Cherry Hill,” said Baba.

“Then why come back here at all, eh?”

Baba made a broad gesture that took both hands, both eyebrows and every muscle in her wiry shoulders. “To come
home
,” she said. “To come
here
. This was his home. It's so strange he should come home once in a while?”

“Only at
yonkiper
?”

“It's when they can expect to find the most folks in one place,” said Izzy from behind his counter.

“Ah!” said Esther, half-turning and holding up a chubby index finger like it was Miss Liberty's torch. “Ah!”

“Ah, what?” asked Baba. “Why do
you
figure the Leveds come home at
yonkiper
?”

“
Zey hobm meyn
,” said Esther in Yiddish, and Ganady, caught by the gleam in her eye, felt his scalp crawl. “They're afraid, is what. They think, ‘what if the Day of Atonement steals up while we're heedless?'”

Ganady glanced sideways at Yevgeny and saw that the other boy's face had gone so pale his freckles seemed to be floating above it. He prayed to God that Yevgeny would keep his mouth shut about the Day of Atonement.

“What?” said Baba. “They got no synagogues in Cherry Hill the Leveds can face Atonement in?”

“Who knows what kind of synagogues they got in Cherry Hill? All those
gansteh machers
with their
gelt
and their big cars and houses. How does one stay Jewish with all that, I'd like to know? Folks leave here, they
gehot fley in de nuz
—above themselves, you know? They think yiddishkeit is something you can come rub up against once a year and carry the smell home.”

“Now, now, Esther,” said her husband, clucking like an old hen. “How d'you know this, em?”

“Isaacson is right,” said Baba. “How do you know Leved doesn't come home just because he wants to be with folk he knows? You said yourself, Esther—people get their noses up. Maybe Leved likes to be among
menschen
.”

“So I said. Hoping some of it will rub off, no doubt.”

It was no secret, of course, that Esther had once been sweet on Joshua Leved, who had married, in her stead, a charmer from New Jersey and who had gone into practice with his new wife's father—a well-off doctor of internal medicine.

True love, Ganady realized, did not always run smoothly, and occasionally derailed. Everyone, Baba had told him once, believed Joshua and Esther were fated, but time and Manya Garudin proved otherwise. And if Esther Isaacson was love's wreckage, then so was her poor husband, who had to listen to her tirades against prodigal Jewry.

Ganady studied Isak Isaacson over the top of his soda bottle and failed to see anything in the man's benign smile but a sort of resigned fondness. There was no indication he knew that when Esther complained of Jews who only came home for the holy days, she was really complaining that Joshua Leved had fallen in love with someone else.

“And what, in all this, is Rabbi Andrukh's fault?” asked Baba, beckoning the frozen Yevgeny to bring her tea to table.

“If he was any kind of Rabbi, he'd fill the shul every sabes, not just on
yonkiper
or, God forbid, when someone dies. And I'll tell you one thing more, Irina Kutshinska, that you know better than anyone, and that's how many young people we lose to that Youth Center.” Her eyes flitted to the two youths. “Take your boys here. If Rabbi Andrukh was more of a rabbi, your daughter never would have allowed her
goy
husband to raise her children Catholic. They'd be going to Talmud Torah instead of Saint Casimir's. If anyone should worry over the Day of Atonement, Irina, it's you and yours.”

Ganady held his breath.