A Princess of Passyunk

Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff

Two: Only at Yonkiper

Fridays were stressful for Ganady Puzdrovsky. This was because Baba Irina must go to synagogue and someone from the family must accompany her.

Friday supper, Baba held court at table, performing a ritual that was at least as old as Ganady himself. She would turn to Da first. This was because Da was the One Who Had Caused It. ‘It’ being his mother’s defection from Judaism. Da had been raised a Catholic and wouldn’t enter a synagogue, nor would he allow his wife to do so, had he any say in the matter. He hadn’t, for Rebecca Puzdrovsky had no qualms about entering a synagogue. To her, the shul was as much a house of God as Saint Stanislaus.

Sometimes she and Da would argue the point. Mother would say, “Look, Vitaly, the Mayflower got here with sails and your family’s boat got here with steam. They’re both boats—where’s the problem?”

This did not mean that Rebecca Puzdrovsky (née Ravke Kutshinska) would actually go to shul, for she would not. And this had only to do with the fact that most of the members were landslayt; she’d known them her entire life from Keterzyn; some of them had even come to the States on the same boat. They would look at her with their heavy eyes and she would feel crushed. Ganady had heard her say so to Da.

“Like being stoned,” she’d said, “but with grapes.”

Having laid her guilt blessing upon Mama and Da, Baba would look to Nick, who always had too much homework, or a need to go to library to study (though it was Friday) or suddenly recalled that he must do Izzy’s windows. More often, it was a dance at the Catholic Youth Center.

Ganady knew that Nick found Sunday mass intolerable enough. To have to go to synagogue as well was more than he could bear; he preferred guilt. And on those Fridays that the distraction was a dance at the Center, the guilt would get especially deep, because then Baba’s eyes would reveal her agony that the grandchildren had lost their yiddishkeit, to her, something even more fundamental than a change of religion.

At this point, the most sumptuous of meals would taste like sawdust. And at this point, Ganady would volunteer to take Baba to shul and would be her golden boychik and his parents would allow it just so they could eat. Mama believed that it was both sinful and dangerous to allow a meal to end in discord.

Ganady wasn’t sure why this ritual must play out every week, but it must. He had tried circumvention once, offering his services as escort the moment Baba Irina sat down at table and said, “Well, it’s sabes,” as if everyone didn’t know.

“I’ll take you, Baba,” he’d said.

It was as if she hadn’t heard him. She’d paused for only a beat, patted his hand, then turned to her son-in-law and said, “Is it too much to ask, you and Ravke should come with, Vitaly? If not you, at least my own daughter...”

Everyone had then assumed his or her customary role, and the guilt had fallen about in its usual pattern. Ganady had never attempted to break the Ritual again.

How Ganady and his Baba got to synagogue depended entirely on upon the amount of guilt that had accumulated at table and upon whom it had fallen most heavily. Ganady found it bemusing that, though the words were almost always the same, the dynamics of guilt were subtly different from week to week, so that some sabes they walked, some they were given bus fare, and some Da would call a cab.

Whatever manner of conveyance they took, Yevgeny Toschev would most likely be waiting for them at the bottom of the front stoop (if he had not been at supper) and would go with. And so, most sabes, Irina Kutshinska entered shul Megidey Tihilim with a good Polish Catholic boy on each arm.

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.

Baba Irina sat back in her chair and slipped her bright red and gold silk scarf from her head to settle over her shoulders, where it clashed wantonly with her purple-flowered sabes dress. She gave Esther Isaacson a long, thorough look through the steam rising from her tea.

At just that moment, with those piercing dark eyes framed in curling mist, Ganady’s grandmother looked just about as he had pictured Baba Yaga might, peering at an intended victim through the vapors off her witches’ brew.

Irina took a sip of her tea, opened her mouth and said, “There was this man our family knew once, many years ago now. He was a rich one—you should have what every day he threw out. Anyway, this man, he had two sons—Lemuel and Samuel, I think they were. Well, when Samuel—the youngest—got to be a man, he says to his father, ‘Father, I’m never going to have the family business or the house. That’s for Lem. So, give me my inheritance and let me go make my way in the world.’”

Ganady had drifted, by this time, a bit closer to the table, and pulled out a chair so as to sit next to Yevgeny, who was still standing there, dumb as a post. Both boys stayed clear of Esther.

“So, Sam took his money and goods and said goodbye to his Mama and Papa and big brother and went out into the world. Well, let me tell you, he didn’t make his way anywhere but into trouble and sin and poverty. Things got so bad for poor Samuel that he was forced to sell everything he had and live off the synagogue from the pishke—the poor box—and scraps of clothing the rabbi’s wife gave him after she’d clothed the Rabbi and their children. Things got so bad for poor Samuel that he was living, I tell you, in a barn.”

Baba’s veined fist glanced across the top of the table. “With pigs,” she announced for emphasis, and Esther snorted. Baba ignored her. “If there was ever a soul living in fear of That Day, it was Samuel. Well, one night, when he was cold as cold could get—cold as a witch’s heart—Sam thought of his family and how good life had been in his father’s house. So!” She slapped her knee. “What do you think he did, Yevgeny?” she asked, courting complicity.

Yevgeny’s huge, pale eyes blinked slowly (as if, Ganady thought, he were an enchanted frog) and he said, “Why...he went home.”

“Exactly. And what did his wealthy father do?”

“Threw him out, is what,” said Esther. “The boy’s a putz.”

Baba feigned surprise at this answer, her lips forming a soundless O, her eyes going wide. “What do you boys say?”

Ganady and Yevgeny eyed each other, then Ganady said, “Took him back?” It didn’t, after all, take a genius to see where Baba was going with this one.

“Took him back,” Baba announced firmly. “And threw him such a party.”

“Putz,” muttered Esther.

“Now, that oldest son of his, eh...”

“Lemuel,” said Ganady.

“Lemuel. Well, I tell you he was mad—mad. ‘Papa,’ he says, ‘why are you giving this boy a party? A hit in the head, he should have.’ And what do you think his Papa told him?”

Yevgeny, still entranced, said, “He said, ‘Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine. It was meet that we should make merry, and be glad: for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found.’”

Baba blinked her dark eyes at him. “Such nice language.”

Yevgeny smiled fleetingly, then yanked at Ganady’s sleeve. “C’mon.” He headed out to the sidewalk.

Ganady followed. The two of them sat side-by-side on the curbing, sipping their sodas and shivering.

“How’d you know that story Baba was telling so well?” Ganady asked at length.

“It’s in the Bible,” said Yevgeny.

“Oh...Oh, yeah.”

“In the New Testament.”

The import of this was almost lost on Ganady, who was introspectively swishing bubbles about in his mouth. Almost lost, but not quite. He stopped swishing, swallowed, burped and said, “You mean the Gospels?”

Somehow he had managed to burp ‘Gospels,’ too, and was sure Yevgeny would give him the wrath of God and the angelic host for it, but the other boy seemed not to notice.

“It’s the story of the Prodigal Son, and it’s in the Gospel according to Luke.”

“You sure?” Ganady asked, and felt immediately stupid. Of course, he was sure. Yevgeny was the darling of every priest and nun at Saint Casimir’s for his knowledge of all things Biblical.

“Of course I’m sure.” He was silent for a moment in a way that suggested many wheels turning, then asked, or rather, demanded, “Why would Baba read the Gospels?”

Ganady felt sheepish and did not know why. “I think she likes the stories.”

“But how can she read the Gospels and...” Yevgeny’s head dropped almost to his knees.

Ganady knew what he was asking, but he took a swig of soda and said, “I don’t know.” The two boys sat in silence for a moment, then he added, “You could ask her, I suppose.”

Yevgeny nodded, but Ganady knew he never would ask, and that ten years from now it would still be eating him.

“I love Baba,” Yevgeny told his kneecaps.

Ganady nodded. “Me too.”