A Princess of Passyunk

Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff

Three: Alchemy

Baba did not steal material only from the Bible. Sometimes she stole from folk and fairytales. Ganady’s personal favorites were stories in which fable and reality blended into an amorphous whole in which one was almost entirely lost in the other. Of course, so much of the history of the Slavic lands read like fairy tale anyway, it was difficult to differentiate between fact and fable.

Often, Ganady listened with only half an ear, which was the way he listened to everything but baseball games. He respected Baba and her stories, because he understood on some level of his pubescent soul that this was Baba’s way of extracting magical moments from life. Perhaps it was because of this that Ganady Puzdrovsky was willing to indulge his grandmother in her more peculiar moments, which included the yearly pilgrimage to Armin the Opshprekher.

The visit occurred invariably the morning after Passover. The pilgrims were always Baba, Ganady, and his Great-Aunt Beyle, Baba Irina’s sister. That is, until Great-Aunt Beyle’s death the year before this, Ganady’s sixteenth year.

Ganady wasn’t completely certain why he was chosen for the pilgrimage. Nikolai said he was a proxy for the rest of the family and that he had been chosen quite simply because no one else would subject him or herself to such nonsense. Nikolai wasn’t about to be a proxy for anything; no one else believed in the opshprekher—it simply wasn’t logical to consult an oracle or wise man or whatever Baba believed the fellow to be, or to pay for his blessing on the family. This wasn’t the old country, after all.

Ganady didn’t much care about any of that. It was no real trouble to visit the opshprekher and Baba always bought him a nice breakfast before and an ice cream after, if the weather was pleasant.

There was a family ritual that went with this, too, though a briefer one than the one enacted every sabes dinner. Odd, since sabes came every week and the pilgrimage only once per year. Baba would announce her intention to go—as if anyone would, after so many years, need to be reminded—and then, in quick succession, Nikolai would roll his eyes, Da would bury his nose further in the newspaper and give it two good shakes and Mama would say, “Oh, Baba, why do you do this? How do you believe in this business?”

Baba would say archly, “How do I not believe, I’d like to know? I’ve seen.”

She would never say what she’d seen, but she would raise a finger to the heavens as if whatever it was, it had appeared in the sky.

Ganny’s little sister Marija would, at this point, beg wide-eyed to go with, and Mama would shush her even as Baba said, “It’s not your place to go, Marija, but Ganady’s.”

Nikolai would give his younger brother a look that suggested he was a chump, and that would be that.

This pilgrimage to Armin the Opshprekher was much the same as in years past except for two things: One—Great-Aunt Beyle was not here and, two—Ganady paid more attention than he had on previous visits.

It wasn’t so much that he meant to pay more attention, but what usually stretched into at least an hour of small talk and “catching up” moved with uncommon speed from condolences for Great-Aunt Beyle’s passing to commiseration with Baba for having been the only one to sit shiveh for her the entire time (“though Ravke did say yiskor in the synagogue”).

At this point, a year’s worth of distress broke to the surface and boiled out of Baba’s soul. Beyle, she said, had been the only other Jew left in a family that had always been Jewish. Now that she was gone, there was no one but this Ganady, a Catholic, to say the prayers for their long dead. The whole family went to mass now, instead of shul, and the children attended the Catholic school and learned God-knew-what from priests and nuns, rather than the rabbis at Talmud Torah. Only Ganny, God bless him, had even set foot in Talmud Torah, and then only when Baba or one of his Jewish friends (who were sadly few) went for some weekend activity.

The entire family, thanks to her love-struck daughter and that Vitaly Puzdrovsky, had lost its Jewishness, had forgotten, even, what it was to be Jewish. The house was full of Catholic icons and alien shrines; they dined on non-kosher food. Oh, and Armin could have no idea what it meant to try to be observant of the kashris in such a house. If it weren’t for the fact that shrimp and pork disagreed with little Marija’s delicate digestion, God knew what Baba might be forced to eat (or starve), especially on sabes when the Catholics eschewed meat.

Armin the Opshprekher, whose last name remained a mystery to Ganady even after all these years, hummed and thrummed and nodded in agreement, his eyes sad and empathetic. By the end of Baba’s recitation, he was holding her hands and sighing in precise harmony.

“I want to understand, you know, Armin?” she said after one particularly harmonious sigh. “They’re my family and, of course, I love them. And because I love them, I want to understand how they, eh, how they think, you know? How they believe. So, I read.”

She let that hang and gave Armin a glance from beneath her lashes that was almost coy. Ganady had never seen his grandmother be coy; he found it unsettling.

“You read?” prompted the opshprekher. “And what is it that you read?”

“This Bible of theirs. These Gospels.” She said it as if it were nothing at all, and Armin’s lips parted and said, “Ah.”

“So what I wonder is, do I need protection from this?”

Armin the Opshprekher’s lips pursed. “Do you think you need protection?”

“If I knew, would I be asking?”

Armin the Opshprekher’s entire face pursed. “What do you think, when you read these Gospels? You don’t think this Jesus was the Messiah!”

Baba glanced at Ganady, who meant to glance away, but could not. “I don’t know about the Messiah. Maybe this is something only God knows for certain. But I’ll tell you what I think. I think Jesus was a mensch—a real man. That’s what I think.”

Armin was thoughtful for a moment, then he patted Baba’s hands and got up to get his opshprekher things. As he put on his talis and gathered his phylacteries and candles and censers, he asked, “Have you spoken to Rabbi Andrukh about this?”

“And what would he tell me about the Gospels except not to read them?”

Armin adjusted his talis about his shoulders and lit a censer. “Perhaps you should not read them, Irina, if they make you weak.”

Now it was Baba’s eyebrows that raised. “Weak? Ikh zen Yiddish, Armin. I’m a Jew—the last Jew in all my family. But I wonder, you see. Who is this fellow, Jesus, that he’s so important to my family? I wonder, you know? Eh—if we are righteous, we Jews, then maybe one old Jew can save her Catholic family. And if they’re the righteous, then surely all those Christians can save one old Jew between them.”

Armin gave Baba a long, solemn look then began her yearly treatment. There was incense and prayer and recitation in an ancient tongue.

As Armin the Opshprekher’s voice droned on and the incense grew thicker, Ganady wondered what magic tumbled from the old man’s lips along with the alien words and what spells oozed from his censer. And as he contemplated what it meant to be a proxy in the parlor of a Jewish cabalist, his hair stood on end.

Was the opshprekher trying to exorcise Ganady and his family of Christianity, so they would convert back to Judaism? Could he do that? And if he could, what magic had Ganady, a rank amateur, to counter the workings of a professional occultist?

He thought first of the Twenty-third Psalm, but realized that it was an Old Testament verse and might not work, and besides, he could only recall a few lines of it, most notably the ones about the Valley of the Shadow of Death.

He considered the Lord’s Prayer, but as Armin had his hand upon a Torah, and the Torah was the Book of Moses and the Prophets, he feared it might insult both Moses and Christ were he to call on it to protect him from a Jewish enchantment (if there were such a thing). Besides, he wasn’t sure he remembered all of that, either.

He wished he had been more attentive in catechism, but he didn’t recall any lessons that dealt with precisely this situation. He wished that he had his rosary, but he only carried that to mass.

What he had was a baseball, deep in the pocket of his jacket. Usually, at this point in the yearly exorcism, he would be sitting in the window casement, turning the ball meditatively in his hand.

The baseball had Eddie Waitkus’s autograph on it. It had been fouled off the bat of the Giants’ Bobby Thompson and fielded by Waitkus for the out. Waitkus himself had flipped it into the stands where it had found Ganady Puzdrovsky’s glove. Mr. Ouspensky had proclaimed it a miracle.

Ganady reached into his pocket and grasped the miracle ball so hard the seams creased his fingers. For good measure, he reached into his memory, as well, for the Lord’s Prayer. He was able to remember only, “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” He turned the baseball in his pocket and silently chanted his scrap of prayer, deciding that his Father Who wert in Heaven could be counted on to know who needed to be delivered from what.

This seemed to work, for when he had left Armin the Opshprekher’s and was sitting, eating bittersweet chocolate ice cream with his grandmother and wondering what Yevgeny would have made of all this, it occurred to Ganady that he felt no less Catholic than he had that morning.

Perhaps that was because Armin’s Yiddish magic didn’t work here, or perhaps it was the Lord’s Prayer, or perhaps the baseball. Ganady did not expect he would ever know.

oOo

“It was the prayer,” said Yevgeny. “I’m sure of it.”

And Nick snorted. “Yeah. What makes you think it was that stupid old baseball?”

Ganady declined to remind his brother that that stupid old baseball had come to him, indirectly, off the bat of B. Thompson—3B, New York Giants—or that Nikolai, who had been sitting next to him in the stands and who had leapt as zealously as he had to glove it, had then proclaimed that any true Phillies fan would have thrown it back, it having come off an enemy stick.

“Maybe it was both,” murmured Ganady.

The three were slouching east on Wharton toward Saint Casimir’s, dragging their feet at the prospect of school on such a spring day. The Baseball was in Ganady’s book satchel. It had, in fact, not left his person since the episode at the opshprekher’s.

“Things are new here,” said Nikolai. “They’re different than they were in the old country. But Baba and her old friends try to hang on. That’s why they’re Jewish and we’re Christian.”

“Da was a Christian in the old country,” argued Ganady. “Only Mama’s family was Jewish.”

“She converted when she married your dad?” Yevgeny asked.

“Yeah. I guess his family wasn’t too keen on him marrying a Jewish girl,” Ganady said. “Of course, Mama’s family wasn’t too keen on her marrying a goy either. Especially since she got to be goy, herself.”

“Shiksa,” Nick corrected. “I’m glad we’re Catholic. All those food laws—no pork; no shrimp; no lobster—what’s that? Fish on Friday I can deal with.”

“But she believed, didn’t she? In our Lord Jesus, I mean.”

Ganady shrugged. “She wanted to marry my Da. They were in love. I’m pretty sure she believes now. I mean, she got baptized and all. She goes to mass and takes communion. I don’t know about then. They only knew each other two weeks when he proposed.”

“You should hear how Baba nudzhes because our house isn’t kosher.” Nick raised the pitch of his voice in warbling mimicry. “‘It’s so I never can tell what I’m eating. I could every day be breaking the kashris and I wouldn’t know.’”

“I thought your mom and dad grew up in the same town.”

“They did. But she lived in the Jewish part and he lived in the Catholic part, so they never met until they got on the boat to America. Mama says it was the magic of moonlight and waves. Baba says it was because everybody but Mama was below, seasick, and nobody was there to keep an eye on her.”

Ganady wobbled a little inside at the thought of his parents staring into each other’s eyes and crooning Polish love songs to each other.

Nick laughed aloud. “And that music she listens to! Accordions and clarinets and stuff.” He gave his little brother, who had played clarinet since the age of nine, a mocking grin.

“Wow,” breathed Yevgeny. “Just like Romeo and Juliet.”

Ganady ignored mention of the clarinet, but thought of Romeo and Juliet gave him pause. “Yeah. I guess so. It’s no big deal. Not like they were at war with each other or anything. Not like Montagues and Capulets.”

“War?” asked Nick. “What war? What’s a Capu—Capu...?”

“Yeah, but their love brought them together. Just like in the movies or something. That’s keen.”

“It’s soppy, is what it is,” said Nick, forgetting about wars, Capulets, and Baba’s fondness for klezmer music.

“Did she really say that about the magic of moonlit waves?” asked Yevgeny. “Your mom, I mean.”

Ganny nodded. “You should have seen her face—all dreamy.”

Nick chortled. “Can you picture our Ma and Da going all ga-ga over each other? Staring into each other’s eyes? ‘Oh, Re-bec-ca, my princess! Oh, Vi-tal-y, my little galobkie!’”

“I bet they’re still in love, huh?”

“Yeah,” Ganady said, and felt an inexplicable bubble of contentment rise up under his heart to pop.

“That’s keen.”

“Yeah.”

“Really soppy.”

The stern face of Saint Casimir’s stopped them in their tracks and put an end to conversation. The Three took a deep breath in unison and entered through the artfully wrought gates.

oOo

Ganady was much bothered by his lack of understanding. It seemed to him that in the case of the opshprekher’s blessing, some force was at work. It was a peculiar force, inconsistent or indecisive or perhaps simply impartial, like God. It didn’t make Ganady, or anyone else in the family, any less Catholic, but it did keep Baba happy for another year and content to live in a non-kosher household.

Ganady thought that perhaps his attendance at synagogue was a result of the opshprekher’s charms and chants. Even Yevgeny’s speaking Yiddish and being allowed to set foot in a Jewish house of worship might be attributable to it.

The baseball, he reasoned, by being on his person, might have protected him from any further effects of the opshprekher’s ministrations. Of course, that didn’t account for all of the years he had not had the baseball with him.

Perhaps he had been protected those years by virtue of not listening. Perhaps the working of such spells or incantations as an opshprekher used required the target to pay attention. He had read a little bit about Voodoo in a comic book, though, and was fairly certain it didn’t work that way.

He racked his brain trying to recall those other visits. Might he have had something else with him that protected him from the full effects of Armin: his rosary, a prayer card, a crumb from the Eucharist?

“Is an opshprekher really a kind of wizard?” he asked Baba. “Do his blessings really work?”

“Of course, they work. How should they not work? You see how we’re all healthy. We’re all together. It was an opshprekher’s blessings that helped bring us to this country, Ganny. They helped your father set up his machine shop. They keep us all together.”

“But wouldn’t God just do that anyway?”

“Sometimes it helps to have someone speak to God for you, someone who knows His special ways.”

“So Armin’s blessings are just to keep us safe?” Would she admit to having the opshprekher try to exorcise her family of Catholicism?

“Yes, and other things,” she said.

“Do those blessings work, too?”

Baba smiled. “I believe so.”

“But, how can you tell?” he wanted to know.

“Some blessings are invisible, Ganny,” Baba said. “You must have faith.”

Ganady didn’t tell her Mr. O had said the same thing about his time windows. He wondered why it was that blessings were more invisible these days than they used to be back in Biblical times, and therefore required more faith. He put the question to Baba.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Well, there used to be angels and burning bushes and plagues of frogs and manna from heaven and pillars of fire. Why don’t those things happen today? And why aren’t there prophets like Isaiah or Moses or saints like Peter and Paul?”

She looked Baba Yaga at him and said,”Have you ever been lost in South Philly?”

He shook his head.

“Have you ever been starving on the zibete?”

Again, he shook his head, wondering how anyone could starve on Seventh Street since it was only three blocks from Izzy’s deli. Even if one had no money, the food would be freely given, without even a promise of repayment.

“Then for what do you need a pillar of fire or manna from heaven, Ganady Puzdrovsky?”

He opened his mouth, staring at her like a startled cod.

“Ah!” his Baba said, nodding at him. “But if you were to ever need those things...”

Later, lying in bed, he gazed at his old baseball by moonlight, turning it in his hands. It was, itself, a tiny scarred moon with a squiggle of black where Eddie Waitkus had autographed it. It wasn’t a pillar of fire or a burning bush or even a crumb of heavenly bread, but it seemed to Ganady that, by its very kismet, there was something miraculous about it. He wondered if there was someone who could tell, someone like Father Zembruski.