Excerpt
In the Beginning
ONE
All beginnings are hard.
I can remember hearing my mother murmur those words while I lay in bed with fever. “Children are often sick, darling. That’s the way it is with children. All beginnings are hard. You’ll be all right soon.”
I remember bursting into tears one evening because a passage of Bible commentary had proved too difficult for me to understand. I was about nine years old at the time. “You want to understand everything immediately?” my father said. “Just like that? You only began to study this commentary last week. All beginnings are hard. You have to work at the job of studying. Go over it again and again.”
The man who later guided me in my studies would welcome me warmly into his apartment and, when we sat at his desk, say to me in his gentle voice, “Be patient, David. The midrash says, ‘All beginnings are hard.’ You cannot swallow all the world at one time.”
I say it to myself today when I stand before a new class at the beginning of a school year or am about to start a new book or research paper: All beginnings are hard. Teaching the way I do is particularly hard, for I touch the raw nerves of faith, the beginnings of things. Often students are shaken. I say to them what was said to me: “Be patient. You are learning a new way of understanding the Bible. All beginnings are hard.” And sometimes I add what I have learned on my own: “Especially a beginning that you make by yourself. That’s the hardest beginning of all.”
I marvel that we survive our beginnings. Mine was filled with strange accidents. In the very beginning there was the accident that occurred about a week after I was born: my mother, bringing me home from the hospital, tripped going up the front stoop of our apartment house and fell forward heavily onto her knees and then sideways onto her left elbow before my father caught her and helped her to her feet. My nose and the left side of my face had struck the stone edge of the top step.
Of course I have no memory of that accident; but that accident has much to do with what I am able to remember of subsequent years.
My mother’s knees and elbow were badly scraped. I appeared to be uninjured. The blanket I had been wrapped in had protected my face, and only very little blood, as if from a small scratch, had come from my nose. Our family doctor—a short, pink-faced, red-haired man who spoke Yiddish and English fluently and wore a pince-nez—came quickly, conducted his examination, and announced that no injury had been done to me, I was lucky, we were all lucky, at least twice a week he had cases of mothers tripping on stoops while carrying their babies in and out of buildings and sometimes the babies were badly hurt. But I was all right. However, if my nose swelled, or my mother’s knees or elbow swelled, they were to call him. My nose did not swell and my mother’s scrapes healed rapidly.
Dr. Weidman had spoken with authority, and neither my mother nor my father had thought to question his judgment. They had the European immigrant’s awe of doctors and reverence for medicine. It was a few years before they discovered that our doctor had erred.
Then there were the bird and the dog I killed accidentally when I was about four. The bird was a canary, a gift of my father’s to my mother. She loved that bird; she would sit in the living room and listen to it sing. After a few minutes she would begin to smile, her tight, nervous features would grow calm, and her darting eyes would slowly relax and become limpid with joy. Once a week my father would close all the windows in the apartment and let the canary fly around the house. I lay ill in my bed one hot day, unable to breathe through my clogged nose, my throat painfully tight and dry. I forgot about the bird and opened my window. The bird flew out and was gone. My father hit me for that accident. A cat would now eat that bird, he said. Only feathers would be left of it, he said.
The dog belonged to a downstairs neighbor, Mrs. Horowitz, who let him roam our New York block. Everyone liked him. I would sit alone near my brother’s carriage and watch the children playing with him. One day he got up on his hind legs and poked his shaggy head into the carriage while my brother slept. I hit him and he ran into the street and was hit by a car. Mrs. Horowitz shrieked at me when she saw her dog crushed and dead along the curb. “But it was an accident,” I kept saying. “It was an accident.”
There was Eddie Kulanski, the boy on my block who hated Jews with the kind of mindless demonic rage that remains incomprehensible—and terrifying—to me to this day. He was only six years old but his hatred bore the breeding of a thousand years. A few months before my sixth birthday he accidentally came near to killing me.
The street we lived on—before our world fell to pieces and we plunged into the decade of the Depression—was wide and tree-lined and lovely. It was a quiet, sunny, cobblestone street filled with well-to-do families who owned cars, went to their synagogues and churches, spoke English civilly to one another—the senior members in the heavy accents of their European lands of origin—and who felt that, at least for them, the immigrant’s dream had been realized, they had been right to abandon the blight of Europe and gamble on golden America. Somewhere in the city things were different for immigrants, they lived in a black nightmare of tenements and a miasma of squalor and degradation; but the immigrants on our Bronx street had succeeded: they were all naturalized citizens, proud of their new country, their new wealth, and their children who romped on the sidewalk, played happily, and chattered in an English that seemed to immigrant ears accent-free.
Those should have been sweet years for me, those first years of my life. But they were not. I did things and things happened to me that brought dread into our lives. All through those early years and on into my teens, accidents trailed in my wake like foul-breathing specters. Often my accidents were very narrow escapes; but sometimes they resulted in serious physical injury to myself or to others—and this despite the fact that I lived and played with caution because I was slight of build, always short for my age, and often ill from the injury our family doctor said had not been done to me when my mother tripped and fell with me in her arms.
The injury that had not been done to me by that fall is called a deviated septum, the breaking of the cartilaginous tissue that partitions the nose and aids the delicate and vital filtering processes of the nostrils. Once it was broken, I became fair game for the viral and bacterial pirates of our world. The break widened as I grew older, and the septum began to block my right nostril; but the damage was not discovered until I was almost six. By that time the break was reparable only by potentially serious surgery, which could not be performed until after I had stopped growing.
I spent my early life growing a little and being ill a lot. I thought and dreamed a great deal. I lay in my bed and watched and listened. I turned my long lonely days and nights into nets with which I caught the whispers and sighs and glances and the often barely discernible gestures that are the real message carriers in our noisy world. But it was years before I could shape what I saw and heard into a pattern that made some sense of the lives of my aunt and uncle and cousin, the alternately withdrawn and volatile natures of my parents, and the mysterious comings and goings of the now ubiquitous, now vanishing Mr. Shmuel Bader.
