Having summoned him as a witness to the quotidian, she fretted over what she had done. Because the more closely he examined life on earth, the more besotted he seemed to become with it, while the more urgently in need of redemption he found it to be—in light of which his newly hatched desire to save some corner of creation seemed all the more futile and picayune. Thus were his emotions dangerously mixed. Meanwhile in the present climate of global mayhem, what with the blood of foreign wars lapping at the nation’s doorstep, it was practically a crime to be in love. Children informed on their parents, parents feared their children, and antichrists were detected in all walks of life. Bernie’s own rebbe, risen like gangbusters from his protracted slumber, was himself in peril of being apprehended for a felon. Recent newspaper editorials tried to link the Prodigy and his followers to subversive activities, even insinuating that the House of Enlightenment was a terrorist cell. This despite a philosophy that seemed to the girl to have less in common with Osama bin Laden than with Norman Vincent Peale. But it troubled her to see Bernie so obviously distraught: Whether or not he had the makings of a saint remained in question, but she didn’t think he was hero material, and heroic measures were what she figured it would take to save Rabbi ben Zephyr. Her only solace was that they still had some chapters ahead of them before finishing Grandpa Ruby’s journal, and she thought she could keep the boy from doing anything stupid until they got to the end. Lou wanted never to get to the end.
1929 – 1947.
I must have contracted some kind of Yid virus from wrestling with the rabbi in the river,” Bernie read to Lou Ella in her bedroom, where Lou sometimes referred to herself acidly as the unmade girl on the bed. “It was a virus with a long incubation, because many years passed before the fever woke up in me.”
WHEN HIS FAMILY arrived several weeks later, they found Ruby bivouacked beside a packing crate containing the frozen holy man in a “frigidarium” at Blochman’s Cold Storage just off North Main Street. Blochman’s was an all-purpose facility housing wine, furs, antiques, and pharmaceuticals as well as meat and produce, located around the corner from Karp’s General Merchandise, the concern owned and operated by Ruby’s Uncle Marvin. A paunchy, balding, ordinarily generous man, Marvin had initially offered his young nephew accommodations in his Mediterranean-style house out on the Parkway but had been visibly relieved when the uncommunicative kid declined his invitation. For despite having been notified of what was coming, Esther’s brother, who’d arranged for the stowage of Ruby’s freight, found the deadpan nephew and his charge a bit more than he’d bargained for. On his side Ruby had reached the end of his tolerance for newly acquired relations and preferred to stay behind the cam-locked door of the warehouse cold room, where he could continue to keep an eye on the rabbi.
Both Blochman’s and Karp’s establishments were situated in a downtown district called the Pinch, a neighborhood of mom ‘n’ pop businesses run by Russian-Jewish immigrants who lived in the rackety apartments above their shops. They were the dross of a vestigial community who, unlike the enterprising Marvin Karp (who’d voluntarily dropped the inski from the end of his name), had not prospered enough to move out of their ghetto and clung to it as to an island in uncharted seas. It was an island bounded on the west by the river, clogged with barge and packet-boat traffic, and surrounded by a city that often hosted spectacles that tried the nerves of the Jews. There were the parades down Front Street of the syklops and kleagles of the Ku Klux Klan marching in their cotton sheets, some of which had been purchased at Karp’s General Merchandise. There was the tabernacle erected on the river bluff from which the voice of an itinerant Billy Sunday challenging the devil to seven weeks’ combat could be heard all the way to North Main. Sometimes the sovereignty of the Pinch itself was violated, such as when the city fathers shut down the Suzore Theater for showing a film featuring Theda Bara (neé Theodosia Goodman), a film star of questionable morals; or when a representative from the board of health came to the Neighborhood House on Market Square to declare that dancing