ought perhaps to research the rabbi’s care and feeding, he made an unprecedented excursion to the library at the suburban temple his family attended on high holidays, where he checked out an illustrated volume entitled To Be a Jew. Perusing its pages, the boy came to understand that he’d been sustaining the old man on filth. Though his vocabulary even in his native English was not extensive—conversation was never his forte—Bernie made an effort to apologize to the rabbi for his trespass in the droll language he had begun to pick up snatches of.
“Ich bin nebechdik, rabbi,” he offered in an unusual foray into humility, and further testing the water, “Hab rachmones?”
“Moychl,” responded the rabbi dismissively, slouched in a morris chair examining the piping on the lapel of Mr. Karp’s cotton batik bathrobe. “A deigah hob ich.” And as he was himself a quick study: “Takhe, think of it nothing.”
After that Bernie tried assiduously to separate meat from dairy in the dishes he smuggled to the old man. Viewed suspiciously by the lady volunteer at the temple library, who was unaccustomed to borrowers of any age, least of all adolescents, Bernie checked out several kosher cookbooks and, despite having never made anything more ambitious than toast, expressed his readiness to attempt broiled udder, stuffed spleen, tripe, liver, lungs, and pupiklekh. The recovering rabbi suffered the kid’s good intentions with a minimum of irritation but asked when he might have the opportunity to taste again “the insects from the sea.”
These were the great days for Bernie Karp. Nothing in his listless history (or anyone else’s he knew of) had prepared him for such an event, and it seemed to him that prior to the rabbi’s resurrection nothing of note had happened in his life at all. It was as if he’d only been marking time, waiting all his fifteen years for the rabbi to come forth from his retirement. While the old man lay in bed regaining his strength, or sat sunk in his chair by the window in a shaft of sunlight that made his paltry bones appear as nearly pellucid as the ice he’d emerged from, Bernie would coax him to converse. Normally reticent if not downright fractious, the boy was at times a little stymied by his own uncharacteristic behavior, but his newfound curiosity had acquired a momentum that would not turn around. It was an awkward process in the beginning, since neither understood the other’s spoken language; in addition, the old man, who appeared perpetually vexed from his rude awakening, could be moody and not always inclined to indulge Bernie’s efforts to draw him out. But in the end he tolerated the kid’s graceless gestures and crude indications and with a little persuasion would return them in kind, until they’d commenced an exchange that passed for communication. At length, each had gathered enough scraps of the other’s mother tongue to allow for a tentative dialogue. Bernie was delighted by his gradual acquisition of his guest’s fruity idiom, but even more than with his own, he was impressed with the rabbi’s rapid and seemingly effortless progress. Of course Eliezer ben Zephyr—it had taken the old man a while to recall his own name—had the added advantage of exposure to the TV, which had captivated him from the moment he’d tumbled out of the freezer.
It had been Bernie’s inspired idea to lead the rabbi, once his stick legs were ambulatory again, back across the covered walkway into the basement whose ground-level entry was at the rear of the house. Not only did the television in the rumpus room give the old man a leg up on the language, but it also introduced him to a culture he might have been ill equipped to apprehend at first hand. It was a culture that seemed to intrigue him as much as his own murky origins interested Bernie, who pestered the rabbi for information about his past at every opportunity. Such opportunities had to be taken more often than not during commercial breaks, though commercials could provide their own brand of entertainment, discouraging interruptions. But over time the two developed a kind of quid pro quo, as Rabbi Eliezer put more questions to the boy about America, which he’d come to understand was the place in which he found himself.
It seemed to fascinate him, this America, or at least the part of it that he viewed through the bowed window of the cabinet that was the centerpiece of the rec room, the