thus you shall teach without payment in the generations to come.” Feeling it was incumbent upon him to remind Rabbi Eliezer of the patriarch’s decree, Bernie charged after the holy man to apprise him accordingly.
“Boychik,” said the rabbi, serene in the midst of the women, “they pay by me only for the time that I lose which I would otherwise devote to earnink a livelihood. As it is written, ‘Torah is the best of merchandise.’” Then assuring the boy he would ask if ever he required his advice again, he passed through the doorway along with his entourage.
Mortified, Bernie slouched past the curtain and out the front door of the House of Enlightenment. But on the way home, still crestfallen, he observed the shadow of a day lily shaped like a jester’s cap on the side of a house, and the image propelled him straight into the realm of the sublime.
1907.
When the ferry from Ellis Island deposited Shmerl Karpinski (his name recently shortened by a harried customs official to Karp) on the bustling wharf, he shut his eyes to keep out the stimuli that threatened to overwhelm his brain. But the hastening crowds into which his fellow immigrants had already begun to dissolve, the clangor of horse cars and the rattle of the elevated train, assaulted his ears; they upset the peacefulness of the “laboratory” back in Shpinsk, which he was trying to reconstitute behind closed lids. Opening them again, he waited for his gaze to light on something that made sense, and saw the young man from the ship seated beside the driver of a dray whose bed contained a worm-eaten wooden casket. Shmerl had seen the youth before through waves of nausea while clinging to the splintered rail of his berth in steerage, trying not to roll off into the broth of vomit and slops. The atmosphere below decks was suffocating from a multitude of private functions made public, but while the whole of the steerage class groaned in time to the drumming pistons of the SS Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, the young man—perched on a barrel and peering out of a porthole at the sawtooth sea—seemed to retain a meditative poise. Shmerl saw him again in the crush of passengers who, mutinous after their long confinement, had emerged from their quarters to overrun the lower deck once the promised city hove into view. Some had shinnied up a mast and climbed into the rigging, where they became entangled like bugs in spider webs. All craned their necks for a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty in her verdigris robes and the glinting towers at the foot of Manhattan Island, itself appearing to float like a low-lying argosy. Everyone looked toward New York, America, all except the staid young man with his handsome face and the worsted suit he seemed never to remove; leaning on the taffrail, he gazed across the expanse of chartreuse ocean the ship had just traversed, as if less interested in where he was going than where he’d been. Lonely since being dispatched by his family to save him from conscription (and to distance him from a community grown ever more censorious of his behavior), Shmerl Karp envied the youth his apparent self-containment. Since they were about the same age, he might have introduced himself, but Shmerl didn’t like to impose, and his slight humpback tended to make him rather shy.
The driver cracked his whip and the wagon bearing the casket drove off, leaving Shmerl to assume that the young man’s aloof demeanor had its origin in his grief for a loved one who’d passed away (as had perhaps a dozen others) during the voyage. But that was all the time he could spare for contemplating strangers now that he had his own welfare to negotiate. Still reeling from an ordeal that had left him barely ambulatory, he was unable amid that head-splitting Babel to grasp the concept of terra firma. After weeks of seasickness, during which he felt he’d regurgitated his very soul, Shmerl had been shunted from steamship to steam launch to the turreted fastness of Ellis Island. There he was made to suffer through stations of functionaries asking bewildering questions in pidgin Yiddish, checking his answers against the ship’s manifest with the severity of clerical seraphs verifying his name in the Book of Life. Doctors thumped his chest, testicles, and gibbous spine, inverted his eyelids, labeled him with chalk, and festooned him with paper flags; then they directed him back into