Two Pockets by Barry Rachin (read e books online free .txt) đ
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/> Mark, who was becoming accustomed to the girlâs eccentric mannerisms shrugged. âWhy do your parents dress like theyâre living in the Middle Ages?â They were a mile from home, pulled up at a traffic light.
âWeâre Hasidic Jews. The Eastern European tradition goes back to two hundred years.â
Which tells me nothing.â
Miriam stared out the passenger side window for the longest time before replying âAccording to Hasidic tradition, everyone must have two pockets, so they can reach into the one or the other, according to need.â Mark flipped his directional on as they neared Hathaway Street. âIn the right pocket are to be the words: âFor my sake was the world created,â and in the left: âI am dust and ashes.ââ
The truck pulled up in front of the slate blue house with the shutters. âSee you tomorrow, Miriam Applebaum.â
* * * * *
Three months passed. Bit by bit, Miriam learned construction. Not that she was anything more than a carpenters helper, rank novice, gofer - go for this, go for that - or fledgling apprentice. Still, she got up every day, and, even when her back ached, hauled her weary carcass off to work.
At first her father showed no interest one way or the other in his daughterâs aberration. To his way of thinking, thatâs all it was â a fleeting mental derangement. The Goyim werenât necessarily bad or misguided; they just did things differently. Religious Jews led perfectly sensible lives. Nice Jewish girls didnât pound nails. They didnât work in blue collar trades, building homes for people who worshiped several gods at once and had spent the last two thousand years tormenting Godâs Chosen People.
But by the third week of the second month, Morris Applebaum had seen enough. âMeshugenah! What is this craziness?â
Miriam had just returned from work. She unbuckled her leather carpenterâs tool belt and let it fall on the floor next to the bed. âWe finished the senior center today,â she said ignoring his belittling tone. âTomorrow we start renovating that mill complex over by the YMCA. High-end luxury condosâthatâs what the developer wants.â
âAnd this is a job for a nice Jewish girl? Nothing good can come of it.â Rolling his eyes, Morris Applebaum began pacing back and forth, hands clasped behind his back. Miriam momentarily drifted into the bathroom where she stripped her clothes off down to her underwear. Pulling a bathrobe over her limbs she returned to the bedroom. âFifteen pounds,â she said. âI lost fifteen pounds since I started this job, and I never felt so healthy in my life.â
âYou know what you are?â The father suddenly wheeled around waving a finger menacingly in the air. âYouâre a Babel. An Isaac Babel!â
âGotenu! Bite your tongue to say such a thing!â Miriamâs mother was standing in the doorway. The large-bone woman placed a trembling hand over her mouth. âIsaac Babel was no better than a traitor,⊠a Molotov-cocktail-throwing Jew who joined the Cossacks, the very people who persecuted our race. How could you say such a thing?â
Youâre a Babel. An Isaac Babel! Miriam understood perfectly well what Morris. Applebaum meant by the outlandish remark. Isaac Babel was a haskelah Jew, an enlightened soul equally comfortable among Bolshevik rabble rousers as mystical Jews. His stature as a great writer only complicated matters. Hero, traitor, lunatic, visionary, political agitator, heretic, prophet â how one understood the anomaly that was Isaac Babel depended as much on oneâs personal biases as what side of the bed he woke up on.
Mr. Applebaum threw both hands up in an attitude of despair and rushed from the room almost knocking his wife down in the bargain. When he was gone, she slumped down on the bed next to her daughter, took Miriamâs hand and kissed it. Then she turned the palm over. âYour beautiful fingers are covered with calluses.â
âFrom honest labor.â In the yard adjoining their property, a lawnmower fired up. Miriam retrieved her framing hammer from where she abandoned it in near the closet. âKenny, the man who does all the fancy work, showed me how to properly set nails.â She raised the shank chest high. âYour arm is just an extension of the tool.â She snapped her wrist and let the head of the hammer fall in a broad sweeping arc, striking an imaginary nail dead center. âI can set a sixteen-penny framing nail in three strokes. No wasted effort. Perhaps itâs not as impressive as studying the midrash but still itâs an accomplishment of sorts.â
Miriamâs mother kissed her cheek and sighed. âWhat we have here,â she waved a hand fitfully in the air, âitâs not enough for you?â
âIâm going to take my shower now,â Miriam replied evasively.
Before she reached the doorway, her mother said, âIn a fit of anger, your father compares you to Isaac Babel.â The older woman spoke in a confidential tone so the words wouldnât carry beyond the threshold. âBut deep down, in his heart-of-hearts, youâre the ben hâbachoor.â
âThe first-born son,â Miriam translated from the Hebrew. The tacit implication was both flattering and unsettling. The first-born son inherited the fatherâs fortunes; he honored and preserved his familyâs good name. Saul, the religious zealot and sexual glutton, was not up to the task. Wrong man for the job. Miriam was the new ben haâbachoor â by default, the Applebaum dynastyâs heir apparent.
Her father could rage about the house, muttering to himself, arms flailing like a madman, but squirreled away behind the fierce eyes and bushy eyebrows was an inchoate fear. The fear of losing his beloved Miri, the indisputable ben habachoor. Mr. Applebaum followed all the precepts of his religion. He recited his prayers, never straying from Hasidic custom. When he crawled out of bed in the morning, the stoop-shouldered man carried the added burden of two thousand years of Jewish tradition on his portly frame. But not one word in the many dozens of frayed books that lined his study taught the devout seeker of eternal truths how to love his wayward daughter with moderation.
âAny news from the Shadchun?
âYour father met with Mr. Gorelnik on Tuesday and they discussed certain possibilities.â
âWhat about the daughterâs feelings?â
âThings havenât progressed that far yet.â
Miriam lowered her voice. âWhat Saul does with the Russian girls isnât right â not for Jew or gentile. Some of those girls are here without work permits or proper visas. If someone abuses them, they have no place to turn.â
âOnce your brother is engaged to the Gorelnik girl,â her mother replied nervously, âall that ugliness will all be in the past.â
Miriam laughed abruptly making an unfeminine snorting sound through her nose. âThe past has consequences that can come back to haunt you.â
* * * * *
Since graduating high school, Miriam noted a creeping malaise among her friends. Everyone seemed to be waiting for something to happen. But waiting for what? For the moshiach, the messiah, to come the first time? The âother oneâ, according Mr. Applebaum was a well-intentioned, if somewhat misguided, false prophet.
Her best friend, Mitzi, was waiting â waiting to find a husband and begin raising a family. Mitziâs brother, Yossi, attended Brandeis. He returned from the prestigious college with a bachelorâs degree in nothing-in-particular. After loafing about the house for the better part of a year, the boy went to work in his uncleâs delicatessen cooking brisket, corned beef and tongue. And waiting. Waiting, waiting, waiting. Waiting to figure out what to do with the rest of his miserable, well-educated existence on planet earth.
Of course, Miriamâs brother, Saul, didnât suffer from any such existential ennui. On Saturday evening, she spied him prancing about the house in a freshly ironed shirt, his frizzy hair blow dried, and cheeks reeking of St. Johns Bay Rum cologne. He favored the fragrance with West Indian lime that left a cloying trail of pungent citrus odors in every room he passed through. âWhereâre you going all dolled up?â
Saul was preening in front of the bathroom mirror. With a pair of pointed scissors, he snipped a few errant hairsâ his beard was still a work in progress - from the side of his chin. âNo place special.â Pulling a billfold from his back pocket, her brother took silent inventory of his finances.
âMust be a heavy date,â Miriam said in a goading tone.
Flashing her a dirty look, he bolted for the front door.
Did he have to call ahead, Miriam wondered, to let the Russian whores know that the rabbinical student, Saul Applebaum, was on his way? Slathered in St. Johns Bay Rum with a hint of lime and horny as hell, Godâs anointed messenger would be arriving shortly.
Later that night as she lay under the covers, Miriam felt like a dry leaf in late October. Waiting. Waiting, waiting, waiting. For what? To fall. To fall and, perhaps, be caught in a frigid updraft of autumnal air. No more malaise. A new life. A new beginning. Which was not to say that Miriam would ever turn her back on her faith. Once a Jew, a Jew for life. But a Jew with a myriad of options. Just as the Sephardic Jews in Medieval Spain learned from the Moslem invaders to cross-pollinate their Cabalist theology with Sufi metaphysics, so too would Miriam Applebaum, the carpenterâs helper, find a way to pass cleanly through the eye of the needle.
* * * * *
On Saturday afternoon, Miriam walked over to Markâs house, where she found him in the driveway hosing down the truck. âI want my own circular saw.â Over the past few months she had been borrowing a reconditioned Ryobi model that the crew used for odds and ends.
Mark ran a soapy sponge over the tires and muddy hubcaps. âThey got a real nice seven-and-a-quarter inch Rigid over at Home Depot for a little over a hundred with discount if we put it on the company account.â He rinsed the wheels off and carried the bucket of soapy water around to the opposite side of the truck. âThatâs worm drive, not traditional.â
âWorm drive?â Miriam repeated.
âThe motor housing runs parallel with the saw blade and uses gears to increase torque,â Mark explained, âso itâs better suited for the type of heavy-duty construction we do.â
âHow soon could I get it?â
He came out from behind the truck, tossing what remained of the soap out across the lawn. âLet me clean up and weâll take a drive over there right now.â
At Home Depot they went directly to the tool department. âThe handle feels a bit strange.â With the fingers of her right hand wrapped around the grip, Miriam hoisted the tool up in the air and made several passes over an imaginary sheet of half-inch plywood.
âOnce you get use to it, you wonât feel comfortable with anything else.â He grabbed a carbide-tipped, Freud blade off the display rack. âYouâll want a decent blade to compliment the new saw. My treat.â
After paying for the tools, they went to Friendlies for coffee and dessert. âMy fatherâs unhappy with my choice of careers.â
âCanât imagine he would be.â
âHe called me a modern-day Isaac Babel.â Mark stared at her blankly. âA turn-of-the-century, Russian Jew,â she explained the obscure reference, âwho ran off and joined the Red cavalry.â âBabel was on familiar terms with rabbis, thieves, Cossacks, religious mystics, anti-Semites and murderers. Being a traditional, goody-two-shoes Jew was never enough.â
âSo, what happened him?â
âUnder Stalinâs reign of terror, Babel was arrested by the Soviet secret police, tortured and executed.â
Mark shook his head in disbelief. âJust what I like - a story with a happy ending.â
âYesterday in the late afternoon,â Miriamâs mind scurried off in another direction, âTom was hanging sheet rock in the vestibule.â
âWeâre Hasidic Jews. The Eastern European tradition goes back to two hundred years.â
Which tells me nothing.â
Miriam stared out the passenger side window for the longest time before replying âAccording to Hasidic tradition, everyone must have two pockets, so they can reach into the one or the other, according to need.â Mark flipped his directional on as they neared Hathaway Street. âIn the right pocket are to be the words: âFor my sake was the world created,â and in the left: âI am dust and ashes.ââ
The truck pulled up in front of the slate blue house with the shutters. âSee you tomorrow, Miriam Applebaum.â
* * * * *
Three months passed. Bit by bit, Miriam learned construction. Not that she was anything more than a carpenters helper, rank novice, gofer - go for this, go for that - or fledgling apprentice. Still, she got up every day, and, even when her back ached, hauled her weary carcass off to work.
At first her father showed no interest one way or the other in his daughterâs aberration. To his way of thinking, thatâs all it was â a fleeting mental derangement. The Goyim werenât necessarily bad or misguided; they just did things differently. Religious Jews led perfectly sensible lives. Nice Jewish girls didnât pound nails. They didnât work in blue collar trades, building homes for people who worshiped several gods at once and had spent the last two thousand years tormenting Godâs Chosen People.
But by the third week of the second month, Morris Applebaum had seen enough. âMeshugenah! What is this craziness?â
Miriam had just returned from work. She unbuckled her leather carpenterâs tool belt and let it fall on the floor next to the bed. âWe finished the senior center today,â she said ignoring his belittling tone. âTomorrow we start renovating that mill complex over by the YMCA. High-end luxury condosâthatâs what the developer wants.â
âAnd this is a job for a nice Jewish girl? Nothing good can come of it.â Rolling his eyes, Morris Applebaum began pacing back and forth, hands clasped behind his back. Miriam momentarily drifted into the bathroom where she stripped her clothes off down to her underwear. Pulling a bathrobe over her limbs she returned to the bedroom. âFifteen pounds,â she said. âI lost fifteen pounds since I started this job, and I never felt so healthy in my life.â
âYou know what you are?â The father suddenly wheeled around waving a finger menacingly in the air. âYouâre a Babel. An Isaac Babel!â
âGotenu! Bite your tongue to say such a thing!â Miriamâs mother was standing in the doorway. The large-bone woman placed a trembling hand over her mouth. âIsaac Babel was no better than a traitor,⊠a Molotov-cocktail-throwing Jew who joined the Cossacks, the very people who persecuted our race. How could you say such a thing?â
Youâre a Babel. An Isaac Babel! Miriam understood perfectly well what Morris. Applebaum meant by the outlandish remark. Isaac Babel was a haskelah Jew, an enlightened soul equally comfortable among Bolshevik rabble rousers as mystical Jews. His stature as a great writer only complicated matters. Hero, traitor, lunatic, visionary, political agitator, heretic, prophet â how one understood the anomaly that was Isaac Babel depended as much on oneâs personal biases as what side of the bed he woke up on.
Mr. Applebaum threw both hands up in an attitude of despair and rushed from the room almost knocking his wife down in the bargain. When he was gone, she slumped down on the bed next to her daughter, took Miriamâs hand and kissed it. Then she turned the palm over. âYour beautiful fingers are covered with calluses.â
âFrom honest labor.â In the yard adjoining their property, a lawnmower fired up. Miriam retrieved her framing hammer from where she abandoned it in near the closet. âKenny, the man who does all the fancy work, showed me how to properly set nails.â She raised the shank chest high. âYour arm is just an extension of the tool.â She snapped her wrist and let the head of the hammer fall in a broad sweeping arc, striking an imaginary nail dead center. âI can set a sixteen-penny framing nail in three strokes. No wasted effort. Perhaps itâs not as impressive as studying the midrash but still itâs an accomplishment of sorts.â
Miriamâs mother kissed her cheek and sighed. âWhat we have here,â she waved a hand fitfully in the air, âitâs not enough for you?â
âIâm going to take my shower now,â Miriam replied evasively.
Before she reached the doorway, her mother said, âIn a fit of anger, your father compares you to Isaac Babel.â The older woman spoke in a confidential tone so the words wouldnât carry beyond the threshold. âBut deep down, in his heart-of-hearts, youâre the ben hâbachoor.â
âThe first-born son,â Miriam translated from the Hebrew. The tacit implication was both flattering and unsettling. The first-born son inherited the fatherâs fortunes; he honored and preserved his familyâs good name. Saul, the religious zealot and sexual glutton, was not up to the task. Wrong man for the job. Miriam was the new ben haâbachoor â by default, the Applebaum dynastyâs heir apparent.
Her father could rage about the house, muttering to himself, arms flailing like a madman, but squirreled away behind the fierce eyes and bushy eyebrows was an inchoate fear. The fear of losing his beloved Miri, the indisputable ben habachoor. Mr. Applebaum followed all the precepts of his religion. He recited his prayers, never straying from Hasidic custom. When he crawled out of bed in the morning, the stoop-shouldered man carried the added burden of two thousand years of Jewish tradition on his portly frame. But not one word in the many dozens of frayed books that lined his study taught the devout seeker of eternal truths how to love his wayward daughter with moderation.
âAny news from the Shadchun?
âYour father met with Mr. Gorelnik on Tuesday and they discussed certain possibilities.â
âWhat about the daughterâs feelings?â
âThings havenât progressed that far yet.â
Miriam lowered her voice. âWhat Saul does with the Russian girls isnât right â not for Jew or gentile. Some of those girls are here without work permits or proper visas. If someone abuses them, they have no place to turn.â
âOnce your brother is engaged to the Gorelnik girl,â her mother replied nervously, âall that ugliness will all be in the past.â
Miriam laughed abruptly making an unfeminine snorting sound through her nose. âThe past has consequences that can come back to haunt you.â
* * * * *
Since graduating high school, Miriam noted a creeping malaise among her friends. Everyone seemed to be waiting for something to happen. But waiting for what? For the moshiach, the messiah, to come the first time? The âother oneâ, according Mr. Applebaum was a well-intentioned, if somewhat misguided, false prophet.
Her best friend, Mitzi, was waiting â waiting to find a husband and begin raising a family. Mitziâs brother, Yossi, attended Brandeis. He returned from the prestigious college with a bachelorâs degree in nothing-in-particular. After loafing about the house for the better part of a year, the boy went to work in his uncleâs delicatessen cooking brisket, corned beef and tongue. And waiting. Waiting, waiting, waiting. Waiting to figure out what to do with the rest of his miserable, well-educated existence on planet earth.
Of course, Miriamâs brother, Saul, didnât suffer from any such existential ennui. On Saturday evening, she spied him prancing about the house in a freshly ironed shirt, his frizzy hair blow dried, and cheeks reeking of St. Johns Bay Rum cologne. He favored the fragrance with West Indian lime that left a cloying trail of pungent citrus odors in every room he passed through. âWhereâre you going all dolled up?â
Saul was preening in front of the bathroom mirror. With a pair of pointed scissors, he snipped a few errant hairsâ his beard was still a work in progress - from the side of his chin. âNo place special.â Pulling a billfold from his back pocket, her brother took silent inventory of his finances.
âMust be a heavy date,â Miriam said in a goading tone.
Flashing her a dirty look, he bolted for the front door.
Did he have to call ahead, Miriam wondered, to let the Russian whores know that the rabbinical student, Saul Applebaum, was on his way? Slathered in St. Johns Bay Rum with a hint of lime and horny as hell, Godâs anointed messenger would be arriving shortly.
Later that night as she lay under the covers, Miriam felt like a dry leaf in late October. Waiting. Waiting, waiting, waiting. For what? To fall. To fall and, perhaps, be caught in a frigid updraft of autumnal air. No more malaise. A new life. A new beginning. Which was not to say that Miriam would ever turn her back on her faith. Once a Jew, a Jew for life. But a Jew with a myriad of options. Just as the Sephardic Jews in Medieval Spain learned from the Moslem invaders to cross-pollinate their Cabalist theology with Sufi metaphysics, so too would Miriam Applebaum, the carpenterâs helper, find a way to pass cleanly through the eye of the needle.
* * * * *
On Saturday afternoon, Miriam walked over to Markâs house, where she found him in the driveway hosing down the truck. âI want my own circular saw.â Over the past few months she had been borrowing a reconditioned Ryobi model that the crew used for odds and ends.
Mark ran a soapy sponge over the tires and muddy hubcaps. âThey got a real nice seven-and-a-quarter inch Rigid over at Home Depot for a little over a hundred with discount if we put it on the company account.â He rinsed the wheels off and carried the bucket of soapy water around to the opposite side of the truck. âThatâs worm drive, not traditional.â
âWorm drive?â Miriam repeated.
âThe motor housing runs parallel with the saw blade and uses gears to increase torque,â Mark explained, âso itâs better suited for the type of heavy-duty construction we do.â
âHow soon could I get it?â
He came out from behind the truck, tossing what remained of the soap out across the lawn. âLet me clean up and weâll take a drive over there right now.â
At Home Depot they went directly to the tool department. âThe handle feels a bit strange.â With the fingers of her right hand wrapped around the grip, Miriam hoisted the tool up in the air and made several passes over an imaginary sheet of half-inch plywood.
âOnce you get use to it, you wonât feel comfortable with anything else.â He grabbed a carbide-tipped, Freud blade off the display rack. âYouâll want a decent blade to compliment the new saw. My treat.â
After paying for the tools, they went to Friendlies for coffee and dessert. âMy fatherâs unhappy with my choice of careers.â
âCanât imagine he would be.â
âHe called me a modern-day Isaac Babel.â Mark stared at her blankly. âA turn-of-the-century, Russian Jew,â she explained the obscure reference, âwho ran off and joined the Red cavalry.â âBabel was on familiar terms with rabbis, thieves, Cossacks, religious mystics, anti-Semites and murderers. Being a traditional, goody-two-shoes Jew was never enough.â
âSo, what happened him?â
âUnder Stalinâs reign of terror, Babel was arrested by the Soviet secret police, tortured and executed.â
Mark shook his head in disbelief. âJust what I like - a story with a happy ending.â
âYesterday in the late afternoon,â Miriamâs mind scurried off in another direction, âTom was hanging sheet rock in the vestibule.â
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