I hadn’t quite rubbed away the impression of the badge. I still felt it in my palm, and thought about it sitting in my drawer among the things I’d collected and put away, feeling that once they’ve been collected, they lose their magic.
* * *
My father had belonged to that singular branch of mankind they used to call ‘businessmen’, and he was readying himself for a great opportunity in a small town when he met my mother. If Eddie Aronbach liked something, he bought six of them. It was in Asper’s window that my father asked my mother for the last black, size medium, long-sleeved polo shirt to add to the other five resting on his forearm. There was only one Margot Hirsch, though, and my father never tried to add another five to his inventory, to the best of my knowledge (for you can never be entirely sure of these things).
My mother had studied fine art and was a promising ceramicist, but she’d taken work dressing mannequins to get by. Margot packed up her fettling knives, pottery needles and loops and moved to the town where my father had established himself in business. The pottery put aside, Margot bore first William, then Elliot, and then me, while my father built Great North Diesel and Auto Electric to sustain us all.
After his death, Ma tried to keep the architecture of our lives as intact as possible. We’d continue to live in the same house; we’d each receive a bicycle, modest pocket money, birthday presents; we’d complete our bar mitzvahs; we’d study after school. These were immovable.
To maintain the architecture, Ma fell into the empty seat at the family business, with Morgan the accountant at one elbow, Hans the sales manager at the other and, ever increasingly, Will looming over her.
Business was not what my mother was made for, but she did it. Every day she’d go in to Great North Diesel and Auto Electric and Hans would show her the figures for orders and supplies and talk over the personal problems of staff, stock shortages, impending strikes and client disputes.
For the sake of her three bar mitzvah boys, Ma ironed down her own creases of rebellion. Still, like Elliot, she couldn’t help marking herself out: a five-foot-two bastion against the narrow-minded, the ungenerous, the racist, sexist and religious in town.
We all regarded bar mitzvahs as tribute to our father’s side of the family, an unpleasant but compulsory procedure, like lancing a boil; the bar mitzvahs became recurring campaigns, waged by Ma with just enough force to press each of us into service (but not so much that she’d actually have to be involved herself).
Will had completed his without too much fuss; it was only later that he began to pull at our mother, striking new deals on monthly allowances and holiday funds. Ma put up with it because in a way Will was her great hope. He harassed and demanded, sure, but he brought his girlfriends home to meet her, he studied practical business subjects at university and, over and above the deals and demands, he worked holiday jobs for extra cash. Will was industrious and promising.
That Ma succeeded in getting Elliot through his bar mitzvah, two years after our father’s death, was perhaps her greatest victory. Elliot mocked and complained, skipped cheder lessons, but never, ultimately, refused to go through with it. Still, throughout the bar mitzvah we were on tenterhooks, waiting for an outburst, a sub-machine-gun spray of insults or a manifesto from the bimah: they never came.
Because of my brothers’ considerable demands upon our mother I tended to hang back, in sympathy for her. For her part, she was always much softer with me, indulging my indecisiveness, my sulking, my laziness, my refusal to play with unfamiliar children just because they were children (I had my own brand of rebellion, you see).
We were attached to each other, it’s true, until I reached an age when boys would rather not show attachment and I’d keep her at arm’s length. Some might accuse me of being a mama’s boy; to them I say, there are worse things.
* * *
On Tuesday afternoon, Carol Richler and her daughter fetched me for cheder. ‘I’ve got a miii-graine,’ said Potato Latke. She suffered attacks that felt as if her brains were being strangled, she said. A me-graine: how debilitating to be afflicted with oneself, I thought, especially if one were her. I sat staring out the window of the rust-riddled Mitsubishi Colt.
‘Mommy’s also got a migraine, baby,’ said Carol, rubbing her temple.
Everyone in the Mitsubishi was in agony. For me, there was the Richler women’s voices, those air-raid sirens warning of impending headaches; the cool depression of the awaiting cheder room at the end of the ride; and the spectre of Carol bringing up the subject of Will.
‘Did you see the black man in shul the other night?’ I asked Carol from the back of the Colt.
‘Meshuge,’ said Carol. ‘Must have thought he was somewhere else.’
I’d gone with the Dorfmans to shul the Friday night after the raid on Roy’s, hoping to meet Leo Fein again.
Those first Sabbath nights the synagogue was a wondrous place for me. In our shul the builders had used wood for the bimah, the pews, the floors – and in a town where so much was tiled and welded.
The punched-out stars in the black steel lampshades of the chandeliers glittered at us all, the deep blue curtain blazed with lions embroidered in gold and, behind the curtain, a secret place, a sliding door for a cabinet that held rolls of parchment, wrapped with white linen and swaddled in velvet.
That Friday, Leo Fein wasn’t among the men who talked business in the back rows. But the appearance of the black man was enough of a marvel to partly distract me.
He was thin, perhaps in his fifties, dressed in old navy-blue trousers with turn-ups, a white collared shirt and a cream cardigan. The black man in shul was wearing a yarmulke atop his bony head and drew a wide almost painful, smile across his face as he jerked forwards and back.
Julian Gross grabbed his hand after the service and pulled him aside while the rest of the congregation shuffled out. Joss and I wanted to know if the man was Jewish.
How could he be, Joss’s father had said, but we had our reply – the black Jews of Ethiopia. Everyone knew Israel flew them out of there when they were starving.
This isn’t Ethiopia, Joss’s father had said, nor Israel, his mother had added.
‘He said he was Jewish,’ I said to Carol as the Mitsubishi rumbled to a stop.
‘Mommee,’ said Potato Latke in the front seat.
‘How can he be Jewish? A black? No, no,’ said Carol. ‘I don’t know where they get these ideas. You know, Ben, some people just see an opportunity when they see Jews.’
‘What if he’s Ethiopian?’
‘I’ve got a migraine,’ said Potato Latke.
‘It’s not a migraine, baby,’ said Carol. The car pulled up outside the compact shul. ‘Shoshana – aren’t you forgetting?’ Carol asked, her eyes pointing to a can of Charlie deodorant on the seat. Potato Latke snatched at it and dropped it into her canvas satchel. Tears welled in her eyes and she massaged her temples as her mother drove away.
We joined the others in the small classroom attached to the shul. There were usually only four or five of us there, all children under the age of thirteen. Joss had already had his bar mitzvah, so he didn’t come to cheder any more; I was the oldest in class.
Compared with me, the others were steeped in Judaism. They’d caught the kosher drippings of their Jewish home life. I, on the other hand, had to learn Judaism the same way I was learning Hebrew: as a foreign language. Not even the black-and-blue covers of the Encyclopedia Americana, the highest authority in my house and a particular addiction of mine, knew the stuff I learnt in cheder.
I sat at one of the dark wooden desks, the old kind with the bench seats attached to black iron frames and a waxy grime deep in the desktop grain. The grime, I imagined, was the source of that sour smell that became associated with the depression of cheder.
It was here I felt most alone. My resistance to cheder came more from my bewilderment