The Human Touch

In the past I have often defended my fellow Jews from slander with fisticuffs and venom (yes, I, the renegade author of “Rabbi Burns!”) but the other night I was called upon to put down a new form of anti-Semitic outrage. I was sitting in a “speak”—one that still holds its boozy clientele by the simple stratagem of selling bootleg liquor instead of the beribboned, belabeled government trickle. I was sitting and drinking with, among others, a pure Nordic, his oblong head in a figurative vise, his careful flannels carelessly worn, when he hiccoughed the following piece of defamation:

“The trouble with you Jews is, you can’t drink.”

“Soggy zemmel,” I hissed, “unrelieved even by the presence of a single caraway seed! Hold onto a leg of the table, so you won’t roll under, and listen to this.

“I had a grand-uncle—May God float his soul in his favorite spirits —Fetter Schloime, or Schloime der Gezaltzener to his cronies. That means Solomon the Salty One, so called because his thirst was so enormous and so constant that everyone believed he had just devoured a stick of salt.

THIS WAS A MAN!

“To my dying day shall I regret that when I knew him I was a little snipe, just old enough to carry his siddar and talith to schul of a Saturday morning and hop along by his side, three hops to his one stride, completely ignorant that I was racing in the shadow of greatness.

“But some of his feats I saw with my own eyes. On Shabbas, after schul, he would say to me with a Falstaffian twinkle in his eye, ‘Well, my little sinner’—he was prophetic, too—’now we’ll call on a few dear friends and make kiddush.’ He intoned the word ‘kiddush,’ with loving musical caress and smoothed his long woolly beard.

By the time I was familiar He would walk slowly, as one who goes about his pleasures leisurely, and first we would call on a cousin Reb Yacob —behind his back called ‘der carger’ (the stingy one). My grand-uncle would come in and roar ‘Goot Shabbas!’ and the wife with a sigh would very quickly bring to the table a bottle of spirits, a piece of gefillte fish and a slice of sponge cake. Once they tried to fool him by diluting the Schlivovitz, but Fetter Schloime, who, if he knew anything at all, certainly was a connoisseur of alcohol, spat out the first mouthful and said: ‘You brought me the wrong bottle. This is for rubbing, not drinking.’ As they looked on with pained interest, he would fill a wine glass with the prune distillation, tilt back his massive head, utter a throaty ‘Lechayim’ and pour. He drank it with a neatness and despatch, aye, even a daintiness, that I have never seen equalled. Not a quiver of muscle, not so much as a faint echo of a cough. He would then nibble a piece of fish, a bit of cake and sing in a slightly louder voice than the first time, ‘And now we’ll call on Tante Mierel and make kid-dush.’ He drew the word out musically.

A MIRACLE WORKER

“Tante Mierel, who grew drunk on the mere vapors of alcohol, would watch him as if he were performing a miracle. She had European wine glasses of ample girth and humming delightfully into his beard, Fetter Schloime would slowly fill a glass almost the size of a tumbler with Schlivovitz —he never mixed his drinks until after the sixth—and as she watched with bated breath he would repeat his little ritual of making kiddush. When this was completed, a slight glow came to that small portion of his cheeks which glistened out of the heavy forestation of his beard. Pinching my buttock gently, he would sing, ‘And now to Bobbe Channah. She would feel insulted if we didn’t make kiddush in her house.’ That inclusive ‘we’ still fills me with pride.

“Thus, on a Sabbath, from the time prayers were over to the time he finally came home, he would honor from six to eight relatives with his visits and make kiddush in every home. But his steps never faltered and he walked home with me straight as an oak, except that the last two or three tumblers of Schlivovitz used to release slumbering musical fragments in him, and on the stairway going to our house he was singing in a deep, vibrant voice.

“When he entered his own home, he roared, ‘Goot Shabbas, mein teiereinke!’ to his wife. She was a patient and tolerant woman, but she had been waiting with the Sabbath dinner (not cooking it, God forbid) for two hours. She would hasten him into a seat and place before him a large cut of delicious gefillte fish quivering in its own frozen jelly. ‘Eat,’ she urged him.

“But he would look up at her sadly and say, ‘What? No kiddush? In my own home?’ And so she would bring out the bottle, and this time he would pour his drink into a glass he had brought from Rumania a glass with secret nooks and odd pockets, all of which augmented its capacity. This he would raise to his lips and murmur, ‘Lechayim.’

“And that was only what he drank before the Sabbath dinner. But on Pesach—”

I stopped to look at the critical anti-Semite. He had just finished his third drink, a watery highball made from sixty-proof rye—but he was already sitting diagonally in a chair which was meant to be upright.

“One more drink, you verrim, and you’ll be under the table. Soggy zemmel!” I hissed.

I changed my seat.