by Judah Greenberg
In [the Jewish] view of the world, though, liking is the first step to losing: if “they” know that you love it, “they’ll” try to take it.
– Michael Wex, Born to Kvetch
Rabbi Ezra Lewicki was seventy-seven when he died in January of 1935, his fingers dyed black and blue from ink and three Dum-Dums in his pants pocket, with a face full of lines and liver spots. He carried himself tall, nothing to betray the long hours hunched over a desk. He’d laid down for a nap one Thursday afternoon and simply hadn’t risen again.
A chill blew through the cracks in the window frames as Yashka Abrams helped his mother, Riva, cut carrots and pit prunes for tzimmes. It was his mother’s go-to comforting dish anytime they attended shiva at someone’s home.
“Did Rabbi have a wife, Mamele?” He asked. The prunes had made his hands sticky, and he slid over to the sink to run them under frigid water.
She shook her head. “Not as far as I know. That man loved the Torah more than he could ever love a woman, olevashólem.” Peace be upon him.
“It seems lonely,” he said.
“He had God,” she replied simply with a wave of her hand. “For many, it’s enough.”
His father’s shtreimel sat unused in Riva’s closet. When Yashka married — an event he didn’t give much thought to at fifteen years old — the hat ringed with dark sable fur would be his to wear. He wasn’t sure if he wanted it, or if he was its rightful heir anymore. The overpious literalism of Orthodox traditions had been more of a burden than a comfort to Riva as she was forced to flee her home and make another, and she had laid them to rest in raising Yashka.
But a shiva service for a rabbi was a strict one. Yashka pinned a knit yarmulke into his dark nest of curls while Riva fussed with tying a tichel around her head in the mirror by their front door.
Winter in Brooklyn was the closest resemblance to what Yashka remembered of Nezhin. Snowflakes drifted down lazily as they braved the icy sidewalks, passing children throwing snowballs and mothers hurrying home with bags of groceries. In Nezhin, Yashka would use an ushanka to block out the cold — a thick fur hat with flaps to shield his ears. New York never reached the icy depths of winter of the Soviet countryside, but it came close. So close, Yashka thought. There were no horses, no chicken coops or winding dirt roads that melted into mud in the rain, but if he squinted and tuned out the noise of the cars, he could pretend.
A sea of black flowed into the Rabbi’s home, dozens of arms laden with dishes to feed the family in mourning — the Rabbi’s younger sister, Rebecca, and her children. All the mirrors were covered with sheets, and the floral-patterned furniture had been rearranged to accommodate cushions for the mourners to sit. Shiva always smelled like cedar blocks. Mourning clothes sat in one’s closet untouched for years at a time, God willing, and could become moth food if precautions weren’t taken.
Yashka hadn’t been particularly close with Rabbi Lewicki. He was prone to skipping Saturday services for the sake of exploring the library to further sharpen his English, or people-watching in Prospect Park. More than once he’d been roped into a game of chess with a stranger. Riva never forced him to attend services, said it served no purpose if he didn’t actually want to be there.
And yet being here now, seeing the Rabbi’s stacks of books spilling from the bookshelves and a bowl of Dum-Dums sitting on the coffee table, made his eyes start to burn.
He’d been this way since childhood — sensitive. Riva reassured him that it only showed his big heart. But Yashka had tried to steel himself for years, closed an armor around his heart and put on a brave face for his mother. Riva had carried him across an impossible ocean when she was twenty-three, alone and in charge of a boy who had just grown out of diapers. Riva, with a husband in the ground and parents too stubborn to jump from the pot of rapidly boiling water.
Yashka only remembered snapshots of their arrival, as if glancing through a blurry photo album; a towering woman in green with a spiked crown, powerful currents of families carrying their fractured lives on their backs, the heavy stench of grief. Upon reaching the immigration officers, Riva offered a sacrificial lamb: Abramowicz was cleaved apart, its latter half swallowed by the gaping maw of assimilation, becoming Abrams on all of their papers in exchange for a bountiful well of possibility for her only son. Even at three years old, Yashka had known to pretend not to see his mother cry as the last thread that tied her to his father was cut.
In New York the buildings touched the sky as if determined to reach God. Yashka had never heard car horns before, and they reminded him of angry geese. Riva cast aside their more rigid observances for the sake of simplicity, but at every corner there was a kosher butcher, a synagogue, a library stocked with Yiddish literature. An abundance of preservation. To see their old world here, superimposed on something utterly foreign, was salt thumbed into the wound. So he tried to close himself, hoping to form a chrysalis that would birth a version of him that belonged here, but he still saw a pale imitation of Nezhin everywhere he went.
“I’m going to find Rebecca,” Riva said, before disappearing down a hall with their casserole dish. The minyan would begin soon, and Yashka wasn’t looking forward to it. The Mourner’s Kaddish always made him dizzy.
“Yashka!”
A head of vibrant red hair tamed by two braids surfaced from a circle of mothers. Ester Asher — a name she argued was made for the movies — scuttled over to him, her Mary Janes clacking against the old wooden floorboards. Ester was one year his junior, lethally observant, and had an opinion on everything. She never failed to put him at ease.
“Ester,” he greeted, audibly relieved. She reached for him as if to hug him, then remembered their company and dropped her arms. The Ashers were German, and had that flair for modernization that hadn’t quite caught on in most of Eastern Europe. But at a Rabbi’s shiva, everyone was adhering to strict law regardless of personal lifestyle, including negiah. Of course, kids their age broke negiah with alarming frequency, even those from the most observant families. Adolescent desires and God seemed to constantly be at war.
“You’ll never believe what I heard from Golda and Raisel,” she said, freckled hands moving wildly in excitement as she launched into the story. He listened dutifully, always happy to be an ear for Ester’s latest social exploits or pieces of gossip.
Even if Riva decided tomorrow that they should observe negiah, it wouldn’t be an issue for Yashka. When his peers lamented their urges, he just nodded along. Was it really so difficult to abstain? Ester was beautiful, of course, but he never found himself… longing for her. Ester’s feelings were mutual; she seemed to have as much interest in boys as Yashka did girls. It made them closer, their shared confusion with their peers.
The service separated Yashka from Ester as men and women divided themselves as much as they could. Low murmurings of prayer led by the synagogue’s cantor floated through the Lewickis’ cramped living room. The typical dizziness rolled into him, so slow that he didn’t notice it before it grew strong enough to sway him. He planted a hand on the nearby side table, trying to steady himself discreetly and breathe. This always happened, but he never got used to it — his sensitivity.
When he began to consider how he could collapse to the floor without making a scene, he decided perhaps it would be best for everyone if he excused himself and found a place to rest. He saw Riva frown in concern as he slipped away, but she didn’t stop him.
He discovered the Rabbi’s room in his search for the bathroom upstairs. There was an avalanche of books and journals and notes so high that the desk underneath it was almost completely obscured; a quilt tossed haphazardly over a creaky rocking chair; an unmade bed, with the depression of its owner’s body in the wrinkled fitted sheet. Yashka settled down gingerly in the rocking chair, trying not to move it too much and further aggravate his dizziness.
Yakov.
He shot up, spine erect and vertigo forgotten. No one used his given name except his mother. And the Rabbi.
“Hello?”
It’s lonely in the dark, Yakov.
The voice was like ice pouring down his back. The urge to flee burned inside him, but alongside it was an odd yet concrete certainty that he was in no danger, and he needed to stay.
“What…” Yashka wet his lips with his tongue. “What can I do?” It was the only question he could think of.
The precise weight of a hand settled on his shoulder, turning him to the bookshelf. The Rabbi had many, many copies of the Tanakh — a mere single copy wouldn’t be able to withstand all the annotations such a devoted student would make over decades of study — but there was one in particular, tucked away, with something bookmarking the pages.
Yashka did not want to do what he did next, but he was more afraid to disobey. He knelt down by the bookshelf and slid the book from its precarious spot, holding it like a newborn animal. The cover was worn down at the corners, the pages yellowing. With a careful hand, he opened the book to find a short silver chain with a matching hamsa, no bigger than the tip of his pinky finger. Embedded within was a glass bead, designed with concentric rings of black, white, and blue. An ever-watchful eye.
“Was this yours…?” Yashka asked aloud. On the back was a set of impossibly small engraved initials: GP.
Gabriel. Like a sigh, Yashka heard it. Had the pious Rabbi borne a child out of wedlock? Abandoned in the old country?
Then Yashka took notice of the page the hamsa had marked. The Book of Solomon — King David, mourning the loss of Jonathan. It was unannotated, the margins and line breaks left blank and unassuming.
I grieve for you, my brother Jonathan, you were most dear to me. Your love was wonderful to me, more than the love of women.
Yashka’s gut twisted with the realization that he had discovered something deeply private, and there was no way to unlearn it.
Gabriel. An exhale, or a gust of wind. My Gabriel.
“Your Gabriel…” Yashka echoed. The hamsa in his palm was impossibly heavy for its size. From the foot of the staircase, Riva called for him. How long had he been in there?
“I hear you,” he blurted out to the empty room. He didn’t know what else to say, what he could do to comfort the dead, or why this was suddenly his responsibility at all. “I promise, I hear you.”
He tucked the Tanakh back where he found it, and closed his fist around the chain before slipping out of the Rabbi’s room.
“What’s wrong with you, lemele?” Little lamb. Riva set a chipped cup of tea down in front of him.
Yashka had been quiet on the way back, preoccupied with the feeling of coming home to a place he’d never been before. It was like looking at the Latin alphabet for the first time as a child, the struggle to parse together meaning within the unrecognizable patterns. He didn’t know it, not at all. Yet, it prickled in his mind. Like he should know it.
“What do you mean?”
Riva sighed with exasperation. “Please, Yakov. I’m your mother, and I have eyes.”
Once, in third grade, he’d asked to hold hands with his friend Benjamin on their walk home from school. Benjamin had wrinkled his nose, as if he’d smelled a foul odor, and asked why.
I feel lonely, Yashka had said. Benjamin hadn’t understood, but took his hand anyway and gave it a gentle squeeze. He had a cow’s eyes, big and dark with long lashes.
“What do you think of spirits, Mamele?”
Riva had been dolloping honey into her own cup, but now she paused. Her dark brows came into a deep furrow above her nose.
“Are you asking if I think they’re real, or if I enjoy them?” She sat down across from him at their rickety kitchen table, moving her cup to the side. “Because I think you know the answer to both.”
Yashka had been a toddler when his father, Ilia, was killed in a pogrom. He had been too young to fully understand what was going on or what it all meant, and certainly too young to grasp what he witnessed one night shortly after Ilia’s death. Yashka watched on, hidden by the dark of the staircase, as Riva spoke to a man who wasn’t quite there in their living room. He could only see the man from his periphery, a shimmer that vanished when he tried to look at it directly. Riva had pleaded, and Yashka had never forgotten the words he’d heard her say: “My love, I cannot leave you.”
The next day Riva had explained to Yashka that they needed to pack their things, and that she needed him to be brave.
“Rabbi Lewicki,” he said, as if that was enough of an explanation. And for his mother, it was. Riva let out the air from her lungs in a long exhale.
“I hoped maybe it would skip over you, you know,” she said, not without sympathy. “I didn’t have any brothers. Neither did your bubbeh.” She did look at him then, lips tightened with worry. “Were you frightened, kindelah?”
His immediate thought was yes, but beneath the knee-jerk reaction of fear was the weight of the Rabbi’s unfulfilled wish, and the drive to see it through.
“I was… sad. I felt his loneliness fuse with my own.” Yashka set his fist down on the table and opened his palm, letting the chain pool between them on the table. “I found this.”
Riva’s expression turned to indignation. “Did you steal from his home?”
“No! He— he guided me to it.”
Riva stared at the necklace. Then she set her hands on the table, loosely clasped, before propping up her elbows on the wood and pressing the pads of her fingers into her cheeks.
“What has he tasked you with, Yakov?”
“I think this belonged to his… friend. Gabriel.” Saying friend felt cruel, and he couldn’t place why; it was the same odd sting he’d always felt as a child when Riva asked him about Benjamin. Did you walk home with your friend again today, Yakov? “He wants me to return it. But I don’t know how to find him.”
Riva tapped her hand lightly on the table, thinking.
“You could try the phone book. You might find some guidance. A name may… pull on you, in the same way you felt a pull to this.” She gestured to the chain. Then her gaze hardened. “But you don’t have to do this. You do a favor for one, and soon they all come flocking to you.”
“‘They?’”
“You’re lucky we left Nezhin.” She reached for her tea cup with a small shake of her head. “It was old, and everyone had something to say.” She took a sip of tea, and seemed to reconsider. “There may be plenty left unsaid here too. The men who built all this, they tried to smooth it over with concrete and steel. But the soil remembers.”
The train ride to Sheepshead Bay was mostly above ground. He was lucky not to be attempting such a journey on a weekday morning, where the working class and the white collar elites packed themselves into the rail cars like sardines. Yashka had spent the years before he started school accompanying Riva to the tailor in Flatbush, where she could keep an eye on him while working in lieu of expensive daycare or nannying. The women who came in would often coo over him and tell her how blessed she was. He never asked her if she believed them — if he was a sufficient balm for all her losses.
Riva had been right about the phonebook. He’d stopped by Ester’s on his way to the station, because she was never one to turn down an adventure and he was desperate not to do this alone. All he’d told her was he needed to make a posthumous delivery on Rabbi Lewicki’s behalf, and they could go to Coney Island after on his dime. Even with the request that she wear a skirt to avoid potential gawking in the event the neighborhood was Orthodox, she was easily convinced.
The train rolled to a stop, and its doors opened for riders to come and go in a shifting wash of color; Puerto Rican, Italian, Irish, African American. Even during quieter hours like this, multiple languages floated through the cars, an auditory mosaic. Yashka never tired of it. He never tired of the view, either. He held the chain tight in his pocket as the train lurched back into motion and the city began to roll past below them in mountains of crimson brick and glittering metal.
“Keep looking out the window like that,” Ester said, “and people will think you’re a tourist.”
Sheepshead Bay was mostly residential, but Avenue U was decently populated. Several butchers proudly displayed their kosher credentials on their storefronts, and they even passed a Jewish Community Center where a herd of children were cheerfully shrieking on an enclosed playground. The address he’d found in the yellow pages wasn’t far off from there, leading them to an old standalone Victorian with chipping green paint and creaky wooden steps.
“What if no one’s home?” Ester asked, lifting the hem of her long skirt and thumping her boots against the porch to shake off excess snow.
“Part of me hopes for that,” Yashka replied. His stomach was in knots.
An older woman answered the door shortly after he knocked. She wore a flowery stained apron and a deep maroon tichel. She simply frowned at them, waiting for an explanation from the strangers at her front door.
“I’m so sorry to bother you,” Yashka said, ignoring the heat creeping into his cheeks. “I’m looking for Gabriel Perlman. Do you know where I can find him?”
“I should hope so,” she said wryly. “Come in, come in.” She beckoned them inside and shut the door behind them. “Gabby! There are children here for you! They better not be yours!” She patted her hands on her apron and turned away. “I’m sorry to leave you, but I have chicken in the oven.”
They weren’t alone for long. Gabriel Perlman looked exactly as Yashka imagined, with a shorter beard that had retained a surprising amount of color. Laugh lines, watery brown eyes, and stooped shoulders. He was round in the middle, with strong arms and legs that suggested years of manual labor during his youth. On his left ring finger, matching the woman’s, was a plain gold band.
“She’s going to wake Miriam,” he said, but with a twinkle in his eye that showed nothing but endearment. “What can I do for you, children?”
Yashka was almost too caught up in his own thoughts to realize he needed to respond. “I…” He swallowed. Maybe this wasn’t the right Gabriel Perlman. There were certainly others, dozens that his fingers had skipped over while poring over the phone book. “Did you know Ezra Lewicki? One of the rabbis at Beth Sholom? Just outside Prospect Heights…”
He trailed off as Gabriel’s features twisted with recognition — as if a piece of him receded and closed a wall around itself before it could be witnessed long enough to be named.
“He was a childhood friend of mine,” he replied. There was that word again. Friend. “We had our differences and grew apart. Why?”
“He died,” Yashka blurted. He was grateful for Ester; if she wasn’t there, he’d be halfway back to the train station by now. His palms were slick with sweat. “And he wanted to return something of yours.”
He watched Gabriel swallow; a slow bob of his Adam’s apple against his wrinkled neck.
“Come,” he said after a moment’s silence and a clearing of his throat. “Please, have a seat.”
“Who’s Miriam?” Ester asked as Gabriel ushered them into a small, cramped living room. Framed photos covered the walls, portraits of families that Yashka didn’t know, but still recognized.
“My granddaughter,” Gabriel answered as he gestured for them to sit on the ancient velvet couch. “She spent Shabbos with us this weekend and is napping upstairs.”
Granddaughter. Yashka sank onto the too-soft sofa next to Ester. He wanted to cry. Was this a kind of grief? Was it his, or Ezra’s?
“You said he wanted to return something of mine,” Gabriel settled into the worn armchair across from them. His voice was like heavy wool.
Yashka couldn’t speak. There was nothing to say. He presented the hamsa, letting the chain slip through his fist and pool on the ringed coffee table.
When he managed to find some words, he said, “Ezra never married.”
“I know,” Gabriel said, and Yashka’s eyes widened. “He said he never would. When I… when I married, he…” He straightened his spine. “Well, you’ve found this. Do you have it all figured out, then?”
“I know what it means,” Yashka said, grinding his jaw down against the threat of it trembling. “Explain it to me anyway.”.
Gabriel tilted his chin up just so. “I was fulfilling my obligation to our community. And I love my Chava, I do.”
“But not the way everyone thinks you do. Not like Ezra.” Why did this feel so personal? Why did it feel like a betrayal?
Ester, to her credit, was doing her best to not look utterly dumbfounded at the alleged romantic pursuits of their recently deceased Rabbi.
“What do you know of Ezra?” Gabriel demanded, leaning forward in his chair. His wrinkled hands gripped the armrests hard enough to whiten his knuckles. “You’re a child.”
“How long have you been in Sheepshead?” Yashka skipped over Gabriel’s jabs. “Did he know you were so close by?”
“Ezra was selfish,” Gabriel’s eyes looked glassier now and a muscle in his jaw feathered. “I did what I am commanded to do. To marry and to have children is a mitzvah.”
“At the cost of your own happiness?” Yashka argued.
Gabriel shook his head, full of scorn. “You, both of you, are children. You couldn’t possibly understand. I am happy.”
But the hamsa on the coffee table spoke to a silent truth, screaming to be let out.
“After all these years, he remembered you.” Yashka’s eyes stung.
Gabriel leaned back in his chair with a deep, rattling exhale. “I never said I forgot about him.”
All that broke up the silence was the tick of the grandfather clock in the corner. Then Ester spoke, the first sound she’d made since sitting down.
“He’s buried at Washington Cemetery.” She kept her voice low. “Off Bay Parkway, in Mapleton. If you’d like to visit him.”
“It’s true, then,” Gabriel said. “He’s passed.”
“Yes,” Ester said, with a compassion Yashka could not muster. “I’m — we’re both so sorry.”
Gabriel’s lips thinned into a line behind his beard. A tear trickled from his eye, following the wrinkles in his cheeks.
“Thank you,” he said. “For returning this to me.”
The hole in Yashka’s chest that Ezra had punched through him throbbed. “That’s it?” He asked. “That’s all?”
“I’ve lived my life.” Gabriel reached for the hamsa. It was small in his palm. “What good will regrets do?”
Ezra’s loneliness closed around Yashka’s windpipe. He couldn’t release the scream lodged in his throat. Ester took him by the arm, thanked Gabriel for his time, and walked him out of the house.
Ester ended up being the one to pay for him at Coney Island. She bought them both hot dogs from a kosher cart and they found a bench on the pier, overlooking the water. Europe was on the other side of this ocean. He’d arrived here on the heels of a war and there was already another one brewing on the horizon. He might as well have still been a child, for all his uselessness in the face of it all.
“Don’t cry, Yash,” Ester said.
Yashka scrubbed the tears from his cheeks with the heel of his hand. “I failed.”
Ester tossed a crumb of her hot dog bun to a nearby pigeon. “You did what you could,” she said gently. “Maybe if you had gotten to him forty years ago…”
Yashka twisted the empty paper tray in his hands. “I don’t want to believe it. That the pain of living a lie is more bearable somehow. That can’t be true.”
“In a world that refuses to understand, it might be.” Ester reached for one of his hands and gave it a squeeze. “But you understood him. That matters.”
She met Yashka’s tearful eyes, a resilience and conviction in her that he’d never seen before.
“Promise you won’t hide from me, Yash,” she said. “Don’t do me the dishonor of believing anything could change how much I love you.”
Yashka didn’t know he needed to hear it until she said it. Her words were an anchor amidst all his uncertainty — about the world, about himself. “I love you too, Ester.”
She straightened her spine. “I know.”
That made him laugh, just a little.
“Promise me,” she repeated.
He leveled her gaze, his heart thudding. “It’s hiding from me, too. I can’t name it.”
Ester gave him a small smile, as if she understood more than he did. “That’s alright.”
She leaned her head on his shoulder and he rested his cheek in her hair as they gazed out onto the water. The waves rippled, catching the yolky orange light of the setting sun. A mass within him writhed, infinite and tangled. But he knew whenever he finally unraveled it, he would hold it up to the light, and they would look at it together.
Judah Greenberg (they/them) is a queer Jewish writer living in Ann Arbor, Michigan. They are the 2021 winner of the Muriel C. Bradbrook Prize in prose at Kenyon College. Judah is passionate about queer theory, anti-Zionism, and Jewish diasporic communities around the world. They have four cat children that they co-parent with their spouse, and are currently working on a novel inspired by Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in which Yashka is featured as a supporting character. You can find them on instagram @earlgaybaby.