The Rabbi on 47th Street
Harrison, Barbara Grizzuti
The rabbi rejoiced THE RABBI ON 47th STREET Ann Birstein Dial Press, $13.95 Barbara Grizzuti Harrison UNTIL my mid-teens, I lived in a three-family house in Brooklyn next door to which was a...
...A young man once said to an old man, What is life's heaviest burden...
...This mystery (or ignorance) must in part have been willed...
...Usually I mistrust this kind of I-was-there hindsight reporting...
...asks one of the rabbi's congregants when Birstein lets girls into the Talmud Torah "to fill up the enrollment...
...but the part of their lives that had to do with worship was mysterious - alien - to me, so mysterious that I can't for the life of me summon up one image of my friends and neighbors going to shul...
...My friend...
...Rabbi Birstein's life was hard, but his dreams, and his joy, were immense: "In our prayers we say thanks for everything: the new moon, the sun, the stars, a piece of bread, a cup of wine...
...And to describe her mother, Clara - a chronic worrier married to a man with an incredible zest for life, a woman always on the verge of hysteria married to a man who was solid as a rock, a woman to whom the idea of motherhood appealed more than the actual mothering ever did, a woman who could be depressed by the words "a good time...
...When he died in 1959, Variety called him "hep...
...I have absolutely no visual memory of its congregants...
...next door to the apartment house was a synagogue, every physical detail of which I remember exactly...
...Toward all of whom he felt responsibility...
...Jews going about their secular lives were one thing...
...it has the power of myth...
...He smoked Turkish cigar-rettes...
...I have not known a family so well since Salinger parted company with the Glass family...
...Neither, for he had tried it, was the Song of Songs...
...He had...
...Like all myths, it has universal appeal...
...I'm delighted to have her lovely book now...
...Rabbi Birstein had three children by his first wife,' two by his second...
...When one of his hard-working daughters criticizes Clara, Rabbi Birstein says of his wife: " 'She believes in food, like Maimonides...
...I feel the despair of the romantic, fastidious young rabbi when he learns he is to become a shochet - a ritual slaughterer - in the golden land, the goldene medina...
...a gray chesterfield with a black velvet collar, plus a black felt hat, and a cane with an amber top...
...the rabbi answers...
...And because I think Maimonides (together with Clara, who always had a hot lunch ready for her daughters) was on to something, I must say that one of the joys of this book is its wonderful litanies of food: chopped liver, chicken soup with knaidlach, roast chicken, noodle pudding, sliced cucumbers, honey cake, tea with raspberry jam at the bottom of the glasses, herring, wine, schnapps, compote, goose, potato kugel, blintzes, sour cream, demitasses, matzo ball soup, ices...
...Like all great storytellers, Birstein instructs painlessly (and her work reads, deceptively, I'm sure, as if it were written effortlessly...
...Such a tsadik, everybody said...
...For with this wonderful world, His wonderful world, God gave us the capacity to enjoy it...
...The Rabbi on 47th Street is beautifully written, it's funny, it's a joy to read - and it taught me things I am glad to know and will be happy to remember...
...The Jews are a nation of dreamers, Channele," Rabbi Birstein told his youngest daughter, who grew up to be a dreamer, a novelist...
...His eyeglasses had black rims to them...
...And yet a woman to whom her daughter gives her due: When her husband died, Clara said, "My king is dead...
...He was very short...
...Their sheer number would have daunted a lesser man...
...Similarly, I see the young rabbi's sojourn to America...
...Where is God...
...For Rabbi Birstein, family and community are all: "Our entire Jewish religion is based on a sense of community," he says...
...I see him smiling, and shrugging...
...he would daven [pray] a little less and help other Jews more...
...On a terrible hot night in Georgia, in a terrible house, lying next to a wife who is not eager to make love, he smells the honeysuckle, and rejoices...
...Of course, he goes on to other essentials.' " Rabbi Birstein had, if one may say so, his crosses to bear...
...The rabbi rejoiced THE RABBI ON 47th STREET Ann Birstein Dial Press, $13.95 Barbara Grizzuti Harrison UNTIL my mid-teens, I lived in a three-family house in Brooklyn next door to which was a six-story apartment building...
...And the old man said, To have nothing.to carry...
...I get the exact flavor of his marriage to a woman who did not share his enthusiasm for the Everglades ("Exotic foliage was not in her line...
...During his lifetime, Ed Sullivan called him "the one Broadway personality that never changes his act...
...In her first nonfic-tion book, Birstein writes of an unconventional Orthodox rabbi, her father, Bernard Birstein, whom she loved...
...It cracks the heart...
...Ann Birstein has achieved her own triumph of mind over matter...
...He says the Misnna begins with dietary laws because food is the first essential of living.' My father sighed...
...He loved actors - at a time when conservative members of the min-yan were urging him to "throw the ac-tyoren out...
...Most of all, I understand his profound dedication to duty, the searching after righteousness that informed all his actions through all his journeys and vicissitudes - the death of his first wife, the death of a child, years spent in ramshackle houses in Georgia and dreary railroad flats in Chicago...
...He does enjoy...
...It made me feel at home...
...Jews at worship were so remarkably other as to veil vision...
...If I were to open a nonfiction book that began "In 1893 he raised his yellow coffee mug to his lips with a trembling hand and a furrowed brow," my inclination would be to close it rapidly - because after all the writer wasn't there...
...I'll tell you a story...
...But where is God in all this, I want to know...
...I am irrationally angry that I didn't have Ann Birstein's latest book when I lived (all unknowing) among Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn...
...These family portraits are the heart of this book...
...His daughter describes him: "He was not only an orator, but a cuff-shooter, well dressed and dapper...
...Working, as she says, "with memories, memories of things that happened during my lifetime, and memories of stories I used to hear," Ann Birstein takes us back to her father's youth in the Slobodka Yeshiva - a "famous and forbidding center of learning . . . mired in the famous mud, the Slobodka bloteh" - to which, "half-starved," he came at the age of nine...
...This is a wonderful paradox: its uniqueness and specificity are exactly what make it accessible...
...Rabbi Birnstein was an immigrant from Russian Europe...
...It brought me back to my childhood, when never ever did I enter a Jewish house without being offered food...
...the more Birstein's family history differs from mine, the more I recognize myself and my family in her and hers...
...Ann Birstein manages, with wit and delicacy, to describe her parents' wedding night (to describe anybody's wedding night is a major accomplishment...
...Even circus midgets, after all, needed a rabbi to marry them...
...Once in Kovno, there was a poor ordinary carpenter who wore his tefillin constantly and davened around the clock...
...Rabbi Birstein's was a life of love, laughter, duty, service, pain, and praise, a life that celebrated life, one that was rooted in family and worship...
...But here is where Birstein's novelist's skills (and her memories of her father's memories) serve her beautifully: When, for example, she describes how her father, on one of his "eating days" engaged in a battle of wits with a charitable Jew from the town who took him in for a meal, I absolutely believe what his daughter calls his "triumph of mind over matter" - I can see the young Yeshiva student dividing the kasha in the communal bowl to illustrate the dividing of the Red Sea . . . and, not so incidentally, to capture the rivulets of chicken shmaltz in the bowl for himself...
...So what's the harm...
...all our prayers are in the plural form...
...if that man really believed in God...
...Dozens of family members troop through this book, some of them jolly, some of them dour (all of mem drawn with particularity and brilliance...
...I had, at that time, Jewish friends, and Jewish schoolmates, and Jewish teachers whom I loved...
...I thought I'd thrown off the shackles of bigotry - but now I think now, for, after all, why else would I not have allowed myself to see...
...This gift for joy belongs also to his daughter, who could not otherwise have written this book...
...Rabbi Birstein, an indefatigable scholar who loved the written word, became, after many travails, rabbi of The Actors Temple, a modest building that still stands on 47th Street, in close proximity to Broadway...
...Her memoir has a folkloric quality...
...And in-laws...
...My immigrant Italian family was casually anti-Semitic...
...And a life that George Jessel eulogized...
...I'll tell you a story," Rabbi Birstein says...
...The little rabbi's role is that of the humanitarian and he plays it to the hilt, bringing comfort and solace to Christian and Jew alike...
Vol. 109 • June 1982 • No. 12
