The Mathematician’s Shiva Read online

  “We’re on skis. It should distribute the weight. I don’t see a problem,” Zhelezniak said.

  “I swear I can see Rachela’s home in the distance,” Ben-Zvi said.

  “Is that true, Ben-Zvi?” Ito asked.

  “You wish! It’s too far,” Jane said.

  Zhelezniak looked at the defeated group next to me and didn’t even try to hide his disgust. “I’m glad of one thing. That Rachela didn’t have to see this display of slabost i len.”

  “My, my, aren’t we full of ourselves.” Jane, who didn’t know Russian but could easily suss out the meaning of Zhelezniak’s words, said it just loud enough for me to hear.

  Zhelezniak shook his head and summoned up some pity. “We’ll go across the lake, then,” he said. “I’ll lead. We’ll get you all back and you can warm up.”

  “We should follow the edge of the lake, Vladimir,” I said. “That way, if someone breaks through, they won’t go very far down.”

  “It would be longer,” Ben-Zvi said. “I’m not in favor of longer.”

  “We’ll go straight across, Abraham. We’ll get you back quickly,” Zhelezniak said.

  I said nothing as we began our journey. The wind was barely blowing. Nature wasn’t being completely unkind. The sky was a wondrous dark blue shade that I never saw in Tuscaloosa, and that in the Midwest only came with frigid days in winter. I had skied on this lake many times way back when. Only once had I run into a spring-thinned patch. It was in 1966, the year when teens in my neighborhood began, for the first time ever, to take drugs for the dual purpose of mental exploration and self-medication.

  I was with my girlfriend of the moment, someone with whom I was trying to maintain a long-distance relationship. It was during winter break and I was happy to be back home with her. I didn’t know we wouldn’t last as a couple past the spring.

  I had decided that it would be fun to take a ski trip on acid. One of the advantages of growing up in a college town is that if you are inclined to take hallucinogens, supplies are ample and the quality is usually quite good. So it was with the acid we took that day, which we licked off some colorful African-themed blotter tabs labeled Safari Travels. The snow was thin on the lake as we skied. I did notice I was crossing a slushy patch, but my brain failed to understand that we were in peril. It was slushy. Hah, hah, hah. That’s so cool. Hah, hah, hah. In retrospect, that year of “mental exploration” was really a year of near total mental vegetation. I guess that was the point.

  I fell in with one ski. “Whoa!” I said. Speaking words longer than one syllable is quite difficult on acid. Woe-ah. I had truly recognized something of significance. My girlfriend was behind me.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  “I’m in a hole,” I said.

  “Oh, that’s not good, I guess.”

  “No, it isn’t,” I said.

  “Well, um, you want me to help?”

  “Um, no, just don’t get close. It’s a hole, you know. You could fall in.”

  “OK. I won’t get close.”

  “Good idea.”

  I don’t remember the details of how I extracted my leg and ski from the water, but one relative advantage of being on drugs when you do something stupid is that you tend not to panic. At least that was true for me.

  I thought about this as we moved across the lake with me at the end of the group, carefully watching my minions directly ahead. When I heard the shouts in Russian a few hundred yards ahead I knew exactly what had happened.

  “What’s that?” Jane stopped and turned to me. She was finally starting to glide along the snow, I noticed.

  “Someone fell in.”

  “This is like Dr. Zhivago,” Jane said. “Omar Sharif walking across Siberia, braving death.”

  “Hopefully it’s nothing serious. I’ll go ahead and check.”

  “Do that please,” Jane said and started to hum “Lara’s Theme” aloud, maybe because she was nervous or maybe because she wanted to make a joke.

  I could hear Zhelezniak continue to curse. He was inspecting his waterlogged right boot and pant leg when I got to him. To his credit, the snow blanket was so thick that there was no way he could have known a thin spot was there. It had helped that he was a small man, about my weight when I was a teen. But unlike me at that tender age, there were no drugs in his bloodstream transforming danger into amusement.

  “I’m happy to see you’re OK,” I said. “You got out yourself?”

  “Of course,” Zhelezniak said. “I didn’t want to endanger anyone else.”

  “From what I remember, and that memory is fuzzy, there aren’t many more thin spots near here besides this one and two others about forty meters to the right.”

  “Orlansky would have fallen through like a stone. You should have told me, Sasha.”

  “It’s been a long time. I didn’t remember until now.”

  “Let’s get out of here,” Zhelezniak said, and they all pushed off while I skied back to my apprentices.

  They were more than a little relieved when we took off our skis and climbed the path to my mother’s house. I decided to stay at the zoo for a bit while the others continued on. This was the kind of weather I liked best to observe whatever animals they allowed out at that time of year. The walruses and sea lions, their whiskers covered in a thin coating of frost and ice, seemed happy to be experiencing the near Arctic temperatures. The noisy sea lions, the alarm clocks of my youth, were active, motoring around their concrete-floored enclosure on their bellies with exuberance. If they recognized me from years before, they didn’t let on.

  I walked over to the bears and looked at the Kodiak, the one my mother watched while she was sick. I thought about her time in the Barents Sea, fresh in my mind from reading her memoir. She had quoted from Gorki in the chapter I had read. “The more a human creature has tasted of bitter things, the more it hungers after the sweet things in life.” My mother always had that hunger, so fierce and something I couldn’t possibly replicate in its intensity. My life had been—thanks to her, my grandfather, father, uncle, and aunt, who had all wished nothing but a kind world for me—not bitter in the least.

  My father had taken Andrea and Amy to the zoo once already. I had heard about this trip secondhand and felt more than a bit jealous of my father enjoying our newly discovered family. Did they stop to take a look at the Kodiak? Probably they did. I thought about my mother talking to this bear when she was ill, about Anna teasing me for doing the same. But sometimes, you need to voice something aloud just to hear yourself say it. Thinking it in your head just won’t do. I stared at that huge brown bear while it paused to look in my direction. No, I’m not foolish enough to think that it was looking back with any sense of cognition when I said, “I want sweet things in life. I have a hunger, too.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Kabbalove

  DAY 4

  A man knocked on the door. He wore a thick black wool coat and a knockoff Borsalino fedora, like the kind you can buy from street vendors near New York City’s Little Italy. His red beard was scraggly, similar to what you find on the faces of some Hassidic rabbis, and the pale skin of his cheeks, pockmarked, also gave off a rabbinical air. He looked a little familiar. A woman, likely his wife, stood beside him. By day four of the shiva none of the mathematicians were knocking or ringing the bell. They would walk right in like they were part owners of my mother’s house. A doorbell ring usually meant someone local with food, but these two weren’t trying to feed us.

  It took me a moment to place the man. The day of the ski trip Ben-Zvi told me that his brother was in town and wanted to pay his respects. I had met his brother long before he could grow a beard, at Ben-Zvi’s wedding to Anna.

  My cousin, Bruce, has an uncanny ability to detect who is sleeping with whom. I, on the other hand, have a finely tuned and less useful sense of who is a real rabbi and who is a poseur. It
comes from my years of religious instruction, especially my days as a yeshiva student in Chicago. This man in front of me was trying to look like a rabbi, and may have spent a few years getting a rabbinical education after high school, but I was certain that he wasn’t the real deal. At the door, he fidgeted, not out of cold, but because he was the kind of man who was easily distracted. Even the lowest of the low of Orthodox rabbis possess sitzfleisch, the ability to concentrate on one thing for hours at a time. Either you possess this trait naturally or they beat it into you with slaps across the face during your early education. Actually, I’m told that nowadays no slapping is allowed, but back when I was a student it was de rigueur.

  Ben-Zvi’s brother’s wife was tall and wafer-thin, perhaps fifteen years younger than him. She wore a tan camel coat, and her long brown hair, definitely not a sheitel, was fully exposed to the elements. Shimon was the man’s name. His wife was an American, Jocelyn.

  The house was warm and inviting, I knew. A home full of people is always pleasant to find on a bitter cold day. The furnace blew in hot air constantly. Abraham Ben-Zvi put aside his thoughts of the Navier-Stokes problem and enveloped his brother Shimon with a bear hug and a kiss on both cheeks. Abraham came from a large family, and none except him possessed any mathematical ability. As Abraham hugged his brother, who he hadn’t seen in more than ten years, the fat around his waist jiggled. These two were separated in age by a good many years, but anyone could clearly see that they were brothers.

  My uncle peeked out of the dining room to see what the commotion was about. He caught a glimpse of Shimon and rose to meet him. Maybe it was my uncle’s lack of Jewish upbringing as a child that caused him to be so enamored of those with extensive Jewish education. Even ersatz rabbis were like catnip for him. When he came to this country my uncle made it his mission to learn about his faith, to learn biblical Hebrew, and even to learn to speak a decent Yiddish with his father. In a few short years, he became a three-star Jew, at least.

  My uncle was prideful of his adherence to Judaic tradition in a way that I’ve seen in a lot of survivors. It wasn’t just about the joy of being of the faith. There was the added kicker of practicing a religion and culture that if Hitler and many others had had their way would have been annihilated. My uncle was jubilant about being a living testimony to the failure of the worst years of hate and anti-Semitism in human history.

  “Reb Ben-Zvi,” my uncle said. “It’s a pleasure to meet you again.”

  “You know each other?” I asked.

  “Yes, of course,” my uncle said. “He’s almost like mishpuchah to us, given that his brother was once married to Anna. We discovered our ties during his last visit here.”

  “I actually remember you both from my brother’s wedding, and your beloved Rachela as well,” Shimon said to us. When Shimon said my mother’s name, he pronounced it like my grandfather did, my uncle did, and like all who came from the Jewish Pale likely would have, Rookh-eh-leh. Usually when I heard my mother’s name pronounced this way, I’d be filled with warm nostalgia for my grandfather and his cronies. But hearing Shimon with his affected shtetl accent irritated me. “I’m so sorry to hear of your loss,” he said, placing his hands on my uncle and me as if he was about to give us a blessing. My uncle seemed genuinely soothed by this gesture.

  Shimon had emigrated from Israel to New York in his twenties and did god knows what for several years. One day he ventured to Manhattan and by chance ran into an old Jewish socialist with a nostalgia for Eastern European shtetl culture who owned a book, written in a mix of Hebrew and Yiddish, detailing life in his grandfather’s hometown in Poland. There are thousands of remembrance books, yizkor beecher, like this. They are a testimony to a life that is no more. Written after the war not by journalists but by groups of Jewish survivors, these heartfelt scrapbooks of pictures and memories describe what Jewish life once was like in most every shtetl and dorf in the Pale before Hitler destroyed it all. For a little money Shimon translated the book into English. The man was grateful. Out of the blue, on the day he received the translated book, the man asked Shimon what he knew about Kabbalah. Shimon, who had a genuine penchant for mysticism, began to expound on his love of those Jewish ancients who probed deeply into the meaning of life. The man, who was an assistant director of NYU’s adult learning program, proposed that Shimon give a series of lectures on Kabbalistic thought. The lectures were a huge success. Shimon found his voice and his career.

  Such was the story that Abraham Ben-Zvi told me about his brother. What he didn’t say was that teaching the rudiments of Jewish mysticism was a competitive business, and simply informing those who were spiritually hungry about the wonders of God and his relation to the world wasn’t quite enough to generate a long-term, steady, paying audience. You needed something practical, and maybe borderline salacious, to stand out from the rest. Shimon, his lecture career flagging, came upon a new idea. He called it Kabbalove, a lecture series and instruction manual for couples that mixed sex tips with relationship advice, all of which supposedly were “inspired” by the Kabbalah. Shimon traveled around the country selling his self-published paperback book and videos of lectures out of the trunk of his car, speaking primarily at “forward-thinking” synagogues. Along the way he had found his besheret, Jocelyn. I noted that somehow over the years he had managed to avoid my synagogue in Tuscaloosa. Apparently we weren’t forward-thinking enough.

  But there he was in Madison, Wisconsin, scheduled to speak at Temple Beth El. This was his second time in town, the first having taken place three years before. That was when my uncle Shlomo, attending a lecture with his new bride, Cynthia, had met Shimon. Both of them had found the lecture and the $29.95 manual captivating.

  As Abraham Ben-Zvi took his brother to the flock of mathematicians, I turned to my uncle. “What do you know of this guy?”

  “Shimon? Not much. You should see him talk in front of a crowd, though. The dveykus just oozes from him.”

  “He’s a trained rabbi?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Why are you always so skeptical about the Orthodox, Sasha?”

  “I have my reasons. Why are you always such a sap about anything that has a Star of David on it?”

  “I’m not a sap. But unlike you, I don’t just say the words in shul. I believe them, and I know dveykus when I see it.” I actually admired my uncle’s ironclad belief in God and his feeling of immeasurable gratitude to Hashem for giving him the strength to rise out of the earth as a young boy and live, and for returning him to his father and sister. But I never understood how or why he entirely dropped all of his hard-earned circumspection and savvy when he encountered ordained men of faith, be they Christian or Jewish.

  I watched from a distance as Shimon took in the crowd in the living room. “You know, you and I share much in common,” Shimon said to the group. “I, too, believe that numbers provide a conduit to real meaning.” Abraham seemed to visibly shrink upon hearing his brother’s words. Maybe the most insulting thing you can say to a mathematician is something to the effect that math is all about numbers. Arithmetic is all about numbers and none of the people in the room gave a damn about arithmetic. I got the sense that this was not the first time Shimon had managed to make Abraham’s stomach churn in a public setting. The room’s ambience was already black because of the mathematicians’ inability to make headway on the Navier-Stokes problem. No one had patience for nonsense.

  “Shimon, please tell me you aren’t talking about Kabbalah,” Peter Orlansky said. Peter had had a Jewish education similar to mine, and not surprisingly, also shared a similar love-hate relationship with the most devout of The Tribe.

  “But of course, that’s exactly what I’m talking about,” Shimon said. He was smiling, completely unaware of Peter’s hostility. “Do you know Kabbalah, my friend?”

  “A bit, yes.”

  “Well, there is always
more to know. I study every day and still I consider myself uninformed. I’m holding a seminar tonight at the local synagogue,” Shimon said. “I know this family is dealing with a terrible loss, but perhaps some of you could attend?”

  “I’m afraid we have our own work to do tonight, Shimon. We are trying to follow through on the efforts of our lost colleague regarding an important problem,” Abraham said. The two brothers said their good-byes and, in the alcove, Shimon met my uncle and me yet again. He looked at us with kindness. “I know that this is probably of little consolation to you, but I thought I might offer it. The name of your lost loved one, Rachel. It’s numerically the same in Hebrew as the words in Genesis, viyihee or, ‘and there was light.’ I am certain your mother will be a source of even greater light in the world to come.”

  “Thank you, Reb Ben-Zvi,” my uncle said. “I may need to have a word with you while you’re in town. Would you mind giving me your cell phone number?” My uncle had already whipped out his phone, ready to take the rebbe’s digits. Shimon obliged.

  “The man has a way with words, don’t you think, Sasha?” my uncle asked after Shimon left. He was still aglow from being in the presence of someone he believed was divinely inspired.

  “That man? What’s with his wife, anyway? She just stands there like a Giacometti statue. Doesn’t say a word, and nods her head.”

  “Some people are quiet. Some aren’t. Who is Giacometti, anyway?”

  “A Swiss-Italian sculptor who stretched all his subjects into linguini.”

  “Jocelyn isn’t Italian. Far from it. She’s related to the Baal Shem Tov on her mother’s side.”

  “Oh please, uncle. Do you know how many Jews say they are blood relatives of the Baal Shem? Even in Tuscaloosa I can find them.”

  “I know. A lot. But she’s the real deal. I can tell.”

  CHAPTER 25

  On the Mend

  DAY 4

  When my aunt died and Uncle Shlomo fell apart, my mother was beside herself. My uncle wasn’t returning phone calls, a telltale sign that he was in a bad way. Even before the invention of the cell phone, my uncle had been telecommunications obsessed. My mother had to use her own key to get into his house. She’d yank him out of bed or out of the corner of the living room where he had spent the night. Bruce, a music and classics major at Williams at the time, was still in his I-can’t-see-past-my-own-nose phase, lost in a sea of cocaine and sex. While many chose that route back then, Bruce didn’t view it with any nostalgia. “My music was shit and I could have fucking died,” he told me once.