Then a gaggle of old ladies were
surrounding him, holding congress over the recumbent old man like witches over
a bubbling pot, issues instructions and counter-instructions. And then, above the din of confusion for
confusion’s sake, a voice piped in slow Yiddish vaser, vaser, vaser, water, and it took a moment for the thin voice
of Goldfarb to waft above the background scent of tumult and uncertainty.
He was gently lifted from the bed and five
cups of water were thrust beneath his nose.
His complexion was waxy and wan.
His face had assumed the slack dimensions of a recently cast death
mask. But the water revived him.
“A dank… a dank,” he said to the congress
of old ladies. He stood. He told them he was going home, that literary
conversation tapped his meager energy, but they all protested at once, throwing
up an impenetrable wall of words. They
told him he was going to a hospital in an ambulance, in a cab, but he threw up
his two hands, as if to shield himself from some invisible enemy.
“Neyn, neyn,” he shook his shaggy head. “My vhole life I’ve walked or taken the subway. A big mackher
in cab I am not. Vone does not change
vone’s habits so late in life, good ladies.”
But the ladies were insistent, recounting the dozens of ways an old man
could die in New York City,
from the mundane to the supernatural, from falls, blows, muggers, an errant taxi
cab, the Angel of Death hovered over every manhole cover and curb. Then one woman said that dear Mr. Zimmerman
would be pleased to accompany Mr. Goldfarb to his apartment. If the old man refused an ambulance, a taxi,
or any standard conveyance, I was to be his beneficent conductor.
So
I found myself on upper Broadway with Mendele Goldfarb, who had lost the Nobel
Prize by the width of a hair. He had
written a particularly large Yiddish novel fifty years ago, the Carnovksy Sisters, a stormy drama of
three daughters from a Rabbinical scion, who each embody an object of Jewish
male fantasy and paranoia: the young,
wanton whore, the matronly yet chaste Chasidic mother, fertile within the
bounds of the Creator’s first commandment, and the old crone.
The novel is a vast rumination on female
infidelity, both of a sexual and spiritual nature. The work was the kind of novel that could not
be published today, even in Yiddish, its slant is so overwhelmingly suspicious
of the duplicitous nature of women.
Goldfarb wrote many more novels, poems, short stories, and even adapted
some for the stage. No others were translated
into English.
He labored long
and hard under the shadow of Isaac Singer until he was all but eclipsed by his
rival, who even in death continued to bathe him in evening gloom. The Sister
Carnovsky was translated in English and published by Doubleday, Garden
City, New York,
in 1953, but it had been out of print for scores of years. Every blue moon, I discovered it on the dusty
shelf of a used book emporium.
“But
I’ll pay, Mr. Goldfarb,” I answered him.
“Where do you live?” He gave an
address in upper Manhattan,
near Inwood Park, the north pole of New York City. If I could get a cab driver to take us there,
it would cost over $10, but luckily Mendele Goldfarb would not take my charity,
and remained adamant about the subway.
We
threaded our way through the rush hour crowds.
At the turnstile, Goldfarb fished for a token deep in the channels of
his overcoat to no avail. I offered him
one, but he waived a trembling hand dismissively in the air, as if my offer was
a pesky fly. I insisted on the express,
but he was unwavering about the local, claiming the rapid movement made his
eardrums pop. Someone offered Goldfarb a
seat, he was such a display of decrepitude, but he wagged his head, proudly
grasping the overhead strap. He began to
speak to me in Yiddish, but over the dim of the train, whose parts sounded like
a sack of bones being dumped into a bucket, I couldn’t hear a syllable. I bent down and pressed my ear against his
chapped lips.
“I
need my medisohn. I vant my medisohn.”
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