The city was still pressed in the
vice of muted snow. But it had stopped
falling from the gray sky. A few flecks fell from the low cloud cover, only to disappear somewhere
above the mounds of snow. But still I
couldn’t find a taxi, at least this far in the north of Manhattan.
So I began the shlep south to locate some mode of transport to take me
to that illusory physicality, home.
There was a snow emergency in effect in all five boroughs. No unnecessary traffic was permitted on the
street. It was only when I reached Fifth
Avenue that some semblance of road was visible beneath my feet and I found a cab
with a cabbie within, an old man sitting in the car, idling with the heater on
full blast. He ignored my tapping until
it was apparent I would not go away.
“Vat?”
he asked, a level tone of disgust implying it was nothing personal.
“I
need a lift,” I answered in Yiddish, following a certain linguistic instinct
honed by one-thousand years of European exile.
The man’s dull eyes lit: a person
under fifty speaking the Mother Tongue.
“A
landsman?” he said, finally, uncoiling his looping Ukrainian accent around his
diphthongs and vowels. “What’s a Jew
doing out in this? The mayor, may his
name be blotted out, has closed down the roads.
If I should get caught, a fine I could get.”
“I’ll
give you $50.” The man gazed at me
quizzically. What was my angle? Than all doubt evaporated as President Grant
was pressed into his hand, magically outstretched.
“Vos mer yidn, als mer ganovim,” he said
as I planted my fanny in the back seat.
A venerable Jewish proverb of self-mockery: the more Jews, the more thieves.
As
we drove downtown, the man would not stop talking. Now that he had found a fellow Jew, a real Yid, the words flowed like a tap
which had been turned on and broken.
His was a familiar tale of destruction and
dislocation. Similar in broad outlines
to versions I had heard told by members of his generation, differing in minor
details, mainly the boldness of the horror or deprivation suffered at the hands
of goyisher scoundrels. This man was indeed a lucky Jew. As a teenager during the war a buxom Ukrainian peasant woman
without a husband had taken him in as a farm hand. He shaved his beard and side locks and
pretended to be her mute, pork eating son. The woman was “vild” the cabbie explained,
implying more with his tone than with his words, but he was alive thanks to
her.
“She
von’t be among the Chassidey umot ha Olam,
the righteous among the nations, in the Garden of the Righteous in Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, but the shikska
saved my hide, I’ll give her that.”
When
the cabbie found out he was carrying Nathan Zimmerman, who wrote in Forvarts, he grew visibly excited. His tale was designed for installments in
that venerable Yiddish daily, he panted, and
he scratched his name and number on the back of a blank cab duty roster:
Samkele Gabinizer. I looked twice at the
last name. Gabiniz was the muddy shetl
of my grandmother of blessed memory, my poor loopy Bubbe, who mind was stuck in
the mire of history.
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