Judaic Studies

I smelled the souk in these unveilings of Masha’s. Costly and undesired, all her revelations—to say nothing of her character.  (For example, I can’t remember how it came out, but I learned that she joined societies and sisterhoods with strange objectives–woodcock and vole preservation,  citizenship for Hindu gurus threatened with deportation, those sorts of things.)

If I were reading this in a fiction, I’d be shaking my head at this stuff: she was pregnant. In retrospect, I’d seen her swelling stomach in Vienna.

Yitzhak would not countenance this state of affairs—she used “would not countenance.” He already had three children and a wife in Israel to whom he refused a get that enables an orthodox woman to divorce her husband. The wife wanted to divorce him because he was a philanderer—not now he wasn’t, of course, but he’d been that then.

“When was then?” I wanted to know.

When he’d been ostracized from the Satmars for adultery, extensive and divisive within the community. Thence he’d tried to affiliate himself with the transdenominational, neohasidic, kabbalistic synagogue of Rabbi Ingber—who’d have none of him, either. So to Europe to make his way.

She had made a bond with Yitzhak—it was love, of course, passionate faithful eternal love (they swore that they’d be lovers forever, but in case anything came between them, they’d be friends forever); the bond forewent the bourgeois institution of marriage (Yitzhak’s Hasidism had been lightly salted with neomarxism).

“And how did you find me in Vienna?”

“I did a terrible thing. I lied to the secretary in your department. I know how these people would say routinely, ‘I’ll give him a message. Where can he contact you.’ So I lied…”

“You said to her…?”

“I said to her I was carrying your child and you’d want to hear it from me.”

I raged at her for a few minutes until it began to seem as if I were merely expressing an obligatory outrage—is that weird?—then I began to become very interested in this whacky sob story.

Sex. Sex. Sex. Sex dripping all over this tale—but my libido at a distance, and then I asked her:

“Why me?”

Well, she was alone in Europe, alone and afraid and uncertain and she knew no one other than Yitzhak and the poet with whom they were staying—and me. Why me? Because I was kind. I was a professor of literature and knew, she said, knew well, the supreme virtue of kindness. It was bred in the bone and sinews of literature. Surely, I’d read E.M. Forster on the subject.

She started to get up, laboriously: “I’m sorry. What the fuck—“ (Shock to hear her utter the word.) “—do I think I’m doing? I apologize profoundly. I don’t speak French at all. Yitzhak and the poet jabber away. I needed to speak English, to say things…I’m terribly ashamed…terribly. Please. Please. Please. Forgive me and forget the things I said today. Hormones. Hormones. And MANY thanks for your imprimatur on my book. I really don’t have any other questions. I’m a fool and I’ve made an ass of myself and I’m soooo sorry…”

“You said that, already. Sit down.” She did, and went on:

“I know Yitzhak only wanted to argue with you—I know he thought…he also thought, I hate it, but he also thought we might be having sex. He’s insanely jealous.  Really pathological…I knew he’d insult you. I’m soooooooo sorry. But I thought, well, you and he are humanists. Something would pass between you. You’d tell him how good you thought my book was and that you were very pleased to have met me…and him…and that ultimately…’

“—ultimately, the subject of your dilemma would come before the two us, wise men in the ways of the world and Yitzhak would be blessed with the light of conciliation and your dilemma would disappear. Is that it?”

“Yes,” she said. “How insane! I know it’s insane. I’m a rational person, a scholar with standards of reason…insane.”

“It is,” I told her. “It is.”

She reached out with a hand, shook mine and said goodbye.

It had been insane. That was true. In fifteen minutes, however, I was overtaken by another insane thought. I wanted to see her again. I wanted to have more to do with her.

Maybe I could call the Muhlenberg College Department of Judaic Studies and get an address for her. I could make up some lie.

I was her lover. We’d had a terrible disagreement. I feared for her life. She was pregnant with my child. I didn’t know what she might do, but I wanted us to reconcile—more than anything else in the world. Besides, she’d inadvertently dropped some things and I wanted to return them. In addition to all that, she’d been a student in my course on Genesis.

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