“Answer me or I’ll bust you right in your goddamn big mouth. Come on, you wanna help ugly man?” the tall punk said, now slapping the newspaper into his open hand and not against my shoulder. What the tall punk was saying and doing reminded me of a scene in some inferior-grade movie. I wanted the film to break, the actors to disappear.
“Ugly man a friend of yours?” the tall punk shouted at me. I still said nothing. I didn’t understand the street mentality yet—I had been trying to learn. Maybe the four punks had knives, I thought; maybe they would cut my throat. I tried to imagine my parents’ reaction to the news of my violent death.
“You’re a fuckin’ useless idiot,” the tall punk said with a savagery that pressed against my face and ripped through my chest. The one with the flower-shaped scar picked up my pen from the counter and wrote “fuck” on the third punk’s cast. The one wearing the orange-rimmed sunglasses pointed gleefully and laughed loudly at what the punk with the scar had written.
“Useless idiot and ugly man, what a delightful couple,” the tall one said with mock tenderness, silencing the laughing punk with a slap of the newspaper.” You two oughta get married or something’ like that. You’re both queer. Two nothin’ queers.” He stopped speaking and returned to rubbing the old man’s head. Tears began to appear in my Lost Rabbi’s eyes.
“Ugly man, you like when I rub your shiny, pretty head? Feels good, don’t it?” the tall one said after a short silence, moaning as though he were rubbing a woman’s breast.
I tried not to think about what was happening in the restaurant, to flee somehow into safer thoughts, but images of European Jews being uprooted and killed battered my mind instead. I jumped up from my stool and grabbed the tall punk’s hand, unable to control myself any longer. He was striking my grandfather, forcing him back behind the concentration camp fence.
“Stop it, you bastard!” I screamed as I tried to push the tall one away from the old man. I wanted to go mad and swell into a furious giant who could smash to pieces the punk’s skull with his bare hands. I had never physically fought anyone in my life yet I believed I could kill the punk—wanted to kill him. He slapped me several times across the face with the newspaper. Then, as my murderous thoughts became more intense, he punched me in the stomach. I gasped for air, holding my belly in pain. I suddenly thought about graduate school, about sitting in a classroom in Toronto and taking notes during a lecture, completely invulnerable.
“See what you get when you interfere. Now shut your lousy mouth and we’ll be real nice to you. Very, very nice.” After he had finished saying “very nice” the tall one hit me in the stomach again, right when I was beginning to straighten up. All four punks took turns hitting me until I dropped to the floor. I could hear myself groaning, unable to call for help clearly.
The four punks paused from their attack and stood silently over me. The tall one threw the newspaper at me and it landed close to my head. I wanted to call them Nazis, to ease my pain with curses, but even more I wanted it all to end. The one with the cast kicked me in the side, forcing me onto my back. I saw four grinning faces. Lying there, I could imagine no worse horror. I wanted to reveal that I was a Jew. Maybe, if they beat me for being a Jew, I could get some grasp of their evilness. The punk wearing the orange-rimmed sunglasses opened my notebook, glanced at my writing, and then began to rip out the pages, letting them float down on me.
Some of the people at the counter had turned in their seats to watch me being beaten. I could see the movement reflected in the metal bases of the stools. Each of the punks kicked me once more and then they ran out of the restaurant, one shouting, “Nobody saw a fuckin’ thing.” Most of the customers soon formed a circle around me, curiously inspecting what to them must have been another identity-less shadow. I hated them as much as I hated those who had beaten me up.
The old man knelt down beside me and said, “Think of the future. That is how I survived Hitler.”
I tried to smile in appreciation. I whispered to the old man that I was Jewish too, calling him zayde—grandfather—my zayde. When the old man began to gently stroke my face, humming what sounded like a Yiddish lullaby, I heard a voice yell, “Mother of Jesus, call an ambulance quick.”
As I looked at the old man’s face, I thought that maybe I would be able to get a story out of all this. I decided that I would write about how the old man, my Lost Rabbi, had survived Hitler and how I had survived New York City. Then I decided firmly to call my story “The Lost Rabbi.”
I got my story published in a small literary magazine after I moved back to Toronto a few months later, and a lot more stories published after that and seven novels also, but I lost so much. Now I’m a Writer-in-Residence, Clown-in-Captivity, wanting back the passion I had when I wrote “The Lost Rabbi.”
[...] Rabbi – Rachel Barenblat, entitled Instead of Sons (Vayechi) and a short story – The Lost Rabbi - all the way from Canada (Prince Edward Island to be exact) from the prolific pen of J. J. [...]