“You like my treasures?” the rabbi said, and Michael’s heart slipped.
“What?”
“My books,” the rabbi said, his own hand touching the books on the second shelf, below the photograph of the dark-haired woman. “Is all I have, but treasure, yes?”
Michael’s heart steadied as he peered more closely at the books. Their titles were in languages he did not know or letters that he did not recognize.
“You like books?” the rabbi asked.
“Yes,” Michael said. “I love books. But — are these books written in Jewish?”
The rabbi pointed at the leather bindings of the thickest books.
“Not Jewish, Hebrew, these here,” he said. And then he touched some smaller books, with worn paper bindings. “These are Yiddish.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Hebrew is, eh, the, eh…” His eyes drifted to the dictionary. “Language of Yisrael.”
The word came out lan-goo-age, the last syllable rhyming with rage. Michael pronounced it correctly for the rabbi, who nodded, his bushy black eyebrows rising in appreciation.
“Eh, language.” He said it correctly. “Good, I need your help. Please tell me when I make mistake. Language, language. Good. Anyway, Hebrew is language of Torah and Talmud—”
“The language,” Michael said, remembering the endless drills in grammar class. “The the? It’s called an article,” Michael explained. “A definite article, they call it. The language, the table, the stove.”
The rabbi smiled. “The tea!”
He went to the stove and lifted the boiling water and poured it into a pot.
“We soon have the tea!”
“What are those other books?” Michael said. “You started to say—”
“Yiddish,” the rabbi said. “The language of the people. The ordinary people. Not the rabbis. The ordinary people.”
“What are the books about?”
The rabbi stood before the bookcase.
“They are about the everything,” he said, lifting a volume. “Religion. The history of the Jews.” He hefted a volume. “But also Balzac. You know Balzac?”
“No.”
“Very good, Balzac. A very smart Franceman. You should read the Balzac. He knows everything. And this, this is Henrich Heine. Very good poetry. And here, Tolstoy, very great.”
Michael squatted down, took a dusty book off a bottom shelf, and opened it.
“Is this Hebrew or Yiddish?”
The rabbi perched the glasses on his nose.
“Yiddish.”
“What’s it say?”
“Is a very funny story. Very sad too. Good Soldier Schweik. A Czech soldier, he knows the war is crazy. I am sure all are in the English books too.”
The rabbi turned away and found two glasses on a shelf above the sink. He poured the tea. Then he folded the newspapers and moved them aside and set the glasses on the table and gestured for the boy to sit down. Michael had never had tea in a glass before. The rabbi then placed a sugar bowl and a spoon between them. Suddenly he reached forward awkwardly, offering his hand. Michael shook it.
“I am Rabbi Hirsch,” he said. “Judah Hirsch.”
“Michael Devlin,” the boy said.
“You are kind boy,” the rabbi said, rhyming kind with kin. Michael repeated the word, rhyming it with rind. Then the boy lifted the tea and sipped. The glass was hot in his hand.
“This is great,” he said, putting the glass down to let it cool.
“Is hard to get the good tea in America,” the rabbi said. “Maybe the water?”
So he was from Europe, where the water was different. Michael remembered the blue books and said: “Are you from Poland?”
“No. From Prague. You know where is Prague?”
“I know about the Infant of Prague. It’s a statue of Jesus that’s supposed to work miracles or something. They sell little copies of it up at Sacred Heart. But I’m not sure exactly where Prague is.”
“In Czechoslovakia,” he said. “Beautiful city, Prague. Shain. Zaier shain…. Most beautiful city in all of the Europe.”
Sadness surged in his voice then, and he seemed guarded, and Michael thought of his mother when she would sing certain songs about the Ireland she’d left behind. The Old Country, she would always say. While living in the new country.
“Why you think I am Polish?”
“I read in a book that before the war there were three million Jews in Poland.”
“True. Now? None left. All dead.”
Abruptly, he shifted his eyes to the newspaper.
“English, very strange language.”
“Are you going to school to learn it?”
“No. No. Teaching myself. But is very hard.” He held up the back page of the Daily News and pointed at the headline. “Look, what is this mean?”
The headline said: FLOCK SIGNS ROBBIE.
“Well,” Michael said. “It’s about baseball.”
For the first time, and not the last, Michael began to explain the mysteries of baseball to the rabbi from Prague. He started with the word flock, which meant the Brooklyn Dodgers. The reason they were called the flock, he said, was that years ago they were called the Robins. And robins were birds. So even after they changed their name they remained a flock of birds.
“But nobody ever calls them the flock,” the boy said, “except in the newspapers. Here we just call them the Dodgers. Or dem Bums.”
The rabbi’s eyes looked quizzical.
“Dem Bums?” He paused. “What it means?”
“Well, a bum is like a tramp, a worthless person.”
“So they don’t like them?”
“No, we love them. But when they lose, here in Brooklyn, we call them dem Bums. Dem is a Brooklyn word for them. We should say ‘those Bums,’ but — You see, Rabbi, it’s like a Brooklyn way of saying things. In the movies or on the radio, they talk different…”
Michael’s voice dribbled into frustrated silence; in some ways, baseball was really too hard to explain. He could never explain any of it to his mother. You probably had to be born to it. The rabbi stared at the boy, his brow furrowed, as if he were realizing again that learning English would not be simple. Then he pointed at the other word.
“What is Robbie? Is a Bum?”
“We don’t know yet.”
Michael explained that Robbie was a baseball player named Jackie Robinson. He was a colored man, a Negro, and there had never been a Negro player in the big leagues before. So the headline meant that the Dodgers had signed a contract with Jackie Robinson and if Robinson got through spring training he should be playing in Ebbets Field by the middle of April. This year. Nineteen forty-seven. The first Negro in the big leagues.
“What is the big leagues?” Rabbi Hirsch said.
“Well, there are two major leagues, which is another way of saying big leagues. The Dodgers are in the National League. So are the Giants, who are over in Manhattan in a place called the Polo Grounds. But the Yankees, who are up in the Bronx, they’re in the American League. Then there are a lot of minor leagues. The best players are in the major leagues, especially now that the war is over….”
He struggled to make all of this simple. But the rabbi’s face became a tight grid of concentration.
“I must to learn all this,” he said, shaking his head. “If I am to be in America, I must to learn.” He looked up at Michael. “Maybe you can teach me.”
“Aw, gee, Rabbi, I don’t know. I’m still learning it myself.”