The rabbi also taught by example. Michael realized that he had never done with Latin what the rabbi was doing with English. He barely knew what the Latin words meant, and he certainly could not speak Latin. And neither could the priests at Sacred Heart. They all spoke English to each other. The priests and the altar boys recited Latin, like actors in some play. The priests often read the Latin prayers from books, while the altar boys called up the replies from brute memory. And Father Heaney raced through Latin prayers as if they were a bore. Michael did love the sounds of the Latin words, the flowing vowels, the abrupt consonants. But they were part of a code he didn’t fully understand.
Spurred by the example of Rabbi Hirsch, he went to Father Heaney and borrowed a translation of the liturgy of the mass, and within days the Latin code was partially cracked. But the new knowledge made him feel deflated. What was being said in the ceremony of the mass no longer seemed as mysterious. Ite, missa est, for example, meant Go, the mass is finished. Deo gratias meant Thank God. He laughed when he read that, because that’s how he sometimes felt, after a long, slow, drowsy mass. Thank God this is over, he would think, because now I can pick up the buns at the bakery and go home to breakfast. Deo gratias.
But Michael’s sudden interest in Latin wasn’t as impassioned as his growing desire to learn Yiddish. At first, he had agreed to learn the rabbi’s language out of politeness; that agreement had even felt like a trap. But then the lessons began to feel like part of an adventure. Not like visiting the Taj Mahal, the way Richard Halliburton did in those fat books he saw at the library. Or like Frank Buck going after man-eating tigers in India. But Michael did feel that learning the language was like entering another country.
There was another thing too. In some way, because he had heard it all of his life, Latin was familiar. It was like the parts of the parish that everyone else knew: the church, the factory and the police station, the Venus and the Grandview. But Yiddish was strange, secret, special; in the world of the parish, it would be his. After all, the Egyptian wizard didn’t give Billy Batson a magic word in English or Latin. It was a private word in a private language. And even if Michael did master Latin, he couldn’t speak it with anybody. As a language, it was dead. The blue books said so. By the end of the eighth century after Christ, Latin was no longer the common spoken language, and was diverging into Spanish and French and other forms…. Yiddish was different. Right there, on page 3067 of the Wonderland of Knowledge, was the entry.
From Eastern Europe has come Yiddish, an extremely flexible language spoken principally by Jews. It is based mainly on the German of the Middle Ages, but the inclusion of Aramaic, Hebrew, and Slavic words and phrases has made it quite distinct from the language spoken in Germany today. Although Jewish scholars once frowned on Yiddish as a vulgar tongue, it is now accepted as a language of wide literary merit. Numerous high-grade works of literature have been written in Yiddish; first-rank writers have used it as their medium; and there are a number of newspapers printed in Yiddish. Russia, Poland, and the United States have produced the principal Yiddish literature….
If he could learn Yiddish, he could read the newspaper that Rabbi Hirsch sometimes had on his table, the Forvertz, and find out what they said about the goyim in a language the goyim could not read, and how they would cover the arrival of Jackie Robinson. And he could borrow books from Rabbi Hirsch’s bookcase and read them. He was thrilled by the example of Balzac. He wrote his books in French, which came from Latin, and here they were in Yiddish, which came from German, and wouldn’t it be something if an Irish kid could read those stories after they had traveled all the way to Brooklyn? It would be like reading Latin, French, German, and Yiddish all at once, and turning them into English in his head. There were some books by Balzac on the shelves in the public library, but Michael did not even try to read them. He wanted to hold off until he could read them in Yiddish, the way he had held off looking at the snow on the morning of the blizzard. But more than anything else, he wanted to have a secret language. Among his friends and classmates, among the priests and the shopkeepers, in a world where Frankie McCarthy swaggered around with the Falcons and old rummies died in the snow, Yiddish would be his.
By the end of January, he had established a routine with the rabbi for their classes. Saturdays were out. The rabbi had to preside over the downstairs sanctuary. A small group of old people would arrive early, and sometimes stay all day, and the rabbi had to be available for discussion. Michael did show up early on Saturday mornings to be the Shabbos goy, refusing money from the rabbi but always accepting a glass of tea. Sometimes he brought the rabbi a sugar bun from Ebinger’s Bakery, where the day-old pastries were only three cents. Sometimes they talked quickly about the weather. But then they would say goodbye until Tuesday. The lessons now were on Tuesdays and Thursdays, after school, which still gave him time to see his friends.
But it wasn’t only the rabbi’s obligations that made Saturday lessons impossible. The rhythm of Michael’s week was changed one evening near the end of the month. He came up from the streets and found his mother happy and whistling as she listened to Edward R. Murrow on the radio.
“I’ve got great news,” she said, turning down the volume on the radio. “We’re going to be the janitors. And I’ve got a new job.”
She turned the hamburgers in the frying pan on the coal stove while she spoke, and stirred the boiling carrots. The McElroys were moving out of the first floor, his mother explained, going to Long Island, and Mr. Kerniss, the landlord, had asked her if she wanted the job of janitor. She had accepted.
“The first thing he’s going to do is take out the damned coal stove and give us a gas range,” she said. “How do you like that?”
“No more rotten egg smells!” Michael said.
“And we won’t have to pay any rent,” she said, her face happier than he’d ever seen it. “We’ll have to sweep and wash the halls once a week, and make sure the garbage cans are set out, and change the lightbulbs. And put coal in the furnace in the cellar for the hot water. It’ll be hard work, but with your help, Michael, we can do it.”
Michael felt a surge of emotion that he could not name. For the first time he was being called upon to do a man’s work. He would be able to help his mother in a way that he could never do when she worked at the hospital. Then she gave him the rest of the news.
“I’ll be leaving the hospital on the first of February,” she said, her face telling him this was good news, not bad. “And I’ll start work as a cashier at the RKO on Grandview Avenue. It’s a bit more money, and with us not having to pay rent, we’ll be in the chips.” She smiled broadly. “Well, not really. But 1947 will be a lot better than 1946.”
She seemed abruptly close to tears, and for a moment, Michael wanted to hug her. He wanted to tell her that as far as he was concerned 1946 wasn’t so bad. They hadn’t gone hungry. They didn’t go on relief, like the Kanes or the Morans. He’d done well in school. And right at the end, he’d met Rabbi Hirsch. That was a good year.