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Note: This chapter contains swear words.
The bashful cannot learn. (Avos 2:6)
Mercifully, no one said anything to him about his unexplained absence on Tuesday. It was almost June and his class was caught up in exams and secondary schools and didn't give too much thought to the quiet boy in the fourth row who Meyerson hated.
"Amar mar, we said before," the rebbi chanted. "Hashoel sefer Torah meichaveiro, if one borrows a sefer torah from his friend, harei zu lo yashilenu l'acher, one cannot lend it to his friend. Fregt the Gemara, mai irya sefer Torah? Why do we say specifically a sefer Torah? Afilu kol mili nami, even all other things you borrow you can't lend to your friend, and how do we know that when one borrows an item he cannot lend it to his friend?"
"But what if it's not his friend?" Meyerson burst out.
It means any person, Yehuda thought, but didn't say. We've been using it to mean any person all year.
"Where it says chaveiro, it doesn't specifically need to be an actual friend," the rebbi answered. "Please try to follow along, Moshe. We're using chaveiro to mean any person you might borrow something from."
I knew that.
"D'amar Rav Shimon ben Lakeish ka'an, for Reish Lakeish said here, shana Rebbi: Ein hasho'el rashai leh'ashiel v'ein hasocher rashai lehaskir, Rebbi taught us that the borrower cannot lend it to someone else, and someone who rents an item cannot rent it to someone else. Enfert the Gemara, sefer Torah itztricha ley, we said sefer Torah because this is a chiddush, that even a sefer Torah you can't lend out. Mahu diseima nicha ley l'inish d'teiavid mitzvah bmamonei, one is happy for someone to do a mitzvah with their money, ka mashma lan—" A light knock at the door cut him off. "Come in."
The headmaster, Rabbi Frank, entered. As one, the class rose to their feet. He motioned for them to sit. "Pardon me, Rabbi Kaufman. May I borrow Yehuda Goldstein for a moment?"
Twenty-six heads instantly swiveled in his direction. His face was hot as he closed and kissed his Gemara and walked down the aisle, avoiding Meyerson's foot stuck in the aisle. The door closed behind him.
"Good afternoon, Mr. Goldstein," the headmaster said. "We missed you last week. Would you like to tell me about that?"
He gulped, fishing for an explanation. "I had to—go. My father—" He was stammering, but Rabbi Frank did not bail him out, just watched him with calm, inquiring eyes. "My father had to take me—shopping." He hated how girly that sounded, the headmaster would never, ever believe him. "For—you know. For school."
There was a long, pregnant pause.
"Well, if your father felt it necessary, I'm not going to question your parents' judgment," the headmaster said. "But there's one more thing I wanted to discuss. I was looking over your class's secondary school applications and I couldn't help but notice that you didn't apply to any of the local schools. Do you have plans for next year?"
Oh, no. "America," he blurted, then stopped. He couldn't remember the cover story McGonagall had given them.
"Do go on, Mr. Goldstein."
He was doomed.
"I—I'm going to school in America. Not Yesodey. A different school. You never heard of it." He was babbling, and the headmaster just looked at him, waiting. "It's in America. It's—small. Yeah, it's quite small. So probably no one from Torah Temima ever went there."
"I see."
He blushed, feeling very small, and stared at the floor.
"This isn't going to fly," Rabbi Frank said. "To be honest, I'm not believing a word of it. Yehuda, you know we all only want what's best for you. If you don't have plans for next year, it's nothing to be ashamed of."
He nodded painfully, still studying the tiles under his shoes.
The headmaster clapped him on the shoulder. "I'm going to have a talk with your parents and get to the bottom of this. In the meantime, you can go back to your lessons."
And just like that, he walked away.
Baruch Hashem. How had he gotten so lucky?
Recess had already begun. Hopefully, his classmates would be engrossed their usual game that involved screaming and tackling each other and not much else. With any luck, he'd skirt the edge of the brawl and make it back to his seat where he could spend the fifteen minutes quietly looking into a sefer, or maybe play a game of Spit with Danziger—
But he had no such luck. They were dismissed but still putting sefarim away, and the click of the door closing was somehow the loudest sound in the room.
"Hey, Goldstein's back!" Sandler said. "Goldstein! What'd Frank want from you?"
"Rabbi Frank," Levitt corrected.
"Probably tried to burn down his house or something."
"Aw, come on, Meyerson."
"All right, then, maybe he tried to burn down the school," Hillman suggested. The four or five boys around him all burst out laughing. Even if he hadn't been the target of the joke, Yehuda would still not have found this funny.
"Na, you guys are all way off," Wasserman broke in. He pushed his way to the forefront. "I know the story. My father said he never got an application from you, Goldstein. What's up with that?"
"Never got an application?" Meyerson said gleefully. "You mean Goldstein's not going to Yesodey? So where are you going, Goldstein? Day school? Lubavitch?"
"Probably going to To-rat Eh-met with Snapir and Abulafia," someone snickered in exaggerated iamb, and they all burst out laughing again. "Or maybe they finally sent him off to state school where he belongs."
"Nu, are you going to tell us?" Wasserman asked. "If you're not going to Yesodey, where are you going?"
Yehuda opened his mouth, but his mind was blank and the words would not come.
"Oh, lay off him already." Danziger, finally, came to his defense. "It's none of your business where he goes next year. Maybe your father doesn't have to tell you everything, Wasserman, you're just a great yenta."
They all seemed to wilt, and the crowd softened just enough for him to push through it to his desk. At least at the new school he wouldn't have to deal with Wasserman and Meyerson. At the new sc—oh, all right, at Hogwarts nobody would know he'd once set another boy's hair on fire quite by accident.
Wait. Had he just thought the new school was a good thing?
August 31
"Well, tomorrow's the big day, isn't it?" Rabbi Zeller asked. Yehuda grimaced. His father forced a cheerful smile. "Tell me what you've got planned."
At this, his father lit up. "Well, we're planning on covering Perek Hakones in Bava Kama, and hilchos Shabbos in Kitzur Shulchan Aruch, and of course a little weekly parsha. The school doesn't have phones, so it'll be all by mail. That McGonagall woman said their library's got some sefarim, but he's got almost a whole library in his trunk just in case."
Yehuda fidgeted. He should be glad his father had put together a curriculum for him, but he was disappearing tomorrow into a great unknown void and there was a snake writhing in the pit of his stomach.
"How are you holding up, Yehuda?" the rabbi asked.
He forced himself into painful awareness. "I—uh—well, I'm all packed and everything. Nervous, I guess."
"Nervous?"
"You can't blame him," his father blurted. "It's a new school—"
"Some boys in my class were making fun of me," Yehuda interrupted. "They all know I didn't apply to Yesodey. I met Breuer in shul and he acted like I wasn't even there. Danziger said they're all betting I'm going off the derech. The last week of school someone said I belong in state school."
"But surely you realize they don't know the whole story," Rabbi Zeller said, ignoring Yehuda's father's gasps of outrage. "They see little bits and pieces, and put together the most exciting story they can think of. Why let it get to you?"
"Because they're right! It's not a Jewish school. They might make fun of me here, but they're all Jewish. I learn Gemara and mishnayos and everything, and everyone—it's kind of like we're all one family. We all do the same things, we all know the same things." Words tumbled faster, desperate to make himself understood. "And there, it's not Jewish, I'll be different and I'll be the only one, and I'll feel like the only one, it'll feel like I'm the one who's doing something wrong. I don't want to go off the derech—"
"Yehuda!" said his father in horror.
The rabbi shot him a look. "Actually, your son is quite right, Reb Meir."
"He's—what?"
"He's right. He's going into an environment that at best will be completely neutral and unsupportive of his being Jewish. Environment is everything. Eini dor ela b'makom Torah and all that. There's a reason we open organizations dedicated to paying the yeshiva tuitions of state school children—"
Yehuda cut him off, unwilling to have the rabbi go off topic. "But what can I do?" he said desperately.
"You can ask questions," Rabbi Zeller said.
He stopped short. Whatever answer he had been expecting, it was not this. "Sorry—what?"
"I'm expecting a letter from you every week," the rabbi said. "I want you to ask me ten questions every week. They can be halacha or hashkafa or Gemara, whatever. Your father is taking care of your academics, and he's a talmid chacham, so I won't get involved there. But every boy needs a rabbi. Especially a boy like you. I want you to get used to asking questions. Asei lecha rav, Yehuda."
He finished the mishna with a mischievous smile. "U'knei lecha chaver?"
The rabbi looked startled, but laughed. "Well, I'll admit I'm curious about what goes on in a school for wizards, so I suppose my interest isn't strictly halachic…"
Yehuda's father cleared his throat. "Excuse me, Rabbi Zeller. Are you encouraging him to question—things?"
"There's nothing wrong with questions, if you have good answers," Rabbi Zeller said firmly. He pulled a notepad toward him and scribbled. "Here—take my address. Write me some good ones. I expect great things from you, Yehuda."
He shook Yehuda's hand, like a grownup, and gave him a bracha and a hug, shook Yehuda's father's hand, and sent them off. They didn't talk much on the way home. In his pocket, Yehuda's sweaty hand turned the rabbi's address over and over. He didn't stop to say hello to his mother, but headed straight to his room, where Sholom sat on his bed engrossed in a sefer and dead to the world, and Esti was carefully writing his name on his trunk in fat permanent marker letters three inches tall.
Panic shot up his spine. "Hey, get your hands off my trunk!" He scoured his memory, desperately hoping that he had packed the set of machzorim on top of the wizard's robes, tzitzis on top of course books with strange names. If she opened his trunk, he would have nothing to say.
To his relief, she backed off, dramatically lifting her hands in surrender and dropping the marker. She flopped down on Sholom's bed. "Relax, I'm not touching your precious trunk. So, ready for your big trip to America?"
America. Right.
"You're so lucky. I always wanted to go to camp in America, but Mummy and Tatty never let. Said it was too far away to be without supervision. But I guess for yeshiva it's different. Funny that the first of us to go to America is our little baby brother, huh, Sholom?"
Sholom looked up, finally appearing to notice his siblings' presence. "Get off my bed," he muttered, turning the page.
"I'm your big sister, don't tell me what to do."
"By not even two years." He looked back into the sefer.
A knock at the door. "Anyone home? I have your laundry for you, boys." Their mother entered, balancing a stack of folded shirts. She laid it carefully on the bureau and glanced up. "Oh, good, you're all here. Stay a minute, Esti—I was hoping I'd catch all of you."
"Should I get Adina?" Esti offered.
"No, I meant only the big kids. Tatty and I have a…bit of news for all of you." She was smiling, almost shining; her tone even made Sholom drag his eyes from the sefer, and Yehuda instantly knew what she was going to say before the words left her lips. "We're expecting a baby."
"What? No way," Esti said, with a dubious glance aimed at her mother's midsection.
Their mother laughed. "The baby's not due until the end of February, but with Yehuda going off to—America tomorrow, we reckoned now was the best time to tell you."
A wide grin split Esti's face. "So…seriously?"
"Seriously."
"Baruch Hashem," Sholom said primly, and returned to his sefer.
Yehuda could only stare in wide-eyed, glowing wonder. Adina's hopscotch rhyme echoed in his mind: Tatty-Mummy-Esti-Sholom-Yehuda-Adina-Brochie-Eliyohu—Goldstein! He tried to think it again, only with some other name stuck in between Eliyohu and Goldstein.He couldn't, the names blended together so familiarly, but they had before Eliyohu was born, and they would again, and he wouldn't even be here when the baby was born, it was still happy though, he was happy, he was, but...oh, why did Hogwarts have to come into everything? "Brilliant," he squeaked finally.
They had chicken stir-fry and rice for dinner. His mother said it was because he was leaving tomorrow. He wouldn't have noticed: he was too nervous to eat, and when he did, he felt the texture of the food in his mouth but there was no taste. A small smile played across Esti's face the whole meal, and Adina demanded to know what was so funny.
When his father and Sholom went to ma'ariv, he went to take a bath. His mother said he ought to go to sleep early because he had a flight to catch the next morning. He knew it was really a train—the ticket was in Tatty's wallet—but they would keep up the pretense to the last moment.
He lay in bed facing the wall, his eyes wide open and his heart pounding in his chest. Tomorrow, in the morning, he would leave and get on a train with hundreds of non-Jewish teenagers to a school of kishuf, and his mother was going to have a baby. Nothing could be more right, and yet nothing could ever be more wrong.
He was at Hogwarts. He was surrounded by boys, all of them much bigger than him, and his hair was on fire. His mouth opened in a wordless scream and he knew he should move to put it out but his hands were stuck at his sides. He was onstage and they were all staring at him and his peyos were burning up.
"What's the matter?" said the biggest boy, removing his cigarette to blow out a long cloud of smoke. He looked kind of how Yehuda imagined Moshe Meyerson would look, if he was black and had blue spiked hair and earrings. "Didn't you ever put someone's hair on fire? That's what we do at Hogwarts. All day, we set each other's hair on fire."
"Don't forget we also say swear words," added a boy wearing a nose ring, very cheerfully. "Bloody buggering sodding hell."
"What's that thing on your head?"
"What's your name? Anthony, Anthony, Anthony. That's a nice goyish name! You'll fit in perfect here! We're all goyim!"
"No, my name is Yehuda!" he shouted desperately. They didn't seem to hear him. He screamed his throat raw. "My name is YEHUDA!"
Immediately everyone fell silent.
"Yehuda?" said the biggest boy, who now had a swastika tattooed on his forehead. "You're Jewish then."
"We're all anti-Semites here," nose ring boy explained brightly, "so that means we have to kill you!"
He woke up in a panic, his heart racing. It took a few fuzzy seconds to realize it was a dream, and he blearily checked to make sure his peyos were still there before falling back into an uneasy sleep.