Kaaterskill Falls Read online

  “Daddy!” Three-year-old Brocha runs toward Isaac. “Up!” He hoists up his youngest daughter onto his shoulders and they watch as the huge truck backs into the Curtis lot with half the house clamped on its back.

  Isaac’s wife, Elizabeth, makes her way to him through the crowd. She doesn’t kiss him. Not in front of all these people. But Isaac stands so close to her that her skirt brushes against him. Elizabeth is wearing a long twill skirt and a pinstriped man-tailored shirt buttoned all the way up. In summer she is so covered up in her long sleeves, long skirts, and white stockings that only the backs of her hands are freckled, and her face. She wears small gold-rimmed glasses. Her cheek is curved in a smile, her hazel eyes green in the shade.

  “Isn’t it marvelous?” Elizabeth says to Isaac. Her voice is distinctive. Her accent English. “Look, even the carpet is down in the rooms already!” She watches the men maneuver the second half of the house into place.

  “Well, it’s just a prefab, Elizabeth,” says Isaac, amused.

  “Oh, I know that,” she says, eyes on the closing seam between the two halves. “But it’s marvelous. It’s like a doll’s house.”

  Nearly the whole town has come to watch. The year-rounders and the summer people, who are mostly from the city, Kirshners from Washington Heights, families from Borough Park, Lubavichers from Crown Heights. They all stand together, chattering excitedly, watching the delivery of the new house. The old place is gone, burned to the ground, and now the insurance money’s come in. Everyone’s busy pointing and shouting out directions to the movers and the trucks. “A little more, a little more,” urges one of the teenagers from town.

  “You’ve got a mile!” screams a Talmud scholar, up for a week’s vacation.

  The trucks pull the two halves of the house in close, but there is still a gap between the walls. The crowd stirs, frustrated, surging forward to give advice—fair-haired children along with young men in black hats.

  “Nu? What gives?” demands a silver-bearded man in a frock coat. And just then the seam vanishes and the house is finished. The whole town and the summer people break into applause.

  “More. More,” protests Brocha from Isaac’s shoulders.

  “It’s all done,” he tells her. “It’s time to go home.”

  “Again!” she says, pointing to the house, but Elizabeth is already crossing the street, and Isaac follows with Brocha swaying on his shoulders. He puts her down on the porch.

  “Go on,” Elizabeth tells him. “Go on inside.” And she calls the children to help her unload the car. “Ruchel? Sorah? Take the bags. Chani?” She looks over to the tire swing, where their oldest daughter stands, storklike, watching the trucks pull out across the street. “Chani, could you bring your sisters back? They’re still out with Pammy Curtis.”

  Elizabeth’s English accent hasn’t rubbed off on her daughters, but they all have English names. No one ever uses them. To their friends they’re just the Shulman girls, five rattled off in a row: Chani, Malki, Ruchel, Sorah, and Brocha. But Elizabeth gave them other names, and she repeats them to herself: Annette and Margot, Rowena, Sabrina, and Bernice. These are her daughters’ real names; the ones on their birth certificates; extraordinary and graceful—princesses and dancers. It’s true, of course, the nickname Malki by itself means “queen,” and Sorah means a “princess.” But those are words the children drag around the house. There must be twenty Sorahs at the Kirshner school. Elizabeth wanted something remarkable and elegant—beyond the usual expectations. She didn’t name her daughters to be rattled off. She named them to have imagination.

  As a girl in Manchester, Elizabeth played tennis. When she was sixteen, she even got a job teaching it to younger children at her school. But the interschool matches in the district were all on Saturdays, and she couldn’t play on Shabbes. Hers was a small school built by the Kehilla of observant families. Her father taught Talmud in the upper division. Elizabeth had prepared to teach Hebrew herself, and took her certificate at Carmel College in Henley before she married. Then she settled down to raising children. None of this was unexpected. Meeting Isaac in New York was not arranged, but it was natural. Elizabeth was twenty, and her parents said she ought to move about and see things. Not exactly travel, but visit the family, her aunt’s family in New York. And there was Shayni’s wedding that summer anyway. Elizabeth would be their emissary.

  She is unusual in her community, an Englishwoman among the Kirshners of Washington Heights. She reads Milton on her own. She’s spent her pregnancies with Austen and Tolstoy. With Brocha she was the most ambitious and tried to read all of Sandburg’s biography of Lincoln. She should get back to that one, she thinks, as she sets the table for their late dinner. They don’t have a separate dining room, of course. It’s a small bungalow. Just three bedrooms. The girls’ rooms are so narrow, there is barely any space between their beds. They don’t mind, though, because they spend their time outside. The living room is shadowy, with only one dim ceiling fixture and two windows. Elizabeth keeps the front door open to let in more light.

  In the evening the trees rustle together. Not a single car passes by. Elizabeth prays, standing in the living room, with her tiny siddur, its pages thin as flaky pastry. She recites the Friday-night service to herself, rapidly, under her breath. She is not tall, only five foot six, but she holds herself straight. In the way she holds herself, in the way she moves, she has a kind of athletic grace. She is slender, although she has five children. She grew up early, marrying young, having her first child at twenty-one. Still, at thirty-four, she is excitable, eager to speak, and quick to laugh. She is, more than anything, curious, delighted by paradoxes, odd characters, anything out of the ordinary. She looks forward every year to Kaaterskill and the people there: Andras Melish and his South American wife; Professor Cecil Birnbaum; the Curtises with their tomboy daughter, Pammy; the Landauer family, Lubavichers from Crown Heights. In the summers she can see these friends again, and they are both exotic and familiar, like distant relatives.

  Both Brocha and Sorah are asleep by the time Isaac comes home from services, and so Elizabeth and Isaac sit down for blintzes with the older girls. Twelve-year-old Chani looks most like her mother, with her fair skin and hazel eyes. She has Elizabeth’s black hair, though a stranger wouldn’t know. All Elizabeth’s sheitels are auburn. She’d always loved auburn hair, and so when she married and had to cut hers short she decided she might as well become auburn haired. She bought auburn wigs in different styles: pageboy, straight, short, and wavy. Most often in Kaaterskill she wears a kerchief over her hair, but she brings the sheitels up, and keeps them on the top shelf of her closet on faceless white Styrofoam heads.

  Next to Chani at the table, Malki eats her blintzes without sour cream or jam. Ever since she could talk it was always “plain, plain” for her food. No jam on blintzes, no gravy on her meat, no mustard on her salami sandwiches. She’s a solemn girl: light brown hair, brown eyes, a little wall-eyed even. A quiet child, not a biker like Chani or a tree climber like chattering nine-year-old Ruchel. Ruchel’s legs are scratched from her expeditions climbing birches. She comes home covered with mud. She and Sorah and Pam Curtis with her red wagon seem to be dredging Bramble Creek behind the Birnbaum place.

  “Daddy,” Ruchel says now, “you know down there at the creek?”

  “Yes.”

  “The blackberries down there are the biggest ones I’ve ever seen in my life. But Mr. King came out with his dog.”

  Elizabeth laughs. “You mean his poodle?”

  Ruchel keeps talking. “He said we were trespassing on his property and we had to get off. But he doesn’t own the creek, and I was standing in the creek.”

  “But the bushes belong to him,” Elizabeth points out. “You shouldn’t pick from his bushes.”

  “He’s a Norka,” Ruchel says oddly. She’s been reading the Red Fairy Tale Book.

  “He’s a real estate developer,” Isaac says. “Do you know what else he owns? He owns this house.”


  Ruchel dismisses this. “I don’t believe you.”

  “When we went up to the lake I squashed the tire on my bike,” says Chani.

  “Sh. We’ll talk about it later,” Isaac tells her. Drowsily he leans back in his chair. Across from him Malki cuts her blintz and Ruchel chatters about bicycle pumps.

  “Cecil Birnbaum brought his wife up,” Elizabeth tells Isaac. Cecil is the Brooklyn College professor who summers across the street. “And do you remember Regina from Los Angeles?”

  “Cecil’s sister.”

  “She came up for the week. She’s having a wedding reception for Cecil and Beatrix tomorrow. His wife’s name is Beatrix.”

  “Cecil and Beatrix Birnbaum,” Isaac says, trying out the names.

  “Yes. I said we’d come.”

  “We’ll see,” says Isaac. He can barely keep his eyes open.

  Isaac goes to bed right after dinner, and Elizabeth tucks in the children and washes the dishes alone. The candles are burning down in the little silver travel candlesticks. Elizabeth wipes the crumbs off the counter and then walks out onto the front porch stacked with bicycles. The house, small and close, is filled with the rhythmic breathing of Isaac and the children, but the air outside is cold, and it wakes her. She peers through the thick maple leaves, trying to glimpse the stars. What are they dreaming about inside? Blackberries and poodles, speckled newts, “The Twelve Dancing Princesses” in Ruchel’s Red Fairy Tale Book. Are her daughters now tiptoeing down the secret staircase to the enchanted lake? Perhaps now they are dreaming of the silver wood with the trees spangled in silver, and the golden wood where the trees are spangled with gold, and at last the diamond wood where the trees are hung with drops of diamonds. They are wearing out their shoes dancing. Elizabeth had loved that story when she was a child, and the idea that there are secret forests where you can become someone else.

  2

  THE Kaaterskill shul is an old, steep-roofed clapboard building, prim and white. It was built long ago for a Reform congregation, but in the past twenty years the synagogue has filled with Orthodox vacationers. Its arched windows frame men davening in dark suits and black hats.

  Elizabeth and the girls walk through the vestibule, where only the racks of wire hangers and an abandoned blue scarf remain of winter. The paneled synagogue is narrow but deep, with rows of long, high-backed benches cushioned in red plush. A mechitza of polished wood and glass separates the men from the women. In front, in the men’s section, the seats surround a raised bima fenced with newel posts like a dark porch railing all around.

  Sorah and Brocha are still little enough to sit with Isaac in the men’s section. It’s not sitting they like, though—it’s running back and forth. They squirm their way between the dark-suited men to the front wall where the ark stands, its red velvet curtains decorated with gold tassels and lions embroidered in gold thread. Above the ark hangs the ner tamid, the eternal flame encased in red glass. The girls tilt their heads back and dizzy themselves looking all the way up at the embossed tin ceiling, painted robin’s-egg blue. Back and forth Sorah and Brocha wriggle between the tall dark rows of men. They like the bima best, because it’s in the center and it’s crowded. Sorah pushes her little sister in front of her, and the two of them work their way over to the dais, where they grasp the base of the railing and look at the polished shoe tips and trouser cuffs in front of them. Whenever the reading stops and the Torah rises above them, they look up expectantly. Maybe old Mr. Heiligman will see them; maybe he will give them candy from his blue velvet tallis bag. Small, thin lollipops or sour balls. Either way the choices are orange, red, green, purple, or yellow.

  Elizabeth and the three older girls sit in the front row of the women’s section. Chani daydreams, siddur open on her lap, while Malki bends over her prayer book, catching up on what she missed by coming late. Ruchel is neither quiet nor industrious. She’s leaning forward, blowing the curtain on the mechitza to make it flutter against the glass, rubbing the velvet chairs back and forth with her fingers so the nap stands up rough and then slides down smooth. Elizabeth scans the room for Cecil’s wife, but she doesn’t see anyone new. She turns to her Tanach and follows the Torah reading. She cannot see the men on the bima, but she knows them all by voice. There is the rich bass of the Hasidic rabbi, Reb Moshe Feurstein, and then Rav Joseph Butler with his strong, slightly acerbic tenor. And then reedy Pesach Lamkin. Although much younger than his colleagues, Pesach Lamkin is the official rabbi of the synagogue. Every summer the shul is full of great rabbis, exacting and learned men who come up to the mountains with their own constituencies. In order to avoid disputes and interrupted vacations, they chose Lamkin to officiate in Kaaterskill. Young, pious, inexperienced, he was likely to offend the fewest people.

  Rabbi Lamkin is well liked, but the synagogue hushes as Elizabeth’s own rabbi, Rav Elijah Kirshner, reads from the prophets in his precise baritone. Rav Kirshner was the first of all the rabbis to come up to the mountains, and he has hundreds of followers in Kaaterskill. Just after the war, the Rav decided his community should migrate in the summers. In 1938, just before Kristallnacht, they had left Germany en masse from Frankfurt, and resettled in Washington Heights. Then, in the fifties, those with reparation money bought summer houses together in Kaaterskill. The Rav is a grandson of Jeremiah Solomon Hecht, the founder in Germany of neoorthodoxy, who wrote in his elegant and stylish German, arguing that the generations to come should study science and languages, law, and mathematics—and yet none of these could come before religious law. Rav Elijah Kirshner was born in 1898, only ten years after Hecht’s time, and it is said his mother was Hecht’s favorite daughter. He earned a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Frankfurt am Main, and then rose to take his grandfather’s place. Rav Kirshner brought Hecht’s books and his community to America—only a small part of what there once was, but a remnant that he has guided and strengthened. He has founded the Kirshner school and the yeshiva, sustained his people in Washington Heights, even now in the battered parks, the narrow alleyways. The Rav is an extraordinary man. And famous. He knows the mayor of New York, has led prayers in the state legislature. The New York Times calls him “the Reverend Doctor.”

  As usual, at the end of the service, one of the Landauer boys sings the hymn “Anim Zmiros.” There is always a Landauer boy to do this, as each succeeds to the position when he turns eight. Isaac watches in the men’s section as Avromy Landaur pulls the gold cord and opens the ark curtain for his brother. In their small dark suits they look like miniatures of their father. It is always quite a contrast, the little boy—just a pipsqueak—singing at the front, and the spectacular thirteenth-century poetry, the reedy voice singing the mystic love song to God: Anim zmiros, vishirim erog, ki elechah nafshi tarog. … I sing hymns and compose songs/Because my soul longs for thee./My soul desires thy shelter,/To know all thy mystery…. Landauer’s son rattles off the verses. It’s like a kazoo performance of Beethoven.

  Isaac has always liked Joe Landauer’s sons, but his own daughters laugh at them and their nasal voices. The girls pretend they can’t tell the Landauer boys apart. After the service, when everyone is talking, crushed together, trying to get out, Isaac says to Elizabeth, “That was a good job Boruch did with ‘Anim Zmiros.’”

  And Chani says, “No, that was Yakov-Shloimie.”

  And Ruchel contradicts, “It was not Yakov-Shloimie. It was Avromy. I recognized his voice!” Then they start giggling among themselves.

  Near the door, Elizabeth and Isaac catch sight of Cecil Birnbaum with his sister, Regina. Cecil is wearing his old blue suit and wire-rimmed glasses, and he has a vaguely dissatisfied look. His parents, of blessed memory, were pillars of the summer community and the synagogue, but in ways Elizabeth can only marvel at, Cecil has become a gadfly and a malcontent in Kaaterskill.

  “Mazel tov,” Isaac says.

  Elizabeth looks around for Cecil’s bride. “Nu, where is she?”

  “Oh, Beatrix doesn’t come to services,” Ce
cil says grandly.

  Elizabeth smiles. Cecil likes to shock people, but she’s known him since their first summer in Kaaterskill five years ago and she is used to him. “When did you get back from England?” she asks.

  Before Cecil can answer, they are both crushed against the wall as the crowd parts for old Rav Kirshner. Seventy-eight and frail, the Rav is borne forward by two of his nephews, one on each side. His thin hands rest on his nephews’ arms—his pale fingers translucent skinned against their dark suits. The Kirshners pull back the children in the Rav’s path.

  The crowd closes up quickly behind the Rav. There are many Kirshners in Kaaterskill, but they mill about in shul with Hasids and their little boys with peyyes, modern Orthodox, with wives in hats instead of sheitels. There is even a Conservative rabbi named Sobel, who is revered by no one in the synagogue but Cecil, who shows him the utmost courtesy, partly out of real respect, and partly in order to pique his orthodox neighbors. Rabbi Sobel is struggling to get out in the crush of people, and Cecil holds the door for him. “He walks over here every week,” Cecil tells Elizabeth after he passes, “and no one gives him the time of day. This is a world-renowned historian—”

  Elizabeth doesn’t hear him. She is staring after the Rav and his entourage. There, in that mass of black hats and jackets, is a man in a cream suit. It is, unmistakably, Jeremy Kirshner, the Rav’s firstborn son. Jeremy Kirshner, Dr. Kirshner, as he is called, is an enigma. He is a rabbi, like his brother Isaiah, but he works as a professor at Queens College. No one speaks about him. If his name comes up, people just say one thing—“He never married, you know”—and they leave it at that.