Free A Curable Romantic by Joseph Skibell Page B

frothings. As for Russian, it wasn’t even a human language. Rather, it had been taught to the ancient Varangians by bears (hence the Russian proclivity for laziness and violence). French, something Father had picked up in his youth, my grandmother Sammelsohn having harbored unrealistic dreams of a diplomatic career for him, was, on the other hand, an all-too-human patois: curling the tongue, it trained it for duplicity. Why else did everything in it — taunts, curses, even the blackest of threats — sound like the sweetest of psalms?
    For all his fanciful glossologies, Father might have languished in silence, had it not been for the holy tongue, although Hebrew presented its own problems: the language in which the angels beseech one another for permission to chant their unceasing praises, as well as the language in which these praises are unceasingly chanted, Hebrew was the language with which the Holy One had spoken the Heavens and the Earth into being. This troubled my father. How could he, mere ashes and dust (Job 42:6), speak the language of the Lord? Fearing the Holy One’s sacred places (Exodus 19:30), he would have preferred the distant dove of silence (Psalm 56:1) to defiling the sacred tongue by straying from its words (Proverbs 4:5).
    Fortunately, God Himself had commanded us to speak it, viz.: My words, which I’ve placed in your mouth, shall not be removed from your mouth or from the mouth of your children or from the mouth of your children’s children, thus saith the Lord, from now until forever (Isaiah 59:21). Still, painfully aware of his dismal humanity, Father leavened thiscelestial vocabulary with the earthier Aramaic of the Oral Law, hoping in this way to keep his feet rooted to the ground.
    And did our Father find his powers of expression limited by this peculiar choice?
    Not at all, not at all! On the contrary:he’d say: Turn it and turn it for everything is in it (Avos 5:26). Indeed, father’s knowledge of the scriptures was so complete he was able to carry on lengthy conversations on a wide range of topics, once, for example, discussing his gastric pains with our family physician.
    Dr. Kirschbaum asked him, in Yiddish, of course.
    Father said. I’m in distress (Lamentations 1:20). He pointed to his belly. There is an evil sickness I’ve seen under the sun (Ecclesiastes 5:12).
    “And your bowels?” the doctor asked, palpating him, “how are they?”
    my father said: They’ve shriveled up (Job 6:17).
    “Any problems with flatulence?”
    Father shrugged. Is there no end to these words of wind? (ibid. 16:3).
    Dr. Kirshbaum handed him a curative powder in a paper sleeve and played along. This will be a cure for your navel (Proverbs 3:8).
    Another time, when Father had ordered manure to be laid upon the orchards, he’d noticed the gardener boy idling about.he muttered. There he stands behind our wall, peering through the lattice (Song of Songs 2:9). He called to the lad. Incline your ear to me and help (Psalm 71:2) for now the winter is past and the rains are gone (Song of Songs 2:11) the flowers have appeared on the land and the time for pruning has come (ibid. 2:12). Steering his charge towards the fertilizer, he commanded him: You shall spread it out powerfully westward, eastward, northward and southward (Genesis 29:14) that it may blow upon my garden and its perfume spread (Song of Songs 4:16). But he cautioned him: My boy, let your mind retain my orders (Proverbs 3:1), for why should the work be halted when I leave? (Nehemiah 6:3).
    As incredible as it may seem, those who knew my father as a young man claim that though he never uttered a word that couldn’t be found in the Torah or the Talmud or the Commentaries or the Codes, he was a chatterbox who never ceased talking. However, as he grew older, the fear that he might tarnish the holy tongue through everyday use took hold of him, and by the time I was born, he’d ceased speaking in complete sentences and only whispered one or two