Free Someday the Rabbi Will Leave by Harry Kemelman

business is businesses. I read all about the company in Time magazine, and I looked it up and read it again when he got elected. What Magnuson does is buy and sell businesses like other people buy and sell shoes or automobiles. He buys up a business. Then he brings in his team of managers and they jack up the efficiency of the company and fire all the old hands—that’s called cleaning out the deadwood. Then if they show a good quarterly report and the stock goes up, they use the upgraded stock to buy another company, or maybe they milk it for a while and then unload it. They’re into electronics and hotels and shoe manufacturing and a company that makes cleats for baseball shoes. The article called him a romantic on account of he’s apt to buy into something that interests him. Some romantic!”
    â€œSo you think he’s going to try to increase our efficiency and then trade us in for another synagogue, or maybe a church?”
    â€œGo on, laugh, David, but I’m telling you he’s going to be trouble. He’s not our kind.”
    â€œAnd what’s that supposed to mean?”
    â€œWe’re all second generation or third generation. Our parents or our grandparents came from Russia, Poland, Lithuania, or wherever. I’ll bet there isn’t a single member on the Board of Directors who if their parents didn’t talk with an accent, then their grandparents did. The smell of the shtetl still clings to us. But he’s different. He’s fifth-generation American, or maybe even sixth. His great-great-grandfather, according to this article, fought in the Civil War. He don’t think like us. He’s a Yankee, a Wasp—”
    â€œA WASP? A white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant?”
    â€œMaybe not a Protestant, but you know what I mean. He’s not like us, and that means trouble. You take these job descriptions he asked us to write. Now I’m not saying that Sam Feinberg, say, might not have had an idea like that when he became president. I can even imagine him sending out these forms. Then when we’d made them out, he’d read through them maybe, and toss them in a desk drawer and never think of them again. But that’s not the way Howard Magnuson is going to deal with them. He’s going to go over each and every one and check one against the other. And if they don’t jibe, then there’ll be trouble.” His tone became very easy and casual, and the rabbi sensed that now he was going to hear the real reason for his coming. “So I thought, since we both have supervision of the religious school, each of us in a separate kind of way, we ought to adjust our job descriptions so that they’ll kind of mesh instead of maybe conflicting.” He looked expectantly at the rabbi.
    â€œI didn’t write one.”
    â€œDidn’t you get one of these forms?”
    â€œYes, I got one,” said the rabbi, “but I assume it was a mistake.”
    â€œIf they sent it to you, it was no mistake, David. Magnuson wanted you to make it out.”
    â€œIt was addressed to employees of the temple,” said the rabbi, “and I don’t consider myself an employee.”
    â€œYeah, I know what you mean. I know you always say you’re the rabbi of the community and not just of the temple congregation, but it’s the temple that pays you, and from Magnuson’s point of view that makes you an employee. Remember, David”—and it was plain that he was truly concerned—“it’s not Sam Feinberg you’re dealing with, it’s Howard Magnuson.”
    â€œWhat’s the difference?”
    â€œThat’s just the point I’m trying to make. To a Sam Feinberg, like to the rest of us, you’re a rabbi, something like a priest to an Irishman. But to Howard Magnuson, you’re just an employee, an underling, the kind of person he’s been giving orders to all his life.”

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