Free The Rabbi of Lud by Stanley Elkin

during an entire unmodified Shachris, conjuring God and praying and praying for the restoration of Stan Bloom’s blood. Though the image I had behind my boarded-up eyelids was the leather box blossoming from my forehead like the horn on a Jewish unicorn.
    Because I was a little spooked myself now, just like my little girl, on the defensive in the upper reaches of the Garden State, hard by Pineoaks and Masada Plains, those big Jewish graveyards in the Jersey flats where Jake Heldshaft was buried and which death and Perpetual Care had made bloom like a desert in Israel. Hence the sociology, all the worked-up learning and high academics of my lessons, my scholarly observations on Lud and Judaism. Which I was actually preparing, writing down now, like Connie on a homework tear, rehearsing and delivering to the kid just as if, Lord save us, she were a living, breathing, fleshed-out, honest-to-God congregation instead of only just a by-blood, captive audience of one.
    “Since coming to Lud,” I told her in my discourse upon Civilization and the Jews, “which, to be quite frank with you, Connie dear, has too many people under it not to be classified as a sort of Jewish death farm, I have had ample opportunity to observe our gentile, American neighbors. They’re handymen and artisans. They not only putter, these people, they flat-out build! And they do this with an ease that belies simple competence or skill. Now I put it to you that what’s happening here is that many of even the Yankee waspiest of our Christian friends are simply presenting—I use the word in its medical sense—not so much traditional values as racial traits and characteristics, the drives, I mean, of the peasant! And now I put it to you—I speak in my rabbi mode here—that most Jews don’t know their wrenches, are board-foot illiterates and are behind in their band saws. We’re often heavy smokers but generally nondrinkers, good husbands and loving, doting daddies who worship our kiddies. We leave them philosophy, talmudic quease and quibble, leave them, that is, history, culture and civilization. But for all that we practically invented the city, there are very few Jewish architects, and for all that a gemütlich notion of our families is the popular and conventional one, or that our drawing rooms frequently smell like comfortable old quilts or the fixings for soup, it’s the Wasp pop who’s loved.—And I’ll never understand how we ever got our reputation as a desert people!”
    “I love you, Daddy,” Constance said.
    “Then why are you so troubled?”
    “I have no one to play with.”
    This wasn’t, in the strictest sense, true.
    As Lud’s only living child it would have been unusual if Connie weren’t at least a little spoiled. She could have had, had she wanted them (as once she did, on first-name terms with the gravediggers and, when she’d been small, Sal’s happy little helper, his assistant—I hadn’t known this—coffinside, bumping up bouffants, shaping corpses’ hairdos with her little hands and picking the odd thread from the burial clothes they lay in, smoothing the lapels of the men and punching up the big, puff sleeves on the women’s dresses, playing dolly with the dead), all the town’s day laborers at her beck and call, all its clerks, landscapers, stonecutters, morticians, and small shopkeepers.
    And me. She had me. I was still giving her instruction, coaching her in her theosophics, rabbinics and doxologicals.
    “When Hear-O-Israel wants—”
    “Why do you use those names?”
    “What names?”
    “Hear-O-Israel. Holy One, Blessed-Is-He. Whole-Kit-and-Kaboodle. Master-of-the-Fruit-and-Vegetables. Those names you call God.”
    And I tried to explain to her that it wasn’t mockery but I/Thou, only a little tit for tat. “He likes it,” I said. “He likes the way I do business.”
    “Really?”
    “Sure,” I said, “He don’t mind. He’s got a terrific sense of humor.”
    “Really?”
    “Hey,” I said,