Free East of Time by Jacob Rosenberg

from his door like an unstoppable bullock. ‘If you ever involve my children in your gang of Apikorsim ,’ he shouted, ‘I’ll skin you alive!’
    For years I lost track of Simcha. I caught up with him in November 1944, in the slave-labour camp of Wolfsberg. He was singing to entertain the kapos for a slice of bread. Haggard, worn to the bone, he had no life left in him. At roll-call next morning he was selected to be transported to the Auschwitz gas chambers. The deputy commandant, who was known as Henk, asked Simcha if he had heard of the singer Joseph Schmidt. Simcha said that he had. ‘And do you know his famous song?’ ‘Yes, Herr Unterscharführer.’ ‘So let me hear you.’ ‘I’ve forgotten the words, sir.’ ‘Then let me teach them to you. This is the final day, of my existence; this is my final day, I can be sure... ’ But Simcha, already in the open truck, remained mute. ‘Damn Jew,’ screamed the officer. ‘Damn Jew, sing !’ My friend’s lips stayed firmly sealed. Then, as the truck began to move, Simcha looked straight into Henk’s eyes and, with his last ounce of strength, let his voice fly. It resounded once again like the chime of a brass gong:
    Avinu malkenu...
    Though this time beneath the unblemished blue of an indifferent cosmic cupola.

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    Â  The Melamed  
    I cannot quite remember how it came about, but one evening, as mother was dishing out our dinner, I heard her say: ‘Gershon, I’m about to engage a melamed for our son.’ A melamed was a religious teacher. ‘I don’t think the extra study will interfere with his school program, and it will enhance his knowledge of Jewish history.’ Father’s non-response was a sign of acquiescence.
    But my older sister Pola, a confirmed Marxist who had already done time for the glory of Stalin in a couple of prestigious Polish prisons, would not hear of it. ‘Why, mother?’ she pleaded. ‘Why should you introduce your son, at such a vulnerable age, to that opium?’
    Father, a sworn atheist who quarrelled with God all his life, chuckled. He was a socialist but, like many others of his comrades, of the Fabian persuasion. Once, in a discussion, I heard him remark that if Marx had been born into money, he would never have written Das Kapital . In fact, father argued, Marx hated the very class he yearned to belong to.
    Next day after sundown, as I was finishing my homework, Eliahu the melamed arrived. He was a smallish man with a very sympathetic face, but without one solitary hair on his chin. What’s this, I thought, a rabbi without a beard? After he left I asked father — who, at the other end of the table, had pretended to read the paper while listening attentively to my first lesson — how it was that the rabbi’s face was as smooth as a baby’s bottom. ‘Well, son,’ he replied, ‘better a rabbi without a beard than a beard without a rabbi.’
    Father had clearly taken a liking to the man, and so had I. Eliahu began each lesson with a story from the Chumash (the Pentateuch, or Five Books of Moses), to which I would listen with a certain juvenile scepticism. Yet these stories opened upa new world. It was not that I hadn’t heard them already from my teachers at school; but Reb Eliahu knew how to add fire to these wondrous tales, and they set my boyish head spinning.
    One evening, as mother interrupted the simmer of the kettle on the stove and poured hot tea into white enamel cups, the melamed asked my father: ‘Reb Gershon, why do you not send your son to a proper religious school where they teach about the Almighty and His real glory?’
    My father smiled. ‘You mean about our personal Creator, the one who governs our lives? Well, Reb Eliahu, the Creator’s track record is not a very good one, especially in relation to His chosen.’ He said this without a hint of