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An Uncommon Friendship. Bernat Rosner
Читать онлайн.Название An Uncommon Friendship
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780520945357
Автор произведения Bernat Rosner
Издательство Ingram
The half-hour break at 4:00 Bernie remembers even now with a sigh, as if after all these years he still feels the need to pause for a brief respite before continuing. The midafternoon break was followed by more excruciating religious instruction that lasted from 4:30 to 6:30, five days a week. During these interminable two hours, Bernie rode his imagination out of the confines of the classroom to places beyond Tab, to Kaposvar and Kiskunhalas, and beyond the reach of the train journey he knew. And when the longing for escape became particularly intense, he imagined himself following the sun on its path to more distant places.
By 7:30 during the summer, everyone was back in the synagogue for the evening prayers before the appearance of the first star. In winter nightfall came earlier, and so did the evening prayers. In summer supper was eaten between school and the evening prayers; in winter it was eaten after the evening prayers. An hour of homework assigned by the teacher of the secular school finished the day's duties. The only free time during the busy week was on Friday afternoons. Even this interval was filled with chores left undone during the week or with preparations for the Sabbath, which commenced at sunset on Friday. Nevertheless, the absence of school on Friday afternoons and the relief that the drudgery of the week had been left behind lent those few hours a magical sense of exhilaration.
Bernie associates the beginning of this short period of respite with the Friday lunch that his mother prepared for the family: potatoes spiced with paprika and crispy fried chitterlings. Friday afternoons were also punctuated by the weekly bath and sunset attendance at the synagogue to celebrate the arrival of the Sabbath. At the end of prayers and after their return home, the Rosners' religious rituals continued with a blessing by Bernie's father and a sumptuous meal of fish and chicken and the traditional Sabbath eve soup prepared by his mother. This meal was followed by the recital and singing of traditional prayers. Young men from the Yeshiva —upper-level students whose homes were not in the area—were invited to the meal, to pray with the family, tell stories of their lives, and accompany the Rosners in song. These young men also joined the family for several other meals during the rest of the week and became part of the ritual life of Bernie's Orthodox family.
The Sabbath day started at 9 o'clock with an extended service at the synagogue that lasted until almost noon. On the way home from the synagogue the Rosner brothers stopped at the baker. There they picked up the casserole made of beans and a goose neck filled with a delicious spicy stuffing that their mother had prepared on Friday afternoon and that the baker had baked on Saturday morning in his large oven.
Saturday afternoon from 2:00 to 4:00 was examination time, when children were tested on what they had learned the preceding week. These examinations were conducted by learned men of the Orthodox community. Bernie's father was not a learned man and was chagrined that he was not qualified to examine his own sons. Following the Sabbath exam, the Rosners often took a walk up the “hill of a hundred stairs.” The stairs were made of railroad ties, and Bernie recalls that on one of these traditional walks the adults talked about how the Germans had just invaded Poland.
This austere schedule might suggest that Bernie's childhood was a time of unremitting tedium. But that is not the way he perceives it now. The little bits of free time—the Friday afternoons, the several half-day holidays at Passover and Succoth, and the visits to his grandparents —were, because of their scarcity, all the more enjoyable and precious. And an intelligent boy could infuse even the most disciplined days with his own imaginative escapes. On the 2-kilometer round-trip he made several times a day between his home and the village center where the school and the synagogue were located, he would run at full tilt and shout, “I'm the train on the way to Siofok.” On snowy winter days, a farmer would permit Bernie to ride to school on the runner of his horse-drawn sled, the only means of transportation during the Tab winters. These winters were enveloped by an aura of pristine innocence when he trudged home through the deserted, snow-covered streets with a candle enclosed in a glass lantern. At times he would take imaginary excursions to Andocs, the village where the Rosners' housemaid lived.
Bernie did not feel close to his father, Louis Rosner, who was born in 1892. But the son enjoyed the stories the father loved to tell and remembers that one of them was called “The King of Claws.” It had something to do with a cat, tiger, or lion, but the plot has faded in Bernie's memory. As Bernie and Alexander grew, their father became less involved with them and more absorbed in the changing fortunes of his business growing, processing, and wholesaling walnuts and other produce.
The Rosner ancestors had been wealthy. On walks through the village, Bernie's father would show his boys the property once owned by the family and drop hints about some disaster that had radically reduced the Rosner wealth and about the paternal grandfather who deserted his family to go to America. As young boys, Bernie and Alexander were told two different versions of the grandfather's fate —one that he was dead and the other that he ended up in San Francisco. The family was not poor at that time, however, and their fortunes improved during Bernie's childhood, so that in 1940, when Bernie was ten, they were able to move into a better house.
Louis Rosner, a redhead, had an emotional side that ill tolerated the impertinence of his eldest son. Their frequent quarrels were caused by a “lack of subordination,” as Bernie describes his own behavior, assuming a fatherly tone himself. At one point, Bernie's interest in learning and books got him into trouble. A prayer book belonging to one of the pillars of the community sat on the shelf right next to Bernie's customary seat in the synagogue, day in and day out. Bernie coveted that marvelous, leather-bound book so much that one day he stole it, took it home, tore out its pages, and deposited the cover, now devoid of its spiritual content, back in its customary place. Bernie was the prime suspect. When accused of the theft, he denied everything, prompting the owner of the book to comment sarcastically that perhaps an angel had taken it and removed its pages. The boy's insistence on his innocence gained him the nickname “Angel Tralala.” As the full wrath of his father was about to descend on Bernie's head, a minor religious miracle occurred. The owner of the book, the man who had dubbed him Angel Tralala, pleaded that the boy not be punished, since his transgression proved a genuine interest in reading and in matters spiritual. Thus the anger of the father was diffused, but the nickname stuck to Bernie for the remainder of his life in Tab.
Little Angel Tralala felt closer to his dark-haired mother. Bertha Rosner, née Schwartz in 1893, was the spiritual bridge to Bernie's grandfather in Kiskunhalas. She was a sensitive person who cried easily, and Bernie suspects that his mother was a hypochondriac with an imagined “bad heart.” She was the emotional font for him and his brother. An articulate storyteller, she was also the inspiration for his enduring love of books. He still remembers how beautiful her handwriting appeared in the letters she read aloud to him when he was very young. As he found out, these were the letters she had written to his father during their engagement. With a teaching credential, Bertha Rosner was the most educated member of the family. She was the one who made sure there were books in the home, even though the volumes often had batches of pages missing. Bernie remembers how frustrating it was to arrive at page 15, only to find pages 15 through 34 gone, so that he had to use his imagination to bridge the gap. Bernie's mother was also an expert seamstress and a good cook. She baked delicious sweets — cinnamon swirls, jellied rolls, and the kind of cakes that showed that Tab and its inhabitants were not far from Vienna and its elegant pastries.
Bertha Rosner instilled in her boys a sense of duty to take the straight and narrow path. This Hungarian mother employed old-fashioned educational methods in vogue all over Europe — unadorned scare tactics. When confronted with a disobedient son, she threatened him with the gypsies who roamed the landscape: “If you don't behave, we'll hand you over to the gypsies, who will take you away.”
How many times was that admonition used to reprimand European children, and in how many languages? I remember the gypsies in my village who knocked at our front door to beg. I hid behind my grandmother's skirts, fearing they might take me away whether I had misbehaved or not. The very gypsy wagons that moved in and out of villages struck fear into every child, since these wandering people played a sinister role in the pedagogical arsenal of