by Sabina Berman · 08/26/10
My father didn’t talk much. But when he did, he talked to the air. He would gaze at the ceiling and speak in a grave monotone, disconnected from me and anyone else who might be within earshot. It was like listening to the rain. The few bits of his life that he told me about, he told just like that, and then he fell silent, without searching for a moral. And that silence was like listening to the rain in some corner of my memory, distant, remote.
Eleven moments have shaped my destiny, he once told me. Just eleven, that’s all. But if you were to take even one of them away, I’d be a different person altogether. I’d have a different name, I’d think in another language, and I’d live on the other side of the world, or else I would have stopped living long ago.
The first of those moments happened at the turn of the century, in Radzin, Poland. That spring night the Jews of the shtetl left their houses and walked along the dirt path to the cheder, the school, where they shuffled around, standing, whispering, quietly wondering if what had brought them together there was really a miracle about to happen. The rabbi was in the middle, seated at a wooden table, and on the table a glass bubble waited enigmatically, empty except for a simple filament that rose about four centimeters from its base. The rabbi beckoned the children over to the table.
Let the children be the first to see the Future, he said.
Reb Meyer, according to my father, was famous in Poland for his oratory.
Among the children who stepped forward and surrounded the table was, of course, my father, Herschl Berman, dark-skinned, with black eyes and payes.
All right, said Reb Meyer, let’s see.
Then, soundlessly, the miracle occurred: the bubble lit up like a tiny sun on top of the table. The people gasped, their eyes opening wide.
Then they applauded.
And the applause grew louder as the rabbi waved his hands, palms down, over the shining light bulb, blessing it in Hebrew. Blessed art Thou, Lord our God, King of the Universe, who allows us to light electric bulbs.
The next day at cheder, Reb Meyer spoke animatedly about the miracle of a literally brilliant Future. Myriads of light bulbs would arrive to erase the darkness of evil and suffering from the earth. Hadn’t God revealed Himself to Moses as the radiant light of a burning bramble bush? Hadn’t He appeared to Daniel as a bolt of lightning suspended in the sky? Light is the appearance of God, and if God had found it necessary to set fire to a bramble bush in the desert in order to talk to Moses, in the twentieth century he would talk to everyone, ecumenically, through light bulbs.
And now not even fools will be capable of sin, the rabbi concluded.
Over the years, Reb Meyer’s optimism grew bitter in my father’s memory, but the joy of seeing that burning light bulb was something from which he never recovered.
I’ll tell you exactly what I felt when I saw the bulb, my father said to me.
He closed his eyes and spoke to me of the long, cruel winters in Radzin. Winters that lasted half the year and forced people to lock themselves inside their houses or in the temple, because to step outside into the air meant being stabbed by a piercing blade of cold.
During that half of the year the sun was always a hypothesis: maybe it was hiding behind the perpetually clouded sky. And when the wind rearranged the clouds and the sun gradually peeked out between them, Reb Meyer knew it, because the window next to his chair lit up, and beneath his gaze the sheet covered with the characters of the great book of the Talmud grew whiter and finally, radiant. Then he would dismiss his class and order the children to leave the schoolroom to take advantage of the interstice of sunshine.
Out in the snow, the children unbuttoned their black jackets and white shirts, they slipped their tzitzit over their heads, and flung their arms open to feel the sun on their chests. That was the happiness I felt from the light bulb, my father concluded, opening his eyes.
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