The Collected Stories

the author and Laurie Colwin

The Cabalist of East Broadway

    As happens so often in New York, the neighborhood changed. The synagogues became churches, the yeshivas restaurants or garages. Here and there one could still see a Jewish old people’s home, a shop selling Hebrew books, a meeting place for
landsleit
from some village in Rumania or Hungary. I had to come downtown a few times a week, because the Yiddish newspaper to which I contributed was still there. In the cafeteria on the corner, in former times one could meet Yiddish writers, journalists, teachers, fund raisers for Israel, and the like. Blintzes, borscht, kreplech, chopped liver, rice pudding, and egg cookies were the standard dishes. Now the place catered mainly to Negroes and Puerto Ricans. The voices were different, the smells were different. Still, I used to go there occasionally to eat a quick lunch or to drink a cup of coffee. Each time I entered the cafeteria, I would immediately see a man I’ll call Joel Yabloner, an old Yiddish writer who specialized in the Cabala. He had published books about Holy Isaac Luria, Rabbi Moshe of Cordova, the Baal Shem, Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav. Yabloner had translated part of the Zohar into Yiddish. He also wrote in Hebrew. According to my calculations, he must have been in his early seventies.
    Joel Yabloner, tall, lean, his face sallow and wrinkled, had a shiny skull without a single hair, a sharp nose, sunken cheeks, a throat with a prominent Adam’s apple. His eyes bulged and were the color of amber. He wore a shabby suit and an unbuttoned shirt that revealed the white hair on his chest. Yabloner had never married. In his youth he suffered from consumption, and the doctors had sent him to a santorium in Colorado. Someone told me that there he was forced to eat pork, and as a result he fell into melancholy. I seldom heard him utter a word. When I greeted him, he barely nodded and often averted his eyes. He lived on the few dollars a week the Yiddish Writers’ Union could spare him. His apartment on Broome Street had no bath, telephone, central heating. He ate neither fish nor meat, not even eggs or milk—only bread, vegetables, and fruit. In the cafeteria he always ordered a cup of black coffee and a dish of prunes. He would sit for hours staring at the revolving door, at the cashier’s desk, or the wall where, years ago, a commercial artist had painted the market on Orchard Street, with its pushcarts and peddlers. The paint was peeling now.
    The president of the Writers’ Union told me that although all of Joel Yabloner’s friends and admirers had died out here in New York, he still had relatives and disciples in the land of Israel. They had often invited him to come there to live. They would publish his works, they promised (he had trunks filled with manuscripts), find an apartment for him, and see that he was taken care of in every way. Yabloner had a nephew in Jerusalem who was a professor at the university. There were still some Zionist leaders who considered Joel Yabloner their spiritual father. So why should he sit here on East Broadway, a silent and forgotten man? The Writers’ Union would have sent his pension to him in Israel, and he could also have received Social Security, which he had never bothered to claim. Here in New York he had already been burglarized a few times. A mugger had knocked out his last three teeth. Eiserman, the dentist who had translated Shakespeare’s sonnets into Yiddish, told me that he had offered to make Yabloner a set of false teeth, but Yabloner had said to him, “There is only one step from false teeth to a false brain.”
    “A great man, but a queer one,” Eiserman said to me while he drilled and filled my own teeth. “Or perhaps he wants to atone for his sins this way. I’ve heard that he had love affairs in his youth.”
    “Yabloner—love affairs?”
    “Yes, love affairs. I myself knew a Hebrew teacher, Deborah Soltis, who was madly in love with him. She was my patient. She died about ten years ago.”
    In connection with this, Eiserman told me of a curious episode. Joel Yabloner and Deborah Soltis saw each other over a period of twenty years, indulging in long conversations, often discussing Hebrew literature, the fine points of grammar, Maimonides, and Rabbi Judah ha-Levi, but the pair never went so far as to kiss. The closest they came was once when both of them were looking up the meaning of a word or an idiom in Ben-Yahudah’s great dictionary