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Authors: Benjamin Markovits
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were davening in front of it, tirelessly, and the comfortable repeated motions of their backs and heads reminded me strangely of one of the warm-ups Charlie used to make us do before practice: rolling from toe to heel and back again, in order to stretch the Achilles tendon and strengthen our calves. In fact, my knees and ankles began to throb a little as I joined them, with a bent head and my hands clasped in someembarrassment across my stomach. I had hoped to sit down.
It was their voices that kept me going, the low continuous echoing voices of their prayers, which afflicted my own throat with aching sympathies. Their prayers were different from the ones Iâd grown up with, softer, more sibilant, and the cadence of their chanting seemed older and less musical. Even so, something about the blind urgency of their singing, which wasnât quite singing, seemed familiar. The Sunday school I used to go to, until the class times interfered with football season, treated Hebrew as a language to be repeated rather than understood. I had no doubt that the men rocking on their feet in front of me could speak Hebrew, but the words they chanted had broken down into something more basic than meaning: into tones and beats.
By this point in the preseason everything ached, not least my heart, with homesickness and the sense of failure. Exhaustion had on me the effect of sentimentality â I began to cry.
Nobody noticed. In any case, such a congregation probably had enough to grieve about; they wouldnât wonder too much at a few tears. The Holocaust had always struck me, in my American childhood, as a symbol of something terrible: both of the evil people were capable of committing and of the suffering they were capable of enduring. It seemed so powerful as a symbol. For the first time it struck me as a fact, which made it much worse.
Most of the men before me were survivors; they must have been roughly my age at the end of the Second World War. Their parents might have known my grandfatherâs parents â might have tried to dissuade them, a generation before, from emigrating to New York. Munich had once had a prominent and lively Jewish community, but most of the synagogues were destroyed in the war along with the Jews who had prayed in them. This makeshift temple had been carved out of a postwar apartment block, hastily erected in the gap a bomb had made between the taller, older and grander buildings on either side. The first and second floors had been removed. All that was left of them was a narrow gallery running along three of the walls. It was there the women prayed. I spotted them for the first time, leaning over and looking down, when I finally had a chance to sit.
I suppose the men there were as various as any other set of old men, but to my eyes they seemed mostly short and a little fat. It was something of a relief, after a week devoted to the perfection of the body, to spend an hour or two among people who had long ago accepted the eccentricities of their own. Besides, I didnât want to understand the prayers; incomprehensibility was a part of their charm. We bowed and ducked and shouted and mumbled. Sport is the art of repeating meaningless and tiny acts: I liked the idea of a God who required a similar duty in his people.
In fact, it was the idea of that God, presiding over his dying congregation, which I developed in the houror two of each service, and which kept me coming back. Success didnât matter to him. (It was hard not to imagine a him with the women sequestered above.) Bad luck and losers were also among his creations. He did not intervene. The business I was in depended on percentages and probabilities, but I had never seen so vividly demonstrated, by the men who had survived to reach that shabbas, the terrible operation of chance.
Of course, this is just loneliness talking. Loneliness theorizes. The truth is, it was a place to go and sometimes sit down in a strange city on Friday
It was their voices that kept me going, the low continuous echoing voices of their prayers, which afflicted my own throat with aching sympathies. Their prayers were different from the ones Iâd grown up with, softer, more sibilant, and the cadence of their chanting seemed older and less musical. Even so, something about the blind urgency of their singing, which wasnât quite singing, seemed familiar. The Sunday school I used to go to, until the class times interfered with football season, treated Hebrew as a language to be repeated rather than understood. I had no doubt that the men rocking on their feet in front of me could speak Hebrew, but the words they chanted had broken down into something more basic than meaning: into tones and beats.
By this point in the preseason everything ached, not least my heart, with homesickness and the sense of failure. Exhaustion had on me the effect of sentimentality â I began to cry.
Nobody noticed. In any case, such a congregation probably had enough to grieve about; they wouldnât wonder too much at a few tears. The Holocaust had always struck me, in my American childhood, as a symbol of something terrible: both of the evil people were capable of committing and of the suffering they were capable of enduring. It seemed so powerful as a symbol. For the first time it struck me as a fact, which made it much worse.
Most of the men before me were survivors; they must have been roughly my age at the end of the Second World War. Their parents might have known my grandfatherâs parents â might have tried to dissuade them, a generation before, from emigrating to New York. Munich had once had a prominent and lively Jewish community, but most of the synagogues were destroyed in the war along with the Jews who had prayed in them. This makeshift temple had been carved out of a postwar apartment block, hastily erected in the gap a bomb had made between the taller, older and grander buildings on either side. The first and second floors had been removed. All that was left of them was a narrow gallery running along three of the walls. It was there the women prayed. I spotted them for the first time, leaning over and looking down, when I finally had a chance to sit.
I suppose the men there were as various as any other set of old men, but to my eyes they seemed mostly short and a little fat. It was something of a relief, after a week devoted to the perfection of the body, to spend an hour or two among people who had long ago accepted the eccentricities of their own. Besides, I didnât want to understand the prayers; incomprehensibility was a part of their charm. We bowed and ducked and shouted and mumbled. Sport is the art of repeating meaningless and tiny acts: I liked the idea of a God who required a similar duty in his people.
In fact, it was the idea of that God, presiding over his dying congregation, which I developed in the houror two of each service, and which kept me coming back. Success didnât matter to him. (It was hard not to imagine a him with the women sequestered above.) Bad luck and losers were also among his creations. He did not intervene. The business I was in depended on percentages and probabilities, but I had never seen so vividly demonstrated, by the men who had survived to reach that shabbas, the terrible operation of chance.
Of course, this is just loneliness talking. Loneliness theorizes. The truth is, it was a place to go and sometimes sit down in a strange city on Friday
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