Course: Science Fiction & Religion
Lecture #5: Reading #2
The Emigrant
By Joel Rosenberg
Joel Rosenberg was born in Manitoba and lives now in Connecticut, but part of his childhood was spent in a place called Northwood, North Dakota, where, he says, "there were two kinds of people at least according to the strict Lutherans who were the vast majority: Papists,' who were Catholics and Protestants, everybody else, including, I suppose, Jews Baptists, Moslems, and people who sacrifice bulls to Jupiter on their living room rugs.
Rosenberg began writing in 1980. "The Emigrant" is his second sale. It's the shortest story in this book, but it's among the most powerful.
The Emigrant
After supper, and his announcement, and his older sister's almost. hysterical recriminations and protestations over his desertion, Yisroel Cohen stepped out the back door, stood on the damp evening grass, and tilted his face toward the heavens.
He was not an old man, no more than thirty years of age, but he had the beginnings of gray in his hair and beard, and the hints of lines to come in his face that seem to characterize Hassidim, even when young.
Idly, Cohen twirled an earlock around his index finger as he squinted at the sky. Above his head, looking like a fourth star adorning Orion's belt, he saw a glint of light that might be the Colony-no, it was moving too fast; most probably a satellite in low orbit. He tilted his head back, accidentally dislodging the black wool skullcap from its top.
As he stooped to pick it up, he heard the back door whisper open, and the heavy footsteps of his brother-in-law thud on the-steps.
Sarah sent me out to talk to you," Alfred Morin said. As with most non-Jews-or most Jews, for that matter-Morin was uncomfortable around Hassidim, Cohen thought.."
Morin shifted his feet in the grass, uncomfortably.
Cohen straightened easily, saying nothing, his thin face holding only a trace of expression, perhaps weariness, perhaps discomfiture. He had not been looking forward to this weekend.
“What are you doing out here?" Morin asked.
“Seeing if, perhaps, I could spot the Colony," Cohen said. But, he sighed, "it's too early, I guess."
He turned to Morin. "My bags are packed. After Shabas I will be going to the airport."
“And the house? What are you going to do with the house?" Cohen shook his head and shrugged. "It really doesn't matter.. You and Sarah may do with it what you please. The papers are at my lawyers'." He walked over to the oak tree in the middle of the yard, turned, and leaned his back against its bulk. Morin followed, and faced him:
"And the butcher shop?"
"Avram is taking it over.... He's my uncle's son. I don't think you've met him."
“No,” Morin shot back, "that part of the family still doesn't accept me." He kicked at the base of the tree with his square-toed shoes. I thought you were different."
Cohen chuckled, a strange sound in his throat, something halfway) between a laugh, and a sob. "No,. it isn't you. Now, mind you, for my parents, it might have been: They would have said kaddish-the prayer for the dead-over Sarah, and never allowed either of you in their house."
Cohen laid his slim hand on Morin's muscular arm, and led him over to a pair of wicker lawn chairs. They sat down.
But me? No. I am of a different generation from my parents, as they were of a different generation from theirs, who died many of them and may they rest in peace at the hands of Hitler."
Cohen sat, silently. Morin reached into his jacket pocket for a pack of cigarettes, offered one to Cohen, who declined with a motion of a finger, and lit up.
The tip of the cigarette glowed in the darkness.
'No," Cohen went on, as though he hadn't paused, "I am not responsible for how my sister lives her life-although she seems still, to feel responsible for how I live mine."
She did raise you, after the accident," Morin said, brushing his limp blond hair into place with his free right hand. "Old habits die hard."
This you're telling to a Jew? After all, because I am named Cohen, after the cohenim, the priests of ancient Judea, congregations are still, after two thousand years, in the habit," he bit the word off of letting me share, with other Cohenim, the privilege of first aliyah, of being first to go up to the altar for the reading of the Torah.
"Because I am a Cohen," he pronounced it Ko-hain -- I am not permitted to marry a widow, or be in a graveyard except to bury. a blood relative, or another score of piddling things."
"But," Morin said, gesturing with blunt, nail-bitten fingers, you seem; except for the way you dress, so, so modern, in so many ways."
"Because I call myself a butcher, instead of a shaychet, like my father and grandfather? No, I am not a modern man; I am an orthodox Jew, and sometimes I feel very out of step with this year 5750, the two thousandth year of the Christian era. I still; he said, finger-flicking the fringes that depended from underneath his shirt, wear the tzitzit, I pray three times a day, and I study with Reb Gershon-who, by the way, I suspect my sister blames for all of this, for my leaving."
Morin took his cigarette between thumb and forefinger, flicking it off in a shower of sparks into the darkness. "So why you?" he asked. "Why not everyone named Cohen?"
"Because I'm a Jew, and you're thinking like a Catholic." He: raised a peremptory palm. "No, I don't mean that as a put-down... You are a good man, Alfred, and you treat my sister well.
"But... were I a..Catholic, and had a... .religious problem, would ask a priest. If he did not know, he would ask a bishop, who, still puzzled, would ask a cardinal, I suppose, all the way up to the pope, who is the sole arbiter of what is right and wrong. For Catholics.
But for a Jew? No, no final source, except the Law, and the Almighty. And the conscience.
"And," he sighed, "the possible. To wish for, or attempt, the impossible," he said, warming to the subject, "is a sin against God, who reserves the impossible for Himself.
"The day my parents died in the crash," he mused, and I wished it wouldn't have happened I sinned." Cohen shook his head, wondering. "That I really don't understand.'
"I don't either," Morin said, lighting another cigarette and shifting uncomfortably in the hard chair. "And I still don't really understand why..."
"Just so," Cohen said. "In there," he indicated the house with a shrug of his thin shoulders, "I stated the bare facts of my leaving mainly to get it out of the way, partly for my sister's benefit, because she should understand. For you I will... trot out some history.
Please understand, I am a butcher, not a historian, but this bit of history every Jew knows." He leaned forward, resting his elbows on thin, bony knees, and rested his forehead in his cupped hands.
"In 1933, the year that the Germans elected Hitler, there were ten million Jews in Europe.
"Between 1939 and 1945, the Nazis murdered millions of people in their death camps. Six of those millions were Jews." Cohen spoke slowly, carefully, as though each word were being written down.
Some were forced to dig huge pits, lined up on the edge, and shot. Films made by the Nazis themselves survived the attempt
themselves-survived to cover up in 1944 and '45 when the records were being burnt) when plans were made to destroy and cover the camps themselves.
Most of the people, though, died in gas chambers, where they were told, half-heartedly by the sniggering guards, that they were going for 'decontamination.' They were crammed inside, the doors locked and barred, and crystals of Zyklon-B were dropped in through hatches in the ceilings.
"Their death was not a pleasant one. I have never been to Auschwitz--I am a Cohen, and may not enter a graveyard--but I have seen pictures of the gas chambers. The walls, the floors, and even the ceilings are marked with deep scratches from fingernails; people trying, in their last agony, to claw their way through the concrete of the room, perhaps to leave some mark of their passing.
After the bodies were looted, they were burned." Cohen's voice was level, as always. Morin's eyes stung as he lit another cigarette. "Some in crematoria, some on open steel frames where the air could circulate more easily, as the corpses were splashed with gasoline, and set on fire.
"Some of the ashes were buried in deep pits, some scattered in the winds.
"And the winds blow across the face of the world. Every time we breathe, we breathe in traces of these people, murdered and burned.”
Cohen sat silent again. Morin was almost sure that he had finished, and had opened his own mouth to speak when Cohen continued.
And now, a quarter of a million miles from here, men build the Colony from aluminum and steel taken from the moon.
"I have applied for a job there--they' will need butchers--and I have been accepted, and must go.
"For I am a Cohen, descended of priests, and to be in a graveyard is forbidden me."