Death to Steinsaltz! 

by Ronald Pies

Sam Steinsaltz, already running late for his own book reading, struggled to knot his tie, distracted by the unsavory smell coming from beneath the floorboards in his apartment. Or maybe, he thought, he is losing his mind to early-onset Alzheimer’s, which had taken his father thirty years ago. When he was a boy, Sam Steinsaltz had learned to tie a decent Windsor knot. His father had stood behind him, moving the boy’s hands with his own, the two of them standing in front of the bathroom mirror. Pull the wide end to the left, Sammy, and push it through the loop.  But now, in his sixties, Steinsaltz struggled, and the more he thought about how to tie the knot, the more entangled his thoughts became.

The odor was getting to him, too. The stench was familiar to Steinsaltz, whose Brookline apartment had always had mice, despite many attempts at ridding the place of the creatures. Lately, Steinsaltz had taken to placing small boxes of tiny green pellets in the apartment, which – he knew guiltily – caused the mice to bleed to death. But what else can you do? Live with mouse droppings on your kitchen counter, night after night?

The truth was, Steinsaltz had always seen the universe as tilted toward the tragic, the irrational, the chaotic. This was hardly an insight anybody would trumpet as original. After all, as a one-time, high school physics teacher, Steinsaltz still remembered the second and third laws of thermodynamics: all systems tend toward maximum entropy and minimum enthalpy. Basically, the entire universe is moving toward chaos and coldness. How many relationships, Steinsaltz wondered, twenty years after Rivka had left him, are defined by these immutable laws?

He had his doubts about this reading, too. He had never been to this particular synagogue in Newton, but he had heard enough gossip about Temple Beth Elohim to be slightly on guard. After the appearance of his story in the New Yorker two years ago, Steinsaltz had gotten some nasty letters and even a few obscene phone calls. “You write story for New Yorker slandering Russian Jews? And you do not see you are disgrace to your own people?” one such note had read. And one phone message, left late at night on his machine, had made vague threats about “pay back” – the thick Russian accent making the words sound like pyehbeck. Besides, who knew about book readings? Nobody could show up, or the crowd could boo you off the dais. You could freeze up while reading a story, piss your pants, or stammer like an idiot.

The “disgrace” accusation had struck a nerve in Steinsaltz. After twenty years teaching high school physics in Cambridge, Steinsaltz had left his job and entered a masters-degree program in Jewish Studies, at Harvard. But after teaching for so long, moving to the lowly status of student was more than Steinsaltz could bear: the patronizing questions from the professors, the term papers, the tedious reading assignments. And, of course, the inevitable and painful question from his fellow students, most much younger than Steinsaltz: “So, Sam, are you related to the famous Rabbi?”  In truth, Sam Steinsaltz had determined that he was a very distant relation of the renowned scholar, Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz – a third cousin, in fact – but the two men had never met or even corresponded. The great Rabbi in Jerusalem – the author of The Thirteen Petalled Rose and renowned translator of the Talmud– could hardly regard his distant cousin as anything more than a disgrace to the Jews. Sam had been booted from the Harvard program after only a year of study, having gotten involved with a young teaching assistant named Tziporah Mehlman. Although the very attractive young woman had been the instigator of their affair, she wound up furious with Steinsaltz – a married man at the time – after he “refused to make a commitment.” She reported him for “sexual harassment,” and Steinsaltz was told by the Dean himself to leave the program immediately. A few months later, Rivka found out about the affair from her friend, Ida Stern, who knew the Dean, and left for Manhattan to live with her sister. “All systems tend toward chaos and cold,” Steinsaltz heard himself saying out loud, finally completing a half-assed Windsor knot. But before she left, Rivka had admonished him: “You can create plenty of mishugas on your own, Sam, without thermodyno-whatever.”

It would take a good twenty minutes to drive from Brookline to Newton, and Steinsaltz had only about forty minutes left before the reading. He was hungry, and decided to heat up one of “Dr. Praeger’s California Veggie Burgers.” Steinsaltz sat at his tiny kitchen table and read the side of the package: Developed by two New Jersey-based heart surgeons, Dr. Praeger’s Sensible Foods are all natural, made with the finest ingredients: fresh vegetables, fish from cold northern waters, tasty herbs & spices. A year ago, Steinsaltz had wound up in the emergency room with pain in his left arm and jaw. The doctor had drawn blood for cardiac enzymes, and told Steinsaltz he had suffered “a mild heart attack.”

“Also,” the young doctor had warned, “your cholesterol is through the roof. You need to make some changes in your lifestyle.” Resisting medication, Steinsaltz had settled on Dr. Praeger’s Sensible Foods, which included gefilte fish, pizza bagels, and “homestyle” broccoli pancakes. Then again, what difference, in the long run, would a change in diet make? This obsessive clinging to life and health could take you only so far, Steinsaltz knew, and would never protect you from chaos. When his father was dying, Steinsaltz had paid a violinist to come to the house and play some tunes from Fiddler on the Roof. The elder Steinsaltz, probably hallucinating, had thrown a cup of coffee at the terrified musician, shouting, “Cossack! Cossack! I’ll die before you take me!”

The audience at Temple Beth Elohim was polite and attentive throughout Steinsaltz’s reading, and laughed at the appropriate times. Perhaps all was not lost. The last twenty years had been hard ones, with Steinsaltz struggling to pay the bills by tutoring students in physics and math, and eking out the occasional freelance article for the Boston Globe.  Living alone had its benefits, but Steinsaltz was not well-suited to a solitary life: his scholarship had suffered as he sought increasingly desperate ways of distracting himself from the ruins of his marriage. The book he had planned to write on Nachman of Bratslav never got beyond the outline stage. He had let his hygiene and diet go to hell and had put on thirty pounds since Rivka left. He had managed to get hooked on surfing the web, usually avoiding the porn, but spending hours delving into obscure Kabbalistic texts. Still, there had been success in the last two years: after the New Yorker story made a name for Steinsaltz, a small university press in Canada contacted him, wondering if he had a collection of stories he could send their way. The result was “Zimmerman’s Trollop,” a series of loosely linked stories that had garnered good reviews in The Boston Phoenix. His literary life, at any rate, seemed to be more ordered these days, less ravaged by entropy.

Steinsaltz was midway through his last story, intent on reproducing for the audience the raspy timbre of Zimmernan’s voice. He did not notice the young man in the second row, whose eyes looked like runaway trains. On the man’s forehead, beneath a strand of matted hair, tiny Cyrillic letters had been carved with some kind of sharp instrument, highlighted with indelible blue ink. Steinsaltz did not see the young man rise from his seat and remove the steak knife from his leather jacket.

After the melee had subsided – bloodlessly, thank God – and the police had hustled the young man away in handcuffs, a plump, middle-aged woman approached Steinsaltz and placed a hand on his quivering shoulder.

“I am werry sorry for trouble, Meester Steinsaltz,” she said in a thick Russian accent. “But, you know, your story in New Yorker – some in congregation were, how do you say? Werry poot off by idea that Russian Jews are all whores and mobsters.”

“That young man,” Steinsaltz said, “do you … do you know what the words on his forehead said?"

“Da! For sure, but they make no sense. In Russian they say, Death to Steinsaltz, bringer of chaos and cold!”