One Hundred Philistine Foreskins Read online

  ONE HUNDRED PHILISTINE FORESKINS

  Also by Tova Reich

  My Holocaust

  The Jewish War

  Master of the Return

  Mara

  One Hundred Philistine Foreskins

  Copyright © Tova Reich 2013

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  A section of this novel was written at the Yaddo artists’ retreat in Saratoga Springs, New York. The work was completed with the support of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Reich, Tova.

  One Hundred Philistine Foreskins / Tova Reich.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-61902-204-1

  1. Women rabbis—Fiction. 2. Jewish fiction. 3. Satire. I. Title.

  ps3568.E4763O54 2013

  813'.54—dc23 2012040587

  Cover design by Rebecca Lown

  Interior design by David Bullen

  COUNTERPOINT

  1919 Fifth Street

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  TO SARA TOV

  Contents

  Part I: Azuva

  King Solomon Made an Aperion for Himself

  More Bitter than Death Is Woman: Azuva

  Part II: Yiska

  Here’s Your Wife, Take Her and Go

  You Shall Give Me the Firstborn of Your Sons—And You Shall Do the Same for Your Cattle and Sheep

  More Bitter than Death Is Woman: Yiska

  Part III: Haya

  They Have Gone Astray in the Land, the Desert Has Closed in on Them

  And Dina Came Out

  I Remember, O God, and I Moan

  More Bitter than Death Is Woman: Haya

  Part I

  Azuva

  King Solomon

  Made an Aperion

  for Himself

  It is a matter of record that certain living creatures, feeling the end of life squeezing them in, make one last desperate attempt to break free and do exactly what they want to do and express themselves exactly as they wish to be understood, on their own terms, without consideration of the desires or pressures or disapproval of family and other enemies, or of any being at all who claims ownership over them.

  As she readied herself to carry out such an action, HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, the renowned Jerusalem Bible teacher and beloved guru revered as Ima Temima by thousands of disciples, called to mind the case of the most godlike of all mortal creators, the writer Lev Tolstoy, who in a grand final gesture took flight from the unbearable materialism and vulgarity of wife and other hangers-on and bolted from his estate Yasnaya Polyana in search of the purity he preached and needed—yes, he had to have it right now, he could not put it off another minute, this was his last chance, his final statement—only to be reduced by an old man’s illness in the once insignificant train station of Astapovo, where he died the ignoble but fitting death of a holy fool.

  Tolstoy was a Russian, as everyone knows, but under the same heading of striking out at the last moment in a pure gesture of unrestrained, desperate fidelity to self, as Temima was preparing to make her own radical statement on this order, she also called to mind a German—a German Shepherd to be precise, her gentile neighbor’s dog known as Germy from the earliest chapter of her life when she was a girl growing up in the ultra-Orthodox Boro Park section of Brooklyn and was known in those days as Tema. Howling raggedly day and night, lunging at the end of his rope inside his wretched cage of a yard due to the surrounding Jews’ fear-of-dogs gene, Germy’s fur thinned and faded as Tema bore witness year after year until one day, when they both turned twelve and Tema was legally and halakhically considered a woman accountable for her own sins, and Rabbi Manis Schmeltzer, the principal of the girls’ school she attended, maneuvered his member into her mouth to her wonderment that such a curious idea could even be contemplated—Germy finally shut up once and for all. Casting off his chains with the recklessness of nothing more to lose, he leaped wildly through the gate, staggered down the alley that separated their two houses straight into the street to keep his appointment with the oncoming truck driven by Itche the junkman, which smashed into him, killing him instantly, leaving nothing but a pulped and liquefied mess.

  From dead dogs Temima’s thoughts glided seamlessly to her area of universally acknowledged expertise, the Hebrew Bible—Tanakh—with her specialty, its difficult women, problems one and all, coming to rest on one of her dearly beloveds, her pet, the majestic Queen Jezebel—in Hebrew, Izevel, island of garbage, female spam—who, as the very strict prophet Elijah the Tishbite had foretold, was recycled first into dog food and then, in the natural course of bodily processes, into dog shit in the fields of Jezreel. Jezebel was the model to whom Temima now turned as she made her preparations for a public demonstration that would finally bring clarity to all who took note of it. Nothing remained of that proud old queen but a skull picked fleshless, a pair of inedible feet, the palms of her idolatrous hands—leavings that even the dogs had spurned. The bitch got what she deserved—Jezebel, a name translated on the tongue of posterity to harlot, but oh how noble and true to herself she was in her final hour, Temima could only bow her head awestruck. Staring straight into the eye of her doom without a speck of self-deception or self-pity, her murderer already at her door, even so this proud old dowager makes him wait, takes her regal time, applies her eye makeup like war paint slowly and artfully for this last battle, the outline of black kohl punctuating her death mask, she helmets her hair as befits a warrior queen, she arranges herself at the upper story window of her palace as for a royal audience—and from that elevation she talks down to the killer of her sons and her own designated assassin—Traitor! Usurper! Murderer! Her eunuchs arrayed behind her take stock of the situation, consider their options, give the old lady a little push, flick her out the window, skirts flying up to expose the withered queenly jewel box, blue blood splattering all over the walls, the absurd indignity of that tough old carcass splayed on the ground to be mashed under the hooves of her executioner’s mount.

  Her eyes rimmed with black kohl expertly applied by Cozbi, one of her two full-time personal attendants, the unwholesome glow of her skin calmed with white powder, Temima Ba’alatOv sat at her window that morning in her private chambers on the upper floor of her house in the Bukharim Quarter of Jerusalem, gazing down on the street below. Her richly embroidered white silk yarmulke was pulled low over her nearly hairless skull, her phylacteries box from the morning prayers was still affixed to her forehead, the tefillin straps still wrapped around her slack arm, her great talit draped over the shoulders of her loose white robe. Women at windows were never good news, she reflected, they never came to a happy end, you didn’t need the Bible for that insight. The women for sale in the storefronts in the municipal whore market in Amsterdam, for example, each a different piece of goods depending on the depths of your fantasy and your pocket. She had been window-shopping that night so many years ago with Abba Kadosh, blinded by too much light, and he was explaining to her softly, in his intimate voice that forced her to lean in closer, in his spiritually enlightened mode,
how each of these women in the storefronts was an aspect of the feminine emanation of the divine presence, the holy Shekhinah, and by offering herself so generously to the broken vessels of the shattered male spirit, each of these beautiful, holy, holy ladies in sheer synthetics and leather studded with nailheads and gelatinous smears of lipstick was performing an act of unparalleled loving-kindness and tikkun olam, world repair, for which the reward would be incalculable and the redemption hastened.

  What had been leaving Temima transfixed and breathless during that entire trip was her knowledge that Abba Kadosh almost never left his compound in the Judean Desert where he had recreated a patriarchal community with himself as the number one patriarch, but for her sake, for the sake of swaying her to join him as either one of his wives or a concubine, he had taken her on this educational junket to the red-light district of Amsterdam at great personal risk to himself. She was dazed with flattery beyond anything she could have anticipated, like the most simple and inexperienced of girls, she had considered herself above such primitive seductions but in the end she was swept away. She was thirty-five years old when Abba Kadosh became her impresario, but her thighs were still like globed jewels the work of an artisan, her navel like a round goblet, her belly like a heap of wheat, her breasts like two fawns, her neck like a pillar of ivory, her eyes like the pools of Heshbon, her nose like the tower of Lebanon looking to Damascus, her head like a camel, her hair like purple streamers in which the king is entangled—people said of her that her beauty was surreal. She was still ravishing, still smoldering, still desirable despite seven pregnancies, five miscarriages and two live births, both of whom, including the baby buried in the ancient cemetery of Hebron and the little boy not even three years old, she had abandoned along with her husband of over fifteen years, Howie Stern of Ozone Park, Queens, reinvented as Haim Ba’al-Teshuva, scribe and phylacteries maker in the holy city of Hebron in the biblical heartland of Judea and Samaria, known to the alien world as the West Bank—Occupied Territory.

  In Judea and Samaria, between Bethel and Ramah, the ferocious Deborah, wife of Lapidot, sat under a palm tree and prophesized, belting out her victory song after the battle against the Canaanites, gloating over her conjured-up image of the mother of the enemy general Sisera sitting at her window, gazing into the distance, awaiting the return of the chariot of her triumphant son—in vain, in vain. How long are you going to sit there waiting at that window, Sisera’s mom? Your boy is already dead. The savage Yael, wife of Hever the Kenite, in whose tent he had sought refuge, refreshed him with milk, warmed him with her mantle, offered him so selflessly who knows what other acts of lovingkindness to repair his broken vessel, and when afterward he had immediately fallen asleep, as men tend to do, snoring with supreme entitlement, she drove the stake of her tent through his temple and into the floor, pinning him like a trophy beetle spread under glass.

  Maybe the time has come for women to stop looking out of windows, Temima concluded. What are we hoping to see? What are we expecting? What are we waiting for? Abba Kadosh had a mother too, the late Mrs. Hazel Clinton of Selma, Alabama, and Arad, Israel. Temima supposed that she owed Abba Kadosh’s mother a debt of gratitude simply for sticking it out and not running off and abandoning the oiled black boy she had called Elmore, who, when in the fullness of time he had anointed himself as Abba Kadosh, prophet and messiah, affirmed her mastery of Tanakh and forced her finally to surrender to her destiny.

  Cozbi had carried the lumpy root-vegetable weight of the earthly corpus of her mistress to the window with the assistance of Rizpa, the second live-in personal attendant. They settled Temima in the saggedout scoop of her capacious ivory wingchair where she presided as upon a throne overlooking the Bukharim Quarter, awaiting the delivery of the brilliant conveyance from which she would offer her final and boldest teaching as she was transported to her personal Astapovo, her fatal encounter with the junkman, the bitch queen’s showdown at the gates with her assassin.

  She had stopped walking entirely at an appointed hour some years earlier, and without offering any commentary as to whether or not she still was able to, had simply declared one day that she had walked far enough, she refused to take another step, leaving it to her followers to draw from this mysterious abstention whatever wisdom they were capable of, each at her own level. From that time forward, all of her business was conducted in this room, most of it from the vast high bed that was its centerpiece, where she would recline propped up against a bank of white satin cushions under mounds of white satin bedclothes. In her white silk skullcap that bulged with the mortal nodes and knobs of her head, the discolorations and spots on her face concealed by the makeup expertly applied by Cozbi and over which she wore a veil such as masked the blinding flush of Moses Our Teacher, Ima Temima six nights a week presided over her following gathered around the great raft of her bed at least three deep with mouths open to suck in her wisdom. The seventh night, Friday, the bed was transformed into a table, a tisch to usher in the Sabbath, a great banquet-sized white damask cloth spread across it, the holy woman HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv enthroned as if at its head leaning against the bolster of her white cushions tearing with hands gloved to conceal the mottled, loose skin underneath one hallah after another set out by Rizpa, her Hasidim, like ravenous birds to whom the old lady tosses some crumbs, stampeding savagely for the smallest blessed leavings touched by Ima Temima and cast out as shirayim.

  All of this would come to an end this morning, thank God, Temima thought—it had become tainted, idolatry. Her body had grown flaccid and scaly from age, grotesque like a vermin. Somewhere along the way it had happened; as she herself noted, No one escapes. Yet she had not let her inner self go, she was preparing herself—the shells and klippot were being peeled away to expose to those with true vision her purest self contracted to the essence of her all-knowing soul still unborn; she had undergone a kind of divine constriction—zimzum—reconfiguring herself into the Place that withdraws to leave some space for others. In the same ironic way, though her outward physical presence had swelled and sagged with lumps and ruts, the physical space she now occupied was condensed to this chamber from which she had not emerged in years. The pot was carried in and the pot was carried out by tiny Rizpa, in her past life the cleaning woman Mazal Shabtai of Rosh HaAyin, Israel, brown and wizened like an old shoe. She was bathed and dressed and groomed and made up and then veiled on the changing table of her bed—by Cozbi, the former masseuse Anna Oblonskaya of Tverskaya Street, Moscow, six feet tall without the three-inch stiletto heels she always wore. Anyone who desired intercourse with her—responsa, exegesis, advice, a blessing, a cure, prophecy, prayers, above all the truth about themselves that Ima Temima possessed and selectively dispensed, the meaning of their troubling dreams, what would happen to them, where to find what they had lost, how to remember what they had forgotten—came and petitioned for access from her gatekeeper, her damaged boy, the son she called Paltiel, the child she had abandoned in Hebron who, in his manhood, had found his way through the woods back to his mother, the only male member permitted unrestricted entry into her innermost-inner court.

  Behind her, rimming the upper floor of this stately old Jerusalem stone house bequeathed to her by a benefactor whose name was too dangerous to pronounce out loud, room after room with lofty vaulted ceilings and floor tiles stenciled like Turkish carpets that had once comprised her living quarters opened up in a balcony arc overlooking the study hall and synagogue below. She could scarcely believe now that there had ever been a time when she had felt the need for so much space. This was the morning when she would remove her presence from her dwelling place, but she would not fold it up and carry it off to the next station like the God of the Testament with his Tabernacle, she would not bear its contents away with her on long poles always in place for portability, ready to travel; she would not blow it up or burn it down, foxes would not be seen prowling among its scorched ruins. Whether she lived in it or whether she left it, whether she wanted it or whether she
wanted nothing more than to be rid of this earthly yoke, the house was hers, it was her eternal possession, that was the deal—those were the terms the mentor with hidden face had laid out, addressing her from behind a mask, backlit with fever.

  When she vacated it this morning in a public demonstration of great moral consequence, articulating exactly how she meant to be understood in a form that could not be misinterpreted, Paltiel would simply in the natural course of events complete his takeover. The house would be her reparations to him, to erase from her life book the frozen frame that still screeched in her memory—the child following behind her and weeping as she made her way to the car where one of Abba Kadosh’s retainers was awaiting her, Paltiel stumbling after her along the path sobbing, Ima, don’t go, please don’t go, Ima, until his father, the husband she still called Howie, scribe and phylacteries maker of Hebron, took his hand and said, Come home now, and carried him away. Still, there he would always be, fixed ever after, the little boy branded eternally into her memory as Paltiel, walking and crying, walking and crying, like Paltiel son of Layish when he was forced to give up his beloved Mikhal daughter of the paranoid King Saul to that mafia don and bandit, David son of Jesse, anointed in Hebron and soon to consolidate his kingship in Jerusalem over all of Israel, who had first seigneurial rights on the woman because he had bought her from her father for the bride-price of one hundred Philistine foreskins, he had the receipt.

  I’ve been expecting you, Paltiel, were Temima’s words to him that day when, as was inevitable, the wounded and bereft boy came back to her with his dark beard tipped with silver and a bald patch on his head, small and soft-paunched, a grown man in outer appearance only. She appointed him her chief of staff on the spot, number one shammes, and gave him full rights and privileges over the property as her authorized squatter. From shreds of chatter gleaned through acolytes who congregated at her bedside each night to drink in her teachings she had heard that he had appropriated the living quarters behind her chamber, converting a portion of it into a private apartment for himself and Cozbi who towered over him, not to mention allocating a room of one’s own convenient to the kitchen and laundry for Rizpa, and turning the rest into an administrative complex with banks of computers and other high-tech equipment, everything cutting edge and top of the line, from which he oversaw their entire operation.