The Rabbi of Lud

eight

Don’t think I don’t know what’s going on!” I shouted at her. “I know what’s going on! Oh, boy, do I know what’s going on! I know what’s going on better than you do!

“You’re looking to discredit me. You’re looking to get me fired. Always the short view. Always the short view, hey, Connie? Go, run to the bishops, run to the papers. Go run right up to Elaine Iglauer herself, looking in Fairlawn, looking in Ridgewood for a house for us while you’re out there playing in the street with Holy Mother! Ha!

“Well, my friend, you ought to know just a leetle bit more about your religion before you go barking up that tree! We’re this Sins of the Fathers people visited even unto the third and fourth generations. Where is it written, you tell me, where does it speak anywhere in Torah about the Sins of the Daughters? Can you answer me that, Buster Brown? No! Because it doesn’t work that way. It ain’t any two-way street we ride past each other with the windows rolled and the top down flipping hexes and trading calumnies.

“So I know what you’re doing, little missy.

“You’re not afraid of any ghosts. You’re looking to drive a wedge. Why don’t you own up? You think you can trade your meshuggina mishegoss for your old mother’s. Bingo bango! Moishe Kapoyr! Moses reversed! But what you don’t understand, my fine-feathered friend, is that husbands and wives cleave. I’m a cleaver, kiddo. So’s Mummy. We’re the whither-thou-thither-me chosen people, your mother and I. The Bible tells us so. Go,” I told her, “you can look it up!”