I came down with a heavy bronchial cough one year to the day after my Bar Mitzvah and on the very day that my mother went to the hospital to give birth to her third child, a baby girl, my little sister. My father tended to me in her absence. When on the third day of my illness the cough hadn't disappeared in spite of my taking medicine prescribed by a doctor, my father took matters into his own hands. He put together a concoction that his own parents had given him when he was a child: the yellow of eggs, one squeezed lemon, one spoon of honey, and two or three teaspoons of sugar, all mixed together and taken down as if I were drinking a milkshake or an egg cream in the candy store downstairs. Unlike all other medicines, this tasted fine. In fact, I made note of the ingredients so that I could put all that stuff together for myself secretly, even when I didn't have a cold.

          "What is it called?" I asked my father.

          "In our shtetl in Galicia and in Russia, an uggle-muggle," he said. "In Rumania, a guggle-muggle. In France, a chateau, but what do they know."

          "What is it supposed to do?" I asked hoarsely.

          "With God's help," my father said, "it's supposed to break up the phlegm and clean your throat out."

          But my father didn't rely on the uggle-muggle alone. He also went to shul, the synagogue, on the fourth day of my illness which was the Sabbath and said special prayers at the Torah reading for my recovery and for the good health of my mother and the new baby sister whom he named after his own departed mother.

          The prayers did only part of the job. I recovered almost immediately, but my mother came home from the hospital one week after giving birth without the baby. The baby, apparently very sickly, remained behind, lingered for another week, and died.

          My mother's grief was deep and anguishing. I could see it all the time even though, despite her physical weakness and her sorrow, she tried mightily to minister to me in order to make sure that I did not have a relapse after my illness. My father comforted her at every moment and tried to persuade her to let him do things for me. I myself told her that I was okay and didn't need such close attention, but she drove herself, as if to be busy all the time would help her fight off despairing thoughts.

          We did not sit shivah. Pa said that a baby less than a month old that passes away is not yet a bar kayama, a fully assured life according to religious law, and that therefore there is no official mourning period. But I could see that my mother and father would mourn forever.

***

          About two or three months later, when my father and I were alone in our kitchen, my mother out of earshot two rooms away in the bedroom with the door closed, I dared interrupt my father from his intense study of a Talmudic tractate.

          "Why did the baby die?" I asked hesitantly.

          My father did not look up immediately. He finished a passage, studied the Rashi commentary and Tosafos, then spoke without looking at me.

          "Ha-Shem nawsahn v'ha-Shem lawkach, y'hee shaim ha-Shem m'voiruch," he said.

          I knew what that meant in Hebrew. "God gave and God took away, may God's name be blessed."

          It didn't satisfy me. She was my only sister.

          "But why?" I asked. "Why?"

          My father must have realized that I wasn't a kid anymore and that he would have to deal with me.

          "In the Toirih in D'vawrim it says that we know the things that are revealed but that the hidden things are God's."

          I would not be trifled with. I almost leaped at him from the other side of the table, knocking over my science book and the written homework I had been doing for school.

          "But if we never tried to find out the hidden things, we wouldn't have cars or airplanes or telescopes to see the stars and planets or medicines to heal the sick. We must know what's hidden."

          My father rose from the table. He marched back and forth, his head bent forward so that he was shorter than usual, his hands clasped behind his back. He did not speak.

          I did. "And if there is no good reason," I asked brazenly, "then what's the difference between God killing an innocent child and Hitler and the Nazis killing innocent children?"

          My father stopped in his tracks. I could not tell if he was shocked, angry, distraught, annoyed, or anything else. His face was a mask, a mystery, a hidden thing like God's motives.

          He stood his ground for an unbelievable amount of time, like a tree rooted to its spot for generations, unmoving in the windless room. His eyes were dead though open. I knew he was thinking of my mother and her lost baby daughter and of his brother, the shoichet, the ritual slaughterer in Poland or in Russia or in God-knows-where who hadn't been heard from with his family since the end of the war, the defeat of the Germans and the Japanese, and the liberation of the concentration camps in Europe.

          Finally, he sank into a seat much closer to me, away from his Talmudic tractate, and spoke softly.

          "It is time you should know that your father, the melamed, the teacher, does not know everything. I don't know. I don't know. Ask other people smarter than me. Ask your Hebrew teachers. Ask your English teachers. Ask goyim. Ask the world for an answer. I don't have any answers."

***

          Big Red was the first guy I asked. He came by to visit us the following Sunday with his wife Aunt Geety who was not really my aunt but my cousin. She was much younger than my mother who was her aunt. In spite of the difference in their ages, Aunt Geety had given birth to her first child, a girl, almost at the same time that my mother had given birth to her ill-fated baby daughter. Aunt Geety and Big Red came visiting without their baby. Big Red's mother was taking care of the baby elsewhere for the hour or two of the visit.

          "Why didn't you bring the baby?" my mother asked.

          Aunt Geety caressed my mother who had brought her up during her teen years when she lived at our house. She said nothing.

          "You didn't wanna hurt me," my mother said.

          Aunt Geety nodded.

          "Next time," my mother said, "bring the child."

          Big Red winked to me, and I followed him out the door just as he was telling the others that he and I would be taking a stroll. I went willingly because I didn't really care to hang around in our apartment. Aunt Geety didn't look like Aunt Geety anymore. She looked like she was still pregnant and hadn't as yet given birth. She was very fat and lumpy, and her face was blubbery with many chins and a disappearing neck. She just wasn't the beautiful Aunt Geety whom I once loved when I was a kid. And she hardly looked at me, as if she didn't recognize me, or maybe because I had grown so much and had become a man.

          "Why does God let children and babies die?" I asked Big Red as we pounded down the four flights of stairs to the candy store below.

          Big Red took off the yarmulke that he wore whenever he came to visit my parents. I kept mine on my head. Big Red looked inside the candy store and waved to Vinnie who came out from behind the counter to slap him on the back. Big Red was too tall for fat little Vinnie, and the owner's slaps on the back almost hit Big Red in the tush. Nobody else was in the store, none of Big Red's old friends from his hanging-around days, so after Vinnie and Big Red had talked about this and that, we moved on towards Avenue C and the Sunday morning pushcarts that stretched all along on both sides of the street as far as the eye could see.

          "Why does God kill little babies? " I asked again.

          Big Red shrugged. "Those are the breaks a the game," he said.

          "That's no answer," I said.

          "Sure it's an answer," he said. "You want everything in life to happen just the way you want it? Who are you? Who am I? I married the best-lookin' broad on the block, for her sake I quit the mob and only do a little loan-sharkin' on the side in Brooklyn to make a decent living, and now we got a kid, and I hafta get a regular nine-to-five job that'll kill me, and my wife looks like a tub. That's the way the cookie crumbles. I'm a man and I gotta take it. You a man?"

          I knew there was no sense arguing with Big Red. He had his mind made up. But it didn't satisfy me one bit.

          Big Red bought a bat from a pushcart peddler and also a used indoor baseball, a softball that is, which was bigger than the hardball major leaguers played with. We headed back to the park and went to the basketball courts that were set up in the dry swimming pool. Big Red talked a bunch of guys into a softball game. He already had the bat and the ball, and he volunteered to be the umpire. Most of the guys willing to play baseball were Puerto Ricans who had recently arrived and settled on the Lower East Side of New York and spoke almost no English. Big Red didn't speak any Spanish except to imitate the words "mira, mira," which we heard all the time around us. But he wanted a game-I think a game for me-or maybe a game to remind himself of old times when he hung out at the candy store and played ball with Vigdor Grossman and Mugger Wojehowicz and other guys who weren't on an errand for the mob. So he communicated with the Spanish guys in one way or another and got them to come with him. We all marched out of the pool area into the baseball field. Big Red made me play with them. I didn't want to, not because I didn't like the guys, but because they were too good for me. Boy could they field! I was an amateur compared to them. But I played anyway to please Big Red.

          It was only a three-inning game, but since each side scored quite a few runs, almost everybody got at least two times at bat. In fact, I came up for the third time in the bottom half of the last inning with two outs and the bases loaded and our team a run behind. Big Red called a ball on me that should have been a strike. It gave me extra time to settle down at the plate. I hit a dinky ground ball between second and third. The shortstop moved to his right and should have easily tossed out the runner at third on a forced play to end the game. He had done that twice before. He was the only player on both teams to use a major-league glove that he carried around with him all the time. The other guys fielded with bare hands. The glove should have made it even easier for him to make the routine play. But in his haste to get to the ball, the glove suddenly dropped from his hand down to the concrete. My high-bouncing grounder hit the leathery glove on the ground and skittered off without another bounce under the shortstop's straining hand into the left field corner. The guy on third scored easily, and the guy on second came prancing in with the winning run, and I was credited with a game-winning single, my only hit. The other players on my team mobbed me as if I had hit the ball over the fence and broken a window on the second floor of the school across the street from the park.

          "Happy, kiddo?" Big Red asked me on our way home. I didn't say anything.

          "Sure you're happy," he added. "When the breaks a the game go your way, you're happy. And you don't even question it. Why did the breaks come your way? You don't ask. You take what you can get. That's life. You only question it when the breaks go against you. I don't question it either way. So be happy, and forget everything else."

          "I'm not so happy," I said. "That shortstop got a rotten break. He's a much better ballplayer than I am. He didn't deserve it. It's unfair."

          Big Red stopped in his tracks at the base of the stairs leading up to our fourth-floor apartment.

          "I can't believe this kid. He got the weight of the whole world on his shoulders. You think Johnny Mize and Ralph Kiner who each hit 51 homers this year cried into their beer when the wind suddenly picked up a routine fly ball a theirs and pushed it into the stands? Not on your life."

          "God should have cried," I said. "If God kills innocent baby children, then He's acting just like a Hitler who killed a million and a half children in the Holocaust."

          Big Red's face suddenly became deathly pale. "Don't talk that way," he said. "Maybe I ain't religious and I don't know how to davin, to say all them prayers in Hebrew, but you don't see me talkin' that way. God is God and the bastard Hitler was Hitler. Don't put them two together in the same sentence. You should be ashamed a yourself. Poo poo."

          And he actually spit at the bottom of the stairs. When Aunt Geety came to kiss me goodbye, I drew back a little, and she seemed to be disturbed by my resistance. As for Big Red, he didn't even want to shake my hand. My quest for the truth was pushing me into making enemies, even among my very own relatives, which I didn't really intend to do. Who could understand all of the consequences in this world?

***

          Mr. Spring, my ninth-grade English and French teacher in school, was the second person not counting my father that I asked. He was a tiny man with three strands of jet black hair that he brushed sideways on his head to cover up the center baldness, and he also wore a skimpy mustache over buck teeth that made him look, not like Hitler, but like a Japanese diplomat.

          Once, after seeing a rerun at a local movie theater of How Green Was My Valley, I had asked Mr. Spring what he thought of the film.

          "Sentimental slush," he said, which shocked me. I had rather liked the movie, especially Maureen O'Hara. I thought perhaps Mr. Spring was put off by the mushy parts involving love and the women in the movie. Not so.

          "The minister gets the crippled little boy to walk," he sneered. "Tear-jerking baloney, that's what it was. Stay away from the movies."

          He sounded like the rabbis who hated all the movies, but for a different reason.

          "Don't addle your brain with that pap," Mr. Spring said. "Read, read. Read good stuff. You want to read about a boy growing up? Forget Wales and How Green Was My Valley. Read Joyce's Portrait of the Artist. Read Rolland's Jean Christophe. You're a musician, aren't you? You play the piano. That novel is really about Beethoven. Read books like that by great writers who are also touched by music."

          Mr. Spring's opinions seemed so very daring to me. He was a real cynic. I was surprised that there was anything he liked. For a while, I wanted to have opinions just like him, but I hadn't read enough to know what I liked and what I disliked or why. But since Mr. Spring mentioned the minister in How Green Was My Valley, I decided that he was the one to be asked the question.

          "Why does God allow babies and innocent little children to die?" I asked him one rainy afternoon after school. Mr. Spring didn't like the rain. He didn't have a car and went home every afternoon by subway. And since it was a long walk to the subway station on Second Avenue even if he took the First Avenue entrance, he normally hung around school after class and dawdled with books and things until the heavy rain stopped. That's when I collared him after school hours.

          "Are you sure," he said slowly, "that God is responsible for these things?"

          "God is responsible for everything."

          "Is He responsible," Mr. Spring asked slowly, measuring his words, "for your asking me this question?"

          I said yes.

          "Then if God is responsible for your asking me this question, then God is responsible for whatever answer I give you."

          "So?"

          "So, consider the inevitable consequence. If God is responsible for my answer, then He undoubtedly won't put an answer into my brain and mouth that casts doubt upon God's goodness. So how can you trust my answer? I'm God's mouthpiece. I defend Him like a crooked lawyer who knows his client is guilty but can't say it. In other words, there's no sense asking me this question. You're going to get God's defensive answer, not mine. I'm a corrupt witness."

          My head was swimming. I tried to follow Mr. Spring's words. They were complicated and twisting. His face was wreathed in a smile, his buck teeth protruding between thin lips under his black mustache, as if he had won a contest.

          "Let's go back," I said. "I changed my mind. The answer is no. God is not responsible for every question I ask. He gives human beings the right to think for themselves and to do good or bad by themselves. Rabbi Akiva said that everything is in the hands of heaven except the fear of heaven. That means that we make the choices. You can choose what answer to give, to defend God or to condemn God. You alone."

          Mr. Spring was clearly taken aback by my passion. His smile narrowed, his buck teeth disappearing over lips that grew and grew and covered them completely. The contest was not yet over.

          Your rabbi teachers in afternoon Hebrew School and probably your father have really fortified you with the goods," he said. "I don't want to contradict them. That's dangerous stuff for me. I'm a public junior-high-school teacher. There are limits to what I can say to students. Go home and read everything. Read Spinoza, read Bergson, read T.S. Eliot, read André Gide."

          "You can say anything you want to me, Mr. Spring," I said boldly, "I won't tell anybody."

          At that moment Mr. Yochnowitz, the social studies teacher, walked into the room. He looked at the two of us and cleared his throat.

          "Tell the kid to get lost," he said. "My wife just came by in the car. We'll give you a ride to the subway."

          Mr. Spring hesitated.

          "What gives here?" Mr. Yochnowitz growled. He wasn't much taller than Mr. Spring, but he was twice as wide, like a football tackle. His neck seemed wider than Mr. Spring's chest from shoulder to shoulder. "Are you molesting this snotnose? Is Mr. Spring molesting you, Sonny?"

          "No, sir," I said. "We're discussing literature and-and religion."

          "Just as I thought!" Mr. Yochnowitz howled. "That's molestation. Nothing less. Leave the kid alone. Sonny, don't listen to this atheist over here. How the Inquisition ever missed him I'll never figure out. He should have been burned at the stake long ago."

          Mr. Yochnowitz guffawed with such power that he blew some pencils off Mr. Spring's desk. Mr. Spring bent down to pick them up at the same time that I did from my seat near the desk. He spoke to me quickly and softly from underneath the table.

          "If God is not responsible for your question or for my answer," he whispered, "then maybe He has given up responsibility for a lot of other things in this world-like the death of little children."

          "I heard that! I heard that!" Mr. Yochnowitz screamed. "God is responsible for everything in this world except your miserable sophistry. Stop taking advantage of a little kid, you pederast!"

          "He's not a little kid anymore," Mr. Spring said as he followed Mr. Yochnowitz out the door. "Read Keats. Listen to Beethoven's Eroica, to Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps. Look at Picasso's Guernica. You're not a little kid anymore."

          Actually, I was taller than he was. He pinched my cheek as he passed by. Ordinarily, I would have been annoyed because my mother's friends pinched my cheek pretty often when I was a kid, but not this time. Not this time.

***

          I was at the point of losing my childish high alto voice that had put me into Beril Braverman's symphonic liturgical choir, and Beril made it clear to me that I would not be singing anymore for the High Holidays. But every now and then, he did call on me to sing alto at a Saturday night or Sunday evening wedding because it was harder and harder for him to get kid singers on those nights.

          When I started, he had paid my mother fifty cents per wedding for my services and a dollar fifty if I sang a solo, compared to a big twenty-five bucks for the two days of Rosh Ha-Shanah and the one day of Yom Kippur. By the time I was losing my voice, I was getting a dollar a wedding without singing a solo which wasn't much of an inducement to the other kids.

          But it was different for our family. We were still living on the Lower East Side in a tenement apartment walk-up on the fourth floor. My father was still a teacher of Talmud in the local Yeshiva and received a very low salary. At least twice, the teachers had actually gone on strike-not for higher pay, but to get paid. The Yeshiva had delayed paying their salaries for several months. The strike didn't help much.

          My mother, meanwhile, had given up being the janitor of our building because she wasn't strong enough anymore for the tasks she was expected to accomplish, maybe because she was pregnant again with the pregnancy that led to the ill-fated birth. This meant that my parents now had to pay full rent for our apartment, and it wasn't easy. So I sang at two or three weddings each week and delivered Women's Wear Daily during the summer months to the doors of garment-industry firms and did some other odd jobs for local merchants that brought a few extra bucks into the house. My newspaper-delivery job took place long before that particular paper began to be sent by mail, making delivery boys a thing of the past.

          There was no sense asking my question of anybody in the choir. Every one of the older men-the four male sopranos, the bass, and the tenor-were only interested in copping a few free drinks and some food at the smorgasbord that preceded our participation in the wedding ceremony. The boy altos-three, sometimes four others besides myself-who were almost my age, went chasing around the floor sneaking looks at the girls with real low décolletage and sometimes befriending teenage kids by claiming they were sixteen or seventeen years old. On several occasions, they even sneaked off with a few girls to an empty ballroom in another part of the wedding-hall building and played kissing games with them and felt them up. I didn't join them in these escapades though I sometimes wanted to. My father would have frowned on such behavior. He often assured me that the parents of all these kids had not brought them up correctly and had not taught them Torah and tzneeoos which meant modesty and the proper morality.

          But I did ask Mrs. Braverman who had long since stopped fooling around with me and touching me. I think she was having an affair with the tenor in our choir who wasn't a religious man. In fact, nobody in our choir was religious except me. They sang sacred texts at Jewish weddings and in shuls all over the city on holidays and special Sabbaths, but it was only a job to them. In fact, I don't think they really loved music. They considered me a double nut because I was still religious and because I took lessons in classical piano.

          On the subway train one Sunday evening on the way to a wedding hall, Beril Braverman got into a conversation with a seated passenger who was studying a musical score. Beril called me over from my seat and introduced me to the stranger.

          "This kid here," he said to the stranger, "is my prize alto soloist and the music expert in our choir. He knows every piece of classical music. Try him out. Show him your score."

          The man showed me the sheet music. It was a vocal score of some songs by Mahler.

          "I don't know Mahler's music," I said. Beril was clearly disappointed in me. "I don't think he wrote piano music, and I play the piano."

          "Do you play Chopin?" the stranger asked.

          "Yes, I do. I've played some études, especially Opus 10, #3, and some waltzes, but not the Minute Waltz. I'm now working on one of the Scherzos. It's very hard."

          Beril Braverman beamed at me and at the old man with his score.

          "Chopin was Polish, you know," the old man said.

          I nodded.

          "And Mahler was Jewish," the old man continued.

          I nodded again, though I really didn't know for sure even though the composer's name Mahler sounded very much like mine which was Mehler.

          "The Jews in Germany," the stranger proceeded, "and the Jews in Austria, Vienna, like Mahler, produced great music. They were cultured people. I'm not Jewish, but I'm the first to admit it. But the Jews in Poland were only religious fanatics and finagling people, very dirty. They spit in their beards. They didn't produce anything worthwhile. There was no Jewish Chopin among the Poles. They're gone now. No great loss to culture. They were not like you, my young man."

          I turned away from the stranger and went back to my seat next to Mrs. Braverman. She and Mr. Braverman still shepherded me everywhere, just as they had promised my parents they would do when they had hired me for the first time when I was eight years old, never letting me go alone even though I was traveling alone to all other places for a long time now. It bothered me a little as I got older, but I tolerated it because Mr. and Mrs. Braverman had no children-the choir was their whole life-and I was like their substitute child. This time I didn't feel like a child. I turned to Mrs. Braverman in anger.

          "The sonofabitch!" I said. It shocked her. She had never heard me use such language before. "The war is long over, but it never ends," I added. "The bad guys are still around. So why did God kill little children in the death camps built by the Nazis in Poland? Why did He let the bastards do their dirty work? Why little children?"

          Mrs. Braverman began to cry. She never gave me an answer. She just cried, and I put my arm around her big fat body and comforted her.

***

          I didn't go to any of my Hebrew teachers with the question because they were modern teachers, Zionists all of them, and they weren't really interested in religion. They preferred to talk about the United Nations Partition Resolution which gave the Jewish community in Palestine the right to proclaim an independent Jewish state. They had been dreaming about this all their lives, and they had been teaching us Hebrew, the modern living language, to prepare us kids for life in the Jewish state that had just miraculously come to pass. They were nationalists, most of them socialists, not really religious, in some cases anti-religious, and they grew impatient with questions about God and religion.

          So I became very courageous and went to the old rebby in the street-level store on Stanton Street who years before had given me a beating with a kantchik, a multi-strapped rod, and to whom my mother refused to send me anymore for religious studies whether my father liked it or not.

          The old rabbi was still plying his trade, teaching those youngsters who would not go to my father's Yeshiva because it was a school that took up the full day until seven in the evening or to the local Zionist Hebrew School because some of the religious folk in the area said it wasn't religious enough. He looked just as old as he had looked when I was his student-a hundred years at least. Or so it seemed. I froze when I saw the kantchik on the wall-that hadn't changed either-but I was older now, taller, stronger, and I think smarter. I was not afraid. If I could stand toe to toe with Mr. Spring, I could do the same with Reb Itzik.

          I came after his last class and introduced myself. Reb Itzik made as if he didn't recognize me and as if he didn't remember who I was. But when I mentioned my father's name, he rose in respect for my father's scholarship and bade me to continue speaking.

          "I have a question that's been bothering me," I said. "My mother gave birth to a little baby girl that died within two weeks after birth in the hospital. I want to know why God allows little babies to die. God is just. Hitler was evil. God cannot do Hitler's work. Why did my little sister die?"

          Reb Itzik opened a holy book on his side of the desk. Then he opened another. Then he began to sing a wordless tune. "Deedle, deedle, dai. Deedle, deedle, dai." He opened two more books without closing the others. His eyes roved from book to book to book to book, singing all the time, humming when he stopped singing.

          "Do you mean older children or just your sister?" he asked.

          "I mean all babies who couldn't have sinned. I know not to ask about older people because everybody sins and because of our sins we were exiled from our land it says in the yontiff musaf prayer, so there's no sense asking about sinful people because you're gonna say that if they suffer they should examine their own actions to see where they sinned and why God brought the suffering on them and if they get killed in a hurricane or an airplane crash then their relatives have to ask the same question, but I'm asking about little babies and children who never sinned. Why do they die before their time? Why does God kill them?"

          I was breathless-I had to get it out fast. Reb Itzik closed all four books. He spoke slowly.

          "The Medrish Tanchuma brings that when the Holy One Blessed Be He was about to give the Holy Toirih to the Jewish people, He asked for a guarantee that the people would obey the laws of the Toirih and not do sins. The Jewish people offered their forefathers as the guarantee, the pledge. But Der Eibishter, the Eternal One, said that even the forefathers could not be a fit guarantee because they sinned and sometimes showed lack of faith. So the people offered the prophets of Israel, but the Riboinih Shel Oilim, the Lord of the World, would not take the prophets either. They also were sinners in their time. Then the people of Israel offered their children. They brought their babies to the mountain, even those who were not yet born, and the Boirih Nifushis gave all the babies the power of speech. 'I'm ready to give the Toirih to your parents now and in the distant future till the Messiah comes,' the Creator said to all the children who would be born from then to eternity. 'Will you pledge that your parents will keep all the laws and do nothing but good in this world and be repentant when they make a mistake and beg forgiveness and not do evil ever again?' The children of all generations then and in the future made such a pledge on their lives. So when Israel violates the Toirih, the Lord of Justice demands return of the pledge. The prophet Hoisheiyih says so in Syfer Try-Ooser, The Book of Minor Prophets: 'Seeing that you have forgotten the law of your God, I also will forget your children.' That's what's written in the Holy Books."

          I didn't say a word. I kept quiet for a long long time.

          "I beg of you, I beg of you," Reb Itzik said all of a sudden, "sleechih and m'cheelih for-for hitting you that time. I beg of you a third time for forgiveness. I have not been able to sleep."

          I nodded my head vigorously to show that it was okay, that I hadn't thought of it for a long time. But it wasn't enough. Reb Itzik wanted me to say the words.

          "Ich bin eich moichl," I finally said. "I forgive you."

          Reb Itzik sighed in relief. "God is good," he said. "May my little grandchildren, born and unborn, live and be well."

***

          I met a girl in the library on Houston Street whom I had seen both in public school and in Hebrew school without ever saying a word to her. She had strands of hair over her forehead that I think they called bangs and bright red cheeks as if she had just come from the park and a game of paddle tennis. Somehow we got to talking. I guess she began talking to me in the literature section of the library when she saw that I had taken a book of poetry by Keats off the shelf.

          "Boys don't read poems," she said.

          And that got it started. Her name was Sarah and she was a grade below me in both schools. She said that she had seen me before too.

          "I saw you talking to Mr. Spring and to Mr. Yochnowitz after school the other day," she said. "Are you the teacher's pet?"

          "Mr. Spring is my favorite teacher," I said. "I was asking him a question about religion."

          "What question?"

          "A question. I ask him a lot of things. He's a smart man."

          "Did he give you an answer?"

          "Not really."

          I liked the way she looked at me from her book on the other side of the library table without raising her head. She just raised her eyes. They were very very big. I would have wanted her to raise her head a little so I could see some more of her, but I settled for her big eyes.

          "What question?" she asked again. Her voice was low.

          "A question about things like the Holocaust and Hitler and stuff like that."

          "Oh," she said. She raised her head as if she now understood it all. "That's why Mr. Yochnowitz was there. He's a good history teacher, and the Holocaust and Hitler are in history."

          "Mr. Yochnowitz wasn't involved in the discussion," I said.

          "So it wasn't a history question. Look," she said, "if you don't wanna tell then you don't have to." And she turned to her book.

          "I asked why God lets little children die during childbirth or in accidents when they didn't do anything. If God is just, God shouldn't be allowing a Hitler to make a Holocaust of children."

          Sarah screwed up her lips in a way that showed she was thinking.

          "Then you don't believe in God. If there is no God, then there doesn't have to be a reason for children dying. They just die by accident, like many other people."

          "I didn't say I didn't believe in God." I was disturbed by her accusation, but I couldn't take my eyes off her. She wore a blouse with a V neck and a Star of David around her neck and hanging down.

          "I didn't say that," I repeated.

          "So what you really mean is if there is a God and if God is good, then how come little children die?"

          "Yeah, that's it," I said. "You got it right."

          A librarian came by and told us to be quiet. She looked like a witch, and I didn't want to tussle with her. I put the Keats book back on the shelf. Sarah put her book back too. I walked out of the library and sat on the concrete slabs that framed the library steps. Sarah came too. I told her that I felt like taking a walk to the East River Drive to look at the water below the Williamsburg Bridge. She nodded. We walked together, saying nothing at all to each other. When we got there, the lights were on, I mean the field lights in the dance area, and older people were doing folk dancing with music on loudspeakers from a record player. They were dancing a Neapolitan tarantella. It was lively. We walked pretty far away from the music and the dancing and the lights. In the shadows near the bridge, we could see couple after couple sitting on the benches opposite the river in the dark and necking. We sneaked looks at them as the couples coiled into each other. They were older too. We were too young for that. We just hung over the railing at riverside and followed the ripples in the water from distant boats that occasionally cruised by. It almost reminded me of Tashlich on the first day of Rosh Ha-Shanah when my mother and father and kid brother Noosin and I would come to the same spot in the afternoon and say prayers of repentance and throw crumbs of bread into the river to symbolize throwing our sins away. I wondered if kissing and hugging Sarah and feeling her up was a sin. It's a question I wouldn't ask Reb Itzik or my father or even Mr. Spring. There was no point asking Big Red because he used to do that stuff all the time with Aunt Geety before he married her when he took me with them to Central Park or Prospect Park. He once used to be a hoodlum, a mob member, and he did everything. So I would have to answer that question for myself some day.

          "So let's say just for argument's sake," Sarah said, "that there is a God and that God is just and God is good. Let's also say that God decided to give us human beings the choice of believing in God or not believing in God, a kind of test. Is that okay with you? Nothing terribly wrong with that even though it may seem funny that God needs to have believers, but that's His business. Okay?"

          "Okay," I said in great surprise.

          "Now let's say," she continued, the large whites of her eyes and her flaming cheeks lighting up the dark river edge, "that because God is just and God is good, He makes it that no child ever dies. All the children live. An airplane crashes-only the bad people die. All the children on the plane live. A car crashes. The little children live. Only sinful adults die. No child can ever die. They all live until the grow up and do wrong things. Then maybe they die. Is that a problem?"

          I didn't know what to say. I couldn't believe that this girl who was one grade below me in public school and in Hebrew school was saying all this stuff.

          "Yes, it's a big problem," Sarah said without really waiting for me to say anything which I wasn't going to say anyway. "Everybody in the world would automatically know that there is a good God in the universe and that they have to be good. No more test. No more choices for human beings to believe in God or not to believe in God, to follow the rules to be good or not to follow. There can't be a test anymore if we all know that all the little children always live."

          I had never heard anybody speak like that, not even Mr. Spring or the principal of the Hebrew School, not any guy or girl my age or even older. I would have liked to kiss her, but I hadn't yet decided if fooling around was a sin or not, and I certainly wasn't going to ask her that question.

***

          "Why did our baby sister die?" my kid brother Noosin asked me one day. We were in the park, and I was watching him. He was already in school, and he knew how to read. I didn't answer.

          "Will I die also?" Noosin asked.

          "Not soon," I said. "Only when you're a very old man."

          Noosin began tracing the foul lines on the softball field where nobody was playing at the time. I was on the parallel bars that were in foul territory along the first-base line. Noosin crawled on his hands and knees down the foul line all the way to the right field fence and then all the way back to me. He strolled over to me, his bare knees below his short pants scuffed and even a little bloody, the palms of his hands very dirty. My mother would be very angry with me for letting Noosin mess himself up though she wouldn't raise her voice in anger. Noosin walked up to my chest just as I dropped down from doing dips on the parallel bars.

          "How do you know I'll die only when I'm an old man?" he said. "You're not God."

***

          "I'm not interested in any answers," said my piano teacher Mr. Edelstein. "I don't want to know the answers to the death of children. No answer, no matter how smart, will satisfy me. I ran away from Berlin in 1933 soon after conducting my first performance at the Deutches Oper. My career in Germany ended almost when it began. The family I left behind I never saw again-my parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, cousins, old people, little children. Who wants answers? God has to answer to God. He doesn't have to answer to me. Human beings will have to answer to human beings. And human beings of good will can react only as human beings do-through art. Gustav Mahler who was a Jew for part of his life read and loved the poetry of Friedrich Rückert. Two of Rückert's children died in childhood from scarlet fever, and Rückert wrote hundreds of poems in his sorrow. Mahler who lived much later had about a dozen brothers and sisters, and seven of them died in infancy, some also from scarlet fever. One brother whom he loved very much died at age fourteen. It crushed him."

          I stirred in my seat at the piano where I wasn't playing a note.

          "Did I mention that Gustav Mahler set five of Rückert's memorial poems to music? He called the work Kindertotenlieder, Songs on the Death of Children, written for a singer and orchestra. The words give the impression that a bereaved father is speaking even though a woman can also sing the song cycle. In one of them, the father sees the child's beautiful eyes which upon death will be nur Sterne, only stars in the sky to him. In another song, the father says that when the child's mother comes into the room, he doesn't look first on his dear wife's face but on the place where the little child's face used to be when the child was alive and following the mother into the room, where the child used to enter Wie sonst, mein Tochterlein, as usual, my little daughter. If a brother like you was the writer of the poem, not a father, the singer would sing, my little sister. The death of children can never wither from the memory. The death of children can never be explained by God to human beings in an explanation that we could accept. The death of children can only be absorbed through the consolation of art, through the words of a poet like Rückert and the divine music of a Mahler. Make art, young man. Make music. Make poetry. Make stories. Don't look so much for logical answers. Art is the only answer."

           ---------------

          Big Red and Aunt Geety came to visit again on the Sunday after the Sunday of my baseball game with Big Red's pickup team. This time they brought along the new baby girl, my cousin.

          "Feel a little better this week, Uncle?" Big Red asked my father, adjusting the yarmulke to his own shock of red hair at the same time. When my father didn't answer, Big Red added: "Not that anybody can feel good these days. You and Auntie suffered enough."

          My father turned his remark aside with a wave of his hand. "Eeyif hutt gelitten mehr fin meer," he said.

          "What did he say?" Big Red whispered to me.

          "He said that Job in the Jewish Bible suffered more than he did."

          "Is that Hebrew he said?" Big Red asked.

          "No, Yiddish."

          My father turned to us both. "What are you two whispering about? If it's worth saying, it's worth hearing by everybody."

          That was my father's teaching voice, I'm sure-words he probably used frequently to students in his classes. But in this case, Big Red jumped in, ostensibly to protect me. "The kid was makin' a survey of what people think about God and-and-good people sufferin'. Is God doin' the right thing? I mean to little children, when they suffer, or when they-when they suffer the-the most."

          My father turned to me and cleared out his ear with the index finger of his left hand. That meant that he was suspicious. I knew the signs. We were sitting in the kitchen drinking coffee and tea and for me milk, and the two women, my mother and my Aunt Geety her niece, and the baby were in the living room. The light streamed in from a corner window that faced an empty lot. Sometimes, in the spring, we cleaned out all the garbage from the lot, set up bases, and played punchball. It was easier than playing stickball in the street among the parked cars and traffic moving briskly much of the time.

          So you made a survey, tachshitl, my son." My father didn't sound like he liked the idea that he himself had set in motion. "Who did you ask?" he continued. "What did they say? Did they reveal to you the unrevealable? Who gave you wisdom?"

          "I asked Reb Itzik," I said. I didn't intend telling him about anyone else because everyone else would have made a bad impression on him. I certainly didn't want to tell my father that I even talked to my kid brother Noosin about it even though it was Noosin who really brought up the subject. My father seemed quite surprised by my mentioning the name of the elderly teacher.

          "Reb Itzik? He's a misnahgid. He doesn't like Chaseedim. He's too rigid. Once he-he-" my father broke off in mid-sentence. Perhaps he didn't want to remind me of the old beating with the kantchik. Perhaps he didn't want to speak ill of a man behind his back so many years later. That was looshin hawrih, the language of evil, and my father tried to avoid such inclinations most of the time.

          "What did he say?" my father asked again.

          I told my father the Medrish Tanchuma that Reb Itzik almost quoted by heart-God's refusal to accept the patriarchs and the prophets as guarantees for giving the Torah to the people of Israel, His acceptance of the offer of the children as pledges because they were sinless, and His demand of the penalty when the people of Israel violate the Torah, as written in the prophecy of Hosea."

          My father jumped to his feet and almost knocked over his glass of tea and Big Red's coffee mug. My father screamed in a way I had never heard him scream before. He was a wounded animal, at once a bleating sheep and a roaring lion.

          "Chilul Ha-Shem!" he screamed. "Desecration of God's Name! God isn't cruel. What do these rebelach know? They are half-learned and half-ignorant. They latch on to a Medrish, they leave out the last lines of the Medrish, they-they-you know what the last lines are in the Medrish? You know what? That God then says that He also is so unhappy for the little children because the parents did not teach them Toirih. This shows that the Medrish was not speaking about newly born babies who cannot as yet learn, but about big boys and girls a little below Bar-Mitzvah age who are not taught Toirih and the right way of living. Then the children suffer because of the sins of the parents. That's an entirely different thing. Isn't that true in life? If the parents don't bring up the children properly, the children suffer. What does a dardikih melamed, a teacher of 'A-B-C,' know except to twist a Medrish upside down and to be rigid and cruel in his interpretation, as if Medrish is law. He knows only to hurt the oovel, the mourner, instead of to comfort. He knows only Elokim, the God of justice, but he doesn't know Ha-Shem Yisborach of rachamim, the God of mercy."

          My father repeated the word "rachamim," which also meant "pity" in Hebrew over and over again, his voice cracking, close, very close to tears. The only other time I had ever seen my father close to tears was when the Joint Distribution Committee told him two years after the war that there was no living record of his brother, the shoichet of Radom, and his brother's wife and children, among the remnant that escaped the gas chambers in Europe and the Holocaust of the Jews or even among the holy dead.

          My father's words were so loud in the beginning and then so distraught that even Big Red jumped out of his seat in amazement. His yarmulke fell to the floor, and he picked it up quickly and reset it on his head. Then he moved to my father's side and shushed him, trying hard to quiet him down.

          "Reb Mehler, Uncle," Big Red said to my father, "don't yell so much. Cry, but don't yell. Think of the ladies out there. Those are the breaks a the game. You can cry, you can cry. The kid tells me that God is cryin' too. It's permitted to cry."

          Then Big Red turned to me. I had retreated to the far reaches of the kitchen. I had never seen my father this way.

          "Run to the ladies!" the big guy with the flaming red hair called out to me desperately. "They'll be terrified by all the yelling."

          My father wasn't actually yelling anymore. His last few words had frittered away into breathless gulps and gasps as if he were sobbing. First I also worried along with Big Red that my mother and Aunt Geety who was really my mother's niece would be shocked by all the screaming. But then I worried that my mother in the living room would hear my father crying and would become disturbed for him and maybe disturbed herself.

          I ran into the living room in our railroad flat, but I did not see the two women. I looked around for a moment or two, foolishly wondering where they could be. Then I moved straight through the room to the door of the bedroom. I entered the bedroom without knocking, something I never did with my parents. Aunt Geety was there, sitting on the bed, her heavy body down on the spring mattress, her legs dangling over the side facing my mother, apparently not conscious at all of the yelling and crying that had been going on two rooms away. My mother was seated in the adjoining chair-a sofa-like upholstered chair and a very comfortable one too-a look of almost joyful acceptance upon her face as she caressed the tiny little baby, holding her beautiful grandniece close close to her motherly breast.