The stranger

A short story.

By CYRIL SHERER
Dr. Cyril B. Sherer (photo credit: Courtesy)
Dr. Cyril B. Sherer
(photo credit: Courtesy)
Editor’s note: Before he died in Jerusalem at the age of 97 on December 4, Dr. Cyril Sherer sent in the following story to be published in “The Jerusalem Report.” We publish it here, with love, in memory of a wonderful physician, writer and human being.
When my doctor’s office was closed, the phone would switch through to my house. I enjoyed taking calls, they gave me a preview of the person behind the voice, valuable information about someone whom I’d shortly meet. Every voice is revealing, each in its own way. It would tell me about nationality, dialect, physique – tall or short, thin or fat, personality, demanding or submissive, educated or otherwise, easy to get to know or difficult. Especially in treating tourists where contact was very important, this was always an advantage. Over the years, my batting average improved to somewhere over fifty percent.
One day I took a call from a man speaking French, in which I’m reasonably fluent. So why was this voice different from all other voices? This was unusual French, it was elitist, used by highly educated, literate people, who took care to pronounce every syllable carefully. They gave the language the respect it deserved, every consonant spoken the way Arthur Rubinstein plays Beethoven, when every note is given its value from one bar to another thus producing a subtext, as did the caller. When the caller wanted so say “because” he said, in French in single syllables, “Par-ce-que.” Frenchmen normally don’t speak that way. They slur, especially Parisians who say “Passque.”
I knew this one was different. I tried, as I always did, to persuade him to come to my clinic. He said, in a firm, if slightly commanding, way he wanted “une visite à domicile” (a house call). I had to agree.
He was a guest at the King David Hotel, close to my home. I recognized his room number as one of the choicest in the hotel, with a beautiful view of the Old City Wall, built by the Turkish Sultan at the time, Suleiman the Great. The quality of the room matched his voice. I knocked, if not too loudly. I was not surprised at the man who appeared; he fitted his voice.
He greeted me with a gracious wave, his left arm moving from the shoulder. He invited me in..
We exchanged business cards. His was very elegant, beige with brown borders, engraved printing, reading:
M. Jean-Jacques DuBois
Ancien Professeur de littérature du 18 ème siècle
Université Paris-Sorbonne, Faculté des lettres
Mine was simpler. We don’t have engraved print in Israel. At least mine was made of grained paper.
He looked as elegant as his card. He wore a beige cashmere sweater with initials, dark brown pants and highly polished brown shoes: graying hair neatly coiffed over his ears and his neck, à la française, with a faint aura of aftershave perfume. His appearance was something between casual and careful.
I asked what his problem was. “Je ressens une très grande fatigue,” he said, a generic term used in France which doesn’t correspond to the same word in English. In French it can mean anything from “I’m out of sorts” to “I’m so tired I can’t stand up.” Fortunately I knew enough colloquial French not to take him literally, or I would have asked him why he needed a house call for being fatigued. An Australian, asked the same question ,might say, “I’m crook.” “Where are you crook?” I’d say. “In me guts, Doc.” My present patient was slightly more precise, but not much. His French doctor would understand “grande fatigue,” as did I.
I examined him carefully. All vital signs, pulse and blood pressure, were normal. His lungs were clear, throat not inflamed, no palpable glands, liver normal. I still wondered about “la fatigue.” I asked him if he had had a temperature in the past few hours. Indeed he had. I asked him how high. “Trente-veet,” (38 Celsius), he replied. What he said sounded out of place. “Trente-veet?” I asked, questioningly – because of the pronunciation of the “V” – not the temperature which I could believe.. But the pronunciation didn’t fit the person. “Trente-huite” is normally-pronounced like “Trente-wheat” by the French, except for people from Eastern Europe, who cannot pronounce the consonant “W.” There is no such sound in Poland. Once more he said, “Trente-veet.”
Then I knew. I could not ask him again, but I allowed myself to raise one eyebrow, and I waited.
He paused, looking at me in a slightly different way. I could see he was thinking, his lips slightly pursed, his head moving up and down in a slow, pensive rhythm. A minute or two passed while we both stood silently. Then he said, “I see you know.” Gently, I said I thought I did. I didn’t want to hurt him; we were now on very sensitive ground – not part of my professional visit. Again he waited, as though inwardly questioning himself what to do next.
Finally he spoke. To my utter and complete surprise M. Jean-Jacques DuBois began to speak in fluent Yiddish, asking me if I understood him. “Ihr redt Mammaloschen?” he said, meaning did I speak the mother tongue. I did, from my childhood onwards. It was my second language. Yiddish being full of humor I tried to break the tension, “Nein, ober ich redt Bubbaloschen,” meaning it was not my mother tongue but my grandmother tongue, indicating where I had learned it, if with a vocabulary based entirely on food.
He laughed. We were connected.
He waved me to a couch “Zetsach avek. Ich vill dir dertzeilen a mayseh. Mein mayseh.” (Please sit down and I will tell you a story, my story.)
He looked down at the floor for a moment, then looked straight at me. His voice was soft. “I was not born with the name Jean-Jacques DuBois. I was Jacob Gutkind, known by the diminutive Yankel. I was born in Varshav (Warsaw), I studied in a yeshiva. I was 17 when the Germans invaded. My whole family was put in the Warsaw Ghetto. You will understand our conditions. Hungry, hopeless, our humanity taken away from us, we suffered for two years. In 1943 a group of fifty young men, myself included escaped through a disused sewer. We linked up with a group of partisans and for nearly two years we fought the Germans as best we could, sabotaging and killing. I saw and did many terrible things that a young man should not have to see or do. We lived off the land, always in fear of the Germans. When we met Poles, we never knew whether they would befriend us or betray us.
We were thin, but we kept fit. We exercised every day and, of course, walked endlessly. One day I was out with another young man foraging for food. We were friends, much the same age and appearance. We heard the sounds of people moving, we heard them speaking German. My friend and I rushed to the woods. He tripped over a fallen tree and lay dazed for a moment. He had no chance. The Germans shot him with their Schmeisser machine guns. They kept shooting for a long time, pouring bullets into his body. They laughed. I wanted to vomit but dared not make a sound. I breathed quietly. I lay there for hours after they left. I stayed in the ditch all night, shivering, trembling. I whispered the prayer “Shema Yisrael” (Hear, O Israel), as I thought I might die of exposure or be killed if the soldiers came back. But they didn’t, thank God, and as the sun rose I went over to my friend’s body. His face was frozen in shock; he must have died instantly. His body was riddled with dozens of bullet holes, shot for no reason after he died. Just brutish, animal behavior by the Germans. They took nothing from him except his pistol. I stayed long enough to take his water bottle, his bag of food, and his identity. Yes, he was Jean-Jacques DuBois, a young non-Jewish boy from a Communist family, fighting with the partisans for political reasons. I took his papers and left mine in his pocket. Jacob Gutkind was dead and I was Jean-Jacques DuBois from then on. It was safer.
I joined another partisan group. An underground forger tried to put my picture on the papers instead of his, but it had an official stamp over it and didn’t look right. So I got “new” papers and stayed with the group till the end of the war in 1945, when I made my way to Paris with a few of the other men, walking when we had to, riding on trains or trucks when we could. No one asked questions there. Hordes of refugees crowded the city. We survived on odd jobs. I worked in a restaurant washing dishes, the scraps of leftovers kept me alive. I found a more or less steady job with a coffin maker, who let me sleep in his workshop at nights. I never dared sleep in a coffin for warmth, for fear that someone would close a lid on me.
I learned that my entire family had died. I did not know when. I mastered the French language and studied it when I could. I bought or stole books on French literature from bookstalls on the Left Bank of the Seine and in two years managed, with the help of a friend, to enroll at the Sorbonne, working at odd jobs to pay my way. I earned money tutoring adolescents.
I was a good student. I loved my subject. I consistently got good marks. I was noticed by my teachers After graduating I became a junior lecturer, and gradually rose in the academic world, eventually becoming head of a department. I married a rich widow, and lived in a beautiful home in Neuilly, an upscale district in Paris. When she died some years later, I inherited the house, and a comfortable fortune.”
He took a sip of water, paused for a while and then said, “So what am I doing here in Jerusalem, after all that? Monsieur le Docteur, I will tell you after a rest.” He went to the phone and called room service, ordering tea and biscuits. He could have done this with supplies already in the room but it was not in character. He sipped his tea elegantly, dabbing his mouth with a napkin. He didn’t make crumbs as he ate a biscuit. I smiled. He asked me why. I said I was thinking of Yankele Gutkind in Warsaw, dipping his biscuit in the tea before eating. With a wry smile DuBois said, “That would only have been when we had biscuits. My father was a teacher in a Jewish day school. We were very poor.”
We sat a while and then he said, “Now I’ll tell you why I’m here. I came to say Kaddish for my family. I had never done so, ot even thought about it, I was so assimilated. A few nights ago in Paris, by chance I saw a program on TV with excerpts from Claude Lanzmann’s film “Shoah” (Holocaust). I was shocked beyond belief. I had seen parts of it before, but strange as it might sound I never thought it applied to me. Perhaps it was a face here or there; a scene or two in Warsaw, a comment by someone Lanzmann had interviewed, I don’t know what. But I was transported back. It was happening to me all over again. Memories recalled for the first time are the most vivid, as if they had just happened. They are never again so intense.
My soul was touched. I cried most of the night. I could not sleep. The faces of my dead parents and family seemed to speak to me. Was I dreaming? Hallucinating? I trembled with the thought that not only had I neglected their memory, I had disrespected it. I knew I must say Kaddish (a prayer said in memory of loved ones) as soon as possible. I could not do it in Paris. I had no connections and wouldn’t know where to go. There was only place. Jerusalem!
I booked an airline ticket, made reservations at the King David Hotel, and here I am. I knew I would meet someone who could help me find a minyan (a quorum of ten Jews necessary for this prayer), and I hope, my dear doctor, you will be the one to do this. Am I right?” His hand trembling slightly with emotion, he put down his cup and looked directly into my eyes, which by now were moist.
Having lived in Jerusalem for almost sixty years I no longer believe in chance or coincidence. Things happen here, which are too strange for reality. I felt that some unknown hand had guided me to him. I now had a religious duty to help a fellow Jew, a mitzvah (not just a good deed.) This is much more, a duty, a commandment from the Almighty – the word is derived from the Hebrew root “tzav.” I was commanded, as it were, to help him and I gladly did.
Also it so happened that I knew exactly the place for him.
Mea She’arim is a unique district in Jerusalem, separated by an invisible cultural wall, a kind of internal colony inhabited by extreme Orthodox Jews. It isn’t quite autonomous though, it observes rabbinic law according to the Jewish faith. Disputes are settled by a religious court of rabbis called the “Beit Din” rather than by civil law. People dress differently. Men wear long black coats, black hats with an outsize brim, ritual fringes outside their clothes, and sometimes wear the bottoms of their pants inside their socks, which differ in color according to the sect. Women dress modestly, skirts not too short, never pants. They wear thick stockings even in summer, heads always covered, mostly in black They marry young and have many children.
There are multiple houses of prayer and synagogues. The one I chose had no name. I had known it since my arrival in Jerusalem many years before. It was widely known for the fact that there were perpetual prayers, like an endless tape. It employed 10 elderly men so that one could be sure, morning till night, that one could say Kaddish. Women didn’t count in a minyan. I once had an Orthodox neighbor with a large family. When I asked him how many children he had, the answer was “Thirteen and one girl.”
 Jean-Jacques bought a black kippa (skullcap) at the hotel gift shop. I had mine. We took a taxi. We set out, not talking much. When we reached Mea She’arim and left the cab he seemed to change. He stooped a little as we walked. He greeted passersby not by saying “Shalom” as Israelis do, but “Shulim Aleychem” (Peace be unto you), using an old Eastern European accent. He was like a pigeon, swooping down into last year’s nest.
Small boys with long sidelocks, wearing Polish-style peaked caps ran after us. Seeing a well-dressed foreigner they begged for candy. He bought some at a little kiosk, distributing them to an ever-growing crowd. They followed us to our destination. The boys dispersed. What we entered, going down a few steps, was a small room lit by a single electric bulb hanging over a long table around which sat ten elderly white-bearded men, each hunched over a book, their bodies moving to and fro’ like the pendulum of a grandfather clock. A collective low-pitched murmur could be heard as they prayed. An old tradition says that the Angel of Death cannot take you while you are praying or studying the holy texts. They felt safe.
A wooden cupboard covered by an ancient curtain stood in a corner, facing east toward the site of the Second Temple. Bookshelves held prayer books and some larger volumes of the Talmud. The place was known as a shtiebel (a small room in Yiddish) It  smelled of dusty old books, tobacco, and old clothes. Other than the old men round the table there was another old gentleman who introduced himself as the Shames, equivalent to a beadle, caretaker or sexton in a church. He asked what he could do for us. I told him my friend had come a long way to say Kaddish.
It is customary to offer a stranger to lead the prayers. Speaking Yiddish, of course, he did so to Jean-Jacques, who accepted, to my surprise. The Shames handed him a much-used tallis, a prayer shawl and led him to a rickety lectern.
Had anyone said anything to me I would have been speechless. DuBois swung the tallis around his shoulders, kissed the ends, put it over his head, and reading from the prayer book, recited “Minchah,” the afternoon prayers, with enthusiastic responses from the ten old men and the Shames. And me.
DuBois used the old Eastern European Ashkenazi pronunciation. He made no mistakes, did not hesitate except once. When he finished he said Kaddish, but did not take off the prayer shawl. He turned to the Shames and said, “ Now I have a special request. I would like to say Yizkor for my family who died in the Shoah. The Shames was surprised. Yizkor is said only in the synagogue and only four times a year on the major Holy Days – Passover, Shavuot (Pentecost), Rosh Hashanah (New Year) and holiest of all, Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement).
“That is impossible, as you probably know,” said the Shames. DuBois waited for a moment, and said he did know that, but could they not make an exception? The old man pondered, his index finger bent over his lips. Suddenly he straightened up, raised the finger in the air, and with an air of triumph said loudly, “Oh-ho, oh-ho, I have an idea.”
He walked to the minyan men, and asked if any of them had semikhah (rabbinical ordination). Now many scholars, who have studied in yeshiva have this title, even if they never use it professionally. Three men put up their hands. “In that case,” said the Shames, “you may call yourselves a Beit Din (a court of law) on an emergency basis, and the oldest among you can serve as the “Av Beit Din” (the chief judge).
The 10 men nodded and the three members of the court took their chairs to a corner. They spoke quietly for about ten minutes. There was discussion back and forth, as between Judges deciding a case. No shouting. It was all very dignified
We waited anxiously. Finally, the Av Beit Din stood up and said, “By a majority of two to one, the court has decided in favor of the applicant, but on the following conditions. First, this decision is not to be taken as a precedent. Second, it shall not be made public. Third, the decision applies solely to the applicant who must now state his name.
DuBois stood up, bowed to the court, thanked them for their consideration and said in Yiddish, “Yakov ben Shimon v’Rivka (Jacob, the son of Simon and Rebecca) respectfully thanks the Court, and accepts the conditions stated.” He shook hands with the three members of the Court, bowed before them as one would before judges, and then recited the Yizkor prayer separately for each parent.
He sat quietly by himself, weeping softly, then stood up and said he wished to make a donation.
The Shames brought out a large wooden box, with a handle attached. It had a slit in the top for inserting coins. DuBois said his donation wouldn’t fit in the slot. The Shames obligingly removed the bottom of the box, while DuBois (or Yankel) stuffed in several hundred dollars. Handshakes all round, and with best wishes for good health and a long life, we left. The Shames went to the cupboard took out a candle in a glass container, which would last twenty-four hours, and is lit as a memorial on the anniversary of a death, a “yahrzeit.” It was for next year he said. Not just a souvenir. It was a meaningful gift from the old man, who may well have sensed what was going on. DuBois declined my offer to call a cab. He preferred to walk back through Mea She’arim, lingering in its atmosphere. We walked slowly; he looked back several times, pensively, saying little. He kept his kippa on his head; he gave money to the few beggars we passed.
When we reached King George Street, back in modern Jerusalem, he felt tired. We took a cab to the King David Hotel. He was due to fly back to Paris the next day. My mission was over. I did not know how to conclude it. Still speaking Yiddish as we had done since leaving the little house of prayer, I wished him a safe journey. I gave him a twenty Euro note to give to charity in Paris. During the time he carried this note he was called a shaliach mitzvah, someone who is carrying a mitzvah for a third person, an ancient custom which protects the carrier from all evil while performing a holy duty, ending only when the charity is given.
We stood in the hotel lobby, facing each other. He was flying out to Paris in the morning. It was time to say goodbye. We each waited for the other to start. I took the initiative, still speaking Yiddish as we had been since leaving the house of prayer. I wished him a safe journey again and said I was glad to have been of help. He nodded his head in assent while I spoke. He waited a moment, thinking. He put his hands on my shoulders, embraced me, kissed me on both cheeks – French style – and then said, in French,“Mon ami. Je vous remercie infinimant pour tout ce que vous avez fait pour moi, un étranger. Adieu.” (I thank you profoundly for all you did for me, a complete stranger.)
And with that he turned and walked to the elevator, never looking back.
Jean-Jacques DuBois and Yankel Gutkind had both come home.