390
PARTISAN REVIEW
who live to maturity, grow up speaking Romanian.
If
he must com–
municate with natives through a heavy accent and an impoverished
vocabulary, it does not matter. Even in the Yiddish shared with the
family, he has little to say. There may be words in him, but they are
not the kind spoken with the mouth. They are voiced with the lan–
guage of the body, the bowels, the eyes .
One means of communication is with the scissors and sewing
machine , in a language that also crossed the river. He is a skilled
tailor, far different from most small town practitioners who patch to–
gether the threadbare remains of worried lives . His hands are com–
fortable creating new suits. They know the feel of fine cloth , woven
in far-off English mills; they understand instinctively the cut of a
jacket, drape of a coat, turn of a lapel and angled fall of trousers that
make even a poor man feel, on a special day of wedding, bar mitzvah
or other holiness, like a king. In any religious theory, a man should
not take pride in the ephemeral of outward appearance . But his hands
know the wisdom of this world, the instinctive blessing that exists
outside the pages of any sacred text.
Life in Romania all those years is quiet, regular, tuned to an
unvarying pattern of seasons, holidays. Flights of birds , the sowing
of corn, clouds rumbling into rain, the annual festival of ripe grapes,
the visit of gypsies - none of these change from year to year. The
man who swims into history fits into the cycle . He is quiet, too, per–
haps even timid. His only vice is gambling. He is never known to
question the customs and laws that circumscribe his days. Naturally
he takes part in the ceremonies of the small Jewish community, but
never with much enthusiasm or faith. His children never see him as
angry, upset, authoritarian, but they feel his emotional wires are
somehow crossed. When it is time to discipline a youngster, he smiles
sheepishly and disappears. The task always falls upon the strong fore–
arm of his wife. In moments of sadness or tragedy, even death, he
unaccountably grins, sometimes breaks into soft laughter. Then , as if
ashamed at the inappropriate response, he vanishes from the house.
After the swim, he never travels much. Business can take him
to the regional center of Bacau, but there is no evidence of visits to
the former Moldavian capital, Jassy, or of journeys to Bucharest,
less than two hundred miles away. His decision around the turn of
the century to leave for America may be as much of a surprise to the
family as to neighbors. He goes by boat, no doubt from the port of
Constanza into the Black Sea. The view from steerage is not good.
Perhaps a glimpse of domes and minarets, draped across Constanti-
