Crash Course in the Classics
Yermiyahu Ahron Taub
He returned to his teacher. Somewhere in a far-flung corner of the virtual realm he had located her. Forays in the then new world. Just write. So he did. Just call, she said. So he did. His fingers didn’t tremble. He was in control. The self was surely assured. Suddenly, her voice. It hadn’t changed. The warmth of the drawl. The welcome of its extended sounds. Magically, he was thirteen again, immersed in her lectures on the Peloponnesian War. On Sparta and Carthage. There he was on the beaches of Mykonos.
And the diagramming of sentences; the precision of the language whose mysteries she uncovered for him. Or guided his discovery of. An infectious love. And lo, he who was always picked last for baseball or soccer or basketball or volleyball; he who stumbled in the labyrinth of the Talmud; he who forgot which blessing to recite on noodle kugel and tomatoes and buckwheat and pizza found a place for himself. Saw a way ahead. The marble statues made room for him in their halo. He caressed the muscular deities. He turned to worship them. He would be their servant. Gladly would he serve. And his teacher gasped at his ravenousness, fed him more. Read this. Tell me what you perceive. She marveled at his embrace of the Hellenists, his fluid paeans to their celebration of wisdom and debauchery. And her praise, her attention, set him on the path. To this book-lined garret.
And he told of what he’d been reading since those long-ago sojourns in the realms of the deities. Of interests in a more recent old language, sometimes said to be in a renaissance of its own. Sometimes said to now be the new Latin or Ancient Greek, popping up in academe, yet now with (comparatively) few native speakers. A language that beckoned a bridge back to his own tradition. Then, she spoke of her children and her return to the ancestral home high in the mountains and of grand-children and new pupils who themselves were reading. Devouring. She asked him about children of his own or a significant other. And he said there were none. Was none. And he could have left it at that, evaded as he so often did; using an ambiguous pronoun or avoiding one altogether. Instead, he just blurted it out. The unspeakable vice of the Greeks. His interest wasn’t academic. Well, not just academic. Had never been.
And he felt the floor give way, saw the chasm open between them. The silence wailed. The darkness burned. Aargh! You … goose! Why did you have to…? What a cozy reunion they had been fashioning … and now this. And suddenly excuses were proffered. Something about the grandchildren and reading time. The dog needing walking. Then, click. She was gone. He held the handset until the dial tone returned, and then the beeps. He disregarded their urgency. He left it off its cradle for days. Then weeks.
Perhaps if I had traveled to see her, he thought much later. If I had crossed multiple states lines on the train, trees flitting by. The canopy of green might have fortified me. I might have interacted with the grandchildren or the dog. I could have read the visual cues. I could have revealed without revealing. I could have enabled textual exegesis of myself. I would have had to be seen. It might have gone differently. The chasm might have been smaller, or not as visible. I might have returned to this book-lined garret with orange blossoms garlanded around my shaved skull. Without ashes rising into my throat.
Yermiyahu Ahron Taub is a poet, writer, and translator of Yiddish literature. He is the author of two books of fiction and six volumes of poetry, including A Mouse Among Tottering Skyscrapers: Selected Yiddish Poems (2017). His recent translations from the Yiddish include Dineh: An Autobiographical Novel (2022) by Ida Maze and Blessed Hands: Stories (2023) by Frume Halpern. Please visit his website at https://yataubdotnet.wordpress.com.