Avigdor of the Apes

“What ails you now, that you have gone up entirely to the roofs?”—the Zohar

Avigdor Bronfman, an indifferent scholar, made his way across Orchard Street at twilight, on his way home from his Talmud Torah class. He sidled between the vendors of nickel spectacles, celluloid collars, and cotton waists, and avoided a shrill woman in the process of slapping a peddler with his own stinking carp.  He skirted a starving draft horse with ribs like hood louvers dropping a steaming pile into the gutter, and stepped onto the opposite curb. Mounting the stoop, he entered a cabbage-rank tenement beneath a sign in Hebrew characters advertising the second floor occupant’s profession of circumciser. That was his father. The boy climbed a flight of stairs, opened the door to a stuffy apartment wherein his bearded papa stood swaying in his prayer shawl, his mama pumping her sewing machine, and tossed in his books. Then he closed the door and continued his ascent up the five remaining flights to the top of the building, where he pushed open a tin-plated door onto the tarpapered roof. Crossing the roof he shed his reefer jacket and hopped onto the low parapet, stood a moment admiring the salmon-pink sunset, and plunged into the crisp autumn air.

 *

His flights had begun soon after Avigdor and his friend Shaky Gruber went to a Shabbos matinee of “Tarzan of the Apes” at the Grand Street flickers. The film starred Mr Elmo Lincoln in the role of the ape man, an actor so gross and lumbering that even when battling an authentic...