The Greens of San Rodeo

My friend Stevie had not been home to San Rodeo in many years. We didn’t think his estrangement from his family particularly severe, no more than the rest of us who had left the West coast to come East. What made Stevie a little different was that his parents, Abe and Sarah Green, were Hebrew school teachers. As a matter of fact, they were my teachers.

We won’t go into the quirks of fate and immigration that brought the Greens from their native Lithuanian village, but suffice it so say they must have felt very strange in the modern new school building of steel and plastic gleaming beneath tall, waving palms.

Abe was tall and gaunt with a horseshoe of white hair behind a large intelligent forehead. He still wore the old-fashioned wire-rimmed glasses that kept slipping down his nose. His wife Sarah was also thin and no matter how demure the dresses she wore, her bones always seemed to stick out at acute angles. Making arcs across the chalked-up blackboard, her long arms were lessons in anatomy themselves. They reminded us she and her husband had come to us from Europe, that far away place where people went to bed hungry and where their clothes didn’t always fit on their bodies, as ours did.

The Great Mojave Desert that surrounded San Rodeo was not the Judean Desert, yet the various cult healers, reincarnations of God, and shamans who rose up there made a bizarre yet somehow fitting setting for the Greens to teach us in Hebrew school about the prophets of the Bible, major and minor.

And there was no...