Beth Adelman
writerChapter 1
Max Arnold
The phone rang. It was down the hall in the living room, but Max Arnold could hear it from his bed. He would not answer the phone now, at six in the morning, or ever again: he had had enough. Turning to the wall, Max closed his eyes against the noise. They shouldn’t call so early to an old man like me.
Last Saturday, a visitor to the synagogue sang the “Tree of Life” melody louder than this phone, louder even than the hundreds of men singing in the men’s section. It was a surprise when that voice rose to a piercing sob, and the usual men in their prayer shawls stopped swaying to listen. Remembering, Max had chills—
But the phone was still ringing. Max went into the living room to get it.
“Max,” said a woman with a hoarse voice. “Max,” she repeated, and cleared her throat. Her voice sounded familiar, but she wasn’t Henrietta, the person he did not want to talk to. He sat down in his corduroy armchair.
“Apologies for calling you so early,” she said. This woman talks nicer than Henrietta, Max thought.
“I was awake.”
“This is Natalie Herris,” she said. “I should have told you right away—but—but I had a bad night.”
Max was surprised. The president of the company where he worked had never called him at home or told him about her life.
She continued. “I want to ask to you about that government man you spoke to yesterday.”
“All right.” In the past week, he had talked to more people than usual. There was Henrietta, Leon and his son in the lobby of their apartment building, and the government man. Max pulled onto his lap a folded blanket that he kept on the coffee table for Shabbos naps. He would talk.
“Not on the phone. Could you come to the office by eight o’clock?” she asked.
“Ok.”
He’d have to leave earlier than usual to get to 31st Street by eight. He hung up the phone, put the blanket back on the table, and sat there. To change his routine and say the morning prayers now, after using his mouth for an ordinary conversation, would spoil them. He took a shower and when he dried himself, noticed the wrinkles in his thin thighs that were once so strong. That’s how things are.
He put on a robe and shaved. To get to his upper lip, he made a long face in the mirror and glimpsed his grandfather’s expression when zaide was thinking of a clever or punishing thing to say. That was another country, long ago.
Shaving finished, Max returned to his white-walled living room. After the shower, he felt that the day could start again and began his prayers facing the eastern wall where he kept the shelf of Yiddish books he’d picked up from synagogue book sales. Yet, while he heard himself singing in an old-style Ashkenazic accent, Max felt pressure to hurry and get to the office soon.
After his prayers, he dressed in his usual short-sleeved shirt, wool trousers, and because it was winter, a heavy sweater. He opened the fridge and looked in. The four navel oranges on the top shelf were bathed in the interior light. A box of blueberries was at the forefront of the second shelf, with gleaming red strawberries in a plastic box behind them. When he moved it, the Romaine lettuce bristled against its plastic package on the bottom shelf, next to cucumbers, a bunch of radishes, and three sturdy carrots. These are the things that matter, Max thought, and he was glad to have all this food.
Max watched his cream of wheat bubble in the pot and thought of kugel made with noodles, sour cream, and pitted tart cherries. When he ran into his neighbor Leon the other day, Leon had bragged about the cherry kugel his son, Barry, was going to bake for his wife’s homecoming from the hospital. Max knew how it would taste: straight from the oven, with the cherries and sour cream oozing between the noodles the way his mother had made it in Poland. An uncle had once warned her that the white cloth she put on the table would get stained. “Never mind!” she’d said, as excited as the guests who crowded around the table where the enormous kugel had been placed, fragrant and steaming.
He poured his hot cereal and a handful of washed blueberries into a milchik bowl and then remembered the phone in the living room. It must not ring again! He took the receiver off and laid the side with holes against the blanket. Then he covered it with last week’s Forverts newspaper and went back to his breakfast.
In a few seconds, the phone emitted a pulsing noise, a kind of backwards alarm. It would be better if he didn’t have a phone, but the phone company might make trouble if he unplugged it. Max continued to eat. A man’s muffled voice came out of the covered receiver.
“It appears there’s a phone off the hook. Please hang up.”
It was the voice he’d heard two days ago, when he had taken the phone off the hook to stop Henrietta’s calls. At first, the voice had alarmed him, but now he’d figured out where it came from. It was a robot.
After he finished breakfast, Max crossed the living room to the windowsill where he’d put his new green plant, the silent witness to his troubles. The soil was still damp from the first watering when he brought it home on Sunday. Outside, the sky was white. It might snow. White particles were flying through the air.
If it snowed, the trip to the Bronx this evening might be postponed, he thought, as he wound his blue scarf around his neck. Good: he’d heard that the Bronx should be avoided. He had scarcely ventured beyond the area between his apartment on 49th Street and the office on 31st Street, and had never gone to the Bronx to visit his Aunt Malka. Last week, she had died. His aunt’s friend and neighbor, Henrietta, called to insist that he come uptown to get his inheritance—a box. She interrupted his protests by reading from the letters he wrote to Malka.
“‘Dear Aunt Malka, I can’t visit you because I don’t take the subway.’ You wrote that?” the sarcastic Henrietta asked over the phone. He did not want to tell her how Malka treated him when he arrived in America.
Henrietta had called repeatedly until he said, “OK, I will come to the Bronx.”
He buttoned his coat, hoping for a snowstorm that would give him a reprieve from Henrietta and the Bronx. Then he left his apartment for the walk to the office.
Outside, with the cold air blowing against his face, he walked south for two blocks on First Avenue, passing his supermarket and the restaurant with dark glass windows for U.N. diplomats. At the next corner, a plume of white smoke rose up next to a Con Ed truck, and Max turned west to avoid it.
Today was February 15th. He had come to New York on this day in 1951, 26 years ago. And on the day of his arrival, after all that had happened to him, he had expected to find comfort at his aunt’s home. His mother’s sister, he had imagined, would want to cook for him, give him clean clothes, and show him the way to earning a living in his new country. He would surprise her with his English and his knowledge of Polish bookkeeping, which had to be universal. He’d get a job quickly. But it had not happened that way.
He’d trained himself not to think of these things, but when they did come, he gave himself long division problems to do in his head. He would become abstracted, thinking of how many times, say, 39 might go into 1,268, and step into the street without looking. But arithmetic could not hold back the memories today. Max stopped to lean against the wall of an office building, steadying himself with a hand flat against the rough limestone façade. If he lived 9 more years to 70, he would have spent half his life in New York, half in Poland. But Poland had made him.
“How was Poland?”
After services last Shabbos, he’d gone into the shul’s cloak-room off the lobby, where a tall man shouted at a shorter man having difficulty unwinding his scarf from a hanger:
“How was our Poland?” insisted the tall man.
“Don’t shout,” said the short man.
Poland! Max had thought. Could you go back to the land of the dead?
The man who had returned to Poland began to put on his coat and scarf. Both men moved aside, leaving a space for Max at the coat rack. Max took his coat from the hanger very quietly so that he could hear the answer.
“How was our Poland?”
“I walked on the old streets.”
“They’re letting Jews back now? They need the tourist money, huh?”
“Yeah.”
One of the synagogue officials stepped into the cloakroom to remind the men about a special kiddish catered by a wealthy family. The two men who had been talking sighed as if they wanted to leave, but hung up their coats.
“What about him?” The one who had returned from Poland nodded at Max, who was buttoning up his coat.
“He don’t socialize,” answered the other, and they went downstairs to eat.
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© Beth Adelman 2026