Kaaterskill Falls by Allegra Goodman

for them, no modern Hebrew newspapers. Hebrew is a holy language. The Kirshners are anti-Zionist. They are not militant. They don’t campaign for an end to Israel like that tiny community near Jerusalem that actually allies itself with the PLO. The Rav would never countenance such actions against fellow Jews. Nevertheless, his people stand apart from Israel with its atheist socialists. They haven’t softened, like the Lubavichers. The Rav’s yeshiva remains in New York. He rarely speaks of Zionists, and when he does, he merely remarks that they are a troubled lot. Elizabeth actually had a cousin who left England and went to Israel; that was a terrible thing, a scandal, and a great heartache for her grandmother.
    Sitting in his chair on the porch, Andras watches the unease settle on his neighbors in the wake of Cecil’s remark. Much as he disagrees with, and even disparages, the Orthodox in his mind, Andras hates to see them provoked. It seems unfair, unmanly. Like hitting a girl. He looks at Isaac and Elizabeth and feels protective of them, almost proprietary of their narrow experience and messianic politics. He feels concerned, somehow, for the integrity of their quaint closed worldview. Smooth, small, delicate, useless as a robin’s egg.
    Nervously Nina flits from one person to another, offering more lemonade, more ice. “Well, Cecil,” says Andras, “it’s about time for us to go to the Lamkin Camp’s opening day.”
    “You’re going to that?” Cecil asks quickly.
    “Of course,” says Andras. He knows it angers Cecil even to hear the camp mentioned. As Cecil says, his father had bought the land as an investment for the synagogue and not as a free gift to a third-rate rabbi. He puts it that way, as if the camp were just poor financial judgment. But Andras knows Cecil’s true feelings: that leasing the land to the Lamkins for their camp is an insult to his father’s memory. “You’re going, I take it,” Andras says to Elizabeth and Isaac.
    Cecil reddens to the edges of his ears.
    Andras just sips his lemonade and says coolly, “Of course, it’s easier to boycott a summer camp when you don’t have children.”
    For once Cecil doesn’t know what to say. For a long moment he is silent.
    They are all surprised at Andras. He is usually so controlled. Even Elizabeth and Isaac don’t fully understand his motivation: his irritation at Cecil for provoking them about Zionism. His motive was too complex. And here is the mystery of Andras’s character: he is cold, but deep, too deep, within him, his heart is chivalrous.

    T HERE are so many people at the camp opening that Elizabeth and Isaac are lucky to squeeze in at a picnic table. A crowd of sixty, maybe even seventy, fills the park above the falls. A mixed group, some Kirshners, some not. At one table, clustered together in dark trousers and white shirts, sit the five teachers Rabbi Lamkin has brought up from the city to instruct the children. They look pale and a little worried in the gold summer light. All this commotion bothers them. They bob back and forth respectfully, trying to hear Rabbi Lamkin’s speech.
    Elizabeth can’t hear Lamkin well either. He’s standing up on a rock, talking excitedly, although few are paying attention. He wanders between topics, and quotes profusely from the Torah and the prophets, but without much art in the quotation, so that instead of embroidering his drash he seems to bury it. The feeling is there, the knowledge is there, but he seems unsure of his direction. He just flits from one idea to the next, weaving like a drunken bee; mixing up the events of thousands of years of history, tangling up texts and commentaries. At first Elizabeth thinks he’s talking about youth, “bonayich, your builders,” but, suddenly, he is speaking about the destruction of the Temple and the dispersion of Israel. He takes a turn back in time to speak about the encampments of Israel in the desert, only to jump forward to the Maccabees in