When I got home that day I put the Williams card in a drawer. I pulled out Skylock for another read and it felt like some buzzing at the back of my head had been silenced. I didn’t have Poxl near, but that couldn’t negate the fact that I had read his book. I found what I could on the RAF in our school library. But now when Rabbi Ben brought up Poxl in Hebrew class, I would find some way to deflect the conversation, not wanting to talk again about the idea of Poxl’s coming to visit us — not wanting to admit I hadn’t spent time with him in months, and I hadn’t asked if he’d come see us. I could talk about Skylock, but not its author.
“So what’s the deal with Kabbalah, anyway?” I said one Monday evening when conversation had drifted away from Hebrew and I feared it might drift toward me. But there was real need in my voice, and whether it was for an absent uncle or an unknowable God, everyone in the room could hear it. Rachel Rothstein rolled her eyes and I immediately wished I hadn’t said a word, but Rabbi Ben sat up straight.
“You never seemed all that interested before,” he said. But before I had time to respond, he said, “Shit, I wrote my dissertation at Yeshiva on Moses de Léon. He was the thirteenth-century Spaniard who wrote the Zohar, the central text of Jewish mysticism. Check it out, guys — he believed that God was in everything around us. The world started in ein sof, he said. Who can translate that term, Ein Sof?”
Our Hebrew had gotten us only so far that Rachel could say she knew the first word, Ein. It meant “one.”
“It means ‘nothingness.’ One endless nothingness. The world started in nothing, and even though God made something — Adam, Eve, a garden, Zion, later us — the original state of our souls, of our existence, was nothingness. The Zohar says we need to return to that state if we want to touch the Godhead.”
“I want to touch some kind of head,” Zach Swartz said.
Everyone cracked up.
“What’s that, dude?” Rabbi Ben said. Now everyone just looked down at their feet. “Well, look, Eli, if you want to hear more about Kabbalah, let’s definitely find some time to rap outside of class. I’ll give you some Gershom Scholem. You’d like Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism.”
I didn’t know what to say. I told him that was fine, and everyone in class looked at me like I’d lost my mind. But I hadn’t lost my mind. I just was missing my uncle, and while he wasn’t my uncle, Rabbi Ben was here.
After class that night I went into his office, where he walked around his overloaded bookshelves and showed me the major texts of the modern study of Kabbalah. Some part of me had come to think that the elders at our shul read only books about the atrocities of World War II, and all at once my eyes were opened to the fact that mostly on Rabbi Ben’s shelves were texts of Talmudic study, midrash, and Kabbalah. We only see what we want when we’re in need, and for months I’d seen only one history. Now I was seeing something else. Here was one thing Poxl West hadn’t talked about, but which was always lingering: God.
We were sitting now, me in the chair in front of Rabbi Ben’s cluttered desk, him behind it. I was ready to hear what he had to say. Receptive.
“So I finally had a chance to read Skylock, dude,” Rabbi Ben said. This was unexpected. It threw me for a moment, made me more comfortable than I could have anticipated. Here I was, ready to ask him about the Zohar, all that he’d wanted to talk about for months, and instead he was bringing up Poxl West’s memoir.
“And?” I said.
“And!” Rabbi Ben said. “Your uncle’s a majorly good writer, and mein Gott the experiences he’s had. I can totally see why you’ve been so into that book. And him.”
“Well, he is my uncle,” I said. Talking to Rabbi Ben, in that moment, all my regret and sense of absence was gone. It was almost as if Poxl were back with us. “I did kind of play a part in helping him get his manuscript together.”
“It occurs to me that some of what goes on in there isn’t so different from what draws me to the Zohar. I mean, when he describes flying in his plane, he describes looking into the face of the whirlwind. That’s what Job did, right? Look right into the face of the Behemoth. For me that’s why I care about thinking about God. Not just to say, ‘What stories do we read in the Torah?’ ‘But to say, ‘What would it look like to meet face-to-face with the deity?’”
When Rabbi Ben had brought this up in class, we were too uncomfortable to discuss it. But sitting in his office, I remember I gave it real thought. What had Poxl West seen up in those skies? And more important: What occurred in my daily life that could bring me face-to-face with Ein Sof? Rabbi Ben gave me a handful of books to take home. I stuffed them into my book bag and thanked him.
I wish I could say now that I’d read them.
But once they sat down on the shelf next to Skylock, their gray cloth covers just seemed so gray. There was a book full of stories of heroism and emotional drama; here was some unintelligible drawing of Hebrew letters adding up to a rudimentary picture of a body that might be our Lord. And there I was, a teenager, confused. I wanted to think about mysticism, but it grew ever more intangible the more I thought about how tangible Poxl West’s story was. That it had come almost to replace the human himself for me. I liked Rabbi Ben and I liked Gershom Scholem, but for me, then, with Poxl gone and only his book to consult, it was still Skylock to which I’d be turning in my moments of confusion.
Finally in May, I turned in a final report in history class on Uncle Poxl’s memoir, which by then I’d read five times. Each time I reread I watched as Poxl again left his mother in Leitmeritz, again left Françoise, again left Glynnis for training. As much as it hurt, as much as it tore the scab off my not having spent time with him, what I fell back on was his heroism, and what came after. I cited more than a dozen sources on the Royal Air Force in the report, sources on military actions in Britain during the war. I quoted from two other memoirs, and I even learned to make the citations properly.
Interspersed within those quotations and summaries, I wrote florid reminiscences of my trips into Boston with Poxl, memories that made it feel almost as if he were back again, taking me to see Shakespeare, to eat sundaes. Almost. As I wrote, I overplayed my role in giving him someone to talk to while he was drafting the book. I won’t lie: No matter what ended up in it, I still feel some pride now thinking of how hard I worked on that report. No matter what was to come, no matter what lay beneath any of my motivations during that period, Poxl West had brought to life in me a curiosity I wouldn’t otherwise have had. One I retain to this day.
When I got the report back a week later, my teacher had written on the last page, “Impressive research, impressive topic, impressive writing, impressive, impressive, impressive. And above all, impressive company you’ve been keeping. Meticulous work: A−. Keep up the good work.”
ACT THREE
1.
My first few weeks after enlisting in the RAF were taken up with logistics. I was given an examination in math, which I passed with ease. I was issued a respirator and identity disks, eating utensils, and a whole new set of vaccinations should I be shot down over North Africa. An officer in his RAF blues gave me and three other recruits a lecture about how short we should keep our hair, how it was imperative that a pilot shower after each run, and bathe himself every other day on any account.