Princess of Passyunk Read Online Free

was a piece of a homeland Yevgeny had never seen—a place of roots and heritage and history that his parents were loath to speak of; a place whose very mention drew snickers in school.
    Baba was conjurer and wise woman. She was a favorite book. The boys had learned once, by Kismet, that after synagogue that book might open and its pages give up stories filled with the sounds and sights and aromas of Poland and of times that likely never were and never would be, except in Baba’s memory. Ganady didn’t care and suspected Yevgeny didn’t either. Baba was always a good read.
    Ganady had asked Yevgeny once if he remembered anything at all of the actual sabes service. He was surprised to find that Yevgeny could not only chant the prayers, but understood them—at least, in the literal sense. If you asked him, though, what this or that meant, he would speak of candlelight and spirit and the rise and fall of the cantor’s voice and the supreme sense of sorrow that filled the heart with a slow, throbbing fever and hung deliciously in the sanctuary mingled with the incense.
    The sorrow was so deep and wide, it was almost joy, Yevgeny said, and Ganady, who could almost feel it, but not quite, thought that must be the meaning of ‘bittersweet.’ On the heels of that epiphany came the realization that forever after, his favorite flavor of ice cream would remind him of Baba Irina’s shul and the sadness of old and displaced Jews. Bitter-sweet.
    Yevgeny spoke Yiddish. He spoke it as flagrantly and stubbornly as he used his given name—not ‘Gene,’ not ‘Eugene,’ but ‘Yevgeny.’ This endeared him greatly to Baba and perpetuated her personal myth that he would someday convert to Judaism.
    Ganady, who was privileged to know such things about Yevgeny, thought it far more likely that he would become a monk or a priest so he could imagine himself to be Copernicus, who was both wizard and saint in Yevgeny’s cosmos. Yevgeny believed fiercely in Christ and the Church; perhaps even more fiercely than he believed Baba’s tales of places and people and culture lost. Ganady thought perhaps he was a monk already, or perhaps a curator.
    There were sabes when Yevgeny could not, for one reason or another, come to shul. On those Friday evenings, Ganady was surprised at how alien the service seemed and how indecipherable the experience. It was as if Yevgeny were a filter or a translation device—like a Captain’s Courageous Code-O-Graph. Yevgeny, though, rarely missed synagogue—something for which Ganady was very grateful, for his own sake as well as Baba’s.
    Ganady was glad of Yevgeny’s fixation with the homeland. It allowed him to hear of it, smell it, see it, know it, without having to betray the depth of his own interest. At home, he was expected to be American. It was as if his family’s history had begun with their first footfalls upon the Philadelphia pier. What had come before was not discussed, nor were questions asked. And if, by chance, a word or two of a prior life slipped from his mother’s memory into her conversation, a look from her husband would cause her to pack it away again. Everything Ganady knew of Poland, he knew from his grandmother, who did not have to be so much asked as prompted.
    One Friday night, as Ganady and Yevgeny sat upon the Puzdrovskys’ front stoop waiting for Baba Irina to come down for shul, Yevgeny asked, “Does Baba know the story of Jesus?”
    â€œI suppose so,” Ganady answered, but wasn’t at all sure. “Mother must’ve told her,” he guessed.
    â€œI don’t understand how she doesn’t believe. It’s like she doesn’t even think of it.”
    Ganady didn’t suppose she did think of it. He shrugged. “She has her ways. She’s had them all her life. Her parents were Jewish and their parents. It’s who she is.”
    Yevgeny pondered this, his