Barney Greengrass











I have just finished my writing work and went off for bagels. Walking down the street, I ended up thinking of two restaurants. one Japanese, one Jewish.

My son, Sage, was very disappointed that Sapporo was renovated. It was a typical Tokyo or Osaka feeling restaurant, a shabby and unfancy, beaten up place that served wonderful, basic food - chicken katsu and noodle soups. But it was special because it's in Manhattan. Now, the food is still the same, but my teenage son, like a retired geezer longing for "the good old days," complains that the katsu have gotten smaller.

Oh, and don't be mistaken that their katsu is like what you've had in other places, unless you've eaten katsu in Japan.

We get out bagels from Barney Greengrass, that still-the-same, dingy, unrenovated restaurant across the street from where Mr. Singer lived and where the author had many a bagel and bialy, eating there practically every day for many years.

I think Issac Baschevis Singer, an author my son likes, would have understood Sage's feelings.

One biographer supposed Mr. Singer choose his apartment building because it has a huge inner court to look in on. It would have reminded the Yiddish writer of the court his family lived on in Warsaw as a child. Mr. Singer wrote of how he loved to watch from his family's balcony, the dealings and dramas going on below in the Jewish ghetto, an old world he chronicled and which is now gone.

And while Barney Greengrass across the street wouldn't have been why he took an apartment in that building which takes up an entire city block like a medieval castle; I'm sure it was one of the reasons he stayed there so long. A comfortable, unfancy place with simple, familiar soups and food.

The English title we have for Issac Baschevis Singer's short story masterpiece, Gimple the Fool, is a mistranslation. Tamim is not a fool. It is a Hebrew word for perfect in a straightforward and untricky way. In our selfish, tricky, clever, violent world, the simple tamim is looked upon as foolish. But that is a mistaken view of fools.

I used that word, tamim, only once in my fiction writings. Just last night, actually, in the simple poem I wrote. I will share it with you below. I am still looking for a title. Maybe a good one will come to you as you read? Nothing fancy I hope.

find a way
to be amazed
and thankful
at sighting the next
small, brown bird
in a common, green tree.
it will have taken
every, every one of
this world's woven events
to bring the two of you
together just then.

be as the true and tamim cellist
or the quiet guitarist in his room,
who has chosen to love
the subtleties of each
of eighteen million,
slow, unadorned scales.