Reckless Endangerment by Robert K. Tanenbaum Page A

sulking Karp had deliberately snapped the legs off a glass deer and his mother had smacked him, the last (nearly the first) occasion of violence between them. He had run out of the suffocating apartment, down the stairs to the street, a street not a hundred yards from the street by which he now traveled.
    Karp was not a particularly reflective man. His recollection of that day at Aunt Reva’s had been neatly plastered over, along with the repugnance he felt at the odd, un-Americanness of Williamsburg’s self-ghettoized Jews, along with the usual tag ends of guilt and remorse. Karp was a believer in the sacred American right of re-invention. The Williamsburg of his youth had seemed to him an antique remnant of a doomed way of life. Jews were like anyone else. They played basketball and lived in houses with lawns, and if they were religious they went on Saturday morning to modernistic buildings indistinguishable from Baptist churches (except for the lack of a pinnacle cross) and ate what everyone else ate.
    The idea that people might choose to live like Aunt Reva, that people with education, people his age, might volunteer to live in the tenements and brownstones their grandparents had occupied and pursue a life of piety and ritual, was something his imagination could not grasp. He probably had (something he would be reluctant to admit) more real sympathy with that bunch of black kids hanging out on the stoop of one of the battered brown-stones on Union Avenue than he did with his putative coreligionists. The kids at least played basketball.
    The Jewish part of Williamsburg is a small trapezoid lodged uncomfortably amid substantial districts inhabited by American and West Indian blacks, Puerto Ricans, and (this zone a more recent one) immigrants from various parts of Central and South America. The line is as sharp as any in Beirut or Belfast. On one block the stores cashed checks and sold liquor, Latino or reggae records, and cheap furniture. Every sixth storefront was a barbershop, a hair parlor, a nail joint, or a Pentecostal church. The people were variously brown.
    On the next block the stores sold kosher meats, dairy foods, cheap clothing, and slightly better furniture. There were neither barbershops nor liquor stores, and every sixth storefront was a shul or a ritual bathhouse. The people were white, pale white, the men in black clothes, hatted and bearded, the women scarf-headed and accompanied by clusters of children, each little boy with his knitted yarmulke and dangling side locks.
    “This is it,” said Karp to his driver, a black detective named Morris. They were on Boerum Street, in front of a substantial pink sandstone building, formerly a private home, that had been converted into a synagogue-cum-headquarters for the Ostropoler Hasidim. The house was set back from the street, and an iron paling surrounded what had once been a small garden. This had been paved over in the fashion of the Orthodox, who begrudged the time that gardening would steal from their duty to God. Karp had a vague awareness that an ancient named Reb Moise Koppelman was the leader of this small community. Reb Mendel Lowenstein, the man he had come to see, was the rebbe’s son-in-law and heir presumptive.
    The street in front of the building was thronged with men, dressed either in black suits, with fedoras, or in the traditional long gabardines with round hats trimmed with red fox fur. They shot hostile looks at the car and its driver. A man came up and told Morris he couldn’t park there. Morris put a cardboard POLICE sign on the dashboard. Another couple of men came up and started arguing with Morris. Karp got out of the car. “You’ll be okay?” he asked Morris.
    “I got a radio and a gun,” said the driver. “How long will you be?”
    “As short as I can make it,” said Karp. He had to push through the crowd on the sidewalk and the stoop, the men yielding to him reluctantly. At the door, a burly youth wearing a brassard marked