Chaim Garfield had read about the murder of the rabbi’s son. He tried not to think about it, especially now on Rosh Hashanah, but the details kept coming back to him. Stabbed twenty times, the paper had said. He stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, looked up through the branches of a tree, and prayed that Reb Levy had not had to see his son’s body. Other people on the street looked curiously at him, and he walked on up Route 9A to 236th Street, then across to the river. It was late, the services were over at most shuls by now, and the people were home for dinner. Dinner was waiting for him, too. There would be chicken basted with honey and orange juice, tsimmes made with honey and apples, and honey cake. Everything sweet in hopes the new year would be the same. He walked with his head up like he always did, not looking where he was going, and he tripped on the uneven sidewalk and had to grab a tree trunk to keep from falling. He shook his head at himself and went on. He left shops, houses, buildings behind and reached the riverbank in front of a huge gray stone apartment building. There must be a hundred miles of hallways in the place, he thought; more. He didn’t like this backdrop for the ritual he had to perform, but there were probably other people at the prettier river accesses and he wanted to be alone.

He wasn’t usually a loner; he liked being with people. He’d been trained for the rabbinate by the rabbi of Vorka, and when they sent him to Theresienstadt, the “model” camp, the older men kept up the teaching. He wasn’t sure anymore if there was a God, or how he felt about him if there was, but he’d stayed a rabbi when he got to America, first in Washington Heights, then in Riverdale. First because he liked people; he wasn’t sure why else—inertia maybe. He wanted to be alone for this ritual because the others believed in it, or looked like they did, and he didn’t. He was going to do it anyway. Again, he wasn’t sure why. Maybe because he always had.