Bee Season. Myla Goldberg

With suburban rabbis outnumbering suburban synagogues two to one, Orel Mayer chose a steady salary over spiritual affinity. A Conservative Jew, Mayer disapproves of Beth Amicha’s laxer Reform tendencies. He had initially hoped to spur the congregation to new heights of observance but Saturday evenings, when he lights the braided Havdalah candle and watches the shadows flicker upon the synagogue’s walls, he is often alone. Beth Amicha tends to regard Shabbat as a Friday night obligation. Most congregants have never been to a Havdalah service, have never heard the crisp crszh of the Havdalah flame being quenched by the wine, the true moment of Sabbath’s end. Rabbi Mayer longs to lead a congregation that appreciates this sound. But a good rabbinate is hard to find. He comforts himself with the fact that his is not the life of the itinerant rabbi, reduced to performing the brisses, weddings, and bar mitzvahs of strangers.

      Saul’s gangly arms look particularly cartoony when he leads prayers on his guitar, strumming and even thumping as he sings. On the Judaism spectrum Saul’s self-proclaimed Reconstructionism puts him left of center, an affiliation the congregation hoped would counterbalance Rabbi Mayer’s, leaving Beth Amicha’s services somewhere in the middle. By playing the strict traditionalist, Rabbi Mayer makes the congregants feel as if they are being the type of Jew of whom their parents would approve. By playing his guitar and turning prayers into group sing-alongs, Saul allows people to have enough fun to forget they’ve come largely out of guilt. Rabbi Mayer is the dentist, Saul the congregation’s lollipop reward for having kept their appointment.

      English prayers outnumber Hebrew ones. The Jewish Congregational Prayerbook attempts to compensate for this by using “thou” and “thee” instead of “you,” and by adding “-est” to verb endings. “Mayest thou liest down and risest up” is supposed to feel more like the four-thousand-year-old language the book has largely replaced. There is, of course, some Hebrew. A gifted minority can parse the words without any idea of their meaning. For those who forgot Hebrew phonetics soon after depositing their bar mitzvah checks, there are English transliterations.

      The foreword to the JCP claims that the transliterations are “for the reader’s ease and comfort.” This gentle lie cloaks an embittered editor’s elaborate scheme to avenge the childhood he suffered while actually learning the language. SH replaces T; a K is inserted where a G would be more appropriate. As a result, it is painfully apparent who is reading the Hebrew and who is not. Misbegotten syllables collide midair with their proper cousins, making the service more closely resemble a speech therapy class than a religious gathering.

      Aaron will recite the Hebrew just a little faster than everyone else, just to show that he can. He doesn’t need to actually look at the JCP; he can recite the entire service beginning to end with his eyes shut. Since he was eight, people have been saying he should be a rabbi. Aaron is embarrassed by how much he still likes to hear this. Walking through the synagogue doors, he imagines heads turning to look, excited whispers of “There goes the cantor’s son.” Inside Beth Amicha’s walls, he is junior class president, football captain, and star of the school musical. In Aaron’s imaginary congregational yearbook he is Most Popular and Most Likely to Succeed, with the special added superlative of Best Young Jew. In Beth Amicha, he’s pretty sure girls smile at him sometimes. He never doubts his clothes. He is neither too tall nor too pale.

      Eliza can’t read Hebrew like her brother. In the time it takes her to negotiate the first five words, picking her way right to left across the page, the prayer is halfway over. Rather than add to the aural melee, she chooses to keep her mouth shut.

      For years after his summary dismissal from Dr. Morris’s office, Saul entertains hopes that Eliza will prove her elementary school principal wrong. Grading quarter after grading quarter he erases all memory of report cards past, tearing open each successive manila envelope in a frightful evocation of predator and prey.

      Eliza is sitting at the kitchen table so engrossed in a Taxi rerun that a mini-pretzel is frozen in its trajectory from the bag to her mouth. The sealed manila envelope rests on the table just beyond the pretzel bag’s shadow. Jim Ignatowski and Alex Rieger are far more comforting than the sound of Saul exiting his study. Eliza can block out the sounds of her father’s arrival altogether if she concentrates very hard on the openings and closings of Alex Rieger’s bloodless mouth.

      Eliza is seven, she is nine, she is six and a half. She is any age at all between second grade and the present.

      Jim Ignatowski is bugging his eyes out at Latke Gravas, that funny little foreigner, and Eliza is right there in the taxi depot with them, can practically smell Louis’s cigar as he barks commands from the dispatch desk, wants to bury her face in Latke’s grease-stained overalls. Her father’s hand snaps her out of it.

      Eliza wishes her father’s hand were on her shoulder for some other reason, generally covets all forms of his attention. She feigns absorption in the TV so that the hand will stay a little longer. Eliza has learned this trick from Saul himself, though she knows his powers of concentration are real.

      Take, for example, the time the ambulance came for Mrs. Feruzza when she broke her hip. The sound of passing sirens shook the walls, but Saul swears he didn’t hear a thing, reading as he was a recent translation of Pico della Mirandola. Eliza isn’t convinced her father would hear an emergency knock on his closed study door. What if she was bleeding, choking, going blind, the house burning down, the escaped convict holding her at knifepoint? She has been kept awake nights wondering if her father would save her in time.

      The hand on her shoulder is gone. The manila envelope, now empty, has fallen to the floor. Eliza cannot help but watch her father’s eyes scan the twin grade columns. She feels compelled to watch his face fade from expectation to resignation. Math, C. Science, C. Social Studies, C.Work Habits, B. Behavior, A. Reading, B. Spelling, A. Then, the forced smile, the patting of the head. The click of Saul’s door after his silent retreat to his study always manages to cut through the sound of the television. That night when Eliza glides into sleep, she sees the disappointment on her father’s face behind her closed lids.

      Eliza realizes too late that slipping the spelling bee notice under her father’s door may have been a mistake. There is no historical reason for her father to think that an envelope from her is a good thing. When, that first day, he emerges from his office without lauding her bee victory, Eliza assumes he has saved the envelope’s opening for a better mood. She decides to keep quiet to preserve the surprise. She likes picturing Saul’s face the moment he realizes the envelope’s true contents, mentally screens and rescreens this imagined moment to ease her anxiety.

      When three days pass without a word Eliza, so accustomed to being disappointing, begins to wonder if the singularity of this, her first achievement, has caused her to overinflate its importance. Spelling, after all, is a skill made redundant by the dictionary. The steady stream of spelling A’s on her report card has never inspired much praise. Perhaps her father is even a little embarrassed? That all his daughter can do is spell? His daughter, who still can’t recite the Hebrew alphabet? Eliza accepts this possibility with the inherent grace of the acutely under-confident, decides not to mention it until he does.

      By Friday night, Eliza’s resolve has been seriously shaken. The district bee is less than twenty four hours away. Even if her father is not impressed by her victory, he should have acknowledged by now that there are transportation needs to be met. Saul has never shirked his duty as child chauffeur, is a reliable member of any carpool. But, by now, Eliza cannot imagine bringing it up. Like many things left unsaid, Eliza’s thoughts have metastasized, kernels of doubt exploding into deadly certainties. She has taken Saul’s silence to mean that her accidental achievement is too little too late. Friday night after services, she cannot sleep. She stays in bed until she can’t stand picturing another version of Dr. Morris’s rebuke for her failure to serve as the school’s spelling representative. It’s way past midnight. Eliza decides to visit her mother in the kitchen.

      Miriam Naumann is a hummingbird in human form, her wings too fast to be seen without a stop-motion camera. The silver in her hair makes her seem electric, her head a nest of metal wires extending through her body. Eliza can only imagine the supercharged brain that resides inside, generally equates the inside of her mother’s head with the grand finale of a July Fourth fireworks