A Jewish Ghost Story
By Ted Roberts
My grandmother believed in dybbuks like Newton believed in gravity. "They are real," she said, arching her eyebrows and enlarging her eyes for emphasis. An old trick that rarely failed with us kids. I think it worked on my grandfather, too.
"Dybbuks?" I said with surprise. "Dybbuks, the evil spirits? Bubbe - you don't believe that!"
"It's best to believe in them." she said quietly, "because if you don't, they'll pull their nasty tricks on you. If you believe in them, they'll leave you alone."
Logical or not, she became a recognized neighborhood authority on dybbuks. Bubbes are blessed with various talents: Some make tzimmes with a secret heart of Kishke; others cure a chill with one artful application of chicken fat spread on the victim's frosty chest; my grandmother specialized in dybbuks. Especially those from Northwest Estonia - her home.
Most of them stayed in the old country, she told me. At least the powerful ones. What kind of fun could a big time dybbuk have in a 2-room coldwater flat in Brooklyn? So when the boatsful of Jewish immigrants left Hamburg and Bremerhaven, hundreds of out-of-work dybbuks had to find new hosts - new spirits to torment. According to my grandmother, so many Jews fled Europe around the turn of the century that the spirits flew to the gentile world. That's why we suffered WWI, said Bubbe. A tragedy staged by the evil spirits who jumped into the skins of the Sarajevo assassins and the Balkan rulers.
"Just like I told you before," she crowed, "if you don't believe, you're in trouble." And she went on to explain that no way could a couple of goyishke emperors and a murderous crew of Serbian assassins believe in a Jewish spirit. So look what happened - a World War.
"But some stayed with their hosts and took a ticket to the New Jerusalem, America. They pranced on the humble stage of soap opera as well as grand historical drama. In fact, they had infected our own family. That's what Bubbe told me.
"You remember the time your Uncle Dan had to leave Savannah - suddenly? Remember we woke you up in the middle of the night to kiss him goodbye." Sure I did, but I never knew why. And his loving sister, my mother, never wanted to discuss it. But there and then my Bubbe solved that mystery as simply as she dealt with the origins of World War I.
"Dybbuks," she whispered. "A dybbuk got in him - not the Kaiser - but Uncle Dan."
He was my grandmother's favorite. Her first born. Sure, he could have talked his way to the head of the line of O'Neils and O'Reillys waiting to smooch the Blarney Stone. A Blumenfield in front of all those Cork County lads. Had to be, because Uncle Dan, as melodious as a nightingale, could talk Long Island ducklings out of the sky and onto his dinner table. And they'd be glazed with orange sauce when they landed on his plate. And if playing gin rummy instead of steady work was his talent - well that was OK, too. At least with his mother and sisters.
But his career collapsed when a dybbuk made him write checks for three days on a bank account that only existed in Uncle Dan's pompadoured head. It was a busy three days. Goaded by the evil spirit, he wrote many checks. And soon his creditors came by to discuss these checks. A check without a bank account, they explained to Dan, is like a body without a head. Useless. Dan listened with total comprehension. Then, with his ghostly alter ego, hitchhiked to the bus station.
"Where to?" said the ticket agent.
"Anyplace - that's got some action and is at least 500 miles away," said one of them - Dan or the dybbuk. So Uncle Dan ended up in Chicago.
That was the only time a dybbuk showed up in the bosom of our family. And that long bus ride from Savannah to Chicago must have bored him to death - the devil, I mean - because shortly afterward he departed Uncle Dan. Maybe into the heart of a cute little fat man in Chicago named Al Capone, who loved a sub machine gun like Dan loved a deck of cards. Even though you can't detect a dybbuk or his absence by peering down a man's throat, we know he left Uncle Dan because Dan never wrote another bad check.
Years later I repeated my grandmother's story to a Logic Professor at Syracuse University who was tormenting me with a course called Symbolic Logic 321.
"Silliest story I ever heard," he muttered as he gathered up the mid term exams full of formulas and overlapping circles; and stuffed them in his briefcase. I got a "C-" on that Midterm; maybe I should never have told him my family story.
Bubbe was right. See, he didn't believe in dybbuks and already one had subleased his heart.
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