Traditional Stories No. 4

Tu b’Shvat:

New Year’s Day for Trees.

I think that I shall never see

A poem as lovely as a tree.

        

                    Joyce Kilmer (August 1913)

Sometime near the middle of February in the goyish calendar the Jewish people celebrate a holiday especially for trees. It has something to do with leaving fruit trees alone for three years to let them regain their strength. This is very strange. It never meant anything to me, a new year for trees? Something maybe like Arbour Day. Naah, who knows from that either?

What did we know from trees in Boro Park way back in the olden days when I was a boy? Not much. A tree grows in Brooklyn was a movie. But that has nothing to do with my story. A tree grows on 47^th Street. Now that’s something. Some some people liked to climb on it, which also never seemed a very Jewish thing to do. While that is true for most of the kids on our street and in my gang, it was certainly not true for Shlirmy Itzkowitz, though he was definitely—as you can tell by the name I am making up for him—a Jew. Shlirmy had, one might phrase it in fancy-shmancy terms, a penchant for climbing trees. And also a tendency for falling down.

In fact, he fell so many times and broke his arm so often that the doctor at the hospital where they would fix him up warned him, “Listen, kiddo, you do this again and come back here with another broken arm, I am going to saw it right off, you understand?” He was a real doctor, a young Jew with a little black beard, who said that, so you better believe it.

But Itzkowitz, you must be kidding? This boychik loved climbing trees and he never stopped. Some of the gang thought he was crazy, others that he was just a tiny bit mishuggah but otherwise normal, and yet we all agreed it would be completely nutty to risk having your arm sawn off by the doctors at Israel Zion Hospital on Fort Hamilton Parkway.  We are talking about a really serious warning.

And yet the attraction of trees can be more powerful than anything else in the world, at least if your name is Shlirmy Itzkowitz. How could a boy, already twelve years old and approaching bar mitzvah and becoming an official man, not listen to what the doctors said? The rest of us therefore watched in shock and disbelief when, you got it, as soon as his arm was out of its cast—the one we all signed with funny sayings and our names—there was Itzkowitz back on the street and staring up at one of the tallest trees in the neighbourhood, the one with wide branches right in front of Mrs. Lefkowitz’s house. It was an hour after school, so everyone had dropped off his books, drank his milk and ate his cookies, and came out to play until the sun went down. Itzkowitz didn’t have to say a word. We knew what he was going to do. More and more kids came out of their houses, down the elevators in the apartment buildings, and from around the corner—because you know how news travels when a great event is in the offing; and soon there is a whole crowd of boys and a few girls gathered across the street watching to see what would happen to this crazy kid.

Some people wanted to say, “I bet he’ll climb right up to the top” but nobody dared to do it; that would be a jinx. Other people wanted to say, “With a doctor’s warning like he got, he’s have to be crazy to climb up that tree.” The little kids stared with bright eyes, the girls sighed in a tone of terror, and the gang folded its arms and waited in expectation of the inevitable.

It was like a slow motion movie what he did. One hand grabbed a branch, another swung over it, and both hands pulled, and then he pulled himself up until he got one leg on the branch, with arms grabbing the branch above him, and so on and on. The tree was sturdy and steady but we could see Itzkowitz trembling as he slowly made his way up this arboreal jungle-gym. Everybody held their breath. Cars occasionally whirred by, trucks rumbled past, and sometimes a vehicle slowed down to watch what was going on, too. Mothers with prams and babies inside locked the wheels, folded their arms, and also stared. The super from down the street who was taking out the ash cans, banged them on the ground, and ran over to see what was going on with this crowd. Many hands pointed across the road and up into the tree.

“Hey, that stupid kid’s gonna hurt himself, he do that.”

No one answered the obvious.

“Sheyatt, man. Hey, you crazy kid up there, you gonna hurt you’self real bad. Come right down here now or I gonna go home and call the pol-eece, you hear me?”

But as though he were way up in the clouds and couldn’t hear anything, Itzkowitz kept going up and up and up. Branch by branch.

Again, everybody on the street, grown-ups included, held their breath for a long time.

Well, of course, what everybody knew what would happen happened. The mothers and other grown-ups didn’t have time to cover their eyes and we just all stared in wonder and waited until, wham-bang, down came Shlirmy Itzkowitz on to the pavement. Some of the girls ran away, some of the little kids started to cry, and the super shouted, “Sheyatt! He’s gone and killed hisself. I better go home and call the cops.”

In a few minutes, though, Itzkowitz’s body moved and he raised himself into a standing position, one arm embracing the other. His face was really red. Then he looked at us and said, “Please don’t tell my mother what happened.” He ran off, carrying his broken arm with him.

A few minutes later we heard two sirens racing down 47^th Street. A police car and an ambulance arrived. They stopped in front of us and we pointed at the tree.

Then the policeman asked, “Not that Itzkowitz kid again?”

We all nodded yes.

The policeman went over to the ambulance and told them where the injured boy lived.

“Please don’t tell his mother,” we said. “He’s going to be in big trouble if you do.”

The policeman laughed and went to get the two ambulance guys, and they all went into the apartment building where the Itzkowitz family lived. The game was over, so we all went home for dinner—or we would be in trouble, too.

Nobody could ever look at that tree without remembering the day Shlirmy Itzkowitz fell down for the last time. He moved away probably because no one ever saw him again. Every year when the teacher in Hebrew School told us it was Tu b’shvat, the new year of trees, we would think about that crazy kid.