Forward by Constantine Gochis

I think I remember the man of which my dad wrote in this story. Well, not him actually, but my father's speaking of him, and his shy knocks on the door to ask for help on the small issues of life which become very large when you get old. Then, my father was probably just in his seventies, or younger. Things change. My father has been gone for 12 years. I assume Yitzhak, if that was his real name, has been gone for much longer than that. The newspaper, The Forward, is no longer paper. As with everything else, technology has required adaptation. I doubt Yitzhak would have approved.

FORWARD

He clung, precariously, to the back of a seat as the bus driver made sudden starts and stops.  He looked fragile and lost.  We stood very close.  I could see his eyes, enlarged behind thick lenses, looking straight at me with no sign of recognition.

"Yitzhak," I shouted, ". . . you've forgotten your old friend?"

The eyes responded.  The face beamed with pleasure. He did not call me by name.  He was never able to articulate it in the twelve years of our acquaintance.  

"My friend!" he exclaimed, finally, in the way he always adressed me, with a laughing sound that stretched broadly beyond the scope of the two words.  

"So," I asked. "Vee gays du?", that is, "Where are you going?"

He teetered, challenging disaster, as he fumbled for a tattered envelope.  I knew immediately what it was.  I had seen it many times before--his gas bill.  He always paid his utilities in person.  

"Still no checking account?  You couldn't send a money order? I chided him, good naturedly.

It was a question I had asked countless time, a futile inquiry.  Yitzhak did not trust banks, or checks. "Money orders cost money," he would retort.  I frequently offered the use of my own checking account, to no avail.  He was fiercely independent and proud.  Yet, if anyone was in need of governmental assistance, it was he.  Yet he consistently disdained any help.

"I never took before.  I wouldn't take now."

Suddenly I sensed that something was amiss.

"Yitzhak," I shouted.  "You're on the wrong bus."

He was embarrassed but he laughed as he always did when he was uncomfortable.

"But it says on the envelope. . ."

"Never mind," I insiste. "It's the wrong bus. Shnell, Yitzhak, let's get off."

The bus driver had stopped the vehicle too fare fro the curb.  We descended with great difficulty.  Yitzhak assured me throughout the process, "I can make it. I can make it."

We made the return trip together.  I could not abandon him in his manifest disorder  By my calculations, he was bordering ninety years of age.

It was the "Forvetz", the then Yiddish news weekly, now printing an English edition, called the "Forward" that brought us together.  We were neighbors.  Every Tuesday I would encounter him waiting for the mailman.  Tuesday was when the "Forvetz" arrived.

One time, when the mailman came, the "Forvetz" didn't.  It is difficult to describe his dismay. I have seen major tragedies that produced less reaction.

"So you go to the corner. They carry the weekly."

"They charge a dollar, thirty five."

"Maybe it will come tomorrow," I reassured him.

"Tomorrow," he moaned in a dirge like like tone, "Tomorrow."

It did not come that week, nor he next.  He was inconsolable.  I had to intervene. 

I called New York, one of the newspaper's distribution points.   We were promised delivery, for sure, the next week, with a replacement of the missing issues. He was only partially mollified.  Then he was suspicious.

"Maybe someone is stealing. . ."

"Who reads Yiddish in this neighborhood?" I asked.

I then made a cardinal error.  I bought a copy of the latest issue from the news stand and offered it to him. He was not pleased.  Had it been anything other than the "Forvetz" he would have refused it.  His mental struggle was visual.  He glanced alternately at me, then my offering.  The newspaper prevailed, barely.

In tie, I learned the importance to him of the weekly. It was his only pleasure.  He seldom went out, except to shop, or to wheel his invalid wife to her doctor.  He spoke of children, but I rarely saw any evidence of filial attachments.  He was not gregarious.  He was solitary except fo that wife who sat perpetually before a television set, too bent out of shape for surcease from trial.  He had no interest in soap operas. There was no music.  He busied himself with household chores and waited for Tuesday.

We talked in a melange of pidgin English, some Yiddish, though his deafness precluded a real two way conversation.  I listened, mostly, understood with difficulty, and waited for a polite interval that would allow me a gracious retreat.  Yitzhak was painfully repetitive.  

In those twelve years I lived in the building, his hesitant knock on my door came frequently.

His problems were not major.  A letter from Social Security terrified him though usually it was nothing more than an advisory. He would never sit when he visited.  He was ashamed of having to ask for help.  Frequently, he had problems with his bank. He was sure they were underpaying interest on his meager Certificate of Deposit.

There was no room for proligacy.  He and his wife subsisted on an aggregate Social Security of seven hundred dollars a month.  The rent took more than half.

He was fourteen when the Germans left ony rotting potato skins for the staving Polish populace in 1914.  After the wafr he took his fabric weaver with him to Argentina, married, witness the antics of the Peronistas, removed to America for more years of privation.  He related these sadness without rancor, sotically, almost as if he accepted a Divine Judgment, an immutable predestination.

We shared our tales of privation, my own, in the Great Depression, not as horrendous as his.  We talked, that is, he talked of the trials of his beloved Israel, quoted the latest from that beacon of light, the "Forvetz".  It was his "Aliyah" to the promised land he would never reach.

For casual conversation we spoke of the weather and those occasions when chicken was selling for forty-nine cents a pound.

One day his familiar knock again summoned me to the door.  It was a Tuesday.  He did not want to come in.  He was smiling. There was no sign of travail.

"I got something for you," he said, his eyes glinting and enlarged behind his thick glasses.

"Today, I get two "Forvetz", one in English.  He unrolled the paper revealing the masthead.

"This one is for you," he said happily.  He was sharing a part of himself.  He did this every week subsequently, with the very same ceremony.

When next his subscription came due, he allowed me to use my checking account for him.  He was happy when I enrolled also.

"The only newspaper that writes the 'emmes'." 

The other day, I went by my old building, and inquired after my old friend.

"They moved, a long time ago," I was told.

I don't really want to know any more than that.  I like to think that every Tuesday he ispacing, with usual apprehension, before the new mailbox.  He is stopping now and then to peer into the distance for the mailman.  His eyes are wide and expectant for the news that links him with the world of his "emmes", his truth, his dream.