Forerelish, image by Irene Koronas
Frontispiece, from Sefer
Minhagim
or Book of Customs: A Novella
If
she’s a person of the book then she’s a person of the book, but the book should
include a frontispiece, in all reality a map—here a heron rookery and there a
red brick silo, here a boarding house for horses and there in the thicket of an
open prairie merely a hundred persons gathered for age-old rhetoric against the
Jews, a few notable cottonwoods, a commune, a grange with goods for barter and
a wool farm. Why include a frontispiece insisting
it’s a map? To begin with, the word itself is soft and bookish. Frontispiece sounds
like that thin protective leaf at the front of some old books, the one you lift
to see the frontispiece itself. It sounds like other anachronistic, triple
syllabic words—for instance forerelish,
what nobody would ever use in a sentence, except that she did actually find it
in a book translated from the Yiddish, sounding there a little like horseradish, though it had nothing at
all to do with the pungent root. All of Thomas Hardy’s novels let you
forerelish the map before entering the village. You’re meant to imagine simple
paths through woods and meadows, the distance from one curious dwelling to the
next, and as you linger on the whole of that locale it’s meant to dawn on you
in an instant that the tale in question has been delimited at the outset, here
at the forefront of the book, whittled down to notables, or are they symbols.
All the places she’s ever been begin to blend, as if grafted. A wind comes down
from the mountains and tiny dwellings less fortressed, less fearful, brace against
the impact. She shuts the book and blows out the bedside candle, listening
until sleep to the foundations, off kilter yet sound, her washtub tumbling
around in the grasses beyond the book and into the stables of itinerant horses.
In
an ancestor’s apartment in Brooklyn, a well-worn Talmud bearing an ex libris at
its heart refuses to begin on page one. In the beginning is altogether vague. The oral literature,
rather, agrees to begin with elision by beginning somewhere else. A student of
a sage, having committed a thicket of argument and folk wisdom to the heart’s
genizah, kisses the front and back covers of the book, the beloved book. A
descendant enters enchanted shtetlach by entering outright the openwork of the
book.
—Tirzah
Goldenberg
