Excerpt from Gary Shapiro's "The Feigenbaum Foundation"

In the aftermath of all the difficulties we encountered last year, local pundits and nay-sayers were quick to observe that Milton Feigenbaum's dream of establishing a foundation devoted to Judaic Studies here in Pinkney, Nebraska-population 4,570-was nothing short of deranged, and it should have been plain to everyone that it was doomed to failure from the very beginning. I'll admit that in retrospect I can see that there were some inherent problems with the whole idea: first, Pinkney lacked a Hebrew school; second, we didn't have a rabbi; third, we had no synagogue; and fourth, we basically didn't have any Jews. And yes, I'm big enough to admit it now: I suppose these factors should have given us pause.

But they didn't. In fact, although I think we all knew we had an uphill battle to fight, we carried on in a remarkably optimistic frame of mine, right from the start. It all began on a beautifully clear, crisp day late last January-the kind of mid-winter day in Nebraska that makes you think that anything's possible-even spring. At around ten in the morning I got a call down at the store from Len Moody, our mayor, telling me to head over to the courthouse at noon for a reception in honor of Milton and Ida Feigenbaum. "Milton and Ida who?" I asked.

Just be there, Stanley, Len told me in a cryptic tone of voice. "You'll see. There'll be an announcement-a big announcement. I've got some more calls to make. See you at noon." I'd never heard him sound so mysterious-it just wasn't like Len Moody. So I got the idea that something big must be going on, and called my wife, Beth, to explain why I wouldn't be home for lunch.

I showed up at the courthouse a little early, just out of curiosity. Within fifteen minutes the whole of Pinkney's Jewish population was in attendance-all twelve of us. I'm counting the agnostics in this group (Jews doubt God, and God doubts the Jews-it's been a part of our relationship since the Golden Calf)-and I'm throwing in Earl Hostetler, the janitor at the YMCA, who just decided to announce, about five years ago, that he'd switched over. (He came into Weintraub Sporting Goods one morning, cornered me back by the golf clubs, and told me, "Stan, I'm a Jew. I figured it out last night. I'm a Jew! What do you think?" Well, I thought he was drunk, to be honest about it, but I didn't want to hurt his feelings.)

Beth dropped by with our twelve-year-old son Andy, to see what all the commotion was about; then Norm and Helene Botwinick showed up, followed by Ben and Roseanne Halpern and their daughter Stacey, the three elderly Charnis sisters, Rhonda, Arlene, and Faye-and finally Earl Hostetler walked in, decked out in a jumpsuit and an embroidered yarmulke he'd attached to his bald scalp with some sort of packing tape. Len Moody was there, too, of course-even though he had to take some sick time over at AutoLube to do it.

"I'm a man of few words," Milton Feigenbaum began when we were all gathered in front of him. He was a fat little guy with a red, frightened face, and his sentences came out breathless, each one separated by a gasp, like he'd just run up a hill. "Sixty years ago I was a young fellow down on his luck, trying to get from Newark, New Jersey to Seattle on the cheap," he told us. "I had some tough times. Who didn't? It was the Depression, and let me tell you, nobody had anything. Destiny took me through your town-just raw luck-and it was here in Pinkney that I got a warm bed and a good hot meal. I've never forgotten that kindness. Perfect stranger took me into his home and fed me borscht. How about that? Borscht! Out in Seattle I finally found work on the docks, then I met my Ida here-" he squeezed his wife's plump shoulder-"and together we started a family. Make a long story short, we got rich. I'm not ashamed of it. Ball bearings-little thing the size of a pea-who ever thought it could make that kind of money? Last year we sold out-I'm seventy-seven years old, the children are grown, who needs the aggravation? So today we're here, Ida and me, to say thanks. We're here because we want to give the town of Pinkney something back in exchange for that bowl of borscht. Namely, two million dollars."

Two million dollars! Well, you could have knocked us over with a feather or two. It reminded me of one of those witness-stand-confession scenes on Perry Mason: we all gasped, Roseanne Halpern put her hand to her heart and cried, "Oh, my God," and Rhonda Charnis started to weep like a baby.

Milton Feigenbaum wrapped an arm around his wife and pulled her close to him. "Two million dollars," he repeated. "Our legacy to the world. Some men dream of landing a man on Mars. I have a dream of my own-the establishment of a foundation devoted to Judaic Studies. History, theology, art, music, philosophy-the whole ball of wax. And right here, Pinkney, Nebraska is the place I've chosen to make that dream come true."

I looked over at Norm Botwinick, and he looked back at me. Was this guy serious? Was he sane? Norm shrugged, and so I shrugged back. Then I thought of that baseball movie where Kevin Costner hears voices telling him, "If you build it, they will come." So he builds a baseball diamond someplace in Iowa-middle of nowhere, a cornfield-and shazam! Shoeless Joe Jackson comes running in out of the mist to play ball.

So who was going to come out of the mist in Pinkney? The Baal Shem Tov?

Which made me think of my grandfather, Max Weintraub, may he rest in peace. What would he have said if he'd been alive to see this? As a teenager he'd fled Russia and landed in America as an itinerant peddler, then spent several years roaming the Midwest with a bundle of tchatchkes he sold door to door. He caught pneumonia in Wyoming in the winter of 1910, and on his way back to Kansas City he collapsed in Pinkney, where he was forced to put up for several weeks while he coughed his lungs out and recovered his strength. That fateful turn of events led eventually to the establishment of Weintraub's General Merchandise, which stood for over fifty years at the corner of Sixth and Seward right downtown. The building's still there today, currently occupied by my store, Weintraub Sporting Goods.

He was a free-thinker, my grandfather-he had no use for religion whatsoever ("fairy tales for the weak-minded," he called it), and my faint memories of him-he died when I was a boy-involve nothing more religious than his devout regard for the Chicago Cubs. But I want to think that he'd have made an exception in the case of the Feigenbaum Foundation, because Max Weintraub was a dreamer at heart, and he loved a long shot. Why else would he have put down roots in Pinkney, after all?

My parents, who had retired and moved to Arizona a few years ago, were going to bust their buttons when they heard about this. Pinkney, Nebraska, their little town, was going to be thrust into the limelight, Judaically speaking. Who could say for sure how famous we might become? Maybe, I told myself, we'd end up mentioned in the same breath with the great yeshivas-the mystical centers of spirituality, the dynastic rabbinical cities: Ompol, Berditchev, Lublin, Bratzlav, Pinkney In the awestruck aftermath of the Feigenbaums' dramatic announcement, my daydreams took flight, and suddenly I envisioned myself ushered into the study of our town's legendary and beloved Tzaddik, whom I named, for no particular reason, Rabbi Shlomo Zindel of Pinkney-also known to his adoring followers around the world as the Feigenbaumer Rebbe.

Well, okay, so I was getting carried away. So sue me.

The Feigenbaums flew back to Seattle immediately after their big announcement, leaving us slightly shell-shocked. The next day all twelve of us who constituted Pinkney's Jewish community got together and agreed to sit on the foundation's Board of Directors. Our first order of business was to name Norm Botwinick Chairman of the Board-he was an attorney, and he'd served a term on the town council back in the Seventies, so we figured he knew something about Robert's Rules of Order. Norm gavelled us to order-he'd brought a gavel with him, just in case-and we got down to business. And yes, I'll be honest: my heart was pounding.

Though I'd lived in Pinkney all my life, and I knew just about everybody in town, I'd always felt a little out of kilter here. It was hard to avoid feeling that way, being just about the only Jew in town. When I was a child in elementary school, every year around Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur I had to stand up and give a little explanation of Jewish holidays for my class. My teachers meant well, but it made me uneasy, having to do it. Kids stared at me like I was talking about some remote tribe of cannibals in the wilds of Borneo. Their eyes grew wide with alarm as I told them about the Days of Awe-about the Book of Life, in which all names are written: on a certain day, after God considers everyone's deeds over the past year, He decides who's going to be written in the Book of Life for the new year, and then once he's done with that, He shuts the Book (here I'd always demonstrate with a textbook, slamming shut my copy of, say, Friends Around the World with a sharp crack), and that's that-you're either written in the new Book of Life, or you're not. One year when I got to that point-I think it was the third grade-a girl in the back of the class began to cry.

I loved that part.

A few days after my annual class report, my family, in its annual spasm of religious observances, would take me out of school and close the store for a week, load up the car and drive all the way to Omaha (with Grandpa Max in the back seat, smoking little hand-rolled cigarettes and muttering to himself in Yiddish), where we stayed in sweltering rooms at the old Portman Hotel downtown and attended services at a crumbling Byzantine-style synagogue in Omaha's Jewish neighborhood on the north side. This trip was taken each year to satisfy my mother, who'd been raised in an Orthodox family in St. Louis; my father, on the other hand, like my grandfather, considered the entire subject of religion to be a joke foisted on poor, gullible people by a tribe of rabbinical pranksters. Our annual trek was his one concession to Jewish custom all year long, and he didn't suffer it gladly.

Of all of us, I was the most devout. Don't ask me why: it was just in my blood. For me the biggest treat of the trip was the chance to hear those plaintive Hebrew melodies-to see, miracle of miracles, a hundred, two hundred Jews at once, all gathered together in prayer, to sit among them in a genuine synagogue, with three Torahs in permanent residence, enthroned in full bejeweled regalia like queens behind the splendid velvet curtain of the ark. For those few days a year, I was among my own kind, a Jew among Jews.

Then we'd head back to Pinkney, and as we pulled into our driveway at the end of the long trip, I felt as if I were re-entering an ongoing play, a melodrama that demanded I wear a mask to disguise myself from my friends, my neighbors, my schoolmates. Nobody knew who I really was-that's what I told myself. I was like Zorro. Oh, sure, I presented a pleasant, plain enough facade, a sort of Midwestern version of Don Diego de la Vega, but on the inside I was exotic and mysterious-a secret Jew.

So when I went away to college and met Beth (she's from Minneapolis), I had a big decision to make: whether to come back to Pinkney after school, or go out into the world where there are Jews clustered here and there in groups-where you can live a Jewish life and still feel like a normal human being.

Back to IR Fall 1997