When All Else Fails

Just after my eighth birthday, I developed an unrelenting, hacking cough. It persisted for months despite my immigrant mother's valiant efforts with home remedies and the cough medicines prescribed by our Jewish immigrant family doctor.

Frantic, my mother took me to a Jewish doctor who had immigrated a generation before and had been her family's doctor until he returned from Vienna as an ENT specialist. He diagnosed a pan-sinusitis and probed my sinuses with painful drains at least weekly. That went on for a couple of months; I continued to cough.

In desperation, my mother reverted to her shtetle past. She brought me to a faith healer steeped in traditional Orthodox mysticism. The room was dark. Thick, dark drapes covered the windows; rich Eastern carpets covered the wooden floors. A darkly shaded lamp on a mahogany desk was the sole light. The burly, dark-bearded man wore an embroidered skullcap, his long, unshorn ringlets and sideburns marking him as an ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jew.

All I remember of the treatment was that amidst some incomprehensible incantations he put an oil-cloth serape-like cover on my shoulders, broke three raw eggs into a bowl, blessed them, stepped behind me and, with rising babble, poured the eggs over my head.

That was in the spring. When school was out my cough disappeared. And I understood fractions.

Ed_Rudin@macnexus.org