A Serious Man Page #3

AN EARPIECE:

A pull back—a reverse of the preceding push in—from the white plastic earpiece of a

transistor radio. The Jefferson Airplane continues over the cut but becomes extremely

compressed. The pull back reveals that the earpiece, lodged in someone’s ear, trails a

white cord.

compressed. The pull back reveals that the earpiece, lodged in someone’s ear, trails a

white cord.

We drift down the cord to find the radio at its other end. As we do so we hear, live in the

room, many voices speaking a foreign language in unison. A classroom, apparently.

The radio, on a desktop, is hidden from in front by a book held open before it. The book

is written in non-Roman characters.

We are in Hebrew school.

The boy who is listening to the transistor radio—Danny Gopnik—sits at a hinge-topped

desk in a cinderblock classroom whose rows of desks are occupied by other boys and

girls of about twelve years of age. It is dusk and the room is fluorescent-lit.

At the front of the room an elderly teacher performs a soporific verb conjugation.

Danny straightens one leg so that he may dig into a pocket. With an eye on the teacher to

make sure he isn’t being watched, he eases something out:

A twenty-dollar bill.

Teacher

Mee yodayah? Reuven? Rifkah? Mah zeh, “anakim”?

BLINDING LIGHT:

The light resolves into a flared image of a blinking eye.

Reverse:
the inside of a human ear: fleshy whorls finely veined, a cavity receding to dark.

Objective on the doctor’s office: the doctor is peering through a lightscope into the ear of

an early-middle-aged man, Larry Gopnik.

Doctor

Uh-huh.

HEBREW SCHOOL:

Close on Hebrew characters being scribbled onto the blackboard as the teacher talks.

The teacher, talking.

A bored child, staring off.

His point-of-view: a blacktopped parking lot with a few orange school buses; beyond it a

marshy field and distant suburban tract housing.

Close on another child staring through drooping eyelids.

His point-of-view: very close on the face of a classroom clock. We hear its electrical

hum. Its red sweep-second hand crawls around the dial very, very slowly.

Danny Gopnik hisses:

Danny

Fagle!. . .

The teacher drones on, writing on the blackboard. Danny’s eyes flit from the teacher to

the student sitting kitty-corner in front of him—a husky youth with shaggy hair. He

hasn’t heard Danny.

. . . Fagle!

The teacher turns from the blackboard and Danny leans back, eyes front, folding the

twenty up small behind his book.

The teacher, not finding the source of the noise, turns back to the board and resumes the

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