“It’s too good an opportunity to pass up. What Yid can say no on Motzaei Yom Kippur, right?” Rabbi Plaut stopped to bask in his own brilliance
He wasn’t inferior. Being okay in learning and okay in sports kept him average, and every so often he had a good line in the dorm that made him exceptional for an hour or two, but by and large, the mark was mediocre.
His father was also mediocre, but it was worse for Tatty, because he was surrounded by superiority. Uncle Ari had his name on buildings and Uncle Shmuel was saving lives and Tatty was your man when it came to good life insurance at a fair price and had nothing memorable about him other than the fact that his brothers were famous. A career third brother.
Once, they had been to see a gadol in Eretz Yisrael, and the gabbai had actually said it to the rav. “This man is Ephraim Loemer; his younger brothers are Ari Loemer, the groisse toimech Toirah, and Shmuel Loemer, the one from the medical transports — he helped Moishe, the rosh yeshivah remembers? So this is the dritte brudder — the third brother.”
Nussi knew that he wouldn’t see anything in Tatty’s face, it was all part of the mediocrity, swallowing and pretending and showing nothing, nothing at all, as if he had determined that the only way he could match their distinctiveness was by being as unremarkable as possible and he didn’t want to ruin it.
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