The Temple on West Street

Benjamin Lichtenstein walked south on West Street on a Monday morning in June with a box under his arm, and when he reached the lot between Fourth and Fifth Streets he stopped, because the building was gone and the lot was bare and the sky was where the roof had been.

He was thirty-one. He was an accountant at a firm on Virginia Street, three years out of the university, quiet, good with numbers, the sort of young man who kept his opinions in his chest until he was certain of them. He had come to the temple at 426 West Street since he was old enough to walk, since his father Aaron had carried him up the steps on Saturday mornings to sit in the hard pews and listen to the service, since his grandfather Jakob had told him about the day in 1921 when the cornerstone was laid and the governor and the chief justice and the mayor had all come to speak because it was the first synagogue in the state of Nevada, the first real one, built from subscriptions and donations and labor, and it had mattered to everyone, not just the congregation but the whole town.

Fifty years. The building had stood fifty years on this lot, a modest brick structure with good proportions and ten stained glass windows that caught the morning light on the east wall, and Benjamin had grown up in that light, had been bar mitzvahed in it, had sat in it on the high holy days with his father and his grandfather and felt the weight of the thing, the continuity of it, the knowledge that this room was where his family had brought their faith and kept it for three generations in a town that did not always know what to do with them.

And now it was a lot. The demolition had been finished two weeks ago. The congregation had voted. The building was too small, they said, and the neighborhood had changed, they said, and the new site out on Lakeside Drive was better, more room, more parking, more of everything the modern congregation needed. Benjamin understood the arguments. He had sat through the meetings. He had not spoken against it because the vote was clear and because he was young and because his father had voted yes and because there were things you did not fight when the community had decided.

But he had come here this morning, before work, to see it one more time. To see the nothing of it. To stand where the building had been and know the exact shape of what was gone.

The box under his arm held papers from his grandfather’s store. Jakob Lichtenstein had opened the dry goods store on Sierra Street in 1893, five years after arriving from San Francisco where he had clerked for a wholesale house. The store had run forty years under Jakob and then under Aaron, selling work clothes and yard goods and household supplies to a downtown clientele that came on foot because everything was walking distance in those years. The store was gone now too, closed in 1961 when Aaron retired, the building still standing but holding a different business, and the papers in the box were the old ledgers, the ones Benjamin had found in his father’s garage last week while looking for something else.

He had brought them here without quite knowing why. Some connection between the store and the temple, between the two places where his family had been most fully itself. Jakob had sat on the founding board of the congregation. Aaron had served as treasurer for fifteen years. The store and the temple had been a block apart, both on the near side of downtown, both walking distance from the house on Court Street where three generations had lived. The store closed. The temple was demolished. The house on Court Street had been sold when Aaron moved to the new house out west. The family’s whole geography, the three points of the triangle that had defined Lichtenstein life in Reno, was gone within a decade.

Benjamin set the box down on the ground at the edge of the lot and looked at the space. They had saved the windows. Ten stained glass panels, crated and stored, to be installed in the new building when it was finished. The cornerstone box had been removed intact, the copper box that held the newspapers and the coins and the letter from the governor in 1921, and that too would go into the new building. So the congregation had not abandoned the old one. It had carried what it could carry and left the rest.

He thought about the new building. He had seen the architect’s drawings, the modern design, clean lines, a building that would look like 1973 instead of 1921. Graham Erskine, who had designed half the notable buildings in Reno in the past twenty years. It would be good. It would be new. It would have parking and a social hall and room for the school. The congregation would grow into it the way it had grown into this one fifty years ago, and in fifty years someone would stand in it and feel the weight of it the way Benjamin felt the weight of this empty lot.

But that was the thing. You could move the windows and the cornerstone box and the Torah scrolls and the congregation itself, all of it, out to the new site on Lakeside Drive, and what you could not move was the fifty years of walking. His grandfather walking from the store on Sierra Street to the temple on West Street every Saturday morning for forty years. His father making the same walk. Benjamin making it as a boy, his hand in his father’s hand, the route so familiar it was not a route but a fact of life, as fixed as the river or the mountains.

The new temple would be a five-minute drive. No one would walk to it. The connection between the store and the temple and the house, the triangle his family had lived inside for three generations, had required all three points to be close enough to walk between. Remove one point and the triangle held. Remove two and you had a line. Remove all three and you had nothing but memory and a box of ledgers under your arm.

A car passed on West Street. The driver did not slow down. There was nothing to slow down for. An empty lot between two buildings, chain-link fence around it, a few pieces of broken brick along the edge that the demolition crew had missed. If you had not known what was here, you would not have known anything was missing.

Benjamin picked up the box and walked back north on West Street toward Virginia, toward his office, toward the morning’s work. He would go to the new building’s dedication when it happened, next year or the year after, and he would stand in the new sanctuary and see the old windows in their new frames and feel something, probably, a recognition, a continuity. And he would carry this too, this morning, this empty lot, this knowledge of what the ground had held and given up.

He turned the corner onto Virginia Street and the casino signs blinked at him in the morning light, as always, the town going on about its business, not unkind, not unaware, but moving, always moving, replacing the old thing with the new thing, and the people who remembered the old thing carrying it quietly, in boxes, until they set it down.

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