by Miryam Sivan
“To want to understand why we’re here and what to do about it, okay.” Isabel turned to Lia and left Uri in the dust of the habitual disagreement with her first born. “But to say it’s one god over another, and that there’s a messiah, or saints, or many gods, or only one, is a matter of information dissemination. And power.
“Nobody knows really, sweetheart.” Isabel turned back to Uri and his question. “Christians believe Jesus is god and messiah. Jews believe god is without form and they’re still waiting for the messiah. Some people don’t believe in god at all.”
“Yeah, like you.” Uri snorted.
“Yeah, like me. Look the door’s open. We’ve got to keep up.” She nudged him forward.
On the way back down the mountain they walked through the small village of Karlštejn. A diminutive lane lined with souvenir shops and pubs pouring draft from early morning. Uri ran ahead to look at the display of kites.
“Why did you tell Uri you don’t believe in god?” Lia asked.
“Because he wanted to know. Why should I lie? I didn’t with you or Yael.”
“We never asked those kinds of questions.”
“Kibbutz was anti-religious and mocking. Anyway, Uri’s different. Don’t you remember when he asked why god made us? How old was he?”
“Three and a half.”
“He thinks about these things. Maybe he’ll become a rabbi or a philosopher.”
“Or guru,” Lia grinned.
Uri came running toward them clutching a bright red kite.
“Can I have it, Ema? Please, prosim?”
He ran around them with the kite. Red like the matador’s cloth. Like Christ’s blood.
6
The last day in the beautiful city of Prague was the Jewish day. Isabel always saved Jewish sites for the end of any trip to a European city. Why ruin a good vacation? Dave, who seemed to hold a personal grudge against history, still liked to point out: “From a Jewish point of view, Europe is one big graveyard.” Not knowing how her children would react, Isabel decided to postpone their encounter with this particular history until the end of the visit. They had seen the sites. They had had their fun. Now they could see what had happened to the Jews.
Waking early they went straight to perennially crowded Josefov.
“I’ll explain who the golem is later.” Anticipating Uri’s stream of questions, Isabel held his hand and pulled him past the large doughy statue of the golem at the entrance to the quarter.
“Golem?”
“Later.”
At first her children were not impressed. They were accustomed to seeing much older buildings. And the stone streets were like those back home in Jerusalem and Acco. But the six synagogues on Maiselova Street—the only structures left standing after the vast renovation—got their attention.
“Look.” Uri pointed to a clock with Hebrew letters.
“Old Town Hall,” Isabel said. “The clock hands run backwards, right to left like Hebrew.”
“Built in 1586,” Lia read from a pamphlet she picked up in the hotel lobby, “and renovated with this Baroque pink facade 200 years later.”
Down the alley, they passed tourist stalls selling small oil paintings of Josefov’s narrow stone streets, dolls of Hasidic men and children clutching gold coins, and clay golem figurines in a myriad of sizes.
Lia stopped and lifted up a Hasidic doll. “I don’t believe this.”
“Like the men in Jerusalem,” Uri said.
“I just don’t believe this.” Lia glared at the vendor.
“What are they doing here?” Uri asked.
Concern plowed through Isabel. They had barely touched the surface of the ghetto and already her children were freaking out. They stared at Isabel. She didn’t answer.
“Ema?” Uri asked.
“Mom?” Lia asked.
“Yes, these dolls are dressed like Hasidic men from Jerusalem and Bnei Brak and Brooklyn and Antwerpen and other parts of the world. This look originally comes from Poland. Not that far from here actually.”
“And the coins?” Lia asked heatedly, as if Isabel were responsible for Exhibit One of anti-Semitism.
“The coins are vulgar, I’m with you on that. If you ask the guy selling them, he won’t even understand why it’s offensive. For many of these people Jews and money go together.”
“But this place is Judenrein. Jews don’t live here anymore.”
“Lia, honey, we have the whole day to get through. Please.” She tilted her head in Uri’s direction.
“It’s just disgusting. If they could, they’d kill us again.”
“Who killed who?” Uri’s ears on fire.
“The Holocaust, Uri.” Lia put the doll back and glowered at the merchant again. “Then we were vermin. Now we’re dolls.”
“Lia, please.”
“Here too?” Uri asked.
“Yes, here too, Uri.” Maybe it wasn’t a good idea to have them join her on this brief holiday. She didn’t know if she could face history and be strong for them at the same time.
As if reading her mind, Lia bent low to talk to her little brother. “Uri honey, where we’re walking lots of Jews used to live. For hundreds of years. Then the Germans came and killed everyone. But there’s still a lot of interest in Jews. See these dolls, and the golem Mom will tell you about.”
“Necro-nostalgia,” Isabel whispered.
“What Mom?”
“Necro-nostalgia,” Isabel said louder. Rows of male dolls in long black coats wearing fur shtreimels, long black beards and knickers, with hooked noses and clutching large gold coins to their chests, stared blankly into space.
The children watched her. She shook her head to stay present, focused, but tears filled her eyes anyway. “Let’s go.” Isabel straightened her back. “The Altneuschule’s over there.”
Uri took her hand.
“Called Staronová in Czech. Europe’s oldest active synagogue. Built in 1270,” Lia read the brochure as they stood in the long entrance line. “When it was built Jews were not allowed to be architects. So a Christian designed it.”
“Looks like Shrek’s house.” Uri was excited.
“You’re right.” Isabel saw the low building, its heavy-hanging eaves and saw-toothed gable, through the child’s eyes. Indeed, a dwelling fit for an ogre.
Once inside they wandered around the dim medieval sanctuary. Isabel slipped away into the women’s gallery seeking repose. But the space was too narrow and dark for that. Women who might want to pray along with the men of their community were sandwiched between thick walls and basically could feel on their bodies this reluctant concession to their presence. There was little air and slits in the thick wall provided minimum visibility into the main sanctuary. Lia and Uri joined her.
“These days services are held irregularly, and few women come.” Isabel felt a need to rationalize the inhospitable and demeaning space to her daughter.
“That’s obvious. This place is as spiritual as a dungeon.” Lia frowned.
The three of them squinted through the slits. People milled under Gothic stone bays and around heavy octagonal pillars. Twelve narrow windows in the exterior walls, one for each Israelite tribe, let in negligible amounts of light. Retrofitted large and ornate electric chandeliers hardly helped. The place was dark, gloomy, and depressing.
After a couple of minutes, Lia got up. “We’re done.” She took Uri’s hand and they left.
Isabel remained and steadied herself. She worried. If the Hasidic doll with the coin brought them low, how would they react to the Pinkas Synagogue? And the cemetery? She watched Uri drag Lia to see a glass case against the far wall. Maybe they should skip the rest of the Jewish quarter? Go to the city’s anemic zoo instead?
“Mom.” With her hand Lia summoned Isabel to come quick.
Isabel came out from behi
nd the restraining wall of the women’s section and walked over to them standing by a memorial case she had never noticed before.
“Ema, it’s like the ten commandments.” Uri pointed at the shape of the two cases. “Like what you sewed for my book.”
“And look.” Lia pointed at the names in the glass case. “Franz Kafka.”
“Huh?” Isabel felt lightheaded.
“Says here,” Lia read from the brochure, “that Kafka had his bar-mitzvah in this synagogue and on the new moon of the month of Sivan, the anniversary of his death, the light near his name is turned on.”
Isabel grabbed the edge of the case to steady herself. Why should Kafka’s yahrtzeit take her by surprise? Why should it affect her so? He was born in this city, grew up here, and lived here for nearly his entire life. But how did she not know this when she knew so much about him and his Prague? Isabel looked for the ark on the eastern wall. Empty now of Torah scrolls it was the shooting gallery he described in the well-known letter to his father. From this vantage point, sitting in this synagogue’s pews, Kafka drew certain conclusions about appearances, hypocrisy, and the lack of true affection.
“Pretty cool. You really like his work, right Mom?”
Isabel nodded. Swept into a draft of revenants, she stared at his name and leaned more of her weight on the glass case. No big deal she scolded herself. Just another fact. Another bit of history. Let it sweep through you, no, over you, she instructed herself. Keep it together.
“You okay?” Lia tugged at Isabel’s sleeve. “Ready to go? Uri’s already outside.”
Isabel forced herself to move, to shake off the pain of the rejecting father and the snubbed homeland. To join her children. To return to here and now. By the time they reached the Pinkas Synagogue on nearby Siroka Street she was back. Though more nervous than ever. What if they fell apart here? What if pain coagulated and choked them? She paused outside.
Lia looked at her. “We’re tougher than you think, Mom. It’s you I’m worried about.”
The walls of the Pinkas Synagogue were covered ceiling to floor with the handwritten names of the 77,297 Jews from Bohemia and Moravia who died in the ghettos and camps. Uri had just mastered his Latin letters and read the wall, starting from the top. Cities. Towns. First names. Last names. Dates of birth. Deportation dates—the last known piece of information about the dead. Isabel stopped Uri after a few names. He read too slowly. Much remained to be seen that day.
They climbed the stairs to the synagogue’s second floor. Isabel on one side of Uri, Lia on the other, and made their way slowly past display cases containing some of the 4,000 drawings, paintings, and poems created by Jewish children in Terezin. Isabel legs shook. She walked to a window for some air. Left Uri in Lia’s care.
The city’s pitched roofs were so pretty. Terracotta soothed the eyes. Of course Uri knew about the Holocaust. The year before he came home on Holocaust Remembrance Day and asked her if she knew that children had been taken in trains built for cows to camps where they were gassed and burned. Isabel had forgotten that Israel’s state school curriculum exposed Jewish children to this information so early. When Lia came home in first grade with this same information and many questions, Isabel was shocked. Why so young? Why so early? The teacher pointed out that the children who were transported, gassed, and burned were not exactly spared this information.
And just like Lia and Yael, Uri insisted on knowing whether anyone in their family had been taken away in cattle cars and gassed to death. And as with the girls, Isabel began the conversation that would probably go on for the rest of their lives about Grandma Suri’s mother, Bella Weiss, and her sister Raizel, Aunt Zizi’s twin, and baby brother Sholem, and the walled town of Kamenets-Podolski. And when Uri insisted on knowing if anyone in their family had actually died in the camps, Isabel said yes and named more names for nothing less would satisfy him.
“Great-grandmother Bella’s sisters went into the gas chambers?” His eyes lit up. “And their children? Aunts, uncles, cousins? Wow. So many.”
And as with Lia and Yael, Isabel reminded Uri that having family killed in the concentration camps and in the Ukrainian woods wasn’t like winning the lottery. There was nothing good about it. And like his sisters he said of course, he knew. But still this was his family. History had come a little closer to him that day. Grandma Suri’s mother! Grandma Suri’s brother and sister!
Slowly Lia and Uri made their way past the children’s drawings and poems in the glass cases. Isabel remained by the window and watched. Uri had no questions. Isabel didn’t know whether this was good or bad. Soon enough they were done and together they descended the stairs.
They toured the remaining four synagogues in the quarter. Despite Isabel’s antipathy, they wandered through the craft stalls in Old Town Square and bought small gifts for Alon, Yael, Emanuel, and Suri. Then they went to the Old Cemetery.
✶
For 350 years Prague’s Jews buried their dead in the Old Cemetery. 12,000 tombstones stacked one against the other. One hundred thousand graves burrowing twelve stories deep in less than a quarter acre. The MaHaRaL—Rabbi Judah Loewe ben Bezalel—artisan, kabbalist, creator and destroyer of the infamous golem, its most famous VIP.
“Like Star Trek.” Uri pointed enthusiastically to hands carved on a gravestone held up like two fans directed toward one another. The first and second fingers coupled, split from the coupled third and fourth. “Spock and the Vulcans do that.”
“When the priests bless Israel,” Isabel explained, “they hold their hands like that. Gene Rodenberry borrowed stuff from Judaism.”
“Cool.” Uri was captivated.
On this sunny day the cemetery was especially crowded. The narrow paths around the graves almost too busy to walk on. Everyone it seemed had followed the travel guides’ advice and arrived early. The Starý židovský hřbitov, or Old Jewish Cemetery, was the largest tourist attraction in Prague. Isabel had been twice before. Each time, once even during a light snow, the place overflowed with visitors fascinated by the site of a people as restricted in death as they had been in life. A necropolis ghetto.
In 1787 even the municipal authorities realized that there was a limit to urban density and closed the Old Cemetery and opened a new one in Zizkov. Then in 1890 a Jewish section adjacent to the large Christian cemetery in Strašnice opened. Kafka and his parents were buried there. Dying from tuberculosis in 1924 spared Franz the ghettos and concentration camps where his three sisters were murdered less than twenty years later.
On her first trip to Prague Isabel visited Kafka’s grave in Strašnice with its ivy trimmed perimeter walls, spacious plots, and untended gravestones. She was surrounded by Ashkenazi names from her American childhood: Schwartz, Roth, Miller, Horowitz, Applebaum, Eisner. Those whose ancestors were lucky enough to get out before the war, lived and prospered on the banks of the Hudson, in the L.A. basin, in other parts of Europe, and Israel. But here in Prague, only two generations managed to be buried in Strašnice’s New Cemetery. All activity stopped in the early 1940s. The next generation went up in smoke in the ovens of Terezin, Chełmno, and Auschwitz-Birkenau. An alternative solution to urban density.
They walked toward the Maharal’s grave. Though crammed close to the others, its headstone was taller, wider, and grander than its neighbors. A large acorn at the top acted as a beacon. Columns with pomegranate capitols framed the headstone shaped into two tablets, like the memorial case in the Altneuschule, like the stone Moses brought down with him from the mountain top. Religious Jews, some praying, some crying, encircled the grave.
“Who’s the Maharal? What’s a golem?” Uri demanded to know. “And the slips of paper . . .” He pointed to them jammed into the grave’s crannies. “Does he get messages to God faster?”
The three of them stood closely together beside the heavily trafficked tombstone. As quickly and as simply as possible, and again in Hebrew, though
here many of the Jewish visitors would understand her explanation, Isabel gave Uri another thumbnail sketch of history. This time of European anti-Semitism. On this his last day in the city, she recounted that Jews were hated, feared, and locked into the ghetto at night, and often killed.
“Rabbi Loewe created a superhero to protect them. A golem made from mud, water and holy words. It had no soul but could understand language. I read somewhere that his name was Yosele.”
Lia and Uri laughed.
“But in the end Rabbi Loewe had to undo the golem. Superheroes can grow too large and become too powerful. From forces of good they can become agents of destruction.”
“Like the Hulk!” Uri called out.
“Exactly,” Isabel answered. “Legend says that the dust and soil of the golem’s remains are in the Altneuschule’s attic.”
“The Shrek building?”
“Yes.”
“Let’s go back and see it.”
“Can’t.”
“Why? I want to.” He turned slightly, ready to run back to the synagogue.
“There’s no way into the attic.”
“I’ll find a way. Please, Ema, let’s go now and try. Please.”
“Uri,” Isabel said firmly. “It’s off limits. No one’s allowed. Okay? No one.” She paused. She wanted to tell him she already tried, but that might encourage him.
He was quiet. And upset. Isabel started to walk away from the grave. They followed.
“Only very holy people can make a golem. The rest of us have to know our place.” Isabel put her hand on his shoulder. He shook it off but after a moment stared up at her. He wanted to understand.
“Why is it so crowded in here?” He stopped and gazed at the hundreds and thousands of gravestones leaning one against the other.
“Because they wouldn’t give Jews more land.” Lia took over.
“But why? Couldn’t they just buy it? Were they poor?”
“It wasn’t a question of money. Correct me if I’m wrong, Mom.”
