Praise for Rosemary Friedman
‘Delightful and easily read’ – Weekly Scotsman
‘Writes well about human beings’ – Books and Bookmen
‘Accomplished, zestful and invigorating’ – TLS
‘A funny and perceptive book’ – Cosmopolitan
‘A confident, sensitive and marvellously satisfying novel’ – The Times
‘A classic of its kind’ – The Standard
‘Readers will find it as affecting as it is intelligent’ – Financial Times
‘Adroitly and amusingly handled’ – Daily Telegraph
‘An entertaining read’ – Financial Times
‘Highly recommended for the sheer pleasure it gives’ – Literary Review
‘Observant and well composed’ – TLS
‘A pleasing comedy of manners’ – Sunday Telegraph
‘What a story, what a storyteller!’ – Daily Mail
I’ve travelled the world twice over,
Met the famous: saints and sinners,
Poets and artists, kings and queens,
Old stars and hopeful beginners,
I’ve been where no-one’s been before,
Learned secrets from writers and cooks
All with one library ticket
To the wonderful world of books.
© JANICE JAMES
What a tragic story is the history of the Jews in modern times! And if one tried to write about the tragic element, one would be laughed at for one’s pains. That is the most tragic thing of all.
HEINE
What do I have in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself.
KAFKA
Contents
Title Page
Epigraph
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
About the Author
By the Same Author Also On Ebook By Arcadia Books
Copyright
One
Whenever Rachel gave her name, Klopman, in the antenatal clinic, she was aware of a frisson that passed between herself and the clerk behind the counter. When her name had been Shelton, conjured by her grandfather from Solomons, she had not, as often as she was required to identify herself, been made conscious of a difference which was impossible to quantify but had resulted in the expulsion of the Jews throughout the ages from so many countries of the world. They had been persecuted if they were poor, resented if they were rich, were the objects of opprobrium in both religious and secular societies, and to the Third Reich responsible for an economic depression for which the punishment had been the gas-chamber. Since the emergence of the Jewish State, antisemitism – blamed at various times on the need for scapegoats, ethnic hatred, xenophobia and religious bigotry – had acquired a new and “respectable” image, changing its name to anti-Zionism, a euphemism heard more often since the day, one month before Rachel’s wedding, that three Israeli armoured columns had rolled purposefully into the Lebanon.
Patrick’s father had referred to the event briefly in his wedding speech. “We are condemned for not fighting,” he said, “and we are condemned if we fight.” He was right of course. The Jews of Europe had been accused of not rising up, although Rachel had yet to hear of the threatened passengers of a hijacked plane, in a parallel situation, indicted of the same crime.
The war in the Middle East, two months old now, which many had expected, Israeli-style, to be over in days, had had a curious effect. It had forced diaspora Jews to take a stance, set them at each other’s throats. To their horror, on their honeymoon, Rachel, the hawk, and Patrick, the dove, had found themselves on opposing sides. “Operation Peace for Galilee” was, according to Rachel, Israel’s response to fourteen years of terrorist warfare – avowedly dedicated to her destruction – launched from Lebanese soil. To Patrick it was an obsession of inept rulers and vain military men who were running a nation created by moralists and dreamers. In the interests of harmony the subject was, as far as possible, avoided.
Fortunately, Rachel had other matters on her mind, not the least of which was the child she was carrying, whose movements in its aqueous nest were a source of never ending astonishment and pleasure to both herself and Patrick. She had experienced the first of these beneath the marriage canopy. Rabbi Magnus had just proclaimed them man and wife, delighting vicariously in the forthcoming kiss, when Klopman junior, without warning, made his presence felt. Rachel, almost dropping her bouquet, had put a hand to her belly, causing an expression of alarm to cross her mother’s face, and felt with amazement the inapt protrusion through the lace of her dress. It was as if the baby had waited for the ceremony to be completed, as if he had bided his time, as if he knew.
She was sure that he would turn out to be an exemplary child, co-operative and manageable, that there would be none of the alarums and excursions of rearing that beset her sister Carol, and that she and Patrick would set a new and enviable trend in the art of parenthood. There was nothing to it. Take pregnancy. Carol, who was in the midst of her fourth, would regale Rachel with tales of indisposition and matinal nausea, while her sister-in-law Sarah, who made the hat-trick, had in the first trimester clung on to the child she was carrying only by the skin of her teeth. Rachel, who was certain the whole thing was in the mind, had never felt better. Her son, for she had never had any doubts that this prize-fighter, this acrobat who made his existence so manifest within her, was anything but male, took his cue from his host. Unless the subject of the Lebanon was broached, Rachel was a model of serenity – a state which she hoped would communicate itself to the foetus – acquainting herself with every nostrum of pregnancy in the absence of her mother, whose departure to New York with Maurice Morgenthau had brought Rachel closer to her sister Carol, with whom previously she had never had much in common.
Keeping her options open, Kitty had not sold the flat. Widowed now for two years she was ambivalent about Maurice Morgenthau. She had agreed to go to New York with him, to live in the apartment that he used as his studio, but there had been no talk of marriage. Rachel, remembering her father and the special bond between them, hoped there never would be. Her brother, Josh, said her attitude was selfish. Carol, who had met Maurice only briefly at Rachel’s wedding, wasn’t sure. She was living in Kitty’s London flat (an arrangement which had worked out most conveniently) with her three children who were on summer holiday from school, while her husband, Alec, remained in Godalming to care for his patients and supervise the renovation of the Queen Anne house they had bought there. Rachel found it strange to go into her mother’s home and find Carol – who so resembled her – as beautiful in her pregnancy as Rachel knew from the family records Kitty had been. Rachel’s condition seemed to have overlaid her features with an unattractive mask.
“How could you have married me?” she’d say to Patrick in the mornings, examining her unfamiliar features, the novel contours of which confronted her from the mirror.
“You trapped me into it.”
“What if I don’t get my looks back?”
The question was rhetorical. Patrick’s regard for her had grown stronger with the marvel of each successive month. He practised sensual massage as he had been instructed at the clinic and took photos
of her gravid body with its shadowed planes, contact sheets of which – “Rachel with Child” from a hundred miraculous angles – he passed round the family, profoundly shocking Carol.
“You don’t look at the mantelpiece when you’re poking the fire,” Patrick said.
Rachel stood still. It was the first time she had heard Patrick make a joke. His father made jokes. Herbert Klopman. He was renowned for them, cynicism covering the feelings he was unable to express. She could hear the ring of her own father’s voice in her ears repeating the family aphorism, which had been handed down, concerning apples which did not fall far from trees.
“Klopman,” the clerk repeated Rachel’s name, isolating her from the Wheatleys and the Frasers, the Stylianides and the Obodos. She was happy with “Rachel” (she had been called after her maternal grandmother) from the Hebrew for “ewe”. She liked the names, lyrical and poetic, derived from scriptural objects: Leah, a gazelle; Zipporah, a bird; Jonah, a dove. Rachel’s son would be named Sydney after her father who had not lived to see him. They would have to find a derivative, something more contemporary, to go with Klopman, which, according to Patrick’s grandmother, had originated when the first census was taken and the Jews under the Austrian Empire had been required to provide themselves with Germanic names. Those who had not objected to the decree had chosen Blumenthal (Valley of Flowers), Rosenberg (Rose Mountain), Bernstein (Amber). The Orthodox, unwilling to dehebraise their names, had been at the mercy of spiteful officials by whom they had been saddled with Eselkopf (Ass’s Head), Stinker, Lumper, Fresser (Glutton), Elephant and Weinglas.
Rachel’s own recent name change, Shelton to Klopman, had, she supposed, brought to the surface her ambivalence about her Jewishness. She was not observant, as her father had been and as her mother and sister still were. She did not go to synagogue, cooked bacon and eggs for breakfast and disregarded the Sabbath with its injunctions. Even so, looking around the waiting-room at the polyglot mothers in their various stages of gestation, she realised that she was not as others, and like Israel herself aspired to be like the whole world yet to be apart.
Unlike Patrick’s background – his father had been more concerned with producing an accomplished professional than an accomplished Jew – Rachel’s had been steeped in religious values. When she went to college, regarding her parents’ lifestyle as alien, she had felt herself to be Jewish but not uncomfortably so. As a freshman she had gone along to the Jewish Society but found that the mise-en-scène was a replica of the parental home on Friday nights and that she had nothing in common with the members. The following autumn she became involved in the Students’ Union; but it wasn’t until her final year that she became increasingly disturbed by, and could no longer ignore, the activities of the far Left, who passed resolutions equating Zionism with racism, and put forward provocative views in their official handbook which roused ancestral voices in her, forced her to take a stand. Now it was the war in the Lebanon which led her to reappraisal.
Unlike her father, and Carol who had always followed blindly in his footsteps, Rachel – as far as Judaism was concerned – was uncommitted. She could no more identify with her sister than she could with the Hassidim (with their long black coats and side-curls who walked the streets of Stamford Hill or toured the suburbs with their mitzvahmobiles), or the Anglicised practices of Reform and Liberal congregations who recited the liturgy in the vernacular and summoned women to the Reading of the Law. Sometimes she had difficulty in identifying with herself. There had been heated discussions with her father – which upset Kitty, disturbed the equilibrium in the home and ended invariably in deadlock – in which Rachel challenged as outmoded the need for organised religion. Wasn’t it OK, she argued, to be a good individual, someone who didn’t hurt anybody? Not hurting anybody, Sydney said, was not good but merely not bad. To be a worthwhile person involved the active pursuit of good. It was not enough to refrain from abusing fellow human beings, one must intercede on their behalf. Jewish law – unlike secular laws which were almost all negative, forbidding criminal acts – demanded positive action: to give charity, silence gossip, visit the sick. Involvement was required which, to be effective, needed (like political parties and other social systems) organised operating procedures of law and ethics. Ideas such as Rachel’s were the product of woolly mindedness and were not sufficient to create responsible people and a moral world.
It was easy for Sydney. Like Tevye – the Jewish Everyman created by Sholem Aleichem and popularised in Fiddler on the Roof – he seemed to have an intimate and personal relationship with his Maker, a direct line to God. The pious milkman had prayed three times a day, understood his history and the meaning of continuity, yet had little interest in the outside world and no particular measure of parental insight.
In the shtetls of eastern Europe there had been a pattern to existence, of tradition, of oppression. Life had dictated the terms which must now be redefined. In Anatevka they were born, married and died within the community. Today there were choices. Get blue eyes and assimilate; intermarry as her brother Josh had done; opt out of Jewish life but identify by means of token barmitzvahs, a smattering of Hebrew words and nostalgic foods the tastes of which had persisted from the ghetto; join anti-Jewish causes in a process of self-destruction.
The State of Israel itself had not solved the problem but at least, although there were political and religious rifts, there was a Jewish ambience and to be a Jew did not require, as it did in Britain, affirmation.
There had been no necessity, until now, to give these matters too much thought. But what about her son, hers and Patrick’s? Was Jewish consciousness to be maintained, and if so how, and to what extent? What acts would they teach him of Jewish significance? Prayer? Language? The basic tenets of tolerance and righteousness in human relationships? The older Sydney had been a firm believer in inculcating children by example. Rachel wondered how much of an example she and Patrick would show their son. She could see that the future held problems other than merely the safe delivery of her child but these she would face as she came to them. At the moment she was devoting her entire attention to the manner of his birth.
Two
“She’s going to have it standing up,” Kitty said, holding up Rachel’s letter in her hand. “Did you ever hear of such a thing?”
Maurice was painting at his easel, sombre strokes of grey and burnt sienna, slashing at his past with charcoal and with slate.
“It’s the most effective method of pain control,” he said, pausing to half-close his eyes. “The supine position compresses the veins, starves the uterus of blood, makes the contractions more painful and prevents the force of gravity from helping the baby’s head along. It was first used by Louis XIV’s mistress so that His Majesty could keep an eye on the proceedings.”
It was not a topic Kitty could have discussed with Sydney. Maurice went back to his canvas. “Immobilising the mother prolongs the labour.”
Kitty averted her eyes from the painting. She no longer looked. All around the walls, ten deep, were stacked the outpourings of Maurice’s daily therapy in which he was both analyst and analysand. When first she had come to New York – staggering under the August heat, that struck like a cobra as soon as one went outside, and the enormity of her own decision to leave her home and live with Maurice whom she scarcely knew – she had looked, had stood by bereft of words as he demonstrated his obsession.
Canvases in which there was no light and little life; crushing invasions of space as stark forms with the just discernible features of human beings clawed a breathing space on barrack bunks; forced marches, and cattle trucks in which the beasts were human; the distribution of the bread and the crucifixion on the wire; heads which were all eyes; eyes which were all dead; the grisly ballet of the leaps for air in the ovens; a misery of little children; a landscape of bones. After the first time she had averted her eyes, not focussing on the sludge and the slime of Maurice’s canvases in which he said the things he could not say, which were his
mute cry, his silent scream, his unsung song.
He had met her at the airport. All the way across the Atlantic she had been terrified that he would not be there, and so appalled at the temerity of what she was doing, that had she had the power to do so she would have gone into the cockpit and asked the pilot to turn back. The realisation of the step she was taking, and the suddenness with which it assailed her, overlaid her views on flying and to her own astonishment she quite forgot to be afraid. Having had seven hours of voluntary incarceration in which to consider the matter she had come to the conclusion that her arbitrary decision, to leave her home and family for Maurice Morgenthau and New York, had been made on the swell of euphoria which followed Rachel’s wedding and bore no relation to how she might have acted in a more contemplative mood.
To all appearances she hardly knew Maurice. She had met him on holiday in Israel – her first proper trip in the two years that she had been widowed – and between that time and Rachel’s wedding had corresponded with him. Through his letters, poignant and articulate, Maurice had painted his history for her, his childhood in Germany, his existence in the concentration camps which he alone of all his family had survived, his new life in New York as a physician and his retirement since which he had dedicated himself to portraying the unique horror of his wartime experiences in paint. On airmail paper, the tenuous friendship forged in Eilat had prospered. Maurice for the first time shared his past, and Kitty found the sympathetic ear and practical solutions she had lacked, since Sydney’s death, for the daily problems which beset her. She should, she told herself on flight BA175 to New York, have left it at that.
It was the excitement, she thought, of seeing Rachel off on her honeymoon that had led her to accede to Maurice’s suggestion that she come to live with him in New York. He had two adjoining apartments and he had offered to move his painting into his living quarters, leaving the studio for Kitty. A more permanent relationship had not been discussed. The decision had something to do with her own flat, which seemed so empty when she came home after the wedding, although it was a long time since Rachel had lived there; something to do with her sister-in-law Beatty, whose husband, Leon, had died in hospital while Beatty was at the wedding and for whom Kitty now felt herself responsible; something to do with Frieda, her other sister-in-law, and her husband, Harry, who were always ringing her up for one bit of advice or another; and Mirrie, Sydney’s younger sister, who was demonstrating signs of senility; and her nephew Norman, who by the look of things would be getting married soon to the South African Sandra and would no longer be dining with her twice a week; something to do with Carol, who was coming to stay for three months and would be bringing the children and chaos into Kitty’s ordered life while the house in Godalming received its face-lift; something to do with her son, Josh, and his wife, Sarah, who was also expecting a baby and, under Kitty’s guidance, hoping to become a convert to Judaism before the child was born.
To Live in Peace Page 1
