Eight
Kitty’s letter was addressed to Sarah and Josh but it was Sarah who opened it. She missed her mother-in-law. As the only child of a Foreign Office wife whose very definite priorities ranged, in precise order, from her dogs and her gardens to her horses and her offspring, she had found in Kitty, a warmth and affection, an élan vital, which had immediately entranced her. Before she met Josh she had known few Jews (they were conspicuous by their absence in her father’s diplomatic circle) and had distinguished them only by the negative stereotype she had been raised to identify, with its long nose and swarthy appearance. It was not until she had gone with Josh to a concert given by an Israeli orchestra, when she had searched the platform in vain for features that confirmed her mental picture of the “Jewish face”, that she began to question her preconceived notions and wonder whether from a roomful of Italians, of Spaniards, of Asians, of Slavs, she would with any degree of accuracy have been able to nominate the Jews.
When she and Josh decided to marry, the announcement was received with a decided lack of enthusiasm by both families. Sarah’s mother in Leicester, in so far as she was capable of betraying any emotion, had been horrified. She made no secret of the fact – even before she met Josh – that she thought Sarah was throwing away herself and a first-class classics degree on a second-class citizen, an arriviste Jewish dentist who would drag her down to an unacceptable level.
Mrs MacNaughton was awkward with Josh on the rare occasions they met, as if he were suffering from some physical disability, and was not in the least pleased that she was to have a Jewish grandchild.
In Josh’s family, with Kitty at its pivot round which echelons of aunts and uncles and cousins and nieces and nephews revolved, Sarah found the sense of kinship with others she had missed out on in her peripatetic childhood. She was intrigued by the notion that the birth of a Jewish child was a major event not only for those immediately concerned but for the whole community; that the circumcision of a boy was not merely the antiseptic surgical procedure she had imagined, but a celebration of the entrance of another Jew into the covenant with God; that when the committed Jew travelled anywhere in the world he would find brothers and sisters who would take him in, feed him, show him love; that when the Jew died he was not alone (annual candles of remembrance would be lighted for him) and those who mourned him would be visited and comforted. She countered Josh’s argument, that universal brotherhood could only be achieved by assimilation into the majority cultures, with the assertion that any universalism that demanded that smaller groups abandon their identities was totalitarianism rather than brotherhood, and that all people should share their moral values while retaining their ethnic diversity. The fact that Josh was not enamoured of his birthright, that he found his family at times – to say the least of it – an embarrassment, surprised her.
Josh’s revolution, unlike Rachel’s, had been bloodless. He had not wilfully opposed the orthodoxy in which he had been reared, as Rachel had, but had quietly rejected it – Sarah said he was turning his back on his father – walked away without troubling to glance over his shoulder. Since his broken engagement to the spoiled Paula he had not gone out with Jewish girls. He found them immature and demanding and felt threatened by their families, recognising in them the claustrophobic echoes of his own. He was a shy and private man who, measured against his parents’ expectation of him, their ever ready judgements, had been found wanting. Sarah compensated for his inadequacies. In her easy going presence Josh found balm for his damaged ego, and his hitherto hidden qualities flourished. Because Sarah expected nothing he was able to give her everything and he amazed them both with the extent of the gift. As far as Josh was concerned, Sarah was the best thing which had happened to him in his entire life. As he unravelled her mysteries more were revealed, perhaps the least explicable of which was his wife’s decision to become Jewish. She was certainly not doing it for him. He was discomforted by his faith – to which he had only ever paid lip service – felt it was like a millstone round his neck, and was not the least concerned that, without a Jewish mother, his children would not be Jewish.
At first, as Sarah was able to see now, her actions had been prompted by a desire to belong, a yearning for roots and a place in which to put them down. She did not like it when Josh’s aunts and uncles stopped talking when she came into the room, and wanted to be one of them. Amused by her decision, Josh had indulged his wife by going with her to synagogue and fulfilling the obligations of the head of a Jewish household – as he was obliged to do – as she followed her course of instruction. He had thought that Sarah would soon tire of what he held to be the irksome minutiae with which the faith was hedged about, and waited tolerantly for her to discover the whole ethos antiquated and time expired as he himself had done. Had her mentors been other than Rabbi Magnus and Mrs Halberstadt this might well have happened. From the moment, however, that Rabbi Magnus had explained to Sarah that what rendered Abraham (a Mesopotamian) Jewish were his beliefs and not his blood, and that the Jews – unlike any other group in the modern world – were not a race (by any accepted definition of either Jew or race) but a nation, composed of members of every race, defined by its religion, Sarah realised that she had found not only a competent instructor but her intellectual match and knew that there would be no going back.
It was as if she had struck oil, drilled an untapped well. The deeper her involvement became in the legacy – automatic membership of one of the few civilisations that had left its mark on all mankind – to which Josh was indifferent, the richer she found the seam. She steeped herself in Jewish language and philosophy, history and religion. Her sessions with the Rabbi made her realise both that simple acceptance of faith in a deity would not produce a moral society, and that any attempt to be religious, without practising a definite religion, was as impossible as attempting to speak without a specific language.
When she examined the Christianity of her parents – in which the Messiah, for whom the Jews still waited, had already arrived – and contrasted it with Judaism, she discovered that it was neither an ethical code nor a branch of idealism, and had nothing to do with the secular world; that each one of the sentences she had, as a child, repeated in the Lord’s Prayer was a Jewish sentence; and that to the Christians a man sinned because he was a sinner while to the Jews he was a sinner because he sinned.
She had, she supposed, regarded herself if anything until meeting Josh, as a humanist, but now she saw her humanism as a set only of personal ideals (restatements, in fact, of Jewish ideals) which had no mode of transmission from one generation to the next and absolutely no system for producing decent people. Her husband’s heritage – with its emphasis on right conduct and the sanctity of human life – which she had at first believed to consist of no more than a few arbitrary dietary laws, rituals and defined prayer and a sense of affinity with others, turned out to her amazement to take nothing for granted – there were blessings for all life’s experiences – and to possess the most extensive system of legislative good known to mankind. Goodness had both to be defined and formulated (it was as difficult to become a good person as it was to become a good tight-rope walker) and this Judaism had done. Violence and oppression were repugnant to the teaching which embraced the whole domain of life, and paid due regard to the human condition, its difficulties and dilemmas. There were entire texts governing speech alone (speaking evil about someone was a serious sin and one who humiliated his fellow man in public was regarded as if he had shed blood) and the laws of ethics governed not only business relationships, treatment of the elderly, the weak, the poor, but in every area of conduct with titbits from which, at unexpected moments, Sarah would regale Josh.
“Did you know that according to the Talmud a Jew is not allowed to raise the hopes of a shopkeeper by asking the price of an item which he knows he’s not going to buy?” or “Listen to this: it’s forbidden to turn back a poor man empty handed even if one gives as little as a dried fig!”
In reply to
Josh’s scepticism, that he didn’t think such injunctions of earth shattering importance, Sarah informed him that while each particular law might not seem that significant, added together they represented unique consideration for fellow human beings.
After almost eighteen months of application she was able to parry the enquiries of her curious friends in the advertising agency where she worked, of which by far the most frequently recurring were “Why do they call themselves the Chosen People?” and “What about ‘an eye for an eye’?” She learned to explain that the former claim was one of obligation and suffering, rather than superiority or privilege, and that more was expected of the Jews who were obliged to spread ethical monotheism throughout the world and to live as a “light unto the nations”. Anyone, of any race, could become a Jew and thereby chosen, as she herself would be, by assuming the Jewish task. “An eye for an eye” and “a tooth for a tooth”, as she found herself frequently explaining, was not the doctrine of vicious retaliation it implied, but was based on the concept of the dignity and worth of man and implied monetary indemnity. If in the course of a quarrel one person inflicted an injury on another, he was entitled to claim both for the pain suffered and the humiliation sustained, and Biblical law stated clearly the extent of compensation to be paid.
As far as her conversion was concerned Sarah found, paradoxically, that despite the dictum that “he who befriends a proselyte it is as if he had created him”, the matter raised more eyebrows among Jews than non-Jews.
“It doesn’t matter what she does, she’ll always be a shiksa!” Josh’s Aunty Beatty had said, in a breath disqualifying both Abraham and Ruth (for whom a book of the Bible was named) from Judaism. Aunty Beatty mistakenly believed, if she thought about it at all, that proselytes should be discouraged when, since it was maintained that the Messiah himself would arise from amongst their number, they must in fact be enthusiastically welcomed.
What puzzled Sarah most was that the Jews themselves, Josh’s family at any rate (apart from Sydney whom she had not known), had no real understanding of the culture – its origins, its beliefs, its role in history – no close acquaintance with its classical texts, skimmed only the surface of their vast endowment, carried the burden so lightly that in some cases all that remained of their Judaism was the desire to go on eating and making a noise together. According to Rabbi Magnus, the Jews were messengers who, sadly, in many cases had forgotten their message. Sarah applied herself to the burden of it which she would pass on to her son.
That it would be a son Sarah already knew, although she had not told Kitty. An ultrasound scan had revealed the sex of the child she carried and had spurred her on, aware of future responsibilities, to greater efforts in her studies. What she did not learn from Rabbi Magnus was disseminated by Mrs Halberstadt who had both grown fond of Sarah over the months of instruction and found in her a willing pupil. To Josh’s amusement, and occasionally his chagrin (he had liked his prawn cocktails and his lobster), his wife had wholeheartedly embraced the dietary laws – with all their implications – which had to do with holiness, demanding dedication to a purpose rather than health. She had been surprised that such a code as Judaism did not embrace vegetarianism, but learned that while the ideal was not to kill for food, kashrut – which placed a strict limit on the number of animal species which were allowed to be eaten – was its compromise. She was intrigued to discover that not only the renowned pig but the lapwing and the vulture among others were forbidden, not because they were considered dirty, a common misapprehension, but because they lacked cloven hooves and did not chew the cud – arbitrary characteristics as random as the selection of colours for the traffic lights; that every permitted animal was a herbivore, and every animal which fed upon others was not permitted.
According to an only partially joking Mrs Halberstadt, food had done more for the cohesion of the Jewish people than all the religious reform movements put together, and from her and from Kitty, Sarah learned the delights of the table. To Josh’s amusement she was planning – in Kitty’s absence – to entertain his family for dinner on the first night of the forthcoming Jewish New Year. She had mentioned this to her mother-in-law, hoping she would be pleased, and Kitty’s letter arrived when she was mentally planning her menu. At her own mother’s insistence Sarah had taken a cookery course between school and going up to Oxford, graduating with proficiency in the delights of Jellied Ham Bourguinonne and Scallops Chapon Fin, but her interests now were in a cuisine that dated from the time that Rebecca had made her casserole of venison, and her son Esau had sold his birthright for what sounded like a bowl of lentil soup. During the two thousand years which followed, the Jews became in turn the subjects of the four civilisations in which the art of the kitchen flourished, but whilst the empires of the Egyptians, the Persians, the Greeks and the Romans had faded into history, their cuisines were preserved to be perpetuated by their one time slaves. Jewish housewives still made the sweetmeat of dried apricots for Passover which their ancestors had learned in Egypt, the baked honey and cheesecake of the Persians, and the strudel stuffed with poppy seeds which had graced the Roman feasts.
While Mrs Halberstadt enlightened Sarah as to the prescribed preparation and serving instructions for the permitted fare (the separation of foods of animal and dairy origin, and the purging of the blood from the meat), it was Kitty who, with her practical demonstrations, had before she went away initiated her daughter-in-law into the Jewish culinary art. At Kitty’s elbow (scorned by Rachel who said that if you were really into that sort of thing you could buy the whole shooting-match pre-packed and frozen) Sarah learned to make cholent, a Sabbath casserole of meat and beans, which in nineteenth-century Russia had simmered all night in the baker’s oven (chaud lent), and the chopped liver which in certain circles had become the sine qua non of Jewish life. Sarah had tried the dish out on her mother on one of her visits to London, with the result that Kitty’s special recipe (a little brown sugar added to the frying onions) was now served in Leicester, on triangles of toast, to the members of the local hunt.
Kitty’s letter encompassed several pages. To Sarah, reading it, it was as if her mother-in-law was in the room:
DEAR ALL (please pass this letter round), One minute you boil and the next you freeze. I don’t think I shall ever get used to the cold indoors or the heat in the streets – it comes right through the soles of your shoes. I used to grumble in London when we had a hot summer but it was never anything like this. Maurice says you get used to it. There’s so much to get used to sometimes I wonder if I must have been a little mad, had a brainstorm or something, coming all this way where I don’t know a soul, then I look at Maurice and make up my mind to put up with all the annoying little things and being so far away from you all. He makes me so happy.
I know Rachel can’t understand (doesn’t want to) but we’re like two children, doing things together. I can hardly believe it (having someone I mean) after two years on my own as a widow with people avoiding me as if I had some catching disease. We saw ‘The Dining-Room’ (a Sunday matinée) which takes place somewhere in New England with brief scenes about a large assortment of characters over the last fifty years or so, and it reminded me of our dining-room (we’ve had the same table and chairs ever since we were married) and of the family meals when Sydney was alive and all the changes which have taken place. We go out a lot and it’s like being on one long holiday. Sometimes we go to a movie (you have to pay for your seats then join another line for ticket holders)! We saw ‘Chariots of Fire’ – about a Jewish student at Cambridge who runs against snobbery and prejudice – it’s a big hit here (that tune and all that slow motion) and I felt very proud of England; and ‘Body Heat’ (as if it isn’t hot enough) which isn’t up my street; and ‘On Golden Pond’ – Katherine Hepburn still with the cheekbones at seventy- two dancing by herself in the woods, and Henry Fonda, an overbearing and often unpleasant old man squinting into the sun – playing a husband and wife who have been married for forty-eight years. It’
s about the misunderstandings between the generations (Rachel should see it) and about everyone’s parents.
Generally we go to concerts. The ‘Mostly Mozart Festival’ at the Lincoln Centre – there’s a lovely Plaza but the fountains aren’t playing right now because of the water shortage – which has an opera stage as large as a football field and holds 13,000 people and 1,000 cars! One afternoon we drove out to Waterloo Village (they’re mad on villages) to hear Yitzhak Pearlman play Brahms’ Violin Concerto with the tears running down his chin. We parked in a field (meadow) with a million others and had our picnic on a rug (blanket). Some people brought proper (regular) tables and set them up with candelabra and scarlet candles like a wedding or barmitzvah – it was something to see.
When the season starts we’re going to the opera: Rosenkavalier, which is on Maurice’s list of favourites he wants to take me to, Figaro, Cosi fan Tutte, Don Giovanni, Zauberflote, Fidelio, Falstaff, Fledermaus, Boris Godunov (The Meistersingers and Parsifal, too, but he won’t have anything to do with Wagner since the camps), and we listen to his tapes in the evenings when we’re home so that I’ll have some idea of what it’s all about.
I can’t tell you how many miles I’ve walked. The Statue of Liberty I told you about (did Debbie and Lisa get the postcards? I sent one each so that they don’t quarrel) and we’ve seen, amongst other things, an exhibition of photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Ansel Adams and some seventeenth-century French art, Poussin and Georges de la Tour, in the Metropolitan Museum. I’ve been to the Guggenheim and the Whitney (Georgia O’Keeffe), and the Jewish Museum on 92nd Street, and we’re going to the Museum of Modern Art (Maurice has been saving it) next week. Does it take your breath away? It does mine. A bit different from the Day Centre (Have you heard how they’re getting on without me, have they found anyone for the lunches?) and bridge (I can see now it was just to pass the time, wasting it really) in the afternoons.
To Live in Peace Page 7
