The Legacy

by Melanie Phillips

  But it is we who have been punished by the most greedy and improvident king, who takes from us sums that greatly and unjustly exceed the demands placed on other subjects in his realm.

  As the king neared his death, the waters of hatred rose up even higher among the barons and the priests on account of the debts that we were owed. The leader of these barons was one Richard Malebisse, may his name be blotted out for all eternity, who was in debt to my master Josce for many thousands of marks, as were other mighty nobles whose names shall also live in infamy.

  They spoke against my master and spread false reports that tarnished his good name. But who would yet have imagined what was about to be unleashed.

  In the Frankish lands, many of our number were slain with great savagery at the hands of the bloodthirsty Christians. And everywhere the people murmured against us with charges that shouted out to the heavens for their baseness and injustice.

  These miseries and terrors increased yet a hundredfold when the old king passed away and the land was ruled by his son, who they say has the heart of a lion but in truth has the fangs of a snake.

  In the year of the coronation of this king, great evil fell upon us. Many folk came to bring tributes at the crowning at the great abbey in London, including my master Josce and Benedict his associate in the house of finance in our town of York.

  Alas the wretched day that the King received the crown of this wicked and faithless land upon his head. For the members of his accursed court spread false report that our people were sorcerers come to put a spell upon the King. Some including my master Josce and Benedict his associate entered the abbey; whereupon a great roaring broke forth from the multitude, and they set upon the members of our faith and dragged them from the church and beat them and slit their throats and hewed them into pieces.

  Many fled from the massacre but the mob pursued them into the houses of the Jews and murdered every one they saw and performed abomination upon their wives and then they burned their houses to the ground. From house to house they stormed in a frenzy of bloodthirstiness, shouting “Kill the Jews! The King has commanded it! Kill the destroyers of Christ!” And the slaughter continued throughout the night and until the following afternoon. From these horrors my master Josce escaped and made his way back to our town of York.

  The king was much displeased by these events because he knew his coffers would empty if those who were so punishingly taxed were no more. So he proclaimed a law for the peace of the Jews throughout England, and there was quiet as we mourned our blessed martyrs. But our respite was short, and an evil greater than anything we had yet suffered was about to befall us.

  * * *

  29

  RUSSELL CAME TO the house every day to finish translating Eliachim’s story. He sat in a corner of Haia’s living room. She brought him mint tea and cake she had baked herself. Sometimes she sat and played her cello. Would this disturb him, she asked solicitously. On the contrary, he found its plangent sadness matched his mood. He recognized some of it—once he thought he detected Elgar, but was too shy to ask—but other pieces stirred in him much deeper memories: buried Yiddish melodies and half-remembered snatches of liturgy. He felt his father, his grandmother, hovering in the room like yearning shadows.

  Strangely, it soothed him.

  “So what’s it all about?” asked Haia curiously.

  “It’s a kind of love story,” he said. But it was turning into something else.

  “How romantic,” said Haia, picking up one or two of the books he had brought with him: Middle English and Anglo-Norman dictionaries and reference books, histories of the Jews in medieval Europe. She turned them over slowly in her hands and gave him a quizzical glance.

  He felt himself blushing, and was alarmed. She waited.

  “I…your mother…Zofia…I had a bit of an idea what this book might be,” he mumbled.

  She nodded slowly. He could see she thought something didn’t quite add up. But it didn’t bother her enough to do more than fleetingly wonder.

  He was troubled, and she noticed. He was working feverishly, driven not just by the fear that at any moment he might once again have to abandon the task but by the tumultuous story unfolding before him, word by word.

  “You’re very caught up in this,” she said, wonderingly. “It all seems very intense for a love story.”

  He snapped his laptop shut and looked at her.

  “It’s about a country and a people I never knew,” he said, slowly. As soon as he said it, he realized there were two peoples in that country whom he didn’t know. He sat back and puffed out his cheeks. So which people did he know? To whom did he now feel he belonged?

  “You know,” said Haia, “I lived in America, and when I came here I didn’t realize what made the fit so good ’cause I didn’t know anything else. See, the people there have the same outlook on life as the people here. Straightforward. Transparent. What you see is what you get. Sometimes it’s a bit too much in your face. But when I meet up with Brits, that’s when I feel like I’m meeting a foreigner. Their language is…well, opaque, it’s veiled. They speak in riddles half the time–metaphor, irony, saying the opposite of what they mean. You do it too.”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “Oh, most definitely. The self-deprecation, for instance. ‘I am but a lowly researcher,’ when it turns out you arrive in a stranger’s house in a foreign country toting a whole library of medieval lexicography.”

  Her voice sounded severe, but her eyes were crinkled in a smile.

  “In any case,” she said, “I’d have thought most Brits can’t recognize their own country anymore. It’s all over, isn’t it? Britain, I mean, and Europe. They’re finished.”

  He bridled.

  “Of course it’s not over,” he snapped. “Britain remains what it always was. It just has different kinds of people in it, which is fine.” But in front of his eyes swam the image of himself running for his life down Cable Street.

  “Anyway,” he said defensively, “it’s your granddaughter and her boyfriend who think this country isn’t worth staying in.”

  Haia shook her head despairingly. “It’s becoming a serious problem. Who would have thought we Jews would have so neglected the education of the young. But we have. They just haven’t got a clue what this country really is all about, how unique it is, and how uniquely it is seen and always will be seen. They can’t bear it, you see, the young. They see the isolation and they hear the vilification and the lies and they think it’s not natural for people to be so hated, it must be our fault, something we’ve done. But this is how Jews have been treated since the very beginning. Whatever we do, we have to do it alone.”

  He stared at her, transfixed. It went against everything he stood for, everything he believed in. And yet, when he thought of Eliachim, when he thought of Michael Waxman, when he thought of Haia’s own father, for heaven’s sake, it was as if a pixelation began to resolve itself into a recognizable image. An image from which he recoiled.

  “And that’s very, very hard. Not just for the young, for all of us. Look, I was trained to deal with children who had been abused. We did what we could to undo the harm that had been done to then, to help them heal and live a normal life. But it was very hard for them because they had never known anything other than living in the shadow of the abuse. The stronger ones developed strategies to deal with it; that helped them survive rather than be destroyed. But those very strategies meant their lives were abnormal. They survived, but as dysfunctional people.

  “So it is with this amazing place. It has never known what it is to be a normal country, to live in peace and security: not one day, not ever.

  “This isn’t a country like Britain or America. This is an armed camp. Everyone here lives with their hearts in their mouths. All the time. Everything here is geared to the next attack on us, the next desperate defense against an enemy just down the r
oad who never stops trying to kill us. Just because we exist. This is a people who have never known anything other than surviving against the odds, against the psychotic hatred of millions of people. With no prospect of it ever stopping because that hatred, that madness, is deep inside a culture; and now with much of the West kicking us in the head too. And then people expect Israelis to act normal, to behave as if everything can be settled over a nice cup of tea and a cucumber sandwich?”

  He wanted to tell her she was wrong, that the situation could be sorted so easily, it was so obvious; the words dissolved in his mind into a fog. She didn’t look or sound like a zealot. She was intelligent, cultured, gentle. He liked her; he enjoyed being with her. Could he have been wrong about all this? Could so many people, hundreds of thousands of them in Britain and Europe who thought like him, all his friends and colleagues, all thinking, concerned, educated, compassionate people like him—could they all really be so totally wrong? It was inconceivable.

  “But you chose to live here,” was all he said.

  She looked pensive. “It was certainly a strange decision. I was an all-American kid, and, after all, plenty of others also had a tragic Holocaust back story. But I had no front story. See, I was told I was a Jew. But the thing was, I couldn’t actually be a Jew in America. I was raised in a Christian family. My sister wanted to save my Jewish soul for Jesus. I wasn’t drawn to practice Judaism; the religious stuff meant nothing to me. Israel was the only place where I could be a Jew just by being me.”

  No no no, Russell wanted to shout, of course you can be a Jew in America or Britain without religion. That’s exactly what he was, wasn’t he? He was brought up as one. He looked like one. He had all the cultural baggage–guilt, neurosis, concern for human rights. How absurd to suggest you had to have all this nationalist stuff as well.

  So why did he feel so uncomfortable?

  “But it’s tough here,” Haia went on, “no question, very tough. We pay a heavy price.”

  She paused, as if unsure whether to continue.

  “When my son was born—my first child, Noam—I thought that by the time he grew to be a man there was bound to be peace here, that he wouldn’t have to go into the army, to serve in a war. Now one of my grandsons, Amitai, nineteen years old he is, well he’s a commander of a unit which is sent into the Palestinian murder tunnels to sweep for booby traps, for bombs and mines. Imagine. Another grandson, Calev, all of 20 years old, also my daughter’s son, he’s in a crack commando unit so secret we have no idea where he is; we just know he’s likely to be in danger. We haven’t seen or heard from him for months now. My daughter doesn’t sleep at night.”

  She shook her head sadly.

  “And this never-ending nightmare splits families. My son Noam—you met his daughter here, Shira—well, Noam’s a hot-shot lawyer at one of the most swanky law firms in Tel Aviv. He’s very left-wing; he was involved in the Oslo peace negotiation, another world now, the process by which we all thought finally, finally the Arabs would agree to let us live; and he’s never changed his views. He refuses to visit my daughter Yael because she lives over the green line, in one of the settlements. As a result Yael won’t even speak to him. He won’t even come here now in case he sees her.”

  “Can’t you smooth things over?”

  She sighed deeply.

  “Noam is just too angry. Angry with Yael, angry with me, angry with everyone.”

  “Angry just because of the settlers?”

  There was a pause. When Haia spoke again it was with obvious difficulty.

  “My husband, Aryeh, was a wonderful man. A pediatrician who specialized in treating children with cancer.”

  “And a poet and art collector too?”

  She nodded. “He was a very rare human being. So talented, so humane. A sweet man, entirely taken up with giving of himself to others. Second Intifada, he was eating pizza in a cafe in the center of town when a Palestinian came in and blew the place up. Suicide bomber, so-called. He murdered seven people in the cafe that day, including my husband. He was sitting close by the guy, didn’t stand a chance. Frankly, I don’t know quite what it was that we buried.”

  Her voice was flat, matter-of-fact. Russell gazed at her, horrified. Suddenly he saw her quite differently. The room, the furniture, the pictures on the walls, everything in that moment seemed frozen, as if time itself had stopped. And he was back standing at the foot of the bed, with his father there but not there, feeling then as he did now that strange sensation in his head, as if he had stepped outside himself.

  Her life, her heart, her very being had been shared. He had been a good man, a great man, a man who had made a difference. In a split second, though, he had been erased.

  “I’m so very sorry,” he said finally. She looked at him, and he flinched from what he saw in those dark pools.

  “It’s often the living whom we mourn most, isn’t it. Noam, our son Noam, he took it very badly. He kept going over and over it in his mind, why Aryeh had gone to the cafe that day, why that particular cafe, why he hadn’t been sitting in another seat; totally pointless, obviously. He just couldn’t accept it. Of course you can’t ever come to terms with such a thing, not completely, but you can learn to park it so that it doesn’t take you over, doesn’t destroy your life. Noam couldn’t do that. His anger, his grief just consumed him. And he felt guilty…”

  “Guilty?” Russell was startled.

  “Sure. Because he was still living and Aryeh was not. Aryeh had been such a wonderful, exceptional person, Noam felt he himself should have been blown up that day, not his father. But the pain of all this was just too great. The monstrous fact of this murder, and all the others who were being murdered or terribly injured, dozens and dozens of them blown to pieces in buses and hotels and amusement parks, all the parents who lost their kids and all the families shattered forever, and the fact that it was going on and on with no end to it—well, he just couldn’t bear it. He couldn’t bear the fact that the Palestinians were just never, ever going to stop this—never going to be stopped. He had to find someone else to blame for it all, someone over whom he felt he could have some control.

  “So he became fixated on the settlers, and on the governments that built the settlements. He became obsessed by them, convinced that if only they weren’t there the murders and the attacks would stop. And anyone who disagreed, anyone who supported the settlers—he thought they were themselves helping produce more attacks and more murders.”

  “Including Yael.”

  “Of course. And including me. I was very distressed that he wouldn’t talk to Yael. I knew he was in pain. So I tried to reason with him. The result was that he accused me of taking Yael’s side, taking the side of those responsible for incubating mass murder. And then he refused to talk to me too. He won’t come here, he won’t speak on the phone. I see him fleetingly at family events, but I haven’t seen him properly, to talk to properly, for years. It’s as if he’s cut me out of his life. In a way, that’s even worse than losing Aryeh. It’s a kind of death in life, if that’s not being too melodramatic.”

  Her voice caught. The tears welled up in Russell’s own eyes. He heard his mother’s voice: “It’s as if you are dead to him.” But it was Russell who had had the door slammed in his face; or was it? And then he heard Beverley, angry Beverley, accusing him, saying no, it was he who had abandoned his father. And his head swam in confusion. Which way round was it? Who had been to blame? Were they perhaps both to blame? How he wished his father was still there. Because now it could never, ever be put right.

  Once started, Haia clearly was finding it hard to stop.

  “Losing Aryeh,” she said softly, “well that was hard, of course. But we had had a good life together, and he was of a certain age. But Noam, well, there’s the grief; and it’s ongoing. Y’know, I stare at his picture, this middle-aged, brilliant, powerful lawyer. My Noam. Because I can’t put the two toget
her, the eager little boy in his shorts and knee socks who was so open and so loving, and now this big man who is so remote, so wound-up, so angry. And I wonder, where did my little boy go? Because this man, this Noam, seems like an entirely different person.”

  He had almost stopped listening. Jack now stood just behind her shoulder, with his characteristic stoop, looking away. What did I do to you, Dad, said Russell silently to himself. What were you: the frightened nebbish that I knew, or a war hero? Were you both? Could you be both? He hadn’t ever really known him at all, had he, and now he never would. His father’s shape dissolved into a mist.

  She shook herself slightly, as if in reprimand. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to unload all this on you. But…well, somehow you remind me of him.”

  “You have to find a way to talk to your son,” he said.

  * * *

  Eliachim’s story (4)

  The king assembled his followers for the pilgrimage to take the holy city of Jerusalem from the Saracens, with cries of bloodthirsty vengeance against all those who denied the divinity of the crucified one who has caused the world to err. This enraged the citizens not just against the Saracens but against all who do not bow down to their idol.

  All the envy and hatefulness that the barbarians had stored up against us burst forth in a frenzy of killing as they struck against us again and again, burning and looting and dishonoring our daughters before putting them to the sword. They tore down the stairways and destroyed the houses. They plundered and ravaged.

  This barbarism spread like a contagion throughout the land. Scarcely a week passed without some new horror. In Stamford, in Norwich, in Lincoln and in Bury, our people were butchered with swords and with arrows and lances, with stones and with fire, even children of tender age. These were scenes the like of which we do not permit even inside our slaughterhouses: women with their breasts or ears sliced off or their children sheared from their bellies, men with those parts formed for the sacred duty of procreation stuffed in their mouths, souls burned alive inside their houses.