Mazel Tov

by J. S. Margot

  “Come on, translate it. You studied translation, didn’t you?” I went and stood next to her. She shoved the sentence under my nose. I didn’t talk back, didn’t say anything about Germanic and Romance languages, didn’t mention Jakov’s similar inability to get to the point without first playing some linguistic game. It took me ages to come up with a remotely plausible translation. I felt uncomfortable.

  “A Jew loves the taste of a Yiddish word in his mouth,” grandmother Pappenheim cried out at last, as if she had won the lottery.

  Relieved, I told her that I felt the same way about the Limburg dialect as she did about Yiddish. It was more than a language. It was a home.

  Then she grew serious: “Yiddish was forbidden in the camps. Everyone had to speak German. If you were caught speaking Yiddish, you’d go straight to the bath and disinfection building, that’s to say, the gas chambers…”

  I fidgeted on my chair. I nodded. I assumed, indeed hoped, she’d start telling me about the war, but at the same time I felt it would be inappropriate to encourage her, so I said that the weather was quite mild for the time of year, which happened to be true.

  Out of the corner of my eye I looked at Mrs Pappenheim. The only Jewish person most non-Jews in my country knew was Anne Frank, and they only knew her posthumously, from the diary, from the secret annexe, from all the stories later concocted about her, perhaps from the horse chestnut tree in her garden.

  The woman I was sitting next to had been such a girl during the war. Gabriella. A little older than Anne. Her maiden name might be Frank for all I knew.

  “My daughter-in-law is a wonderful cook,” the grandmother continued, having already forgotten the gas chambers, or perhaps trying to change the subject. She gestured with her chin at the cheese and apple turnovers that had been served with the tea. “Savour the pastries as I savour Yiddish,” she said. “Eat. I like to watch people eating.”

  I didn’t need telling twice.

  Mrs Pappenheim only talked about one subject: her second husband, who’d apparently died three years earlier, a fact that confronted me once again with the closed nature of the Schneiders, because no one had told me back then that there’d been a death in the family. I hadn’t been aware of it at all.

  Although there’d always been this selective openness and closedness between us, I felt hurt. At the same time I took myself to task: why hadn’t I seen any signs that the family was grieving, how could I not have noticed Elzira’s sorrow?

  Mrs Pappenheim told me how her beloved husband had got sick: cancer it was, first just in his bowels, then everywhere. How she’d looked after him as best she could, right up to his death, also afterwards. How she’d got to know him, no, how he’d got to know her. How he, Levi Pappenheim, had introduced himself to her through his family. How the rabbis had sanctioned the marriage and how both families—the few members that had survived the Holocaust—had approved their engagement.

  The marriage of Gabriella and Levi Pappenheim had lasted forty-two years and produced three children, and according to her their love had matured like a good, full-bodied red wine, a Château Mouton Rothschild, if she were allowed to choose the vintage herself. “My husband had to travel a lot for his work. Back and forth to India, Israel and the US. Sometimes he was away for months. This time he’s on a trip that will take a few years. That’s how I try to think of it. It’s the only way I can cope with his absence.”

  She talked about her apartment. How she missed him there. How she missed the very things that used to annoy her. Him slurping his coffee. Leaving the door open when he went to the toilet. Letting his beard trail in her home-made chicken soup with matzo balls. “My daughter-in-law now uses my recipe.” His crooked, skinny back as, when praying, he turned to face Jerusalem.

  Every now and then I nodded. I didn’t know how to respond to these confessions. I wanted to hear about the war, not this run-of-the-mill love story: all widows were sad and all widowers wanted to remarry.

  I said: “You survived the hell of Auschwitz.”

  “Yes,” she said. Her voice was low, and her grimace betrayed that her hip was hurting. My experience of Marjane had taught me that physical pain manifests itself in recognizable ways, while mental suffering can take every conceivable form.

  Resuming her thread, she told me how she missed the sound of his singing, as he led prayers at dinner. How he sang out of tune, but that now she longed to hear that tone-deaf voice.

  How she missed the guests that he brought home from shul on Friday evenings. Missed the silence she’d shared with her husband, a silence that—so unlike the soundlessness of the last few years—had been brimming with mutual understanding and shared thoughts; nothing could surpass such wordless communication. She sometimes still talked to him, she said. She knew he could hear her, and that he was silently responding.

  She told me how their three children resembled him, and how even Aaron and his sisters, who weren’t her late husband’s biological children, had acquired Pappenheim traits. “Like their love of telling jokes, they can’t get enough of it.”

  Every now and again she would start to cry. She dabbed her tears with the tissues on her lap, the same brand as the box that my mother always kept on the dashboard in the car—you never knew when you might need them. She wadded the tear-soaked hankies into little balls which she hid between her thigh and the wheelchair, like a little girl. Sometimes she rocked back and forth silently, her eyes cast down, or gazing at her teacup.

  “Shall we visit his grave together? Would you like that?” I asked. I knew that my own grandmother was comforted by her visits to the cemetery. She cleaned her husband’s grave every week as if it were their house, scrubbing every inch of the headstone.

  “My dear husband was buried in the Netherlands.”

  “We could go to the Netherlands.”

  “Can you drive?”

  “Not yet.”

  “The trains don’t stop in Putte.”

  “Where’s Putte?”

  “On the Belgian border. If the traffic isn’t too bad, you can be there in forty minutes.”

  “So your husband came from Putte.”

  “No.”

  “But he’s buried there.”

  “Many Belgian Jews are buried in Putte. Others buy their last one-way ticket to Israel with the assistance of a chevra kadisha, a voluntary association that helps repatriate Jews after their death. Antwerp doesn’t have a Jewish cemetery.”

  I was baffled. She explained, but I still didn’t get it. How could it be that members of Antwerp’s Orthodox Jewish community, probably the largest in Europe, were welcome in Belgium while alive and prosperous, but that once they had the temerity to die, they were deported?

  “Only a few liberal Jews, like the Tolkowskys, are buried in the Jewish section of Hoboken cemetery. What’s it called again? Schoonhof.”

  I nodded. It was called Schoonselhof, but what did it matter? Famous writers lay there: Elsschot, Conscience, Van Ostaijen, many others.

  “Do you know who the Tolkowskys were?”

  I shook my head.

  “They came from Poland, originally. Generations ago they made Antwerp the diamond capital it is today. Aaron owes his livelihood to them.”

  I wasn’t listening. “Can’t you, the Jewish community, buy some land in Antwerp and make it into a Jewish cemetery? What makes a cemetery Jewish? Does it have to be blessed by a rabbi?”

  “You ask far too many questions. I don’t know all the answers. But Belgium and the Netherlands have different laws about concession rights. We, the Jews, never want to be dug up. Our remains must lie undisturbed until the coming of the Messiah.”

  I only knew one Jewish cemetery: the old one in Prague where, in my youthful ignorance, I believed Kaf ka to be buried.

  “So the people who died in the camps…” I said, a lit
tle nervously. “That must make it even worse for their surviving relatives. They weren’t buried, they were incin—” I was silent.

  She pinched the bridge of her nose between her liver-spotted thumb and index finger. Only then did I realize that she didn’t wear spectacles, that I’d never seen her with glasses on.

  “After our first anniversary, my husband and I resolved never again to speak of the war and the camps,” she said. “Only if the children asked us about it. Then we would answer their questions. But they rarely if ever did.”

  “Perhaps you’d like to talk to me about it?”

  “Like to talk about it?” Her indignation almost propelled her out of her wheelchair. “You won’t find anybody who likes to talk about the war! And if you did, you should immediately be suspicious of them! Silence is the best medicine. So I, too, am silent.” From under her dress she pulled out a medallion on a chain. She carried her Orthodox husbands in duplicate on her chest: one photo in black and white and one in colour, which, given the nature of their clothing, amounted to the same thing. She caressed their faces with her wrinkled fingers.

  I could have sunk through the floor.

  Forty-Three

  Elzira passed her final exams with flying colours. The end of her secondary school also meant the end of our partnership. And because Sara continued to manage perfectly well by herself, Elzira’s school-leaving diploma put an end to six years of almost daily visits to the Schneiders’.

  Elzira insisted I attend the diploma award ceremony.

  I’d never been to the Yavne school before, at least not inside; I’d waited for Elzira a few times at the gate, along with Monsieur, who would jump up on her excitedly as soon as he spotted her and, folding himself round her neck like a fur stole as she bent to greet him, would give a fond squeak, a display of love exclusive to his little mistress, I knew, because I never heard him utter it for anyone else.

  Elzira had told me that the school would probably soon have to move to smaller premises. Mr Schneider had also mentioned this concern a few times: the number of modern Orthodox Jews in Antwerp was declining, while more and more ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jews were settling in the city. “It would be sad if we, modern Orthodox Jews, were eventually to become a minority in Antwerp’s Jewish community,” Mr Schneider said. “But I fear the worst. Our children won’t want to stay here, you will already have some idea why. But we’re also losing our position in the city’s economy. In the last five or six years the cards of the diamond sector have been thoroughly shuffled. Indians, Lebanese and people from the former Soviet Union are now our competitors. They’re very good at their profession, n’est-ce pas, but they practise it without respect for the craft’s tradition or for the history of Antwerp. I don’t blame them. But it’s a regrettable development. You know what the worst thing is? The beginning of the end? That the expertise of our Antwerp cutting specialists, the best in the world, is being lost. No new cutters or polishers are being trained. Within a few generations, there will no longer be a Jewish middle class. Which means that the good schools and the modern Orthodox Jews will also disappear.”

  The diploma award ceremony was like diploma award ceremonies all over the world: pretty dull. The playground was decorated with streamers and balloons. A big Israeli flag hung on the far wall of the stage and when the Israeli national anthem was sung, everyone looked very serious. Mr and Mrs Schneider were sitting in the front row, along with the members of the parents’ committee and the school board. They gave me a quick wave, signalling that they’d meet me after the official ceremony.

  A couple of the mothers had a non-standard hairdo: not quite short, not quite shoulder-length. Some of the men were talking on their mobile phones: huge, clunky devices with protruding antennas. People constantly took photos: say “cheese”.

  To divert myself during the speechmaking, I tried to spot the little ways in which one child distinguished itself from another, just as pupils in Catholic schools manage to do, despite all wearing the same uniform. Though their clothing choice was very limited, my schoolmates had found ways of expressing themselves individually; you could tell just from the brand of socks they wore what class and clan they belonged to. I didn’t know the codes of Jewish dress. Though I had grasped from Jakov that yarmulkes and hats had their own fashions and codes: Jews could tell from the make of a shtreimel where its wearer came from, and to what branch and community he belonged. One Hasidic Jew would let his sidelocks dangle in front of his ears, another would tuck them behind. Each detail had meaning. Black or white socks under the breeches of ultra-Orthodox men: the choice spoke volumes about their lifestyles and beliefs. The size of the yarmulke told you what political party the wearer identified with. Recently, someone had even invented a yarmulke made of synthetic hair. Resembling a toupee, it allows religious Jews to cover their heads in a way that doesn’t advertise their faith to the outside world—a world where anti-Semitism is an ever-present threat. “A mini wig like that could only have been invented by a Jew,” Elzira giggled, when she told me about this latest thing.

  “Shalom,” said the woman who sat down next to me. “Shalom,” I answered.

  She asked me something in Hebrew. It sounded like ata bishvil shelcha.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t speak Ivrit,” I said.

  At that the woman turned to look at me. “Oh, of course, I can see that now,” she said. At which I laughed—I just couldn’t help it—and she laughed too, somewhat apologetically.

  “My daughter just finished school,” she said a little later, in Dutch. Unusually, she didn’t speak it with a French accent. “In a week’s time she’s going to Israel for a working holiday at a kibbutz. Then she’s going to study in England.” She mentioned an institute in Newcastle, and said something about frum girls.

  I nodded. Frum meant pious in Yiddish; a frum girl would observe the religious laws much more strictly than Elzira. There were no Hasidic girls at this school.

  Sara came up to me and handed me a bottle of mineral water: “Shalom, erev tov, you must be thirsty, I always have soif… à tantôt, my friends are waiting for me.”

  “Do you know the Schneiders?” the woman next to me asked, after greeting Sara.

  I nodded. “They’re friends.”

  “Elzira is going to England with my daughter.” I looked at her. “On holiday?”

  “No, to study at the institute I mentioned. A two-year course.” She craned to get a better view of the rabbi on the platform. It must have been funny, whatever he was saying in Hebrew, because the audience occasionally burst out laughing. He’d come over from Israel for a temporary placement at the school. Religious leaders were replaced every two years so they wouldn’t get too used to the liberal ways of Antwerp. Just as the mullahs in Meulenberg were, when I went to school there. I’d gathered from Elzira that some rabbis were stricter than others. A particularly stern one had taken offence at the clothing worn by a few mothers at the school gates. There were some mothers, even in the modern Orthodox community, who felt it was okay to wear long, loose-fitting trousers. When the rabbi took them to task about these garments they protested, but they did listen to him. The next day they’d appeared at the school gates in skirts that revealed their bare knees.

  “Elzira Schneider is going to an institute for girls?” I asked. I couldn’t believe my ears.

  The woman nodded.

  “She wants to train as a teacher,” I said, telling her what Elzira had told me. “She’s going to study biology. In Antwerp.”

  The woman was no longer looking at me. She was clapping. Everyone was clapping. The girls were called up on stage one by one and given their diplomas. When it was Elzira’s turn I clapped too, filled with proprietorial pride. Her hands did not shake at all as she clasped her diploma. The little girl had disappeared, replaced by a confident young woman.

  I urgently needed to speak to Mr and Mrs Schneider.
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  Forty-Four

  The woman at the award ceremony had got it wrong: Elzira went, not to Newcastle or London, but to Israel to study, though the Schneiders had nearly registered her at an exclusive college for Jewish girls in Stamford Hill. But: “Too religious and too Yiddish for us.”

  Elzira left for a women’s seminary in Israel, an institute where Orthodox girls could not only receive a general education but also be instructed on their role in Jewish life. “It’s a lot cheaper than the one in the UK, too,” said a relieved-sounding Mr Schneider, segueing into the joke about the hotel porter holding the door open for a guest with wet hair who’s just leaving. “You took a bath?” asks the chatty porter. “No, why?” the Jew answers. “Are you missing one?”

  A few weeks before Elzira left, I went to say goodbye to her.

  “Monsieur is at Opris’s house,” said Elzira. We were sitting in her room, which looked even more immaculate than usual. “Monsieur is going to live with Opris and her daughter.” In one hand she held a handkerchief, in the other a little dark-blue ball that squeaked when you squeezed it: the dog’s favourite toy. Her father had had it made into a key ring.

  “Daddy and Mummy can’t keep Monsieur. I’ll be away for at least two years. And Sara doesn’t have time to look after him. Monsieur will be happy with Opris and sa fille Leila, n’est-ce pas?”

  “Of course he will, Elzira,” I said, “Opris and Leila are very kind to Monsieur. They know his little ways, they know what he likes to eat, where he likes to walk, what other dogs he likes to play with. He’ll soon feel at home with them, though he’ll miss you very much, I’m sure!”

  As I comforted her, though, I felt a few stabs of pain. It was a shame that Monsieur and his little mistress were being separated. Apparently Mr and Mrs Schneider weren’t attached enough to the creature to provide it with a loving home until Elzira’s return. What was the Hebrew word for “dog” again? Okay, I realized the Schneiders weren’t the kind of people who’d walk the dog several times a day. But given its importance to their daughter, I couldn’t understand that they didn’t feel obliged to care for it. With the help of Opris and her daughter that would have been feasible, surely? They had a garden, too. And there was Sara.