by J. S. Margot
“Speaking of Belgium, don’t you miss it?” I asked, for something to say.
“Yes and no,” he answered. “Sometimes I’m homesick for my family, for Beni’s Falafel, for friends. But I’ll never go back for good. New York’s a great place to be a Jew.”
He walked between us. Like so many Orthodox Jewish men in Antwerp he walked quickly. I could scarcely keep up with him. I felt like sticking my arm through his, so as to keep pace with him better. I also felt like a nice glass of wine.
“Only now that I’m one of the one and a half million Jews of New York—twelve per cent of the city’s population!—do I know what it means to be a modern Orthodox Jew as a matter of course,” he went on. And European Jews were different to American Jews, he said. “We, Europeans, have a different type of humour. We dress and act differently. We love soccer. We look each other up, even in New York. By the way, more and more Antwerp Jews are moving here. Including friends of mine, of Simon’s and my sisters’. I think I’ve started a trend,” he joked.
“Elzira beat you to it.”
“Yes, Elzira’s intuition was always spot on,” he said.
“What language do you, European Jews, speak amongst yourselves?” I asked. I was playing our old language game.
“I’ve still got a school friend who speaks broad Antwerp dialect,” he laughed. “In fact he knows you,” he said, “we even talked about you not so long ago.”
“He knows me? Apart from you, I don’t know any Orthodox Jews.”
“Sure you do. You wrote his essays!”
Everything he said about his wife Thirza, there at the waffle truck, radiated admiration. She’d been born in New York. She’d got a PhD in physics, but preferred—and found it made more financial sense—to join her parents in their jewellery business. There, she didn’t have to work nine to five. And she didn’t have to explain about Shabbat.
He talked about his parents-in-law. Thirza’s father had been born in Antwerp. After the war, in which he lost practically his entire family, Europe felt like a tainted place. He’d boarded a ship to America. Aged sixteen, he lied to the US immigration authorities that he was an adult. Eventually Thirza came along. His daughter had been introduced to Jakov through a shadchan. They had two children. “I’d like five, at least, so you can see why it’s handy for Thirza to keep on working in the family business.”
He seemed to have put away his us-and-you grin. His spectacles had been traded in for lenses; I got the impression he saw the whole world differently, with more colour.
Jakov told us about the business he’d started up, developing digital cameras. He already had ten people working for him. “I’m still making a loss at the moment, but we’re going to grow, to boom.” To set up the business, he’d borrowed money from a wealthy Jewish real estate broker. At first, the man had refused to invest in Jakov; he didn’t think his plan would work. But Jakov hadn’t given up. For weeks, he’d gone to the same shul as the property magnate. When that didn’t lead to a breakthrough, he spent three successive nights in a sleeping bag outside the real estate broker’s front door. On the third morning the man said “Come in.”
Jakov paid for the waffles, which were indeed excellent. We talked about this and that. About his parents: their health, how Mrs Schneider’s fear of flying ruled out visits to the US, though she would take the train to Amsterdam, where Simon and Abigail lived with their two children. About Sara, who, to everyone’s amazement, never volunteered for the Israeli army. The youngest of the four children had stayed in Antwerp, marrying a Jewish man of Turkish origin. We talked about Elzira. He saw his older sister only occasionally. They might live in the same city, but New York was so big, and Elzira lived in Brooklyn Heights and he up in Fresh Meadows, to the north of JFK. At least an hour’s drive, assuming there wasn’t a hold-up. But there was always a hold-up. And they both led separate lives, went to their own synagogues, lived within their own Jewish communities. “No, my Thirza doesn’t wear a wig. She’s a young Madeleine Albright, if you know what I mean. We don’t even live in a neighbourhood with an eruv, can you imagine! Elzira and Isaac do. There are lots of eruvin in New York, about ten or so just in the south of the city, I believe.”
Then Martinus told his story about Elzira’s wedding.
During the reception, some of the guests had held a hat, a tin platter or a money box under his nose, muttering something in Hebrew or Yiddish. Each time, Martinus had got out his wallet. First he had given them notes. When he didn’t have any notes left, he switched to coins. He assumed this ritual was part of the wedding; all the contributions would go towards a present for the young couple, or perhaps to cover the accommodation costs of foreign guests. But the hats and platters kept coming. He asked the man next to him what present they would buy for Elzira and Isaac with the money they collected. The man had started to laugh heartily.
It turned out that the collectors represented all kinds of Jewish voluntary organizations. They liked to drop in on weddings, because there they found lots of good-humoured, generous people all in one spot. What’s more, the peer pressure was considerable: one person could see how deep into his pockets another was prepared to reach in the interests of tzedakah, a God-bidden act of charity.
Without knowing it, Martinus had sponsored all kinds of—possibly ultra-Orthodox—schools, youth movements, shuls, associations for the elderly, kosher meal providers and ambulance services.
“Fantastic,” chuckled Jakov, after hearing the story.
“Well I felt pretty stupid,” Martinus said.
The two got so immersed in conversation that I felt left out.
They talked about migration. About the travel bug that infects the Dutch, making Jakov think of his people: the history of Jewry had traditionally been one of migration. They talked about IT, getting all geeky and technical. Sometimes Dutch tripped off Jakov’s tongue, sometimes American English. The language he spoke depended on the subject and on his memories, the time events took place. The two men swapped email addresses.
As we sat next to Jakov on a little stone wall near Penn Station, waiting for his train, I saw he was wearing black socks with the days of the week embroidered along the top. It was a Friday, but they said something else. What’s more, Jakov was wearing a different day on each foot. Discovering that felt like coming home.
Two
I was just sorting out my mailbox when the message arrived.
At first I thought it was from Elzira. She and Isaac had a shared email address featuring both their names. But it was from Isaac. It boiled down to this: he hoped all was well with me and Martinus. He didn’t want to bother me, he said. He told me that their elder daughter had recently had to undergo major heart surgery. The operation had been a success, thank God (that was what he wrote). But Elzira couldn’t shake off her worries. Because the 9/11 attacks had happened just as their daughter was being operated on. He wondered whether I might like to come and stay for a few days. He wrote that they had plenty of room for guests. That it would do his wife good to talk to me. That for the time being he’d prefer to keep my visit a surprise. So it would be better not to email him back.
He gave me three telephone numbers. In a postscript he added that he would like to pay for my flight.
Three
I stayed for five pleasant days.
Elzira and Isaac had three daughters and a son. When I went to bed, I would find sweets and little notes under my pillow. Every day, I found sweet Post-it messages and drawings on the bathroom mirror.
The house was full of song. The youngest daughter made off with my high heels and transformed the sitting room into a catwalk. The oldest, who’d had the heart operation and afterwards been passed fit as a fiddle, couldn’t believe I’d ever tutored her mummy. She must have asked me at least fifty times. The middle one wanted everything I said to be repeated to her. When we played with his toy cars or I helped him make a san
dcastle in the sandpit, the little boy could gaze at me fixedly for minutes at a time. He was a dear little chap, not quite three. In accordance with the Torah, his hair wouldn’t be cut until his third birthday, so his corkscrew curls tumbled down his cheeks. Elzira was more strictly observant than her parents. Her children spoke English and Hebrew, and a smidgen of Dutch. They loved waffles and frites. And cheesecake from Kleinblatt’s in Antwerp’s Provinciestraat—I’d brought some with me, which made my popularity soar.
The Latin American home help lived on the attic floor. When she romped with the children, her laugh made the whole house vibrate, as if an engine had been switched on. The young woman was mainly responsible for the laundry and other domestic chores. Elzira did the cooking herself. And it was she who helped her children with their homework. Despite her deep concerns about her family, she radiated the good-humoured, self-assured contentment peculiar to mothers who have consciously chosen to devote their lives to their families, and who lack for nothing financially.
After her first pregnancy, Elzira, whose name I only now discovered meant “devoted to God”, had given up her clerical job at a Jewish school. Since then she’d focused on voluntary work. She’d metamorphosed into the selfless linchpin around which local—Jewish—community life in Brooklyn Heights revolved. If, when leaving home, she didn’t immediately get into her khaki-coloured four-wheel drive, she was very likely to be buttonholed by a local resident. “I get on well with everyone, though I do find some of the JAPs trying,” she said. “JAPs?” I asked. “Jewish American princesses. Rich Jewish women who are out of touch with the real world. The Paris Hiltons of our community. I try to be super friendly, and I’m very patient with them. But inside I sometimes think: grow up!”
She knew the local families and what was going on in their lives. Her insight, her efforts and her refusal to judge had a wide social reach. If she hadn’t been a woman, she’d have made a good Orthodox rabbi.
“You could still become a shadchan,” I grinned.
“Yes! Dating agency Elzira, more reliable than Al Jazeera,” she laughed.
But we didn’t discuss 9/11. Not in essence, anyway. The debris, the dust, the commotion in the hospital on the day her daughter was lying on the operating table: that was talked about at length. She’d seen some of the severely injured brought in as she sat in the waiting room, praying for good news from the heart surgeon. She’d gone on praying for days.
*
My stay with Elzira’s family included one Shabbat.
I asked her if she’d be okay with me taking the children for a walk this Friday afternoon, instead of helping her in the kitchen.
“Of course,” she said.
I was too unfamiliar with the dietary laws to feel confident about what I was doing, and wanted to avoid that stress. I still didn’t know which ingredients were allowed to lie side by side, which plates I could rinse in which sink, which pans I was allowed to use. Whether I could touch the knobs of the gas cooker—because wasn’t turning up the flame the same as lighting a flame? The fridge, with its light that went on and off: was it okay to open and shut its door? Somewhere I’d heard that even the transport of kosher foodstuffs was strictly regulated: if a truck’s last load had consisted of non-kosher products, the back had to be thoroughly cleansed before it could be reloaded. “Who comes up with these things?” had been my response. And: “No wonder kosher food’s so expensive.”
Despite this, I still slipped up that evening as we sat at the table. I was taking notes after the candles had been lit, the blessings pronounced, completely forgetting that writing fell under the list of prohibited activities. I just hadn’t internalized Jewish laws.
Elzira and Isaac’s youngest daughter put me straight in no uncertain terms: “That’s not allowed,” she piped up. “You must put away your pen. And switch off your phone. I know, Mummy and Daddy say you can do what you want, because you’re not Jewish. But I’d prefer it if you didn’t confuse us.”
Four
A few years later I sent Elzira an email unlike all the ones I’d sent before. Without elaborating on the threads of life I’d briefly lost hold of, I told her I felt a need to see her and her family.
“Come whenever you like,” she answered.
Despite my belief in the adage “Guests, like fish, start to smell after three days,” this time I spent seven nights at their—new—brownstone in Brooklyn Heights, where I stayed in a spacious guestroom with en suite, and slept in the same bed as Mr and Mrs Schneider when they came to stay.
I was given the key to their home and the code for the alarm system. “There are ashtrays in the garden house,” Isaac said, after I came back from a stroll through the neighbourhood—he must have smelt that I’d had a furtive smoke. He gave me the key to the garden house, which was like a country retreat, and featured a bar stocked with spirits of the finest brand, some with kosher certificates, including a bottle of Jack Daniel’s Old No. 7. Besides soft drinks, the fridge contained Duvel and Maredsous (beers without additives were kosher) for friends from Belgium who regularly came to stay. Their American friends were partial to them too. Isaac told me of Hasidic men who loved to drink Duvel. Picturing this made me smile.
The volumes in the garden house bookcase included my debut novel. I leafed through it. Here and there Elzira had marked passages and made notes; I recognized her handwriting.
I went for a lot of walks. On my own or with the children. Sometimes with Elzira, sometimes with Elzira and Isaac. She and her husband almost never touched each other familiarly when I was there. But from the playful interplay of their words, silences and covert glances I could tell they’d created their own language and their own world, and felt at home in it.
On my outings, I saw every branch of Judaism. Within each branch I encountered every conceivable gradation. Within each gradation I came across every conceivable individual difference.
For the first time in my life I was aware that a homogeneous Jewish community just didn’t exist.
Short-skirted Jewish girls walked alongside Hasidic women in ankle-length dark skirts, fake-hair wigs and beige tights featuring a thick, vertical seam so the nylon couldn’t possibly be mistaken for the potentially erotically charged skin of the lower leg.
In New York, women in antique garb seemed less anachronistic than in Antwerp. That realization surprised me, because on the Old Continent, past and present were more interlinked than in this New World metropolis.
I talked to people of all kinds. In these conversations I noticed that Jews addressed me with an openness I’d never encountered in Antwerp. In the course of a week I spoke to more Orthodox Jews than I had in the quarter of a century I’d lived in Antwerp. Perhaps because, as a visitor to the city, I opened up more to the world around me. Martinus had once put forward a theory along those lines, and there was a lot of truth in it. But the reality was more nuanced than that: the people, young and old, who I started conversations with on the street, or in the subway or lift, weren’t bent on concealing their lives. They weren’t bolting and chaining the door to their world. On the contrary. They wanted to share it with me.
These exchanges made me recall the teacher who’d gone with Jakov’s class to the Anne Frank House and had initiated a debate in the train about Jewish self-confidence. Apparently, the DNA of Jewish New Yorkers contained less fear, and more pride and joie de vivre. How had Jakov put it again? That the naturalness with which he could be a Jew here boosted his self-confidence? As I saw it, the collective self-confidence also benefited from the advantages of New York. As if the people here didn’t bear the weight of the grim history of European Jews on their shoulders, didn’t perpetually fear a repetition of these horrors, weren’t constantly surrounded by traces of their extermination. As if there were more light here, and more future.
During those seven days, Elzira never asked me what was wrong. She watched over me in
silence.
Five
On the occasion of Mrs Schneider’s sixty-fifth birthday, Elzira secretly rounded up her sister and brothers. On their mother’s birthday, the four gathered in Antwerp, where they stood singing at her front door.
It just so happened that the week before, I’d sent another how-are-you-doing-it’s-been-ages email to Elzira. She’d immediately responded with an invitation. Couldn’t Martinus and I drop in too, at her mother’s birthday party? “That’d be great, it’d be just like the old days, Mummy and Daddy won’t believe their eyes, I’m not even going to tell Daddy: he’s in on the whole surprise plan for Mummy, but we won’t say anything about you coming.”
There are people who never shed the past versions of themselves. Mrs Schneider was such a person; she accommodated all her ages in her and was as inscrutable as always.
But that afternoon of her birthday she seemed completely at sea. She had the look and the gestures of someone who’s lost something important but doesn’t know what. Like when you leave the house in the morning feeling you’ve forgotten something. You sense—you know—that something’s not right, but you just can’t work out what’s missing. You pat your pockets. It’s not your wallet. Not your bag. Not your coat, your scarf, your jewellery. But what is it then?
I’ve no idea what Mrs Schneider was missing during her party. Time, perhaps. Three of their children had gone abroad when they were eighteen or so. Since then they’d only been home occasionally, for brief periods. Never, since secondary school, had all four stayed in the parental home at the same time. Certainly not by themselves, without spouse or children. Sometimes Mrs Schneider had to reach for her handkerchief. Like when she picked up a photo of Granny Pappenheim from the sideboard.
