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The Terrorist’s Holiday
Andrew Neiderman
For my wife, Diane,
who has never taken a holiday from our love.
Preface
The two figures hidden in the darkness of the alley remained stone still and silent with an air of expectation, their bodies frozen in movement, caught on pause. It had rained, and the street glittered with the reflected light of an occasional car headlight. Minute particles making up the heavy mist could be seen dancing in the beams like fireflies brought to life by the illumination. Suddenly, the door to the basement of the synagogue across the street cracked open with a sound resembling a gunshot, echoing into the alley. Words and laughter followed, triggering the two dark figures to stand erect. Both raised their shoulders and were hunched up like hawks, perched and studying their prey.
Three young men, all under the age of twenty, emerged from the synagogue basement. They spoke quickly and fluently in Hebrew. One of them laughed, and then the other two joined in. All three still wore yarmulkes.
It was the end of March. They were on Wallace Avenue in the Bronx. They had just emerged from a meeting with the other members of the JDL, the Jewish Defense League.
“Soviet Jews will sing praises in your name forever. Daniel, son of Hymie and Sylvia Goldstein,” one of the young men said and laughed.
“Since he was in the Middle East his name sends cold fear down the spines of Arabs,” the other one said.
“Laugh, you two, but Kaufman agrees with me.”
They grew serious.
“Then you’ll go with him back to Israel in the fall?”
“I don’t know yet. I’m going to talk to my parents about it.”
“Good.”
They all stood facing each other for a moment. Then Daniel reached out, and the three took hands.
“Never again,” he said.
“Never again,” they repeated.
“Shalom,” Daniel said.
“Shalom.”
“Shalom, Daniel.”
The two others started up the street. Daniel stood there for a moment watching them. Then he turned to go in the opposite direction.
He hesitated at the street corner. It was certainly cold and damp out. He would have preferred snow. There was something neater about snow until it melted and became rain, he thought. He wiped his face with his handkerchief and then looked at his watch. It was nearly midnight. His parents would have many questions again—his father genuinely interested and desiring to know, but his mother, sitting with worry, holding her breath. She had given up trying to hold him back.
Recently she had said, “This is what comes of sending you to Israel? You come home, believing yourself to be a soldier?”
“Every man, woman, and child is a soldier in Israel,” he had replied. His father nodded, smiling. Yes was written over his face.
“The boy’s got a feeling for something,” he said. “He’s got pride and deep belief. You want him to be like the lost youth roaming America?”
“I don’t want him to go find wars. There’ll be plenty who’ll do that for him. Plenty. Do you have to be in the protests and the demonstrations? A policeman will hit you over the head with his club and make you a vegetable.”
“Leave him alone. You want him to be a coward like that Grossfield boy?”
“A valedictorian you call a coward? He’ll be a success, rich and safe.”
“No Jew is safe if one Jew is in danger because he is a Jew,” Daniel said. “That’s what Rabbi Kaufman says.”
His father had smiled again. Daniel remembered that smile now. It made him swell with pride. He took a deep breath and started across the street.
The two figures in the darkness stepped forward in such synchronized unison, it was as if they were attached to each other. When Daniel reached the sidewalk, the taller figure stepped farther out and took a position against the far wall. Daniel began to walk past the alley. The other figure waited, frozen in a ridiculous posture—bending over, his arms hanging forward, his head tilted to the left. Just as Daniel was in front of the alley, he stepped out in front of him. Daniel stopped abruptly and stepped back.
“Shalom, Jew,” the figure said.
Daniel raised his hands quickly and took a karate stance. The second and taller figure came out of the darkness behind him. He raised his right hand high. He had an ice pick grasped within his fist. It came down on Daniel silently and swiftly, punching a small hole where his brain met his spinal column. A little spurt of blood came up around the shiny pick. Daniel didn’t even utter a cry. He grimaced and raised his shoulders like someone who had just caught a chill. The man with the ice pick pulled it up in the same quick motion with which he had brought it down. Daniel’s body folded beneath him like a suit of clothes sliding off a hanger. The first figure stepped back and watched him collapse to the sidewalk.
The two assailants looked at each other for a moment, and then they heard the door of the synagogue basement open again. Instantly, they moved back into the darkness of the alley and disappeared down the corridor of shadows. When they were safely away, they spoke.
“It was easy, Joseph, easy,” the first figure said. He spoke with hot excitement.
“Call me Yusuf. Now and forever.”
They stopped to rest, leaning against the stone wall of a corner apartment house. Both of their faces shone with the wetness that had settled on their cheeks and foreheads. The boy’s face, although lighter in tone, was spotted with dark blotches from some skin ailment. He looked younger than his sixteen years. Even standing still he was animated, driven by that nervous energy of adolescence. His eyes darted about as he continually searched the neighborhood, and he shifted weight from foot to foot rhythmically. The young man with him had dark, Semitic skin and a rather long, thin nose. His lips curled downward at the corners, giving him a habitual sneer. He closed his eyes and took deep breaths as he rested.
“Even in public? Call you Yusuf, even in public?”
“Of course in public.” Yusuf squeezed his arms against himself as if to hold in the excitement, but his voice was high pitched. He cursed himself for not having his brother’s coolness. It was important to master one’s body if one wanted to master others.
“But isn’t that dangerous? Hassil said …”
“Hassil is too cautious. He is a sheep among horses, a sparrow flying with a flock of hawks. We must be stronger,” Yusuf said and put both his hands on the boy’s shoulders. The boy smiled and straightened his body.
“And what will you call me?”
“The name of your father. Abu. Now and forever.”
“Now and forever,” the newly baptized boy said.
They grasped hands. The boy’s lips were burning. He ran his tongue over them. It seemed to him that his whole body was hot with excitement. He was a torch. It was as if he could light up an entire street.
“It was easy,” Abu whispered. “Easy. Just as you said it would be.”
“It won’t always be as easy, but it will always be as good.”
“Yes. It’s good.”
“Let’s go. We bet
ter not be seen on any of these streets now.”
They started walking away, keeping to the shadows, hugging the protection of the darkness. They feared the touch of streetlights.
“Now what? Can I tell my father?”
“No. We wait.”
“They’ll recognize us now, see our true value and count us in when the time comes?”
“Yes, they’ll recognize us.”
“Do you think … maybe something big?”
“Of course big. Nessim is respected. My brother is the best. Wherever they send him, we will all go. You, your father, Nessim, and I. It will be big.”
“Big enough to make a difference? A real difference?”
“Yes,” Yusuf said, but at the time he had no idea just how big it would be.
1
Abe Rothberg folded the newspaper and put it down on his desk. He shook his head and stood up to walk over to the window that looked out over Sixth Avenue, clasping his hands behind his back. It is getting to be too much, he thought, too much. He had turned forty-three just last week, but he felt much older and very tired. He saw it in his mirrored reflection—the graying temples and thinning hair, the deeper creases in his brow, the drooping of his eyelids, the paleness in his cheeks and lips. At times he even caught himself slouching when he stood talking to people. It depressed him because he let it happen. His life was shrinking inside him.
On the other hand, Lillian grew softer and more beautiful every day. She was radiant and alive. Her energy made him feel insecure. She never seemed to stop. She was into everything she could possibly get into—an officer in Hadassah, president of their chapter of B’nai B’rith, a leading fund-raiser for the United Jewish Appeal, active in the PTO. The list went on and on.
Here he was, the president and owner of one of the biggest wholesale paper goods outfits in the city, and she seemed busier and more important than he did. It was unnerving at times to be so overshadowed by his wife.
Of course, it was difficult to attach a great importance and significance to paper goods in light of her battles for justice, education, and a free and secure Israel. At parties and dinners, the conversation rarely turned to his work. What could he say—toilet paper had gone up in quality?
Even his sixteen- and fourteen-year-old daughters, Denise and Lori, looked at him as if he were an oddball in the house sometimes. He was the provider of dresses, cars, cosmetics, stereos, televisions—a machine to make possible the consumption of consumer goods. They loved him in an offhanded sort of way, he was sure, but did they really respect and understand him? What’s more, did they care?
He was worrying about them the way he would worry about a finished paper goods product. Increasingly, he had come to consider his children as products. They were, after all, created and molded at home. Denise, especially concerned him. She took more and more for granted each day. He hated to use the word spoiled, and Lillian never seemed to know what he was talking about when he talked about Denise’s attitudes. She had no respect for money, never yet having had to earn a penny, and she used the credit cards as if they were tickets admitting her to a world of dreams. It struck him that a good many people in America had that attitude about credit cards. They had long since lost their original purpose, or perhaps, the originators knew right from the start just what a temptation they had turned loose on the population. No, his daughter was a big problem. She had become a Jewish American Princess, and he was afraid there was little he could do about it now.
The ringing of the phone snapped him out of his depression. It was Lillian, bubbling over the wires as usual.
“It’s a coup, a real coup. Everyone’s been trying to put something like this together for years. I told you. All it takes is real effort.”
“Slow down. What are you talking about?”
“What I described at breakfast.” Her voice dropped like a deflated balloon. “Weren’t you listening?”
“You mean that business on Passover?” He had picked up key words. Over the years he had learned how to converse with Lillian; how to nod at the right times and go “uh-huh” at the pauses in her diatribes.
“Of course. You did make the reservations, Abe. I left that up to you.”
“Yes,” he said lying, “I did.”
“Well, the fund-raiser will be held at the New Prospect. We’ve got Chaim Eban for the third night. That’s when we’ll have the rally. We did it,” she said, her voiced filled with special excitement.
Chaim Eban was the Israeli general whose military strategy was held to be chiefly responsible for keeping the Syrians from retaking control of the Golan Heights during the ’73 war. Now he was moving into the political arena as one of the leading advocates of a hard line with the Arabs.
“This is a hundred percent?”
“Practically. His exact words were ‘Barring any unforeseen circumstances.’”
“Oh.”
“Whaddaya mean, oh?”
“Tell me a day when Israel doesn’t experience unforeseen circumstances.”
“Thanks for your optimism,” she said. “Be a little more cheery at supper, will you, Abe? Denise, especially, is looking forward to this family holiday.”
“Family? She said that?”
“Well …”
“The Marx boy will be there too, I assume.”
“Of course.”
“A matchmaker at thirty-nine, Lillian?”
“My mother taught me well.”
“Damn right,” he said. “Okay, I’ll see you later. My intercom is buzzing.” He hung up. He hated using deceptions like that, but Lillian could tie him up with her projects for hours. He pressed the intercom and waited for Mrs. Green to pick up.
“Yes, Mr. Rothberg?”
“Call the New Prospect and make reservations for me and my family for Passover, Mrs. Green. Tell them the same accommodations for the same length of time.”
“Certainly.”
He hung up the receiver and opened the paper again. He had circled the headline: “Eighteen-Year-Old Boy Murdered on Wallace Avenue.”
Daniel Goldstein. He read the name again. Poor Hymie and Sylvia. He was surprised Lillian didn’t know yet. When she found out, she would call him and bawl him out for not telling her. She knew he read the paper thoroughly every morning in the office. But he couldn’t do it; he never could do it. There was something about being the bearer of tragedy, something that made him feel closer to it, almost a part of it. It was easier to sit back and let others tell the horrible news—easier to just react with everyone else.
The article had mentioned a JDL meeting too. Abe had just recently had a pretty heated discussion with Hymie about that. Sylvia sided with him, not Hymie.
“I wouldn’t want my boy to toss bombs and indiscriminately kill people, no,” Hymie said, “but we must begin to go on the offensive. It’s the only message anti-Semites understand. Act like sheep and they’ll act like wolves.”
“So you encourage your son?”
“I don’t encourage him. He’s got a mind of his own. I don’t discourage him, either.”
“Same thing.”
“I tell him it’s no good,” Sylvia said. “I tell him there are other ways, more peaceful ways.”
“They do no good.”
“Who says they do no good? What have you won so far with your wolves, Mr. Samson?”
“You’re not realistic,” Hymie said.
“I am realistic,” she snapped. “Abe’s right. The actions are stupid. They’re insignificant in the light of what’s happening, and they only bring negative feelings and comments. They feed the anti-Semites, give them something to point to and talk about.”
“So we should go hide in a synagogue somewhere?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Neither did I,” Abe said.
He relived the entire con
versation. Daniel Goldstein. He could have had a son nearly Daniel’s age. Perhaps he would have been out there too, meeting secretly in synagogue basements or back rooms, planning revenge for the massacre at the Olympics. Is it better to have daughters?
He thought about Denise—how she had blossomed into a beautiful young lady, taking on Lillian’s good features—small and dainty curves, gentle blue eyes, rich and thick dark brown hair. She knew she was attractive, and she took advantage of it. He had fallen in love with his own daughter the way a father falls in love with images of his wife and images of himself. She was a bright girl, despite the problems he saw developing in her character. Her grades in school were always in the A range, and Lillian had already picked out Skidmore, mainly because the Solomons had sent their daughter there.
“I want her to mix with best. Touch only good things. Realize what she can become.”
“The wife of a rich businessman, like Bernard Marx, who will inherit his father’s position with a chain of department stores, maybe?”
“Why not? There’s something bad about that prospect?”
People were prospects to Lillian—prospective donors for her charities, prospective speakers for her meetings, prospective workers for her causes, and prospective husbands for her daughters. To her everything existed for its potential. Maybe nothing’s wrong with that, he thought. The phone rang.
“Abe, Bill Marcus. You heard about the Goldstein boy?”
“I read it in the paper.”
“It’s not just a mugging you know.”
“Seems not.”
“All this is a result of that damnable resolution in the U.N.”
“I don’t know.”
“Now, more than ever before, we’ve got to get behind Tel Aviv. We have no one but ourselves, just the way it was before the Second World War.”
“Maybe so,” he said. He hated arguing with Bill Marcus. The man was so dramatic and often twisted words. It was better to speak in short, impotent sentences.
“This affair in the Catskills is beginning to take on a lot more significance. I’m glad our wives are deeply involved. You heard about Chaim Eban?”
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