Leah's Journey

by Gloria Goldreich

  There was no shame, Leah knew, attached to the violation of innocent, powerless women and it was not out of shame that Leah maintained her silence but out of the terrible doubt that haunted her. For a while she had hoped that her menstrual flow would begin but now she recognized at last that it would not. It was probable that the child she carried was Yaakov’s but there was a chance that it was not. To tell of Petrovich’s attack would mean planting the seeds of doubt in other minds as well and the child would grow up in this shadow of communal uncertainty. And so the teasing half-knowledge remained hers alone and she hoarded her secret like an emotional miser, shrouding it in silence.

  She would have to make plans for herself and for the child and she knew she must come to a decision soon. Moshe and Henia were eager to embark for Palestine and join their friends who were building a kibbutz, a communal settlement in the Huleh valley. They were delaying their departure, she knew, until she was better able to cope with her grief and order her life. They had urged her to join them but the thought of Palestine terrified her as did any mention of violence. The Arabs did not welcome the Jewish settlers and were mobilizing against them. Only the previous week there had been a newspaper account about the burning of a Jewish settlement in the Galilee, and she had thought again of the miller’s house and the orange flames of death that had rocketed from the thatched roof. She never again wanted to watch helplessly while the fires of hatred blazed.

  Her parents were staying in Russia although every day more and more Jews from Partseva came to bid them good-bye. Most of them were leaving the shtetl for the United States and Canada, a few for Palestine, and others were sailing to England and Australia. One family had even opted for New Zealand amid considerable speculation about whether kosher food was obtainable in Auckland.

  The Jews of Russia were on the move, practicing their ancient skill of tying intricate knots around clumsy bundles and trunks and suitcases that seldom closed properly. Huge cartons were anchored together with lengths of cord and rope and finally strapped with broad strips of leather. Pots and pans clattered as they were linked together on a chain of rope. They would be needed to prepare meals during the journey and some worried housewives attached them like a belt to their aprons.

  Families were split asunder as one brother chose Palestine and the other set sail for New York. Husbands left their wives, planning to work for several years in the new world and earn the dollars that would purchase tickets and passports for the families left behind. Each day processions of horse-drawn wagons clogged the streets of Odessa that led to the seaport. There old men kissed their sons good-bye, urging them to remain good and faithful Jews. Brothers embraced with desperate finality and left each other without looking back. Children waved frantically to fathers they would not see again for years, and old women pulled their shawls tightly over their heads and walked slowly back to houses grown silent and empty.

  Leah’s brother-in-law, Shimon Hartstein, had left for America the week before. He estimated that it would take him two years to send for Malcha and the children.

  “Stay with us in Partseva, Leah,” her parents had urged, but the thought of returning to the small town filled her with dread. To return to Partseva would be to step backward, to surrender the advances she had made, to suspend a journey which she knew must lead away from that village which smelled of the past and was rooted in resignation. She could, of course, stay in Odessa and live on in Moshe and Henia’s flat. Yaakov’s parents had been generous to her and she knew they would continue to offer her money, especially when they learned of her pregnancy. She was an accomplished seamstress, she could tutor schoolchildren, and she had friends and acquaintances in Odessa. Some of Yaakov’s friends from the Socialist League had come to see her during the seven days of mourning and offered her reassurances and sympathy. But she knew that most of them had not come forward and the knowledge angered her. Still, she liked the small city with its cobbled streets and low-storied stone buildings. It throbbed with activity and life. Ideas flourished, presses rolled, urgent discussions took place in book-filled parlors. And the city held many memories for her, memories of her brief courtship and even briefer marriage.

  Leah paused now in her walk, stopping at the entry of a small municipal park. She and Yaakov had often sat on the stone benches here, listening to the music of the twin violinists who played at the café across the way. But tonight only one violin filled the air with aching melodies that were lost in the rustling of the leaves. Had the other brother decided to leave Odessa, leaving his twin to play on mournfully alone? The park was empty except for a woman who sat on a low stone bench surrounded by canvas shopping bags and clumsily laden straw market baskets. The woman was reading from a Hebrew book and Leah, glancing quickly at the volume as she passed, saw that it was the Book of Psalms. Above the strains of the violin the woman’s monotonous voice echoed through the empty park.

  “The sorrows of death compassed me and the pains of hell got hold upon me. I found trouble and sorrow. Sorrow and trouble.”

  Leah recognized the woman as Bryna Markevich and her heart turned in pity. Bryna Markevich had been a young bride, like Leah herself, during the terrible pogroms of 1903. Her husband, a prosperous young businessman, had been among those Jews apprehended during train journeys whose naked bodies were found weeks later, lying at the side of the tracks. Peasants and Cossacks, wearing the dark business suits and gold watches of the murdered Jews, brazenly walked the streets of Odessa, boasting of their murderous exploits. A widow would pass a man wearing her dead husband’s suit and collapse in anguish but no one turned to the authorities, knowing that it would do no good. Bryna Markevich’s husband had boarded the train at a distant city but he had never reached Odessa. His wallet had been discovered on a road and his watch had turned up at a pawnshop, but the young Jew had disappeared. Years later, during excavations for a new track line, a skeleton was unearthed and after much consideration, the shining pile of bones to which ragged scraps of flesh still hung was buried in the grave of the young Jewish businessman.

  But Bryna Markevich did not go to the funeral. For sixteen years she had haunted the train station waiting for a train that would never arrive. During the winter she slept in the waiting room, constantly asking the attendants, who had grown weary of ousting her, when the express from the provinces was due. During the summer months she slept in the park, jerking herself into wakefulness and hurrying to the station as though fearful that the long-awaited train might have arrived while she slept.

  Leah felt in her pocket for a half-ruble note and dropped it into the overflowing shopping basket, but the madwoman did not look up.

  Leah shivered, chilled by a prescient wind, by the foreknowledge of what could happen if she were not moved to action. She had been seized by such knowledge at her sister Malcha’s wedding when she had resolved to leave Partseva and fight for her own fate. Now again, she felt the ghosts of the future hover about her and knew she must struggle against them.

  “This is what happens,” she thought, “if you stay behind, if you remain entangled in the net of sorrow.”

  She suddenly remembered another line from the Book of Psalms and repeated it aloud.

  “I will walk before the Lord in the land of the living,” she said in a clear strong voice—and for the first time since that August morning of terror her life was pierced by the brightness of hope.

  “Leah!” Her name was spoken in a breathless tone, as though the speaker had been hurrying and slightly frightened.

  She turned in surprise and saw David Goldfeder rushing toward her.

  “Leah, where have you been? I’ve been looking all over Odessa. Even down at the pier. Henia and Moshe were worried.”

  “Just walking,” she said.

  “But now you’re tired?” David asked and found his answer in her pale face where sharp lines of fatigue were etched about her large dark eyes.

  “Yes, I’m tired,” she admitted.

  “Then let’s sit and talk.�
�

  David Goldfeder took her hand, surprised at its weightlessness as it lay passively in his own, and led her to a bench. From where they sat she could see Bryna Markevich suddenly set aside her prayer book, arrange her packages, and then carefully comb her hair and apply liberal amounts of rouge to her sunken cheeks. A railway train hooted in the distance and the woman hurried toward the station to search among the arriving passengers for the husband who had left Odessa so many years ago.

  “Have you thought about what you will do when Moshe and Henia leave for Palestine?” he asked. “Perhaps you would want to join them? They would like that.”

  “I know,” she said. “But I don’t want to go with them.”

  “You don’t want to return to your parents’ house?”

  “No.”

  “And you cannot want to stay in Odessa.” He offered the last statement with flat certainty. Like Yaakov and Leah, he and Chana Rivka had met in Odessa. Each cobblestoned street rang with memories. The sound of the evening breeze, stirring through the scrub pines that rimmed the port, reminded him of long evening walks when Chana Rivka’s small hand lay in his and they strolled in silence, thinking the same thoughts, planning the same plans. Sometimes, during such a walk, they would pass Yaakov and Leah; the tall, slender redheaded groom always linked arms with his dark-haired bride whose gentle laughter rippled through the evening quiet. Now, as he walked alone through the streets of Odessa, David Goldfeder felt himself half a person and the enormity of his loss pounded against him as he went alone through the streets and courtyards they had once passed through together. He turned to Leah and saw in her downturned glance an affirmation of his own feelings.

  “No. I don’t want to stay in Odessa,” she said at last.

  “Then come to America. Come with me. I have passage for two. All the papers are ready. Chana Rivka and I were almost ready to leave. I am all prepared.” He spoke softly, but she sensed the desperate urgency in his tone and she saw that his hands were knotted into fists which he clenched and unclenched as though fighting a silent battle against the encroaching despair.

  “What exactly are you suggesting, David?” she asked gently.

  “I’m suggesting that we marry. That you go to America with me as my wife. You’ve lost Yaakov and I have lost Chana Rivka. We are both alone and lonely. We need each other. We have always gotten along well, even when we were children in Partseva. I think it would be a wise thing for us to do. Believe me, Leah, I have given it much thought. We will be good for each other.”

  He sat up straight now, his hands at last motionless on his lap. He did not move to touch her, but stared straight ahead as though gathering strength after the effort of his speech.

  Leah too sat quietly, thinking about David Goldfeder, gathering all she knew about him and piecing the facts together like the scattered parts of a jigsaw puzzle. She knew of his kindness and gentleness and she remembered now how he had been one of the brighter students at the Hebrew school. The rabbi had wanted him to go to the great yeshiva at Ger, but David had refused and left his father’s home in much the same manner that Leah had left her own family. He had wanted to study medicine, to become a doctor, and the elders of the village had laughed at the idea. Jewish boys were not allowed to pursue medical studies in Russia and there was no money available to send him to France or Italy, where some of the richer families sent their children. He had found work in Odessa and like Yaakov he had been caught up in the dream of a new system of equality. She had often seen him at meetings, sitting next to his small fiancée and taking copious notes. But unlike Yaakov’s, his belief in the new philosophy had not been implicit. His questions had been piercing and troubled, and finally he had stopped coming to meetings and there were those who had been disappointed to learn that he and Chana Rivka planned to emigrate to America.

  “I am pregnant, David,” Leah said at last. She uttered the words flatly and searched his face to see what impact they had made, but he sat expressionless in the darkness.

  “All right,” he said finally, as though her statement had settled something that had hung in abeyance. “We are fortunate. The child will be born in America. In the land of the living.”

  She started at his choice of words and looked up. The pale evening light had vanished and with the darkness the first stars had become visible. David’s eyes followed her and together they sat quietly and gazed at the vast blackness of the sky strewn with starry silvern shards.

  “Yes, David, we will marry,” she said and lightly placed her hand on his, then withdrew it. Slowly, in silence, not touching, they made their way back to her brother’s home to arrange for their marriage.

  The Lower East Side

  1925

  2

  AARON GOLDFEDER sat beneath the kitchen table, meticulously sorting worn wooden clothespins into mysterious patterns which he arranged and rearranged as the sunlight shifted. Now two pins shaped like a T lay in a pale shaft of light. A shadow pierced the arrangement and the child plucked the pins up and set them next to a scarred table leg where the sunlight fell in a small circular pool of brightness. The sun, entering the kitchen window at a curious angle, defied the narrow panes that were covered with coal soot minutes after they had been scrubbed clean, and turned Aaron’s bright hair into a coppery crown of flaming curls. Solemnly now, he abandoned the game of patterns and began a new enterprise. He arranged four of his clothespins against the table’s legs and sitting before them, he addressed them sternly, issuing a series of commands in strangely compounded scraps of simple Yiddish and simpler English.

  “Du, Mottel, stand like a mensch,” he told the clothespin nearest him. “Du bist a Yankee soldier.”

  The two women working at the table above him listened to him and smiled.

  “How nice he plays, Leah. You’re lucky he’s not a wild thing, like my Joshua. Aaron’s such a quiet boy, such a good boy.”

  Sarah Ellenberg’s voice was sorrowful, wistful, as though Aaron’s goodness reflected sadly on her own small son, a cheerful gamin who at the age of six was familiar to every pushcart peddler on Hester Street. Joshua Ellenberg, his cap askew and his knickers flapping, dashed between the wheels of their carts, begging scraps of merchandise, running to fetch water in tin cups from the public fountains on Monroe Street or pickles and slices of herring from the huge wooden barrels that blocked the entryway of every small grocery. The peddlers rewarded him with bright strips of fabric or copper pennies worn thin and dull. They were not surprised when Joshua set up business himself, wheeling a small cart he had crafted out of old crates and the wheels of a discarded baby carriage. The cart was loaded with their debris and the smallest peddler on Hester Street had the loudest voice.

  “Buy! Buy! You can’t get cheaper anywhere. From me only the best. Only the cheapest. Bargains only!”

  “That’s some boy. He’ll be another Straus. The head of a department store,” the admiring street merchants told Sarah Ellenberg, but Joshua’s mother turned sorrowful eyes on her son and knotted his earnings into the corner of a handkerchief which she stuffed into the knee of her cotton stocking. She sat now with Aaron’s mother, softly grieving that Joshua was not seated safely below the kitchen table with Aaron playing soldier with a basket of clothespins.

  “Yes, Aaron’s a good boy,” Leah Goldfeder agreed. She continued to knead dough for the Sabbath loaves and the table shook beneath her strenuous effort. Aaron’s clothespin soldiers collapsed and he gathered them together and emerged, defeated, from his fort, stealing a shy look at his mother as he left the room.

  How beautiful his mother looked, he thought, and felt in his pocket for the piece of coal that exactly matched his mother’s hair.

  In the public library on East Broadway, the thin blonde lady who ran the story hour had read the children a tale of a princess who had slept for a thousand years and had shown them a picture of the beautiful raven-haired girl.

  “Just like my Mama,” small Aaron cried and the librarian had motioned him t
o silence and smiled secretly to herself. She knew the mothers of the children who came to her library. They were stout worried women who wore their dull hair twisted into shapeless buns which they covered with kerchiefs because of some weird religious Jewish injunction about married women covering their hair. Their plain cotton housedresses glistened with spots of cooking grease and their thick cotton stockings were wadded about their knees. How could the mother of this auburn-haired little boy (he was quite cute, she admitted, and it was odd to find hair of that color among the dark Jewish children of that neighborhood) resemble the Sleeping Beauty? In library school she had always imagined herself sitting in a bright sunlit room, reading to children dressed in starched gingham who asked clever questions and admired her greatly. She had not then anticipated a depression which made children’s librarians expendable, and she was glad to had found this post where the Borough of Manhattan began. And truly, some of the children were charming, especially this small bright-haired boy whose name tag, cut in the shape of a turkey from bright orange construction paper, announced him as Aaron Goldfeder.

  When Aaron’s mother came to call for him, the librarian had to admit that the child was right. Something about the young mother was indeed reminiscent of the artist’s drawing. Perhaps it was her dark hair, the coal-black braids fashioned into an intricate crown—or the high pale brow and dark eyes, sad and watchful. The librarian had taken careful note of the woman’s hands. She had seen that the skin was red and roughened, cluttered with small bruises where knives and chopping implements had slipped. There was the pale scar of a burn, doubtless a memento of the day a cauldron of boiling water for laundering had tipped over on an unsteady kitchen table. But Mrs. Goldfeder’s fingers were long and tapered and the nails were beautifully shaped. Women notice such things about each other and because of those hands the librarian had spoken softly to Aaron’s mother, had offered her some books to take home, and had told her what a good and quiet boy Aaron was.