Leah's Journey

by Gloria Goldreich

  It was almost dark when Leah stumbled home that evening. The lights of the large synagogue on Eldridge Street were ablaze and congregants were already filing in for the Sabbath eve service. Hugging the velvet bags that held their prayer shawls, the worshipers looked after Leah as she walked slowly down the street, their sad eyes paying silent tribute to her grief.

  Leah’s long black hair, loose and knotted, tumbled about her shoulders and she wore a loose flowered housedress that a relief worker at the makeshift shelter had given her. Her own clothing had been scorched and shredded. She had lost a shoe in the fall from the window and she wore a man’s slipper on one foot. Her hands, covered with soft yellow burn blisters and swathed in Vaseline-stained bandages, throbbed, though she was indifferent to the pain.

  Her weary path seemed mysteriously familiar, and quite suddenly she realized why. Once before she had fled from fire and loss, running barefoot then through wooded hills and brambles.

  Now she trudged slowly through urban streets, her mouth bitter with sorrow. Could one taste flames? She wondered and thought that she might laugh but did not. She was, it seemed, too exhausted for either laughter or tears. Painfully, she urged herself toward the house. When she arrived, she looked automatically up at the window where Aaron, his bright hair the color of those frightening flames, so often stood sentinel. But Aaron was away, she remembered. Everyone was away. It was Friday and the apartment was empty. They would be waiting for her in that mountain bungalow, miles above the river along which she and Eli had cruised and sung and laughed only days before.

  Now Eli was dead. She reminded herself of the fact as though she might forget. Dead. Her love was dead.

  Through the open windows of the synagogue she heard the voices of the men at prayers intoning the mourner’s Kaddish, the prayer for the dead.

  “Yiskadal v’yiskadash, shmei rabah…”

  Silently, her lips moving, she mouthed the prayer after them and slowly climbed the stairs to her apartment. A sliver of light glowed beneath the door and when she opened it, David was sitting in the armchair, his face turned toward her, his fine thin features masked with a grief that matched her own.

  “David!” She ran toward him and buried her head in his lap.

  Gently he patted her shoulders and ran his fingers through her dark hair, allowing her sobs to spill forth until his clothing was drenched with her tears and his own, too, were falling freely.

  “How did you know to come here?” she asked.

  “The news of the fire was on the radio.”

  “Eli is dead,” she said.

  “I know. I went to the factory to look for you and they told me.”

  “Eli and I…” New tears came, choking off the desperate words. She could not finish the sentence, nor was there any need to.

  “I know.”

  Gently he pulled her to her feet. Like a father caring for a small helpless daughter, he peeled her clothing off and filled the bathtub with hot water, carrying potful after potful from the stove. He led her to the steaming tub and immersed her in the soothing water; tenderly he bathed her, washing away the traces of soot and ash, the smells of fetid flesh and searing skin. He washed her long dark hair, freeing it of the smoky odors that had clung to it. Beneath his ministrations she wept, grew calm, and wept again. At last, he toweled her dry, dressed her in a clean white nightdress, and led her gently to the bed that had not been slept in for a week.

  She fell asleep at once and slept heavily, waking now and then as young children do, to pound and scratch at the darkness, trembling and weeping wildly. He calmed her then, stroking her gently and pulling her down against the pillows. But at her side he lay wakeful and heavyhearted, as the velvety darkness faded into the gray, rose-streaked skies of morning.

  *

  “Death day,” she thought on wakening and stirred restlessly within the sheets, damp with her sweat. Beyond her door she heard David talking softly and Malcha’s indistinguishable reply. Malcha must have arrived during the night, then, Leah realized, and wondered if David had sent for her. No matter. She was grateful that her sister was there and grateful too that minutes later the front door to the apartment closed and David’s step sounded on the outside stairwell.

  Slowly she lifted herself from the bed, moved toward the mirror, and looked closely at herself as though her reflected image might reveal the terrible loss she had suffered. Her dark eyes, dulled with sleep, stared back at her; neither misery nor pain had carved new lines across her high smooth forehead. Her hair, newly washed, shimmered darkly and she thought of how Eli had loved the touch of its wetness, had played with it, draping it in sheaves of darkness across his face—or combed it with his fingers as she lay across his narrow bed after lovemaking. She reached up and touched a single soft curl, as though within its tendrils she might discover a ghostly caress, a lingering trace of tenderness. Then violently she pulled at the dark hairs, jerking them fiercely from her scalp, moaning with the pain and glad of it. She knew now what she must do.

  She searched frantically in her bureau drawer and pulled out her heavy shears. Roughly she pulled her hair, layer by layer, as though it were a stubborn sheath of fabric, and hacked at it until it lay in severed, mutilated dark swathes across the bare wood floor. She had not shorn her hair when she married the youthful Yaakov nor had she covered it when she became David’s wife. It was for Eli, who would be buried that day, that she had reserved that sacrifice. She plucked up one long dark curl and pressed it against her cheek, then carefully folded it into a scarf and put it in her drawer.

  “Leah, what have you done?” Malcha, pushing open the door, stared at her sister. “Oh Leah, poor Leah,” she said and cradled her in her arms, her fingers gently stroking the cropped head.

  “I had to do it,” Leah said, the first tears of that day of grief and loss twisting down her face.

  “Yes. You did. Of course you did,” Malcha replied and went to find a black kerchief for Leah to wear to the funeral that afternoon.

  Long before the noon hour, the small funeral parlor on East Broadway was filled to capacity. Outside, crowds of mourners milled in the street and black-garbed men and women emerged in throngs from the subway and filled the tables of the Garden Cafeteria. Small children, their large eyes wide with startled wonder at a death so bright and terrible, lined the curbs. They held bouquets of wilted flowers, the meager offerings of tiny gardens cultivated in empty lots or sun-starved tenement courtyards. An old woman held a small boy by the hand and told him, in melodic zeugmas of English and Yiddish, that there had not been so large a funeral on the east side since that of the great writer, Sholom Aleichem, thirteen years before.

  “Sholom who?” the child asked irritably.

  “Sholom Aleichem. The great teller of tales,” the grandmother replied.

  “Oh.”

  The boy was unimpressed. He was not interested in writers, particularly writers who used a language he could not read and would soon forget. Eli Feinstein, on the other hand, had been a hero, a crusader for justice, a fighter. He had organized the workers. He had saved the lives of young girls fleeing in terror from the flames. The boy touched a hunk of charred wood he carried in his pocket. It was a fragment of the door that had once served as a portal to the Rosenblatt factory. He had snatched it still hot from the flames, scurrying through the rubber-booted legs of cursing firemen to acquire it, Other children in the somber crowd that morning carried similar grim souvenirs―blackened fragments of glass from the windows that would not open, distorted hunks of metal burned to a ferrous brightness, singed scraps of fabric, a girl’s barrette, a man’s rimless spectacles.

  A café artist had made a sketch from memory of Eli Feinstein, and an enterprising printer had run off hundreds of smudged copies which sold on East Broadway and Canal Street for twenty-five cents a copy. Joshua Ellenberg bought one and tucked it into his shirt.

  Limousines carrying dignitaries drew up in front of the tiny building. Rabbi Stephen Wise, emerging from a lo
ng black car, almost stumbled over a little girl and bent to lift her to his shoulders, smiling into the wide startled eyes before handing the child back to her mother. Governor Franklin Roosevelt sent a representative and Mayor Jimmy Walker arrived with David Dubinsky. The crowds parted to admit them and the street filled with excited murmurs. Fingers pointed, heads nodded, and fathers lifted their children above the crowd to stare at faces that molded history.

  But when Leah Goldfeder, her arm resting lightly on her husband’s, her newly shorn hair covered by a black scarf, arrived, a hush fell over the crowd of mourners and spectators. Silently they stepped aside. In the small, stifling room where every wooden chair was occupied, seats were mysteriously found and offered to them.

  She looked up only once, her dark eyes resting fearlessly on the plain pine coffin which was closed and draped with a prayer shawl. The corpse within it—the body of the man who had held her and loved her—was a mass of charred putrescent flesh and she had heard that even the most seasoned veterans of the burial society had wept as they prepared the body for interment.

  She listened intently to the eulogy of the white-bearded rabbi who had come from Eli Feinstein’s village in Russia and who had, so many years before in that distant land, intoned the service for Eli’s young wife, her dead body heavy with its burden of undelivered life.

  “A martyr,” the rabbi called him. “A man who sacrificed his life for his people. A man who died for the sanctification of God’s name—for a world of justice and right.”

  “Amen!”

  The single word rose like a mighty prayer and trembled thunderously in the heat-heavy air. The aged rabbi wept unashamedly—the bewildered tears of an old man who accepts but does not understand.

  David Dubinsky spoke in the thick, heavily accented English of those whom he organized to struggle for their rights. He reminded the mourners of the reasons for Eli Feinstein’s death and for the deaths of all the men and women who had perished in what he called “the flames of greed” and “the fires of indifference.”

  “Renew your struggles. Take up their legacy. There must be no more fires—no more funeral pyres!”

  “No more!” the crowd thundered back.

  In the rear of the room Eleanor Greenstein slipped to the floor in a faint and was carried out of the room. But Leah Goldfeder remained seated quietly; her hands were clasped and David’s hand shielded them, covering the bandages that blanketed her burns. She did not weep, although once, as the rabbi intoned the Kaddish—the memorial prayer for the dead—she swayed lightly from side to side and those standing nearby saw her lips move as she repeated the words soundlessly.

  She and David did not join the parade of mourners who followed on foot after the horse-drawn hearse which carried Eli Feinstein’s body through the streets of the lower east side. The wheels of the black carriage rattled across the cobblestones as it made the traditional pilgrimage to those places which had held meaning for the dead man. It halted at the tiny synagogue built by those who had emigrated from his village; it stopped at Rutgers Square, where he had gone to hear the impassioned words of Eugene Debs and returned to issue his own pleas for justice and right. At the Irvington Settlement, a chorus of children came out to sing in Yiddish a sweet song of hope for a better tomorrow; and at the Cafe Royale, where he had sought life and laughter during long dark nights, the artists and poets stood quietly and a guitarist played a mournful melody that had never been heard before and was never heard again. And then at last the hearse picked up its pace for the long journey to the open fields of Long Island, where a grave waited for Eli Feinstein in a newly opened cemetery, established, according to the ancient law, on the outskirts of a city.

  Leah sat through the afternoon at the window of the parlor on Eldridge Street, and her son Aaron crouched in the doorway, a small witness to his mother’s sorrow, his eyes fixed on her bent form. When at last the streets filled with returning mourners and Leah knew that the cortege had disbanded, she turned from the window, and leaning heavily on her son’s arm, she allowed the child to lead her to her bed where she waited desperately for tears that would not come.

  Brighton Beach

  1933

  8

  CHARLES FERGUSON LOOKED UP from his New York Times as the Brighton express careened wildly out of the darkness and soared magically above ground, triumphantly jolting to an abrupt halt at the Prospect Park station. He looked out the soot-encrusted window at the quiet Brooklyn station, almost deserted so early on a Saturday morning. A group of youngsters, one carrying an old army blanket and others cradling large brown paper bags stuffed with fruit and sandwiches, settled themselves on one of the wicker benches in his subway car. The tallest boy leaped up on the seat and proceeded to draw a moustache on the fading face of Franklin Delano Roosevelt which adorned the subway advertising poster, headed by the slogan “A New Deal for All America.”

  “Oh, Tony, cut that out,” one of the girls protested.

  “He don’t need no more posters. He’s pres’dent awready,” the boy answered.

  “Yeah. And my old man still don’t have a job,” another boy said, and they all laughed as though the thin, sad-eyed youth had uttered a great witticism.

  It was easier, Charles thought, to accept deprivation with the equanimity of laughter, to use wit as an anodyne against desperation. He thought of all the hungry families who sat clustered around their enormous Stromberg Carlson radios, their faces expectant even through the introductory commercials. Clearly, the Depression would have been unbearable without Amos ’n’ Andy and Fibber McGee and Molly.

  There were, of course, those few who managed to struggle through pain and crisis supported only by their own strength and determination to survive and get on with the business of living. It occurred to him now, watching the same laughing, sad-eyed boy who had defiantly whipped out a bottle of beer and was drinking it without pleasure, that Leah and David Goldfeder, to whose home he was traveling, were among those few.

  He looked out the window and watched the backyards of Brooklyn speed by and thought of the Goldfeder family, realizing with a start that it was almost ten years since Leah Goldfeder, then a shy young woman in her early twenties, had first entered his studio. He remembered how a hazy cloud of sunlight had hovered over her coronet of blue-black braids that afternoon, and he regretted again that Leah had finally cut her hair, shaping its thickness into a smooth heavy cap that hugged her finely formed head.

  Ferguson had heard somewhere that on isolated Greek islands, young women whose lovers had been killed hacked off their own braids in paroxysms of grief and thrust them in the earthbound coffin. He had thought of those stories when he first saw Leah, her hair newly shorn, at Eli Feinstein’s funeral. What would have happened if Eli Feinstein had lived? Charles Ferguson wondered. Would he be sitting on this BMT Brighton Beach express so early on a Saturday morning, en route to Aaron Goldfeder’s bar mitzvah? Would Leah and David Goldfeder still be married?

  Charles had watched his friends through the years that had passed since that long hot summer that had erupted at last in the flames of death and destruction. He had seen a new relationship slowly devolve between Leah and David. Slowly, like dancers in a tableau, they had moved toward each other, trading touch and glance, until they came together at last in a circle of stillness and light. He had not been surprised to receive news of the birth of their son Michael soon after their move to Brighton Beach.

  After all, each life was a long road, inevitably marked with those blurred, uncertain ifs. What, then, if he had never left Illinois, if he had concentrated on his painting rather than his teaching, his life too would have curved its way down different, unknown pathways. Leah and David had been lucky, immeasurably and deservedly lucky.

  In the grimy train window he saw his own face reflected and noticed that strands of gray had stolen into the wispy blond growth of his beard. His own luck was still concealed beyond an undiscovered detour. Each graying strand signified one of those mysterious ifs
, and he stroked the silken silver threads as the youth in the next seat wrenched open the window and the salt smell of the approaching ocean filled the train.

  *

  Leah Goldfeder, too, had arisen early that morning and moved softly through the silent house. Always, upon waking, she followed a mysterious discipline and wandered from bed to bed, glancing briefly at each sleeping face, arranging a coverlet, smoothing a matted pillow. So too, on this spring morning, when the acrid scent of newly blossoming sorrel grass mingled with the odors of the ocean, she had looked down at David’s sleeping face and lightly touched his cheek, shadowed by the morning growth of beard. How beautiful he looked in the half-light of dawn, she thought, and marveled at the mingled strength and gentleness of his sleeping face, feeling now a stirring within herself as her body called to his. Briefly she thought of crawling back into bed with him, of moving her hands across his sleeping form, of watching his body slowly stretch into wakefulness before he opened his eyes and took control of a new day. She knew how to caress his legs, moving her fingers gently and then, slowly increasing the pressure, up his thighs, slowly coaxing his sleeping sex into wakefulness until it sprang upward, firm and mobile, possessed of a vital life of its own. Then, at last fully awake, he would smile at her with his eyes and grasp her, holding her willing prisoner upon the bed, lashing her with kisses and embraces until she surrendered, admitting herself both victor and vanquished in this sweet battle which they fought again and again, relishing wound and victory.

  But she did not waken him, recognizing that there would not be time this morning. She assuaged herself by planting a light kiss upon his sleeping face and allowing his hand to move and lightly touch her thigh before he turned and smiled and slept on.

  Now she heard Michael, the baby, call to her from the small room which had once been a back porch and was now enclosed within huge panes of glass so that when she entered it each morning she shielded her eyes against the brilliance of the morning sunlight.