“So you still are mistress here in town of the healing arts?” Leah asked.
“Yes, but much is changing. The state controls all medicine now and the law is that doctors must treat any citizen who comes to them. Of course, the fees then belong to the government and many are against this. But I say that as long as sick people get good care we should be happy and thank God. This is not the same Russia you left, Leah.”
“The same and not the same,” Leah said. “I’m not the same Leah.”
“That I can see,” Shaindel said and her ample body shook with laughter. “You were such a small, skinny girl. Now you’re a woman. But your hair, Leah. You had such beautiful hair. Why did you cut it?”
“It’s the style in America,” Leah said and remembered the afternoon she had cut her hair, hacking away at it with kitchen scissors as Eli Feinstein’s body was prepared for burial.
Walking slowly now, she followed Shaindel down the village streets, so much narrower than she had remembered them, across wooden walkways to the narrow path where she had grown up and where her parents still lived. Women, sweeping their wooden steps with straw brooms, paused to stare after her, and small children, playing games of jackstones in the dust, looked up curiously. To all of them Shaindel called proudly, “It’s Leah, daughter of Basha and Avremel, come from America.” The women nodded and their tired eyes took careful note of her tailored blue suit, the quality of her handbag, and her sheer silk stockings encased in the neat brown-and-white spectator pumps. Two small girls, barefoot, in homemade dresses fashioned from the same bolt of dull plaid cloth, trailed shyly after her, jumping into the shadow of a house when she turned to smile at them. She opened her bag, thinking to give each a coin, but at that movement they dashed away and disappeared into a doorway, like frightened little animals.
Word of her arrival had reached her parents and they stood leaning against the wooden porch rail of their frame house, staring down the narrow path. Grayer and smaller than she remembered them, not touching but gripping the railing, they stood together and watched the tall dark-haired young woman, in foreign dress, who was their daughter, walk slowly toward them. So they had stood when as a young girl she had left the narrow street and the tiny house for the world of Odessa, and in this same posture of anxious despair they had welcomed her home as a young widow of nineteen who would have to fashion a new life in a new world. So they stood, passive and submissive, schooled in the rhythms and patterns of their history. Things had always happened to Jews as they waited in the shadow of their porches for the sound of approaching footsteps or stood behind bolted doors in anticipation of a harsh compelling knock; it was the role of the Jew to allow them to happen, while they clutched the rituals and routines of their faith, clinging for support to fragile wooden railings.
“Papa, Mama,” she shouted and dashed toward them. It was only after she had grasped them both and felt her father’s hands in gentle strength against her temples, his red lips like a soft bright flower blooming within the gray foliage of his beard, that she saw the tears that glittered in their eyes. Her own cheeks were wet and the tears of her parents mingled with her own as they embraced and wept and embraced again, oblivious to the stares of the small crowd that had gathered in front of the house.
Her father wore the black caftan and the high skullcap of the Talmudic scholar. His robe was belted around bulky ill-fitting trousers of the kind which Seymour sent in regular parcels each year. Leah’s mother had aged greatly and her head was too small for the marriage wig which tottered on it. She moved with the fearful slowness of the old and the fragile. She wore a flowered cotton dress which Leah remembered Mollie buying for her, and where its folds were too large, she had fashioned a cord to pull the fabric closer to her diminished form.
“Nu? Why are we standing here? Come in, Leahle. And you too, Shaindel.” The frail old woman herded them into the house and they sat around the table almost shyly as she hurried to prepare tea. The small room was fragrant with the odors of newly baked honey cake and golden spongey loaves. These delicacies had been Leah’s favorites as a small girl and her heart turned because her mother had remembered that over the acres of vanished years. How must it be for her parents to live on in this house that their three children had deserted for distant lands, east and west. Did this dimly lit, quiet room echo with the laughter of vanished children on quiet winter evenings? Did her mother steal up to the small loft room where they had slept and touch the empty beds as Leah sometimes did when Aaron and Rebecca were not sleeping at home? Did her father sometimes look up from the mountain of black-bound Talmudic texts that rested always on this table, and see their shadows whirl in the empty room—hers and Mollie’s and tall Moshe’s? Their pictures, portraits dutifully sent each year at Chanukah, were ranged in gilt frames on a small oak chest. Leah stared at a photograph of Moshe and Henia and their three children, posed among newly planted trees upon a stark mountainside. Their oldest boy, young Yaakov, held an unplanted sapling, its bulky roots shrouded in cloth, in his hand.
“Moshe’s children look so beautiful. I would love to see them,” Leah said wistfully.
“Yes. God bless them,” her mother said. “Moshe keeps writing us that we must come to Palestine. Some of the parents of the other pioneers have done that and there is a special house for them on the kibbutz. But we are old and this is the village where we have lived our lives. How can we leave?”
“I’ll show you how you can leave,” Shaindel said. “You take a suitcase and put in it your Shabbat cloth and Avremel will put in it his tallis and tefillin and you close the door and say ‘Shalom.’ That’s how you leave.” And the fat woman leapt jovially up to demonstrate in pantomime the simplicity of the venture.
Leah’s mother served the steaming tea in tall glasses, and as they drank and ate the cake still warm from the oven, Leah told them about her family and Mollie’s, about the prosperity of S. Hart and the way they lived their lives.
“But Seymour and David still pray three times a day in a minyan at the synagogue?” her father asked anxiously.
Leah did not answer. It had been years since either her husband or her brother-in-law had attended a daily prayer quorum and recently they had seldom attended services even on the Sabbath. But her father’s eyes searched her face and golden crumbs of sponge cake trembled on his beard as he waited for her answer.
“Yes, Papa,” she said at last. “They are still good Jews.”
She offered the untruthful answer, acknowledging that there was no danger of her lie being discovered. Her parents would emigrate neither to the United States nor to Palestine, but would remain on their porch, gripping the wooden handrail, awaiting the destiny that God meted out to the Jewish people.
Still, all that evening and the next day, she tried. She walked with her parents through the village, stopping to greet old friends, to answer questions about children and brothers and sisters who had left for America years before. With her mother and father at her side, she walked across the fields to the small cemetery, established according to biblical injunction at a distance from the town. Within the small graveyard, where wild flowers gutted the sloping graves in a frenzy of color, wild red roses entangled with sunny masses of goldenrod and threaded with hardy clumps of deep purple clover, they found Yaakov’s grave. Leah stood quietly while her father intoned the Kaddish, tears flowing down his cheeks. Then she bent and searched the ground until she found a small smooth stone which she placed gently on his headstone.
She knelt to pluck up a few weeds and touched the stone, roughened and weathered through the long seasons. Her tears, too, fell freely and the Hebrew inscription danced before her clouded eyes, the sunlight bouncing off the twisted letters that grew larger and smaller through the saline curtain of her grief until at last the tears stopped and the letters etched in stone fell still beneath her gaze—“Yaakov, son of Eli, gathered unto his fathers at the age of twenty.”
“Shalom, Yaakov,” she whispered and broke loose a wild rose w
hich she placed next to the smooth stone. Its thorn pricked her and she welcomed the pain and the hot blood that seared her fingers.
Slowly they walked back to the village, following the long purple shadows of sunset that stretched across the vast sky.
“Mama, Papa, you must make plans to leave Europe—to come to Mollie and me in America,” she said. “We will make you a good, comfortable life.”
“My life here is good and comfortable,” her father replied. “I have my books and the study house. Your mother has her home, her small business. You and your sister have built lives in America and Moshe has his own life in Palestine. We have our lives here. We are too old to move to a land where we do not know the language. We want to die where we have lived.”
Her mother nodded in agreement. They had reached their small home and in the yard a cruelly stunted apple tree shaded a patch of barren earth, its small burden of fruit slowly blushing into redness.
“We planted that tree when we were married, when I came to this house as a bride. Each spring I have watched it bloom and each fall we have picked the fruit of its branches. That is what I want for my old age—to smell the sweet flowers and eat of the fruit of our tree,” her mother said.
“But your grandchildren—Mollie’s children and mine—don’t you want to see them?” Leah asked.
“If I could. If I could,” her mother answered sadly. “But they are of your life, Leahle. You will see that when your children are grown, their lives belong to them and your life belongs to you. I wish I had known that when you left for Odessa. You claimed your life very early and if your father and I had granted you that right there would have been less pain for all of us. For your own children, learn from our mistake.”
They sat together on the porch, smiling at the neighbors who made their way down the street, the children carrying pails to be filled at the communal pump, the women hurrying home with their straw baskets laden with produce, with small red potatoes, flowering stalks of beets, bright green bouquets of sorrel grass, pearly-headed scallions. All of them slowed their steps as they passed the house of Leah’s parents, straining for a look at the daughter from America who wore a bright red dress and whose stockings were of a sheer, shimmering silk.
“You know, Papa, in Paris I met a Jewish family who recently arrived from Germany,” Leah said.
“It is a terrible thing that happens there,” her father replied sadly. He spoke as though Germany existed on a distant planet and his weary voice was heavy with resignation and acceptance. Terrible things happened to Jews everywhere from time to time. The only thing to do was to wait and pray and a remnant would survive and create new generations. Shaarit Yisrael—the remnant of Israel.
“But Hitler will not be content only in Germany. He wants to conquer all of Europe and wherever he goes there will be terrible danger for the Jews,” Leah continued, her voice tense and urgent.
“Hitler? Who is this Hitler?” her mother asked. She sat in the shadow paring an eggplant she had removed with surgical skill from the plant that grew at the side of the house.
“I told you,” her father replied impatiently. “That new Haman who has become the dictator of Germany.”
“Ah yes. The little man with the moustache. He looks like Perel Lieber’s younger son—the one who went to America and never sent for his wife and children—he was never heard from again. Do you remember Perel Lieber, Leah?”
“Mama,” Leah said impatiently, her voice rising in familiar irritation, “I am not interested in Perel Lieber although it is interesting that you think this Hitler resembles a Jew. He considers Jews to be obscenities, subhuman creatures, and he intends to make Europe free of Jews—Judenrein is the word he uses. Have you heard that word, Papa?”
“Many have threatened to make Europe—no, not only Europe, but the world—Judenrein, Leah. But do not worry. It will not happen. It has not happened. We must have faith and study and pray and live where God has sent us.” Her father lifted his head and charted the progress of the lowering sun. Slowly he rose from the wicker seat and went into the house, emerging with the blue velvet bag that contained his prayer shawl and phylacteries.
“I must go to the evening service now,” he said, and joined the small parade of bearded, slow-moving men who walked down that narrow path, their long shadows streaking the splintered planks that served as sidewalks, each cradling a worn velvet sack.
Leah sat on in the quiet dimness and then joined her mother in the kitchen where she took up a paring knife and sliced the potatoes in neat ivory squares as she softly told her mother about her children—Aaron of the blazing curls, laughing Rebecca, and small Michael, born to joy and gaiety. Mollie’s children were such good students and Mollie and Seymour had a beautiful home. Anne played the violin and Jakie’s hair curled the way Moshe’s had as a boy. Softly she talked on, answering her mother’s questions about the grandchildren they both silently acknowledged she would never see.
She left early the next morning. The car she had ordered arrived just after sunup to give her enough time to take the Bessarabian Express in Odessa and begin her journey westward to Le Havre where the Queen Elizabeth was accepting passengers for the return voyage to the United States. She stood again between her parents and embraced them, feeling her father’s hands, gentle against her temples as he blessed her in words she did not understand. Her tears mingled with her mother’s as they kissed and then kissed again, unable to release each other until the driver harshly pressed his horn. The automobile negotiated a laborious turn down the narrow street, and she looked back; through streaming tears she saw her parents standing together in the half-light of dawn, their hands clutching the wooden porch railing.
There were letters waiting for her in Paris and as she sat in her room on the Rue du Bac, looking down at the sparse traffic on the street below, she read that Seymour had received her sketches and that production on the new line of S. Hart originals had begun. The children were all enjoying the summer and they had all attended Bonnie Eckstein’s sudden marriage to Peter Cosgrove. The ceremony had been performed by a judge and Bonnie’s father had refused to attend. He had, instead, rent his garments and observed seven days of mourning for the daughter whom he now considered dead to himself and his people.
“It is an oddly appropriate match,” David wrote and Leah, knowing Peter and Bonnie, understood his feelings, but thought too of her father’s sweet innocence when he asked if Seymour and David still attended daily prayer quorums. Her father would see nothing appropriate in this marriage between a New England Protestant and a Jewish immigrant girl. In a Left Bank stall, lithographs by an artist named Marc Chagall were being sold and Leah bought several because they reminded her of life in the village of her birth. But one such lithograph, portraying a bride and groom in dizzy dance beneath a glorious, starlit heaven, she saved as a wedding gift for Bonnie and Peter.
On that last day in Paris she went again to the narrow streets of the Pletzel and climbed the dank stairwell of the building on the Rue des Rosiers where the Schreibers had lived. But it was another frightened German Jewish woman who opened the door cautiously, her children clinging fearfully to her skirt and her own eyes wide with fear. That terrified stare told Leah more than she wished to know and she turned her eyes away and asked about the Schreibers. They had left for America, the woman said, and the Joint Distribution Committee had assigned the apartment to them. The tiny flat, with its frayed rug and ragged grimy curtains, served now as a way station in misery. Leah reached into her purse and pulled out a handful of francs which she held out to the woman. Proudly, the woman shook her head and the door was softly closed and bolted. But from behind the closed door Leah heard a threnody of sobs and a child’s voice pleading “Bitte, Mama, bitte.”
Two days later she boarded the Queen Elizabeth carrying a copy of the Paris Tribune. The headlines screamed the news of Fascist ascendancy in Spain, the Abyssinian riots against Italian occupation, and new anti-Semitic measures in Germany. Leah stood at the
rail of the ship that slowly made its way out of the harbor, her eyes drifting from the headlines to the slowly disappearing coast of France. A sad-eyed priest, standing at her elbow, glanced at her paper and then at the gentle curve of the shoreline.
“Let us say good-bye to Europe, Madame,” he said softly. “I fear that it will never again be the great good Continent we have known.”
They stood together on deck, allowing the salt spray to seep into their clothing, and watched the peaceful lights of the port city disappear into the purple twilight.
Scarsdale
1939
11
DAVID GOLDFEDER AROSE EARLY that Friday morning, the first day of a September still searing with summer heat. It was the sheer habit of years that awakened him because he was due neither at his consulting room nor at the hospital. He had decided to turn the Labor Day weekend into a four-day holiday and he glanced approvingly out the window at the sun-speckled leaves of the large maple, relishing the luxury of four days of leisure. Briefly, he glanced across the bed where Leah was still deep in sleep and was tempted to awaken her. Her dark hair, grown long again, was strewn across the pillow and her flesh was soft and rosy within the folds of her sheer white nightgown. He leaned over to kiss her and she smiled, murmured something unintelligible, and curled up into renewed sleep. He sighed in disappointment but told himself firmly that it would be unfair to deprive her of rest when they would be entertaining guests throughout the weekend. The Goldfeders’ sprawling Scarsdale home became the gathering place on holidays and the Harts, the Ellenbergs, the Cosgroves, and poor Mr. and Mrs. Schreiber were expected that afternoon. No, it was best for Leah to sleep as long as she could.
Feeling virtuous, he padded down the hallway, past the large sunny bedroom where his daughter Rebecca slept, her arms still draped around a large panda Joshua Ellenberg had bought for her at the World’s Fair. Rebecca was seventeen now, a senior at high school, but to them she remained the gay laughing girl whose childhood they had jealously guarded. David smiled when he noticed how the panda’s bright black nose gently nudged the soft full curve of Rebecca’s breast. Their little girl was quickly becoming a woman, he thought, remembering that Leah had been married to Yaakov when she was a year older than the girl who slept with the large stuffed animal in her arms. Very softly, he closed her door.
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