by Tommy Tenney
“Upon seeing her, David immediately started to shout at them. Then he realized that even asking who had allowed them to enter had inadvertently acknowledged her existence, so he turned his back and fixed his stony gaze upon a far wall. Rivke’s sisters both burst into sobs and began begging David to reconsider.
“‘Please, David. At least talk to her! She says she has something important to say!’”
“‘David,’” Rivke added her own plea, “‘what I have to tell you will change everything. I promise.’”
“Slowly, David had turned around, his own cheeks stained with tears.
“It was Anek who spoke next.
“‘I am Jewish.’” He paused, allowing the words to sink in. “‘I am Jewish, and the hardest thing I’ve ever done was to let you think otherwise. But you see, I had no choice. Part of my family is in prison back in Iraq, others in hiding unable to escape, and the Israeli government is desperately trying to negotiate for their release. But until things are resolved, I am under a firm Esther Edict imposed here by the embassy staff. I am prohibited from telling anyone the truth about my heritage. I risked everything even telling Rivke, and I’m risking even more telling this to you now. Do you remember, it was that attache who told you I was Gentile, not me. Had I told you the truth in front of him, all efforts to save my family would have ceased immediately.’”
“David looked at Anek for a long moment, his face slack and his expression inscrutable.
“‘I don’t believe you,’” he said at last.
“The sisters’ sobs sounded as one around the room.
“‘Why not?’”
“‘Because when I look at you, I don’t see a Jew. All I see is a lonely young man madly in love with my sister and willing to do anything, say anything, to have her for himself. Tell me, if you’re a Jew, have you been bar mitzvah’ed?’”
“‘No, I’m afraid not. Hardly any boys have had bar mitzvah in Baghdad for the last ten years. It’s just too risky. The last two ceremonies I heard of were attacked by mobs and the whole families slaughtered.’”
“‘Do you read Hebrew? Speak it?’” David demanded. “‘No, I cannot. All yeshivas and Jewish schools of any kind have been closed for years.’”
“‘Can you even tell me a word of it?’”
“‘What? Like Shabbat? Seder? Pesach? Eretz Yisroel?’”
“‘Stop this!’” shouted Rivke’s sister Rachel at her brother David.
“Anek was now as angry as David. ‘Would you like me to remove my pants?’” he asked, lips curled.
“‘What?’” David roared.
“‘You know what I mean,’” Anek said, keeping his voice cool and level. “‘Would you like to see it?’”
“‘Shut your mouth! You have the gall, having already taken our sister from us, to come back here and insult the women of this house, on Shabbat, with this obscene proposal?’”
“‘Come now, I am a decent man, David,’” Anek now said contritely. “‘I’ve behaved toward your sister with complete honor and decency. I would never have revealed my circumcision without respectfully asking the ladies in the room to leave us for a moment.’”
“‘It doesn’t matter,’” David spat back. “‘Even Muslims sometimes circumcise. It doesn’t prove you’re a Jew. Look—even if what you say is true, you’re the most dishonorable Jew imaginable. At a time when millions of your people went to their deaths because they refused to hide, because they dared to wear the Yellow Star, you hid who you are. If some bureaucrat had told me to lie about my Judaism, I would strike him down.’”
“‘Really? Even if it doomed the lives of your whole family?’” “‘I would strike anyone who questioned or undermined my Jewishness.’”
“‘Oh, I see. Well, maybe I should, too.’”
“Anek stepped forward and shoved David hard across the chest. David reeled backward, caught his balance, and chuckled oddly toward the floor, as though ruefully conceding the validity of Anek’s rebuttal.
“Then in a split second he was upon the younger man, both of them staggering under a flurry of blows that filled the air with fists and blood and the screams of the women and the hands of two male cousins trying to insert themselves and stop the fight. Anek was restrained first, from behind, and in the instant it took to pull David away, the older man landed a hard blow on the defenseless man’s mouth, sending a spray of blood across the room to hit Rivke’s face.
“Another round of screams erupted. David was pulled back to the other side of the room. Rivke reeled backward, and while wiping her cheek, she felt something die inside of her.
“Anek violently shrugged himself loose from the cousins’ grasp, turned back, and took hold of Rivke’s hand.
“‘Now you know what kind of family you came from,’” he said to her in a tortured voice. “‘Jewish or not . . .’”
“Anek and Rivke walked out,” Ari said wistfully to Hadassah over the whine of jet engines, glancing out the Gulfstream’s oval window at the lights of London tilting away far below him. “They slammed the door behind them, and the family was ruptured forever.”
He looked over at where his father lay wrapped on a fold-down bed, the embassy doctor keeping careful watch over him from a nearby seat.
“I grew up in a home without relatives,” he continued, looking back at Hadassah. “My mother’s Jewish family was a subject of great pain and anguish. My father’s family no less so, because soon after they were married, he received word that the whole family had disappeared—bribed a guard to escape prison, but with no passport with which to leave the country they had probably assimilated into the general population, passing themselves off as Arabs. My father’s hopes—his whole reason for living all the years since arriving alone in London—were shattered. Without the written records hidden in Iraq, he could not even prove that he was born Jewish. So even immigrating to Israel would be a nightmare. And things only grew worse when my mother exchanged letters with one of her sisters and learned about the Hadassah Scrolls—that her family privately owned an ancient letter written by none other than Queen Esther herself, addressed to a young Jewish exile named Leah, who happened to be their great-grandmother several dozen times back.”
“I knew there was something strange about your reaction in the museum,” Hadassah said, “the night you first saw them.”
Ari nodded. “In all my years of intelligence work, I have never had such a hard time hiding my emotions. Thank G-d for the dim lighting. I know the shades looked absurd in that dark place, but at least they helped mask what I was feeling.”
“Why didn’t you reveal yourself to me? And why were the scrolls such an issue? Of all the things you’ve lost, I’d think people were far more significant than some old documents.”
“You’re right—it wasn’t just the scrolls, although they were important. It was meeting you. The impact of seeing someone of my own family bloodline, for the first time in my life, caught me totally off guard. That, and the fact that you resemble old pictures of my mother. I never knew it from your press photographs, but you both have the same beautiful green eyes I was always told appear once in ten generations. I had no idea that seeing you would affect me as it did. As it has.”
“So why did you ask to see the Hadassah journals? You can’t tell me it’s some sort of coincidence in your work.”
“No. I needed to authenticate what I’d found, for both job-related and family reasons. See, I’ve crafted my whole Mossad career to dovetail with the mission drilled into me by my father ever since I was a boy. Which is to discover the documents that would prove who my father was, who I am. To find Iraq’s Jewish genealogies and prove that we are Jewish. And to find the records of the Exilarch, fulfilling my grandfather’s final request to my father.”
“There’s that word again. Exilarch.”
“You know it?”
“I’ve heard it several times in the last few weeks. In the strangest of places.”
“It is a word with ancient roots.
It means the leader of the Jews in exile.”
“Of course. Mordecai bore that title, at least if legend is true.”
“I believe it is. Exilarch is a word familiar to all Iraqi Jews, because it comes from a much better time, a time when Jews were respected and even celebrated by the Islamic rulers of the country. The Exilarch sat on a throne opposite the caliph himself. Every Jew and Muslim alike had to stand and salute the Exilarch or face a hundred lashes.”
“But the word seems doubly important to your family for some reason.”
“It was. For the al-Khalids, the word and the office meant even more. Before he lost his fortune, when he still moved among Iraq’s rich and mighty, my grandfather dreamed of reviving the office, even though it’s been dormant for centuries. He thought it could be the solution to all the oppression against his people. He claimed that buried somewhere under the Battaween Synagogue in Iraq, and maybe hidden under the text of Jewish records elsewhere, were documents proving he was descended from the family of David and the hereditary office of the Exilarch. After they lost everything, it became an obsession. My grandfather would talk of it all the time, as if just mentioning it would somehow restore what had been stolen from us. His last words to my father were a plea that he return to save his family, and to always mention that he was descended from the Exilarch. When my father reached London but failed to prove that he and his family were Jewish, he vowed to keep searching for proof. He also vowed to find the Exilarch link, which could not only make him a Jew, but a powerful one as well. Now he’s passed that quest on to me.”
“But how did the Exilarch issue come to involve our two families? Or our scrolls, for that matter?”
“When my father learned of your family’s Hadassah scrolls, he became even more enraged at David than ever before. Rivke tried to calm him by reminding him that their existence was a secret even within your own family—that traditionally, even Kesselman girls were not told about them until just before their wedding day.”
“That’s the way it was for me. Just a few days before,” said Hadassah.
“Well, that meant nothing to him,” Ari continued. “In his eyes, it was another important thing the Kesselmans had kept from him. Not the story of Esther, although that would have been a great blessing to my mother. But the names.”
“The names?”
“The signatures at the end of the scroll. Surely you signed yours.”
“Of course I did, but—”
“The names are a link proving an unbroken descent between Kesselman women and the ancient office of the Exilarch.”
“But that’s not true. They’re a link to Leah, the girl to whom Esther wrote her letters and who was our ancestor. But that’s all anyone knows. I know Mordecai has always been rumored to have been an Exilarch. At least the first real one. But that seems unlikely, because he wasn’t of the line of David. And even then, it doesn’t matter, because Leah was not related to him, so she had nothing to do with the Exilarchy.”
“Maybe—but there’s one possibility that could have erased all those problems at once. And that possibility is what I’ve been trying to confirm all these years. You see, in Jewish Iraqi legend, it was often rumored that Mordecai married late in his life, and fathered the ancestors of many of our people. According to legend, this wife was a young woman in the palace, a young Jewish girl from the royal line—”
“You mean . . . ?” Hadassah barely breathed the question.
“Why not? It’s just a rumor, but a persistent and pervasive one. According to my father, there was hardly a Jewish woman in Iraq who wouldn’t have repeated it to you with all the fervency of Torah truth. This is what I have been groomed to do my whole life, Hadassah. To reach a place where I could retrieve this knowledge kept from us, to vindicate our family and save our people.”
“So—if Mordecai had married Leah,” Hadassah continued, staring through her eyelashes like a schoolgirl struggling with long division, “then their offspring would have combined his political influence with her Davidic pedigree—”
“Making them the perfect source for the all the Exilarchs that followed. Which would mean that the Kesselman family would have a provable claim to the Exilarchy itself. And by joining the heritage of our two families, my father’s son would have been a viable al-Khalid heir to the Exilarchy.”
“That’s you,” she said in a voice breathy with astonishment.
“That’s me. If I could prove that link, I could be a new Exilarch.”
“But by denying your father any access or proof of the Hadassah scrolls, my father made all that impossible. No wonder you were so moved to see the scrolls in person. They mean everything to you. They’re the key to saving all your lost relatives, to carrying out your grandfather’s wish, restoring your family’s fortune, vindicating your father’s whole life, not to mention healing the breach between our families. . . . ”
“But only if we can prove that Mordecai married Leah. If that’s not true, or provable, then it’s all for nothing.”
“So that’s why the documents you found mean so much. If they’d actually proven that the marriage took place, they could tie it all together.”
“Yes, on the personal front. But on the global front, the genealogies I found with them also complicate things immensely. They have started the clock ticking, by identifying helpless Jewish families in their midst and facilitating their extermination. And putting you and your husband right in the path of a scandal related to the whole thing.”
“Yes. And if the documents prove something else, then everything is lost.”
The implications of that unfinished sentence shoved both back into their seats with a force greater than that of accelerating jet engines. Their minds traveled down identical “what if” pathways. And they both arrived at the same destination.
If Jews in hiding were being exterminated, in some revival of Haman’s ancient hatred, then the nation of Israel would not stand idly by. And Israeli involvement in Iraq would drastically escalate the conflict.
Only a strong, untainted prime minister could take the action necessary to avoid a fresh war in the Middle East. And Jacob ben Yuda, with a wife recently linked to a provocateur in London whose purse strings were tightly wound around the whole affair, could hardly qualify.
The only person who could save the Jews of Iraq without drawing in Israel would be a leader they trusted, from their own midst, their own blood.
Only a new Exilarch could stop a new Middle East war. And if Mordecai and Leah had never married, there would be no new Exilarch.
Chapter Twenty-five
BEN GURION AIRPORT, ISRAEL—FIVE HOURS LATER
The Israeli jet had left Ben Gurion Airport on a Tuesday night with Hadassah ben Yuda aboard and landed back on the same runway less than sixteen hours later. The journey had proven even more of a lightning trip than anyone had anticipated. Luckily, they had been able to sleep aboard the Gulfstream—all except for the embassy doctor and the pilots.
It was two-thirty in the morning, Jerusalem time, when an ambulance met the aircraft just inside the Lod Air Base side of the tarmac, without even waiting for it to finish taxiing. Within four minutes, the recovering Anek al-Khalid was leveraged out of the plane’s door and stowed aboard the ambulance.
Another vehicle, a black SUV with mirrored windows, pulled up and accepted three passengers: Israel’s First Lady, her bodyguard, and her newly discovered cousin, Ari. The GMC Suburban made the trip to Jerusalem in less than an hour, accompanied in front and back by identical vehicles with flashing red lights on their rooftops. Once in the Eternal City, the convoy was joined by a pair of Israeli helicopters, while the flanking SUVs lowered their windows to permit their infrared scopes and sniper rifles to do their work.
Alerted by a prearranged phone call that had roused him from a restless sleep, Jacob ben Yuda—looking less like the Prime Minister of Israel than a sleep-deprived husband—stood waiting in the shadows when the Suburban pulled up inside his office’s un
derground parking complex.
Even as her SUV coasted to his side, Hadassah could see that her husband’s gaze was cast downward in deep concentration. Hard to believe a man this preoccupied had nothing more serious on his agenda than meeting her.
But then—she reminded herself with an inner smile of satisfaction—this time, his serious matter had everything to do with her. This time, she stood at the very core of those white-hot “national affairs” that had once seemed to preempt her existence and hijack her husband’s time and focus on nearly every other day of her marriage.
Whether or not the Mideast was once again a political cauldron, her husband’s genuine care for her was part and parcel of the crisis.
Her door flew open and without even trying, she fell into her husband’s arms. He embraced her more tightly than he ever had before; held her to his chest longer than he ever had in public. She frowned anxiously, for he seemed different somehow. Then she found that her eyes were filled with tears. A short trip . . . she reminded herself. Short trip, indeed.
He let her go, aimed a searching glance up and down her body, then once again grasped her to himself.
“Oh, sweetheart,” he whispered hoarsely. “I’ve been so afraid for you. Things are moving so fast, so dangerously.”
He pulled back again and caught Ari’s eye. Silent for a moment, the two shook hands.
“We meet again, under different understanding.”
“Yes. A true one, sir.”
“Is your father doing any better?”
“Yes. He’s stable, and sleeping quite stubbornly.”
“Well, thank you for leaving his side to speak with me. I intend to make it worth your while. You too, Hadassah. Ari, are you able to come with us now?”
At Ari’s nod, Jacob led at a brisk pace through the same hallways Hadassah had covered barely a week before—on her way to crashing the cabinet meeting. She found it almost eerie, seeing these spaces devoid of people and only lit by floor-mounted sconces. Jacob swept open the double doors to the cabinet room and ushered the two into his domain.
