Leah's Children

by Gloria Goldreich

  “How is Leah?” Yehuda asked.

  “Unbelievable. Paulette is staying with her now because Aaron is arguing a case in Washington. I think Leah has more energy and patience than I have. She tells Paulette stories, teaches her songs; she even bought her a sketch pad, although all Paulette can do is scribble.”

  “I suppose being a grandparent must be something like being given another chance,” Yehuda speculated. “When Aaron and Rebecca and Michael were small children, Leah had no time to tell them stories, sing them songs, draw pictures with them. She was too busy working to keep bread on the table. And when Michael was little, there was the war. So all that she could not give to them, she gives to Paulette.”

  He picked up a carob pod and ate it, spitting the seeds out. He, too, spent little enough time with his own children. For much of Noam and Danielle’s childhood he had been involved in the rescue of the remnant of European Jews, and later he had been away working for the Haganah. Now, during Yaakov and Amnon’s childhood, he traveled constantly on intelligence missions. Like Leah, in order to protect his children’s futures, he was forced to miss their present.

  “And Leah sees a great deal of her Russian friend, Boris Zaslovsky,” Lydia continued. “They’re both involved in working for Soviet Jewry. Leah is forever going to a protest or a lecture, a congressional hearing or some sort of demonstration.”

  “I’ve never met this Zaslovsky,” Yehuda said. “We seem always to miss each other. What is he like?”

  “Very kind. Very gentle. Intelligent. Introspective. Distinctive-looking. Tall with a white goatee and fine dark eyes. He has a wry sense of humor, but somehow, even when he laughs, I sense a terrible sadness, a kind of weary resignation.”

  “You never knew David Goldfeder,” Yehuda said, “but except for the goatee, you have given a very good description of him. Do you think they will marry, our Leah and her Boris?”

  “I think it’s a very distinct possibility,” Lydia said. It occurred to her that she had never discussed the possibility of Leah’s remarrying with Aaron. Oddly, there were things that she and Yehuda discussed openly that neither of them would speak of with Rebecca and Aaron.

  “It would be good if she remarried,” Yehuda said. “They worry too much about her—Aaron and Rebecca and Michael.”

  “Ah yes. Michael,” Lydia repeated and sighed.

  “How is he?”

  “I saw him when I lectured at Berkeley a few months ago. He is almost through with his doctorate. All that remains is the defense of his dissertation, and he will receive his degree in June. He loves teaching and seems to have a talent for it. And he has many friends, but he seems always so lost, so lonely. As though he is searching for something, for someone.” Lydia’s voice was soft. Her young brother-in-law troubled her, reminded her somehow of Paul. “He seems always so alone. So vulnerable.”

  “I hope Michael finds what he is looking for soon,” Yehuda said. “It is not easy to be always alone.”

  He himself felt invaded, suddenly, by an aching loneliness. He would not be returning to Israel from Rhodes. An international conference on terrorism was convening in Brussels, and he was to deliver a paper. Again, he would be in a strange city when evening fell. Again, he would return to an empty hotel room and eat a solitary dinner ordered in a language not his own.

  The sun was setting now, and mauve shadows veiled the crenellated arches of the castle. Lydia stood and brushed twigs and heart-shaped young fig leaves from her dark skirt. She lifted her arms to the dying light; a golden glaze settled on her pale skin. Her hair had escaped its neat coil and draped her shoulders. Yehuda plucked an orange blossom and held it out to her. She accepted it, her fingers touching his own, and he was strangely pleased when she braided the fragile flower through her thick dark hair.

  “Lydia.” He recognized the plea of desire in his voice and was shamed and astonished by it.

  She turned to him, her face radiant.

  “But I haven’t told you the most important news,” she said and moved toward him, brushed a shard of bark from his jacket.

  He stood quite still and felt the gentle westerly island wind brush across his face. (If only I could paint the wind, Rebecca had said all those years ago when they stood on this same spot.)

  “What is your news?” he asked.

  “We’re going to have another child. The baby will be born in the spring.”

  “Lydia. That’s wonderful. I’m so glad.”

  He took her hands in his own and kissed her cheek. The spontaneity of his gladness reassured him and extinguished the vagrant spark of desire that had at once invigorated and saddened him. Yes, he acknowledged, there was an attraction between them, woven perhaps of their shared brushes with danger, knowledge of death, the brief and fleeting solitude that thrust them together in cities far from their homes. She was Aaron’s wife, and thus sister to Rebecca and to himself. The orange blossom fell from her hair and he did not stoop to pick it up but allowed it to lie there amid the detritus of moss and twigs.

  “A new baby for a new decade,” he said.

  “I hadn’t thought of that. But yes. My child of the sixties.” Her hand passed protectively over her abdomen, and he saw that although the navy-blue coat dress had obscured it, her body had already begun to gently swell as the new life grew within it.

  “It should be an interesting decade for our family,” Yehuda said. He felt the press of new events—envisaged the newborn infant in swaddling clothes, Michael in academic cap and gown, Noam in uniform. Perhaps his Rebecca would even learn to paint the wind.

  “I think so.”

  Lydia held her hand out to him and they walked, fingers linked, to the car. They drove slowly then back to the city of Rhodes that rose from the sea like an amphitheater, encircled by wall and towers, starkly silhouetted now against the bloodied sky of sunset.

  MICHAEL

  The Sixties

  MICHAEL GOLDFEDER, his arms laden with empty cartons, heard the ringing of the telephone as he entered his apartment building and knew at once that it came from his fourth-floor flat. He cursed softly to himself as he loped up the stairwell, and on the second landing (and the third ring) he slowed his pace. There was no point in breaking his neck to catch a call that would surely be for one of his roommates, summoning them to a victory celebration. Both Jeremy Cohen and Les Anderson had been Kennedy supporters since the Massachusetts senator had announced his candidacy, and they had returned jubilantly from Los Angeles the previous evening. John Fitzgerald Kennedy had won the Democratic nomination for the presidency—admittedly by a narrow margin, but nevertheless he had won. Now the parties would begin—not that the Berkeley community ever needed much of an excuse for a party. During his four years at the university, Michael had attended celebrations of the new moon, of tenure granted and tenure denied, of marriages and divorces. A presidential primary was the ideal focus for Berkeley celebrants, a party with a purpose. There would be no dearth of purposes in the summer of 1960 with a presidential campaign revving into gear.

  The Stevenson supporters would congregate in candlelit rooms and hold good-natured wakes while they drank the very good scotch that had made Kennedy’s victory possible. They would be philosophic and resigned, and by the end of the evening they would join the Kennedy parties and become boisterous and argumentative. Naturally, there would be more exuberance in the Kennedy camp. He envisaged kegs of beer, wine from gallon jugs, music blaring from the newly popular amplifiers, competing amiably with the inevitable guitarists. Jeremy and Les were welcome to the scene, Michael decided as he shifted his cartons. He would pack. He was too old for Berkeley and Berkeley parties.

  The phone was still ringing when he reached the third landing.

  A wrong number or a breather, he decided, but remembered suddenly that Melanie Reznikoff had promised to call him that afternoon. He took the steps two at a time then and reached his door just as the phone fell silent.

  “Damn,” he muttered and tossed the cartons down
on the worn sleeper sofa, which Melanie had covered with a bright madras spread. He noticed now that the spread was ripped and stained with coffee spilled while he had proofread his dissertation. The same stain marred the straw mat that covered the floor—another decorating effort by Melanie. It could be cleaned, he supposed, but it was hardly worth bothering about now. The next tenant would probably throw everything out. He might have done something about the apartment if his mother had come west for commencement, but in the end Leah had succumbed to his arguments and decided to remain in New York.

  “Why do you want to bother, Mom?” he had asked. “I’m not even sure I’ll go myself. It’s going to be a mob scene. This isn’t a university, it’s a factory. There’ll be thousands of us getting degrees. You won’t even be able to tell who I am.”

  He had heard stories of other Berkeley commencements where parents had been unable to locate their own graduate son or daughter and had wandered disconsolately about, their cameras dangling uselessly from leather straps.

  “But a commencement is important, it’s a milestone,” Leah had protested. “I remember so clearly the day your father graduated from medical school. Aunt Mollie cried, but me—I couldn’t stop smiling. And don’t you remember how we all went to Cambridge for Aaron’s law school graduation?” All of them. They had been an intact family then, and David had stood beside her and wept unashamedly, as strong men weep.

  “Those commencements were different.” Michael’s voice was strangely harsh, his tone unyielding.

  “I don’t see how, but we’ll talk about it more when I call next week.” As always, Leah hung up without saying goodbye. A persistent aversion to farewells, Michael supposed, because so many arbitrary partings had been thrust upon her.

  Michael had stared sadly at the phone then and reflected that this commencement was, in fact, different from those of his father and his brother. Like everything else in his life, it had been too easily earned and had involved him too little.

  David Goldfeder’s graduation from medical school had been the realization of an impossible dream. His father, the immigrant factory worker, had confronted every economic and cultural adversary—a new language, the strain of poverty, the demands of a family, the rigors of night school—and earned a medical degree, confounding all odds. A mighty battle had been fought, and David Goldfeder’s commencement (captured in sepia-print photos proudly displayed in his mother’s Scarsdale living room) was a celebration of perseverance, a vindication of ideal. His father’s achievement had been awesome, Michael knew, and he cowered in its shadow. Could I have done it? he wondered. Would I have had the courage, the tenacity? He had teased himself with the question during his undergraduate years at Princeton and later at Berkeley, but the truth was that he did not know and would never know. It was impossible to confront a challenge that did not present itself.

  Aaron’s love of law derived from his agonizing confrontation with the lawlessness of war. He had begun reading law in a prisoner-of-war camp in Trieste—an unlikely student in prison stripes, thin and anemic but charged with a fiery intellectual energy. He had completed those law studies at Harvard, and his commencement had been more than the earning of a degree—it had been an affirmation of the freedom of the mind, the power of the intellect.

  Michael contrasted his own pallid and passive academic career with those of his father and his brother. He had not struggled toward success. He had slid into it, effortlessly, carelessly. He was the child of privilege, the heir to his parents’ late and hard-earned prosperity. His birth had presaged the end of poverty and struggle. “We already lived in a house when you were born,” his aunt Mollie had said proudly. A house! The culmination of the American dream. The acquisition of property and land by those who had been denied ownership, forced into the impermanence of tenancy.

  He had drifted from an enchanted childhood into a relaxed suburban adolescence. His memories of growing up in Westchester were a mosaic of sunlit playing fields (always he had been chosen as pitcher, always he had been first up at bat), tree-shaded bicycle paths, snowmen grinning beneath the maple tree in winter and barbecues at the end of long hot summer days. In dreams he smelled the delicious aroma of charred meat, heard the laughter of his parents’ friends, the clink of ice cubes in tall glasses; he felt the muscular embrace of strong-armed men, the light kisses of sweet-smelling women. “How are you, Michael? Still growing? Are you going to be as tall as your brother? As smart as your father?” And why had such questions bothered him? he wondered. He had grown taller than his brother and had taken every scholastic prize at school. They had not, after all, asked him if he would be as daring as his brother, as determined as his father.

  There were, of course, dark tiles on that mosaic—the tension and anxiety of the war years, the melancholy desolation of a suburban street in the midafternoon, the echoing loneliness of a large house after school. The phone rang and his mother told him that she would be home late—there was a design problem, a production problem. His father called. He, too, would be late. An emergency. A very sick patient. A conference. Michael would turn on the television set and watch the shadow of Howdy Doody glide across the screen. The puppet’s voice fought the loneliness, the silence, and he would turn the volume up as he pondered his trigonometry. But suburban loneliness did not qualify as tragedy. He never traded stories in the dormitory marketplace of unhappy childhoods. His own childhood had been happy, perhaps too happy.

  There had been no loneliness at Princeton. He had rushed through his four years with ease and acceptable success, and then suddenly he was wearing a cap and gown, marching in solemn academic procession, smiling shyly at his mother and father as he passed them. Their faces glowed with pride and his father’s eyes were bright with unshed tears. Their joy bewildered Michael. He had, after all, only done what had been expected of him, unlike his father, who had achieved what had been thought unachievable, and his brother and sister, who forged their own history—Aaron in Europe and Rebecca in Israel. “My brother and sister are a tough act to follow,” Michael would tell his Princeton friends.

  His classmates were not interested in following tough acts. They were interested in split-level houses, station wagons, and good corporate jobs with solid pension plans. Security was the watchword of their generation, although insecurity hovered dangerously over them. The Bomb haunted their dreams, and they fled from its malevolent threat by conforming to straight and narrow paths. They had been dubbed the “silent generation,” but they knew that they did not speak because their words would reveal their fears. They did not trust Michael Goldfeder’s restlessness, but they assumed that he would settle down. A job at IBM or General Electric would pull him into the safety of their own silent and steady orbits.

  It had been assumed that he would go on to MIT. Hadn’t he built intricate models with his expensive erector sets as a child and written a paper on suspension bridges as an undergraduate project?

  His framed physics citation hung in David Goldfeder’s wood-paneled study. But when his father was killed in Israel, he changed course suddenly. He wanted to learn more about the social forces that had led to David Goldfeder’s murder on the sands of the Negev (just as David had studied psychology to learn more about the dynamic of hatred—a generational pattern, Leah had thought, but said nothing). Michael was drawn to sociology—the science of the origin, history, and constitution of human society. There was a good department at the University of California at Berkeley.

  Leah had raised no objection. Sociology? Good. Berkeley? Fine. The maternal skepticism she felt was not articulated. Her life of chance had given her son the luxury of choice. The arguments he had developed to defend his position were unnecessary and thus stillborn. They congealed within him. He had wanted to argue, to justify himself, but his mother was understanding, his brother accepting, and his sister, far away in Israel, supportive. “It is wonderful that you have this opportunity,” she wrote. She lived in a country where young men wore uniforms and lived on the edge of d
anger. Rebecca had gone to too many funerals. She visited the children’s house in the still hours of the night and studied the faces of the sleeping youngsters. She wrote to her brother and urged him to take advantage of his life, to live it fully.

  Leah paid the tuition and gave him a generous allowance. He returned half of it. He was not a child but a man in his twenties. He found a half-time job teaching at a small community center. Evening classes, like those his father had attended at City College. But his students were not immigrant Jews. They were Chicanos and blacks and the sons and daughters of farm and factory workers. Michael discovered that he loved teaching. He relished the development of a lesson, of charming his restless students into a sudden expectant silence. He thrilled when a previously silent student suddenly raised a hand and asked a question that betrayed a new and unsuspected curiosity. Warm pleasure flooded him when Jared Parks, a lean black youth who had registered for every class he taught, told him that he was going on to the university.

  “On account of you, Mr. Goldfeder. On account of you said it could be done.”

  He had realized then that sociology was his discipline but teaching was his vocation.

  It took him four years to earn his doctorate. He attended seminars while Eisenhower sat benignly in the White House and the Korean War veterans filled the lecture halls. He formulated the thesis statement of his dissertation on the afternoon that federal troops integrated Little Rock. He sent a one-hundred-dollar money order to help cover Rosa Parks’s court costs and voted against a congressman who wanted to establish funding for shelters designed to be impervious to radioactivity. He sat in smoke-filled rooms and listened to earnest appeals for a sane nuclear policy.