The Liberation of Celia Kahn

by J David Simons

  “This is a compelling tale with characters who imprint themselves on the streets of Glasgow.” SCARLETT MCGWIRE, The Tribune

  “A very good read, which explores feminism and socialism with subtlety and intelligence.” Gutter Magazine

  “This is a thoughtful, neat and plucky book, much like its heroine. J. David Simons is brilliant at capturing the little oddities and foibles of his characters. The book is a riotous celebration of female empowerment.” LISA GLASS, Vulpes Libris

  “Simons’ ability to capture the essence of his protagonist will really strike a chord; Celia’s pain and challenges are sensitively rendered, her passion and stoicism enchanting. A quietly brilliant book.” REBECCA ISHERWOOD, The Skinny

  “Emotive, this is a thought-provoking piece of fictionalised social history.” ALASTAIR MABBOTT, The Herald

  “It is always a joy to find a novel which is such an entertaining and compelling read, is faithful to the history of the times and which also explores so many stimulating political themes.” ALAN LLOYD, Morning Star

  “Simons has brought off an unusual coup in getting under the skins of girls liberated by the conditions of WWI… He illustrates an intriguing strand of social history in a lively and gripping way.” JUDITH MIRZOEFF, Jewish Renaissance

  “This novel marries a vivid sense of place with characters who endear themselves to the reader, while tackling head-on the issues of socialism and the liberation – individual and gender – of the title.” CAROL MCKAY, Northword

  “This informative, entertaining and uplifting book left a favourable impression long after I’d finished reading. Highly recommended.” JANET WILLIAMSON, Historical Novel Society Review

  THE

  LIBERATION

  OF CELIA

  KAHN

  J David Simons

  Contents

  Title Page

  Glasgow 1915

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Glasgow 1918

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Glasgow 1923

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Novels by J David Simons

  Copyright

  Glasgow

  1915

  One

  CELIA HAD NEVER BEEN SURE how she felt about Sundays. She liked that the schools, the pubs and the shops were shut, that the locals scrubbed up and spruced up in their best clothes, that the streets were emptier and the parks busier. She even liked the sound of the church bells, their plodding patient summons to worship. She admired this distinction made between an ordinary and a holy day. But not the distinction between herself and the rest of the population. Between Christian and Jew. For despite her fondness for the Sunday peace, it also reminded her that this was not her Sabbath. This was the Sabbath that counted the Old Testament’s seventh day of rest from a Monday rather than a Sunday. This confusion in starting point ending with her as an outsider. An alien. So when the doorbell rang and she stood to answer it, she knew that on this holy day, it would not be a Christian calling. But she was wrong. Not that she possessed some inner litmus test that could differentiate between Jew and Gentile. Although red hair was certainly almost positive proof. It was just that the blatant cockiness emanating from these two young men standing in the doorway could not possibly belong to a member of the Jewish race living in a land that God had not promised them.

  “Moses Cohen?” one of them asked. This was the taller one with a hat shoved down to shade his eyes, a pus-coloured scar across his cheek. His companion was much younger, perhaps about eighteen. Skinnier too, with a nervy twitchiness about him. He was the one with the red hair. Both boasted skin pale enough to raise an initial presumption of illness or at least of days spent in places devoid of natural light. “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know who you mean,” she answered curtly.

  “Of course, you do.” It was the red-haired lad who spoke this time, his voice nasal and mean as if the sound started from some nastiness inside his head rather than from his throat.

  “Oh, you mean Uncle Mendel.”

  “We’re not interested in his relationship to you,” the taller man said. “We just want to know where he is. And what’s this?” He was tapping at the decorative case of the mezuzah nailed near the top of the door jamb. “Is this a Jew thing?”

  “Yes. It contains parchment of holy prayers.”

  “What happens if I pick it open?”

  “You’ll be cursed for life,” she said, not knowing if this was actually true. But guessing she could not be too far off the mark given that God’s punishments ranged from a plague of locusts to the death of the first-born male.

  The man’s fingers leapt from the casing. “Fuck,” he said.

  She was shocked. It wasn’t as if she had never heard the curse word before. Just not in her home where the air had only been filled with the vocabulary of civilised conversation. Even the most minor profanity was forbidden, except for Yiddish put-downs that sounded far worse than they actually were. This man’s Anglo-Saxon ‘fuck’ word hovered in the doorway where he stood. She wondered if the mezuzah might protect the hallway from its unholy invasion.

  “Stop fucking around with that thing,” his colleague said now that the sluice gates of cursing were open. And then to her. “We just want to know where your fucking Uncle Mendel is.”

  She realised she had remained rather calm despite this verbal onslaught. Not to mention the actual physical threat from these two men. “What do you want from him?”

  But there was no time for an answer for behind her she heard the most awful wail and then:

  “They’ve come,” her mother screamed. “They’ve come again. I’m not going this time. No more. I’ve had enough. I’ve had enough of camps. Listen to me. Hear this.” And she started humming the opening bars of “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary”. Even the men in the doorway were dumbstruck as Madame Kahn walked up and down the hallway swathed in her dressing gown. Singing. “It’s a long way to Tip…”

  “It’s not you they want, mother,” Celia shouted. “It’s Uncle Mendel.”

  Madame Kahn pulled in her gown, continued her promenade. “Mendel or me. What difference does it make? We are kin. But we are not your enemy. Look, look at these hands. I work my fingers into bones for making your uniforms. Into bones.”

  “Shut up,” the taller man screamed. “Just fucking shut up.”

  Madame Kahn halted, brought the palms of both hands to her open mouth. Celia thought her mother might faint. Instead, she just seemed to deflate before her eyes into a cowering figure. Celia stepped back, put an arm around her. The poor woman was trembling in her grasp.

  “What do you want from my Uncle Mendel?” Celia asked.

  “He owes us,” the nasal lad said.

  “Owes you what?”

  “Fucking big time.” He reached into his inside jacket pocket. She thought for an instant he might be reaching for a knife. Instead he brought out a wad of papers, waved them at her. “Fucking debts,” he said. “Gambling debts. All unpaid.”<
br />
  Madame Kahn looked up. Celia noticed she had calmed considerably now that her personal freedom was no longer at stake. “How much?” her mother asked. “How much this time?”

  The taller man related a substantial sum in guineas.

  “Moses Cohen is not here,” Madame Kahn said. “He works in the Highlands. I don’t know how long he will be gone. That is the truth. Half I can give you now.”

  The debt collectors looked at each other. “A month,” said the nasal lad with an intimidating lean towards her. “That’ll buy you another month. We’ll come back for the rest then.”

  “You know about this, mother?” Celia asked.

  Madame Kahn grunted. “It is not new. All my life I have to pay off my brother’s gambling debts,” she said. “Now stay here all of you. And I will bring the gelt.”

  * * *

  The small bedroom was hot and dim, the curtains closed even on such a bright day. Her nose crinkled at the stink of boys. Of Nathan and Avram. Of their sweat and soiled linen. She managed to find a space for the tray on the bedside table before drawing open the drapes, dragging the window up a crack. But Nathan, propped up sickly on the pillows, winced at the light and she had to pull in one of the curtains until he was back in shade again. She sat down by the bed, laid a bib around his scrawny neck, felt the almost fleshless bones around his collar as she fussed over him. He stared back at her with yellowish eyes sunk into their sad, dark sockets as she used the bib to wipe the crust from the corners of his mouth.

  “I’m sorry I’m late,” she said. She spooned up some borsht, let it hover for an instant before his mouth until the dry lips unstuck and she was able to tilt the liquid into the gap. “But you don’t really care, do you, little brother? I could starve you to death and you wouldn’t say one word. Not one word to your sister. When was the last time you said anything to me? Anything at all. I can’t even remember the sound of your voice.” She gently poured another spoonful of borsht into his mouth, the gulping of the soup the only sign her brother was alive and conscious. Rabbi Lieberman had once suggested Nathan’s condition might be associated with the legend of the lamed vav –the thirty-six righteous men who existed in the world solely to relieve the burden of suffering from the rest of humankind. Otherwise life would be too much to bear for the ordinary person. When she looked at Nathan, she could believe such a myth was true. Her brother’s condition had certainly deteriorated since the beginning of this dreadful war, since the reports of the hundreds and thousands of casualties had begun to mount up.

  “Two debt collectors came to see Uncle Mendel,” she told him. “One of them swore at Mama. You should have heard it.”

  A voice from behind her. “Who? Who swore at Madame Kahn?”

  She turned round. Avram stood in the doorway, a pair of muddied football boots slung around his neck. Next to him, his friend Solly, shining like the sun in a yellow goalkeeper’s jersey.

  “Tell me who,” Avram insisted.

  “I’d rather hear what the man said,” Solly added. “Come on, Celia. Tell me.”

  “It’s not important. Where have you been?”

  “Flag day,” Avram muttered.

  “Selling pins for the Scottish Women’s First Aid Corps,” Solly said. “Avram got rid of them all. It must be his miserable face that wins over the wifies.”

  “You need football boots to sell flags?”

  Avram grinned at his friend. “We finished early.”

  “Well, there’s coal to be brought in. And carpets to beat. You should have come home right after you finished. You should have been here.”

  “All right, all right. I will do it now.”

  Solly stayed back in his guarding stance at the doorway. Like the goalkeeper he was. “What’s put you in such a bad mood?”

  “Get back to playing your silly games, Solly Green.”

  “Are we not old enough to know your womanly ways?”

  “Just get away with you.”

  “We used to be friends.”

  “When we were at school, Solly. Things have changed since then.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, there’s a war on, in case you haven’t heard.”

  “I’m too young to sign up. But at least I work for a living.”

  “Taking illegal bets for your father? Standing in the lane looking out for the constable? That’s not much of a living.”

  “You’re right, Celia.” Solly shifted on his feet. “You’ve changed.”

  He left her sitting there on the side of the bed, still with an empty spoon in her hand. She heard Nathan groan as his head shifted on the pillow.

  “Oh, look at me,” she said. “You must still be hungry.” She dipped the spoon back into the bowl, but as she brought it up to her brother’s lips, she noticed her hand was shaking.

  With the heat gone out of the day, the night had come in quite cold. Celia sat alone in the kitchen, rocking in her mother’s chair, listening to the flat as it creaked and settled. Everyone was asleep. She liked it that way, time to let her own thoughts calm to the clicking rhythm of her needles as she knitted some kind of a garment she could hardly remember what. A comforter? A balaclava for an unknown soldier? A pair of socks for her father? A winter scarf that stretched forever? It didn’t really matter. Just good to be sitting there, sometimes a voice in the back-court, the light from the furnaces at Dixon’s Blazes dancing across the dim kitchen, feeling more like a mother than a daughter. She thought about her Uncle Mendel. Of course, he had a partiality for a little too much schnapps – even she who was not very worldly in the ways of alcohol consumption could see that. But apart from a fondness for a game of kalookie, she never imagined her uncle was a gambling man. Rather he was a person with strong socialist views who cooked fish wrapped in damp newspaper over his fire until it peeled succulently off the bone. He told her Old Testament stories, read her the doctrines of Karl Marx, explained to her the secret meaning of the playing cards. How diamonds represented money and springtime, clubs stood for work and summer, spades health and winter, and hearts autumn and love. “Never be low in hearts,” he would tell her as she sorted through her hand. “Especially in the autumn.” “Why in the autumn?” “Because then the winter will be very cold.” If the Jews had an equivalent of Santa Claus, she imagined her uncle would be first in line for the part, albeit with a tendency for too much Christmas sherry. But someone who could be the object of attention of those two gangster-types who had visited her home, this she found hard to believe.

  She heard one of the bedroom doors open, her father’s cough, footsteps across the cold hallway.

  “You are still up,” Papa Kahn said.

  “And you shouldn’t be. The doctor told you to stay in bed.”

  “I shall not be made a prisoner in my own house. By my own daughter. Anyway, I am hungry.”

  “The soup is still warm,” she said, jumping up to attend the pot on the stove. “And there is some bread. I managed to get some rye this morning.”

  “Yes, yes. Some soup and bread I will have. But first a schnapps. A patient must have his schnapps. A sick heart needs a good kick.”

  He took the bottle of sweet brandy off the mantelpiece, poured himself a large glass, knocked it back quickly. He then filled the glass again, sat down at the table in front of his soup bowl. She watched his tired face as he blew noisily on his spoonful, quickly slurped down the hot liquid.

  “You know I am taking Avram out of school? To work as a credit draper with Uncle Mendel.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “He is a bright boy. But more important he brings money into this family. When Passover is finished, I will make the arrangements.”

  She picked up her knitting. Her father refused to look at her, staring sideways instead to the mantelpiece where the family photographs stood, sepia and stern. His cheeks were flushed now. The schnapps had done its work. She waited to hear the old complaints.

  “I worry about your mother,” he said.

 
; “She says she was treated well.”

  “Physically, yes. But in her heart I know she suffered. Twenty-five years in this country. And then to be locked away. For what? For being a German. It is the humiliation. One moment she makes uniforms for the British army, the next she is locked up like a common thief. What did they think she was going to do? Poison their children? Pass on secrets? Secrets of what? How to fix a button? To stitch a hem? It is the humiliation. It eats and eats away at you.”

  He picked up his glass, drank back the contents, brought it down so hard on the table she was sure it would break.

  “And now I have to make some declaration,” he continued.

  She broke off mid-stitch. So this was the cause of his irritation. “What kind of a declaration?”

  “Some kind of statement about my nationality. All the Jews have to do this.”

  “A declaration you are Russian?”

  “Yes, yes. That I was born in Russia. This means I am not German. That I am a friendly alien and not an enemy alien. But still an alien.”

  She rocked back and forth on her chair, watching her father contemplate his empty shot-glass. “Is it so bad to declare such a thing?” she asked.

  “You don’t understand, Celia. All my young life, I tried to escape from this Russia. From its persecution and pogroms. Now I have to declare myself a Russian.”

  “But it means you will never have to go to a camp. Like Mama.”

  “This is true. It also means when I am well again I can continue being a tailor making uniforms.”

  “What is so bad about that?”

  “I help the British who help the Russians. This war. It plays with my loyalties. It makes me meshugge. Like a madman. What kind of a world is this?”

  “It is not so bad here. At least there are no pogroms.”

  “Yes, yes, yes. To be a Jew here is no bad thing. But to be a German Jew like your mother is not so good. Ha! Better to be a Russian Jew. To declare loyalty to a country that hates you.”