Sisters Weiss ~ A Novel

by Naomi Ragen

  In the morning, she found a cloth napkin on the dresser. When it was carefully unwrapped, she found two sugar cubes, a piece of crumbling chocolate cake, and three almond cookies inside, tidbits Rose had squirreled away for her.

  “Thank you, Rose!”

  Rose smiled. “It’s a little crushed and dry but still tasty. And next year, you’ll be old enough to stay up.”

  That had not occurred to her! Her sister would always be older, but she too was growing! It filled her heart with sudden joy, as did the weeklong festival of the Feast of Tabernacles, or Sukkot, in which even the youngest children were allowed to participate, helping to decorate the pretty little booth that her father and Shlomie Yosef and Mordechai, home from yeshiva, built of wood in the backyard and that the girls and their mother decorated, hanging colorful chains of pretty paper, shiny red apples, and bunches of grapes from the ceiling of palm branches that formed the roof. Abraham, recently married, would be spending the holiday with his in-laws in far-off Monsey, as was the custom for newlyweds.

  Sukkot was a holiday that started and ended with Sabbath-like holy days, but in between had ordinary days that even the most ultra-Orthodox men used to take a religiously mandated vacation, spending time with their wives and children on rare and joyful outings.

  This Sukkot, it was the Bronx Zoo.

  “But what will we see there, Rose?” Pearl asked anxiously, settling into her sister’s lap as the crowded subway car with its rancid odor of oil, old rubber, and scraped metal careened down the dark tracks.

  “Lions and tigers and monkeys,” came the excited reply.

  “Wild animals? Like the plague in Egypt?” Pearl questioned, horrified. Animals in general were feared by religious children, and benign pets virtually unknown. Dogs especially were considered impure and contaminating creatures whose mere presence made it impossible to pray or say a blessing of any kind. And only those with a mice problem among the very poorest of families kept cats.

  “No, not like the plague…” Rose struggled to explain. “Beautiful creatures like the ones God saved from the flood. Remember the pictures in the book Tateh gave you? The one about Noach and the ark?”

  The tall giraffes and the lions, all walking docilely in pairs into the strange wooden boat.

  “They don’t bite?”

  “One bite? You they’ll chew up and swallow as soon as you walk in! Such a tasty little morsel!” Shlomie Yosef told her wickedly, unable to resist.

  Pearl froze, then burst out in wails. “I want to go home!” she sobbed, until the other subway passengers in their workday clothes turned to look at her and, in so doing, rested their gaze longer then they’d planned, staring at the strange, foreign-looking family dressed up in holiday best on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon.

  A teenager in a black leather jacket looked at them insolently: “HYMIES!” he called out, just before the subway doors slid open and he jumped off.

  Rabbi Weiss’s cheek twitched. He adjusted his large black homburg hat, his eyes lowered.

  “Stupid shegetz,” eighteen-year-old Mordechai said bitterly.

  Rabbi Weiss threw him a cold look of warning. “No matter where we are born or where we live, we Jews will always be strangers because our laws and our God are strange to those around us. We must never provoke them.”

  For the rest of the ride, no one said anything.

  “Tateh, it’s the next stop,” their mother finally whispered. “Help me.”

  “Hmm…” he uttered distractedly, lifting the carriage out to the platform and up the stairs to the street.

  Their steps were heavy as they neared the ticket booth to the zoo. Rabbi Weiss took out cash and gave it to Mordechai. “Go, buy the tickets.”

  Rabbi Weiss sat down on a bench nearby. He was not used to being seen together with his wife and children in public. It felt demeaning somehow for a Torah scholar to be involved in such frivolous activities. In fact, were it not for the fact that what they were doing was in honor of the holiday, and thus a mitzvah, he might have considered the terrible insult on the train a just punishment from God for going to the zoo in the first place.

  “I also want a ticket!” Pearl wailed, refusing to budge, feeling deprived and belittled.

  “You don’t need one. You get in free,” her mother scolded. “Go under the turnstile! Nu already?”

  “I’ll give you my ticket, and I’ll go under,” Rose said, taking her hand.

  “This is allowed?” Rabbi Weiss asked the ticket taker, who shrugged and waved them through.

  Pearl took her father’s hand. “Tateh, why did Hashem save the vilde chayas from the flood? Why did He put them in the ark?”

  “Some people are worse than vilde chayas,” Bracha Weiss interjected with a conspiratorial glance at her husband. “He keeps them alive, too.”

  “Because He made all creatures, and there is no end to His compassion,” her father said gently, suddenly gaining back his good humor.

  “Tateh, is it maybe because they are so beautiful?” Rose asked, taking his free hand and looking up at him earnestly.

  He squeezed his daughters’ hands affectionately, then lifted Pearl into his arms. “As it is written: ‘But ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee; and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee: Who knoweth not in all these that the hand of the Lord hath wrought this?’” he said in Hebrew, walking through the leaf-strewn paths, staring with childlike delight at the creatures behind the bars as he pointed them out to his little girls and his sons and wife.

  “Look, Mameh, the monkey house!” Rose shouted, running ahead.

  “Go away from there, quickly,” her mother called back.

  “Mameh, it’s all right. The children can look. You go sit down.”

  “Why doesn’t Mameh like the monkeys, Tateh?” Pearl wanted to know as they went into the elaborate Beaux-Arts building.

  “It’s not that she doesn’t like … it’s…” But he didn’t continue.

  “It’s because she thinks she might be having another baby and if she looks at a monkey, the baby will also come out looking like a monkey,” Shlomie Yosef whispered into Rose’s ear.

  It was Rose’s turn to be horrified. But soon she forgot everything as she stared at the strange creatures that looked so familiar with their expressive, almost human faces and delicate pink hands. She watched, filled with compassion and delight, as a mother chimp cuddled her baby.

  “Look, Pearl, see the baby chimp?”

  But Pearl couldn’t get beyond the dark strangeness of their skin, the way they hooted and swung so fast from the bars and ropes.

  “He has a tuchus, a naked tuchus. It’s not allowed. We can’t look…” she said piously, turning away.

  “Very good! She’s right!” their father agreed. “It’s indecent. Let’s go to the birds.”

  Rose reluctantly dragged herself away.

  “As it is written: ‘Curse not the king, no, not in thy thought…: for a bird of the air shall carry the voice, and that which hath wings shall tell the matter,’” said Rabbi Weiss as he entered the aviary.

  Rose felt breathless as the birds circled above her with their wide wings, wishing she could tear off the roof for them and let them soar into the sky. The more she looked, the more she resented her father’s attempt to lock them into some kind of pious context. Who had the right to label them, to reduce them into something controllable, useful, and convenient?

  The reptile house was next. Pearl, terrified of the snakes, had to be taken outside. But Rose lingered, studying with fascination the intricate designs and patterns of their skins. God could have made one snake, with one kind of skin without designs of any kind, like the skin of humans, she thought. Instead, He had chosen to do this. Her child’s heart filled instinctively with love and admiration for the abstract, unseen God she blessed in her daily prayers, for His endless creativity and sense of beauty, which touched something deep inside her.

  “Such a big place,” her mother sighed, fanning her
self. “I’m shvitzing, and my feet are killing me. Soon we’ll eat. Are you hungry?”

  “But, Mameh, we just got here!” Rose implored, disappointed, anxious to get in as much as possible before they packed up and went home.

  “Your mameh is right!” Rabbi Weiss affirmed, ending all discussion.

  Food. It was always about food, always about when they were going to eat, Rose thought with uncharacteristic resentment. How could you stop to sit and chew when faced with such miracles?

  Tired of looking for a picnic table, they spread a blanket on the grass. Mrs. Weiss took out the chicken-on-challah sandwiches she’d prepared and wrapped in waxed paper for the youngest children and herself, the jars of sliced fruit and pieces of leftover honey cake and apple-noodle kugel—snacks she’d prepared for her husband and sons, who were forbidden to break bread and eat a meal outside the sukkah during the holiday. Someone went to buy drinks. They lay in the grass looking up at the trees and sky.

  Pearl squealed, pointing to the ground.

  “It’s just an anthill,” Shlomie Yosef said, lifting his foot to crush it.

  “NO!” Rabbi Weiss grabbed him. “You must never be cruel to any living creature, even an ant. As it is written: ‘Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise! It has no commander, no overseer or ruler, yet it stores its provisions in summer and gathers its food at harvest.’”

  He sat on a rock, looking like a raven in his dark, festive coat, Rose thought, watching her father as Pearl climbed into his lap. Rose sat down beside him in the grass. “Come here, Shlomie.” He beckoned kindly to the boy, who was still sulking from the reprimand, touching his son on the shoulder. “The pain of a man and the pain of other creatures is the same; there is no difference. A mother’s love and tenderness comes from her heart, her feelings, not her mind. All living creatures have such feelings.” Overcome by his own words, he suddenly hugged Pearl, who leaned into him, allowing herself a moment to claim him as her own, and hers alone, as she basked in this rare display of tenderness. Rose watched, touched by a sudden envy. The older she got, the less her father touched her.

  “That is why the Holy One, blessed be He, forbids us to wear leather shoes on Yom Kippur. As Rabbi Moses Isserles, the blessed Ramah, states: ‘How can a man put on leather shoes—for which it is necessary to kill a living thing—on Yom Kippur, a day of grace and compassion on which “His tender mercies are over all His works”?’”

  “But is it not also written: ‘Conquer the earth and subdue it’?” asked Mordechai, a serious, quiet boy already being praised by his teachers as one of the most promising scholars in his class. “Is not the whole earth man’s to do with as he pleases?”

  “Quite right, Mordechai. But for the glory of God, my son, not our own, and with restraint,” his father answered him, nodding affectionately. Soon they would find him a match, a girl from a wealthy, pious family who would be able to support him as he labored in the study halls to reach his full potential as an authority on Jewish law, a posek, who would help the Jewish people submit to God’s will by answering the serious questions that arose in each generation on how to adapt modern life to the Torah’s ancient, unchanging laws.

  The soft winds of the Indian summer sent a leaf falling from the sky, which tangled in the thick curls of Rabbi Weiss’s beard. Rose leaned over, plucking it out.

  He smiled, taking it from her hand: “As it is written: ‘And the dove came in to him in the evening; and lo, in her mouth was an olive leaf plucked off; so Noah knew that the waters were abated from off the earth.’”

  “Do you know the whole Torah by heart, Tateh?” she asked in wonder and admiration.

  “I know what I know, but not as much as I should know. Not as much as your brothers will know,” he said with a proud look at his sons.

  “I will also study the Torah and make you proud, Tateh,” Rose whispered, leaning against him.

  “You will make your parents proud in other ways, child.” He chuckled affectionately.

  “What ways?”

  “You will be obedient and frum, and keep the laws stringently so that God will send you a great scholar for a husband, who you will work for and support, and in that way share his reward for all his Torah learning, and in that merit Hashem will grant you sons who will be great Torah scholars…”

  “But I can also learn things myself, Tateh!”

  “Then learn to listen and to be an eshes chayil, child, like your mother.” He smiled, nodding at his wife, who smiled back. “That’s all the Rebono shel Olam asks of you.”

  Pearl drank in her father’s words, but Rose was troubled.

  3

  Williamsburg, Brooklyn, 1959

  “Time to get up, maidelehs!”

  Sunday mornings were always hardest. While the rest of New York slept on quietly through a two-day weekend, the day after the Sabbath was simply another tedious weekday for the Weiss family. Rose dressed quickly in her school clothes, the long-sleeved blue blouse and long pleated navy skirt, pulling the brush fiercely though her hip-length brown hair, which she then expertly braided. As she did every morning, she went into the kitchen and waited for her mother to outline her preschool chores.

  “Go down to the grocery and get bread, milk, eggs, some butter … and maybe a little jam. Tell her to write it down.”

  Rose tensed.

  “And hurry. You still need to help Pearl get dressed.”

  She lowered her eyes. “Yes, Mameh.”

  She walked reluctantly down the steps, dreading the lingering stare of the nasty woman behind the counter as she took out her little pad and penciled it in. Always, Rose worried if her parents had actually paid last month’s bill or if this time the woman would shout at her, chasing her out in humiliation.

  It would never have occurred to nine-year-old Rose to complain. Life was hard and full of things you didn’t want to do but did anyway, whether because they were the right thing to do, or because there was no alternative. Her father set the example, rising before daybreak to purify himself in the cold waters of the ritual baths—winter or summer—before saying his morning prayers in the synagogue. Only then did he begin his long day’s work as a bookkeeper at the yeshiva. Her brothers too spent long hours studying Talmud, while her mother not only took care of the house but worked part-time selling tablecloths and towels in a local shop. Even six-year-old Pearl struggled with the demands of her first-grade teacher, often sitting in the corner as punishment for talking too much or forgetting the words to the blessings. Even little Duvid was not wholly exempt, spending his mornings in endless recitations of the Hebrew letters in cheder.

  Rose never considered her life harsh, having no inkling that other girls her age had indulgent mothers in white aprons tenderly combing their hair and making them breakfast. But even had she been aware such things existed, it would have seemed like a story in a book of fairy tales she’d once taken out of the local library, which—while tempting—were utterly foreign and forbidden, like delicious food displayed in the window of a nonkosher restaurant.

  The streets of Williamsburg were quiet, the spring leaves abundant as they swayed above her in the warm wind of May. If she finished quickly enough, there was always the possibility of stopping off on the way home at the candy store to look at the magazines. Life and Look fascinated her most, with their full-page color photographs. Last week, Marilyn Monroe had been on the cover of Life, chewing on one diamond earring while the other dripped down from a frothy wave of platinum blond hair. There had been something disturbing to the girl about the way the woman’s white teeth clamped together, something she couldn’t quite explain to herself as her stomach went queasy with excitement. Look magazine had also had a woman on the cover, a brunette with painted red lips and blue eyes, her photo covered by circular bands of red, white, and blue next to the words “the case for the American woman.” She’d stared at the photo, shifting the basket of groceries from hand to hand as the handles cut into her tender flesh.

 
Mr. Schwartz, the store owner, busy behind the counter serving scrambled eggs to Gentiles, was always kind to her, never yelling at her as he sometimes did to other kids, demanding they buy something or leave. Once, he had even given her a magazine for free. “They left it out in the rain, the morons. Here, take it.”

  Aside from several pages that had been stuck together, it had been perfectly wonderful. She kept it hidden beneath her mattress.

  She lifted her legs, hurrying. But the line in the grocery was long. She would have to skip the candy store today, she realized, disappointed.

  “You went to milk the cow?” her mother scolded when she got home. “Hurry and dress your sister! She won’t have time to eat.”

  Pearl was still sleeping.

  Rose tickled her nose, then pulled her arms up from under the blanket, shaking her gently into consciousness.

  “No!” Pearl whined, burrowing back beneath the covers.

  “Look, Pearl, be a tzadakis this morning, won’t you? Don’t make me late again. My teacher said the next time she will punish me. And your teacher will yell, too, remember?”

  Pearl reluctantly sat up, biting her lips. She was afraid of her teacher, who liked to smash heavy rulers and pointed sticks against their desks to get their attention.

  “Come, I’ll help you.”

  She brushed the child’s beautiful blond curls with pleasure, the way you would comb a doll’s hair, thinking how she preferred Marilyn to the all-American woman. Even though Pearl had not only gotten the hair but the large, clear blue eyes that ran in her tateh’s family, while she’d gotten stuck with her mother’s rich, dark brown in both, she was not envious. Female physical beauty was not a quality her family or her culture lauded or prized. In fact, a really beautiful girl was considered flashy and somewhat immodest, calling undue attention to herself. Her sister’s face was too pretty and angelic, a perfect oval with perfect small lips and a tiny nose. She herself looked decidedly plainer, with her narrow cheekbones, large, full lips, and very Jewish nose. But her eyes, despite their color, were beautiful, too, she realized: sparkling dark ovals that thankfully called attention away from the other, less wonderful elements of her face. They were the first thing anyone noticed about her.