Sisters Weiss ~ A Novel

by Naomi Ragen

  “No tights!” Pearl complained, wriggling away. “It will be hot!”

  At least three times a week, if not more, they had this fight. Ever since Pearl had turned six and started school, her parents decided the stringent laws of modesty should be applied to her as well. But sometimes, Rose knew, if Pearl threw an especially tiresome tantrum, her mother would give in and allow her to wear socks like many of the other girls in her class, whose parents were less meticulous about the laws of modesty for little girls. Tired and rushed, Rose gave in, helping her on with her socks, then helping her to lace up her shoes.

  Their mother, who usually had more patience, noticed immediately. “What’s this? Go put on tights and don’t you dare open your mouth to say another word back to me!”

  Duvid was sick, again. He had kept her up all night. The child lived on antibiotics. On top of that, Rebbitzin Weiss had an appointment with her gynecologist to take a test that would ascertain if the last few days of throwing up was a flu she had caught from her son, or something she had gotten from her husband. Not being allowed to use birth control because of religious stringencies, she was never quite sure. The “blessing” of pregnancy always hovered over her, and would until the change of life made it impossible.

  Without a word, Rose dragged her sister back into the bedroom, pulling off the socks and pulling the tights up forcibly around her waist, Pearl all the while struggling against her with all her might.

  “Stop it already, Pearl!” she demanded, wiping the beaded sweat from her forehead.

  “Come eat already. You’ll both be late,” their mother called from the kitchen.

  “Mameh?” Rose said reluctantly.

  “What now?” said her mother.

  “The teacher says we have to bring in a quarter to school today.”

  “A quarter? For vus?”

  “I don’t know. The teacher said.”

  Reluctantly, her mother opened her purse, digging into her change.

  “If the teacher said…”

  The institution of school had its own sacredness and authority that her parents never questioned. Still, she knew her mother never liked to part with money, and she felt unhappy in making such a demand, even if it was only a quarter. She placed the money carefully in her pocket.

  Pearl complained all the way to school, dragging her feet as Rose tried to hurry her along.

  “It’s too hot in tights! Why did you get a quarter and not me?”

  “Because the teacher said. And if you stop complaining, I’ll play a game with you.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll pick a color, and you and I will think of all the things that are that color. And if you can think of more things, then you’ll win.”

  “What color?”

  “Well, what about blue?”

  “No, no,” the child complained. “White. White is better.”

  “All right then. White.”

  “A wedding dress. Now it’s your turn.”

  “Clouds.”

  “Frosting on a wedding cake.”

  “Cotton.”

  “Wedding shoes.”

  “Pearl, can you think of something that doesn’t have to do with weddings?” Ever since their brother Abraham had gotten married the year before, Pearl had been enraptured, talking of little else.

  “For vus? Don’t you want to be a bride, Rose?”

  For some strange reason, the question sent a chill down Rose’s spine. To her, her sister-in-law Gitel had seemed like a doll, all dressed up in silly clothes and led from place to place, first by her parents and then by her groom. She hadn’t even been allowed to dance. They put her in a special chair, and there she sat, her elbows resting on the arms, a silly smile pasted on her too-rouged face, while all the women and girls danced rings around her and brought her cups of cold water as they fanned her sweating brow. What was fun about that?

  Rose didn’t answer, kissing her sister’s hot, sweating forehead with compassion before reluctantly leaving her at the entrance to her classroom and to the mercies of Mrs. Abramov, who stood waiting with a large wooden ruler tapping against her palm. While boys were regularly hit by their rebbes, the girls seldom were. Still, the noise of a ruler smashed against the old wooden desks was shattering. It was too bad she had missed out on having Mrs. Geller for her teacher, a beautiful young rebbitzin with sparkling dark eyes and a lovely smile who had not been teaching long enough to have lost her enthusiasm and patience.

  It made her sad to see Pearl so unhappy. But what could she do? Even with Mrs. Geller, the child would have had problems. She had no self-discipline. Her teacher sent home notes complaining at least twice a month that she talked nonstop to her friends and spent the rest of the time daydreaming. Talking-tos followed, and even a rare and occasional spanking, but they seemed to have no effect upon her at all. She was irrepressible, Rose thought with a reluctant kind of admiration as she hurried up the cracked steps of the old stone building to her own classroom before the late bell sounded.

  Like most parochial-school buildings in Williamsburg, theirs was a converted apartment house. Old, scuffed chairs and desks filled the tiny former bedrooms and living rooms. There were no lockers in which to store the heavy books that had to be dragged to and from home each day. There was no gym, no auditorium, no cooking class—nothing but blackboards and chalk. There weren’t even decorations on the walls: no snowflakes for winter or pumpkins for fall, just bare expanses painted an ugly, institutional green that set her teeth on edge.

  While she enjoyed the morning classes in Torah and Jewish law taught by pious rabbis or their learned wives—women in dark wigs and hats and calf-length skirts and opaque stockings—she nevertheless fingered the quarter in her pocket, anxiously waiting for Miss Fischer’s afternoon English class.

  She was entranced by Miss Fischer, who taught goyim in the mornings at PS 68. She was so young and pretty and wore red lipstick and high heels and did not cover her blond hair with anything at all. Rose loved the assignments she gave out to read stories and to write about them. It didn’t even feel like homework but like something she would happily do for fun. Miss Fischer was also a smiler, which the rabbis’ wives were not. She had beautiful white American teeth.

  “Girls, please be seated. I hope you’ve all brought your quarter?” Miss Fischer said.

  The fortunate ones nodded eagerly, while the others hung back in their seats trying to avoid eye contact.

  “Good. Now I have a surprise for you. Mr. White from the Dime Savings Bank of Williamsburg is here to speak with you about a subject that is so very important to your future that even your rabbis agreed he could come in and take up some class time. So please, be on your very best behavior and listen.”

  They stared at the smoothly shaven, bare-headed Gentile in his seersucker suit as they would have a tribesman from Zululand.

  “Hello, my name is Dan,” he said, his smile wide, as if he had heard a good joke. It was not returned. He continued smiling, not knowing what else to do in front of a class of foreign-looking, unsmiling little girls. “How many of you have ever been to a bank with your mom and dad?” he asked.

  Unsure they were allowed to speak to such a person at all, the girls lowered their eyes. Besides, none of them had either a “mom” or a “dad,” and their mamehs and tatehs were wont to keep money in bills in shoe boxes or under the mattress.

  He shifted uneasily. “What? No one? Well, I never…” He chuckled awkwardly. “Well, it’s like this, see. You earn money, or maybe your parents or relatives give it to you, what’s the best thing to do with it?”

  Someone finally raised her hand. “Buy something?” she said.

  “You could do that,” he replied, smiling but shaking his head, his face clearly indicating she’d gotten the answer wrong. “Let’s say you’ve got a dollar for your birthday. You could go to the candy store and fill up a brown paper bag with penny candy…”

  The girls suddenly smiled and nodded.

  “Whoah!
I say ‘could.’ But what will you have the next day if you do?”

  They looked at each other in surprise. Who ever thought about the next day when you had a dollar in your hand and a candy store around the corner?

  “I’ll tell you what! Bad teeth and a tummy ache!”

  This was certainly true and no laughing matter. But since their teacher, Miss Fischer, laughed, the girls allowed themselves confused smiles.

  “But if you put that money in the bank, the bank will add more money to it, so that you’ll have more than a dollar. And if you keep adding all the money you can to that amount, then one day, well, sir, you’ll have enough to purchase anything you want. A bicycle, a new television set…”

  The girls looked at each other in amazement at this startling information. Did the ownership of such things depend merely on having the money to buy them? Or did you need to be a wholly different person, living a totally different life? The boys had bicycles, but the girls? As for television sets, they were unheard of in religious homes.

  As they turned their appalled faces to him, it was his turn to be confused. “Well, maybe not those things, but something else, see? You decide what it is you want, see…?” He coughed. “I understand your teacher told you each to bring in a quarter today? Well, we at the Dime Savings Bank of Williamsburg are going to open bank accounts for each of you with that money! We’ll give each one of you a little book and write it down. And then we are going to give you each, absolutely free, another quarter, so that each of you will have fifty cents in your account! Every week, your parents are going to give you another quarter, which you’ll bring to school, and someone from the bank will be here to collect your money and write it down in your passbook. If you keep adding, then when you get to five dollars, we are also going to give you this valuable gift, absolutely free.”

  He reached into a bag, pulling out a box about six inches wide and six inches thick, painted black. The sighs of disappointment were audible. “It’s a brand-new Kodak box camera!” he explained. “You look in this end, and when you press this button, you can take a picture!”

  Rose felt her whole body tingle. Photos, like those in the magazines, she thought, feeling herself fill with excitement.

  “How many of you have one of these at home? Or maybe your dad or mom has one?”

  Even those who did have cameras at home were reluctant to admit it. Frivolous modern luxuries were considered a moral stain and being well-off a sign of impiety. After all, the men looked up to and admired in their world were scholars who had deliberately chosen to live in poverty in order to spend their time increasing their Torah knowledge so as to better understand and fulfill God’s will and inform others how they might do the same.

  “No? Well, then, you can be the first one in your family. Now, won’t that be swell?”

  *

  It took Rose two months to reach five dollars with the reluctant weekly quarter she got from her parents, supplemented by occasional babysitting money from the neighbors. She was given a coupon and told to take it to the bank. Even though it was around the corner from her school, she had never been inside. It was cavernous and dreamlike, with Greek columns and vast swathes of cold, rich marble on the walls and floors. When she picked up her camera, she found that something of the bank’s cold majesty had seeped into the little box, making it seem like an artifact from another world, a world of men in light summer suits and straw hats, pretty blondes like Marilyn chewing on earrings with lipstick-smeared lips, a world parallel to their world of dark bearded men in black coats and skullcaps and scrubbed-faced women with dark wigs low on their foreheads. It was another dimension, hovering just above their own, unseen, impenetrable. And now this thing had fallen into her hands as though through some unfathomable crack, linking her to a vast and unknown universe.

  It was thrilling.

  She held it tightly in her hands, running home in excitement.

  “Mameh, look!”

  “Vus is dus?” Her mother eyed it suspiciously.

  “A camera. From the Dime Savings Bank of Williamsburg. It’s free.”

  “Free?” Her mother arched her brows suspiciously, contemptuously, looking it over.

  “If you have five dollars in your bank account.”

  “You have already five dollars?” Her mother’s stern face melted into a grin, impressed. “Tateh, you hear that? Already Rose has a bank account, nuch, with five dollars!”

  “‘She saved for the purchase of a field and bought it, and she planted a vineyard from the work of her hands,’” her father quoted, smiling, coming into the kitchen. “My little eshes chayil!” He beamed at her.

  She blushed with delight.

  “And you know how to use it?” he asked her.

  “There is a book, with instructions.”

  He patted her head.

  “A lucky, pious yeshiva student will one day have a wonderful wife, eh, Mameh?” he said, stroking Rose’s head.

  Her heart overflowed with joy.

  “This is true,” her mother answered. “A girl who knows how to put one penny next to the other so her husband can sit and learn without worrying about supporting a family is a treasure.”

  “Let me take your picture, Mameh!”

  “What, is this a wedding?” she blustered, patting down her wig and taking off her apron.

  “With Tateh!” Rose begged.

  He backed off, waving his hands. “No, no. It’s bitul Torah, a waste of time.”

  “Come, Tateh. It takes a minute!” Her mother suddenly urged him with uncharacteristic insistence.

  He reluctantly stood beside her, careful not to touch her, squeezing his beard in his hand to smooth it down. “Wait!” He went to the closet and took out his large black hat, placing it carefully over his skullcap. “Now!” he ordered. “Nu, Mameh. Give a smile!”

  She glanced at him, a rare smile lighting up her careworn face.

  As Rose looked through her lens, she saw for the first time as if by magic that otherwise invisible bond connecting them.

  “Smile!” she said, and the word made her smile as well as she pressed her finger on the button.

  But when the picture was printed, the results were disappointing, the photo of her parents dark and blurry, their features almost indiscernible, nothing like she remembered. Still, long after her parents were no longer speaking to her and her own home was already filled with hundreds of the thousands of photos she was destined to take, she kept that one in a special box, treasuring it.

  4

  Williamsburg, Brooklyn, September 1963

  “But who will take me to school in the morning now?”

  “Don’t be a baby, Pearl! When I was your age, I not only went by myself, I walked you to school! Behave yourself and in three years, you’ll also be going with me to Bais Yaakov High School.”

  “You’ll be married by then.” Pearl sulked.

  “I have no plans like that, believe me. But At Bais Yaakov, they only take the good girls, the ones with the best reputations,” Rose warned her. “So you’ll have to start behaving yourself, stop rolling up your skirts and wearing bobby socks instead of tights. You’ll have to listen to Mameh and Tateh and not talk back to your teachers…”

  Pearl bit her lip, staring at her sister resentfully. “Like you never do anything wrong.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I know about the magazines. The ones you keep under the mattress.”

  Rose inhaled. “You little snoop! I’m not ashamed. There’s nothing wrong with them!”

  Pearl gave her a shrewd sidelong glance. “So why do you hide them, and only look at them at night with a flashlight, under the covers?”

  “Because Mameh and Tateh don’t understand about magazines.”

  Pearl sat down on Rose’s bed. “What do you like so much about them, Rose?”

  She sat down beside her sister, her eyes looking into the distance, far above Pearl’s head. “I don’t know. They tell me about things.”
/>   “What things?”

  “Things! Things that happen to people. Things people do. Places they go to. People that are not like us.”

  “Goyim?”

  “Don’t use that word. It makes you sound stupid.”

  “Mameh and Tateh use it all the time. Are you calling them stupid?”

  “NO, no. Of course not. Just, they came from Europe; they went through the war. The Gentiles killed their families.”

  “Our family.”

  “Of course. But Americans gave their lives to stop the Nazis. They liberated the camps…”

  Pearl began to fidget. “Why can’t you still take me to school, Rose?”

  “Because—for the millionth time—I have to catch a bus in the opposite direction.” Rose reached across to her sister, wiping Pearl’s tears away with her thumb. “Why don’t you want to go by yourself? Is there something you’re not telling me?”

  She shook her head.

  “I’ll talk to Mameh. Maybe she can walk you some mornings.”

  “She won’t!”

  They both knew that was true. Mameh had better things to do. Her youngest in school, she was now working full-time as a saleswoman in a bakery. She worked hard and expected the same from her family. She did not believe in spoiling her children by giving into their whims. Besides, the streets of Williamsburg were considered extremely safe and it was not a long walk.

  No one would have suspected what lay behind Pearl’s insistence. Only a few months before, while she was playing alone in front of the house as everyone was busy with Passover cleaning, a strange man in a pious beard and a black hat like her father’s had tried to talk to her and give her a candy, and when she refused, he’d reached out and held her tightly by the shoulder, pushing her into the alleyway. Mrs. Schultz suddenly sticking her head out of the window as she beat the dust from her pillows had made him turn around sharply and disappear. Pearl, convinced it was her own fault for insisting on playing outside while everyone else was involved in the mitzvah of preparing for the holiday, said nothing to anyone.