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FICTION:
The following fiction is written by B. Z. Niditch, the artistic
director of The Original Theatre. His works have been published
in The Literary Review, Denver Quarterly, Hawaii Review, Le Guepard (France),
Prism International, Jejune (Czech Republic), etc.
THE LAST JEWS OF SALONIKA
by
B. Z. Niditch
"The Jews have no bread, neither do they have Christ," or so said
some of the villagers around Salonika, the Greek city where the Jews had
lived for centuries before St. Paul traveled there.
The boy, Joseph, was twelve. Behind the town hall he
saw the Germans entering the city. There was a hushed quiet in Thessalonika
on that cold, raw day. Short-wave radio reports from Serbia had warned
the people that Nazi Germany would soon invade their Greek island. "All
Slavs will be slaves, Jews will be shot on sight, all socialists and liberals
will be killed." The boy heard that those who dared oppose any puppet
regime set up by Germany would be tortured and killed.
Joseph's family was divided between modern Hellenists, who
had adopted Greek ways and a smaller group of Maccabees, those who kept up
the Jewish traditions. Joseph's older, brother, Steven, was favored
by many for his youth and beauty. Though three years apart, the boys
resembled each other. Joseph looked up to his brother, admired him
for his strength and intelligence, and strived to follow his quiet ways.
Life had been good for these Jewish sons of Greece until the
Germans came. Soon their neighbors began to look away while their books,
furniture and late mother's artwork were taken by the local Fascist thugs
who looted their home. They even took away the precious letters, articles
and books their professor father had written and kept under lock and
key.
Some Jews in the village had heard that
the Nazis planned to register the Jews in Athens. Those German-speaking
Jews, thinking they were more German than Jewish because of their birth and
shared language, were fooled into believing that they were simply registering
for a census and might find some favor by cooperating with them. They
were tricked into coming into the city and were immediately rounded up and
deported by trains bound for the East. Steven instinctively knew that
these German romantics, lovers of Schubert and Schumann, who lived for Heine
and Lessing, sat under the feet of Mendelssohn and Freud, discounted the
rumors even though he tried to tell them what was being heard on Serbian
radio.
The Germans spent their holiday rounding up Jews all over Greece.
Suddenly, and unexpectedly, the Greeks rose up and staved off the Germans
for a critical period before the invaders opted for Russia and ordered the
Italian Fascists to occupy Greece. Unlike the Germans, the Italians
would help Joseph and Steven and others of Salonika. The Nazis, though,
had taken pleasure in watching the Jewish people suffer and starve, even
sending the pilfered toys, jewelry, and clothing back to Germany as presents
for their wives and children.
Steven found a girlfriend, Melena, who fought in the Resistance.
Their father had died from a self-administered poison of hemlock.
The boys buried him, then Steven decided to send Joseph into hiding.
Joseph became thin and sickly, while Steven scrounged around for scraps
of food to stave off their daily hunger. "We have the Itlaians here
now. They won't hurt us. They are more like us. Some even
share with us their food and clothing, even their fears."
"I keep worrying that you're going to run away and leave me
alone," Jospeh said. "I'll only do that for your sake, to find food
or a better hiding place," said Steven. "You have Melena, she needs
you more than I do," Joseph said. "That's not true," said Steven. "I
am here for you."
That night Steven heard about a fishing boat leaving for Palestine
and took Joseph with him. He soon joined the Palestine Jewish Brigade
and fought against Rommel in North Africa. The boys never went back
to Salonika for they knew there would hardly be anyone left there to care
for them. Melena had died in the Resistance. In their minds,
the boys would be the last Jews of Salonika.
Fiction by Mike Lipstock of NYC. He enjoys writing
stories, particularly Yiddish themes.
THE CANARSIE ROSE
by
Mike Lipstock
In 1931 I was eleven. Grandma was
ninety-three. It was the depression and she lived with us in a cold
water tenement five floors up. She was bent, wrinkled, and had only
one tooth left in her mouth. But, boy, she had a thousand years of
magic stored in her head. And to a kid like me, she knew everything.
She had all kinds of powders and colored liquids in her room, and when
she mixed them up and we slugged them down, no one ever got sick.
She refused to learn English. When I asked her why, she'd
shrug and say in Yiddish, "English won't help when the Cossacks come.
They'll still break our heads."
"But Grandma, this is America, we don't have Cossacks here."
She'd stare at me for a second and then mumble. "Cossacks
are everywhere!"
"You know," Mom said one day, "Grandma was once very famous."
"What for, Ma?"
"She grew a rose and it was beautiful. It was six inches
wide and white like the cream from the top of the milk. It was so famous
that two men from the Czar even came to look. They gave her a paper
and it was such an honor that the Rabbi himself read it to us from the
shul."
"Was it like a medal, Ma?"
"Yeah, some medal. A week later the Cossacks came
riding through the shtetl breaking our heads and tearing the rose to pieces.
Right after that we were all on a boat sailing for America."
The story of the rose bugged me and I begged Pop to find
her another. Where we lived a blade of grass was considered a plant.
A rose bush? Unheard of. Leave it to Pop, a week later
he lugged a pot up five flights and handed Grandma a tiny new rose bush.
She immediately sifted the soil in her hands and nodded her head in
pleasure. After gently placing it on the fire escape she kissed Pop on both
cheeks and cried.
That summer I could see why the Czar sent his men to give her
a prize. She fed and rubbed her rose bush with different concoctions.
Even the thorns became her freinds. The bush grew sturdy and when a
bud finally appeared, she nurtured it like another child. At night
she would sit near the fire escape and speak tenderly to it in Slavish, Polish,
Romanash, and a few more that I didn't understand. In the beginning
of July, six souls crouched on the fire escape, dizzy with excitement, watching
as the huge bud unfolded its creamy white petals. She had grown a perfect
white rose.
Not long after that Pop gave us some good news. The bunch
of us, my two sisters, Grandma, and Mom and Pop were moving to Brooklyn to
a section called Canarsie out in the boondocks. Around us were miles
of farmland stretching into the distance.
We were homesteading in a part of Brooklyn that was like the
plains of Iowa and Kansas. Flat rolling land, green with eggplant,
zucchini and tomatoes growing everywhere. Grandma took one look and
started to cry. Ninety-three and she had finally discovered America.
The house came with a backyard, and Pop started a vegetable
garden. Mom planted hollyhocks and some other stuff, but the centerpiece
was the rose bushes, Grandma's private preserve. That summer she planted
six in different colors: reds, pinks, peach, and her creamy white that
was going to look like the top of the milk. They bloomed and were gorgeous.
But still, Grandma wasn't satisfied.
"I need a horse," she said. "Not just a horse, a special
horse."
"For what, Grandma?"
"With the right horse I can use the manure for the rose.
Maybe this time the Cossacks won't come."
"Isn't all horse manure the same, Grandma?"
"What are you, meshuggah? There are hundreds of qualities
and I need the best!"
So Mom and I were always on the lookout for the right kind
of horse manure. We carried a shovel and filled bag after bag. They
all failed Grandma's acid test. Like a fine wine sniffer she would
pulverize the manure in her hand, take a whiff, and proclaim our fertilizer
no good. Poor Grandma, she was looking for the perfect bouquet.
And then one day we had a big surprise, new neighbors moved
in next door. They arrived with a big horse and wagon that said Borden's
Milk on the side. Grandma and Mom were at Bill and Grace Hart's door
the minute the furniture was inside. They carried a big welcome basket
filled with Jewish goodies: humintashin, strudel, even the ruggala
that I was counting on eating that night. The Hart's were Irish and
their brogue was as foreign to Grandma as the man in the moon. The
gesture, though, brought tears to the old milkman's eyes. His horse,
Buck, and the Borden's wagon was still at the curb and when Grandma looked
him over...she swooned!
"You see that horse," she said. "He has a golden tuchas.
When he kverches, diamonds will come out!"
"How do you know, Grandma?"
"How do I know boychick? With a horse like that,
the Czar gave me a medal."
Bill was a kindred spirit in his love for flowers and never
failed to leave a bag of fertilizer at our front door with two quarts of
milk. By now they were old pals with a friendship based on shrugs,
grimaces and red and blue liquids that they both shared. With the mixture
of Grandma's voodoo and Bill's manure they were developing gargantuan flowers
and rose buds as big as a fist.
Just when he was needed most, Buck developed a severe case of
constipation. No more diamonds were tumbling out. It was a crisis
and in a few days the Borden Milk company sent a replacement, a horse named
Nick. I thought Nick was great, but Grandma pined away for Buck.
More bad news. Bill told us Buck had three days to get well or
he'd be turned into dog food.
"Murderers! Murderers!" Grandma screamed. She was positive
the Cossacks were out to get her new rose.
"Not this time boychick!"
The next day Bill took Grandma and me to the Borden stable and
we got ready for the cure. A gallon of prunes, plums and other stuff from
her arsenal of medications produced nothing but a little wind. This
was much more than Grandma expected. We slept that night in the barn
with Buck and towards dawn we watched as the old magician started her mysterious
incantations. Bill was hypnotized. She was calling forth the same spirits
that his sainted mother invoked when he was a boy. He crossed himself
a couple of times and we watched as Grandma whipped out a Star of David and
swung it in front of Buck three times. Nothing, not even a little gas.
But she was biding her time. When the sun rose in the east, she
made her big move.
"Boychick," she shouted, "what we need is a tub full of Shmetina.
You understand? Shumetina!"
"What do you need sour cream for, Grandma?"
"Don't ask, just get it!"
So Bill and Pop got a ton of sour cream and ladled it into Buck's
trough. Not just plain sour cream but stuff that she fortified with
royal blue broth. That horse Buck lapped up the sour cream like an
old Galitziana (member of a neighboring Jewish tribe), licking his chops.
Suddenly there was an explosion that almost blew off the rafters and caused
the other horses to stampede out of Borden's front gate. Fertilizer
came pouring out of Buck like a burst dam. Fertilizer so rich in enzymes
and proteins that it revolutionized Canarsie farms forever. A teaspoon
of Buck's manure now accomplied what fifty pounds did before. Grandma
and her blue sour cream had produced a new strain that created monsters in
the garden. Cantaloupes as big as basketballs, dahlias as big as your
head and roses. . . Oh boy! What roses!
The Canarsie Chamber of Commerce and Brooklyn Botanical Gadens
awarded Grandma and Bill its highest honor for their creamy white rose.
This new strain was even given a Latin name: "Buckitus
Shemtinitus."
Wen she accepted her medal, Grandma leaned over and whispered in my
ear, "Boychick, get ready! Tonight the Cossacks will come for the
rose."
Elisha Porat has published several volumes
of fiction and poetry in Hebrew. His works have appeared (in translation)
in Israel, Canada, England, and the United States. He won the 1996
Israel's Prime Minister's Prize for Literature.
Porat grew up in Israel in the early 1930's
on the Kibbutz Ein Hahoresh his parents helped found. He still lives
there.
Mr. Porat served in the Israeli Army and fought in both the Six Day War and
the Yom Kippur War. Aside from his writing as a member of a Kibbutz,
he has worked as a farmer. Currently he edits several literary
journals.
All stories translated from the Hebrew.
JEWISH THOUGHT -
A Story
by
Elisha Porat
Translated by Alan Sacks 1991.
A.
I met Tzila Biran, a young woman from one a large northern
kibbutz, at one of Professor Rosenfeld's lectures. I was late
because the lecture was not in its usual place. Professor Rosenfeld
drew such a large crowd of young people that the small classrooms in the
liberal arts building could not hold them all, so the professor moved from
one large, vacant hall to another.
Though it was impossible to know where his talks would be given,
his audience loyally followed. When I arrived, the students were pilfering
chairs from the next rooms. The audience overflowed out the door into
the corridor. I pulled up a chair and joined those at the front to
catch a few of the professor's pearls of wisdom. Tzila came in and
sat beside me. I saw at once that she was an attentive and very diligent
student.
The professor spoke of the teachings of Rabbi Soleveitchik
who, from his home across the sea in New York, was carrying on, in a manner
of speaking, the tradition of his Lithuanian forefathers. Even as he
offered a nod of respect to the free thinkers, he intended his remarks as
well for his followers living in Zion. Her book open before her, Tzila
closely followed his discourse. Each time he quoted a passage from
his own copy, she moved her lips in unison. I noticed that she had
a heavy, soiled cloth bookbag and wondered if she came to Jerusalem for a
day or two as students from remote kibbutz settlements often did. Her
hands were those of a laboring woman, and I detected the hint of a fine,
light mustache above her lip. She was seated so near me that I heard
her every movement and observed her every motion, however slight. When I
allowed myself this small liberty, I could also draw into my lungs the scents
of her body and her clothes, and even of the bag set on the floor by her
feet.
At the end of each lecture, I would meet some friends in the
building's little cafeteria. Over cups of coffee and dry crackers, we mercilessly
dissected the presentation, Rabbi Soleveitchik and his students. We
held in high esteem only Professor Rosenfeld and the lovely, charming girls
squeezing their bodies between the cafeteria's closely-spaced tables. By
the time I slipped my volume into my black bookbag and straightened up to
see who and what was around me, Tzila was almost out the far exit. Her
movements were so quiet, and her gait so stealthy, that I never heard her
gather up her papers, move her chair and sling the heavy cloth bag over her
back. From behind, her walk seemed somewhat clumsy and her blouse,
which fell a bit short, flapped loose at her sides. A sudden and
inexplicable wave of affection for her swelled within me. Long after she
disappeared up the stairs, I saw her lips echoing the book open before her.
I learned my lesson and, the week after that, arrived early
at the liberal arts building.
I then had plenty of time both to ascertain exactly where Professor Rosenfeld's
lecture would be held and to plan how I would meet Tzila as she descended
the maze of stairs. I already knew her name, which was stitched in
violet thread on her bag, and even the northern kibbutz where she lived,
whose delivery stamp I had glimpsed when I peeked at her open book.
All that, however, merely whetted my curiosity. I saw
before me a young woman who had long since outgrown her youth.
She surely was a teacher of Jewish thought pursuing advanced
studies on sabbatical, taking the trouble to recharge batteries drained by
hostile, apathetic classes who shuddered at the very term "Jewish thought."
Again the hour grew late, but still Tzila had not arrived.
The professor began his lecture and the usual spectacle unfolded before us.
From rooms close by, some of his young, faithful students dragged chairs
into the corridor so that, god forbid, torah-lovers coming from afar would
not lack a seat. I had already made a number of trips to the water
cooler and poked my nose into the filthy men's room again and again, read
with boredom each plate on the doors up and down the hall and even stood
at the cluttered notice board to discover how nerve-racking and stressful
life was for young students. Every inch of the board was plastered with notes
seeking or offering tiny rooms in old apartments, notices of mental health
self-help courses and countless invitations to parties, tennis matches and
special religious services.
She arrived at last. From a distance, I recognized her
awkward limp caused by the weight of her bag. I tarried just long enough
for her to grab a chair and join the river of students overflowing its
banks.
Then I too went forward, took a chair and pressed behind her
so close that I could
stick out my tongue and lick the hair on the nape of her neck. My eye
lingered as she set out her books, drew forth the wide sheet of paper on
which she liked to scribble and ran her tongue over the spot on her upper
lip where the faint line of fuzz sprouted. I saw next how she gave
herundivided attention to the professor's remarks. She bobbed her head
in agreement at the proper times and silently mouthed every question he
permitted.
When he asked for volunteers to read aloud selections from
Rabbi Soleveitchik's works, I saw her legs tense to rise, but others in the
hall were faster. The professor could not see how ready she was, how
responsive to his every whim.
At the end of the lecture, I was quick to follow her. I
carefully climbed the stairs after her and out of the liberal arts building
into the darkness falling on the campus. I trailed her slowly, matching
my pace to hers, until she passed through the university's gate and walked
up the busy street to the central bus station.
Unbelievable, I said to myself, she's not staying in the city.
I sensed in her a stubborn determination. She went ahead resolutely
and without stopping. Someone is waiting for her on the kibbutz way
up north. Someone there needs her very much. I stood by the ticket
windows until I saw her pick up her bookbag and get on the last bus to
Haifa.
B.
Tzila Biran spotted me another time as I walked arm in arm
with a friend through the rented booths of the book fair. "Your wife
is a very beautiful woman," she said, lowering her voice, after one of the
lectures. I laughed so hard that she drew back her chair.
"That wasn't not my wife," I said. "She's a friend who
works as an editor at one of the
publishing houses."
"It's not important," she replied. "Please forgive my
mistake." From what she had said that, I gleaned that if I had any
romantic intentions towards her, I had better keep them to myself. I
suddenly remembered seeing a young woman who resembled her at the book fair.
She had sat by one of the displays studying a catalogue and never looked
up at the stream of passersby. My friend had asked me about a book
and I had been distracted from Tzila's stooping figure.
Only later did I recall the hair on her nape so familiar to
me and the prim collar of her
blouse. I had come to know them very well from my observations during
the weekly lectures. Had my inattention offended her?
I invited her that night to relax with our little circle of
barbed wits after the professor
finished his lesson. She shouldered her heavy cloth bag and, without
saying either yes or no, started in her camel-like gait towards the stairs.
I did not allow her to escape. I sprang forward, blocked her
way on the stairs and said, "Come on, Tzila, have coffee with us in the
cafeteria. You won't be sorry." She shook her head no, but I
had the feeling that she did not want me to let her go and dragged her down
to the next floor, where the group had already taken seats at our little
table. They pulled up extra chairs when we arrived and made room for
us.
"Sit down, sit down. After the distilled wisdom of Professor
Rosenfeld, everyone needs to unwind. Don't be like all those kibbutzniks
always hurrying for the last bus with a glance at their watches and apologizing
that they haven't the time to stay."
Tongues wagged around the table about Rabbi Soleveitchik and
his eclectic rabbinical language. On the other hand, some commended
him for distinguishing the essential from the trivial. For some reason,
the group believed that if he were in Jerusalem, he would lead the ultra-Orthodox
camp against the hot-heads of "Gush Emunim."
Tzila suddenly spoke up. Flushing all over, she gave
us a disjointed account of the time she had seen sleeping bags rolled up
at one a yeshiva she had visited. In all innocence, she asked the rabbi's
wife, "What are all the sleeping bags for?"
"What, don't you know?" the rebbetzin scolded her. "We
leave each Friday night to sleep at a new settlement."
My ever-rowdy companions remained silent and let her finish
the story without interruption. "This dark fanaticism," said someone
in the stillness that prevailed around the table, "will someday lead us to
tragedy and drown us in rivers and rivers of blood.
The sleeping bags are only new symbols for an old world of sanctified
greed."
I fixed my gaze on her. She suddenly appeared so warm
that my hand, as if of its own, nearly reached out to cradle her neck. Her
eyes seemed out of focus and she did not know which way to turn her fevered
face. One could see that she had been careless in choosing her clothes,
which were in disarray. She bent to sip her coffee as though unaware
of the others around her and the reviving noise. Our sharp tongues
ranged over every subject within reach, lazy teachers and dull students and
Professor Rosenfeld's blind admirers.
Some other day, I would gladly have made myself a part of the
wicked festivity raging around the table, but Tzila Biran's mute threw a
damper over me. I could not forget that it was I who had persuaded
her to break her settled routine, to deviate just once from her wild dash
to the bus station.
When she stood up, so did I, and when she turned towards the
broadstairs leading to the spacious grounds above, I turned after her.
Where was it she was in such a hurry to go after the lectures? "Why
haven't you taken a room in the dormitories or near the university?" I asked
her, and added, "Perhaps I can help you in some way."
"No thank you," Tzila answered. "I don't need any help.
And please don't go to any trouble. Anyway, I can't stay in the
city."
"Are you going back to your kibbutz in the north? What
time do you get home? And
how do you travel at night? Alone all the way every week? Now
that's really crazy."
"I haven't any choice," Tzila replied. "I have a little
girl who waits up for me at home
every night."
"But you have a husband and parents and friends," I said.
"You can make arrangements. I know kibbutz life."
She blushed in the dark, and I could feel the color jetting
to the base of her neck. After a brief silence, she said, "No, that
is impossible. I live alone with my child, and I have to get back."
I accompanied her, saying nothing, to the central station.
I began to suspect that she was concealing something in her life from
me. I suddenly felt sorry for the young woman beside me. I wanted
to switch bookbags, so that I would carry her heavy bag while she took mine,
but she refused.
If I could have thought of some idea that would relieve her
depressing silence or ease her camel-like gait, I would generously have offered
it, but nothing that would lift her spirits her came to mind.
The same old story, I thought to myself. Callow youths
rashly married, pregnant too soon, the baby practically a surprise and then
the father ups and leaves. That's not how he saw his life, perishing
among heaps of notebooks and the gripes of a weary teacher. And then
again, maybe not.
Perhaps hers was one of the heart-wrenching legacies of the
war. A wonderful marriage, a brief, glorious summer full of promise
and happiness, then her young man called down that autumn to the Suez Canal,
never to return.
You could read sad stories like that ad nauseam in the pages
of the weekly supplements. But I did not permit myself to ask her any personal
questions.
Before she boarded the bus, I did ask how she had liked our
little coffee klatch in the cafeteria. She smiled at me and tucked
in the wayward tails of her blouse. "If you did, make it a habit with
us. It's a weekly meeting. We'll start with coffee with the gang
and see how it goes." She smiled again and propped up her cloth bag
so she could lean against it during the long ride.
I told her I had a small room among the dormitories in Jerusalem.
If she preferred that to the table in the cafeteria, we could drop
by my lodgings. "Just ring twice."
Beads of perspiration began to glisten through the fine, light
strands of youthful peach fuzz on her upper lip. As the bus pulled
way, I slowly left the station, my heart heavy with the words I had failed
to speak.
C.
One day, Professor Rosenfeld assembled the faithful after the
completion of his lecture and invited them to his home. I turned to
Tzila and asked if she would go with me.
"What for?" she asked. "What's so special about his
house?"
"It's some family celebration, I'm sure," I answered. "But
the highlight comes later when the professor offers personal comments, straight
from the heart, to his favorite students. Come on, we'll tag along with them
one time. You'll see, it'll be interesting." She hemmed and hawed
but I insisted. "And if it gets late and you can't make it home tonight,
I'll take care of you," I said. "I'd
be happy to share my room in the dormitories with you." She still
hesitated. Her hands fiddled with the notebooks and texts in the bag
at her feet.
Finally, she looked at me and the lecture hall growing empty.
"Why don't we leave our bookbags at the coat racks," I suggested,
"to take a load off our feet?" But Tzila would not part from her bag
and slung it over her shoulder. I had to clutch my black bookbag and
hurry after her for fear that she would lose her nerve somewhere on the stairs
and resume her usual route to the bus station.
She did not change her mind. We walked side by side down
the steep short-cut to the eastern gate and sailed through a dense thicket
fragrant with the fresh smellof pine needles. The white rock came into view
occasionally. Tzila nearly tripped over it and when I caught her fall,
she willingly held on. We slowly descended to the exit in the wadi.
She suddenly was moved to tell me of a sweet gesture made by her students,
who knew of the long hours she spent traveling south on the suffocating bus
to Jerusalem and back. Some days before, two girls had risen at the
end of a routine lesson, stammered something about the need to renew one's
zeal and drive, and presented her a huge thermos.
She had been touched. It was a gift from the whole class,
the girls said when she tried to thank them, even those students who could
barely tolerate Jewish thought.
"It was as though they knew how every penny I save goes to
building a basic library in Judaism, and how thirsty I get on these insane
bus rides."
Many guests had already gathered at the professor's house.
The party was in full swing. He had put on a wholly different face
and appeared before his faithful as a genial family man, befriending strangers
and introducing outsiders into the infectious good cheer of his home.
After announcing the family celebration and raising his glass for a
brief toast, he turned to the real business at hand.
"The time has come," the professor began, "for us to start
sharing some of the riches we have stored up over the school year. There
are others less fortunate than we, even some who know none of the joy of
Judaism and the crowning glories of Israel. He who is wealthy," like
the professor and his faithful students, "must know that the essence of all
learning is simply this: give of yourself to others."
He had already consulted a select inner circle of confidants
to whom he had presented a plan we would surely approve.
There was no better time to reveal its main points, that we
might begin our sacred task
at last.
Tzila and I sat by the door somewhat apart from the crowd at
the professor's feet. Most of them were excitable youths.
Though they crouched on the floor under his desk, not much
was required to inflame their passion. At once, they began drafting
"working papers" and formulating proposals. The professor turned the reignsof
the meeting over to one of his students while he mingled with his darlings.
The enthusiastic young students talked about soldiers they had met
stationed at outposts in the Jordan Valley, withered not by the heat of the
sun but by a void in their hearts.
How those people yearned, openly or not, for a sweet drop of
welcoming the Jewish Sabbath, for the warmth and beauty bestowed by the forgotten
customs of our fathers. It was not only soldiers who hungered for our
message. There were also youths in their thousands, in the towns springing
up around Jerusalem, who were just waiting for the good tidings about to
gush from this room. We should all know that this nation had a great
thirst for Judaism. Here we were, shut up in lecture halls, wasting
our nights on pointless paperwork in libraries, while outside real life hummed,
fates were fixed and events decreed. Where were we? What was
our contribution? Would we squander this historic golden moment?
I saw where his remarks were leading and whispered to Tzila
that we were no longer needed here. We could not plunge into the valley
to canvass the outposts or depart for the youth recreation centers in the
villages nearby to prepare the boys for their bar mitzvah ceremonies. We
two, who had come a long way to draw some warmth from Professor Rosenfeld's
light, were exempt from the holy crusade on which his students were embarking.
We rose unobtrusively, slipped through the youths who packed the doorway
and even sat on the stoop outside, and retreated to the peace of the street.
I invited Tzila to my room in the dormitories. So my offer would
seem honorable and upright, I added that the dorm had a well-stocked library
on the second floor, a small self-service snack bar and even a humble synagogue
where the students themselves conducted services.
Tzila was quite hungry, so we took seats at the snack bar.
The time had long since come and gone for her usual trip home, but
I did not dare to ask any questions. I was afraid she would rise and
leave, and this opportune moment, which had unexpectedly presented itself
to me, would pass in vain. While I ordered whatever she wanted, I told
her that she could ask me a little about myself. I was trying to strike
up a conversation, dispel some of our uneasiness. She inquired about
my family, my wife and children, and I noticed that she was listening intently
to my perfunctory replies. Out of the blue, she asked where I had been
during the last war. I warned her that that was a dangerous question.
I had so much to say, my remarks would be more numerous than the sands
of the sea and seven nights would not suffice to hear even a small portion
of them. Still, since she had asked, I told her something of the
interminable months I had lived through and gave her the merest taste of
my innermost thoughts about the war.
She listened, absorbed, to my account. Suddenly, she
blushed from her throat to the V-neck of her blouse. She turned red
so quickly that I wanted to lay my open hand over the blotch, as if I had
been exposed to the forbidden sight of her flesh stripped naked before me.
Averting her eyes, she asked if I had returned whole from the war,
mentally sound, that is. Had I not abhorred my wife when I came back?
Had I not detested my children? Had not our room on the
kibbutz felt like a cage?
And the grounds of the commune, the soil and the lawns, had
they not repulsed me each time I trod them?
D.
I hoisted her heavy bookbag for the ascent to my room on the
second floor. "Here's the public phone, do you see it? And here
to the right is the synagogue. At the top of the stairs is the roof,
a huge, cracked spread of tar and plaster and pigeon droppings. Although
the girls complain that it's unpleasant to sunbathe up there in the mess,
it does afford a wonderful view of the mountains south of the city, Mt. Gila,
the monastery below it and Bethlehem in the distance. No, wait a minute,"
I told Tzila. "Take a seat in this old armchair and I'll put some tea
on to boil. You see, the room may be small but it has everything, a
sink, a toilet and an electric kettle. I don't have to run for the
bus at night like a madman. Now sit down and tell me everything, how
he went off to war and what happened to him before he came back. I'm
beginning to understand some things for myself, like your Jewish studies
and why you have to travel while your daughter stays home alone."
As I poured the tea, I had the urge to place my rough palm
on her crimson throat and
bosom, but she looked at me with those short-sighted eyes of hers and licked
drops of sweat off her lip. She seemed so dependent on me that I knew
I could not so much as lay a finger on her. She choked on her words
and it was unclear to me whether she really wanted to tell me of her life
or the comforting conditions I had forced on her had put her in the mood.
Professor Rosenfeld's name had come to her attention at just
the right time, when the routine of her life was broken. In the beginning,
there were only the trips with her husband to the hospital in Haifa for extended
treatment following his return from the war. There had been consultations,
discussions and sleepless nights, after which the kibbutz advised her to
leave and go her own way so she might rebuild what the war had destroyed.
But life is not so simple.
I sat beside her, sipping tea and urging herto drink with me.
I sensed things that she had not spoken. He had returned from the war
crippled in spirit. Long days and nights of semi- consciousness and
then, when he came to, the refusal to recognize Tzila ashis wife. He fell
on her and asked, what she was doing in his room, what had she to do with
him and the little girl? It was interesting that he had known the girl
at once and embraced her without reservation. He had even told Tzila
that she was not needed, he could take care of the child by himself. In
the weeks after that, however, he went into decline, sinking into a deep
sleep in which he forgot all his obligations and from which he did had no
desire to wake. Then came more trips and doctors' visits. Finally,
he abandoned their room hoping to settle himself into the home of his attending
physician. With difficulty, the doctor convinced him to leave her house,
but he would not return home to his ruined family.
Sometimes, in a rare period of sanity, he suggested that they
amicably separate and even encouraged her to make a new life for herself.
She wept as she spoke. Her tears mingled with the tea
in her cup. There was nothing I could do to stem the flow but put some
paper towelets near her. Beyond the room's thin walls, young students
working off excess energy raised a ruckus in the dorm. Loud music blared
through the cracks and the sound of cushions thrown at the furniture thudded
from their rooms.
Soon they would begin to jump around and race like the devil
through the hall shrieking with abandon. I was all too familiar with
my neighbors' habits. I had once made the naive mistake of going out
to calm them down. I had lost my breath instead as a captive impressed
into their hallway sprints.
One incident more than anything else had cut her to the quick
and inflicted an healable wound. Others had seen himwandering one night
across the lawn, lugging bedding to the room of a good friend of hers.
That insult had finally made up her mind. Never mind that he
left for war hale and hearty and came home from the Suez Canal a broken shell
of a man. Never mind that a doctor had tended him day and night, and
that he had made promises and swore to their daughter oaths he never kept.
But to pick himself up after all that and slink into that woman's room,
on the other side of a patch every damn inch of which was observed by a thousand
eyes, that was more than she could bear. It was then, when she went
to pieces and even was neglecting her beloved students, that she proposed
continuing her education.
She would have been required to do so anyway and, if not for
the war, which delayed her schedule, certainly would already have begun her
leave. Friends recommended the professor in Jerusalem who offered balm
for afflicted souls and she resolved to go despite all the hardships, the
rushing and the fatigue and the uncomprehending looks of her students.
So, I told myself, it is not Rabbi Soleveitchik's commentary
in progress, or age-old Jewish values miraculously transplanted to modern
society, or the light burning unseen within us, or the wisdom of our fathers
slumbering deep in our souls, or even the tireless efforts of Professor Rosenfeld
to kindle the sparks dormant in us all.
It was a only matter of a small, frail woman, a stricken daughter
and a man who, though sound of body when he returned from the Suez Canal,
brought tragedy down on the three of them. I was no great sage. What
had I done for her? Occasionally whispered jokes in her ear during
the lectures? Dragged her to my circle of friends in the basement
cafeteria?
Mysteriously trailed her in the dark of the stairs to see what
course she was taking and whether there was any chance I could deflect her
to my room in the dorms?
And if I had done one thing or another for her, I also, most
unfairly, had demanded much more from her in exchange.
It was purely by chance that matters had turned out one way
and not another. It was luck that she was a woman riven by doubts and
I too hesitant to take risks. Had we been different people, I would
long since have insinuated myself into her mixed-up life, immediately after
our encounter at the book fair or perhaps even earlier than that.
I looked at Tzila seated in my room and saw before my eyes another
woman blooming through the image of neglect I knew. Who cared about
the flapping tails of her blouse and her pants unstitching at the seams,
or the uncombed hair on her neck and her perpetually disheveled collar, or
the soft, blond down above her lips?
How deceptive one's eyes are. Nor can one rely too much
on the murmurs of the heart. I had pushed my chair against hers so
I might lean close and sniff the scent of her body, I had blocked her path
on the stairs and forced her to descend with me to the cafeteria, and yet
I had failed to see from the start what I had to see. If she had not
blushed so startlingly that my hand of itself had sought to reach forward
and clothe the flushing nake_ness suddenly exposed, perhaps I would never
have noticed her. And she would have been invisible among the crowd
of students devoted to the professor who taught Jewish thought in
Jerusalem.
Reprinted with permission of the author.
More works of Elisa Porat here.
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