In Shaul Lasker’s apartment later that evening, in air still thick with the aromas of recent cooking, we stand around a dining-room table laden with food and crowded with children as my father chants the Kiddush. Then we wash our hands and Shaul recites the blessing over the braided breads. The children speak French and Yiddish and are clearly on their best behavior in the presence of my father. They are all awed by him and begin to relax only when he starts telling stories about the deeds of the Rebbe during the early years of the Second World War. He tells them how the Rebbe helped get the great artist Jacob Kahn out of Paris the day before the Gestapo came to his studio to arrest him; how an art dealer arranged a meeting between the Rebbe and Picasso, and they met in Picasso’s studio on the Rue des Grands Augustins, and to this day no one knows what they talked about; how the Rebbe, before he left Paris, established a secret Ladover yeshiva that operated all through the war. Then my father suddenly asks for a length of previously tied string and one of the children brings it to him and he proceeds to play cat’s cradle with the younger children. During the main course—roast chicken, peas and carrots, noodle pudding with raisins—he gives the older ones a riddle to solve. “Listen carefully and see if you can find the answer,” he tells them, his eyes shining with pleasure. “An old Hasid called his sons together and told them that he wished them to divide his property in a certain way after he departed for the True World. The oldest son was to take one-half; the next son, one-third; the youngest son, one-ninth. Soon afterward the old Hasid was called by the Master of the Universe to his eternal rest. The sons wished to obey their father, but they discovered that their father’s property consisted of seventeen goats, and seventeen cannot be divided by one half or one third or one ninth. They didn’t want to kill any of the goats and divide it, because each goat was much more valuable alive than dead. And so they went to the Rebbe, and in his wisdom the Rebbe immediately solved their problem. What did the Rebbe tell them?”
They puzzle over it excitedly and unsuccessfully for the rest of the main course, and then, over tea and sponge cake, my father turns again to the older children. “I have another riddle for you. Are you ready for another riddle? All right. There was a Hasid who owned a little lamb, a big cat, and a big dog. It is known that big cats can do great harm to little lambs, and big dogs can do great harm even to big cats but will never hurt little lambs. The Hasid cared for his animals, was with them always, and prevented them from quarreling and, God forbid, harming one another. Now it happened that one day there was a terrible storm, and the river rose outside the home of the Hasid and threatened his life and the lives of his animals. The Hasid had to get himself and his animals to the other side of the river, where there was a hill that would protect them from the rising water. But he had only one little boat, and in that boat he could only take with him one animal at a time. How did the Hasid get the animals across the river in such a way that they did not harm each other when they were left on the riverbanks without him?”
I listen to him, sense clearly the light and ease that surround him, the soft and certain grace in which he is bathed, and I wonder where it all was when I was growing up and sitting at Shabbos meals with him and my mother in our apartment in Brooklyn. Was I so preoccupied with my own self that I never saw it? Had he pushed the softness away because he needed to appear strong in the face of my mother’s illness and during all the hard journeying years that followed? I loved him, but we never showed each other love. Why? That was perhaps the most bitter riddle of all.
Miriam Lasker—trim, blue-eyed, wearing a lovely pale-blue dress, her head covered with a kerchief—moved efficiently back and forth between the kitchen and the dining room, helped by the two oldest girls. No one started a course until she took her place at the table. She participated in the conversation: Torah talk; tales about the Rebbe; concern about the nascent power of the right wing in the recent French elections; the efforts of the Ladover movement to influence the forthcoming elections in Israel. She had majored in political science in Brooklyn College and thought the movement would do best in the small development towns of Israel, especially among the alienated religious Sephardim. Years back she had worked as a buyer for the Printemps department store on the Boulevard Haussmann, but now she was home all the time with the children. Shaul had told me earlier that she was once again pregnant—in her second month with their ninth child. I looked at her and thought of Devorah and the crippling of her life during the years of terror in the sealed apartment with Max Lobe and his family, Devorah and the miscarriages, Devorah and the tenacity with which she wrote her children’s books, Devorah and her passionate caring for Rocheleh and Avrumel.
We join my father in the singing of zemiros. Then my father leads us in the Grace After Meals. Miriam and the children clear the table. I sit in the living room with Shaul and my father, and we talk about the Torah portion of the week. The children are going off to bed. I am very tired.
Shaul says he’ll walk me back to the yeshiva.
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I need the walk.”
“We will walk tomorrow afternoon,” my father says to me. He is sitting on the couch, a midrashic text open on his lap. He looks wide awake. A transatlantic flight, two days of meetings with government officials, a night of talk and heavy eating—and still alert. His labors seem not to enervate but to strengthen him.
I walk with Shaul beneath the trees of the boulevard. The night air is cool. A distant beam of light probes the sky, moving slowly back and forth in a wide and indolent arc. The streets are nearly empty. Even Paris seems at rest this Shabbos.
Shaul says, “Not to speak of it on Shabbos, but what’s going on with your uncle’s art collection?”
“How do you know about that?”
“There was a little piece on it in the Herald Tribune.”
“It made the papers?”
“I knew about it before it made the papers. We all know about it. We don’t know the details.”
“Devorah told me over the phone that my Cousin Yonkel was going to try to break the will.”
“How can he do that?”
“He claims I exerted undue influence on his father.”
“Are you allowed to say how much the art collection is worth?”
He’s an old friend. I tell him.
He stares at me in astonishment. “Master of the Universe!” he says in Hebrew, and adds in Yiddish, “I don’t believe it.”
“Believe it,” I tell him in English. “My uncle, may he rest in peace, was a very clever man.”
“A lot of good can be done with that money.”
“My Cousin Yonkel wants to build jewelry stores with it. He wants to colonize northern New Jersey and maybe even go into Connecticut. A Lev’s jewelry store in every major shopping mall from Summit to Hartford. Then go national. Franchises. A household word. Lev’s. Like McDonald’s.”
“It’s a desecration of the name of God if it goes to a goyishe court.”
We are standing in front of the yeshiva. At the curb is the police car with two gendarmes inside. They are smoking and watching us. I say good night.
“Asher?”
“Yes.”
“Have you recovered from the art show?” His voice is low, resonant with the concern of a friend.
“In the daylight I’ve recovered. At night it’s another story.”
“Can I do something for you? Do you need anything?”
“I’m all right. Good Shabbos, Shaul.”
“Good Shabbos, Asher.”
I left him on the sidewalk in the shadows beneath the trees. The caretaker gave me my key, and I let myself into the room. I had left on the bathroom light. Inside the room I undressed by the light of the bathroom and the lamp in the yard outside, and washed up and climbed into bed. A wedge of light shone through the partially open bathroom door onto the wall near the desk. I could make out clearly the picture of the Rebbe on the wall. The room was very small. I recited quietly the Krias Shema
. The light from the bathroom seemed unnaturally bright, and I got down from the bed and closed the door. The room was dark save for the dim yellowish light from the lamp outside. I lay in the bed with my eyes open, thinking of the halogens on the Seine, and Jacob Kahn looking out the window of the apartment house, and Lucien running through the rain carrying Rocheleh, and Avrumel playing baseball. The darkness began to teem with the living and the dead, and I got down from the bed and opened the bathroom door again. I lay in the bed with the light from the bathroom on the floor and the wall, trying to fall asleep.
The light was blinding, they said. There was no sunlight that day, still the light was blinding. They left the building, Max holding her hand, and stood on the street that was crowded with joyous people and stared up at the sky, and felt the light as pain. Tears flooded Devorah’s eyes. Max stood with his eyes toward the sky, breathing deeply, his round face flushed with the effort to open his eyes wide. And then he laughed with joy. Devorah still remembers that laugh.
They walked through the throbbing streets. Horns and bells and people weeping with happiness. The sun shone briefly, and Devorah found herself touching things the light fell upon—the sides of buildings, the windows of shops, the white cotton shirt that Max was wearing, her own threadbare and too-small pale-blue summer dress. She looked at herself in windows in the sunlight and was frightened by her appearance. Ghostly white faintly freckled features, dark haunted eyes, frizzy braided brown hair; a weighty sadness surrounded her like a visible presence.
She had gone to sleep in darkness for two years, and that night she needed light. She went to bed with the lights on. Max’s mother saw the light in the crack of the doorway and tapped on her door and Devorah said she needed the light and Max’s mother said nothing and from then on Devorah went to bed with the lights on.
The next day Max’s father went back alone to the apartment where Devorah had lived with her parents. Others lived there now. Then he went to the police to inquire about Devorah’s family. The police seemed surprised that Jews had managed to survive concealed in the neighborhood for two years. They had no information about Devorah’s family.
The news came in bits and pieces. Each piece of information had somehow to be conveyed to Devorah, and each was greeted by her with increasing disbelief and horror, and each was a separate blow. The sadness grew within her until she seemed to exist only as a dark nimbus of melancholy, and even Max could no longer cheer her with his talk and his drawings. Once he showed her a drawing and she looked at it and he left it with her, and when he came back for it he found it torn to shreds. It was a very long time before he left her alone again with one of his drawings.
Her father had perished in Auschwitz, as did her other relatives; her mother, in Budy, a small camp for women near Auschwitz. The official who informed Max’s father about the death of Devorah’s mother seemed embarrassed and unusually ill at ease. Pressed by Max’s father, he grew annoyed. Max’s father probed other sources he knew, some that had been in the French Resistance, and, when he discovered the truth, wished he had not pursued the inquiry. He told no one in his family, not even Max.
One week before Devorah and I were to be married, he showed up unannounced at my studio. He was a thin, nervous man, given to pulling on his gray goatee and staring past the person to whom he was talking. He was sorry he had not informed me he was coming. He had been in the neighborhood. He had not planned to come up. It was truly an impulse. He needed to talk to me. Of course, if I was too busy he could return another day.
I asked him inside, found him an empty chair amid the clutter of the studio, offered him a cup of coffee.
We sat surrounded by my work. He told me about the death of Devorah’s mother.
The village of Budy was located about four kilometers from Auschwitz. Its schoolhouse was the center of a small slave-labor farm camp comprising about four hundred women, many of them Germans, others French Jewesses. Most of the Frenchwomen were from intellectual circles: some were artists; not a few had studied at the Sorbonne. Surrounded by barbed wire, the schoolhouse served as the living quarters for the women, all of whom worked in the fields outside the village.
Max’s father blinked and rubbed his hands together and stared past me. This was very difficult for him, he said. If I did not want to hear any more, he would understand. I told him to go on. He tugged nervously at his goatee.
The SS men who guarded the camp, he continued, would incite the German prisoners to mistreat the Jewish women. Many of the German women were prostitutes. The SS found in such spectacles a pleasant way to pass the time. The result was perpetual conflict between the two groups of women. One night a hysterical German woman accused a Jewish woman, who was returning from the lavatory, of threatening her with a stone. Guards heard her screams and rushed into the building. Together with the German prisoners, they began to beat the Jewish women. Some of the Jewish women were thrown down the stairs; others were flung out the windows to their deaths. The guards drove the Jewish women from the schoolhouse into the yard. They used gun butts, bludgeons, bullets, and axes. The victims were repeatedly struck, hacked, dismembered. There were no survivors. The official SS report stated that the prisoners had rebelled and the rebellion had been put down.
Devorah’s mother had been a graduate of the Sorbonne, with a degree in fine arts.
I sat there and listened. I felt the draining of the power in my fingers and then the boiling rage. Max’s father sat quietly for a while, blinking and tugging at his goatee. Then he stood up, thanked me politely for the coffee, and left.
I did not tell Devorah about her mother’s death in Budy until a few years after we were married, and only after I read about the incident in a book on the Holocaust. I did not want her to find out about her mother from a book.
For a long time afterward, even lights would not help her to sleep. That was when she began seriously to write children’s stories.
I should not be thinking of such matters on Shabbos. It is forbidden to disturb the joy of the day of rest with such dark and baleful thoughts. But memories of the Holocaust often come unbidden to mind. They dwell in a realm of their own, and are not subject to the laws and whims of humankind.
When I finally told Devorah about the death of her mother, she sat in silence a long time. We were still in the apartment on the Rue des Rosiers. Rocheleh was asleep. A wind blew through the narrow streets, rattling the wooden shutters on the windows. I remember the frozen look on her face: horror caught in stone. She stirred finally and said, incongruously, “Did I ever tell you that it took Max’s father weeks before he was able to find a mezuzah to put back on the doorpost of their apartment? Weeks. A Ladover found one for us.” Then, after a long moment, she said, “Do you think there’s a plan to all this, my husband? Do you think there could be a plan?”
That was all she said then about my account of her mother’s death. She took off her clothes and went to bed and lay in the light, trying to fall asleep.
As I lie now, years later, in the Ladover yeshiva in Paris.
The next morning in the synagogue, my father leads the Additional Service. His head covered with his prayer shawl, his long white beard protruding from behind the silver-lined rim of the shawl, he chants the words of the Kedushoh in his strong nasal voice. “He is our God, He is our Father, He is our King, He is our Savior, and He will redeem us again, and in His mercy will let us hear again, in the presence of all living beings, the promise, ‘Indeed, I have redeemed you again in the end as I did in the beginning, in order to be your God. I am the Lord your God.’”
The congregation joins my father in song, and the voices rise and swell. The redemption must come. And soon. How long can this life be endured? My father sways back and forth at the lectern, a luminous presence before the Ark.
Later, around the Shabbos table in the Lasker apartment, triumphant children announce that they have solved the riddles. My father listens to their breathlessly delivered solutions and pronounces them correct. There i
s jubilation. The children sit proudly, basking in the light of my father’s approval. “I didn’t help them,” Miriam Lasker says to me. Shaul says, “Don’t look at me. I’m terrible with riddles.” We eat and we sing and I lead the Grace After Meals. My father says he will walk back with me to the yeshiva.
On the boulevard we walk awhile in silence. Sharp bright sunlight throws broken shadows onto the sidewalks. A warm wind stirs the trees. The afternoon traffic is light, and there are few pedestrians. We walk along together.
“Is there anything in the Rebbe’s letter you want to talk to me about?” my father asks.
“No.”
“The Rebbe especially asked me to tell you that he thinks of you very often.”
“Please tell the Rebbe that I thank him for his good wishes.”
“The Rebbe is very preoccupied these days. We live in a dangerous world. Jewish life in America is threatened by assimilationists. Israel is beset by secularists from within and by enemies from without. The Rebbe prays and visits the grave of his father, of blessed memory, and makes plans and sends us out as his eyes and ears and hands. Tomorrow, with God’s help, I go to Israel. We are developing strategies for the coming election there.”
“What about the election in America?”
“We have our policies for the American election as well.”
“A solid Republican bloc, like the last time?”
“We will vote for those we believe are best for us and for America. We will not vote for the homosexuals or the abortionists or for those who care more for the criminal than the victim.”
“What will you do in Israel?”
“There are people I must see for the Rebbe. We will form alliances. We will make promises, which we intend to keep. The world will be surprised by the outcome this time. The world will have to reckon with us.”