In the Beginning

“What books did you read when you were young, Mama?”

  “All kinds of books. Storybooks.”

  “Where did you get them?”

  “From Lemberg. Sometimes a man would come by the farm with a wagon full of books. My father would buy from him.”

  “Were they in German, Mama?”

  “They were in German and Yiddish and Polish and Russian.”

  “You can read all those languages, Mama?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Once I even knew to read French. But I have forgotten by now.”

  “So many languages,” I said. I was light-headed and beginning to float with the dark soft coming of sleep. “How will I ever learn all those things, Mama? I’m not learning anything in my school.”

  “Sha, darling. Sha. You will learn. This is only your fourth day in school. Even God needed a week to create the world. Sha, my darling. Go to sleep.”

  Through the embracing folds of sleep I murmured the Kriat Shema. I felt her kiss me and I reached up through my sleep and kissed her cheek. I heard her go from the room. The last thing I saw before I fell into deep sleep was a sudden sharp picture of my mother as a child, with a frilly dress and dark eyes and long braids, sitting under the elm tree in front of our cottage reading a storybook written in the black spiky letters of the German alphabet.

  I sat in our little synagogue and listened to Mr. Bader read the Torah.

  To my left sat Saul and his father; to my right sat my father. The synagogue had filled rapidly and by the time the main portion of the Morning Service had begun, almost all the seats had been occupied. Additional chairs were brought in from somewhere in the building and placed in the aisle. These, too, filled quickly. The room had resonated with the loud praying of the Morning Service. Now the room was silent. The first aliyah had been called to the Torah: one of the men in the photograph. He chanted the blessing, the congregants responded with “Amen,” and Mr. Bader had begun to read.

  Saul and my uncle and father followed the reading carefully in their large-sized Hebrew Bibles. Saul sat bent over his Bible, his small mouth partly open, his head moving back and forth as his eyes scanned the lines. We sat in the front row near the window to the left of the lectern where Mr. Bader stood. My father sat very still, wrapped in his large tallit. I turned my head to the left and gazed across Saul and my uncle to the street outside and the statue of the robed woman in front of the Catholic church. Then I looked back at the Bible I held on my lap. I could not follow Mr. Bader’s swift reading of the text. I squirmed with frustration. Abruptly my father, together with some other men in the room, called out a Hebrew word. Mr. Bader had misread a vowel. He stopped, read the word again correctly, and went on reading. I was bored listening to him and felt relieved when the Torah reading finally ended. It was only when the entire congregation stood up for the raising of the Torah scroll from the podium prior to its being rewrapped and replaced in the Ark—it was only then that I realized something out of the ordinary was about to happen: the synagogue had never been this crowded before in as long as I could remember, except for the High Holidays and for Memorial Services. Then I saw my father rise from his chair. He went to the podium and stood there for a moment, the center of the silence that lay thickly upon the room. Then he chanted, “Yikum purkon min shemayo,” and the congregation repeated the words and continued loudly in separate voices the chanting of the prayers that were the introduction to the Additional Service.

  I leaned over toward Saul. “What’s special about today?”

  “Everyone is here,” he replied.

  “What?”

  But he put a finger to his lips. My father’s strong voice rang out in the hushed room. His short stocky figure swayed slightly; his face, raised and tilted to the left, revealed to me clearly the white line of the scar on his cheek. He prayed slowly, intensely, and it was easy for me to follow him in my prayer book.

  When the Torah had been replaced in the Ark, there was a momentary silence. Everyone remained standing quietly, as if for the briefest of seconds flesh had turned to stone. The air was charged with a sense of deep expectation. Instead of going to the podium to continue the service, my father returned to his seat next to me. Mr. Bader came up to the podium. There was a brief scraping of chairs and a rustling noise as people sat down. On the boulevard a trolley car pulled up in front of the church, discharged passengers, then started up again with a swiftly receding clatter of wheels. In the silence that followed I saw my father put his head forward and cover his eyes with his right hand. His bony chin jutted out sharply and his lips were set in a hard firm line. I sat next to him, stunned. In the brief second before his hand had covered his eyes I had noticed that he was crying.

  Mr. Bader cleared his throat gently and brushed a thumb and forefinger across the knot of his tie. He looked tall and trim. His brown hair and deeply tanned features contrasted delicately and warmly with the white tallit that lay draped across his shoulders. He spoke in a soft voice.

  “My father, may he rest in peace, who as you all know was a close friend of the father of Max Lurie—my father once told me a few years after we arrived in America that it is human nature for a person to make all kinds of promises when he is in difficulty, and promptly to forget them when the difficulty passes. He quoted to me Abba bar Kahana in the midrash: ‘When in trouble, I vow; when relieved, I forget it.’ He made those remarks to me in answer to a question I had put to him about his coming to America. He told me that the father of Max Lurie had helped him to come to America. Simon Lurie had promised to help my father in return for a small favor, and he had kept his promise. Our good friend Max Lurie has learned well from his father. He has kept his promise. He made to all of you a promise in return for the funds you gave him and Ruth to enable them to begin new lives in America. The Rambam wrote, ‘Let not your legal contract or the presence of witnesses be more binding than your verbal promise made privately.’ Only your own ears heard that promise the night you all met in Lemberg and Max asked for your trust and swore you would all meet again one day in America. It is written, ‘A pledge unpaid is like thunder without rain.’ Max has paid his pledge. We can say of the Am Kedoshim Society that it is thunder with rain. For the first time all the members of the original Am Kedoshim Society who are still among the living are together under one roof in one room, and in America. We read in the Book of Psalms, ‘Who shall sojourn in Thy Tabernacle? … He who swears to his own hurt, and does not change.’ After the war and the pogroms not a single one of you had enough money to get you to America, but all of you together had more than enough money to send two people and give them something to live on until they could find work. You sent Max and his wife. I do not have to tell you the work Max Lurie put into making good on his pledge to you. You trusted him. Your trust has helped all of you. I express the gratitude of my father to the father of Max Lurie, and the gratitude of all of you to Max Lurie himself for making possible this Shabbos and all the good years ahead which, with the help of God, we will enjoy in this land.”

  In the stir that followed, my father rose and went to the podium. Mr. Bader shook his hand. My father began to chant the Kaddish that precedes the Silent Devotion. Chairs scraped softly as the congregants got to their feet. My father’s voice broke. He paused for a moment. The congregation grew very still. He continued chanting, his voice low and quavering. I looked at my uncle. He was staring intently at the floor, his eyes fixed—unseeing, it seemed to me—on the black-and-red-checkered design of the linoleum. A dense hush fell across the synagogue. The Silent Devotion had begun.

  After the service, there was wine and whiskey and cake and herring and peppery chickpeas, and a tumult of noise and joy. We had gone down the wide stone staircase of the synagogue to the downstairs social hall, and my uncle, standing behind a long table at the far end of the hall, had chanted the blessing over the wine. Then the noise broke over the crowded room like a boom of thunder. There were almost two hundred people in the room—my father’s friends, all from that photogra
ph, and some of their families—and they all seemed to make a sudden rush toward my father. The crowd enveloped him in their forward surge and I could no longer see him. I stood next to my mother and brother a few feet from the long table on which the food had been placed. Someone had put a piece of spongecake in my hand and had remembered to give my brother a cookie. My mother stood talking quietly with the woman who had come to America together with her husband just before we had left for the cottage. They were talking in Polish. I saw Mrs. Bader somewhere in the crowd, looking elegant in a pale blue dress and wide-brimmed flowery hat. I looked around and could not find Saul. Then I noticed him standing against the wall opposite the long table. He was talking to Mr. Bader, who was bending down, listening intently to Saul’s words and nodding from time to time. Alex was pulling at my mother’s hand. He wanted to go home. “Yes, darling,” my mother kept saying. “In a minute. Soon. Soon. David, get Alex another cookie.” I went over to the table. The food had almost entirely disappeared; the table seemed to have been visited by locusts. I found a cookie and brought it to my brother. He looked at it, took a tentative bite, and tossed it on the floor. He pulled again at my mother’s hand. “Home,” he said. “Mama, home.” “All right,” she said wearily. “Soon. Very soon.” She looked at the crowd around my father and shook her head slowly. Beneath the wide brim of her hat, her eyes lay like dark ponds in the slanting fringe of shadow that fell across her face.

  My uncle came out of the crowd and walked over to us. His face was flushed and his eyes shone behind their gold-rimmed circles of glass. “What a Shabbos, David. Your father deserves it. How he worked!”

  “Papa brought all these people to America?” I could not quite grasp what it was my father had really done.

  “He helped,” my uncle said. “And how he helped. Without your father most of these people would not be here.”

  I did not understand it. But the noise made it difficult to talk. And I did not want to shout because I had awakened with a vaguely scratchy throat and the dull pain I had felt on Thursday and Friday was still present behind my eyes.

  “Home, home, home,” my brother said loudly. “Home, Mama!”

  I agreed with him. I too wanted to go home and lie down and let the laughter and the shouting, the jostling and the dense crush of the crowd drain off me.

  I heard a voice alongside me and looked up and saw it was Mr. Bader. He spoke in a very soft voice and I could not hear him. I strained my head upward, feeling as I did a sudden intensification of the pain behind my eyes. Mr. Bader bent down toward me and put his tanned craggy face very close to mine.

  “You’ve started school,” he said.

  I nodded.

  He smiled. “Congratulations, David. I am delighted. How have you been feeling?”

  I shrugged.

  “Saul tells me you had a fine summer.”

  “Were you in Hebron, Mr. Bader?” I heard myself ask suddenly. I could not remember when I had even thought to ask him that question. I had asked a question without even thinking to do it.

  He answered very quietly, “Yes.” I saw his mouth move and understood the answer though I could not hear it for the noise all around us. Then I heard him say, “Afterward.”

  “Was it very bad, Mr. Bader?”

  He looked at me and nodded slowly but said nothing. He patted my arm. “You read and read and read,” he said. “And I’ll make you a promise. I promise that you will not be sorry.”

  He patted my arm again and stood up straight. I looked up at him uncomprehendingly. He spoke with my mother and uncle for a while and then went away.

  Through the slowly thinning crowd I could now see my father behind the table, talking, shaking hands, being embraced repeatedly by his friends. One of them, a tall beanpole of a man, came over and saluted him smartly; instinctively, my father began to return the salute, then stopped. His hand in mid-air, he burst into laughter. The tall man laughed and threw his long thin arms around my father. Mr. Ackerman was there, laughing and talking. The room seemed to swell with the noise. It was like the noise in my school yard during recess, an ocean of voices rolling on huge waves within a small bounded space. I witnessed the shaking of hands and the rapid thinning of the crowd. Then the hall was empty and my father was saying, “All the years, all the years,” and my mother said nothing but nodded slowly and looked down at the floor.

  On the way back from the synagogue, I said to my father, “How did you bring all those people to America, Papa?”

  “By working very hard, David.”

  “But how, Papa?”

  “I told you, David. Hard work. Years and years of hard work.” His face glowed beneath the bluish stubble. “I kept my word. To every one of them who gave me his trust. I kept my word. That was a job. Right, Ruth? That was a job!”

  “Yes,” my mother said softly.

  “All your friends are now in America?” I asked. “The friends you grew up with?”

  “The ones who are still alive, yes. And who did not go to Eretz Yisroel.”

  “Then the photograph is now in America.”

  “What?” he said, staring at me.

  “Everyone is here. The people in the photograph. All the ones with—”

  My mother slipped quietly between us. “Max,” she said. “Max.” Then she said, “David, walk on ahead with your brother. Don’t let him go into the street.”

  “I didn’t tell the man about the guns and the knives, Mama. The man, when he came from the government, I didn’t tell him anything.”

  They stopped walking and stood very still in the middle of the street beneath a maple tree. Their faces went dead white.

  “I understood, Mama. I didn’t let my tongue talk that time. I was a big boy.”

  They looked at each other. Then they looked at me.

  “Sometimes we have to lie to the goyim to stay alive, Papa. I understand that. I’m not a baby.”

  Late Saturday morning traffic cruised idly up and down our cobblestone street. Near Mr. Steinberg’s candy store, some boys my age were playing with baseball cards.

  “I’m not a baby,” I kept saying. “I understand, Papa. And I’ll read, and I’ll like my school, and Mr. Bader will teach me the way he’s teaching Saul. I’m a big boy now, Papa.”

  He bent and picked me up and held me tightly.

  “I’m not a baby anymore,” I kept saying as he carried me through the street and into the apartment house, holding me to him and not letting me see—though I could feel on my cheek—the tears that were streaming down his face.

  I went to school. I was ill, but not too often. I suffered an occasional accident, but they were not serious. The world had become firm and fixed and I was comfortable in it. My teachers gave me books to read at home and let me daydream through my classes. Larry Grossman continued to bait me and I continued to bear him silently. Occasionally I met Eddie Kulanski or Tony Savanola on the street or inside the apartment house. I had nothing to do with Eddie Kulanski. Sometimes I would talk briefly with Tony Savanola.

  Shortly after Succot, in the closing days of October, three large cartons of books arrived at our apartment by special messenger. A lawyer had written some weeks earlier and my mother, over my father’s mild objection, had written back accepting the books left to me by Mrs. Horowitz in her will. My mother looked at them and was puzzled. They were in German and Hebrew; some of them seemed to deal with the Bible. They were difficult to understand, she said. Besides, she had no patience to look at them carefully now, she said. She would ask Mr. Bader when he returned from Europe. My father did not even bother to look at them. The stock market had crashed and he had more important things on his mind than the moldy books of a half-mad old woman. The books were placed in the rear of the lower two shelves of the linen closet in the corridor near my room and were forgotten.

  FOUR

  My brother and I were forgotten, too; or so it seemed to me in the months that followed.

  Suddenly my parents were away often in the evenin
gs and Saul would come over and stay with us. At first, only my father left, rising from the table after supper, putting on his wide-brimmed hat and camel’s hair coat, murmuring good night, and going out the door. During the first week, he would shave before leaving. But his face became irritated from the twice-a-day shaves; red welts appeared on his neck below his jutting chin. Sometimes he cut himself; dark spots of blood stained the rim of his shirt collars. Then he stopped shaving and went out directly after the meal, his features darkened by the stubble of his beard. His eyes too seemed strangely dark.

  “Where does Papa go?” I asked my mother one night in November.

  “To meetings,” she said, bending over my brother, who was resisting her efforts to get him into his pajamas.

  “With the Am Kedoshim Society?”

  “Yes, darling. And with friends.”

  “So many meetings?”

  “There is a lot to talk about.”

  “What?”

  “David, you have homework?”

  “Yes, Mama.”

  “Take your books into the kitchen and sit down and do your work. I want to put your brother to sleep.”

  “No!” my brother shouted. “Don’t want to sleep!”

  “You don’t know how lucky you are that you can get a good night’s sleep,” my mother said.

  She raised the side of the crib. He stood up, his stocky figure looking bulky and shapeless in his heavy winter pajamas.

  “Lie down and go to sleep,” my mother said.

  “Sleep in Davey’s bed,” my brother said. “Big bed! Big bed!”

  My mother passed her hand wearily over her eyes. I took up my books and went from the room.

  In the kitchen, I sat at the table and did my writing assignments and then read from a new book my Hebrew teacher had given me. A gusting wind rattled the panes in the window over the sink. Weeks ago there had been a gale. The rain had fallen in a slant; for a while it blew sideways through the street. The wind had stripped the leaves from the trees. The wet, suddenly naked branches had looked peculiarly stunted and helpless. Darkness had begun to descend earlier upon the gray face of each day. Now the night pressed solidly against the window; I almost had the feeling the glass would crack and break and the darkness would come flooding into the apartment. Off in the distance I heard the clang and clatter of a trolley car.