Illusions of Love (4 page)

Three days later he joined the ragged, hopeful army of miners that left San Francisco and made its way to the rivers and fields where the first discovery of the golden metal had been made.

It was a time of frenzy, passion and intrigue. By day the miners panned for gold in the riverbeds and hacked away at the reluctant earth. At night they gambled, fought, and tried to cheat one another.

It was a strange environment for a Jew from a shtetl. No one saw as he faithfully bound on his phylacteries each morning and each night. No one cared that he kept so much to himself. And then, one day, amidst shouts and jubiliation, he struck gold.

He rushed back to San Francisco, registered the claim before it could be stolen from him, then stood in the assayer’s office and watched as the precious metal was weighed. When the scales tipped, Ephraim was the possessor of one thousand dollars.

Sitting on the edge of his cot that night, Ephraim narrowed his eyes as he contemplated the coins in the palms of his calloused hands.

There was money in gold, but the big claims had already been staked out. He had reached California late in the gold rush and he knew the earth would yield just so much. But perhaps the timing could be made

to work to his advantage. Maybe success lay not in digging, but in lending. After all, many of the great French Jewish fortunes had been made in banking. Setting aside a small amount for himself, Ephraim financed two miners to a grubstake. He also had a document prepared which stipulated that, if there were any profits, he would receive half.

Ephraim’s belief in himself was finally rewarded. The miners struck it rich and Ephraim doubled his money. The next time he financed four miners instead of two, and, within a year, Ephraim was an established banker. Small to be sure, but he had no doubts about the eventual growth of his establishment. After all, he was one of God’s blessed.

Sitting behind his desk, dressed in a high, white, starched collar, a frock coat and fashionable curls, he looked every inch a Rothschild.

Incongruous though he may have seemed in that primitive city of miners and pioneers, it was no less incongruous than the way he viewed himself. He enjoyed remembering the penniless boy who stood shivering on the Marseilles docks, his feet wrapped in rags. He could almost feel the wind pressing against his clothes, which were still damp from his attempts to wash them the previous night.

Now he had several suits and a woman to wash and iron them. But he never forgot who he was. Every morning and every night he went through the ritual of putting on his skullcap, tall is and phylacteries. As a mark of reverence, he placed one diminutive black box on the inner side of his left arm, just about the elbow, then coiled the thin leather strap around his forearm exactly seven times. It had been written that God made the world in seven days. Another black box was placed high up in the middle of his forehead, then he looped the thin strap around his head and knotted it. The two ends of the strap were joined over his shoulder and brought forward. Then he wound the strap from the arm band three times around his little finger, which signified the Hebrew letter of shin. When all of this was done, Ephraim intoned the passages which were written on tiny parchments and placed inside the small boxes: And thou shall bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be for

front lets between thine eyes. And thou shah write them upon the doorposts of thy house and upon thy gates. He swayed back and forth, chanting the singsong phrases as had his father before him. When he finished he was overcome with a feeling of peace and purpose. He had held fast to the beliefs to which he had been born. They were sustained all these years.

In that extraordinary moment of communion he found an added solace which nourished his soul. Soon he would be reunited with his family.

His arms ached to embrace them and his heart overflowed with love.

Nothing he had acquired would be meaningful until he was with them again.

But Ephraim’s dreams were not to be fulfilled. After almost one year of waiting, Ephraim received a letter from his oldest sister, Hannah.

Tears rolled down his cheeks as he read . My dearest brother Ephraim,

Knowing the great hardships you have had to endure makes this letter so very difficult for me to write. I wish I could have spared you this pain, but Momma and Poppa died this winter, less than one month apart.

It was as if once she died he had no will to go on. Now they lie side by side buried in the French dirt. I weep because of that. Momma and Papa wanted to be buried in Palestine, high on the hills of Mount Olive, but God must have decided otherwise.

Now, dearest Ephraim, I beg you to try to understand and forgive us.

The family that is left has no wish to go to America. Instead, it has been decided that we want to live out our lives in Jerusalem. In their last days on earth, this, not America, was your parents’ dream.

Please, dearest Ephraim, know how much we love and miss you, but this is the way our lives were fated. Remember the love we share with you even at opposite ends of the world.

Take care, dear brother . Ephraim could read no more. He wailed as he tore the lapel of his jacket, rending it in

the traditional gesture of mourning. He then sat shiva for seven days, ignoring all his friends’ and acquaintances’ attempts to cheer him. In his bereavement, he was concerned that without his family, his accomplishments were meaningless. He had not left home and come to this alien place to become rich for his own sake. He had sustained the loneliness for only one reason: that one day he would be able to support his family in comfort and freedom. Well, now they had found their own freedom in the Holy Land and all his worldly success seemed futile.

With little but his business to occupy him, he worked tirelessly and his bank grew to be a serious force in the California financial world.

But despite his increased success, Ephraim’s spirits remained low until one summer day fate intervened in the person of Sarah Baum.

Sarah had journeyed West with her mother and father, three sisters and two brothers. Hearing that one of the San Francisco banks was run by a Jew, her father came in to apply for a loan. As soon as this transaction was concluded, Samuel Baum urged the young financier to visit their home for dinner. Ephraim, happy for some Jewish company in a city which contained few of his faith, accepted for the next day.

And the minute he walked into their small boardinghouse, his life changed forever. Sarah was a beautiful, blue-eyed blonde of sixteen, and as soon as Ephraim saw her he knew he had to have her for his wife. The years of loneliness seemed to disappear, and for the next few months he haunted the Baums’ house until she said yes.

Their wedding day was an especially auspicious one. Ephraim had helped found the synagogue, and his was to be the first wedding since the modest building on Stockton Street had opened for services. The entire Jewish population of San Francisco seemed to have turned out for the ceremony.

As Ephraim waited under the chuppa for his bride, whatever loneliness he had endured was now forgotten as he saw Sarah walk slowly down the aisle with her parents on either side. When the tapered candles were lit, the Rabbi began

the sacred ritual in Hebrew. Standing under the blue velvet canopy, they pledged their troth for everlasting devotion. The goblet was handed to the bride as she lifted her veil for the first time and drank from the cup offered by her husband-to-be. The goblet was handed back to Ephraim, whose hand shook as he too drank. The Rabbi pronounced them man and wife amidst happy shouts of mazel tov. After Ephraim had stomped on the wine goblet, he picked up Sarah’s veil again. As tears gathered in the corners of his eyes, he kissed her with all the love he had stored up since his arrival in America. That was the beginning of their life together.

The years passed in peace and contentment. The Jewish community was a tightly knit one and marriage among these pioneers produced a staggering network of family connections. Although not restricted by the European boundaries of ghetto, they felt no need to go beyond the large family circle. They fraternized within the other communities by day, but their home lives remained aloof. At long last Jews had come into their own. In fact, they were usually welcomed by the rather snobbish pioneers of California society as highly valued citizens, and except for a few isolated cases, antiSemitism was non-existent.

The Jews were respected as a religious group who maintained their separate traditions.

As the gold rush died down in the 1850s, the European-bred Jews of San Francisco were particularly adept at making the transition from boom town to sophisticated metropolis. In the years that followed, they elevated them selves from petty shopkeepers to department store magnates, from smalltime lenders to international bankers, from tent makers to real estate developers and shipping tycoons.

The second generation moved into mansions on Pacific Heights and Nob Hill, and built summer estates in San Rafael, Woodside and Atherton.

Wives and daughters were transformed into elegant ladies. Society gathered in their magnificent salons. Their generation established

itself as standard-bearers for the city’s cultural growth. The contributions they made to the arts were so enormous that San Francisco came to be considered a cultural rival of the great European capitals.

Now the tyranny and injustices of Europe seemed very far away. Ephraim had become a part of the privileged upper class. His bank had expanded to such proportions that he controlled great parcels of land and underwrote much of the West Coast shipping industry. But the greatest reward of all had been watching his four sons and two daughters grow into fine adults.

He indulged his daughters shamefully. When they married, each was given a large house as a wedding gift. He endowed his younger sons with companies of their own and eventually gave control of his banking empire to his oldest, Simon. But though he counted his blessings, Ephraim knew that nothing in life was perfect. Somehow, with the ebb and flow of time, the family’s structure seemed to have changed.

There was a watering-down of religious attitudes in the third generation and this pained Ephraim. Although they remained fervently Jewish, they tended to ignore the Sabbath and skip schul. Although they were among Temple Emanu-El’s founding fathers, some families never went, even on the high holy days. And this pained Ephraim. Yet they supported the Temple and paid their dues. Birth, marriage and death required a rabbi.

In the twilight of his life, Ephraim thought about all he had gained and what he had really been able to give his

children. He was a man of great self-introspection whc tried never to hide from the truth, even when it was painful. How honest had he been when he questioned himself that day so long ago? He had been sure that it was possible to be both spiritual and rich. For him, that had been true. But he had been motivated by different dreams from his grand children. He had burned with a desire to provide for his mother and father, to free his sisters and brothers. And even though he had failed in that he rejoiced in the fact that he had been able to give his children an easier life. Yet now he wondered if its very ease had not diluted the religious tradition. It seemed that Jews clung tenaciously to their faith only when they were confined to the ghetto.

It was there that they reached the zenith of learning, but once the yoke was broken, and Jews were permitted to live in peace and freedom, they soon became spiritually careless. Some times when he watched Simon’s two children, a girl and a boy Simon had insisted on naming Ephraim despite the Jewish tradition against naming after the living, the old man wondered: would the new century mean an end to all the old values?

Then a miracle occurred. Simon’s wife, already in her late thirties, unexpectedly became pregnant. Just before the turn of the century she had a little boy she insisted on naming Julian, after a hero she admired in a novel. The old Ephraim, now in his seventies, was fascinated with this child and Julian displayed an affection for Ephraim the other grandchildren had not. As the toddler grew into a solemn-eyed little boy, he would sit for hours listening to tales not just of the old man’s adventures coming to San Francisco, but to the stories of the Old Testament as well. Sitting in the sun, on the porch of the grand estate, Ephraim would close his eyes and pray that Julian would remember these times and that unlike his older brother and sister would not forget the old ways. It was late on a long summer evening that he had a thought which comforted him during his final years.

Why did the Bible read, “The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob’? Why did it not simply say, ‘the God of Abraham’? The more he reflected upon it, the more he felt it was so stated because God must have meant something different to each one of those generations.

Abraham’s struggle was not quite the same as his son Isaac’s, nor was Jacob’s quite the same as his father’s. One’s spiritual needs depended, it seemed, upon circumstances. And there was something else in which Ephraim could take great pride. He was giving his descendants more than riches. He was leaving them a legacy of freedom: freedom from fear, freedom from discrimination, freedom from tyranny. They could stand with their heads held high, and he thanked God for the great gift that was America.

It was a time to remember: the year 1936, when three hundred guests had gathered to attend a yearly picnic at the Hillsborough estate of Ephraim’s grandson, another Ephraim. The opulent surroundings were a far cry from the tent city where it had all begun. It was a day to rekindle old memories. Three generations were present, and the guests numbered the oldest and most distinguished of California’s Jewish pioneers. Although the party was limited to direct descendants, and was an annual event, some were meeting for the first time.

The older guests spoke of the dreams that had motivated men like Ephraim; of the cherished legacies that had been handed down to them.