This Is Not a Love Story: A Memoir (22 page)

“So did you stop crying, Savtah?”

“Over time.”

“How much time?”

“Enough time. There was a full year until the wedding. In between, your father sent your mother the most beautiful jewelry. Nobody in the entire city of Jerusalem got the gifts your mother did.”

“You liked the jewelry?”

“Who could not like such jewelry?”

“Did you also like my father?”

“Your father was a very hardworking man. Everyone liked him.”

“And were you happy about the wedding?”

“I was.”

“As happy as you’d been about Zahava’s wedding?”

“Just as much.”

“Were you, really?”

“Of course I was! Do you have any idea how much that silver gown cost?”

Around me I saw the spirits smiling.

In the summer of 1975, the youngest of the Strauss sisters was married in Jerusalem. Hundreds arrived at the wedding, some to eat, some to stare, some because they were invited.

The rebbe, who had been staying in the northern city of Haifa for the summer, traveled back to Jerusalem for the chuppah. Flanked by his attendants and an entourage of Chassidim, he strode into the hushed courtyard outside the wedding hall. On his head he wore a
shtreimel,
the fur hat worn on the Shabbos and for family celebrations.

Beneath the canopy my father and grandfather stood, swaying fervently, their lips moving, their eyes closed in prayer. The chazzan leading the ceremony looked up at the skies, his voice rising and wailing as he sang the sacred song of marriage. The crowd turned toward the veiled bride as she walked down the aisle, accompanied by Savtah Liba on her left and Savtah Miriam on her right. In the seats lining the right side of the courtyard, my mother’s and father’s sisters gathered, wiping away tears of joy and murmuring prayers.

The rebbe stood on the platform in front of the assembled guests. In his right hand, he held a silver cup brimming with wine. His voice rose as he intoned the blessing
of betrothal, announcing to the heavens and to those on earth that the bride and groom were now man and wife:

Beneath the canopy, the groom placed a ring on the bride’s finger.

With this ring, you are consecrated to me…

A glass cup was shattered underfoot. The crowd rose, the music burst forth. Now the daughter of leaders and rabbis and the son of a milkman and his widow were bound forever as one.

Savtah Miriam lifted the veil off her youngest daughter’s face, folding it back over her covered red hair. The newlyweds stepped off the platform, and together they walked through the courtyard, besieged by happy strangers and friends shouting “Mazel tov! Mazel tov!” from every side. It was then, when they reached the hallway that led away from the crowd and to the room of seclusion—where they’d eat their first meal as a couple, signifying their new status as husband and wife—that my mother turned around.

She found her father, standing among the well-wishers a short distance away. He looked up and smiled, as his eyes reached out to her over the noise and the music. His face was filled with love and joy.

The photographer raised his camera. He zoomed in and pressed the button lightly. The shutter snapped and clicked, exposing the film. The moment stopped, their smiles froze, captured forever.

One year later
October 16, 1994

It is Succoth, the last of the High Holidays. On my grandmother’s roof porch in Jerusalem, it is night. The moon casts a faraway glow over the tiled courtyard, which is festooned with lights.

There are linen-covered tables set out on the porch, laid with silverware and dishes enough for several dozen men. Inside, in the dining room, the women and girls—a small gathering of family, teachers, and my mother’s closest friends—will eat.

Because tonight is Nachum’s bar mitzvah, the night he turns thirteen. In the morning, he’ll put on tefillin and join the men in their prayers at shul. Next Shabbos, he’ll walk to the synagogue beside my Uncle Zev, wearing a hat like my father’s on his head. From this moment on, my brother is no longer a mere child. Tonight, he becomes a man.

A week before the Succoth holiday, my family—my parents, Aunt Tziporah, and we five siblings—flew to Israel from New York. Nearly every day, I watched Uncle Zev and my brother, studying the laws and rituals of tefillin, the black leather cubes containing scriptural passages that men attach to the arm and head and wear during morning prayers. On the day of the bar mitzvah, my cousins, sisters, Nachum, and I rode the bus to the Western Wall to pray.

Along the Western Wall, among the kiosks selling souvenirs and handmade crafts, I had planned to buy a gift for my brother from Kathy. Before I left New York, she had given me ten dollars to buy “something holy” for Nachum on his special thirteenth birthday. “Sure,” I had said. “I’d be happy to do so.” And I’d wondered what my brother would say.

But my brother did not remember Kathy. When I asked him a few days after we arrived what he wanted as a gift from Kathy, the neighbor upstairs, he said, “Who? Who?”

“Kathy,” I said. “The goy who lives upstairs.”

Nachum looked at me intently, as if trying to conjure up a person in his mind.

“Kathy,” I reminded him again. “You know, in the attic apartment. She’s big—like
this
tall—with red curly hair…”

Nothing.

“She’s the
goy!
” I repeated impatiently. “Who lives upstairs, in that attic apartment, with Mark—her
goy husband.
”

But the more I pressed him, the more agitated he became, until, eyes blinking anxiously, feet shifting back and forth, he said, “
Loh, loh.
I do not, I do not, I do not remember. I do not wih-want to talk. Anymore.”

And I stopped, because it made me scared to see him this way, a bit of how he used to be.

It took my brother all afternoon to calm down. And it took me a few days to comprehend what I’d done. I’d forced his mind back with my questions to a dark and distant place, to a time before he had words—and with them, the capacity to form coherent memories. In the fragmented existence of his younger years, people had been indistinct beings. Neighbors, cousins, family friends had slipped right past him, deflected off his overwhelmed mind as just other fragments in the chaos. To him, they hadn’t been real at all.

So in the kiosk near the Western Wall, I had bought, in the end, a small gift for myself, hoping that Kathy’s Jesus would forgive me even if my own God wouldn’t. Then I joined my cousins praying at the wall, before we returned home to prepare for the celebration.

My cousins, sisters, and I put on our holiday dresses and elegant shoes. We sat patiently in leather chairs at the local hair salon. We ate a late lunch, and said the mincha afternoon prayers. Then we went to my grandmother Miriam’s apartment, up on the third floor, and waited for the others to come.

Less than an hour later, I watched my brother walk ever so cautiously up the steps to my grandmother’s apartment, as if the new hat, set perfectly on his head for the first time, would topple right off if he was any less careful. My mother, uncle, and aunt followed close behind him, laughing, calling out to us, their faces beaming, their hands gesturing excitedly at “this prince, this boy—look at him. Just look at him. So tall, so handsome…”

My brother, dressed in the immaculate long, dark silk
kapotah
coat worn by every Chassidic boy after his bar mitzvah, smiled shyly as he nervously fingered the braided belt tied around his waist. He showed us the dark velvet bag, cradled in the crook of his arm, that held his tefillin, and inside them the four scrolls inscribed with verses from the Torah.

At five thirty sharp, the caterer arrived. Savtah Miriam, in her sky-blue suit and flat, orthopedic slippers, her wig perfectly coiffed, her makeup already applied, shuffled slowly inside and out, her voice rising and wavering as she purposefully ordered the help around. At six fifteen, it was done: the glasses were standing like little soldiers, every plate, chair, and piece of silverware in order. On the stove in the kitchen sat large pans covered with foil to keep the food warm. The smell of
burekas,
chicken, and schnitzel wafted out into the hallway.

Uselessly, my sisters and I wandered about, trying not to wrinkle our dresses. My cousins sat outside in the breeze, chatting with Savtah Miriam about this and that, as my mother rushed in and out of rooms, yelling at anyone there to be yelled at about the flowers that had come an hour late, the third cousins whom she should have invited, and my father, who—in the name of heaven—would not stop eating the schnitzels meant for the evening meal!

My father said he had had only three schnitzels. My mother did not care. As she grabbed the phone to call the photographer and demand to know the reason he was not there yet, I snuck a fourth schnitzel for my father. Back in the hallway, my mother brushed from Nachum’s shiny coat the dust particles that could be seen only if you yourself were a dust particle.

At seven, the photographer, his equipment set up and ready on the porch, ordered us to stand and look happy—“No, happier. What is this, a funeral? Everyone laugh! Now!”—but my mother, worried about the time and the guests coming any minute, managed only a tense smile. My sister Rivky, nervous because my mother was, attempted a more cheerful look to cover her grimace. And my father, sweating in the impossible heat and filled to the brim with schnitzel, looked at the forced smile stretched across my anxious face and burst out laughing.

The photographer put up a triumphant hand.

“Like that! Like that! Now
that
is a smile!” And the shutter snapped and flashed at the six laughing brothers and sisters posing together by the gate outside, our backs to the setting sun. Savtah Miriam, sitting in the middle, smiled widely, her quivering lips for the moment calm and still.

Not one minute later, the guests began to arrive: uncles, cousins, family friends, several teachers, and Dr. Cory Shulman. My mother welcomed the women, directing them to the right side of the hall; my father welcomed the men to the left.

At 8 p.m., the elderly rebbe—the youngest of the rabbinical brothers, who had taken over after their deaths—arrived, and a respectful silence spread quickly through the apartment and across the roof. As he walked through the entrance hall, he turned to my grandmother, standing nearby, and murmured, “Mazel tov.” He turned to my mother, nodded, and wished her
nachas.
Then, led by my uncle, he went onto the porch and sat at the small head table, where my brother and father stood, waiting.

My sisters and I rushed out from the dining room to watch. Tittering excitedly, we squeezed onto the narrow threshold among my mother, cousins, and aunts, and peered out onto the porch, where the men sat.

In the years that followed, and during the ups and downs that followed with them, I would remember every moment of this night. In the two decades that came after the bar mitzvah, as I watched my brother navigate the painful course from autistic child to autistic adult, I’d pull out this memory often—a scene of crowded tables and festive lights, of smiling cousins and laughing aunts, of my brother, sitting calmly, his back erect, with my father, the rebbe, and Uncle Zev. I’d remember Nachum’s eyes moving over the crowd, carefully observing his surroundings. I’d remember how he shook each well-wisher’s hand, nodding, listening, responding to the movements of faces and heads. And I’d remember the shadows on the stone ledge behind his table, shifting under the light of the lamps and the moon. My father’s dark form bending slowly toward my brother, my brother’s profile turning up to my father, and the moment their foreheads touched. And on the wall the shadows merged, becoming one.

What had been achieved that night was not perfection, but a miraculous new normal. Perhaps it was a normal still full of complexity; perhaps there would always be challenges and uncertainty. But on that night, my brother had done all that had been declared impossible: he had listened, he had heard, he had connected; he had become a man. Every hurdle that came afterward became a possible thing to overcome.

Aunt Itta stood between Ayalah and my mother, the glasses still crooked on the bridge of her nose. Their eyes followed my brother’s every move, as if hypnotized. Batya, leaning against me, held my hand, squeezing it hard. I looked at her flushed face and smiled. She wore a simple dress and a small silver pendant around her neck. In front of her, Ayalah wore a dark suit and small pearl earrings.

I looked carefully at my two cousins, aunt, and uncle, who were basking in a quiet glow. There was nothing that set them apart, this family from the fourth floor on Rabbi Holy Man Street. There was nothing that said that, though they lived in a small, unair-conditioned apartment, they had one day taken an autistic boy into their home, entered his world, and refused to leave without him.

I looked up at the moon. The stars winked at me from their faraway places, scattered in the darkness like pairs of watchful eyes. I could hear voices murmuring in the background, the men singing
niggunim
of old.

I wondered if God could see us now, if He was looking down from on high at His carefully placed soul. Perhaps beside Him was the angel who had tapped too hard on Nachum’s lip. Maybe around them were the other higher souls, all returned from their long journeys on earth among specially chosen families.

I wondered if my ancestors were watching, if Sabah Menachem Baruch could see what had become of the boy carrying his name. I imagined him smiling, his face filled with pride and joy. Perhaps it had been my grandfather who had gathered my ancestors, who had called for them to come, even as my mother stood over their graves, crying, pleading for help from above. Had Sabah Mechel, Bubba Miril, the Knesset minister, and the Holy Rebbes marched and marched toward the Almighty, breaking down the gates of Heaven? Perhaps they’d declared, “Enough! Enough with the suffering! Let the boy speak! Let him pray! Release this child’s soul!”

Perhaps. It is really impossible to know. But whatever the reasons were, and whichever tales were true, one thing was certain: in a place where there unfolds such a miracle, there could never have been a curse.

Standing on my grandmother’s roof, where she’d screamed some twenty years before, her shame echoing over the neighbors’ yards, I knew that it had really happened. That there, up above the clouds by the royal throne, God and his angels had gathered. There, forty days before my father and mother were born, a heavenly voice had called out, declaring,

“Esther Strauss, daughter of Menachem Baruch, granddaughter of Bubba Miril, descendant of rabbis and holy men, will fall in love with Shloimy, son of Mechel the milkman and his destitute, long-suffering wife, Faigah. Because such are the mysteries of Heaven, and this is what is meant to be.”

And so it was.

It’s true. It says so in the Talmud. Only God knows the secrets of love.