This Is Not a Love Story: A Memoir (4 page)

Sometimes, to give my mother a break, we went to Aunt Tziporah’s in Borough Park. Aunt Tziporah was my father’s younger sister, and she was the only one besides my mother who knew how to care for Nachum.

Nachum liked going to my aunt’s. He liked the soft rug on the bedroom floor in the space between the beds where the toy box stood. There he always played quietly by himself for hours.

My cousins never bothered Nachum. When he walked through the apartment, they quickly made way for him. When he pointed or grabbed, they gave him what he wanted. Aunt Tziporah told my cousins that there was nothing to be afraid of, that Nachum was a special boy, if a little different, and that one day he’d grow out of it and become a great tzaddik, a saint, but they were still scared of him.

Because Nachum was never going to be any saint. No saint would have been struck three times instead of once by the tapping angel. No saint bumped his head against walls and doors. No saint grabbed food from other people’s plates. A saint looked deep into the eyes and souls of others. Nachum could not even look at me.

Once, I walked into Nachum’s space between the beds in that apartment, looking for a book. My brother, building a tower out of Lego, arched his back and froze, his eyes boring into the door behind me, like a rabbit sensing danger. Saints don’t do such things. And I knew all about being a saint. My own family was chock-full of them: rabbis, leaders, and holy men.

Aunt Tziporah told us all about it. She said that my mother came from a noble family, from generations of brilliant rebbes. I loved it when Aunt Tziporah told us stories about my mother and father, and when she spoke of the days when they were young in holy Jerusalem.

Aunt Tziporah knew all about my mother and her royal ancestry. They’d grown up together in Israel, strolling down the narrow lanes and streets of the ancient city. They had been best friends since they met at age fourteen. My aunt always said that my mother was the prettiest girl in Jerusalem. Everyone knew her and her two older sisters, descendants of a noble dynasty, the great rabbinical family of the rebbes of Viyan.

You see, once, before the Holocaust, the Chassidic sect of Viyan had been one hundred thousand strong. There, in the shtetels and towns of eastern Europe, pious Chassidim lived and prayed, paying homage to the Grand Rebbe, my mother’s great-grandfather, who resided in the small town of Viyan.

The Grand Rebbe of Viyan was known far and wide as the Vunder Rebbe (the Wonder Rabbi), the man who could make miracles. It was said that even goyim came to him from surrounding villages for advice, a blessing, or a touch of the hand, and that his face shone like that of an angel.

But then came the Holocaust, and Chassidim everywhere were killed. The Grand Rebbe of Viyan was high on the Gestapo’s list. They wanted him dead, so the Gestapo sent soldiers and spies deep into the Jewish quarter of Warsaw, promising money and precious sugar for the man who brought in the Vunder Rebbe’s head.

But when the Nazi soldiers burst into his building, they could not find him. An SS officer stepped into the rebbe’s room, but he saw nothing but a bright light emanating from the corner. The officer squinted, shielding his face. When he walked out, he declared to the others that the room was empty.

“When the Germans set their eyes on him,” Aunt Tziporah told me, “they saw only the sun.”

In 1941, as the Nazis turned the ghetto upside down, the Vunder Rebbe miraculously escaped. With the help of well-bribed officers, he and a few family members made their way to Jerusalem on the last boat out of Europe.

In Jerusalem, the Vunder Rebbe sat in his small room, waiting. He waited for his disciples to return to him from the ashes and horrors of Europe. But there were few survivors, and when they stumbled onto the shores of Israel in 1945, they found their rebbe a frail and sickly man. He gathered them close around him, but all the loss was too much. His broken heart left the earth in 1948, and his eldest son, my mother’s great-uncle, a fierce and saintly leader, became the next rebbe of Viyan.

My Aunt Tziporah remembered this fierce and saintly leader from when she was a young girl in Jerusalem. She had seen him, with his long white beard and dark, fiery eyes, striding down the main street toward the shul, crowds of disciples rushing behind him.

“Even the air trembled around him,” she said.

The new rebbe told his Chassidim that they would rebuild. There would be new life, a future of thriving towns and cities brimming with the sounds of song, just like the world his father, the Vunder Rebbe, had left behind. Once more, their people would hold their heads high.

I leaned on the table in my Aunt Tziporah’s small kitchen and rested my chin in the palm of my hand, watching her peel tangerines. Aunt Tziporah spoke cheerfully as she stood over an open trash can, her dark hair peeking out from beneath her kerchief.

Both my aunt and my mother had grown up in Jerusalem, but they had lived in different parts of the city. This was why they did not know each other until the first day of ninth grade in the central religious girls’ high school. I had heard the story from my aunt many times, but every time she told it as if it were brand-new.

It was the first week in September, and two days after classes had begun. The teacher had finished roll call and was pacing in front of her desk, about to begin. Suddenly, the door swung open. Into the room walked a girl, tall, slender, and confident. She strode across the classroom as though the wind had blown her in, her long red hair cascading over her shoulders.

The teacher’s eyes narrowed. She tapped her fingers on the desk. She waited for an explanation, an apology, a late note, perhaps. But the redheaded girl said nothing. She sat at an empty desk, flipped back her hair, and then took out a notebook and began to write in long, graceful lettering.

The teacher cleared her throat.

The girl with the red hair looked up.

“My name’s Esther Strauss,” she said calmly. “There was a family wedding.”

The teacher’s mouth opened, then closed. Descendants of noble rebbes did not need late notes.

My aunt chuckled. “It was good being her friend. You could get away with anything.”

I switched my chin from my right palm to my left and frowned. I, too, was a descendant of noble rebbes, by only one generation more, yet in my school I always needed a late note. The only time my teacher said anything about my holy ancestors was when I did not behave.

“What would your great-grandmother Rebbitzen Miril say?” Mrs. Friedman had asked me after I poked Chaya Sarah’s back in the middle of class. “Such
hieligeh
grandparents and this is how you behave?”

I had badly wanted to tell Mrs. Friedman that I poked Chaya Sarah’s back with the sharp point of my pencil not because of my holy ancestors, but because Chaya Sarah was annoying. But she did not allow me to explain.

Aunt Tziporah told us more such stories around the kitchen table, and I listened, entranced. Then, after supper, my father came and said it was time to head home.

Yitzy, Rivky, Miri, and I raced down the stairs to my father’s van, shouting about whose turn it was to press the button for the automatic doors. Nachum came after us, a picture book Aunt Tziporah had given him in his hand. Then my father drove us to our home in faraway Flatbush, under the railroad bridge and to the other side, where the goyim lived.

There were only ten girls in the little yellow van that took my sisters and me home from school. Everyone else at our all-girls school in Borough Park crowded onto the large buses that dropped them off within the same neighborhood, where all proper Chassidic Jews lived. But every day at four o’clock, the little yellow van drove in the opposite direction, past the tracks, past where the trains ran, all the way to the gentile-filled neighborhood of Flatbush.

My family lived three blocks deep into the goyim, among Italians and Syrians and many others—Jews too, but the kind who watched TV and whose women wore pants. It was here that my father had bought a great white house with a large yard and a red fence. He bought it when my mother was still pregnant with me, so I never had a chance to tell him my opinion: that there was no sense in buying a house on Avenue I when we could have settled on Seventeenth Avenue, right by the shul and my school.

Only two Chassidic families lived near us on Avenue I: the Fines and the Cohens, two blocks down. On Halloween, Christmas, and all the
goyishe
holidays, my sisters and I, the Fines, and the Cohen twins were taken home early in the yellow van because it was dangerous for Jews to be out at dusk. Drunken goyim might throw eggs at us or do other evil things.

Ruchela and Leah Cohen, the twins, were a year younger than me but we were good friends. We had our own secret spy gang and played robbers and pirates and had all sorts of fun. We built a tree house from cardboard, staged puppet shows in the basement, and even dug a deep bunker in our yard to hide from Nazis, but they never showed up.

In the summers, the Cohens went to the same summer colony as my family, up in the Catskill Mountains, and we had adventures there too. Once, Ruchela said we were so close we must be secret first cousins, but I said that couldn’t be true because they wore denim skirts. My mother would never let me wear a denim skirt. Denim was a modern, immodest material, unbecoming of a Jewish girl.

Blimi, though she did not live anywhere near me, was my true best friend. She did not wear denim either. But Blimi almost never came to my house in Flatbush because her mother thought it was too far and dangerous, and because Blimi was scared of the goyim.

The first time Blimi came to play with me was on a Friday, two weeks after Nachum came home. She had agreed only because her mother was in the hospital after having her ninth baby, and Blimi was staying with her aunt, who had errands to run before Shabbos.

I reassured Blimi that we were safe, that the gentiles never started trouble with me because I was a Yid
. Anyway, God would come to my rescue in one second. So Blimi had sat in the first seat in the yellow van with me. She stared, wide-eyed, out the window. She said she had never been out of Borough Park before, and already it looked so different.

I shrugged knowingly.

“That’s not Flatbush yet,” I explained. “It’s Webster Avenue, right near Flatbush.”

Blimi pressed her nose against the window.

“You’re not scared to live there?” she asked.

I munched casually on a potato chip.

“Only sometimes,” I said. “Like when my neighbors started a fire and danced around it at night and they were dressed like the Ku Klux Klan.” I took another chip. “Then my father said a special prayer and they disappeared. Poof. Like that.”

Blimi looked at me, shocked. I nodded for emphasis.

Blimi said Borough Park was bigger than Flatbush because Borough Park was where all the real
frum
Jews lived.

I told Blimi that it was not so.

“Borough Park is better,” I agreed. “But Flatbush is for sure bigger.”

“Uh-uh,” Blimi said as though I was mad. “Everyone knows. Flatbush is much smaller.”

“It is not.”

“It is too.”

“Is not.” I licked the salt off my finger. “I even saw it on a map once.”

Blimi scrunched up her nose. “So something is wrong with your map. Everyone knows.”

The van came to a halt. The doors squealed open. The driver shouted at us to stop chattering and get off. He didn’t have all day. Go, go,
go!

I ran up the front steps of my house, Blimi skipping gaily behind me. I threw open the door, shouted hello, and pushed Blimi quickly into my room. I did not want her to see Nachum. I had asked my mother that morning to hide my brother when Blimi came, but she had refused.

“Try playing with him instead,” my mother had said. “Be nice for once, instead of shoving him and fighting!”

But I couldn’t do that. It was dangerous to play with Nachum. He might kick me, or blink creepily at me. Besides, he was a boy. It wasn’t modest.

For us, the true religious, boys and girls didn’t play together. From the age of three, girls and boys went to separate schools, separate pools, and prayed in separate parts of the shul, the girls with their mothers behind the partition, the boys with their fathers in front. It had always been this way among the pious, because terrible things happened when girls and boys mingled, even among family—Blimi’s older cousin, Nechy, had told her so.

Nechy was nine years old when her eleven-year-old cousin Z’vulin suddenly stopped playing with her. This happened after Z’vulin’s rebbe told him that it was a terrible sin to play with a girl, even if she was your cousin. And if they played, the rebbe warned, especially when nobody saw, God would make a baby come. The only girls a boy could play with after the age of three were his own sisters.

Nechy had told Z’vulin that he didn’t know what he was talking about—cousins could still play; she was almost like his sister—but Z’vulin said his rebbe surely knew better than her and he refused to be alone in the same room with her ever again. He did not want a baby to come.

I didn’t know if a baby would come or how, but I decided to be extra modest, just in case. Maybe God didn’t mind if I played with my brother, but I wasn’t going to chance it, not with such a boy. Soon, though, Blimi got bored locked up in my room. She said she really wanted to go out; it was stupid just talking on the bed. So I let Blimi look at my Hello Kitty stickers and showed her how to turn a cartwheel. Then we drew funny faces on the back of my underpants and jumped up and down on my bed.

That’s when I saw Mark coming up the steps outside the window of my room. I pulled Blimi down quickly, whispering that we hadn’t shut the shades and it was a sin if Mark saw.

“Mark?” Blimi said. “Who’s Mark?”

Kathy’s husband, I told her. The goyim who lived upstairs.

Blimi said it was crazy that I had actual gentiles living upstairs, but I told her it was okay. The Almighty protected us from evil at all times.

She begged me to take her upstairs so she could see the goyim, but I told her that it was dangerous because Mark, unlike Kathy, was dark and silent, and he smoked fat brown cigarettes with gold stickers on them, sometimes right by our door.

Blimi looked at me, her mouth open. She said she really wanted to go home now.

I changed my mind. I told her that I was joking. If Mark ever smoked a fat brown cigarette outside our door, my father would kick him out of the house that very day. Anyway, I reassured her, my father said sixteen special psalms every night, and sixteen special psalms every dawn, and those special psalms protected us from any curse or evil that a gentile might try.

My father never forgot those psalms, I explained. He said them fervently twice a day—except for once. It happened some years back when my father was ill, and at dawn he slept late, forgetting the prayers. Eventually he got up and remembered, but only at noon, and for several hours there had been no heavenly protection. Though my father then quickly said the psalms, it was too late. Nachum had already been cursed. The goyim’s evil had struck him, penetrating his very soul. And that’s why my brother was crazy.

Blimi listened quietly. She thought about it for a while, and then decided that it made sense. She said she felt terrible about blaming my parents all along. Nachum wasn’t crazy because they fell in love. It was the black magic that did it, the gentiles’ terrible curse. Goyim did such things, especially to children of such noble ancestry.

I nodded, relieved. Why hadn’t I thought of this before?

“I knew it was Mark’s fault the entire time,” I told Blimi. “I just didn’t want to say it out loud.”

Blimi’s aunt came by shortly afterward to pick her up. I opened the door to my room and Blimi ran out, tripping right over Nachum’s big head where he had settled it on the floor outside my bedroom.

Nachum was looking at a box of colorful blocks, his eyes never moving off the picture on the front of the box.

Blimi stood up, staring.

I pushed her toward the front door. I told her that it was really late and she had to leave, but she kept looking back at Nachum.

I told Blimi that dinner wasn’t ready yet and I had to help my mother in the kitchen, but she pulled on her coat as slowly as possible, still watching my crazy brother.

I said, “Okay, good-bye! Good-bye!,” blocking her way so she couldn’t see. But she looked over my shoulder until her aunt took her hand, and I closed the door in her face.

I thought of kicking Nachum’s box of blocks. Instead, I went into my room, climbed into my blanket box, and thought about the annoying mysteries of God.