This Is Not a Love Story: A Memoir (6 page)

Friday is a terrible time to make a deal with God. It is a busy time, only half a day, really, with Shabbos coming at sundown, and all the work to be done beforehand.

On Friday, we had only three hours of school. By noon, we were dismissed, sent home to help our mothers prepare. The Friday of my failed deal with God began no differently than the others. I sat in the blanket box at the head of my bed, hiding from my mother and the chores I did not want to do. I was preparing myself for a meaningful conversation with God.

There was no time to waste. I folded my legs so that I was comfortable. I carefully covered my knees with my uniform skirt, so as not to be immodest. Then, with my hands spread out like a prayer book, I eased my way into my heavenly request. I explained to God that I wanted to do the fast thing, the forty-days-and-nights thing, the way I’d done for the earrings back when He had made me that miracle.

I thought things were going well. I was pleading and promising extra psalms, but this time God got mad. Suddenly, everything went dark. I was buried in shadows and could not see a thing.

“Help!” I screamed. “Help!” I pushed at the suffocating darkness until there was light again. I blinked in the brightness, my head sticking out from under two heavy blankets, and found myself looking up at my sister, the one who’d thrown the quilts inside without bothering to check first.

Rivky stared down at me in surprise.

“What are you doing in the blanket box?”

I pushed the blankets away. “You buried me alive!” I yelled angrily. “And it’s none of your business! Get out!”

My sister stomped away. “You have to set the table for the Shabbos meal!” she shouted.

I shoved the blankets out of the box and sat down again. I leaned back, ready to start whispering fervently to God. But then, just as I began, I heard my mother’s voice.

“
Me-nu-
chah!”

I could tell that she was angry.

“Come now!”

That meant now.

I threw up my hands, exasperated. Did they not know what I was doing? I banged my fist against the side of the box.

“I’m praying!” I screeched.

There was quiet. I took a deep breath, sighed, and started again. My mother’s puzzled face peered in at me. Wisps of red hair stuck out from under her kerchief. There were smudges of white flour on her housecoat.

“You’re what?” she asked.

I thought of explaining. Then I thought better of it. I stared back at her silently.

She shook her head impatiently. “Where do you think you are—a hotel? Shabbos is in three hours! You don’t sit in a box now! Come peel the potatoes! And make sure you turn off the oven in an hour or the kugel will burn.”

The phone rang. She hurried away. The smell of sweet lokshen kugel wafted into my room, right through the walls, and into my prayers. I sighed and gestured to the heavens. This was terrible timing.

There was a sudden roar from the kitchen as the mixer turned on. The beaters whirred loudly, turning gooey egg whites into frothy snow. My mother was baking the Shabbos cake, the vanilla sponge kind that was my most favorite thing.

I jumped up and finished with God.

“Dear, dear God,” I said hurriedly. “If I fast for forty days and nights, please do a miracle and make my brother normal.”

I said this three times just in case, so it would be as clear as possible, and also because I was in a rush. I wanted leftover cake batter before my sister got her hands on it.

Shabbos was getting closer.

“Try on the Shabbos robe I bought you,” my mother called. I grabbed the robe on my mother’s bed. It fit. Good. I took it off and tossed it on the floor.

“And don’t leave the robe on the floor!”

I picked up the robe.

I set the dining room table. Then I stuck my face inside the flat container of gefilte fish and ate. My mother demanded that I take my face out of her gefilte fish; she had worked on it all night long.

Only an hour and a half to Shabbos.

It was nearly dusk, but my father wasn’t home. It was the traffic again. And no matter how many times my mother had told him not to be late for Sabbath! No matter how many times…Why couldn’t the man leave earlier?

My little sister, Miri, refused to take a bath. And my sister Rivky called me a rotten brat because I refused to move the gefilte fish from the pot to the plastic container. But in with the fish was an actual fish’s head, beady dead eyes and hollow skull, and I said I was not going to touch it. I’d throw up if I had to—I would. Yitzy said that I was a real baby, because once upon a time in Jerusalem (Aunt Tziporah always said), our grandmother brought home a live fish every Thursday night and put it in the bathtub to swim. On Shabbos eve, she’d take it out and hold it down on the kitchen counter. Then, with the words
“l’kovod Shabbos kodesh”
—in honor of the holy Shabbos—she’d clop the thing over the head with the wooden clopper, praying for its quick death.

Sometimes the fish would slip out of my grandmother’s hands and Tziporah and her brothers would run around the kitchen in circles, screeching, as the fish, in honor of the holy Shabbos, jumped and flapped on the hard stone floor and my grandmother chased after it, clopper in hand.

And I couldn’t move one fish head from pot to plastic container.

I told Yitzy that I lived in New York. And I wasn’t touching the head of any dead fish, not for a hundred dollars.

Shabbos was in a half hour. My mother ordered me to call my father—now!

I picked up the receiver to call his car phone. I dialed—just as the front door swung open. It was my father. “It’s thirty minutes to Shabbos!” I hollered into the phone anyway. “Why couldn’t you leave
earlier?
”

Twenty minutes to Shabbos.

My mother rushed out of the bathroom. My father rushed in. I rushed around, just because. Miri spilled strawberry yogurt all over her new Shabbos robe.

A neighbor came by. She needed the eggs I had borrowed last week. We did not have any eggs. She said I was irresponsible.

Ten minutes.

Mrs. Meitelis called. I picked up the phone. She said there was a Shabbos
kallah
after lunch tomorrow celebrating her daughter’s engagement. My mother should come. “Make sure you give her the message, Menuchah, okay?” Not like last time, when I had forgotten to give the message until Sunday evening. I was totally, incorrigibly scatterbrained. “Okay,” I said. “Mazel tov and
gut Shabbos.
”

Five minutes.

The shower was turned off. The garbage had been taken out. The lights in the dining room switched on. My father, his beard glistening, walked swiftly into the room. He set eight small candlesticks on the silver candelabra and the long silver candlelighter near it. Then he pulled on his long Shabbos overcoat. He took out his
shtreimel
and set it carefully on his head.

“Gut Shabbos,”
he called out. “You have four minutes left!”

My father gave me a kiss on the forehead. Also one on the nose. Then he and Yitzy went off to shul.

I stood on the couch, my face pressed against the window, watching them walk down the block. I thought my father looked like a king, with the
shtreimel
like a crown on his head. I watched the fur hat moving regally along, growing smaller and smaller, until it was gone.

I looked up at the heavens. The sun spread majestically in the sky, streaks of red and orange stretching wide along the horizon like shimmering ribbons. Then, as a streak of red dipped and bowed, touching the roof of a distant building, the low wailing of the Shabbos siren rose over the Brooklyn neighborhood, announcing to all Jews everywhere that the before time was over. Shabbos had come.

My mother stood by the candelabra in her elegant velvet Shabbos robe and held the candlelighter. Pointing the lighter at the wicks, she tapped them gently, one by one, as if with a magic wand, and eight flickering flames jumped to life. They danced under the glow of the chandelier, near the sparkling silver kiddush cup and covered challah bread. The warm aroma of chicken soup swirled slowly into the living room.

My mother swayed. She recited the blessing over the candles. She raised her hands, circling the candelabra three times, ushering in the Shabbos queen. Then she covered her eyes and prayed.

Once, long ago, in the days of the shtetl in Europe, the great rebbe of Viloshnik said that the words uttered over the Shabbos candlelight hold the power of many prayers. He said that the holy mitzvah of the Shabbos candles could undo any curse from above, and any sins from a dark past. Each time a woman asks for her sons to grow up to become Torah scholars, for her daughters to be future mothers of the nation of Israel, the angels dance with joy. And God is happy.

My mother’s hands trembled. Her face was hidden beneath the palms of her hands. I could not hear her words, but I could hear her tears. She wept quietly. She was asking God for a miracle.

Miri ran into the dining room, holding Avrumi’s stuffed rabbit. Vrumi chased angrily after her. Still, my mother prayed. Rivky sat in the chair near the flames, her siddur open to the Friday night L’cha Dodi prayer. I folded napkins into sailboats and airplanes.

Finally, my mother finished. She uncovered her face and stared wistfully at the flames. She wiped her eyes and looked down at us.

“Gut Shabbos,”
she said quietly and then smiled.

Then she saw Nachum, standing like a stranger at the entrance to the dining room. He was staring at the flames of the holy Shabbos candles, hypnotized. My mother walked toward him. Her hands reached out, beckoning him, but Nachum never saw her. She bent down, pulling him into her arms, and he stared at the flames over her shoulder. He could not feel my mother’s embrace. He did not know he was being held.

My mother kissed Nachum on the forehead. She hugged him quickly, and then he pulled away.

I wondered about my ancestors. Why, if there were so many of them, noble rabbis and holy saints, had they not already made a miracle? After all, wasn’t it my own great-great-grandfather, the Vunder Rebbe, who did just that for so many others? Then why not for us?

My teacher had once told us that when a person prays from his heart, all of Heaven hears his desperation. The souls of our ancestors carry those prayers aloft, ensuring that they reach the heavenly throne. Then, standing in front of the Almighty Himself, they pray on our behalf.

So what was happening up there? I could not understand. It was really impossible to know. Because my teacher also said that in Heaven, at times, there can be a
stiah,
an obstruction, a spirit blocking the heartfelt prayer. Sometimes it is a sin from the past, long forgotten; sometimes it’s a soul with a grudge from the days he was on earth that can keep a plea from reaching its destination. And God is deaf to such prayers. To have a
stiah
is to be cursed.

In the city of Jerusalem, there were two sides: the one where the rich lived, and the one filled with the poor. My father lived on the poor side. He lived there with his four siblings, the alley cats, and a father who was crippled in both body and head.

That’s why there were no pictures of my father when he was a little boy, said my mother. That’s why there were no pictures of his sisters in elegant, frilly clothes. Because my father grew up in a one-bedroom apartment by the border, where only the poorest lived, right near where the Jordanian soldiers guarded their side of Jerusalem.

Things hadn’t always been that way. Once, my father’s father, Sabah Mechel, had been a healthy man. Once, my grandmother Savtah Liba had been happy. Perhaps they were poor, with five children in a tiny home, but no one was ever hungry. There were chicken legs for soup, warm socks from the
shuk
for the feet, and Aunt Dina, Sabah Mechel’s sister, from around the corner, who sent cakes and little snacks.

My grandmother Savtah Liba had suffered endlessly in her life. She had survived Auschwitz, watching her entire family turned to ash. Then, in the refugee camp, only one year after the war, she lost her new husband. When she arrived in Israel in 1947, she was alone, with a toddler by her side and a newborn in her arms.

Two years later, Savtah Liba married my grandfather Sabah Mechel, a milkman. They were poor, even very poor, for how much did a milkman earn? But my grandmother was happier than she had ever been because Sabah Mechel was a kind and generous soul who treated his wife like a queen.

Sabah Mechel polished my grandmother’s shoes every Friday until they shone like new, in honor of the holy Shabbos. Sabah Mechel bought my Savtah Liba pretty trinkets, a brooch for her dress, a shawl for the cold, a hat that matched her eyes. Sabah Mechel helped keep the house clean—not an easy job, what with the mopping, and the laundry, and the heavy metal pots. And one day, he came home with an expensive new vegetable peeler, made in the faraway land of America.

On Friday nights, in the synagogue, Sabah Mechel gave candies to children who prayed with fervor, and sometimes, at the Shabbos meal, he’d give the food off his own dinner plate to beggars passing by, because they were still poorer than him.

Sabah Mechel worked hard to earn a living, rising each morning before the sun. He’d wheel the milk wagon to the corner of the main street, unload a large metal canister from the dairy truck, a thirty-pound barrel filled with milk from the kibbutz farms. Sabah Mechel would hoist the canister onto the wagon, which he pushed through crisscrossing lanes, over cobblestones and dirt streets. He would hum a
nigun
to himself as he filled the glass bottles that stood patiently beside closed doors with fresh, white milk. At eight, when the sun shone bright in the sky, he parked his milk wagon and went off to morning prayers.

Down the main hallway from where my father’s family lived was the bathroom they shared with the Rosens. Also with the Yuds, the Klaynmans, and the Itamars. Mostly, the families got along and there was peace and harmony. Here and there, a problem arose, like when the Klaynmans got diarrhea, all eight of them at once, or when Little Mendel stuffed his socks down the toilet, blocking the drain completely.

Mendel was my father’s youngest brother, and he had never meant to block the drain completely. In fact, as soon as the socks disappeared into the darkness of the bowl, Mendel changed his mind. He wanted his socks back, to pull up over his cold feet, but it was too late. They were already stuck.

So Mendel called my father, Shloimy, then seven years old, who grabbed a broom from outside the Itamars’ door and thumped it down the drain. Mendel locked the bathroom so the neighbors could not see as his older brother pulled and pushed, pushed and pulled at the socks that would not budge from deep inside the toilet. Mendel said two psalms for unplugging the toilet, the way he’d done to heal his stray cat, and it was then, as my father gave a final push, that the socks came spurting up—along with everything else.

Shloimy told Mendel to stop praying. Now was the time to flee.

They dropped the broom on the overflowing bathroom floor and ran to the courtyard, where they started playing
kugelach
and tag as if they’d been there all afternoon, never once looking back. They chased cats down the alley and dared each other to touch the entrance door of the dark building where the Christian missionaries lived, those who kidnapped Jewish orphans.

When Mr. Itamar returned home to the screams of his wife, hovering over her filth-caked broom, he grabbed his sons, each by one ear, demanding to know which of the little fools had stuffed the only toilet with his socks. They yelped and screamed and said they didn’t know, but Mr. Itamar made them clean up the mess anyway while my father and Mendel sat several courtyards away eating Aunt Dina’s cakes and snacks.

Life could have gone on like this forever, but it didn’t. Perhaps because God saw that things were better for Savtah Liba and He got worried. She had already been happy for several years.

So it was a rather simple thing for an angel to trip Sabah Mechel in the dark, to send him stumbling down the stone steps with his wagon, and to see to it that his head hit the sharp edge of a brick or stone. The milk, rushing from the overturned canister, streamed down the street, all wasted, but Sabah Mechel never noticed. Blood covered his eyes, soaking the fallen
kippa
near his head, red mixing with white, as the wheels of the wagon spun in the dark, silent air of Jerusalem.

It was Yanofsky who saw him first as he walked down the street on his way to early morning prayers. Yanofsky dragged Sabah Mechel to the hospital, where they stopped the bleeding, wrapping his head in gauze and plaster. But Sabah Mechel did not open his eyes for days. In the operating room, a surgeon with a sharp knife cut open the back of Sabah Mechel’s head and poked around worriedly inside. Then, finding nothing but smashed skull, he sewed Sabah Mechel back together again with a needle, a thread, and a prayer.

Sabah Mechel was discharged several weeks later. There was nothing more the doctors could do. The ambulance brought him home, and he lay in the apartment’s one bedroom in crippling pain. He was a generous soul still, but now there was a raging violence that burst randomly from the cracks of his broken skull, and it was impossible to know what would set it off.

Sabah Mechel could no longer wake up at dawn, so Savtah Liba went to work instead. She rose each morning before the sun, pushing the milk wagon down the twisting lanes.

Sabah Mechel’s seventy-five-year-old mother, Bubba Tzirah, moved in to care for her crippled son. In the morning, she filled the house with the smell of cheese strudel and fresh bread. In the evening, she cooked warm soup and scrubbed the little ones clean. Sometimes she sent Hadassah, the oldest, to help her mother with the milk at dawn. Sometimes she sent my father, already eight years old and strong enough, to help too. They filled glass bottles as the sun rose over the city, and children rushed past them to school. Some mornings, Hadassah would see her teacher walking hurriedly down the street. Crouching behind a gate or a wall, she hid until the teacher was gone and could not see her poverty and shame.

Things got better when Savtah Liba found a job koshering chickens in the butcher’s store. There she did not need to wake up before the sun. There no one could see her, standing in bloodstained clothes in the refrigerated back room, salting crates of headless chickens until every speck of blood was drawn out and the meat was kosher and pure, and the skin had come off the palms of both of her hands.

But the butcher was a good man. He gave Savtah Liba drumsticks and chicken breasts to take home to her children free of charge.

“We were poor, I guess,” Aunt Tziporah would say. “But we never thought about it. Everyone was poor. Sometimes when there was some extra money, we bought wafer crumbs at the
shuk.
They were sold at the kiosk, right near the licorice and chocolate and things we couldn’t afford. The wafer crumbs were delicious. There were two boxes of them, one filled with vanilla crumbs, the other with chocolate crumbs, and for only a shekel we could fill half a bag.”

So who complained? Nobody ever complained, and Savtah Liba kept her suffering to herself. Because in the city of Jerusalem there were two sides: the one where the rich lived, and the one filled with the poor. My father lived among the poor—there, with his siblings and his crippled father; there, amidst suffering and illness; there, where the alley cats yowled of their hunger and were chased down ancient lanes by the hiss of old men’s shoes. God’s earth was hard enough. Nobody was interested in hearing about the general suffering too.