Make It Concrete

by Miryam Sivan

  “I wish I were coming with you.” Emanuel leaned against the station turnstile.

  “I know, but I’m going for such a short time.”

  This trip to New York was part of Isabel’s policy of sitting with clients close to a book’s completion. A chance to solicit a last round of comments and revisions, preventing unpleasant surprises after the manuscript was handed over to Schine.

  “In three years we’ve only gone away twice, Issie. That time in Eilat and once to Tel Aviv. Never abroad.” He wasn’t rebuking her, only reiterating facts that spoke for themselves. The gauntlet thrown down at her feet a few weeks ago shadowed his words.

  “We never have enough time.” Isabel glanced at her watch. The train was due in five minutes.

  “Let’s make the time.”

  “Okay.”

  He opened his arms to her. “I know you need to focus on your work now.” They held one another and their bodies spoke their own language. Calm swept away tension. Isabel leaned into the love. Still the day fast approached when she might have to make it concrete once again to Emanuel that she wouldn’t not go all the way. A long trip to Thailand or Italy, yes. Coming home from that trip to the same house, no. They gave each other a full kiss. She turned one last time before going down to the platform. Emanuel smiled and waved good-bye.

  ✶

  Somewhere over the Atlantic, Isabel managed to push Emanuel’s ticking bomb out of her mind. She stared at the soundless movie on the screen and decided to approach Suri by telling her that she was quitting ghosting. Jaim Benjamin’s her last book. Not that this was necessarily true. It was only a consideration at this point, albeit a serious one. Serious enough to use to navigate around Suri’s blockade. If Suri believed Isabel then maybe she would open up about Siberia. She would have no reason to fear that her life story would make its way to the pages of a book.

  Hours later, Isabel having slept some and watched a romantic comedy that ended just as the couple was about to slide into their happily ever after, the plane began its descent into New York. A bitter taste coated Isabel’s throat. She thought of Zakhi putting in extra hours at the Winkler site. Making up for the seven days he sat on a low stool at his parents’ house, mourning the brother who wouldn’t speak to him for ten years. Amos, the brother who just died, was on the side of the excommunicators. Contact with apostates considered a bad influence on the children. It was Aaron, the eldest of the eight children, who always called Zakhi, who believed in staying in touch, in maintaining a bridge. Zakhi knew Aaron continued to hope that he’d repent and return to the fold.

  “Aaron was acting on my parents’ behalf,” Zakhi told Isabel when they met at the Winkler site after the shiva. “No one came out and said it, but by the way my father talked to me, touched me, it was clear that on the one hand there’s pressure to disown me publicly, but on the other, he knows everything Aaron knows about me. At night when we were alone, after everyone went home or to sleep, we talked in the kitchen. My father held my hand the whole time. Asked real meaningful questions about my life. Like I was seven years old again when he used to ask about what I learned in school. Same keen interest.”

  “He loves you.”

  “He does,” Zakhi said. “But not enough to stand up to his rabbi, or his community. Especially since we’re Cohens.”

  “Different standards?”

  “And rules.”

  “You’re not allowed to go into cemeteries, right?”

  “And not allowed to marry divorcees.”

  ✶

  “Maybe I should learn the art of demolition.” Isabel whispered to herself and pressed her face against the airplane window’s cold plastic. The east coast’s silhouette lengthened below. When the city came into view, she felt the rooftops pull towards the sky. The plane flew in low and turned round to Kennedy. The tall buildings, the lights of this other home, worked their charm. Gone were the goat herds, the groves of olive and pomegranate trees. A run of excitement, the pleasures of the urbane, ran through Isabel. Broadway, Central Park West, Riverside. Soon. She leaned further into the window, towards the asphalt, the concrete. Towards the rhythms of the metropolis.

  ✶

  Suri sent a car service. Just past midnight she and Isabel sat together in her small kitchen drinking jasmine tea. Hal was in Buffalo visiting his family. A serendipitous bonne chance to be alone with Suri. But was it really just chance? Zakhi believed that everything happened for a reason. Emanuel said there are patterns to circumstances, but he wasn’t sure if there was meaning to these patterns. Alon didn’t think about these things. Maybe he was happiest of them all.

  Isabel stretched her arms above her head. Eleven hour plane rides wreaked havoc on the spine. She stood and walked to the kitchen window. Lights edged the Hudson. As a child she had paid a great deal of attention to the seasons on this wide river, the closest and certainly largest experience of nature in her urban life. White-grey ice floes locked the waters in the coldest weeks of winter. Slate patches spread along the surface on less cold days. And in summer, the river turned a lighter blue, not cerulean or beryl like the Mediterranean, Dead, Red, and Galilee Seas she now lived with, but a lovely sapphire. And in autumn and spring, on days of sunshine, the waters of the Hudson were royal and navy blue.

  Suri asked about Lia and her studies. About Asaf. About Yael’s transfer. About Uri’s school and the pony. About Emanuel, his work, his daughters. Tired and nervous, Isabel felt like a spy in her mother’s house. The pressure of the conversation she intended to initiate weighed heavily on her. Her responses were laconic.

  “Has anything changed since your talk with Emanuel?” Suri took a sip of tea. “If he doesn’t hold the key to your heart, Issie, then it may not be fair to keep him waiting. He’s in love with you.”

  “I’m exhausted, Suri.” Isabel looked down the hallway. The catch-up talk was over for now. Under the best of circumstances she had little patience for what Molly called the current events reports: synopses of everyday life handed over in succinct paragraphs. The price paid when people who loved one another lived far apart. “I want to talk about everything, Emanuel too, but right now, I’m beat.”

  “’Night, lovely.” Suri kissed her on the brow. “Your bed’s made up.”

  Isabel watched her mother’s back retreat down the hallway to her room. Shorter, thinner, a slight drag in her stride. Suri, in her late seventies, aging prematurely. The war taking its toll. Or maybe it was just the late hour. Why did everything have to be the war? And then Isabel grimaced comically to herself. She sounded just like Suri.

  She went into the unlit living room. Entering a childhood home was like wading through a viscous liquid. Distinct, familiar, yet bewildering. Layers of obsolescence and the present-day converged. She turned on a table lamp. The dark green sofa stood where it always did. The hanging lamp from India with colorful bits of glass was in the corner. Here were the Persian rugs Isabel loved. Their deep warm hues always a comfort. And the Barcelona chair Dave bought right before she was born. But what’s this? A new flat screen television and upholstered recliner? Whoa. Isabel stopped in front of these set pieces. Hal. Concessions to Hal after decades of a small television banished to the maid’s room at the back of the apartment. So Suri was capable of change. Good.

  Usually it didn’t take Isabel more than a few hours to find her place in this cross-section of time, objects, and stories. But this visit was different. This visit was about unveiling, not dressing over. It was about speech, not the status quo. It was about change. More change. Isabel closed the light switch. The living room went dark and she walked down the hall to her old room and stood on the threshold. The remnants of her childhood had long given way to a simple elegant guestroom. Only the bed, the one Jiri came into last time she visited New York, remained from years past. Isabel stood by the window to look at the river again. Guilt overwhelmed her.

  For Suri, Isabel’s arsenal o
f questions would be a kind of trespass. Isabel undressed, brushed her teeth, went into bed. Nervous, self-conscious, but also rebellious. Even a little proud of herself. Finally rebellious after decades of compliance. The need to protect her beautiful vulnerable mother finally giving way to Isabel’s own needs, questions, her own pain. Isabel would ask. Let Suri say no, again and again, Isabel would persist and ask. And ask some more. No more stonewalling. At forty-six years of age Isabel was more than ready to return home to Israel with answers.

  Molly had tried to lower Isabel’s sights before the trip.

  “Silence is commonplace for many Europeans. Not only that generation. Not just those who suffered the war. The culture of disclosure, of talk shows, of public therapy, is not natural to them.”

  To this day, she told Isabel, many of her Dublin friends remained suspicious of too much talk. They poked fun at Molly, said it made perfect sense that she entered the field of psychoanalysis, as one friend put it, that loquacious Jewish science. Molly illustrated her point with a joke. Two Irish men sit next to each other at a pub. They don’t talk. After 3 hours and many pints, one asks the other how he’s doing. His mate answers: Did we come here to drink or to talk?

  ✶

  Under the covers in her childhood bed, Isabel’s inner censure uncoiled and she sought solace in the shadows on the walls and ceiling. Back home, pitch black Galilee nights filled her house. But in New York, the glut of street lights made nocturnal art in darkened rooms. As a child she told herself little dramas about the shadows. This often helped her sleep.

  A constructivist shadow filled one section of the ceiling. She stared at the intersecting geometrical shapes, a large oval and various bands and rectangles, and thought of home. Seven in the morning there. Lia would be preparing herself tea and sandwiches for her and Uri to take to school. Uri would be stirring in bed as Lia came in for a second time to wake him. He was cozy under the down blanket and didn’t want to wake up. Woody, curled into the pocket of his stomach, didn’t feel like budging either. Isabel smiled to herself imagining those two. How school stretched endlessly for a boy of seven. Hanukah, and the vacation that would release him from such long spells of sitting at a desk, was just a few weeks away. And then there was Yael. No doubt she was already awake and in motion. Where, doing what, Isabel didn’t know. And why was the greatest mystery of all.

  After this inventory Isabel thought of Emanuel’s soft good-bye at the train station. He was swimming or running at this early hour. Or maybe at his desk. She smiled thinking of his handsome face, his shy smile. And Zakhi was probably on his way to a construction site, or maybe in bed with a woman, his muscular arm draped over her curved hip. Isabel twisted her head towards the window, overtired from an entire night spent flying. It would be difficult to wind down. She didn’t want to read. She didn’t want to watch television since it only stimulated her. So she drifted, like she did when she was a child, over the elm tree’s shadows in the far corner of the room. Her thoughts wandered until they faded near the wall’s crown molding. A moment of peace.

  The tree shadows swayed with wind coming off the river. Lately she had been thinking about writing a different kind of book to wean herself off the ghosts. It would be about the Holocaust but not personal stories. A concept book dealing with a particular phenomenon: Hollywood and the American government during the war. Twenty years of research had yielded gobs of reprehensible and compelling facts. Finally a non-fiction book openly authored by Isabel Toledo.

  Some people counted sheep. Others counted down from one hundred to tease sleep. Isabel recounted facts. One. After the release of Borzage’s The Mortal Storm, Goebbels banned the screening of all MGM pictures in German territories. 1940. He vowed to boycott Hollywood studios that portrayed Nazis negatively. Which meant realistically, from an Allied point of view. In those years, over ten percent of the American movie market fell in German-controlled European countries and Goebbels meant business. Two. Most American producers and studios took Goebbels’ cue and avoided stories about the German war machine. Their eyes remained fixed on the bottom line. This included Jewish heads of studios.

  Isabel turned on her left side to face the wall and tucked the thick blanket between her knees. Three. The American government was also not interested in cultivating antagonism with the powerful German leader and made it difficult for Chaplin to distribute The Great Dictator. 1940. Their policy was to leave Hitler alone. His continent. His business.

  Four. Senator Gerald Nye, Republican from North Dakota, accused certain Hollywood personalities of goading America into war with Germany. He wouldn’t come out and say it was mainly the Jews, but everyone knew who ran Hollywood. Still, in 1941 the non-Jewish Charlie Chaplin was subpoenaed to appear before a Senate Sub-Committee investigating whether Hollywood was in fact introducing pro-war propaganda into its films. Nye considered The Great Dictator’s final “Look up, Hannah” soliloquy a provocation. It’s anti-fascist message was delivered by a Jew, a nebbish barber from the ghetto, who had the nerve to openly express his dream of a gentler more humane world. Five. Nye didn’t know that Chaplin named his young Jewish heroine Hannah after his own mother. In real life this vulnerable woman was abandoned first by her husband, then by an unkind world, and finally by her sanity. Even twelve years after her death, Chaplin was trying to make it okay for his mother. Look up, Hannah, there was still hope. Isabel could totally relate.

  Six. The big change came once the United States officially entered the war. After Pearl Harbor, Hollywood, with the government’s encouragement, threw itself into the war effort. Casablanca. 1942. Spitfire. 1942. We Dive at Dawn. 1943. The boundary between politics and art so easy to spot, like a fresh pink scar. Isabel sat up in bed. She punched the pillow into a ball and laid back down again. The tree shadows danced. They bent and dipped while the Hudson kicked up a blast, a warning shot of the long winter ahead. It was early December and it felt like snow was on the way.

  Seven. One of Isabel’s favorite Hollywood-Holocaust morsels involved music. Forty-seven years after Irving Berlin, née Israel Beline, left Mohilev in Russia as a child of five, he wrote the song “White Christmas.” Again 1940. A prolific year. America’s popular music industry was rife with European Jewish composers who had fled the continent. Max Steiner won three Academy Awards and twenty-two nominations for Gone with the Wind, Casablanca, The Caine Mutiny, et al. Fredrick Loewe scored Brigadoon and My Fair Lady.

  Irving Berlin was no slouch compared. Holiday Inn came out in 1942. Bing Crosby sang “White Christmas” as thousands of American troops were conscripted into the European and South Pacific theaters of war. Berlin who considered his song an amusing little number, a satirical throwaway, was surprised when it captured the longings of both the fighting and civilian public for a peaceful, family, and community-centered world. “White Christmas” became an enormous hit then and remained America’s most recorded song. The iconic American Christmas carol.

  Isabel turned on her back and relaxed into the ludicrous. Her eyelids no heavier.

  “Eight. Irving Berlin,” she spoke out to the shadow boxes hovering over her, “a Russian Jew, fled the cold snowy land of his birth. There, white Christmas time was also pogrom time, second to Easter, best time of year to kill Jews. Nine. Or maybe this is still part of eight? Berlin won an Academy Award for ‘White Christmas.’ 1942.” Isabel closed her eyes. This was where it got better. Really better.

  Nine. During those same exact months that Berlin became America’s top pop troubadour, his religious compatriots in Deutschland became real-time victims of a populist xenophobia.

  “Paradox a rubber dinghy to cling to once the ship’s hull dips below the water’s surface,” Isabel spoke out to the room’s darkness and continued to trace and address the shadows that twisted turned, dipped, and blew. Feeling no tide of sleep plowing in from the horizon, Isabel got out of bed and stood by the window.

  “The Jews in Berlin, in all of Germ
an-occupied Europe, also listened to the radio a lot during those months. Not for music, not for nostalgia, or comfort or pleasure. Certainly not for white Christmas crooning.” The windowpane was cold. “They listened obsessively because their lives depended on sorting through the maelstrom of rumors and instructions that came with the Final Solution.” The river was black and the sky filled with low lying clouds. Riverside had emptied of traffic.

  Ten. The Czech composer and conductor, Hans Krása, declined conducting posts in Paris and Chicago. He could have gotten out of Europe and made his way to good steady work in Hollywood. But instead of mixing cocktails with Berlin and Brecht in L.A., he ran Terezin’s Freizeitgestaltung: Administration of Free Time Activities Committee. His Brundibar passed the censor because it was a children’s operetta in which the children defeat evil and save their sick mother. Itka and many Terezin prisoners were filled with treasured hope when they saw it. Eleven. Towards the end of the war, under Krása’s artistic directorship, the Red Cross filmed Brundibar. A German showcase to the world that Czechoslovakia’s Jews were being cared for in the ghetto. After the filming Krása was deported to Auschwitz and murdered. October 1944.

  Isabel sat on the narrow window sill and stared down at Riverside. A bus without passengers quickly took a curve. A taxi stopped crookedly by the curb and a couple spilled out drunk with alcohol and desire. They kissed deeply, pushed up one against the other, stumbled and disappeared into a building. The glass was very cold against Isabel’s skin. She wondered where sleep was. Wondered about the white snow.

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