by Miryam Sivan
The following morning Isabel went down into the subway and, as usual whenever she was in a crowded space in the States or Europe, felt the absence of security guards checking bags and surveying the crowd for strange behavior. How easy it would be to set off a bomb in this city. She could almost hear the cell phone ring seconds to detonation. Afterwards surveillance cameras would retrace the scene. They would see the man in a bulky coat. But that wouldn’t help the murdered, the maimed, and traumatized.
These thoughts and fears rose in her as she sat in the train car and watched a man across from her in an especially bulky coat. She stared at his hands. If they began to play with his cell phone, she’d run. But he dozed. One hand in a coat pocket. The other held the phone passively on his thigh. Her stop came. She got off the platform as fast as she could and bounded up the stairs to the avenue. On her way to Jaim Benjamin’s on 11th Street, and in honor of her children, Isabel paused in front of a donut shop. When the children came to New York and woke up super early courtesy of jet lag, they always raced to the donut shop on Broadway two blocks from Suri’s. A lot of time was spent in front of the grid of color and sugar appliqués: frosted, sprinkled, butternut, jelly, crème, glazed, crullers. They bought a baker’s dozen and on their way back to Riverside started eating. On her own, Isabel passed on the donut ritual but remained in front of the plate glass window for a few seconds to feel connected to her children on the other side of the planet.
✶
Jaim and Isabel sat at his small round dining room table.
“Lovely flowers,” she said nervously, admiring the orange lilies and eucalyptus leaves in a vase next to her. A month ago Jaim asked her not to send any more pages. I trust you, he wrote. Finish the entire manuscript and then we’ll sit. And here she was.
“Mr. Schine told me you worked punctually.” Jaim placed a cup of coffee on the table. He pushed the sugar bowl towards her. He looked fit and full of vigor for his eighty years. His grey hair was thick. His lined olive face handsome and alert. No hint of depression this morning. “Let’s begin.”
Isabel plunged into the manuscript with him working page after page for the first four chapters. Jaim had very few comments.
“Here, help yourself.” He put a plate of brioche on the table. “They’re from the bakery on Bleecker.” He paused. “Isabel, I have a question not related to the book.”
“Hmm.” Crumbs of flaky brioche crust stuck to her fingertips and mouth. Much better than a donut. She knew what was coming. At some point all her clients asked how a nice girl like her got into this line of work.
“I know I asked this when you interviewed me last time, but maybe not so directly. Maybe I was too sensitive, too shy. I feel closer to you now. I can be more honest, I hope that’s okay.”
“Sure, please.” She spread blueberry jam on the remaining piece of brioche.
“How come you’re so involved with the Holocaust and not with the Spanish Diaspora? You’re a Toledo after all.”
Isabel put the brioche back on the plate. Not the question she expected. Not the question she wanted to hear.
“You see,” Jaim continued. “If I were a writer, I would write a book linking the Inquisition to the Holocaust.”
Isabel said nothing.
“Have you considered, how strange it is, absurd even, that the small Jewish community in Spain and Portugal wasn’t shipped off to the camps despite Franco’s alliance with Hitler?”
Should she tell him about her high school years and the ache for Spain? How she came to favor, as one did a lame leg, the Holocaust of the twentieth century? Because it was more recent. Because she helped make emotional reparations for fifteen individuals and their families. Because she earned money writing these books. Because of Suri. And Dave Toledo, the absent father, the link to Spain, was no longer.
“Franco had Jewish roots.” Isabel responded out of politeness, her silence making more of a statement than she was willing to own. Emotions sequestered. “King Ferdinand too. His grandmother was Jewish and when her bones were exhumed and burned by the Inquisitors he said nothing. Even the King was afraid of the Church.”
“Is that why Franco restored synagogues in Toledo?”
“Could be.” Her Spanish side bled through despite her resistance.
Jaim pushed his chair back and stood up. He walked around the table. “After the war I heard that Jews who proved Spanish ancestry got transit visas from Spain to Portugal to America.” He faced away from her. “Had we known we could have made it. My family. My brothers, little sister, maybe alive still.” He paused. “I think you should write about this.”
Isabel felt she had landed in a game of hot potato but instead of a small handy object a large meteorite had fallen into her lap. And it burned.
“You know, Isabel Toledo, in Spain, in Toledo, Seville, Cordoba, Barcelona, and I could go on, like in Germany, a Christian with Jewish ancestors was often persecuted. One-twentieth in the blood lines was enough for the Inquisitors to take an interest in you. Imprison you. Torture you. Murder you. The Nazis stopped doing their math at one-fourth.” Jaim paused.
Isabel stared at the orange-rich lilies and the restful silver-green eucalyptus. “The facile reduction from a name to a number,” she said feeling heat rise in her. The shifting shape of the present tense.
“I want to take you someplace.” Jaim walked to the front door and she followed. “Close by.”
They walked east on 11th Street and crossed Sixth. The avenue was so congested Isabel pulled into herself. Years ago she had lost her tolerance for this kind of urban density. Walking among the pack of people crossing from one sidewalk to another she quieted herself imagining the fields around her home. She and Jaim Benjamin continued east towards Washington Square Park. Suddenly he stopped next to a low dark brick wall.
“Look.”
Isabel peered through a wrought iron gate and saw a very small triangular cemetery. Weathered letters and numbers on timeworn gravestones were spotted with moss, fungi, pigeon droppings, and dead leaves.
“Hebrew.” She turned to Jaim.
He pointed to the plaque by the gate and read out loud: “The Second Cemetery of the Spanish Portuguese Synagogue Shearith Israel. In the City of New York. 1805–1829.” He looked up at Isabel. “The first one’s all the way downtown. In Chinatown. This is the second. There’s another on 21st Street.”
“Shearith Israel on 70th and Central Park West?” she asked.
“Right near where you grew up. The Spanish-Portuguese Synagogue. First Jewish congregation in North America. 1654.”
“We never went there. Never went to any synagogue.” Isabel scanned the graves as best she could through the small iron gate.
“No Toledos here.” Jaim was ready for her. “But the footprints of your ancestors are all over this city. And it’s this easy to find.”
“I’ve passed this place hundreds of times and never saw it. Never knew it existed.”
“I know. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
And when Jaim Benjamin walked back towards his apartment, Isabel remained staring into this hole-in-the-wall cemetery. Heaps of people walked by, oblivious to the dead buried in their midst. How had she missed it all these years? She had to see the one on 21st Street. Were Toledos buried there?
The Third Cemetery of the Spanish-Portuguese Synagogue Shearith Israel in the City of New York, 1829–1851, also occupied a quiet plot of land that was practically invisible. A little larger than its 11th Street counterpart, it was sandwiched between tall brick buildings with a small sign at the top of a graceful black iron gate identifying it. Only when Isabel began to hang on to the bars, trying to make out the Hebrew and English on the headstones in the back, did some passersby pause to wonder what she was looking at. Like her they saw a flagstone path, a few trees, crooked tombstones of varying heights, tall grass, and pieces of litter swept into the open space by the w
ind. The footprints of your ancestors are all over this city, Jaim had said, but there were no Toledos in here either. Had she begun to think in clichés? This was almost as bad as being haunted by golems and ghouls. If she were like her grandmother Bella she would spit three times over her left shoulder to ward off the evil eye. Instead Isabel shuddered in the cool air and turned away from the dead.
✶
Isabel needed to walk. She headed north. Suri’s apartment’s was sixty blocks away. In city terms, a piece of cake. She passed through Chelsea, Herald and Times Square, Clinton, then hit Carnegie. Pounding the pavement, street after street, block after block, crosswalk upon crosswalk, was her habitual way of moving back into the city of her childhood.
Autumn cool gave way overnight to winter chill. She walked briskly and looked up at buildings, those familiar and those renovated. Oyster-white clouds floated against the sky’s flat iron blue. The skyline of the urban stride: with Dave on the way to Radio City Music Hall, with Suri as they walked from B. Altman’s up Fifth Avenue to Sak’s then east to Bloomingdale’s. This was the horizon of her adolescent saunter through the Village. West to east and west again to catch the Seventh Avenue line home, giddy with the city’s magnetism and the careless joy of being young and mobile.
When she reached the glorious sanctuary of Central Park West she breathed deeply. A few blocks up she saw a group of men carrying big boxes down the steps of a grand institutional building with arched doorways and Neo-Classical columns. She paused. It was Shearith Israel. Of course it was.
Jaim Benjamin’s exhortation pestered her. Isabel crossed the street, squeezed past the movers, and entered the synagogue’s prayer hall. She sat quietly in a back row taking the space in slowly. This was her first time inside even though she grew up only a few streets away. The windows caught her attention first. Tall Romanesque arches filled with pale yellow stained glass. Three arches on each of the four walls. Twelve windows for the twelve tribes of Israel, like in Prague’s Altneuschule.
“Tiffany,” a mover said passing by.
“What?”
“Tiffany, you know the fancy glass maker. Windows are his.” He waited for Isabel to make a sign that she understood. She smiled and nodded. He nodded back.
Louis Comfort Tiffany. Isabel thought of his full name. Did his windows bring comfort to the small community of Sephardic Jews in a not always hospitable New World? The raised dais from which the Torah was read stood in the center of the room. Sephardic custom. Isabel rose from her seat in the back and moved closer to it. Did Dave ever venture inside? Did his parents pray here? Was Suri ever here? Dave’s presence was so strong suddenly that Isabel expected to see him smirking in one of the pews. But aside from Isabel and the movers, the sanctuary was empty.
Dave and Isabel sat together in a synagogue once. On another island. Lifetimes ago. She was twelve years old and they had flown down to St. Thomas for Christmas. Suri browsed through the duty-free designer shops and Isabel complained of boredom. Dave suggested they explore and not far from Charlotte Amalie they stumbled upon the Congregation of Blessing and Peace and Loving Deeds. A bronze plaque said it was founded in 1796.
“Nine Sephardic families established this place,” Dave read out loud.
Isabel said nothing. Dave never talked about Jews or religion. She never heard him show interest in Spanish Jews, except to mention occasionally the families and friends in the New York community he grew up with. But even then, this common history was a passing footnote. Nothing important enough to linger over.
“After that, more Jews arrived from England, France, and other Caribbean islands. This is the oldest synagogue building in continuous use under the American flag.”
Isabel couldn’t believe he was excited by this. Her father the proud Jew? As a survivor, Jewish pride was naturally Suri’s domain. Though she too made great efforts to keep a low profile on the divine. Once Suri told Isabel that god was passé. This was after Isabel moaned that her Jewish friends went to Hebrew school and were preparing for bar and bat-mitzvas that year. She also wanted a big party. Suri told her she had no problem with the party. She could have a party. She could have a European tour to mark her coming of age. She could go on an African safari. Just leave god out of it. God had nothing to do with her being alive and making it to age twelve. Isabel dropped the subject. No party, no world tour, certainly no Hebrew School.
Dave and Isabel sat on a bench facing the dais in the middle of the room. Soft white sand covered the synagogue floor.
“It’s the beaches creeping in.” Isabel slipped her feet out of her sandals and dug her toes into the cool sand.
“No,” Dave said. “It’s a reference to Egypt. From the bondage of Europe to the freedom of the New World.” Dave’s love for America equaled his loathing for the Old Worlds of Europe and the Fertile Crescent.
Isabel spied a brochure on the dais and got up to retrieve it. “The sand covering the synagogue floor pays homage to the trials of the New Christians during the Inquisition.” She read out loud from the pulpit. “They would gather in Spanish and Portuguese cellars to say their Hebrew prayers. Sand on the floor muffled their footsteps and voices.” She closed the pamphlet and looked at Dave. He was even more enthusiastic. Like before a basketball game at Madison Square Garden. Or when he described California to her and Suri. He had already begun to spend a lot of time there. Doing business, Suri said.
“Why don’t we have a spontaneous bat-mitzva celebration for you, Isabel? You’re twelve. Perfect timing.”
Isabel was surprised. A little appalled. Suri would hate the idea. Where was all this Jewish interest coming from suddenly?
“If we do it here,” Dave nearly shouted out, “it will tie you to the Toledos. Our family came to the New World with the Dutch in the 1700s. We’re originally from Spain, not Ohio, I remind curious Americans. We crossed through France into Holland after the Expulsion. Boarding Dutch ships, we were among the early seventeenth-century European settlers in Brazil, then Curaçao, before moving to the United States in the nineteenth century.”
This was the longest family history lesson she had ever heard from Dave. Isabel knew few cousins on his side. His parents died soon after her birth. Dave had no siblings and kept in touch sporadically with his extended family. If it weren’t for his name, his dark features, and his one remaining childhood friend, Leon Herrera, Isabel might not have even known he was not Ashkenazi. But eventually she learned from Suri that for generations these Spanish Jews married only within their community. By the time Dave chose as his wife a Polish Yiddish-speaking Holocaust survivor, the days of radical shunning for marrying out were long past.
Sitting in the empty Shearith Israel Synagogue on Central Park West thirty-four years later, Isabel didn’t remember her specific reaction to Dave’s lively suggestion of a bat-mitzva on St. Thomas. But it was along the lines of a curt no. At the seditious and remote age of twelve, the last thing that interested her was someone else getting religious at her expense. If Dave wanted a Jewish experience let him go pray by himself.
✶
Isabel sat near the dark mahogany bima. Through the middle set of doors, New York’s sky darkened with clouds. She should get home. Suri was probably wondering what was keeping her. But Isabel lingered. A moment more. A shearith. Remnants of memory were all that remained.
Isabel’s last conversation with Dave took place not far from where she now sat, in the American Museum of Natural History. She had graduated from Barnard four months earlier with a B.A. in Modern European History and had decided to move to Israel, to kibbutz, to Alon whom she had met and fallen in love with. At twenty-two, Isabel didn’t need Dave’s blessing. But she wanted it.
They had come to the museum, a neutral space, to try and talk about her life. In the Hall of Ocean Life, Suri and Dave sat next to one another on a wood bench. Isabel walked around the replica of a ninety-four foot female Blue Whale suspended overhead
and waited for words that never came. Every time she circled past her parents she saw they were lost in their own thoughts. The mass of the whale, three school bus lengths, dwarfed all other creatures in the room, including Dave, though he seemed not to notice. He held himself aloft and aloof and wouldn’t look at his wife or daughter.
After ten minutes or so, Isabel went into the Hall of North American Mammals. Dave and Suri got up from the bench and followed. A room of dioramas. Beautifully rendered backdrops. Stuffed animals, replicas of flora and water sources, figures of Native Americans. Animals in their natural habitat.
“Native Americans are to White America as Jews are to Poles,” Isabel addressed Dave ignoring his don’t talk to me body language. They stared at a stuffed doe and fawn posed to drink water from a stream. A mannequin dressed as an indigenous man stood behind a tall shrub watching them. His bow at rest.
“Enough, Issie,” Dave said but still would not look at her. “You don’t have to go and politicize everything. It takes all the pleasure out of life.”
“You’ve never been to Poland,” she said, relieved that he responded, upset that he was contrary as usual. Why did she expect anything else?
“And I don’t want to go to Poland. America’s perfect for me.”
“On the sophisticated streets of old Krakow,” Isabel’s voice quickly became shrill, “young musicians play Klezmer tunes. Tourist shops sell dolls of Hasidic men holding enormous gold kopecks against their breasts.”
Suri stood quietly. She looked intently through the glass at the painted backgrounds, the stuffed dead animals, the life-sized human dolls.
“So?” Dave asked.
“So?” Rage at injustice, at invisibility, at Dave’s terse dismissal of what was important to her, filled her. Isabel raised her voice despite the quiet in the hall. “Now that all the Jews are dead, we’re charming. Tourist-worthy. Just like Native Americans. Romanticized in these dioramas since they’re no longer an economic or political threat to the white man.”