by James Frey
Why were you there, and what were you doing?
And I didn’t want to say anything, because I was scared and I didn’t know what he would do when I told him, but I was more scared about what he would do if I didn’t.
I found Ben Zion.
I started crying again.
I found Ben Zion.
RUTH
My life has been like all the lives, long and hard and full of sadness and confusion and horror, a frightening, difficult dream punctuated by brief moments of joy. And as is the case with all people’s lives, the moments of joy are never often enough and never long enough. They keep me going, the same way a glass of water, or an idea of a glass of water, might keep me going in marching across the desert, except that the desert never ends, it’s many million miles long, and it never will end.
I was born in Israel. My parents had both survived in the Holocaust of the Nazis, being in camps in Poland. My father was a Polish and went in Stutthof, and ended in Treblinka, and my mother, who was a Slovak, was first in Theresienstadt, and later in Birkenau. They met in Tel Aviv in 1949 and married almost immediately. At the time Jews of their ages were being encouraged to be married and starting families in order to further populate Israel. They didn’t love each other truly, but on some level they understood each of the other, understood in ways that other peoples couldn’t. Both of their families had been put to death by the Nazis during the war. Their entire families, parents, grandparents, siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins, had all been murdered in the death camps. That was the basis for their marriage. Their feelings of the extermination of their families.
I lived in Israel until I was twelve years. We had moved to a small settlement near what today is being called Gush Katif, on the southern part of the Gaza Strip. It was attacked by the mujahedeen of Egypt and my parents were both killed. I was in the school when it was happening and found them on the floor of our kitchen with their throats gashed open. Their closest friends had left Israel for living in New York a year before and took me into their home. They were childless and happy to have me with them, and like my parents, they were both survivors. Also like my parents, their marriage was without love and strained, the main common element of them being they had both been in the camps. Also like my parents, they had survived but didn’t live through what had happened to them. They breathed and ate and spoke and went about their lives, but they didn’t live, didn’t truly be alive, because they couldn’t after what they had seen and experienced. Trauma is survivable, but often not much more. It kills you while allowing you to still live.
They did the best they could with me and I accepted them as being my parents. Like my birth parents, they were being very protective of me, did not trust non-Jews, and were fearful of all the world outside our neighborhood, which was entirely Jews. My adopted father worked as cook in a kosher restaurant, and my mother worked being a laundress. We went to synagogue every week, observed the Sabbath, ate kosher, and had a Shabbat dinner every Friday in the evening. We were happy, or as happy as we could be given the course our lives had all been taken, and we did not wish for anything more than what we had. In that way we were gifted. For if one knows nothing about what may be possible in the world, one will not yearn for it or be missing it.
When I finished yeshiva, I went to work with my stepmother being a laundress. I had hoped to be going to college and maybe becoming a doctor or a teacher, but we did not have the money for me doing that. When I was twenty, I started thinking about marriage and hoping for love. I got one of those when I met Isaac, who was to become my husband. He was working being a kosher butcher, and his family was said to be Davidic and had been in America since the early 1900s and owned their own family butcher shop. We met because the restaurant where my stepfather worked bought their meats from them and Isaac often was delivering it. My stepfather invited him to our home for Shabbat dinner and he came with his parents and we were sitting at the table across from each other. He was very handsome and very shy, with nice green eyes and blond hair, which are rarer among us, and I was very shy too. That first meeting we were hardly speaking and spending most of our time glancing at each other and hoping the other wouldn’t notice even though we did. That night when I went to bed I knew he would be my husband. For my stepfather it was a good marriage and would improve his standing at the restaurant, and for Isaac it would be prestigious to marry an Israeli-born daughter of survivors because there were very few of us then. I believed we would love each other.
Our wedding was a simple and beautiful one and our wedding night was more complicated for us. Neither had ever in our lives been alone with a member of the opposite sex before and we were both scared and being nervous. I was very excited and waited for Isaac but he wasn’t being ready and later he cried. We were both knowing we wanted children and it was expected for us. For six months Isaac was trying and not being comfortable about it and he was being more and more upset. One night he had too much to drink and we became truly man and wife and he cried again because of being happy. That night we were both very happy.
We tried for two years for me to be pregnant. Most of the time Isaac would be drinking but sometimes he would not be. We prayed and lived strictly according to our Jewish laws. When I became pregnant we were overjoyed, and our families too. We were finished choosing names for a boy or for a girl when I started bleeding. A few days later we put the names written on a piece of paper and we burned them and we never spoke of them again. For the worst things of our lives, it is sometimes the best way, to never speak of them again.
It happened three more times in our next four years, with two of the babies going to the full terms. We stopped trying to choose names or even being thinking of names, always feeling we should only give names to the living. In our seventh year of marriage I was pregnant again and it stayed and our son Jacob was born healthy and right. We thought he was a miracle baby, and he was looking just like his father, and we didn’t think we were going to be having any more children. Our families were tremendously pleased and we had two years of happiness, watching Jacob grow and learn, every day becoming more like his father. We never hoped for more childrens and we stopped trying to do it. One night we go to a wedding and Isaac has too much to drink and I have a little as well. The next morning we don’t remember everything of the night before but I know I am pregnant and I know it will be okay and I know the baby will be a boy and I know this with all of my heart without any doubts at all, the same as I know I am alive and I breathe and that God, in any of God’s forms, is all-powerful and all-knowing. There are no doubts in my heart.
Isaac had many doubts and he was always very confusing about the pregnancy. After I tell him about it he is very upset and angry though he will not tell why he is feeling these things. He sees our rabbi many times and then he is happy and ready for another child. When Ben Zion was born, there are some complications with him, and some things not normal, and he did not look like Isaac, for Ben has dark hair and dark eyes like me and my parents, and Isaac left the hospital very angry. Rabbi Schiff examines the baby Ben and then comes to my room and tells me it is a great day, a monumental day, that baby Ben is truly a gift from God, and he stayed by my bedside and read to me from the Torah, and together for the rest of the night we prayed.
When I got to home, Isaac had been drinking and waiting for me, and Jacob is with Isaac’s parents at their home nearby us. Rabbi Schiff is helping me bring Ben home and took Isaac away while I settled Ben Zion into a bassinet we have for him. Isaac also went to his parents’ home to sleep and Rabbi Schiff came back with two other rabbis and they stayed beside Ben for the rest of the night and the next day as well reading the Torah and praying.
When Isaac came home with Jacob, nothing was ever the same again. He was always very angry and drinking and he did not like Ben Zion and when I try to talk to him about it he would not do any talking to me. He drank much more and almost every day he was drinking and he wanted to have another baby soon. He did not care that my body
was not ready and that I wanted time for me to bond with Ben Zion. He wanted more babies right away, I think to prove to himself that Ben Zion was not a fluke. We started trying and it much hurt me but it was my responsibility as a wife for my husband.
We try for one years and it didn’t work, which enraged Isaac. He accused me of being with another man and I said to him I have only been with one man in my life and it has been you. He did not believe me and he said I was with someone else, that Ben Zion did not look like him and could never be his child. He yelled at me often and would sometimes start to push me, and hit me, and call me a whore, even in front of the children. I went to Rabbi Schiff and he consults me and Isaac many many times and he often came over to see Isaac and talk to him and check on Ben Zion, who he said was a special boy, a gift truly from God. And that was our life. We try to have another babies, and Isaac would drink and yell and hit me, and Rabbi Schiff would try to talk to him and calm him down. The boys started to grow up and went to yeshiva and Hebrew school and learn how to be Orthodox men someday. We observe the Sabbath and have Shabbat and go to synagogue. And I would pray to God to make changes for me to make my life better. I would pray to God every day.
And then eight years later after still trying I am pregnant again by a miracle of God and I have a girl we give the name of Esther. She is a beautiful little girl who looks much like Isaac, with light eyes and light hair. I hope and pray that this child will make Isaac happy and return to the Isaac I married, but it did not. He became even more convinced that Ben was not his and he would start telling people at synagogue or at Shabbat that I was a whore who had a child with another man. Once he do it in front of Rabbi Schiff, who immediately take him away. They were gone for one day and almost two and when they come back Isaac is different than he was before. He seemed scared and upset and when I try to ask him what is the matter he pushes me away.
Our lives were separate in the same house from then to the end of our time with each other. He loved very much Jacob and Esther but did not love anymore me who was his wife or his second son Ben Zion, who he would push away when Ben tried to hug him or he would tell to shut up when Ben Zion would try to talk to him. I would try to tell him that he was my husband and I loved him and he would be polite and say he loved me but I knew he did not love me. I knew whatever he had been told by Rabbi Schiff had changed him to make him different. The rabbi still came by and took special care with Ben Zion and would ask him all about his studies and his love of God, and Ben Zion was such a good boy, a kind boy who loved everyone, who was always smiling and doing good things for people. It was Ben Zion who got me through all those hard years. I had no longer Isaac, and Jacob was his son and Esther was his daughter and he told them not good things about me that I think made them not love me the way children should love a mother. And Ben Zion seemed to notice and loved me more and made sure I knew he loved me with his entire heart.
When he was thirteen, Ben Zion became a man with his bar mitzvah. I never knew why but many rabbis from New York and other places attended, and they were not just Orthodox, but also Hasidic and Conservative and Reform, and two came from Israel. He read the Torah in a way that made many of the members of the synagogue weep, which is not something I had ever seen before in my life. His voice was clear and pure and sounded so strong, almost like a thunder, but also his voice had care and love without trying. I had never heard this voice from my son Ben Zion, and I do not know where it came from inside of him. Sometimes I wonder, especially now, if it was even him speaking, or if it was the Lord God himself.
After the bar mitzvah things got worse again, with Isaac drinking and drinking and not going to work and beating me and Ben Zion every day. One morning after a year I go to our room to see why he is not awake and I discover that he would never wake again, that he had passed into the hands of God. The doctor said his heart gave way but no one in his family had that so I always wondered if it was so. Rabbi Schiff did the tearing of keriah and Jacob said the kaddish. We ate boiled eggs for dinner and there was much sadness in our family. For seven days we sat shivah. Even though the Isaac I loved was gone many years before, I grieved deeply for losing him.
At the end of shloshim, after we mourned Isaac for thirty days, Jacob was head of our home. On that very day he told Ben Zion he must leave and never come back again, that Isaac had died because of Ben Zion and that God would punish him. Ben Zion tried to speak to Jacob and tell him he loved him and loved his father, but Jacob beat him very badly and threw him out of the house and locked the door while he bled on the sidewalk. I could not watch and cried myself in my room, and I washed the blood away the next day. Rabbi Schiff was shocked and very stern with Jacob and said he had made a terrible, terrible mistake that he needed to right. But he did not make it right. And Ben Zion vanished. I thought he would come back or he would be at a home of someone that knew our family but he was not anywhere and nobody saw him or heard from him again. And every night I cried for him and it never became more easy for me. My beloved son Ben Zion was gone.
And then sixteen years later, sixteen years of terror, where I was forced to give up my God and pray before one I did not believe in, forced to leave my community for one I did not know, forced to live like a slave to my son who did not love me, Jacob came home with Esther from the church like every other day, but this day would change our life for all times. When they walked in, I could tell Jacob had been hitting Esther like he did sometimes to her and also to me, and I knew not to ask or defy him about it because then he hit more and harder. He was not, though, like he usually is when he is in one of those times hitting, he did not seem so mean and angry, and I asked him what was happening and he said Esther had found him, found Ben Zion, that he was alive, in a hospital in Manhattan, that she had seen him with her two own eyes and had prayed to her Lord and Savior Jesus Christ at his bedside.
Even though I always knew the day would come when Ben Zion would return, I could not believe it was today. I asked Esther who was crying if it was true and she said yes. I asked her what hospital and she told me and I asked her why he was there in a hospital and she said he had an accident with a glass falling on him and was in intensive cares and she started crying. I went to her and held her and told her she would be okay and Ben Zion would be okay and I keep holding her until Jacob told me to let go of her, that she will be fine. I told him she needs me and he yells at me No She Is Not A Baby and he pulled her away very hard and pushed her to the ground and told her to stop crying. Then he turn back to me and say Mother, we need to pray to the Lord for guidance and I say no, I need no guidance, I only need to go see my son who is in the hospital, my son who I haven’t seen in sixteen years. He said the Lord will tell us when to go and I say the Lord has already told me and I went towards the door. He reached for me and I pushed his arm away and he grabbed me hard with both his arms and pushed me against the door and yelled at me We Will Pray Together Until The Lord Gives Us A Sign. I try to struggle away because I just wanted to go to the hospital so I can see Ben Zion and Jacob hit me three times very quickly with his open hand on the same side of my face and I know I must pray with him, even though it is not for me and will make no difference for me, I must pray. We kneeled before a crucifix with me on one side of Jacob and Esther on the other side and Jacob begin asking the Lord for guidance. He said Jesus Christ I am your humble servant please show me the way, please guide my actions, please give me a sign so that I may know your intentions for me and my family. And he go on like this for four hours, asking for a sign, for guidance from his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, for strength from the Holy Spirit to be righteous in his actions. I did not need a sign, that Esther had seen Ben Zion is enough of a sign for me. I just wanted to leave.
After we pray Jacob says we should also fast and have no dinner and tells us we must go to our rooms and continue to pray on our own. I go and pack a small bag and get some money from a small amount I have earned for myself and wait until the house is quiet and I leave without anyone hearing me.
I know Jacob will be very angry and he will punish me for leaving but I feel I must do this so I do it. I say to myself if you believe deeply in your heart you must defy, and if you are willing to pay for your defiance, you must always do it, even though the pain may be much. Too many times in our lives we do not do it, and we pay even more, so this time I do.
I did not know the hospital or where it was being located so I got a taxi and told the driver to take me there. The driver was a Muslim and had something in Arabic hanging from his car mirror. I was already nervous from leaving home knowing Jacob would be angry and the driver made me more nervous because I believe that if he knew I was Israeli he would hate me. I know it is not right for me to be thinking that way but it is also the real way of the world. And it is the real way of the world that I hate the Muslim for wanting me to die and for believing I am not a human. Maybe if he was not what he was and I am not what I am we would be friends in our lives. But we are what we are, and humans will always hate. It is the ruin of our world.
He drop me off and I give him money but do not touch him. I go into the hospital and ask where my son Ben Zion is and the lady tells me the visiting times are over for the day. I tell her my son who I have not seen in sixteen years is here and I must see him. I tell her his name is Ben Zion Avrohom and she looks in her computer and says there is no one here with that name. I tell her my daughter see him here and that he is hit by a glass and in the intensive cares. She looks at me for a moment and picks up the phone and makes call and tells me to sit down and wait for someone to talk to me about this situation. I became very upset and said I just want to see my son who has been missing for so long and the woman say she is calling someone to see.
I sat and wait for someone to come and a lady arrive in a doctor coat and introduce herself to me as a surgeon who work on a young man she believe might be my son. I say I don’t believe anything, I know, I know with my heart fully, that my daughter was here and saw my son Ben Zion Avrohom, who has been missing from me for sixteen years. The woman ask me about Esther and I tell her what she looks like and the woman nod and say I met your daughter earlier today but she told me she was here to pray for the sick and injured as part of a church in Queens. I tell her my daughter is a Christian who lives in Queens and was praying to her Lord and Savior Jesus Christ for the welfare of her brother who she loves. The doctor asks me again what is Ben’s name and I tell her and she asks me when I have seen him last and I told her it has been sixteen years that he has been missing and that every day I prayed to God for him to come back to me. She asks me why he has been missing and I start to cry and I cry for a long time and she sits next to me and holds my hand and it is the first time in many years I have felt any kindness from anyone other than my daughter, the first time in many, many years. I stop crying and wipe my face and try to make myself composed. The doctor tells me her name is Alexis and she tells me she did surgery on Ben when he came into the hospital and has been treating him for his injuries which are very much serious and threatening his life. She says it was a miracle that he was alive and that there was no explanation for it. I did not give her the explanation I know because she would not have believed if I did tell her it. She asked me if I want to see Ben Zion and I say yes and she leads me through the hospital. When we reach outside his room, we stop and I am feeling very nervous and scared and happy. She tells me to prepare myself and I say I believe Ben Zion will be okay no matter what has happened. She smiles at me and says please be prepared. There is, though, nothing that prepares us for the worst of things in our life. There is nothing you can do to stop the shock, or buffer the pain.