My parents left Washington DC to live in Haifa for three years shortly before the War of Independence, under the British Mandate. Then the land was still called Palestine. Though my parents weren’t religious, they were Zionists, seeking a homeland. Even before the outbreak of World War II, they felt the sting of anti-Semitism, not allowed, for example, to purchase homes in neighborhoods with protective covenants. Years earlier, during the Russian pogroms, my father’s father fled Kiev after being conscripted into the czar’s army. He left behind his wife and my then-infant father, promising to bring them to America after he’d saved enough money.
My parents would have remained in Palestine except the British made it virtually impossible for Jews to find work. My father, an attorney, couldn’t secure a job. They returned to America, though they always longed to be Israeli. Were, in their hearts, Israeli, and always wanted me to feel this way, too.
“Next year in Jerusalem,” they always said . . .
I am given a four-day vacation from the kibbutz. Ari and I hitchhike south across the Negev toward Eilat and the Red Sea. Between rides, I pluck a red Negev poppy, weaving the stem into my long braid. We are picked up by soldiers, friends of Ari’s, in a green army truck spewing diesel fumes. We sit in the back, protected from the sun by a canvas awning, its flaps tied back. Ari tries to give me a tour. In broken English, he points out desert mountains, rock pillars, cracked mud flats, craters, green ponds. Bedouins ride camels along the old spice route in this stone and sand desert. Using my dictionary, Ari whispers the names sun roses, swamp irises, anemones. He seems to hiss the words desert broomrape, Oriental viper’s grass. The soft vowels of plovers and Oriental skylarks. The harsh consonants of buzzards and vultures winging like black flames across a white sky. I’m not sure which is more beautiful, which words to savor: the language of the moon or that of Uzis? The rough stubble along Ari’s jaw or the fuzz of fruit.
He presents each word to me as a gift, ribboned in gold. Will I accept this word? This language? This country? This boy?
We swim in the Red Sea, skin bronzing in reflected light from the sandstone of the Red Sea Mountains.
“Aliyah?” Ari asks, his voice of salt, sun, sea. “You to move here?”
In the swell of water, his callused hand holds mine tight, as if pressure alone can make me Israeli, or a Jew.
I shrug. I shake my head. Long strands of hair swirl around my shoulders never seeming to root.
My return El Al flight lands at National Airport. My tanned feet and calves, still laced in leather gladiator sandals, are freezing. I buy a Senators baseball cap in the airport and slip it on my head. From my suitcase I remove a shawl purchased in the Old City to wrap around my bare arms. I catch a DC Transit bus, unsure of my destination, not ready to return to my American apartment. An autumn breeze ripples the Potomac. The setting sun reflects off the white marble of the Capitol, all the monuments, but it is almost too blinding. I shade my eyes. I hunch in my seat as the bus lurches from stop to stop; I don’t know when to pull the cord, when to get off. The driver punches the accelerator. The scent of diesel reminds me of Israeli army trucks, of air silvery with MiGs.
When Ari and I said good-bye, he pulled me from the shade of apricot trees into the white heat of the moon. Or so it felt. In one sentence of English, which perhaps he practiced for days, he said I should return here next spring. Or next summer at the latest. I shrugged. I nodded—not sure which was true. With his hands, he pantomimed wings of a plane before handing me a small paper sack. Food for the long journey home. A hard-boiled egg. A slab of bread. Two apricots.
I finished the snack on the bus before even arriving at Tel Aviv. Once in the airport, I went to the restaurant, ordered a Coke and three pieces of chocolate cake.
Then the plane arced away. I touched the two apricot pits I’d put in my pocket, wrapped in a napkin, saving them, as if I could plant them in a ceramic pot on the balcony of my apartment.
As if they’d grow.
The Invisible Synagogue
My boyfriend, Graham, and I weave—weave because we’re slightly drunk after a breakfast of plummy slivovitz, brandy fritules, and Turkish coffee—along the Stradun, the main commercial street of Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia. I wear an embroidered peasant blouse with jeans. My hair sways in a braid down my back. Silver filigree earrings, which I bought in Israel, pierce my ears. My leather sandals, the same ones that wandered the Old City of Jerusalem, now tramp Dubrovnik cobblestones, which must still carry the stain of centuries-old ethnic wars from before Tito . . . all the blood of Venetians, Turks, Serbs, Habsburgs, Montenegrins, Italians, Germans.
Graham also wears jeans, as well as wire-rim glasses, his hair the length of the Beatles’. We look like the clean, well-behaved, suburban-raised hippies we are. According to Graham, we’re supposed to be serious, earnest. During the five years we’ve dated off and on, we’ve attended movies like Rohmer’s Claire’s Knee, Bergman’s Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal—foreign films, serious films, films with a message. We eat at inexpensive ethnic restaurants. We read the Sunday New York Times. We march in anti–Vietnam War demonstrations, but peacefully, would never get arrested. Rather than be drafted or flee to Canada, Graham joined an army reserve medical unit.
Now Graham reads aloud from a tour booklet: “Inside the thick stone walls surrounding Dubrovnik are fourteen quadrangular towers and a fortress, Sveti Ivan. The most monumental is the tower, Minceta.”
Graham wants to circle the full two kilometers of walls, see everything.
He has come here for all of this.
But not I.
I want to take Graham to the beach, hold hands, as if decisions about our relationship will be revealed in all this sun, stone, blue sky, azure water. Should we part or marry? Won’t decisions clarify if, together, we sip iced smreka, juniper juice, . . . or if we lovingly browse shops selling lace tablecloths and silk pillows? Shouldn’t we at least pretend we’re shopping for our first house together? I don’t want to visit historical sites. What answers for my future can be found on the grounds of ancient battles or on alters of musty churches? But I love Graham, so I follow along, behaving like the girl I think he wants: industrious, committed to causes—and Christian.
We pass a Renaissance church where, according to the tour book, the women of Dubrovnik, both peasant and patrician, carried stones for its construction. They also strengthened the mortar with milk and egg whites, causing, according to legend, the church to withstand the 1667 earthquake, which destroyed more than three-fourths of the city. Women’s Lib or slave labor? The booklet doesn’t say.
We reach Luza Square. It features Orlando’s Column, a fifteenth-century statue of a knight. Here all announcements and proclamations, as well as public punishments, took place. I should proclaim, confess all my imperfections to Graham. But then I know he’d leave me. After all, to him, my most glaring imperfection—being Jewish—is imperfection enough.
Last night in the hotel, I was unable to sleep. I lay beside a drowsing Graham after an endless flight from National Airport, with a stopover in Paris, for this Easter vacation from our jobs on Capitol Hill. I hoped this trip might have led (dare I say it) to a honeymoon. Except Graham’s parents convinced him not to marry me because I’m a Jew—even though Graham’s father, himself, is half Jewish. Very few people know this, his father’s secret. Graham’s parents live in a WASPy suburban neighborhood in Connecticut. They attend Presbyterian services.
Lying awake, I wondered, Why would I love someone afraid to marry me? Would marrying into his family prove that my being Jewish doesn’t matter? Doesn’t matter to him, or to me? Had I hoped Graham would love me more, see me differently, less Jewish, here in Yugoslavia than at home . . . here, far away from his parents?
Outside the open window of our hotel room, below the fortress walls, an oarlock rattled, droplets of the Adriatic trailing from the oar back to the sea. The comforting rhythm finally lulled me to sleep, wafting on a mistral breeze of lemons, almonds, s
tone pines.
Now Graham wanders away from me at the entrance to the Sponza Palace. He searches for the gold-plated statue of St. Blaise. I sit on a bench, the air cool, shadowed. Soon, even as I grow accustomed to the dim light, I barely see him. He’s a vague form, faint as the scent of crumbling parchment and candle wax.
I know he’ll take his time, so I walk back outside. I follow Peline Street past the Minceta tower to Zudioska Street. I pause, looking around. The word “Zudioska” sounds familiar. Shingles of light fade as the street descends (I soon discover) to the Jewish ghetto. In the sunless alleyway the stones grow cold, almost mossy and damp. At the bottom of the alley hangs a small sign on a door. I can’t read it but, again, the word “Zudioska.” It is a plain, nondescript, three-story stone building. A narrow flight of tiled stairs leads to a small office. Inside, the walls are adorned with old photos and documents: a picture of the Wailing Wall, a memorial plaque for victims of the Holocaust. A woman, who speaks almost no English, sells tickets. “Synagogue,” she says, pointing. “Synagogue.” I climb more steps into the sanctuary.
I’m unfamiliar with Jewish religious objects; this is one of few temples I’ve ever entered. I scan a pamphlet, even though it’s poorly written in English. A partition, pierced by three wide arches, divides the room and the oversize bimah. A white satin parokhet covers the inlaid doors of the aron kodesh, which holds several Torah scrolls. The ark is decorated with woodcuts mounted on gold-painted Corinthian pillars. In Sephardic fashion, bronze Florentine lamps hang from chains like chandeliers, containing glass oil cups. My sandals scrape the wood floors, unlike the sandy floors in the synagogue in St. Thomas.
Constellations of golden stars float across a cobalt-blue ceiling.
In 1600 fifty Jews lived in Dubrovnik. Three hundred and eight Jews in 1815. In 1939, 250. Today, 30 Jews reside in Dubrovnik.
Counting me, 31. Thirty-one and one-quarter, counting Graham.
The synagogue, the second oldest in Europe, existed as early as 1352. Now, however, it’s more a museum. No rabbi. No congregation. No prayers.
It’s almost like the Museum of an Extinct People, proposed by Hitler in Prague, where future generations of Aryans would have paid a few coins to tour exhibits of Torahs, menorahs, ceremonial shawls, mezuzahs. Airless exhibits. Absent of people.
No one has ever seen me as anything but Jewish, I think.
Stick to your own kind, my grandmother always hissed.
In 1815 Dubrovnik Jews needed permission from Austria to marry. In 1941 Italians confiscated Jewish property. In 1942, under German instructions, the Italians interned Jews on the nearby island of Lopud. Between the fall of Italy and the German occupation, many Jews were transported by partisans to liberated territory on the mainland. The rest were sent to camps.
Is this why the exterior of Dubrovnik’s synagogue is plain, unobtrusive, nearly invisible—all of its beauty hidden inside?
From Dubrovnik, Graham and I travel by boat up the Dalmatian coast to Rijeka. Here we rent a car to drive to Sarajevo and Montenegro, where we spend the night in a farmhouse. Before dinner, I sit outside and the elderly farmer, in peasant clothes and cap, approaches me. He holds out a gnarled, work-worn hand. At first I think he means to shake mine, so I extend it, smiling. But he, grinning with absent teeth, places three colored eggs in my palm: blue, green, pink. Today is Easter. I have forgotten. He speaks to me in Croatian, so I don’t understand his words—yet I feel them, like a warm egg in my hand.
“Hvala!” I say. Thank you!
I hold up the eggs to admire. The dye is uneven, in places barely a transparent tint, white shell peeking through. I nod my head, still smiling. “Hvala.”
I long for more words but have few in his language. He motions toward the eggs, toward his mouth. Yes, I nod, imitating him. I will eat them, yes.
He smiles, satisfied.
In our room in the farmhouse, I hold one out to Graham. He refuses. They might be spoiled. We might get sick, he says. I sit on the straw mattress peeling blue, green, pink. I take a bite of egg. Speckles of colored shell fall to the rough floor.
On our final evening in Yugoslavia, back in Dubrovnik, I stand by the railing on the hotel balcony overlooking the Adriatic. I want to hear the oarlocks from our first night, just to know someone’s out there: Croatian, Serb, or Jew. The stars in the cobalt-blue sky seem to shine through a film of night . . . as if there is only a thin membrane between me and the realm of pure light.
It will still take me several more months to see that, after all, ancient feuds and warring ethnic and religious factions do predict the future. I will see that Graham’s father is right. His son and I are not meant to marry each other. Our cool, hip, 1970s accouterments only mask how different we are—mask the fact that, although earnest, Graham is not brave.
But tonight I long to tell him about the 311⁄4 Jews, that I will always be a Jew. I want to tell him I am beginning to lose my desire for his love, which is deficient by 1⁄4, or perhaps 3⁄4. Which means it is entirely deficient. Which means I am beginning to peel away his beautiful shell.
Concerning Cardboard Ghosts, Rosaries, and the Thingness of Things
No ideas but in things.
William Carlos Williams
The moment I see the Halloween cardboard ghost hanging in the grocery store window, I unexpectedly enter its secret life. As I approach the ghost, walking home from high school, I sense the papery beat of its heart, a flutter so thin no one else hears. I pause on the sidewalk to confirm that the rhythm isn’t the tap of my penny loafers on pavement—me in my autumny orange-and-brown wool outfit with matching kneesocks. I stand still, silent, now certain the sound emanates from the direction of the window, heartbeats twining with sunrays pulsing off glass.
Outside the grocery store, red and yellow leaves scatter among jugs of apple cider, pots of chrysanthemums, pyramids of polished apples. I recount these details only because, in many ways, the day is seemingly ordinary. Yet because it is Halloween, surely the earth trembles in October winds. A day moon, almost transparent, casts pale shadows. Trick-or-treaters, preparing to spook neighborhoods as pirates, skeletons, witches, cause the everyday world to shiver. And in this tremble, this shadow, this shiver—just as I pass the grocery store—I know how the cutout ghost feels.
This isn’t an apparition. It’s not as if I’m hallucinating. I don’t conclude the cutout is real. I know the ghost is cardboard. It won’t loosen the string that secures it in the plate-glass window. It won’t escape to basements or attics. At midnight, it won’t conjure itself at a dead-end street at the edge of town. Nor do I fear the ghost will haunt me.
I step closer until my own vague image is superimposed upon the glass. The skin on my face pales in this palimpsest of ghost, glass, me. I feel the gossamer hem of the ghost’s body. My veins sense the hoarfrost in its torso. I inhale ether on its breath. As I evanesce into this cutout, I sense the cardboard ghost’s soul—transparent as the day moon and as lovely, inevitable, unambiguous. It is reliable in its “ghostness.” So in this way, yes, I admit the ghost is real: to me. In this way, I am the one to haunt it.
Then, quite simply, the moment ends. I continue walking home from school, my kneecaps above my orange kneesocks now chilled cool and white. Mandee’s Dress Shoppe, People’s Bank, Rock Ridge Pharmacy, all are in their correct places on the sidewalk, nothing amiss. Mothers with kids drive station wagons down Rock Road. The ghost remains hanging in the window, floating behind glass, while I seamlessly reenter this other—what some would call the “real”—world. No one witnesses my brief absence.
This event isn’t entirely unexpected. For years I’ve known how, by mentally deliquescing, to divine the soul of inanimate things. Of my own free will, I allow objects to thrust me into their paper or glass or metal states of being, to decipher their hidden lives. So even when a ghost in a window is depicted in cardboard—immobile, lifeless—I know that molecules can be magically transformed. Things are alembic. I am.
In this particular way the ghost is no different from my own handkerchiefs. One square of cotton shows a drawing of Pluto, the cartoon dog. Another hankie is filigreed magenta. On another, my white interlocked initials, “SWS,” are embroidered on a white background. At least this is how the handkerchiefs appear when neatly folded in my bureau drawer.
They amaze me only when, fresh from the clothesline, I lovingly iron them.
In first grade, to reach the ironing board, I stand on a small stool, sprinkling water—stored in an old bottle of my father’s bay-rum aftershave—onto the material. As I slide the iron, Pluto wags his tail. Magenta explodes in streamers. My initials bloom like orchid petals in bay-rum mist. The rolled hems sway, ghostlike, a mirage of heat, shimmering. I lift the edge of cotton to see what breathes beneath.
As soon as I finish ironing my hankies, I wrinkle them, simply to magically iron them all over again. I pause if my mother draws near while I iron, not wanting her to know the special power I possess . . . the mystical secrets that things possess. This is not a world adults understand.
After we leave the States and move to the West Indies, my mother, in fact, chastises me when I linger on the verandah watching the sky through a prism of garnet rosary beads. I’m given the rosary my first day at All-Saints Anglican School. But since I’m a little Jewish girl (only temporarily attending All-Saints because the nondenominational school is full), my mother insists I put that silly thing away.
I can’t.
I hold the beads toward open windows, squinting, even during school. I ignore the teacher’s strict warnings to pay attention to lessons. Besides, I am paying attention. The sky fireworks ruby suns refracting all the ions in the universe. Since none of my schoolmates hold their rosaries toward space, I believe only mine reveals this secret: there is more than one sun in the sky. At will, galaxies of suns glitter like gems, like stars—atoms dazzling the atmosphere—redder than all the hibiscus and frangipani flowers on the island. Even though I am in the tropics, this warmth, offered by the rosary, is deeper, casting light into my soul.
Pat Boone Fan Club Page 7