Single Jewish Male Seeking Soul Mate

by Letty Cottin Pogrebin

  The items Rivka had so carefully chosen to pack for the journey were gone for good. Her stethoscope would amplify Nazi heartbeats. An Aryan woman would inherit her ivory comb. The son of an SS officer would wake up to find a plush stuffed dog in his crib. As the new arrivals dutifully chalked their names on their luggage, Rivka understood that as of today, she and Nathan owned nothing but the clothes on their backs and the few items in the trunk buried under the chicken coop.

  Though she had packed raisins, almonds, cheese, and chocolates in the purse she would never see again, she’d put nothing in her pockets. No wonder Yitzhak was growing cranky; he hadn’t eaten since dawn. As he squirmed and fussed, she marveled at how, without consuming a morsel of food, a three-year-old could gain weight in his mother’s arms. Shooting pains radiated along her spine but fear trumped the spasms; she would not lower her son to the ground. She shifted him to her other hip.

  The selection process complete, one of the idle SS guards discovered a soccer ball under the stands and started kicking it around, and when other men joined him, enough for a game, the action on the field took Yitzhak’s mind off his empty stomach. He watched for a while, then suddenly shouted, “I want to play!” and craned his little body toward the men. Rivka tightened her grip. “Mommy, let me go! I wanna play ball!” His shrieks grew more shrill, more piercing; it was obvious they were getting on the players’ nerves.

  A thick-necked guard with a gap between his front teeth glared at Rivka as he ran by. “If you don’t shut that kid’s mouth, I’ll do it for you!”

  When Yitzhak burst into tears, wailing and flailing his arms, his mother did everything she could to soothe and distract him.

  “Stop that, Mommy. Put me down. Put! Me! Down!”

  The ball came to the gap-toothed guard; he missed it. His head had been turned toward the boy’s incessant cries.

  “I WANNA PLAY, I WANNA—”

  Rivka clapped her hand over her son’s mouth with so much force that his curls whiplashed. The blow shocked him into silence. Too late. The guard was running toward them.

  “You wanna play, sonny? I’ll play with you.” He grabbed Yitzhak by his blond head and pulled until Rivka, afraid her son’s neck would break, loosened her grip on him. Tossing the little boy up in the air like a ball, the guard drew his pistol and fired. Yitzhak fell to the grass. Rivka dropped to her knees, rounding her back over him like a tortoise shell. The man holstered his gun but got off a powerful kick to her ribcage before rejoining the game that had been so rudely interrupted by the demands of her noisy Jewish child.

  Nathan, on the other side of the field, was oblivious to what had happened until a wheelbarrow was rolled through the men’s section with Yitzhak’s tiny body flung across the corpses of the mother and son who’d been shot because they would not let go of each another. To keep from screaming, he bit the flesh of his lower lip clear through, but he did not tear his garments or rush after the wheelbarrow, realizing with absolute clarity that he was powerless to avenge his son’s murder, that every Jew in the stadium was not just powerless but doomed, that they would surely be transferred to a place with more guards and more guns, with high walls, barbed wire, and killer dogs, but while they were still out in the open, he could break free. Just as Rivka had turned her back on the train and opted for survival, Nathan turned his back on the wheelbarrow. Survival would be his revenge. He couldn’t save his wife or kill his son’s executioner but if he could escape from the stadium and connect with the partisans, he might be able to kill dozens of Nazi assassins. Eventually, he would find his wife. Now, he would save himself.

  For the second time since the start of Hitler’s war, Nathan Levy slipped away from his captors, not in a laundry van this time but on his belly. He wormed his way between the legs of his fellow prisoners, flattened himself under the bleachers, and sprinted for the woods. The dogs would have had no trouble tracking him—his lip was gushing blood—but the guards never realized he was gone. They were too busy playing soccer.

  THE CONCRETE DOORSTEP of Herman’s butcher shop had leached its dampness into Zach’s corduroy pants and sent a bone-deep chill through his body. All his life, he’d been wondering why, before unlocking her keyboard, his mother always grabbed her torso and murmured to the heavens. Now he wished he could blot out the guard, the gunshot, the kick. For the past seven years, since he’d first discovered the album, he had been badgering his father to tell him what happened to Yitzhak. Now he knew and he wished he had let his brother rest in peace, without details, without a story; the sight of his father’s anguish had cracked open Zach’s heart. Not once in his thirteen years had he been forced to look at anything he didn’t want to see. Until now, he could avert his eyes. But yesterday he had become a man and today he made himself look. Made himself see. To look and to see could be torment; it could also be a moral act. If his parents were able to endure all that savagery, he would match their courage with his own, stare life down and keep looking long after others had stopped. To test his resolve, Zach turned toward the butcher’s window and eyed each raw, repugnant item in the refrigerated case, one by one.

  “What happened after the guard kicked Mama?” he finally asked.

  Nathan frowned and shook his head. “Only she can tell you that. It’s not my place. Don’t ask me that again.”

  Snow was drifting down in soft swirls as Nathan, weary as an old man, grasped the butcher’s doorknob, pulled himself to his feet, and retrieved the shopping bag. “Let’s go home, Boychik.”

  Zach picked up the paper sack. The bagels were cold stones in his arms.

  ZACH WOULD ALWAYS feel that he entered manhood not on his bar mitzvah day, but that Sunday when, entrusted with his parent’s story, he vowed to fulfill the promise that would keep him connected to them long after they were gone. In November of his senior year in college, Rivka was diagnosed with breast cancer. Over Thanksgiving break, he told his parents he wanted to drop out of school to help Nathan take care of her, that he would go back to his classes after she got better, after she finished the surgery, chemo, and radiation. But she refused to undergo the operation and would not agree to treatments. She insisted he return to school and complete his studies.

  “I’ve had enough,” she said. “Papa will call you when it’s time.”

  Nathan summoned Zach home in April. “Come quickly,” his father sniffled into the phone. “Your mama has something she wants to tell you.”

  Zach flew to New York that afternoon. Rivka looked like a gray rag doll bundled into a heap of white bedclothes, a rag doll who, the moment he entered her room, beckoned him to sit on the bed, closer than they’d been to one another since she’d last given him a haircut nearly four years ago. He was astounded when she took his hand. What she wanted to tell him was this: He was blameless, a good boy, always a good boy, but after what happened, she couldn’t be anyone’s mother. It was simply impossible for her to hold or hug him. He would have bruised her ribs. He would have crushed her heart.

  Tears slicked her wrinkled cheeks as she told him the part of the story his father had refused to divulge. The Nazis killed her baby then made her take care of their babies. After the guard’s kick broke four of her ribs and ruptured her spleen, they nursed her back to health then ordered her to minister to the officers’ children, her reputation as a pediatric specialist having preceded her to the soccer stadium. Rivka said she wanted to murder a German child, to make a German mother suffer the agony she had, but she couldn’t bring herself to harm the little boy who had cardiac fibrosis, or the one with bladder cancer; she couldn’t hurt the boy who had braces on both legs, or the one with a hearing problem and sad brown eyes. She couldn’t hurt any of them. All she could do was treat them, alleviate their pain, and try to heal them. She hated herself for it, she said, but that was all she could do. So while Nathan was disappearing himself into the Polish forests, Rivka was performing lung surgery on German preemies. While Nathan was smuggling weapons, Rivka was treating a Nazi’s child for rheum
atic fever. While Nathan was forging passports, digging secret tunnels, and blowing up supply depots, Rivka was saving the lives of the next generation of SS officers and Jew-haters.

  She squeezed Zach’s hand. “Remember what you promised me?” she asked, staring deep into his eyes. “You’ll do it? You’ll make up for the ones I . . .”

  As he did the night before his bar mitzvah seven years before, Zach promised his mother that he would marry a Jew and raise Jewish children. Then, he asked her permission to kiss her goodbye, and when her soft smile told him yes, gently, without touching her ribs, he leaned over and pressed his lips to Rivka’s papery cheek.

  HIS NEXT THREE years were bracketed by loss: his mother died just before Zach started law school, his father, shortly before he graduated. Though Nathan remained fit and powerful to the end, dementia was the one enemy he could not dodge. Alzheimer’s kidnapped the man, father, friend, worker, walker, and lontzman. Each time Zach came home on break, his father showed new signs of mental deterioration: in restaurants, Nathan tried to eat off other people’s plates; shaving, he cut himself; showering, he scalded himself; cooking, he burned himself. Though no longer able to work, he walked to Manhattan several times a week, once barefoot in the snow. The night he was found wandering around inside Macy’s after hours with no idea who he was or where he lived, Zach set the wheels in motion for his father’s admittance to the Memory Disorders floor at the Jewish Home for the Aged.

  “You know this place, Pop,” he said, reassuringly, as a staff member led them to a dorm room with heavy locks on the windows and door. “You used to send me here every Sunday morning with our leftovers. They’re going to take good care of you.”

  Nathan looked at him blankly, having long since forgotten Zach’s name.

  Months later, the director of the Jewish Home sounded almost as embarrassed as distressed when he phoned Zach to report that Nathan had gone missing; somehow, despite the security guards, barred windows, and locked doors, Mr. Levy had slipped out of the building. Never happened before. Can’t imagine how he pulled it off. None of us can believe it. But Zach believed it; stealth was his father’s default, escape his forte. After three interminable days, Nathan’s body washed up on the shore of Orchard Beach, a denouement that allowed his son to imagine his final hours—the long hike to Pelham Bay Park along their familiar route, a stop at the venerable old oak tree, then on to the lagoon, where Nathan simply waded into the water and chose not to swim.

  When Zach went to collect his father’s belongings at the Jewish Home, the resident psychiatrist mentioned having looked in on Nathan the night before he disappeared.

  “He was davening, rocking back and forth. I’m Jewish so I recognized that he was saying the Sh’ma. All three paragraphs by heart,” the man commented, admiringly. “He didn’t use a prayer book.”

  Zach demurred. “You must be confusing my father with someone else. He hasn’t said a word in months, you know that. And I know he stopped praying years before he stopped talking. My dad quit doing anything Jewish three years ago when my mom died. He was a confirmed Atheist.”

  “It was definitely him,” the doctor insisted, kindly. “Nathan Levy. And he davened like someone who’s been doing it his whole life. Except he said the first line of the Sh’ma in a weird way—one word at a time, really slowly—and repeated it three times.”

  Zach flashed on Nathan’s mantra crossing the icy stream.

  “With our patients who were raised observant,” the doctor continued, “this isn’t unusual behavior. The constant repetition of prayers and blessings throughout a person’s childhood can carve deep grooves in the developing brain. Even after they’ve forgotten everything else, these guys remember how to pray.”

  CHAPTER 4

  NOT QUITE PERFECT

  ONE BLAZING HOT DAY, THE SUMMER AFTER HIS FATHER died, Bonnie Bertelsman accosted Zach in front of his office building and thrust a clipboard at him.

  “Got a minute for a kid?” she demanded.

  He had graduated from law school in May, a twenty-three-year-old wunderkind, started his job at the ACLU even before he passed the bar exam, and found his cases so engrossing that sometimes, as happened on that steamy August day, he would forget to eat lunch. It was two-thirty in the afternoon before he finally left the office to grab a sandwich.

  “Can’t now, thanks.” He tried to edge past her. He was ravenously hungry.

  She glided sideways, obstructing his passage. “Ten seconds is all it takes.” She yanked a ballpoint out of her elastic ponytail holder, dragging a few strands of her long brown hair with it. “Just sign here.”

  “I don’t sign things without reading the small print.”

  “Come on! It’s a petition, not a subpoena.” She tucked the stray lock behind her ear and stood firm.

  “Sorry, I’m in a hurry.” He was getting annoyed.

  “I’ll speed-read it for you,” she said, and ripped through the text like one of those radio announcers delivering a frenzied disclaimer about a drug with serious side effects. The petition demanded that the city council allocate more funds for after-school programs so that latchkey kids could have adult supervision, safe play equipment, and healthy snacks. Partly because Zach agreed with those demands and partly because he was captivated by her perseverance—as well as the flecks of gold in her deep-set brown eyes, her sexy collarbones, and the flyaway tendril that had snaked down her neck—he accepted the pen.

  She glanced at his signature. “Zach-a-riah Lee-vee!” she read aloud. “Thank you, Zach.” With a brisk swing of her ponytail, she pivoted toward the next passerby, held out her clipboard, and asked if he had a minute for a kid.

  “One second!” Zach called out, his hunger pangs suddenly eclipsed by a schoolboy crush. “Before you go . . .” The ponytail swung back. Her dark brows arched above eyes that said, “Make it quick.” I need a lot more signatures. Don’t waste my time. Thinking, stalling, fidgeting with his tie, Zach finally said, “I have a suggestion that might help your campaign.”

  She looked at him. “Okay, talk to me.”

  “Last summer I interned at a public interest law firm in Detroit where I helped organize a poor people’s protest against increased water rates.”

  She folded her arms below her breasts, framing them.

  “We picketed the homes of city council members—not their offices, their homes. The idea was to publicly humiliate them for voting for the increase and shame them into retracting it. I don’t think politicians should be allowed to hide behind phrases like ‘fiscal responsibility,’ or ‘budget shortfalls,’ do you?”

  “What happened to the rate increase?”

  “Retracted.”

  She pumped her fist. “You’re saying I should find out where our council members live and picket out front?”

  “Not just you.” Zach replied. “Get a bunch of angry parents to march around with you carrying signs—handmade signs. One person should shout, ‘It’s three o’clock. Do you know where your children are?’ And everyone else should respond, ‘No! Because our kids have no place to go!’”

  She smiled. “I like it.”

  “Call a press conference so people can say how much they worry about their kids after school and how unfair it is to penalize children with working parents who can’t afford private nannies. There’s nothing wrong with your petition. But politicians ignore petitions every day of the week. I’m suggesting you try humiliation.”

  By now, he had her full attention; she was twirling her ponytail, the gold flecks in her eyes glinting in the sun. “That’s a pretty polished presentation for a man in a hurry.”

  “It’s just basic media strategy—give them a photo op, they’ll show up.”

  “For whom do you usually strategize, pray tell?”

  “I’m a staff attorney for the ACLU but I also do pro bono legal work for a nonprofit called Families of Holocaust Survivors. I advise them on things like advocacy, fundraising, coalition-building, you know the drill.”
r />   The girl shook her head. “Actually, I don’t. I absolutely loathe nonprofit speak.”

  “FHS represents survivors and children of survivors who are fighting for reparations or restitution of what the Nazis stole from them—property, bank accounts, houses, insurance money, fine art. In plain language, I try to get their stuff back.”

  She seemed to be looking at him differently now. “Well, thanks for the picketing idea. And forgive me for browbeating you before.”

  “I’m the one who should apologize. I’m weird when I’m hungry.”

  “Come to think of it, I could use some fuel myself.” She stuck the pen back in her ponytail and tucked the clipboard under her arm. “How about we do some coalition-building over lunch?”

  Ten months later, Zach Levy married Bonnie Bertelsman in the Crystal Room at the Tavern on the Green and felt like the luckiest man in the world—though he wondered why the universe had to take his father before giving him a wife, why his cosmic karma could not seem to tolerate two people loving him at the same time.

  By then, he had become aware of other things Bonnie “absolutely loathed,” among them, romantic platitudes and gratuitous references to female anatomy, which explained why, in his wedding toast, he avoided mentioning her sexy collarbones. Zach knew she considered beauty to be “an unearned attribute”—like inherited wealth and privilege—and therefore undeserving of approbation. So, he told their wedding guests that he had fallen in love with Bonnie’s passion for justice, her moral probity, her candor, and her fighting spirit, all of which was true. But so was her beauty. He also told everyone that while his parents had not lived to see this day, there was no doubt in his mind that they would have been thrilled by his choice because his bride was perfect.

  Bonnie’s wedding toast, which she had insisted come after Zach’s, was the verbal embodiment of the woman herself: quirky, idealistic, and endearing—also doctrinaire, sanctimonious, and slightly irritating. However, like all her friends, he took the smug with the sweet because her motives were clearly selfless. Standing beside her at the microphone, besotted, Zach hardly noticed that her remarks were less a declaration of love than an ideological proclamation.