Almonds and Raisins

by Maisie Mosco

  “I was waiting for you to ask. Oy, my back and also my bunions. I’ve been cooking all day and now I’m short of an egg for the chopped herring, but my feet won’t carry me to the shop.” She eased them out of her husband’s carpet slippers to prove it and managed to contort herself into a position which allowed her to rub the grotesque protuberances twingeing beneath her wrinkled stockings. “You’ve got an egg to spare?”

  “Help yourself.”

  “Before I go I’ll take it. Last night I was up until two in the morning finishing my sewing for the factory, a little sit down won’t do me any harm.” She eyed the dewdrop on the end of Lou’s nose. “Your mamma didn’t teach you to use a handkerchief yet?”

  Lou used his shirtsleeve instead.

  “Very nice, I’m sure!”

  “I haven’t got no handkerchiefs,” the skinny little boy told her.

  “From your dadda’s old shirts your mamma could make you some, like I did for my girls.”

  “No she couldn’t, my brothers’re still wearing them.”

  Mrs. Plotkin shrugged. “So there’s no hope for you. A child that never blows its nose ends up with a lifetime’s catarrh, isn’t it so, Mrs. Sandberg?”

  Sarah added the flour to her cake mixture. “In Manchester he’ll end up with it anyway.”

  “So how is your Tibby?” Mrs. Plotkin inquired glancing at Nicholas’ successor who was stretched out by the fire.

  “She’s expecting again,” Nathan replied.

  “Mrs. Plotkin knows she is.” Sarah looked at her neighbour reproachfully. “Her Blackie’s the father.”

  “Can you prove it?” Mrs. Plotkin retorted.

  The two little boys looked puzzled. “How can the kittens have a father when they’re not born yet?” Nathan asked.

  “Oy vay!” Mrs. Plotkin averted her eyes from the cat. “Never mind.”

  “Our Tiger’s expecting, too. I opened the cupboard where she always has them and watched them coming out, the last time,” Lou boasted.

  Nathan grimaced. “I wouldn’t like to see them coming out. I wonder if it hurts?”

  Mrs. Plotkin had turned crimson and looked relieved when Sarah distracted Nathan’s attention. “Take the bowl out to the succah Nat, you and Lou can eat what’s left on the sides,” she said finishing pouring her cake mixture into tins and handing him the basin.

  “Listen, let them enjoy themselves while they can, we could all be finished off by a Zeppelin before next Succoth,” Mrs. Plotkin said dolefully as the children went out to the yard.

  “The while we’re still here.” Mrs. Plotkin was the neighbourhood pessimist, but Sarah never allowed her to get away with it. “And we haven’t seen any Zeppelins.” She put the cakes into the oven and began slicing apples for the strudel.

  Mrs. Plotkin cast a critical eye on the rich pastry Sarah had stretched into a large square in readiness for its filling. “Mine I stretch even thinner. You’re having company after shul tonight?” If company had not been expected, the pastry would have been half the size as she well knew.

  “Our friends the Moritzes as usual and tomorrow we’re going to them.”

  “It must be terrible to have no family here,” Mrs. Plotkin commiserated.

  “To us they seem like family.”

  “It isn’t the same.”

  “In some ways it’s better. You can’t choose your relations. How’s that brother of yours you don’t speak to?” Sarah asked with a dry smile.

  “Don’t even mention him to me! Your son’s really going to marry Miriam Moritz?”

  “They haven’t been courting so long for nothing.”

  Mrs. Plotkin’s expression grew gloomier than usual. “You know I hate to say it, but in my opinion her and her sister don’t look too healthy, with those white complexions. I’d be worried if my son was courting one of them.”

  “You haven’t got a son. And with consumption a person has rosy cheeks.”

  “Did I mention consumption? My daughter Sivia has rosy cheeks.”

  And you’d like to make a match between her and David, Sarah thought as she filled the pastry with fruit and cinnamon.

  “You think my Sivia has it?”

  “Me, I don’t think anything,” Sarah told her pointedly.

  Mrs. Plotkin snatched an egg from the basin on the dresser and stalked out.

  Sarah folded the pastry and laid it on a baking tray, then went to the oven to peep at her honey cakes. “What can you do, Tibby?” she smiled to the cat. “It was the only way to shut her up.”

  Tibby mewed a reply, as she always did when Sarah spoke to her. She was as gentle as Nicholas had been ferocious and purred when Sarah knelt down and stroked her bulging grey fur.

  “I’m sorry we can’t let you keep your kittens,” Sarah said to her. “It isn’t fair.” Having babies was a torture, but being parted from them afterwards must surely be a worse one.

  Nathan brought the mixing bowl back, scraped clean, then went to sit on the succah floor with Lou again.

  “If we did sleep in here, like they used to in Russia, we could count the stars at night,” he said gazing up at the roof which was made of loosely woven twigs.

  “I wonder why you have to be able to see the sky through the succah roof, Nat,” Lou said thoughtfully.

  “My father says it has to be like it was for the Children of Israel in the Wilderness.”

  Lou looked at the fruit and flowers hanging in bunches and clusters above his head. “Did they have apples and pears and oranges and chrysanthemums in the Wilderness? My family never tell me anything.”

  “Well mine don’t often, they’re always too busy.”

  “Your David told you about the bayonets though, didn’t he?” Lou said rolling onto his stomach and resting his chin in his hands.

  “I wish he hadn’t, it made me feel sick.”

  “You even feel sick if you tread on a worm!” Lou scoffed.

  “And you’ve got a rip in the seat of your pants,” Nathan retaliated inserting the tip of his boot in it.

  “Now look what you’ve done!” Lou yelled yanking Nathan’s ankle and making the rip bigger.

  “You did it yourself.”

  “And I’ll get murdered, my mother’s too busy doing piecework to mend things.”

  “Mine does piecework, too, but she isn’t.”

  “Would she mind if we had an apple?”

  “Take one each, boys!” Sarah called to them. She had come out to the yard to fetch a sheet which was drying on the clothes line and overheard their conversation. Talking about piecework at their age, but things like that wouldn’t be part of Nat’s life when he grew up if she could help it.

  “We can’t reach the apples down!” Nathan shouted to her.

  “So I’ll do it.” Sarah went into the succah and gave them each a golden russet.

  “You wouldn’t’ve been able to reach if it wasn’t a very low roof,” Nathan teased her.

  Sarah’s children never let her forget how tiny she was and the height of her two elder sons made her wonder how she had produced them. How lovely it is in here, she thought glancing around. David had gone by train to Sale and returned with his arms full of greenery gathered in a country lane. But it was Sammy who had made the little lean-to look so beautiful, it had not looked like this when the children were all small and Abraham had decorated it.

  Delicate fronds of fern and glossy laurel peeped from between the lattice of twigs overhead. Apples and oranges twinkled like coloured lights, each one affixed separately by Sammy’s clever hands. Bronze and yellow chrysanthemum and crimson gladioli heads bloomed as if they grew out of the rough wooden walls.

  “In Dvinsk, decorating the succah was no problem,” Sarah told the two boys. “Nobody needed to take a train to find what they needed. We just cut off a branch from a big tree, leaves and everything, and it was a readymade roof. And all the little ones, like you, used to go with their parents on Yom Kippur night, when the succah has to be erected, to fetch a branch
for their family. What a sight it was! First we’d go home and break the Fast, then everyone would be out in the street, the fathers pushing the children in a handcart to the river bank, where it was thick with trees. But the children had to walk back and help to push the cart because it was full.”

  Nat and Lou were listening raptly as they munched their apples. Lou’s grubby shirt was hanging out of his knickerbockers as usual. “I like hearing stories about Russia,” he said wiping his fingers on it. “It must’ve been very exciting to live there.”

  “Such excitement we can do without.” In Strangeways there were no trees to make the succah roof from, but the last few years in Dvinsk the excursion she’d just described had not taken place. It wasn’t safe for Jews to go out at night, Sarah recalled, or to put up a succah beside their house for fear of it being burned down. But even so, the Festivals brightened our lives, the way they do here, she reflected as she went to unpeg the sheet and blow the smuts off it. Maybe God wanted them to be observed not just to commemorate Jewish history, but to make us forget our everyday troubles now and then?

  She returned to the kitchen just in time to rescue her cakes from the oven and was turning them out of the tins when a woman from across the street walked in. Did nobody else have anything to do today? “Sit down, Mrs. Kletz, I won’t be a minute.” She put the strudel to bake and her cakes to cool. “Your baking’s all done?”

  “I haven’t even started it.” Mrs. Kletz sat down on the chair Mrs. Plotkin had just vacated and looked as though she was there to stay.

  “You’d like some tea?”

  “It’s coming out of my ears, I’ve drunk glass after glass to settle my nerves, but it’s done me no good.” Mrs. Kletz choked back a sob and took a handkerchief from her apron pocket. “It’s my Manny, Mrs. Sandberg. He’s joined up.” She rolled the handkerchief into a ball with one hand, kneading it back and forth agitatedly on her lap. “He told us just before he went to work this morning. A lovely present for Succoth!”

  Sarah felt the goose pimples rise on her flesh. Though she spent her days sewing buttons on uniforms, the war seemed far away. Only at moments like this did the reality of it touch her. She watched her neighbour dab her eyes and straighten her bulky, brown sheitel which looked more like a matted fur hat than a head of hair.

  “So what can you do? He’s caught war-fever, like a lot of others. They think a Jew should fight for England after what England’s done for us.” Mrs. Kletz folded her chapped hands resignedly. “Who could deny it? But also who wants their son to be a soldier? My life I’d give for England, but not my boy. Did I save him from the Tsar so he could be killed by the Kaiser?”

  This is how it’ll be for me, if David gets called up, Sarah thought with the chill still gripping her. Until now, she hadn’t let herself contemplate it. Mrs. Kletz was turning her wedding ring round and round on her finger. Usually, she looked neat and tidy, but-today she hadn’t even bothered to button the cuffs on her blouse, or put on the locket she always wore. Not all mothers were like herself and Mrs. Kletz, taking a real pride in how they and their family looked. Mrs. Benjamin from four doors away was the kind who wouldn’t bother sewing up the holes in her Lou’s clothing even when she wasn’t busy and Hannah Lensky was another like her. But when it came to losing a son in the war, all mothers were the same, the thought of it shut everything else out of your mind. Please God, don’t let there be conscription, she prayed silently. Let the war be over soon, it’s bad for everyone. And for us especially. Haven’t we been through enough?

  “The Almighty will watch over your Manny,” she said quietly to Mrs. Kletz, but she knew this was not a comfort to her and would not be one to herself if David had to be a soldier. Sometimes it was very hard to have faith in God, you couldn’t help remembering those He had let die in the pogroms and asking yourself why He had.

  In 1915 Sammy Sandberg and Mottie Benjamin took their little brothers to watch the “Pals” Battalions of the Manchester Regiment march past the Town Hall. Lord Kitchener had come to Manchester to take the salute and stood like a ramrod in front of the huge recruiting posters, his medals glinting in the sunlight, surrounded by officers and civic dignitaries.

  Albert Square was packed with citizens cheering their very own soldiers and the two little boys were seated astride their brothers’ shoulders viewing the parade.

  “Why aren’t they wearing khaki?” Nathan inquired in a puzzled voice. “Their uniforms look like the ones the tram drivers wear.”

  “That’s what they are,” Sammy told him. “They haven’t got their proper ones yet, so the Corporation’s lent them some.”

  A beery-faced man next to them raised his shabby cap as the soldiers tramped past. “Manchester’s reet proud ’o thi, lads!” he roared. “Good luck the Pals!”

  “Why do they call them that, Mister?” Lou asked him.

  The man laughed. “Dust tha not know, son? Whir’s tha bin? It’s cause ’em amn’t joint oop bi ’emsels like. Ter joint t’Pals tha ’as ter sagn on wi’ thi frens.”

  “You, me and Otto could all join the Pals together, only we’re not old enough yet,” Mottie said to Sammy regretfully.

  “We could sleep in tents in Heaton Park, like them,” Sammy added pretending he was not lame and barred from sleeping in military tents anywhere.

  When Sammy and Nathan returned home, Zelda Cohen was there with her daughters.

  “So how d’you like school, Natie?” she asked Nathan.

  “Very much, thank you,” he replied politely wishing he could tell her not to call him that.

  “Sit down and have some cake with us, Nat,” little Ruby Cohen invited him from the table.

  “He doesn’t need you to ask him, it’s his house,” her eldest sister reminded her.

  There were times when Nathan felt as if it wasn’t. Lately, there always seemed to be ladies sitting in the kitchen with his mother, talking about the war. “I’m not hungry, thanks,” he said to Ruby and went upstairs to escape from her. She sat across the aisle from him at school and smelt of camphor oil.

  “Those two’ll make a nice match when they grow up,” Zelda smiled to Sarah. She was pregnant again, ballooning vastly above as well as below her waistband, as she always did when in that condition, which was most of the time. She unfastened the top button of her skirt and sighed with relief. “Who knows how long the war will last, eh, Mrs. Sandberg? If my Naomi was a boy, she could even get called up.”

  “The while nobody is getting called up,” Sarah said crisply because the subject upset her. “And your Naomi is a girl like her seven sisters.”

  Nathan wished he had stayed downstairs when he went into the bedroom he shared with his brothers. David was ticking Sammy off about going to watch the parade and continued doing so as if Nathan was not there.

  “What d’you think it was for, Sammy? To entertain people?” he said caustically. “They’re after more cannon fodder. It’s all very well watching soldiers march past, but there’s no glamour in the bleddy trenches!”

  Nathan wondered what cannon fodder and glamour were, but was afraid to ask in case he got ticked off, too. The day conscription was introduced, Abraham dropped into shul to see Rabbi Lensky.

  The minister was huddled over a dying fire in the room in which he used to hold his midday gatherings. “If you’ve come to ask me why the Almighty is letting this war continue, I don’t know the answer, so don’t ask me the question. I just told my Cousin Yossel the same.”

  Abraham took the two small packets containing sugar and tea from his pocket and put them on the shelf beside the sink as he usually did.

  “Listen, nobody’s wet through and out of work anymore. I don’t need them,” the rabbi protested.

  Abraham smiled. “But I need to give them to you.”

  “Who am I to deprive a man of what he needs? You heard Yossel’s son Lazar was wounded?”

  Abraham nodded. “And today I heard in the factory that Berel Halpern was killed in France.”

&nb
sp; Rabbi Lensky paled, then he raised his eyes to the ceiling and shook his head slowly.

  “You’re reproaching Him?” Abraham asked.

  “That’s not for us to do. All I ask is He should help me to understand.” The rabbi stroked the silvery beard which made him look older than he was and gazed into the embers. “Everything He does is part of a pattern, Abie, but we never see it at the time. When my poor first wife died, I thought why should He take a good woman like her? So now I’m married again and I have two daughters. Poor Reba gave me no children, but maybe God desired me to be a father, the pastoral duties of a rabbi demand the whole breadth of human experience. So that is what I’ve come to believe.”

  “Wouldn’t it have been simpler if He’d just let your first wife have children?”

  “We can’t concern ourselves with the things He doesn’t do, Abie. It’s enough to fathom out why He does the things He does.”

  “You know the conclusion I’ve come to, Rabbi? And not without reason. It’s better not to question Him at all.” Abraham looked at his watch. “I’d better go, I want to be in time for prayers at the Halperns’ tonight.” He stared into space for a moment, then collected himself. “To say Kaddish for a son and not to know where his body is lying even—it doesn’t bear thinking about.”

  Rabbi Lensky clasped his knobbly hands on his lap and gazed into the fire again. “We have to face up to it, Abie my friend. It won’t be the last time such a Kaddish is said in Strangeways.”

  Chapter 4

  “All my father bleddy cares about is raking it in, the war’s done him a favour!” Saul ranted to David in the workroom early one morning.

  David had just walked in and was shocked by the expression of hate on his friend’s face. “What’s he done to bring this on?”

  Saul was folding some khaki garments, slamming them onto a table as if to make them pay for the way he felt. “My call-up papers came today. You’ll soon be the only one left, David.”

  “Don’t worry, they’re not likely to overlook me.”

  “My old man’s frightened if we don’t get this big order off by tonight, the army’ll stop dealing with him, so he won’t give me half an hour off to go and tell Helga.”