Almonds and Raisins

by Maisie Mosco

  “I was just explaining to you how Jews feel,” he said to Mary managing a smile.

  She looked at him and for once was not smiling. “I’m only interested in how you feel, Nathan.”

  “Stop seeing her, Nat,” Lou advised as they rode home from college one evening. “Be like me with half a dozen.”

  “I’m not the half-a-dozen kind.”

  “Nor would I be if they weren’t shiksahs.”

  “Don’t use that word, I hate it!” Nathan barked.

  “Only because you’ve fallen for one and that’s why you’ve got to finish with her,” his friend said sagely. He glanced at Nathan’s pensive expression and opened his Gray’s Anatomy to read. There was no point in talking to a brick wall.

  Was Lou right? Nathan mused. Was Mary the reason he’d begun to resent traditional Jewish attitudes toward Gentiles? A Gentile could be your friend, but he was different and you were aware he felt the same way about you. Never the twain shall meet no longer applied, but the fruits of conditioning remained and had begun to taste sour to him.

  Once, shiksah had been a word he used himself, but now it grated on him as other such Yiddish words did. “Why can’t you just say Mr. Watson across the road’s a nice man, instead of a nice goy? What’s the difference?” he had asked his father the other day and Abraham’s reply came drifting back to him as the tram clanked along. “The difference is their Messiah they’ve already had and ours we’re still waiting for.”

  Religion and nothing else was the cause of it, he thought bitterly. Without it people would just be people. If Moses hadn’t been found in the bulrushes and Jesus born in the manger, Nathan Sandberg wouldn’t be fraught with dilemma about a Christian girl called Mary.

  He shared the conclusion with Lou when they alighted from the tram.

  “And you’d’ve been born in Russia, your parents would’ve had no reason to come to England,” Lou pointed out logically. “So you wouldn’t’ve had the dilemma anyway.”

  When Nathan reached home, David’s car was parked outside. He had not let his mind dwell on how his brother would react to the affair with Mary and always restricted his outings with her to the south side of town, to avoid any chance of discovery.

  Sometimes Mary wanted them to go to the city centre, but nowadays David and Bessie had a social life which took them there and Nathan was not prepared to risk it. The clandestine nature of his relationship with a girl he was in no way ashamed of bothered him as much as her being Gentile. She was the kind of girl his mother would like, direct and cheerful, kind and intelligent. Deficient in only one way.

  “What’re you doing here at this time?” he asked David. His mother was laying the table for supper.

  “Mother wanted a chat with me.”

  “What about?”

  David lit a cigarette, a recently acquired habit which had stopped him from cracking his knuckles, and avoided his eye.

  “About you,” Sarah smiled. “The big brains of the family!”

  Nathan was always embarrassed when she talked this way, especially in David’s presence. If his brother had had the opportunity he would probably have been the best solicitor in town.

  “The shatchan has been asking about you, Nat,” his mother said lightly and laughed at his stunned reaction.

  A matchmaker inquiring about him? As if he were a prize bull to be sold in the market place! “You can tell him where to go!” he retorted hotly.

  “It’s a her.”

  “And maybe she thinks she’s still in Russia, but I’ve never even been there!”

  Sarah continued laying the table, as though they were discussing some everyday matter. “Marriage is the same everywhere.”

  Nathan looked at David whose expression told him nothing. Was David going to support his mother? Try to make him do what everyone knew he had done himself? And what had he got for it? A load of business worries, a wife who bored him stiff, anyone could see it, and two spoiled kids.

  “You haven’t asked about the girl,” Sarah said.

  “I don’t want to know about her.” He sat down at the table and regarded his mother and brother coldly. “If she’d agree to something like this, she couldn’t be the right girl for me.” His dilemma about Mary crystallized into a reckless decision to marry her, as he saw Sarah and David exchange a glance. They’d manoeuvred him into studying medicine, but they weren’t going to deprive him of the girl he loved! Let them cast him out, it was just another of the archaic rituals born in the Wilderness which had no more place in modern society than the sin it was punishment for.

  His mother took a photograph from the dresser and placed it on the table in front of him. “So you don’t want to know about her, but to see what she looks like is no harm.”

  He glanced disinterestedly at the smooth, dark face. The eyes were almond-shaped and the lips delicate and smiling.

  “She’s better looking than Bessie!” David joked at his own expense.

  Nathan jerked his gaze from the photograph. The girl was beautiful and probably had a figure to match her face, but she was not the girl he wanted.

  “She lives in London,” Sarah said as if this made her an aristocrat. “And money’s no object. Her father owns property. The great-grandparents settled here in 1850. Such a refined family! Can you blame them for wanting a doctor for their daughter?”

  A prize bull for a pedigree cow, Nathan thought with disgust.

  “So what do you say, Nat?”

  He glared at his mother as though he loathed her and wondered why he did not. “No! With a Capital N!” he shouted and strode from the room.

  After he had gone, Abraham came in from the scullery. He had been washing his hands there when Nathan arrived home and had decided to stay out of it. “Listen, the boy’s got feelings,” he shrugged. “What can you do?”

  “Wait and he’ll get over them,” Sarah replied. “He’ll need a practice one day. They don’t grow on trees and we’re not a rich family like Dr. Smolensky came from.” She set a platter of kefulte fish on the table and smiled at David. “He’ll see sense like his brother did.”

  An arranged marriage for material reasons was a custom his parents took for granted, David reflected as he drove home. As he would have done if they’d never left Russia. He recalled how the idea of it had sickened him. How much more repulsive must it seem to Nat, even though he wasn’t in love with someone else as David had been? The difference in their ages set his brother half a generation ahead of him and his boyhood had not been like David’s own, steep in the immigrants’ early struggle to establish themselves in a new land. Nat was more English in attitude than the rest of the family, how could he not be when he’d never lived anywhere else? Despite his Jewish upbringing the old ghetto traditions were bound to conflict with the English conditioning he’d absorbed.

  If I hadn’t married Bessie, I wouldn’t be living here, I’d still be in Strangeways, he thought as he stopped the car outside his house. He wouldn’t be the owner of a Morris Cowley saloon, either, he’d still be travelling by tram. How could he support Nat’s refusal to consider the matchmaker’s proposition, which he was tempted to do, when he’d married for money himself? And with the business barely holding its own, there was no prospect of David accruing the cash to set him up when he qualified. He made up his mind to remain neutral and leave things to his mother who had no doubt worked out how her doctor-son’s practice would be bought the day she decided he was to be one.

  When he opened the front door, Shirley and Ronald were playing in the lobby and rushed to greet him. By the time they grew up, arranged marriages would be unheard of, he reflected as he hugged them. Jews would become more Anglicised with each succeeding generation. Probably the beautiful London girl, who was third-generation English, had only agreed to be a party to one because Jewish doctors were still in short supply.

  “You’re late, David! And we’re going out right after supper!” Bessie shrilled from the kitchen.

  He went to kiss her cheek, wit
h an arm around each of his children. Arranged or not, in the end marriage boiled down to family life and its strains and stresses. With a few patches of joy thrown in if you were lucky. “Where’re we going tonight, love?” He knew it was nowhere special or Bessie would have been wearing her smartest dress.

  “To that meeting you want to go to,” she reminded him peevishly.

  David ate a bit of bread and did not reply.

  “And I still don’t know why you want to bother with it,” Bessie grumbled handing plates of lentil soup to Lizzie to put on the table. But she intended to go with him, nevertheless. Socially she had maintained her policy of not letting him out of her sight.

  “Remember what Mother said to us at Rosh Hashanah, Bessie? About there not being a safe place for Jews in her time? Well it got me thinking. I mean we’ve got a Jewish homeland now, haven’t we? The Balfour Declaration gave us one in Palestine in 1917, but most of it isn’t fit to live in and they can’t make something of it without money. So I made up my mind to join a Zionist group and help to raise funds.”

  “I think that’s lovely of you, Daddy,” Shirley said.

  David pinched her cheek and smiled. “Every year at Pesach we say, ‘Next year in Jerusalem,’ don’t we?” he replied quoting from the Passover meal tradition.

  “But we don’t really mean it,” Bessie put in.

  “Zionists do and from now on so do I.”

  Bessie put the soup ladle down and stared at him.

  “I don’t mean I’m catching the next boat, love! But I think there should be a Jewish homeland to be proud of for those who want to live there. Or need to live there,” he added significantly.

  “You’re getting as bad as Sigmund Moritz! And your mother with her Mr. Hitler! I wish Carl’d never mentioned him to her, or any of that stuff about Blackshirts in England, either. Nothing terrible’s going to happen to us here.”

  “I don’t think it is, either. But that’s a bit of a selfish attitude, isn’t it, love?”

  Bessie glared at him.

  “Sigmund’s been expecting something to blow up on the continent ever since he left Vienna. I used to think he was an alarmist, but now I’m not so sure. This Hitler business could be the start of it and we can’t just think of ourselves.”

  “Your soup’s getting cold,” his wife snapped.

  “Let it. Why d’you think Shirley goes to Habonim on Sunday afternoons, Bessie?”

  “To play with her friends, what else?”

  “And dance the horah,” Shirley piped up.

  “Like they do in Palestine,” David said. He glanced at the cardboard brick on the dresser which Shirley had made with the other children at the Zionist Youth Movement gathering and brought home as her personal symbol of what the Movement stood for. She had been very proud of it, though she was too young to understand what it meant. His wife didn’t seem to understand its significance either; to her the gatherings were just somewhere to send Shirley on Lizzie’s afternoon off. “When Shirley’s grown up, she might want to go and work on a settlement in Palestine, like plenty of them’re doing, it’s the youngsters who’re making it fit to live in. That’s what Habonim’s all about.”

  “I never want to leave my mam’n dad,” his daughter informed him.

  “And you’re not going to,” Bessie assured her turning on David. “Your mother started all this!”

  “My mother’s no fool, Bessie.”

  “I should be so lucky!” Lou said when he learned about the beautiful rich girl the matchmaker had found for his friend.

  They were huddled over the gas fire in Lou’s attic room, assigned to him because he was the youngest of the family and his two brothers were still unmarried and living at home.

  “My brothers as well,” he added. “Not that they’re in the same bracket as you and me, Nat.”

  “That’s what makes it so bleddy disgusting!” Nathan exclaimed.

  “You’re always saying that about something or other.”

  “It must be because they’re so many things to say it about. Can you imagine a Christian family auctioning off their sons?”

  Lou laughed. “I wonder what my brothers’d bring? A machiner’s worth more than a shmearer, so Mottie’d fetch the most!”

  “That’s what it boils down to, doesn’t it?” Nathan got up and paced about angrily. “I hate this whole damn Jewish preoccupation with status and money!”

  Lou studied the threadbare design on the rug for a moment. “If you stopped to think about it, Nat, you’d realise it’s no different from the Christian one. It’s just that Jews are that way openly. How much is this girl’s family offering?”

  “Well you certainly are!”

  “I shouldn’t be honest with my dearest friend? Hand her over to me if you don’t want her.”

  “You’d do it, wouldn’t you?” Disgust was written on Nathan’s face.

  “How else am I going to get a surgery? You as well, you shmuck!" Lou popped a mint imperial into his mouth and crunched it noisily. “If we both do it, we can go into partnership and I’ll be able to keep your feet on the ground, like I’ve had to do ever since I’ve known you!”

  Nathan strode moodily to the window and stared at the rooftops which looked as bleak in the moonlight as the future his friend had just described. He cared no more for medicine now than he had ever done. The thought of spending each day pursuing a career for which he had no heart, with only an anonymous girl he didn’t love to come home to at the end of it made him shudder.

  “Come back and sit near the gas fire if you’re cold,” Lou said mistaking the shudder for a shiver.

  Nathan smiled wryly. Lou was his best pal, but had never understood his deepest feelings, so different from his own.

  “You’ve got a funny look on your face,” his friend told him. “What’re you thinking about?”

  “Homer and Plato and Catullus. And what it’d be like to teach classics and be married to Mary.”

  Lou brought him down to earth.

  “If you weren’t studying to be a doctor you’d never’ve bleddy met her. Listen, at least this London girl’s good looking, she could’ve been cross-eyed and bandy.” He scratched his nose and winked. “But you haven’t seen her legs yet, have you?”

  “You’re talking as if it’s a fait accompli!” Nathan flared.

  “It would be if you hadn’t met Mary. Your whole future’s at stake and if it weren’t for her you’d sell your pound of flesh for a bag of shekels and think no more about it,” Lou said bluntly.

  “Thanks for the compliment,” Nathan retorted. “And like hell I would!”

  Chapter 7

  Marianne loved arriving home from school in the afternoons. When she and her brothers rushed in for their midday dinner, their home would seem a turmoil of incompleteness, the meal they were about to eat waiting on the table for them, tonight’s supper halfway prepared, with its ingredients in a big dish on the scullery draining board, clothes laundered that morning strung around the hearth. But in the afternoons, all would be orderly and sweet peace had miraculously descended upon the house.

  Harry was now old enough to escort the younger children home and had learned to cross the main road with care. They would enter the kitchen and find their mother sitting by the window sewing, dressed in a dark skirt and a pale soft blouse, pastel-coloured with a frilly jabot falling from the vee-neckline. The boys liked their mother’s pink and blue blouses best, but Marianne preferred the lemon one, especially on a sunny day when the light from the window deepened the shade to amber.

  Friday was Marianne’s favourite afternoon. Her mother would be darning or embroidering as usual, but the house had a special atmosphere. She could smell the Shabbos tsimmes simmering in the shiny, blackleaded oven and the candles would be already in the candlesticks, waiting to be lit when her father came home. Best of all, she liked to see the lokshen her mother had prepared for the chicken soup. A huge square of dough, rolled paper-thin and sliced into shoestring-width streamers, it
would be lying upon a snowy tea towel on the kitchen table. No Jewish housewife in Cheetham Hill would have thought of buying a packet of vermicelli in those days.

  One Friday, the children came home and found a strange man sitting in the kitchen. But he looked oddly familiar.

  “Your Uncle Joe’s come to visit us,” their mother said and Marianne thought she looked worried.

  “All the way from London!” the man smiled.

  “I can tell that by the way you speak,” Harry told him.

  He laughed and got up to kiss them. “I haven’t always lived there, but it must’ve been long enough to catch the twang! So these’re our Ben’s kids. I bet he’s proud of them.”

  Marianne did not usually like being kissed, but her new uncle reminded her of her father and she couldn’t help liking him. “Why’ve we never seen you before?” she asked gazing up at him.

  “I didn’t know Dad had a brother,” Harry said surveying him. He was a shrewd little boy, like Ben in both looks and character. “I wonder why he didn’t tell us?”

  “It’s a long story, kids,” Uncle Joe said.

  “But there’s no need to tell it to them, is there?” Esther put in hastily.

  Marianne sensed a mystery and prickled with excitement. “Why not?” she asked her mother, but the subject remained closed and she turned to her uncle. “Why don’t you live in Manchester like us?”

  “Your uncle’s a newspaper reporter and his office is in London,” Esther said before he could reply.

  “What does a newspaper reporter do?” Arnold inquired tossing his shock of red hair away from his eyes. He was the quieter of the two boys, but would ask questions with a serious air and then consider the answers carefully.

  “You’ve seen the daily papers, haven’t you?” his uncle said.

  The children nodded.

  “With everything that happens everywhere written in them? Well how d ’you think it gets there?”

  “I suppose somebody has to find out what’s happening,” Arnold said thoughtfully.