An Observant Wife

by Naomi Ragen

  He filled the special two-handled cup with water, performing the ritual of sanctifying his hands with water before reciting the sacred blessing over bread—the beginning to any meal in a religious home, reminder of the priestly temple ritual. Only then did he tear off a piece of bread, dip it in salt, and eat, closing his eyes as he savored the moment.

  She watched him proudly. “Now come try the herring, and then I’ll bring the soup with the knaidlach.” She bustled from the kitchen to the dining room, carrying the plates carefully.

  “Why do you have to work so hard, Fruma Esther? You know I’m happy to eat in the kitchen.” He said this every week, knowing it was hopeless.

  “Such food deserves the dining room,” she replied.

  He sighed, resigned. How could you argue with that? The last thing he wanted to do was insult such food! Only after she’d served him did she put down a plate for herself. They ate silently, enjoying the food and the company as if they had been together forever.

  It had been like this with her Yitzchak Chaim, may his soul rest in peace. Quiet, friendly meals where neither felt obliged to do more than just sit beside one another in a shared activity. Talk wasn’t necessary when you were married to a man for forty years. You already knew what he was going to say. More than that, you knew when he was about to sneeze and needed a tissue. You knew from the wrinkle of his nose if he liked or disliked something. And you knew when you told him a story, exactly what it was going to remind him of and how he would react. Because in many ways, you’d become one person with two bodies, your experiences, beliefs, frailties, and needs so familiar to one another that you could almost feel the others aches and worries, their pride and enjoyment, which could not but strengthen your own.

  A long marriage with a compatible partner enhanced and heightened everything. Losing that person, being just one instead of two, was not like being single again; it was like being torn in half, leaving a vast emptiness that nothing else could fill. Unless, of course, you found someone who—like a long-lost puzzle piece—was so miraculously similar in shape and color they filled the void completely.

  The stuffed cabbage and tzimmeskugel were next.

  “Just like my Malka used to make. Geshmacked,” he complimented her. “But the tzimmeskugel, this I never tasted. Delicious!”

  “It’s my mother’s recipe. And she got it from her mother.”

  “They were from Poland?”

  “No, Lithuania. Vilna. Descendants of the Vilna Gaon,” she said proudly.

  He pushed himself back from the table. “I didn’t know. Such an important family.”

  “They were. All heads of yeshivas, community rabbis. The Holocaust destroyed them. Did you ever hear of the Ponary forest?”

  “I heard, I heard.” He shook his head sadly.

  “Once, twenty years ago, Yitzchak Chaim and I took a trip to Vilna with other religious Jews. The tour bus drove out to Ponary. We drove down the road that the trucks took to bring the Jews of Vilna from the ghetto. They let us off by the little museum. We looked down the road and there were stone slabs as far as you could see, so many of them, and every one marked a mass grave. As far as you could see,” she repeated, her eyes unseeing as she remembered. She felt her body shiver. “It just went on and on and on.”

  He shook his head slowly. “My own family were from Czechoslovakia, the Carpathian Mountains. During the war, the town changed hands and became Hungarian, and then the Nazis took over, and afterward the Russians. Now it’s in the Ukraine. My grandfather was the chief rabbi, as was his father before him. My father was a brilliant young Talmud scholar who was being groomed to take his father’s place. In 1938, he was the father of two small girls and was drafted into the Hungarian slave labor force. It was a miracle that in 1939 they allowed him to come home for Passover. I was born nine months later. My father, blessed be his memory, never lived to see me. The people of the town—my father’s congregation and students—were able to arrange for my bubbee and zaidie, my mother, my sisters, and myself to be smuggled out of the ghetto to a gentile farmer’s house, where we spent the war in hiding. I don’t remember much. But my grandparents didn’t survive the hardships. After the war, we came here, to America, to Boro Park. I was raised as the last remnant of my family’s rabbinic line.”

  “A great honor.”

  He shrugged. “A great obligation and an even greater burden. To be the only one left…”

  They sat there silently, the ghosts of their families twirling around the room, filling the space between them.

  “It’s hard for people to understand. Even for the kinderlach. Impossible to explain the heaviness we carry around with us.”

  “So many souls depending on us, making demands on us,” he agreed.

  “It is the will of the Aibishter.” She sighed. “We do what we can do, no?”

  He nodded. “Which means we should try not to be sad if we can help it. You can drown in sadness, like the ocean.”

  “Which is why, no matter what, I always have dessert,” she said brightly, smiling.

  He laughed, patting his stomach. “I don’t know if I have room, Fruma Esther.”

  “Of course you have the room! And I also will make the room,” she promised.

  “To something like that, a man cannot say no.”

  “Even a very wise man,” she teased him.

  The babka—a delicate crust smothered in mouthwatering chocolate filling—was scrumptious enough to send even the ghosts out the window. They washed it down with cups of deliciously brewed green jasmine tea, something Fruma Esther had discovered unexpectedly only recently.

  “The tea is good, no?” she asked him.

  “Wonderful! I never tasted such tea!”

  “It was a present from a woman I know.”

  “A frum woman knows about such things?”

  “Not frum, frei. Someone I met from the hospital who drove me in her own car all the way from Manhattan to Brooklyn when I had my eye operation. Didn’t ask for even a penny! A volunteer. Such a schlep. We got to talking. I told her about my Zissele, and she told me she also lost a child, beautiful son, from that terrible sickness, that AIDS. I was surprised she even talked about it.”

  “May HaShem watch over us! Such a tragedy.” He shook his head.

  She nodded sadly. “A very kind woman, full of chesed. We still talk once in a while.”

  “We frum Yidden have no monopoly on goodness.”

  “It took me a while to understand that, Shimon Levi. But when Yaakov married a baalas teshuva, I began to see things differently. I saw things in the community—among our own kind, Shimon Levi!—that made me ashamed, may God forgive me! And I wasn’t any better. I also didn’t want. I was trying so hard to find him a kallah from a choshuva family, a frum-from-birth Bais Yaakov girl. But once I got to know Leah, his wife, I understood what a pure heart she has, just like him. It was bashert.”

  “You know, in the Talmud, two sages, Rav Chisda and Rav Abbahu, discuss who is holier, the tzaddik or the baal teshuva. You would think for sure the tzaddik, who has lived a sinless life. But Rav Abbahu disagrees. He said, ‘Where the penitent stands, even the tzaddik cannot.’”

  “Why is that?”

  “The Rambam says it’s because the baal teshuva has tasted sin and yet separated himself from it, defeating his evil inclination. Their efforts are heroic and unceasing. While the tzaddik doesn’t have to work so hard. And the first Lubavitcher Rebbe said that the enthusiasm and passion of the baal teshuva makes his worship of God special.”

  “I never thought of it that way,” Fruma Esther murmured, moved almost to tears of pride in Leah, and of shame for herself and all the others she knew who looked down on the newcomers to their community.

  “So they’re happy, then, the young couple?”

  She hesitated. “They were.”

  He straightened up in his chair, alert. “What happened?”

  She opened her purse and handed him a letter. “Yaakov asked me to give you thi
s.”

  He sat there reading, shaking his head, his silence punctuated by an occasional heartfelt oy vey. When he had finished, he folded it up and gave it back to her.

  “No, I think he meant for you to keep it.”

  “It’s a terrible story.”

  She nodded. “If Yaakov hadn’t seen these things with his own eyes…”

  “So tell me, what’s happening now?”

  She brought him up to date: the threat of expulsion, the urine, the car tires, and worst of all, the bicycle that had sent Leah to the hospital.

  He slammed a fist on the table. “Tell me, who is responsible for this? A shandah and a cherpeh!”

  “We don’t know, but we have our suspicions.”

  “You know, Yaakov asked me about this Grub. I’d never heard of him, but since he is a Bobelger Hasid, I called the Bobelger Rebbe.”

  “What did he say?”

  He hesitated. “Well, in the end, I didn’t actually speak to the Rebbe. His nephew controls all the phone calls, the visits. The Bobelger Rebbe is very old, you know. But not so long ago, we would sit together on all the important community boards. A very wise and learned man,” he said wistfully. “He’s not well, they say. Nebbech. But the nephew told me they send all their girls to Grub. That he is one hundred percent reliable.”

  “The nephew! He’s a youngster.” She lowered her voice. “And from what I understand, he surrounds himself with criminals.”

  Rav Alter held up a restraining hand.

  “I’m sorry. I know it’s loshon hara. But look, all I’m saying is that if the Rebbe himself would get involved, look into what Grub has been doing all these years, he could save the neshamas of so many innocent young girls. And then … and then … when the truth came out, they would have to leave Yaakov and Leah and the children alone. We don’t know what else to do. You’re our last hope.”

  “Let me ask you, Fruma Esther, because this is a very serious accusation that can ruin a man’s life and reputation—aside from Shaindele’s word, you have proof about Grub?”

  “Only what Yaakov said he saw.”

  “Yes, I read. But this is not really proof. After all, Shaindele is his daughter. He was looking for proof; he wanted to believe his own daughter. His judgment could have been affected. We must have objective proof.”

  “There was another young girl. Yaakov saw her coming out of Grub’s office, very upset. He found out her name. Maybe you could talk to her, to her parents?”

  There was a moment of silence.

  “But maybe it’s better you shouldn’t get involved.” She sighed, gathering the dirty plates and carrying them slowly into the kitchen. She put them into the sink and turned on the hot water.

  He should stay out of it, for his own sake. That was clear to her now. Even though the position he held in the community equaled that of the Bobelger Rebbe and therefore no one would dare to molest him, still, what did he need it for? There would be accusations against his rulings, accusations against his piety. There was no shortage of things these criminals could think up if you went against them. She would never want to put him in harm’s way. Even with so much at stake, she found that she cared for him as deeply as she did about her own family.

  “Fruma Esther.”

  She turned around. He was standing by the counter holding the rest of the dishes. “Give me the girl’s name. I’ll look into it.”

  She shook her head. “Forget I asked you. It’s a bad idea. It’s dangerous, k’vod harav.”

  “Shimon Levi,” he corrected her, his sad eyes suddenly twinkling once more.

  34

  A DIFFERENT WORLD

  “Lola? Is that you?” Cheryl Howard asked sleepily, confused. She had just spent the last hour by the swimming pool in the brutal Florida heat, and her brains felt like sautéing mushrooms, soft and shrunk to a fraction of their size.

  “Leah, Mom. Did you hear what I said?”

  “What?”

  “We are on our way to your house.”

  “We?”

  “Yes. Me, Yaakov, Chasya, and Mordechai Shalom.”

  “The whole family?”

  “Well, the older kids are in Baltimore.”

  “Where are you now?” she asked, just to make sure she wasn’t dreaming. Lola was coming, bringing the rabbi and his little kids? To Florida? To her nonkosher, secular house? Just like that? After she’d politely rejected every single invitation for over two years? Had it not been for the worry that something must be terribly wrong to have unglued her daughter from that backward neighborhood of religious fanatics she’d been clinging to with all her might, Cheryl Howard would have been over the moon.

  Despite her fatigue, Cheryl did a quick review of their last conversation, mining for clues. Well, Lola had remarked that she was, after all, still a feminist (who would have thought?). Then there was that admission about the “ups and downs” of newlyweds. Did that mean something? But if Jacob and the kids were coming with her, she couldn’t be hightailing out of fanatics-ville à la Thelma and Louise. But maybe—could it be?—that she was planning on dumping yeshiva boy once she got there, then kidnapping the kids? Go know.

  “Where we are is someplace on I-95.” Leah’s voice interrupted her thoughts, answering the question she’d already forgotten she’d asked. “We’ll spend overnight somewhere along the way to break up the drive. It’s okay, Mom, isn’t it? I mean, you did invite us.”

  “Of course it’s okay! I’m just surprised is all. How are the little rug rats?”

  Leah turned her head to look at the children in the back seat. Cheeky had a rubber steering wheel toy connected to his car seat and was happily steering, pressing all the colored buttons and pretend-tooting his long-disabled green horn. Icy was more subdued, tracing invisible pictures on the window as she stared at the scenery. She seemed sad, Leah thought, troubled. “They’re fine, I hope.”

  “You hope? Why, what’s the matter?”

  “Well, you’re going to find out anyway soon enough. We’ve gotten into a bit of neighborhood controversy. My stepdaughter Shaindele—”

  “The chubby, vindictive one with the personality of a politician who’s just lost an election? That one?”

  “Really, Mom, she’s just a kid, a kid who recently lost her mother. Be charitable.”

  “No, that’s your department. I’m your mother, and I’m allowed to not adore the little troublemaker for everything she’s done to my daughter.”

  “But we get along fine now, really.”

  “So why isn’t she coming with you?”

  “It’s a long story, but she’s graduating in a few months. She has to study.”

  “Okay, fair enough. So what is it I’m going to find out?”

  “That there is this vendetta against us and we’ve been attacked.” As she spoke, Leah anxiously scanned the children’s reaction in the rearview mirror. Oh no! Chasya’s eyes—alarmed—were taking over her little face. She pressed the phone closer to her mouth and tried to whisper. “I can’t talk now. But it’s not safe for us there right now. We’ve made some very powerful people angry.”

  “So what did they do? Show up with machetes?”

  “It’s Boro Park, Mom, not Sinaloa.”

  “But they did something, right?”

  “Yes, but I can’t talk about that now because Chasya’s … Hi, Chasya”—she waved and smiled at the child’s serious face—“wants to play I Spy with me. Right, sweetie?” She nodded at the child, smiling.

  “But you’re all okay, right?” There was an edge of alarm in Cheryl’s tone. She was waking up fast.

  Leah looked at her bandaged knees and splinted finger. “We’ll live. Not to worry. But I can’t talk right now.”

  “Okay, okay, I hear you. I’ll get you some food and meat at Super Glatt in Boca, and a brand-new barbecue.”

  “Don’t forget the paper plates and plastic utensils and cups—”

  “I know the drill, believe me. My parents were from Flatbush, remember?”<
br />
  “I remember. Mom?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Thank you so much for always being there. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  Cheryl felt her eyes well up from such totally unexpected (and long overdue and totally deserved, in her opinion) praise. “Well, you’re most welcome. Have a safe trip. See you in two days.”

  “Bye.” Leah turned around in her seat. “I spy with my little eye … something green…,” Leah began, and was rewarded by Chasya’s immediate attention, her little face alive with interest. She felt Yaakov’s hand reach out to hers, giving it a gentle squeeze.

  The road whizzed by, rocking the children to sleep.

  “What did your mother say?” Yaakov whispered.

  “She put on a good show. But I think she’s flabbergasted. And worried. This is so sudden. She can’t figure out what’s going on.”

  Yaakov nodded. “We should have come to see her months ago. It wasn’t right.”

  Leah looked at him meaningfully. “Even though she’s not religious? I always thought you didn’t want the children exposed to the way she lives.”

  He seemed genuinely shocked. “No, no! That was never the reason. I just couldn’t get away from work.” His expression was grim.

  “It hasn’t been easy for you, has it?” she murmured, suddenly realizing just how unhappy he’d been all these months.

  “I don’t mind the work, the actual accounting. It’s even interesting in a way. But being part of the ‘team’—my boss, the other people, the clients—having to go to bars with them, to pretend I’m one of them just to get ahead…” He shook his head. “I hate it so much, I can’t even tell you. And that was before my boss threatened to fire me over something that has nothing at all to do with my work!”

  She was genuinely shocked. So that was it, what had been eating away at him all these months, turning him into another person? She felt an enormous relief, bordering on joy. “I thought it was me you were unhappy with, me you wanted to get away from.”

  He clutched the steering wheel, giving her a quick, astonished glance. “HaShem Yishmor! Oy, Leah. I’m so sorry.”

  “I’m also sorry. I never really asked you what was wrong. I guess I was afraid of the answer.”