The Origin of Sorrow

by Robert Mayer

  “I can’t speak for Guttle. Perhaps it’s because I am not a mother.”

  “That’s cruel. Here I thought you were being nice.”

  “You asked me, Dvorah. I should say, Countess.”

  Already he was feeling a slight nausea, the beginning of indigestion. When he returned home, would he tell Guttle of this encounter? She would get upset. But if he did not, she might hear of it from some one else. From Dvorah’s mother. That would be worse.

  “Let me ask you something.” He had lowered his voice. Dvorah leaned close, as if expecting some intimacy from the lane. Her face was inches from his, her bosom brushed his lapel, her perfumed powder made him light-headed. “That woman over there. With the boat on her head. Do you know who she is?”

  Disappointed, Dvorah glanced away. “That’s Wilhelm’s mistress, Rosalie Ritter. She’s Swedish. Mother of seven of his children.”

  “I didn’t know he had so many.”

  “That’s only with her. The rumor is there are seventy, altogether.”

  “The Crown Prince? Does he have such a handsome face? Does he cut such a dashing figure?”

  “You’re funny, Meyer Rothschild. It’s not his face or his figure that’s on his millions of gulden.”

  Meyer’s eyes sparkled, the skin beside them crinkled with delight. That was something Guttle might have said. He had often wondered, in the old days, at the depth of her friendship with Dvorah. Perhaps there was more to Dvorah than he had noticed back then, something obscured by her buoyant shapeliness. Something that perhaps had blossomed when removed from Guttle’s shadow.

  “Come, let me introduce you to Paul.” Taking his hand, she led him across the ballroom. They passed beside the mistress with the clipper ship atop her wig. From up close Meyer could see, on the deck and climbing the masts, tiny Hessian soldiers. He could not help but smile at her taste; she was flaunting at his coronation the source of Wilhelm’s inheritance.

  They approached a gentleman who was leaning on a wooden crutch. Dvorah introduced Meyer to her husband, and to the man with whom he was conversing, a clean-shaven fellow in a blue coat and yellow breeches. Both were sipping champagne. “Meyer Rothschild, an old friend from Frankfurt, this is Wolfgang von Goethe.”

  “The writer,” Meyer said, offering his hand. Goethe nodded politely, but did not see — or pretended he did not see — the proffered hand. Ignoring Goethe’s slight, or trying to, Meyer said, “Dvorah here is your most violent reader.”

  “Yes, I know that story.”

  Dvorah lightly slapped her husband’s arm. “Paul! I asked you never to tell about that.”

  “I didn’t. And Herr Rothschild, my wife’s name is Madeleine, if you please.”

  “Paul didn’t tell me,” Goethe assured her. “It was Mendelssohn himself, years ago. He found it quite amusing, in retrospect. They say he’s dying now, poor fellow, from a disease of the nerves. He made quite a name for himself, for a Jew.”

  Meyer Amschel studied the flute of bubbling liquid in his hand, as if trying to decide if his cautious self should respond, or if he should let the champagne speak. He was tired of acting properly. The drink declined to wait for his decision. “You’re a learned man, Herr Goethe. Do you have a problem with Jews?”

  Goethe, too, had been drinking champagne, had consumed several flutes, and his response was unthinking, something he had said many times before, in different company, as if it were a little joke. “Let’s just say I wouldn’t want to marry one.”

  The three listeners tensed. Goethe realized his mistake. “Present company excepted, of course. The Countess has long since renounced the heresy into which she was born.”

  Seeing Dvorah’s face redden, and emboldened by the poet’s faux pas, Meyer said, “There is talk that some cities may end the prohibition on marriages between Christians and Jews.”

  Goethe waved the hand holding his drink. Paul lurched back to avoid flying drops, almost losing his balance on his crutch. “You’re speaking of Vienna. Not Weimar. As for my native Frankfurt — never. That’s one reason I fight this so-called Enlightenment. It goes too far. Marriage is an affair of emotion, not reason. The gut tells us that marriage with a Jew is unacceptable.”

  Paul was looking at Goethe with a mixture of astonishment and hurt, like a friendly dog suddenly smacked.

  “Stop looking at me that way. Your wife became a Christian before you married her. No one has a problem with that.”

  “Are you married, sir?” Meyer asked.

  “I don’t have to be a donkey to bray like one.”

  Giggling, Dvorah covered her mouth. Meyer could think of no better response than to leave the statement hanging in the air.

  It still was hanging when a cluster of finery that had been moving slowly nearer enveloped them. Wilhelm, the portly former Crown Prince of Hesse-Hanau, as of today the powerful Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel, was greeting his guests. With Buderus at his side, he shook hands with Count Paul von Brunwald, nodded to his wife, shook the hand of the poet. Glancing at Meyer Amschel, he paused uncertainly, as if he recognized him from somewhere but could not recall from where; nine years had passed since Meyer had invested his conscription funds and earned him sizable profits. Buderus leaned close to the Landgrave, whispered in his ear. Still looking at Meyer, Wilhelm narrowed his eyes, but with no further offer of recognition, moved on.

  Meyer was astonished, then furious. Turning away from the others to conceal his anger, he thought: he didn’t know who I was! When Buderus reminded him, he didn’t care!

  The orchestra resumed playing. Dvorah wandered away to find more champagne. Meyer, seething at both Wilhelm and Goethe, walked off in a different direction, out onto the marble terrace. Bonfires illuminated the rising gardens in the night. A quarter moon mocked him with its slashing grin. Fighting a quiet rage that was burning in his chest with the champagne, he rose from one deserted terrace to the next.

  Without planning to climb so high he soon found himself on the topmost tier, gazing at the statue of Hercules against a dome of dark sky and white stars. More astonishing, he soon found himself doing what Guttle might have been expected to do, but not he, not Meyer Rothschild. He found himself speaking to the huge stone figure that held aloft an ominous club.

  “So, Hercules. Do you have a last name? Never mind. They say you are half a man, half a god. Does one half worship the other? Which half needs that club?” Meyer looked about, to make sure the terrace still was deserted except for himself. He gazed again at the towering figure. “You want to know something? I’ll tell you a secret. We have something in common, you and I. I, too, am half a man. But what is my other half? Where I shall find him? Where is my powerful club?”

  Hercules with unblinking eyes stared out over the Landgrave’s palace, over the river Fulda, over all of Kassel. He took no more notice of Meyer Amschel than Wilhelm had.

  Friday was the first day of school. Excitement warred with trepidation in Guttle’s breast as she walked down the lane with Schönche, past men in doorways or open windows wearing their prayer shawls, tefillin wrapped around their arms and foreheads, dovaning, the lilting chants continuing from house to house as they had each morning for centuries, the birdless songbird sound of the Judengasse. The shutters of shops were being thrown open by rag dealers, pawn brokers, tailors, money lenders, hairdressers, carpenters — and in a moment she would open the door to a new world for the girls of the lane. As the German instructor, she would preside over the first class each morning, because learning to read German was the key that would unlock for the girls the literature that Yussel would teach them, the books about science that Rebecca would obtain for them, all the subjects they might want to study later. Teaching them to read German was essential; only religious texts were printed in Hebrew; nothing was printed in Judendeutch.

  “How many girls will there be besides me?” Schönche asked as the smell of the river reached their nostrils, as they drew closer to the River View, where a knot of people, men and women both,
waited. She hoped they were parents waiting to greet them, to introduce their children, to thank the teachers for volunteering their time.

  “Twelve registered yesterday,” Guttle said. “More might come.”

  “There she is!” a man shouted, and as Guttle, approaching, smiled, the group lined up three deep across the lane in front of the school. Then the shouts began. Guttle at first recognized no faces, saw just lips and teeth and tongues mouthing accusatory words.

  “No school for girls!”

  “Ruin your own daughters, not ours!”

  Someone even invoked the painful scourge of the lane: “Women need learning like men need hemorrhoids.” The bitterness in their voices, the stupidity — she had not expected that, not after Rabbi Simcha’s ruling.

  Schönche, frightened, turned her head into her mother’s shoulder. Guttle took her hand, stunned by the confrontation. She looked from face to face, seeing among the men Jacob Marcus and Alexandre Licht, her old adversaries. She could read the bitterness in the moneylender’s face, bitterness related not only to the school; his daughter Misha had been mooning over Georgi Kremm . Alongside Marcus a wide woman turned and Guttle was astonished to see it was Sophie Marcus herself, let out of her attic lockaway. The other women shouting were mostly from the south end; Guttle hardly knew them.

  With the corner of her eye she saw Hiram Liebmann leaning against a wall, pad and charcoal in hand, sketching the angry faces, the open mouths. Such was his success that no one took notice of him anymore, no one took umbrage at whatever he wanted to draw.

  Watching from across the lane in his cylindrical black hat, not smiling, was Rabbi Jonah. Two metres from him a group of men stood wearing white prayer shawls trimmed in black, and holding prayer books. At their feet was a spruce coffin, borrowed or snatched from the shop of one of the carpenters. To the coffin someone had affixed a paper sign that said, in black letters: “Jewish Nation.” As Guttle approached, the men began to chant, Yisgadahl ve yisgadash, shemay rabo . . .

  Kaddish — the mourners’ prayer for the dead.

  “Mama, Mama, why are they yelling at you?”

  She turned and saw Nathan a few feet away, tears running down his face. Her resolve began to falter, she did not want her children involved.

  “What are you doing here?” she said to her seven-year-old. “You should be in heder!”

  “I wanted to see your school. Why are they angry with you?” he said, crying.

  He confronted the rank of women blocking the school. “You leave my Mama alone!” He raised his fists in front of his skinny chest, as if he would box with them. Schönche took Nathan’s hand. “I’ll take him back,” she said, and began to pull him away.

  Guttle felt grateful to her daughter, but the boy threw off her grasp. “I hate them! I hate them!”

  “Go back to heder,” Guttle ordered. “Now!”

  He stared at her. She could read the hurt her in little boy’s eyes before he turned and ran.

  Heart palpitating wildly, Guttle faced the others. Logistics flashed through her brain the way numbers must flash through Meyer’s: what would happen if she moved toward the door? Would they make her push her way through their massed flesh? Arguments were a staple of life in the Judengasse — but physical force? Never!

  She could see some of the girls who had registered for school clustering near the south gate, watching uncertainly. If she did not open today, Guttle thought, her foes would be emboldened, and the school might be lost forever. She needed to be resolute — but did that include pushing, shoving? She was the wife of Meyer Rothschild, the mother of six children. She was not about to roll in the mud.

  She knew not to argue with them, not here, not now. But Avra, who had come up beside her, could not contain her tongue. “There’s a whole world out there we know nothing about! Our minds must be wider than the lane!”

  “Not wider than the Torah!” a yeshiva boy yelled back.

  His words ignited the anger with which Guttle had been prepared to harangue them at the meeting the other night. “Do you want to live in the lane forever? Do you prefer it here? If not, why lock the minds of our daughters behind mental walls, mental gates? Do you feel safer in here? Are you afraid to experience the outer world, is that it? After three centuries we have been conditioned like barnyard animals to accept this smelly lane as our home. Must we not fight against that acceptance? Must we not yearn to be free?”

  The fierceness of her attack stunned them into silence. For a moment she thought she’d won them to her side. Then a man’s voice yelled, “Go home and dump your litter!”

  Whirling about, she faced the crowd that blocked the door. The central obstacle was Sophie Marcus, who looked to have gained a hundred pounds since she threw excrement at Guttle on her wedding day. Guttle looked at her eyes, tiny in her fleshy face. Their glassy glow suggested neither anger nor sorrow, only the absence of clarity. Sophie was not shouting imprecations, but she was blocking the door like a snuffling hog. Bracing for a collision, hands protecting her belly, Guttle directed her gait at the barely visible space between Sophie’s bulk and that of Hannah Schlicter beside her. One step, two, three. Sophie didn’t budge, but at the last instant Frau Schlicter — perhaps out of some muscular memory of the days when Guttle had been like a daughter to her — moved aside, and Guttle edged past Sophie Marcus with only a bumping of hips. The others backed away and let her pass. Taking a key from a pocket of her coat, she unlocked the door, and waved to the girls huddling near the gate, calling them forward. Timidly they threaded through the crowd.

  “Don’t go in!” some in the crowd chanted.

  “It’s the devil’s house!” a voice — it sounded like the shoemaker’s — yelled.

  The girls hesitated. Standing beside the door, Guttle saw Schönche take the hand of one of them and gently lead her through the crowd. The others followed, silent, their eyes cast down to the cobbles.

  When they were safely inside, some remained quiet, others chattered nervously. Guttle locked the door behind them as a chorus of nasty cries poured down from outside. Something thudded against the door. It could have been mud; it could have been something foul.

  Guttle motioned the girls to wooden chairs that had been arranged in a semicircle. Taking off their coats, leaving on their hats, they sought seats beside girls they knew. Guttle’s body was tense, her mind burning with the insults that had been hurled at her. Closing her eyes, she willed her body to calm. She had to be strong for them, not show her own fear. When they stopped fidgeting she stood before them, showed them a broad smile. How nice they looked, their hair freshly washed and combed, wearing their best blouses and skirts.

  “Someone out there just told you this is the devil’s house,” Guttle began. “Looking at all your brave faces, I would say it’s a house of angels.”

  “My little sister was brave,” one girl said, “but Mama wouldn’t let her come.”

  “Perhaps she will when things calm down.”

  Shafts of gray light slanted into the room from the double-high south windows. The devil’s house! Guttle’s mind leaped to Melekh sleeping in his lead coffin three floors above, a secret that none of the girls knew, that none of the people outside knew — a sacred presence, which, for her, consecrated this house, this school. Shouts that continued outside were muffled now by the door, the walls. Her chest filled with the sweetness of victory, the sweetness of challah dipped in honey and blessed by Elohim. The best moments of her life blew through her mind like the golden autumn leaves that sometimes tumbled windblown through the gates and settled on the cobbles like offerings. Her first sight of the Frankfurt Fair. Her betrothal. The first book she read. Her wedding night. Her first birthing — it had been Schönche, now a grown girl, almost a woman, sitting in front of her with the others, waiting eagerly. Such was the miracle of life.

  She began again, more formally, with a talk she had rehearsed the night before. “Welcome, ladies, to the Moses Mendelssohn Academy for Girls — the first Jewi
sh school for girls in the four centuries of the Judengasse. Most likely, one of the first in the Holy Roman Empire.”

  Unbidden, the pupils, these eight daughters of the lane, sat taller in their seats, and began to clap.

  “Here you will learn much about the world outside the lane,” Guttle said. “It will not make you lesser Jews — just better educated ones. Don’t you think that Yahweh, who is omniscient — who knows everything — will appreciate the company of girls who know something?”

  They laughed at that, the tension breaking cleanly, like an egg on the side of a pan. They looked at one another, drawing strength, as Schönche led a second round of applause.

  When they stopped clapping they could hear a knocking at the door, sounding loud as thunder, though it was soft. Instantly the tension was back. All breathing in the room seemed to stop. Guttle approached the door. “What do you want?” she said with irritation. “This is a school in progress.”

  “It’s me,” a muffled female voice said. “Rebecca.”

  Relieved, Guttle opened the door slightly, then further, to let the Doctor in. Behind her the lane was empty now, as if she had imagined it all; she could see the gates of the cemetery across the way.

  “I heard there was trouble,” Rebecca whispered, as Guttle locked the door behind her. “Are you all right?”

  Nodding, Guttle turned and introduced the class to their new science teacher.

  Rebecca had just begun saying a few words about the importance of science in the modern world when there was another knock on the door. Annoyed, Guttle went to the door, unlocked it. Brendel and Yussel Kahn stepped in, looked about.

  “Everything looks calm,” Yussel said. “There’s no problem?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “We heard you were in danger.”

  “Heard from who?”