But he knew he couldn’t do that. The lure of revealing this to the world, of being hailed as the discoverer of a medieval masterpiece, the fame and respect that would accrue as a result, above all the chance to break out of dumbed-down broadcasting schedules and put an end once and for all to the sinking feeling that he was now being left behind by younger, more hungry film-makers—this was a temptation that was too strong to resist. The manuscript just had to be genuine.
11
RABBI DANIEL WAS as good as his word. An email suddenly appeared in Russell’s inbox inviting him to Sabbath dinner on Friday night. Shabbos! No way, thought Russell in horror. He’d had a bellyful of religion in the week after his father had died. He had no wish to be drawn back into that world he had briefly been forced to revisit. Although he had to admit the rabbi’s message made him smile.
“Can we tempt you to venture beyond the pale of rational thought?” he had written. “As a piece of anthropological research you’ll probably find it quite rewarding. I can guarantee that the chicken soup will be medicinal, even if you find the food for the soul less digestible. And do bring your daughter too.”
“Cool!” said Rosa when he told her as a joke that he was facing a choice of entertainment on Friday evening between God and the Manic Preachers. A colleague had a couple of spare tickets for a concert at the Roundhouse. Russell assumed Rosa was impressed by the Manic Preachers; to his astonishment it turned out that she wanted to go to dinner at the rabbi’s.
“But he’s the real thing,” protested Russell. “He’s not some trendy feminist who thinks Moses was transgendered and who signs round-robins to The Guardian about boycotting Israeli apartheid mud packs. This one has, you know, beard and sidelocks and fringes hanging outside his trousers.”
“Wicked!” said Rosa dreamily.
“You won’t be able to do anything there. You’ll be bored. You won’t even be able to turn on a light.”
“God, Dad, you’re really sad, you know? Everyone’s into religion these days. I’m definitely going, even if you’re not.”
So Russell found himself one Friday evening standing with Rosa outside an ugly pebble-dashed, thirties semi in Hendon. He rang the bell.
“Shouldn’t’ve done that,” said Rosa. “Electric bell. Not allowed on the Sabbath. Should’ve knocked.”
How the hell did she know that? When the door opened he was covered in embarrassment.
“Russell! So good to see you. Welcome to the other side!” laughed Rabbi Daniel. “And you must be Rosa. Great that you are here. My children are dying to meet you.”
The house was a blaze of light that streamed into the drab, dark street. Russell was dazzled as he stepped inside. The air was warm and heady with the fragrance of cooked chicken, vanilla, spices. Small children raced around excitedly. There was an atmosphere of expectation. Through an open door Russell glimpsed a long table round which chairs were crammed next to each other. People were standing around chatting animatedly and laughing. Every few minutes there was a discreet knock and more people flowed through the front door.
Two older girls of about eight and ten came and stood next to Rosa, staring shyly at her nose and eyebrow rings. They were wearing demure dresses that almost reached their ankles. Russell noticed that unusually Rosa was not wearing her habitual vest top but had sleeves that covered up the tattoo on her shoulder. But he could still make out the faint scars on her forearms.
A tiny child in blue trousers and striped T-shirt and with her long, light brown hair bunched into a ponytail on top of her head held out a toy bus to Rosa. She smiled a sweet smile that Russell had never seen before, took the bus and rolled it towards the child. Then she darted out a hand and tickled the child’s tummy. There was a delighted squeal. Russell looked more closely. The child was a boy. He danced away shrieking with laughter and Rosa gave chase.
“Looks like Rosa’s already made herself at home—I’m so glad,” said a warm female voice. Russell looked round. A young woman with a ravishing smile and with a kind of black crocheted snood covering her hair was standing nearby. “I’m Samantha—everyone calls me Sam.”
Russell held out his hand. She hesitated and then extended a limp hand of her own. Too late he realized his mistake—she wasn’t supposed to touch a man.
He snatched back his own hand, leaving her own awkwardly stranded in the air. He was embarrassed again. God! How was he going to get through the evening if it was all going to be like this?
“Pinchas! Go help Bracha bring in the wine glasses! And Rafi, please clear away that Lego now before someone breaks their neck on it!”
More and more children materialized to finish setting the table. Christ! How many did they have? Seven? Eight?
Sam moved serenely from kitchen to dining room directing the children in a kind of military operation. She was calm and unhurried. He thought of his own mother, always in a noisy panic whenever they had had just a couple round to tea; getting a full meal on the table so that the food didn’t go cold before everyone was served had been quite beyond her.
He noticed how slim Sam was, despite the bump signaling the forthcoming arrival of yet another child, and how carefully she had dressed; her short, coffee-colored jacket had artful pleats and tucks and her ears and neck were hung with pretty artisan jewelry. This was a woman who, while demure and indeed covered from neck to mid-calf, clearly did not believe in abjuring the demands of appearance. He found this unsettling. Surely, given both her obstetric record and the belief system which had trapped her into it, she should look…well, oppressed?
Everyone finally gathered at the table. Russell found himself seated next to a woman in a bright red dress who appeared to be something in the arts, and on his other side a professor of molecular science. There were several couples but also, he noted, a number of single people. At the far end of the table Rosa had a toddler on her lap who seemed heavily engaged in plaiting her hair, while another hung round her neck and explored the piercings in her eyebrows and nose. Russell stared. He had never before seen Rosa give a second glance to a child.
After the rabbi had made the blessing over the wine, most of the table mysteriously disappeared for a few minutes and then drifted back.
“Do you live far from here?” Russell asked the professor of molecular science. He did not reply but grimaced and shook his head and waved his hands. Why couldn’t he talk? Was he suffering from some terrible affliction? Had Russell been seated for the entire evening next to a mute? Now, however, Russell noticed that all round the table conversation had ceased, and that the children were making extravagant sign language gestures to each other, snorting with laughter as they did so.
Rabbi Daniel leaned over as he too got up to leave the table, and said quietly:
“After we wash it’s the custom not to speak until the bread is passed round.”
For the third time in the space of thirty minutes Russell was embarrassed. Just how many more of these rules were there, for God’s sake, to trap the unwary?
But once the pieties were over, the mood became festive and jolly. Dish after dish arrived, fragrant and steaming and altogether delicious: sushi to start with, then clear soup with little pasta pillows filled with meat, chicken in a herby sauce, sliced beef in savory gravy, sweet potatoes scented with cinnamon, tomatoes stuffed with rice and herbs, three different kinds of kugel or vegetable cake, something garlicky with squashes and peppers; and then later on cake and fruit, chocolates and nuts. There was a more than decent Cabernet, Russell noted appreciatively, and after the soup was served, various bottles of whisky appeared on the now groaning table.
“If you’re a whisky drinker, may I recommend this one,” said the rabbi, lifting an obscure Scottish single malt and looking ruminatively at the label. “Someone brought it back from a holiday in the Hebrides. Has quite a kick.”
He wasn’t wrong. Russell felt an altogether unfamiliar benign sens
e of well-being stealing through him. Through the pleasantly warm stupor of food, wine and whisky, he was surprised to discover that he was beginning to relax.
He felt a tug on his trouser leg. He looked under the tablecloth and saw the small child—boy? girl?—peeping mischievously up at him. Before he knew it, he was under the table too, pretending to be a monster while the delighted child squealed and returned for more. Up above, no one seemed to find this at all unusual.
Children climbed onto the rabbi’s lap and hung one on each leg when he stood. He was strong and muscled. Russell stared at the children in envy. What riches they already possessed. He was suddenly all too aware.
Afterwards, when he looked back on that meal the word that floated into his mind unbidden was joy. Every few minutes someone round the table burst spontaneously into a Hebrew melody; unselfconsciously, most of the diners joined in at the tops of their voices. Russell found himself tapping away with his foot to the rhythm of it all. At one point, various men jumped up from their chairs, linked arms and danced in a circle as they sang.
“Please treat us to one of your family ensembles,” said one young woman, her eyes shining with anticipation.
The rabbi laughed and inclined his head in a gesture of modest acknowledgement. He tapped his wine glass and hummed a note. Then he, his wife and their children all sang in harmony. The sweet, piping voices of the children soared above the rabbi’s strong, mellow tenor.
Everyone else round the table sat transfixed. Rosa’s eyes were shining, her face alight with pleasure in a way Russell had never seen before. He suppressed a lump in his own throat. What on earth was happening here? Had they simply been bewitched?
The talk turned to what Rabbi Daniel called “Jewish geography.” It seemed that just about everyone round the table except Russell was related to someone else in the conversation. Sam, it seemed, came from an enormous family. The woman in the red dress had a husband who seemed to be something in finance and was an important donor to the synagogue, and who was a second cousin of Sam’s mother’s uncle. The professor of molecular science’s brother-in-law on his wife’s side had been married briefly to Sam’s father’s niece—who happened to have been the obstetrician who had delivered the red dress’s first child.
“We really are one tribe,” someone laughed.
“Well, we do all go back to one father in Abraham,” said Rabbi Daniel.
“Not to mention our father in heaven who is responsible for the miracle that we continue to exist at all,” said the professor of molecular science, whose name was Sternberg.
“Figuratively speaking, of course,” said the red dress, who was called Sophie. “Unless you’re talking about the State of Israel, which is hardly a miracle, is it, more a reincarnation of Sparta. Without the charm.”
There was a pause.
“On the contrary,” said Sternberg, “Israel’s survival certainly is a miracle. There is no other way of explaining something that defies all known odds, and not just that but does so over and over again.”
“Oh, come on,” said Sophie. “America’s got something to do with it, surely. No miracle in brute military force, is there. I mean, just look at the way they behave! And anyway, miracles aren’t rational, just a metaphor at best. Merely credulous folklore. How can you have something which goes against nature? It’s just not scientific.”
The lively chatter around the table died away. On his left, Russell felt Sophie’s bristling hostility. On his right, he felt Sternberg stiffen and brace himself. The rabbi stroked his beard, his eyes bright and watchful.
“But the whole point is that God stands outside nature,” said Sternberg quietly. “You can’t use natural criteria to judge His actions. It’s a category error.”
“Well, I’d expect the rabbi to say that,” said Sophie with a brittle little laugh, “but not a scientist. I mean, it’s not a very scientific thing to say, is it? Your discipline is all about the natural world, surely?”
“Indeed it is,” said Sternberg thoughtfully. “And from the study of that natural world, I have concluded that there are undoubtedly limits to its scope and therefore to what we can ever know about existence. Thanks to science, we now know that we can never know all there is to know.”
Sophie opened her mouth again and then thought better of it. She contented herself with shaking her head pityingly. Russell, who agreed with her—or at least, he thought he did—found he was actually rather glad she had been squashed.
“Afraid my wife is rather…left-wing,” said Sophie’s husband with theatrical emphasis. He looked embarrassed. There was a small titter of nervous laughter round the table.
“Well it’s no use hiding our heads in the sand,” said Sophie, tossing her sharply cut, silvery grey bob. “Israel’s behavior does us Jews here enormous harm. I mean, really, their Prime Minister! So extreme! And those settlers—look how they behave! No wonder the Palestinians are driven to act as they do. How would we all feel if our land was occupied and stolen from us?”
“But it was,” said Sternberg. “By the Palestinians’ ancestors. Those, that is, who didn’t themselves only arrive as immigrants in the last century on the back of the Jews—who were, and are, fully entitled in law to live in Judea and Samaria, then and now.”
“Judea and Samaria!” exclaimed Sophie, pronouncing the names with an expression of extreme distaste. “Right-wing talk. That’s why there’s no peace! Really and truly, is it any surprise that people hate us so much?”
Russell looked steadily at his plate. He and Sophie were on the same side, after all, and he suspected that that made a grand total of two around the table who thought like that. But he was unsettled by the argument. He was disconcerted there had even been an argument. This was the first time Russell had heard it said, calmly and rationally, that the facts were simply not as Russell had always assumed them to be.
For Professor Sternberg wasn’t another Michael Waxman. Sternberg was a scientist, a renowned one at that. He had not spoken from emotion. He seemed to have spoken on the basis of evidence. And now Russell wondered for the first time whether the assertions made by Sophie were in fact true.
“So where did your own family come from originally, Russell?” asked Sam from further down the table. Russell suddenly realized that, while appearing to be dealing with the children and talking animatedly to Rosa, Sam had also managed to pick up the tensions that had developed and was now intent on defusing the situation.
Where had they come from, his grandparents and great-grandparents? Russell was aware of faces turned interestedly and sympathetically towards him. Including Rosa’s. Oh God, he groaned inwardly; he didn’t know. Russia? Poland? He wasn’t even sure which. What were their names, the villages from which both sides of the family had fled the pogroms? Something incomprehensible. He had never paid much attention, and his parents had not exactly been forthcoming.
Once again, he was embarrassed. He heard himself start desperately to gabble.
“Oh you know, somewhere beyond the pale at the turn of the last century, pogroms, Cossacks, usual kind of thing, so many of us like that, weren’t there, but you know, what I’d like to know is how we got there, beyond the pale that is, I mean, where did we come from before we went beyond it, as it were, into Poland, Russia, Belarus and so forth, presume we were all pretty Teutonic really, all Germanic really.”
“Well, real Jewish geography is really fascinating,” said Sam. “If you look at a map of the movements of Jews over the centuries, you can see that they really did roam the world. They went from one country to another and then another as one after the other persecuted them or threw them out.”
“My wife is too modest to tell you herself,” said Rabbi Daniel proudly, “but she did her PhD in European demographic change 1100 to 1900.”
Sam leaned forward, her elbows on the table, her face alight.
“If you draw the migration pattern
s as lines across the globe, you can see that it’s not so much straight lines as great loops. From the Middle East and Africa up through Spain and France, and then into Germany, Poland, Russia and even Britain, and then back, some of them, into Africa—Maimonides, for example, had to flee the so-called Golden Age in Spain for Morocco—and then out again; always jumping from one geographic frying pan straight into yet another fire.”
“You say even Britain,” said Russell casually. “But the British Jews were forced out, weren’t they, in the thirteenth century. So where did they go then? Back to France, where many of them had come from?”
“Well yes, in the first instance,” said Sam, thoughtfully. “But don’t forget the Crusades were slaughtering Jews across Europe. So they had to keep moving, from France to Germany, from Germany to Poland and Russia.”
“You mean British Jews could have ended up in Poland?”
“Of course,” said Sam. “Many Jews from Britain, France, Germany and elsewhere ended up in Eastern Europe. You can see it in the language.”
“In the language?” Russell’s heart beat faster.
“Sure. A number of Polish Jewish names, Yiddish names, in fact, which you find in Poland, reflected the influence of French words. ‘Bunem,’ for example, came from the French word bonhomme. ‘Schneuer,’ another very common Polish Jewish name, came from seigneur. ‘Yentl’ from gentille. And so on.”
“And presumably, since the Jews of England at that time spoke a kind of French dialect, some of those French words could have been imported into Poland by English Jews?”
“Very probable, yes indeed,” said Sam.
And they could have brought other things with them too, thought Russell in mounting excitement. Like a refugee’s diary.
“If you are interested in this period,” offered Rabbi Daniel, “I have a number of books here that I can lend you which might be helpful. If you are sure you have the stomach for it, that is. That was a particularly terrible time for us Jews.”
The Legacy Page 12