I often turned to Dr. Diamond, our old neurologist, for advice. Mom was sleeping a great deal and she was barely speaking, I confided. He smiled, reassuring in a way almost no one else was anymore. There were people who could convey more with one or two words than most of us could express with the entire English vocabulary at our disposal, he told me. That is how I had to think of Edith—not by focusing on her limitations but on what she managed to convey in spite of the limitations that God and destiny had inflicted.
Abandoned by our traditional friends, we made brand-new friends. Mitou, a tall pleasant Indian who worked at the drugstore around the corner, came over every day to help get Mom out of bed and into her wheelchair, and then returned in the evening to help us get her back into bed. Aldo, who delivered the canisters of oxygen, always lingered a bit, captivated by the sweet, silent figure in the bed. Even the occasional inspector from Medicaid, the health insurance program that was paying for Mom’s elaborate care, would arrive prepared to be skeptical but left persuaded that the government was getting its money’s worth.
Then there was the army of aides the agency sent over to look after Edith. These were mostly impoverished immigrants, typically from Africa or the Caribbean, who worked for a pittance—$5 or $5.50 an hour—on shifts that were typically twelve hours long, so that they were with us from morning to night, or night to morning. They had grueling commutes—from Crown Heights or Coney Island or Bedford-Stuyvesant or the far reaches of the Bronx—and those who reported for duty in the morning got up at dawn to be with us. In an economy that was flourishing, these women—and they were all women—were the only ones willing to take care of the elderly and the sick. They worked at the jobs no one else in New York wanted, jobs that came with almost no benefits, that hadn’t a shred of security.
They’d settle in the corner of the sofa across from Mom and seemed grateful for small comforts. They loved the old portable black-and-white TV set they could turn on between duties or while sipping the occasional bottle of soda or iced tea I tried to keep stocked in the refrigerator. Most led hardscrabble lives, raising children with the little they were earning, and often no husband to help them. Since they were used to jobs that lasted only a couple of days, they appreciated the steady work on East Eighty-Ninth Street. Mom’s long chronic illness meant they were assured of a stable income for weeks, maybe even months.
I found them comforting to have around the house. It wasn’t only the physical help they provided—the fact that they could keep Edith comfortable and clean. It was the knowledge they were watching over my mom when she could do nothing for herself anymore. Some became my friends and confidantes and threw themselves into helping me rebuild the hearth.
Like Clara Sylvestre, a young woman from French Guyana whom we’d known back in Brooklyn. Because she was fluent in French, she could connect in a special way—my mother had never stopped favoring the language of her youth. Clara would keep up a steady banter, talking about herself, her other patients, or my father whom she also looked after. She would gently try to remind Edith about Leon.
Had Mom forgotten him? She never seemed to react anymore when Clara mentioned Dad, when she said his name.
Margaret Mukoro, tall and striking, brought her boundless energy and verve into our increasingly lethargic household. A native of Ghana, Margaret had never known her own mother, and it was as if she were pouring all of her pent-up love on Mom. She worked the night shift. Every evening, at 8:00 P.M. on the dot, she’d arrive and get to work. “Hello, Edith,” she’d say in her booming voice. She was a whirling dervish of activity, changing Mom’s gown, pulling her up on the bed, trying to keep her awake by clattering about the house.
Sometimes, my mother would look visibly distressed at all the effort required of her. Margaret would say, “No more, Edith?,” and we would see Mom painfully mouthing the words no more. We knew when we were pushing her to the limit and we teased her. “No more war,” we’d chant. It was a nonsense rhyme, nothing more than that, but it seemed to amuse her and make her smile as she tried gamely to answer, “No more war.”
How are you doing, I’d ask my lovely eloquent mother who had worked for a pasha in Cairo and a public library in Brooklyn.
“Okay,” she would reply.
Silence was a luxury, privacy nonexistent. Our house was constantly filled. People talk of the sacrifices to be made when caring for a loved one but there weren’t any—not really—except for the difficulty of finding a quiet corner. There were times when I felt besieged, and once I sought counsel from a therapist with a practice close by in the East Nineties. The psychiatrist seemed amiable enough at first, but when I described to him my life at home, the fact that I’d taken my mother out of a nursing home to live with me, he began to yell. Why was I doing this, he wanted to know. “Is she even alive?” he thundered.
I left in a daze. His attitude was extreme but by no means unique. Our culture was obsessed with the notion of quality of life, and it had become a euphemism for letting ailing loved ones die without a qualm. Typical was the advice I heard from her old social worker at Jewish Home. My mother “was holding on because of you,” she said when she learned I was taking Edith out of the nursing home for good. “You have to let her go,” she told me. There was to my mind a terrifying societal tilt toward mercy killing, and I knew I had to fight against it and all of its proponents. I had to fight as tenaciously as my old heroine, Emma Peel, had battled the bad guys. I had to be my mother’s Avenger.
We favored mercy living on East Eighty-Ninth Street—the gentle touch of Clara, the sweet words of Margaret. They came from cultures where people still looked after their loved ones, and most had worked in institutions so they had no illusions about the level of care parceled out at the typical American nursing home. These women became my fiercest allies; they were with me on the front lines helping Edith survive, and I came to value their counsel far more than that of my peers or the so-called professionals.
No more war, I’d tell Edith, no more war, and I would see her attempt that crooked, intensely endearing half smile of hers and felt immediately heartened about the path I had chosen for us both.
I’d go to work at times with a sense of foreboding and race home in the afternoon, always fearing a new calamity. But there were weeks, even months, when Mom remained miraculously stable. I was even able to take holidays with Feiden—small getaways out of New York. César would relieve me and move in downstairs to supervise the nurses.
We flew to Montreal one week when Mom seemed to be doing especially well. It seemed appropriate somehow to choose Edith’s favorite destination for our vacation, the place where she and I had once enjoyed a respite from a world that had become impossibly bleak.
Walking along Saint Catherine, I found myself searching for the hotel where the two of us had stayed in the summer of 1973. I couldn’t remember its name or its exact location or even what it looked like, but still I searched. Somehow, merely being in this French city had restored hope in both our hearts. “Live and let die,” Edith had whispered to me that night at the movie theater on Saint Catherine, because she had the kind of mind that could find a powerful idea even in a James Bond film. We had prayed for a miracle at each one of Montreal’s chapels and cathedrals and synagogues. I suppose that God heard us, and I was saved.
But what about Edith—she of the fasts and incense burnings and incantations? Didn’t she also deserve a miracle?
I could almost trace her downfall to that summer, when she despaired of ever seeing me well again. My illness—that taboo subject she and I only tackled briefly, elliptically, in hurried, self-conscious conversations—had so consumed her that she was spent. She stopped eating, caring, looking after herself. She resorted to Alexandra’s diet of Turkish coffee and sesame biscuits. Even as I went on a tentative road to recovery, her decline started—the decline that had led her to this state, lying in a bed in the upstairs of my duplex, unable to eat or drink or speak.
I wondered if the old canes and crut
ches were still there, at the shrine on the mountain, and if ailing pilgrims had continued to go to Saint Joseph’s and climb steps and light votive candles and pray.
Did they still believe in miracles? Did I?
One October night when we were all together, Feiden and Mom and I, the aide flicked on the TV as was her habit. The news immediately caught our attention: There had been a major earthquake in Cairo; hundreds of people had been killed and many more were injured, and thousands of buildings all over the city had collapsed into heaps of rubble.
My mother’s beloved city was in ruins. The death toll was mounting, buildings were crumbling everywhere, people were crying in streets that were no longer recognizable, that were overwhelmed with the dead and dying.
Our streets, our city.
When I looked at Edith, I saw to my surprise that she was sitting almost at attention. Her eyes were wide open, and she looked more alert and engaged than I had seen her in months—even years. The shocking images had brought her out of her stroke-imposed languor, and she seemed to be devouring the newscaster’s every word and watching the television screen intently. While the doctors had spent years telling us how compromised her mind was, I realized that she had grasped the depths of the unfolding horror.
It was 1992; we had left Egypt thirty years earlier.
Yet it wasn’t some faraway event in a distant land. The earthquake had struck our home.
That night, my mother was very agitated. She stayed awake trembling and crying and while I tried to wrap the quilt around her, she was still shaking, as if the ground that had opened up and swallowed her beloved Egypt was engulfing her as well.
We kept the TV on and each time the announcer would mention Cairo, I saw her flinch. I held her hand to calm her. I had the sense she was mourning the city of her youth—now as ruined and ravaged as she. Although the rest of New York had lost its meaning and faded in importance, Cairo remained deep inside of her—vibrant and alive and primordial.
BOOK FIVE
The Book of Lamentations
CAIRO, GENEVA, JERUSALEM, AND BROOKLYN: 2009–2010
· 21 ·
The Verse of Consolation
Years after the Shield of Young David had ceased to exist, and I no longer wore jaunty hats and blazers with gold crests, and Edith wasn’t at my side anymore, I would find myself looking back on that period of my life in the women’s section wistfully and with tremendous longing. I would examine my past as a little girl seated next to my mother, peering intently through the diamond- and clover-shaped holes of a small and ornate wooden fence.
We were all dispersed by then, members of a thousand different congregations or in some cases, no congregation at all.
Occasionally, fragments of news would reach me.
David, the rabbi’s pale young son, was diagnosed with leukemia and died. Marlene, my mother’s gentle favorite, had visited him at the hospital toward the end. Gladys, who had watched over me from her perch in the kitchen, finally gave birth—quite miraculously—to a baby girl, years after she’d prayed and given up hope and continued praying.
By then, she and her husband, Saul, had adopted a child, a blond, blue-eyed boy the community suspected wasn’t Jewish but he was. They named their baby Mark and doted on him, and then, a couple of years later, they adopted another infant, a girl. When Gladys learned that she was pregnant, her first thought was that her cries all these years in the women’s section had finally been heard.
What became of Gladys and the other women behind the divider? What happened to the men beyond it?
That is what I found myself wondering after Mom died, a couple of years after I brought her home. She had gone into respiratory failure one night while Feiden and I were out having dinner.
Suzette, who had missed Dad’s funeral, flew home the next day from London, where she had moved after California. At the cemetery where Edith was buried in a roadside grave next to Leon, my sister noticed there was a school nearby. Mom would like that, she said: She had always wanted to be around schoolchildren.
After Edith’s passing, life seemed to lose its moorings. I bought the Brooklyn apartment she had loved so much—the house on Sixty-Fifth Street where she had longed to return after her illness—and kept it with her exact furnishings, yet no tenants. I couldn’t bear to live there, and I couldn’t bear to have anyone else live there either. I would go from time to time and remember her and the hearth she had so desperately wanted me to rebuild.
That is when I began increasingly to think of the Shield of Young David, and its women’s section.
I would imagine myself sampling Gladys’s tuna fish again, or watching her younger sister Fortuna getting all excited about the latest Elvis movie, or I’d find myself musing about little Maggie Cohen, clutching her father’s hand.
And Celia, what about Celia? I was haunted by the memory of my friend’s wedding—that long-ago night when I first realized I was sick. I had felt so tired I hadn’t even danced, and Mom became worried. The next day we had gone to the hospital where the doctors ultimately diagnosed me with cancer. I’d wonder about Rabbi Ruben in Jerusalem: Did he still give stirring speeches? Were his daughters continuing to rail against Darwin?
And what about the Messiah? The Messiah that each and every one of us behind the divider had believed was around the corner…
He still hadn’t come. And somewhere along the line I had stopped waiting and stopped hoping and maybe even stopped believing.
In my new world, no one thought much about the Messiah, no one concerned themselves with his imminent arrival. Perhaps I didn’t need a savior anymore: I was by any measure doing so much better than in my childhood, when my refugee family had barely coped. I had broken free of the women’s section and lived far away from the strictures and petty rules of the Shield of Young David.
I had gone to work, not as a secret agent or an international woman of intrigue perhaps, but still very much as I’d wanted to do years back at the Shield of Young David, when I’d found the men’s world so sober and serious, and the women’s section so frivolous and unsubstantial by comparison.
I became a journalist, an investigative reporter, and I even turned myself into an avenger of sorts, always on the lookout for “extraordinary crimes against the people and the state,” exactly like my childhood idol Emma Peel.
I searched for the Nazi war criminal, Dr. Josef Mengele, and my reporting on a group of his victims, the young twins who had been subjected to his medical experiments during the war, helped spur an international manhunt. Multiple countries, including the United States and Germany, launched a concerted effort to find the monstrous “Angel of Death” of Auschwitz. It was too late, of course—by the mid-1980s when Western governments at last began pursuing Mengele in earnest, he was already dead, having been able to remain in hiding all these many years with the help of his supportive Bavarian family.
Later, when I joined the Wall Street Journal, I turned my attention to seeking out corrupt hospital and nursing home executives who had, in their own way, inflicted untold suffering on the frail and the elderly and the vulnerable. It was all because of my experiences with Edith and Leon, of course. Every exposé I produced of an institution hurting its patients, every investigation into some failing in America’s health system was my way of avenging my parents.
And when Rabbi Kassin was arrested in the summer of 2009—alleged along with other rabbis of engaging in money laundering—I was the journalist assigned by the Journal to do a story about him and my old community. In the years since I’d left, Saul Kassin had become a revered figure, known for his good works and charitable instincts, and he was crowned chief rabbi. It was the highest honor imaginable—a status some said should have gone to my beloved Hebrew school teacher, Rabbi Baruch, but he was passed over. When I heard of Rabbi Kassin’s elevated status, I felt the same sense of bewilderment I had as a child when he’d rebuked me for asking why the Messiah couldn’t be a woman.
I traveled to Deal, the Jerse
y shore town where Syrian and Egyptian Jews now summered. Many of my old friends and neighbors had prospered, and this elegant seaside community of large Victorian mansions was proof of their achievements in America, even as the ubiquitous kosher pizzerias and bakeries also showed me they’d stayed true to the ideals of our childhood. They’d even built a new synagogue called the Shield of David—Magen David of West Deal, a beautiful, imposing structure with a light and airy women’s section.
But along with the wealth and beauty, I found suspicion bordering on paranoia. I had been received with open arms the prior year, embraced as the prodigal daughter for my book that was as much an ode to the community as it was a memoir of my father. Yet now that I was coming as a journalist, I was met with implacable hostility. “It is not personal,” some said as they escorted me to the door, but it always felt personal. Nothing could persuade them that I planned to do a fair and loving story on this world of mine. And while I admired the opulence, how so many had attained the American Dream while shielding themselves from so much that was American, a piece of me mourned the simple ways of my community of old. And I was saddened to hear a year or so later that Rabbi Kassin had plead guilty to operating an illegal money transfer business. He was by then nearing ninety and had to agree to turn over several hundred thousand dollars to the government.
In my postdivider life, while I didn’t use judo moves or karate chops, I was always on the attack, as Mrs. Peel had been. I had broken free of the barrier. I had fled the women’s section and joined the men. I now sat side by side with them in newsrooms and corporate offices and boardrooms.
I was part of an entire generation that had escaped dividers. Even women who had never stepped foot inside an Orthodox shul—women who weren’t even Jewish—had felt that same burning need as I did to demolish barriers. We had, together, reached the men’s section and exultantly sat down with them to find…
The Arrogant Years Page 30