by Claire Hajaj
I think that is why God chose her to be the mother of all the Jews. She was kind in her heart, which is what a mother must be. She also had to be brave, to leave her home and journey so far to find her place in life. So our stories are the same in some way. When I was on the ship coming here, and I cried for my mama and papa and my sister Etka, I thought about Rivka and it made me feel better.
When I was your age, my home was in Kishinev, in Imperial Russia. Those names have changed now, as all names do. It was a beautiful city – grand buildings inside and pine trees and roses outside. We used to say the birds came to Kishinev in summer because it was cool and stayed in winter for the warmth. My father put out food for them, so we could hear them sing.
We lived on a farm owned by my Uncle Simeon on Kishinev’s outskirts. All Jews in the Pale of Settlement lived in Shtetls. My papa told me that Catherine the Great herded all of Russia’s Jews into the Pale like sheep, and told them to stay there or die. It was hard for Jews then, my Judit. The Russians would take our little boys and force them into the army for all of their lives. Some mothers would cut the index finger off a son’s hand, so they couldn’t hold a gun. The new Tsar had passed new laws against us – they called them the May Laws, and they said no Jew could live with Christians, own land or go to Christian schools.
My Uncle Simeon was one of the lucky ones. His farm was too small to be noticed, and close enough to Kishinev to walk there in just five minutes. It fooled the Mayor, and we were safe. But we did not go to school. We learned at home, while Mama and Papa sewed clothes.
Etka, my sister, was nine years older, and she was fierce and quick. Really, I was afraid of her. She would slap me on the head if she thought I was too slow. I had a little brother too, Moshe, born when I was nine. He was a funny boy, always in trouble like your Uncle Alex, and smiling too. If he’d been a dog, his tail would have always been wagging. And there were my cousins – Isaac and Chayah were the same age as me, Gurta not yet old enough to read, and Benjamin the baby. Did you know that whenever I smell a fire burning, I think of them? That wood smoke smell was always with us in those days, from stirring the pot on the stove. It is the greatest sadness of my life that I left them, to be taken by the terrible flood that took us all.
This is the hardest part, my darling. It came in April in the third year of this century. I remember it was Easter Sunday for the Christians. I was eleven like you, just about to come of age. We were forbidden to work on Christian holidays, so we stayed at home and waited for the day to pass.
The first word of it was from Uncle Simeon. He came back from the town centre and said the Russians had left their churches and started marching in the streets. They said we had killed a boy in a town not far from us. Jewish doctors tried to save him, but he died anyway from a poison in his belly. But now the Russians were saying we killed him for his blood to make our matzos. I can’t tell you how it disgusted me to hear that, Judit. Did they think we were monsters or pigs, to eat all manner of filth?
That day my mother was supposed to go to see our friend Navtorili at his shop on Stavrisky Street. She needed Navtor’s candles for the next Sabbath meal. So she waited until the evening, when the Christians were having their Sunday dinner. Then she took Moshe with her and went into the town.
Well, we waited and waited for her. After dark, one of Navtor’s sons came with a note. There was trouble, and Mama was too afraid to come. She stayed there, in Navtor’s house. A thousand times since I’ve dreamed that she risked it, and came back after all. What would our lives be like now? It’s pointless to wonder such things.
We spent that night in fear, and when dawn came, we saw smoke was coming from the town, dark and dirty. Papa wanted to go fetch Mama, but Ekta kept saying ‘Stay, she’ll come.’
It was nearly noon when we heard the screaming. Isaac came running up the path towards the house. He said the Russians were coming up the hill with sticks and knives. When I thought of one of those knives going inside me, I went cold.
Papa and my uncle pushed us down into the cellar and locked it from the inside. I could see through the floorboards, as the men came into the house and began to break everything like mad dogs. They smashed until their sticks snapped. They tore the mezuzah off the door, broke all of our pots and threw the sewing machine on the floor. I heard the screams of the chickens outside as they killed them one by one.
I must have been afraid in that cellar, but all I remember is shame – at the stink on us, at how we hid like rats. I didn’t feel like a mensch, like a human being. We had become animals, just like they said.
When we eventually came out, it took a while for us to stop being rats and have a human thought again. For a few minutes we just picked things up without any plan. Then Papa started shouting and crying for Mama. He could not wait any more to find her. I wanted to come with him. But he told us all to wait inside the house and hide. Etka stayed with us, standing inside our broken front door with an axe in her hand.
I think I knew in my heart she wasn’t coming back, Judit. A daughter knows. I heard the screams and the weeping coming from far away, but I didn’t know if it was real or a dream. Etka knew too. I saw the tears falling onto her axe as she stood there. Now I know what really happened was this: they came to Navtorili’s shop at eleven o’clock in the morning, broke down the door and killed almost everyone inside. Mama died with Moshe behind her, and then they struck him down too. I don’t want to know if Moshe smiled at them as they burst into the room, or if Mama cried. I want to remember them as I see them in my heart right now.
Nearly fifty people died that day in our beautiful Kishinev. We buried them in fear that we would be next. Moshe and Mama lay together in the same box. Two days later, Papa took Etka and me and left our home with a donkey and a cart. The fear, Judit, the fear of those knives and sticks drove us like whips. As for me, I sat on the cart and watched my cousins getting smaller and smaller, before vanishing as if they’d never existed.
Papa told me we were going to a place called Pinsk where we had relatives. He might as well have told me we were going to the moon. Can you imagine, I had never been out of Kishinev? Just a few miles out to the river and back. Now we had more than seven hundred miles to walk, right across the Pale, taking turns resting and pulling the donkey.
After a while, walking becomes like a dream you can’t stop dreaming, and your legs even twitch in your sleep. Sometimes we slept in roadhouses and sometimes we slept on the cart. Etka used to shake her fist at the sky and say thank God this happened to us in summer. If it had been winter we would have died. There were other Jews on the road too. Some of them were heading north, like us. Others were going south, to Odessa. They were trying to get back to the holy land, they said, Palestine as it was called then. Etka said they were mad. God’s promise is broken, she’d tell them. Better go forward than back.
I came of age on that cart, Judit, but no one noticed. There was no Batmitzvah then for girls, just added burdens. Etka remembered only after we reached Pinsk, and then scolded me for not reminding her. She gave me a hug and bought me a bowl of stew. I was so relieved that we could finally stop walking that I forgot about my coming-of-age as I ate it, and just thanked God for our safety.
I lived in Pinsk with Papa and Etka for five long years. You would think it would have become a home to me, but in truth I hated it. These relatives of ours were long gone, and the town was filling up with Jews just as afraid and poor as we were. Etka ran Papa’s house, and I was like a maid – cooking and cleaning all day long. I think she was worried we might stop still like clockwork mice unless she wound us up every day. Perhaps she was right. Sometimes we would hear of a new pogrom somewhere, or there would be some ugliness in town, and my blood would freeze like puddles in winter. If it weren’t for Etka, I think I would have slowed down and never started up again.
Then Papa died. Etka couldn’t keep him wound up forever and one day his heart just stopped. She went into his bedroom to wake him in the morning, and there was
just silence for a few seconds. Then she came back into the workroom where we slept, and said, ‘Papa’s dead. Go fetch the Rebbe and let’s see to his burial.’ Straight away she started heating the pot of boiled dough we ate for breakfast. I don’t think I cried then, to my shame. But later I cried when I remembered the smell of him, and how he used to chase Moshe and me, pretending to be a great forest bear.
After Papa was buried, Etka packed us up and said we were leaving. There’s no future for us here, she told me. This is a dead place for Jews, she said, and even these rich Pinskers are just waiting around to become poor corpses. I did wonder where on earth we could go now. By then I was no longer a child. I was a woman of sixteen. Other girls of my age were married with children of their own. Etka, at twenty-five, was nearly old – and it showed in her face. I was a pretty girl and I remember thinking in my pride that Etka was a shrew. It wasn’t until later, when I held my first son in my arms, that I realized she’d given up everything, every hope for herself, just to keep me safe.
We had no cart this time. So we made our way on foot nearly two hundred miles to Minsk. That was the first time I ever saw a train station, with all the Russian ladies and their fur hats. Our journey hadn’t seemed real up to then, but afterwards I knew it was going to take us to a whole other life.
We bought a ticket to Libau on the Baltic Sea. Etka had heard bad stories about Russian guards waiting for Jews on the German border crossings. This was the easier way, but longer. The fare cost us five roubles – a lot of money in those days. Etka kept our money in a purse tucked inside her underclothes. She said she’d like to see the man brave enough to look for something there.
Our journey was standing up like cows squashed in with a lot of other cows. But it was better to have those iron wheels do the walking for us. Etka only spoke to me once that whole journey, digging my ribs with her elbow to say we had crossed into Litvak – Lithuania these days. I must have looked blank because she said, ‘Don’t you know what that means, you idiot? We’re outside the Pale.’ Outside the Pale! It was such a thrilling sound. But the world looked much the same as before, only bigger and further from home.
We changed trains at Kovno and the next day’s journey took us to Libau. This is where the Jews caught their ships out of Russia to the new worlds. Those Russian port towns are nothing like our own Sunderland. Libau frightened me. It was dirty and it smelt. Everywhere there were drunken men and bad women. We took a room at a boarding house where the stench from the toilet pits was so bad I retched whenever I went inside. There was singing underneath us all the time and it was too hot to sleep.
Etka spent two days trying to find one of the Jewish relief organizations to sell us a ticket on the Danish ships leaving for England or America. On the second day she came in nearly in tears and threw two pieces of paper down on the bed. She picked up the menorah we had brought all the way from Kishinev and hurled it on the ground, shouting, ‘Thieves and devils! May God sink this place like Sodom the second we get on that forsaken boat!’ I guessed she had been forced to pay everything we had for those tickets, by some rogue after a good commission.
That night I dreamed that Etka had talked to me in my sleep. When I woke I saw that her sheets were wet and red. I must have become hysterical because I remember running downstairs and screaming. The woman who owned the boarding house called a doctor and he came quickly. He told us she had dysentery and it was very bad. Even then, I could see he didn’t have much love for Jews. He kept calling us ‘you people’ when asking questions about Etka and me.
I stayed with Etka for two nights and cleaned out the bucket. On the third day of her illness, Etka woke up from the fever and grabbed my hand so hard that it hurt. She told me to go to the Winter Harbour and take the tickets. I could sell hers, she said, to get some money for the passage to England, and take the boat myself before it sailed. Of course I refused. Not because I was brave at all. It was the opposite. Etka was my shelter. What use was I without her? She twisted my hand, her face red and angry like I’d seen it so many times before. She said, ‘Don’t be such a bloody fool, Rivka. It’s time to be a mensch. Mama and Papa will never forgive you if you miss this chance. I’ll haunt you and you’ll never have a moment’s peace.’
Well, I did go at last, but I tell you that Etka haunted me anyway. I made her promise to keep the second ticket and come on the next boat. Of course we both knew that Etka would die in that room, but what could we say? When we made our goodbyes she was just as impatient as ever. The last thing she said to me was ‘Hurry up and go, girl.’ I walked down to the docks to find my ship with Papa’s menorah, one rouble and some clothes. That’s all I had left, after so many long miles.
The boat operator was called Det Forenede Dampskibs-Selskab. I looked at the ticket so many times I will remember the words forever. It was big as a monster and it stank of sick cows. I walked onto it like a sleepwalker, without any feeling at all in my heart. Today they say it’s the way we keep away the things we can’t bear to feel. If so, I’m grateful for that gift.
The person who sold Etka the tickets must have been a rich man when he finished, because every Jew in Europe was on that boat. If we’d been cows, we’d have kicked each other to death before we were halfway across. As it launched I felt everything was slipping away from me – my family, my home, my care for the future.
That was my darkest time, Judit. But then something happened that saved my life. Standing right next to me on that deck was a boy the same age as me, and his brother with him. They saw I was alone and they reached out their hands to me. We spent four days on the water together, listening to the vomiting and the prayers. If you ever talk to someone – really talk to them – for only one hour you will find out most of the truth of them. So just imagine, we talked and listened for four whole days and nights. I started that journey as alone as it was possible for a human being to be. But by the time it ended I had met the man who would be your grandpa.
Had there been just one body between us on that journey, we would not have met, and all the things that flowed from that meeting would not have been. God did that for me, so I can almost forgive Him the rest.
When we docked I had to be told where we were. The port was Hull – of course I had never heard of it. Your grandpa had family in Newcastle and said we could go together there, and marry. He would set up a shop selling buttons, and I had learned enough about sewing from Papa to help us get by. Standing on that dock I had something like a waking dream, of the roses and pine trees in Kishinev under a blue sky. I could smell the flowers, as if they were right there on my filthy skin.
Your grandpa had family on the Jewish Board of Guardians, and when we arrived in Newcastle they came to meet us at the station. They were so happy to see him and ready to welcome me too as his betrothed. It was my last day of being sixteen, but I could not bring myself to tell anyone. It still felt sinful to celebrate life, when Etka, Mama, Papa and Moshe were all dead.
What to say next, my Judit? I married your grandpa and we were happy together, as much as two people can be. We opened our little shop in Sunderland and this place became my home. We changed our names and spoke English not Yiddish, and taught our children only the ways of the country of their birth, not the countries of their history. We shed those old lives like a caterpillar’s skin, because they were no use to us any more.
Your Uncle Max came, named after Moshe. Then your papa and Uncle Alex. For some years I dreamed that a girl would come, so I could remember Etka and Mama. But it seemed they were truly at rest, and God did not want their spirits disturbed. Some lost things can never be found – at least I thought so, until you were born to us.
What a long letter I’ve written you, darling Judit. I hope you can forgive me. But I wanted you to understand why it is such a joy to me to see you come of age. You take this step in a new world. Here, the Jews don’t need to hide or be afraid of the knock on the door. You can celebrate your life in a synagogue with family around you, not on a dirty old ca
rt followed by ghosts. The Jews even have a homeland of their own, and a flag among all the goyim. Perhaps your generation will be the one to make it safe, to finally end the suffering for all of us.
The only sadness I feel is from knowing that I may not be with you to see you fulfil your promise. But you should not be sad, darling girl. Your journey is just beginning, but I am ready for mine to be done. You are walking ahead of me on the road – wherever it leads, it will shape the woman you become. You must think of me holding your hand as you set out. I only pray you find the courage to make your own way. And that your journey brings you joy in the end, as mine has done.
Always your loving grandmother.
Rebecca
2
Settlement
I too was driven out by a cruel fate and forced to seek a new home. And through my suffering, I have learned how to comfort others who suffer likewise.
Virgil
1967
London
The first time he saw her it was just a glimpse of gold, yellow hair and a long, bright chain ending in a star. The star had six points, and for one confused moment it reminded him of home.
Then the crowd in the room closed in, and Margaret took his arm, steering him into the corner for a kiss. Her mouth tasted of cigarettes and sour lemons from the pink cocktail in her fist.
They leaned by the window, the rain battering the glass like tiny hands trying to claw their way inside. His mind felt light as a balloon. Nadia’s telegram was still curled up on his desk where it had been lying for three weeks. Hassan had sent another just that morning. Salim had dropped it in the bin.
Margaret stirred against his chest, and pushed herself away. Her eyes were circled with thick kohl and her mass of black hair was tied in a purple scarf. One long leg twined around his, her skirt riding up her thigh. Everyone wanted Margaret; she worked hard at it, chain smoking like a movie starlet, learning the guitar and casting off her farmyard accent for something more sullenly Soho. That first time in bed, her mouth had torn into his like a desperate animal. But now it was tight and petulant. Here it comes, he thought.