The words abruptly ended. I turned to the next page and saw that only one word was typed on it, in the center of the paper:
Chava
I looked at the pages that followed. On every page was the same word, sometimes typed just once, and sometimes over and over again.
Chava Chava Chava Chava Chava Chava
I went through the pages again, feeling a knot tighten in my stomach. Although it was warm in the office, I shivered. There was something strange and terribly unsettling about it all.
Then I remembered: Chava was my Hebrew name.
12
My office phone rang. I picked it up with a shaking hand. “Hi, this is Jill,” I said, trying to make my voice sound calm and professional.
“Jill, it’s Larry.” I looked over at the caller ID display and saw that it was, in fact, my boss. “I’ve got Aviva up here in the office. Do you have a couple of minutes to talk about the plan for when she goes out on leave?”
“Sure. I’ll be right there,” I told him. I hung up the phone, smoothed a hand over my hair, and picked up a notepad and pen.
With a swift attempt to shake off the sense of trepidation that the typewritten words had evoked, I walked down the hall, opened the door to the stairwell, and climbed the steps up to the fourth floor. Larry’s office was in a suite with the other department heads, whose offices overlooked the harbor. I had worked for him for seven years, moving up from exhibition assistant to junior curator to my current position, all on his watch.
Dr. Larry Grossman held a Ph.D. in Jewish studies and archeology. He was responsible for the creation and maintenance of the museum’s collection and for planning and executing the special exhibitions we developed with scholars and historians from around the world. He had been with the museum for more than fifteen years – even before we had a permanent building. Aviva, who had joined the staff the year before me, had been there for eight.
Over the course of the past seven years, the three of us had spent a great deal of time together, especially during the long, hectic days of exhibition installations. After sharing late night dinners, conversations, and a couple of installation crises, we all liked, and, perhaps more important, trusted one another.
These days, the usual craziness of our department, coupled with Larry’s intense travel schedule, often meant we used email as our primary form of communication. He had just returned from a two-week trip to Israel, where he had been meeting with surviving members of the Haganah — soldiers who had smuggled Holocaust survivors into Israel immediately after the Second World War. It was important to record their testimonies for an exhibition that was still more than three years away.
Even when he was on the opposite side of the world, he remained in constant contact with the office, and so during his absences I frequently received emails sent from Tel Aviv or Haifa, composed long after I was asleep in New York. When Larry wasn’t traveling, Aviva and I usually managed to meet with him at least a couple of times a week, and also during our regular monthly department meetings.
Larry’s assistant, Mira, looked up from the exhibition blueprints on her desk as I entered the suite. “Hi, Jill,” she smiled at me. “You can go in.”
“Thanks,” I said. I knocked lightly on the door and pushed it open. Inside, Larry sat at his desk, and Aviva in one of the two chairs directly across from him.
“Come on in, Jill,” he said. “Have a seat.”
I took the chair next to Aviva and looked over at her. Her eyes still looked a little red, but it wasn’t obvious that she had been crying. I wondered if she had revealed anything to Larry about what she had told me this morning, and then figured, judging from the fact that she looked as if she were keeping it together somewhat cheerfully, that she probably had not.
“So, as you know, Aviva is going out on leave in a few weeks,” Larry began. “And as you also know, we have a special exhibition opening this summer.” He smiled at us both. “I know I hardly need to even say it given all the hard work you’ve been doing with the team, dealing with the catalog updates and rotations in the rest of the collection. At least we won’t have as much to do while the exhibition is being installed.”
“The rotation schedules are done through April,” I said. “Aviva and I have gotten those out of the way.”
“That’s great,” he said. “That will definitely help matters along. So here’s the plan. I’m sure you also know we are going to need to make some changes in the department, so that we’ll be covered until Aviva comes back to us in June.”
We both nodded.
“Aviva tells me you’ve talked about it, and you both agree that from among the junior staff, Robert Friedman would be most up to the task of taking on some of the senior registrar’s responsibilities.”
“Definitely,” I said. “He’d be my pick. He’s smart, he puts in the hours, and he doesn’t only get the work done. He asks great questions and seems to learn a lot from the process.”
Larry leaned back in his chair. “Sounds just like the two of you, when you first started here,” he said fondly.
Aviva and I both smiled. “Fern Dixon is good, too,” Aviva said, “but I don’t think she’s been here long enough.”
“She’s been here almost a year?” Larry asked. We nodded again. “You’re right. I don’t think that’s long enough. But that she’s good, is good to know. Now,” he continued. “Jill, you were at the planning meetings last week with Aviva. So you know where we are in the process. You’ll be coordinating the de-installation of the current exhibition after the closing date on May 15th, and getting the space prepared for the fabricators before Aviva goes out on leave. I want you and Robert to pick your team – you’ll need two exhibition assistants, one registrar and one curator - so that she can advise you about who should get the fabricators and the painters on board and coordinated. Also, Jill,” he looked at the calendar on his desk, “I’d like for you to put off making house calls for a few weeks. While we’re working through this transition, I really need you here in the office.”
“Okay,” I made some notes on the pad. “I can do that.”
“And you’ll let Robert know today? I’d like to make the announcement at Friday’s staff meeting.”
“Sure,” I said, looking at Aviva. “We can let him know this afternoon.”
“Good,” Larry said. “I want the team to be prepared.”
“We’ll be fine,” Aviva said confidently. “We’re ready.”
I watched as she absently brushed the bangs of her wig from her eyes, marveling at her resilience, considering how distraught she had been earlier in the day.
“So,” Larry continued, sounding more conversational. “Has anything interesting been going on since I’ve been out of the office?”
Aviva and I glanced at one another, and I nodded slightly, almost imperceptibly.
“Actually,” she said, “we have something interesting to tell you. Jill received an anonymous donation last week.”
“When you say ‘anonymous donation,’” Larry asked, “do you mean that it came from someone who doesn’t want to be acknowledged, or that it came from someone who didn’t disclose their identity?”
“The latter,” I answered.
“My favorite kind of donation,” he said sarcastically. “What’s the story?”
“We’re not sure yet,” I told him. “It’s a manuscript. Very weathered looking on the outside. Inside, there are a couple of different kinds of parchment. It’s been bound by hand, and it looks as if the endpapers are hand painted.” Aviva nodded in agreement. “The date on the first page is 1536.”
I watched Larry’s face for a reaction, but he only nodded and leaned forward in his chair. “Okay,” he said. “Go on.”
“There was a letter inside, addressed to me. Whoever wrote it said that they had met me, and had donated other items to us in the past. But there wasn’t enough information in the letter to even get started searching the database.”
“Then Jill got another
letter,” Aviva continued. “But there still wasn’t much to go on. We know – or it appears – that the donor is a woman who was born in Germany and says she’s a Holocaust survivor.”
Larry nodded. “But nothing specific?”
“Not really,” I said. “No place or year of birth – she only says that she comes from ‘a small town outside Berlin.’ She says she was married in 1937, and that the manuscript had been in her family for some time. But there’s nothing specific – no city, no town, no dates of birth, no last names.”
“That’s a shame,” Larry said. “The Gestapo rounded up German Jews based on census information. If we had an address or a date of birth we could consult the Bad Arolsen Archives and do a little detective work.”
“Well, today I got a third letter,” I said. “And it’s not like the others. It’s not as,” I paused as I searched for the right word, “—structured as the other ones. The text reads as if recounting her survivor experience is starting to take its toll on her. The good news is that it includes some specific information – the first names of her husband and her daughter – but there’s something strange about the way it’s written.”
“How so?” Larry asked.
“Well, at first,” I said, “it appeared that she was trying to tell me the story of how she obtained the manuscript, and how she managed to hold on to it through the war. But this last letter is more about her experiences of the time before the war – there’s nothing at all about the manuscript in it. The other letters were formally structured. They began with my name, the museum’s address, – salutation, date, the whole bit. This one was just typewritten pages that began without any introduction, as if she was picking up the story in progress. And the last few pages made no sense at all. They didn’t even have any of the story on them, just the name ‘Chava’ typed over and over again.”
“Do you think that could be her name?” Aviva asked me.
“I don’t know,” I said, “but it’s a thought.” I didn’t tell them that I had been so focused on my own Hebrew name that I hadn’t even considered the possibility.
“But anyway,” I continued, “I’ve been reading the manuscript, whenever I’ve had a spare moment or two.”
“Not that we’ve had many of those,” Aviva laughed.
“And from what I’ve read,” I said, “it looks as if this manuscript was written by the daughter of St. Thomas More.”
“You mean the Thomas More who served at the court of King Henry VIII?” Larry asked. “He disagreed with the king about the legitimacy of the Church of England, if I’m not mistaken. And wasn’t he beheaded?”
“You saw A Man for All Seasons, too.” Aviva smiled.
Larry took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, and then put them back on. “And this manuscript is written by his daughter, allegedly.”
“His daughter Margaret,” I said. “About whom there is precious little biographical information available.”
“What sort of condition is the manuscript in?”
“Not great,” I said. “It looks as if it sustained some water damage at some point. And the binding is going to pieces. I can’t remember ever needing to be so careful with an artifact. I can’t tell what sort of conditions it was kept in over the years, maybe in a box or a closet. There’s a lot of dust, but I can’t tell if it’s recent. Aviva and I also saw some dirt in the binding, but again, we’re not sure of the date. We would need a lab for sure to date any trace minerals, not to mention the paper. It’s very brittle. It worries me to think of it under some sort of light, or exposed to chemicals.”
“It would worry me, as well,” Larry said. “But to authenticate it, we don’t really have much of a choice. We’d need to find some budget money, that’s for sure.” His brow furrowed. “But aside from authenticity, of course, my only question is, aside from the fact that this came – potentially - from a survivor, what does this have to do with Jewish heritage?”
“My question exactly,” Aviva said.
“Well, this morning, something turned up.” I turned to Aviva apologetically. “I didn’t have time to tell you. Over the weekend, I came into the office to read further, and I found a note on the text, in what appears to be another person’s handwriting. It’s in Spanish, which I don’t happen to speak, so Fern and Robert translated it for me this morning in the meeting. I can’t remember the exact wording, but as it turns out, the citation matches up with Pirke Avot, chapter 1, verse 15.”
“’Shammai says, set a fixed time for study, say little and do much, and greet everyone with a cheerful smile,’” Larry quoted immediately. “Which follows immediately after the more famous Hillel quote, ‘If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? If I am only for myself, then what am I? And if not now, when?’”
“Is this the Jewish connection you were talking about this morning?” Aviva asked me. “After the meeting?”
I was surprised that she even remembered what I had said, given everything else that was going on. “Yes,” I answered. “But so far, even though it’s in Spanish, that’s the only Jewish thing about it.”
“Does it have anything to do with the text?”
I thought about it for a moment. “Actually, I think it might. The notation is drawn between the quote and a moment in the story during which one person greets another. However, it certainly wasn’t with a cheerful smile.”
“It could have a further significance,” Larry said. “Hillel and Shammai were the founders of two major schools of rabbinic thought – Bet Hillel and Bet Shammai – the house of Hillel and the house of Shammai. These schools differed in their views of how holiness should best be expressed by the Jewish people. Essentially, Bet Hillel believed in community – that Jews should live among others in order to fulfill the commandment to be ‘a light unto the nations.’ Bet Shammai, whose members refused to bend to the rule of other nation’s laws, to the contrary felt that the Jews had to be separate – away from outside influences, living in a self-contained society, in order to achieve a better relationship with holiness. It’s speculative, but it makes me wonder if this quotation is invoking Bet Shammai. Is the author a person who is making a statement of separation from the larger community?”
“But to think that, you have to assume the writer is Jewish,” Aviva ventured. “Or someone who knew Pirke Avot, which at that time would have been a forbidden text in England, under the reign of Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon.”
“But if it’s in Spanish,” I said, “it might have belonged to a converso.”
We looked at Larry, who was silent for a moment. “Let me get this straight. What we’ve got, supposedly, is an artifact that was sent directly to you, Jill, which appears to be a manuscript that dates back to Tudor England. This manuscript was allegedly written by a Catholic woman. It contains a single Jewish inscription, written in Spanish, and you think it might have come from a Spanish Jew secretly living in England. And this supposed secret Jew, this converso, may have had some sort of contact with one of the preeminent Catholic families of that time in order to obtain, and comment on, this story.”
He picked up a pen and made some notes on the paper in front of him. “And this came from a donor who appears to be a Holocaust survivor, about whom we have little or no information to go on.”
“Right. Except in the letter I received today, she mentions being married to a man named Aron – one A – and that she has a daughter named Minna. I did a database search using the two names, but the search returned nearly 300 records.”
“That’s exactly what I was afraid of,” Larry said. “And right now, unfortunately, with everything else going on, you don’t have the time to go through 300 records.”
We nodded.
“I have to say, I’m intrigued,” he said. “If this came from a legitimate source, I’d be delighted. But I can’t spare either of you to go chasing after a donor’s name. If you want to research the database, I’ll have to ask you to do that on your own time, but I don’t see how you’ll even
have the time until after the installation is completed.”
“I understand,” I said to Larry. “That’s why I came in on Sunday.”
“Does anyone else know about it?”
I shook my head. “Only the two of us,” I said, indicating Aviva.
“I’d like to keep it that way, for now.” He looked at us both. “But this is certainly intriguing. In the meantime,” he said, rising from his desk, “I have a quick phone call or two to make, but I’d appreciate it if you’d meet me in the conservation area in about ten minutes. I’d like to have a look at the manuscript.”
“Okay,” I said, “we’ll meet you downstairs.”
Aviva and I both stood and walked out of the office. I followed her past Mira’s desk and out to the elevators. She punched the Down button with some force. “I know it’s only one floor,” she said, “but I hate waddling down the stairs.”
As we waited, we glanced out of the wide windows at the gray sky and the winter afternoon beginning its descent into evening. The elevator arrived, we walked inside and the doors slid closed. “You know, Jill, I know you don’t like to do this, but I think you should take the manuscript home with you. You can’t keep coming in on Sundays.” She looked at me meaningfully. “I mean, you have a life outside of here.”
I decided to ignore the implication that I was using work to avoid figuring out things with Michael. “I know, but with this weather, I’m a little nervous about taking it outside.”
“Don’t be worried,” she reassured me. “Let’s clear it with Larry when he comes downstairs. After he looks at it, we’ll wrap it up and put it in one of the big cases. And bring some acid-free paper for your table. Take it home, get through it, and bring it back in a couple of days.” The doors opened. “You know what to do. Just be careful with it, and it’ll be fine.”
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