The Bookseller's Sonnets

by Andi Rosenthal

  I managed a smile and turned to Mitzi. “That’s very kind of you to think of me,” I said, “but I don’t think I’d be religious enough for him.”

  She shook her head sadly. “That’s just the thing. My sister and I would love for him to meet a girl who’s maybe not so religious. Maybe then he’d come back to his senses. Right now he won’t even eat at his parents’ house anymore. He says they’re not kosher enough for him.”

  I smirked a little, having confirmed my suspicions. “Then I’m definitely not kosher enough for him.”

  My grandmother and Mitzi exchanged worried glances. I could see on their faces they were afraid their plans were about to backfire.

  “Well, you know, my darling,” my grandmother said, “a date is a date. And it sounds to me like you haven’t been on too many dates recently. Just meet him. No one is saying you have to marry him.”

  My head started to hurt again. I thought about all of the times when I had been in this apartment, and how, especially in recent years, all of the conversations seemed to lead to one place: the goal of seeing me married to a nice Jewish boy.

  I looked at my grandmother’s expectant face. I had a feeling that she, in her way, believed I was playing hard to get. She probably thought I was lonely, and maybe even desperate to meet someone, but that I had my pride. So she expected me to sigh, or roll my eyes, but I also knew she thought I would give in, that I would ultimately relent and say, “Sure, yes, I’ll meet him. It couldn’t hurt.” And I would see her face – and Mitzi’s – light up with hope, that the two wayward grandchildren would finally start living the lives they were supposed to be living, and that everything would turn out happily ever after.

  “Actually,” I said, not quite believing that the words were coming out of my mouth, “I’ve met someone.”

  My grandmother looked astonished. “You have?”

  I nodded. The words were out there. I’d said it and there was no turning back. And I figured, great: now I’m in for it. I breathed a silent prayer of thanks that Mitzi had stayed. Maybe it would be easier with someone else in the room.

  “So? Who is he? What does he do?”

  I swallowed. “His name is Michael. He’s my age. He’s a lawyer.”

  My grandmother nodded and smiled delightedly at Mitzi. “A lawyer,” she said. “How about that?”

  “So…you just met?” Mitzi asked. “When did you start dating?”

  Here it was. I knew I could lie to them. And of course, I knew I was capable of lying because I had been lying for so long. I could fictionalize everything: when we had met, who he was, and who we were together. But I was tired of it, and I knew our truth had a deadline. Michael had given me thirty days to tell her about us, and it seemed as if the time had finally come.

  “We didn’t just meet,” I said quietly. “We met a long time ago.”

  “So it’s someone you’ve known for a while, and you just started dating?” My grandmother looked puzzled. “That sounds very nice.”

  “Omi,” I said gently, “I’ve been dating him for a couple of years.”

  Her face grew confused, and then upset. “And you didn’t tell me? Why not?”

  Mitzi rose awkwardly from her seat. “I should be going,” she said hastily. “I’ll see you later, Anna.”

  I saw my grandmother try to smile. “Thank you again for everything, Mitzi,” she said quietly. “Jill will see you out.”

  When Mitzi and I reached the door, she reached up and patted my cheek. “I know you don’t want to upset her,” she murmured. “She’s been through a lot in the past couple of days.”

  “I know.”

  I closed the door after her and went back into the living room. Omi looked at me with eyes that seemed to hover between anger and sadness. “So,” she said, “you’ve been keeping secrets.”

  I nodded guiltily.

  “From your mother and father, too, or just me?”

  “From everyone,” I lied. “Not just you.”

  “But why? Why didn’t you want to tell me that you had a young man in your life? Is there something so wrong, so terrible that you had to keep him a secret? Now I can only imagine that maybe he’s not a good person, or that you think we’d disapprove of him. What is it that you’re hiding?”

  “Omi,” I said miserably, “he’s not Jewish.”

  I watched her in silence. She pressed her lips together and looked down at her hands. I saw her fingers tug at the blue velour sleeve that covered the numbers on her arm. I could hear the murmur of the television and the soft tick of the clock on the wall, and the sounds of the city streets outside her window. After a moment she looked back up at me.

  “I see,” she said.

  “Omi,” I began, and then my voice trailed off into nothingness. I wanted to tell her I was sorry, but I knew it wouldn’t make any difference, because I wasn’t sorry.

  After a few moments she spoke again. “With your job,” she said. “I thought in that place you wouldn’t meet anyone who wasn’t Jewish.”

  There didn’t seem to be any point to telling her that there weren’t only Jews working for the museum. “I didn’t meet him through work,” I told her.

  “I feel like I should ask you about him,” she said. “If he’s a good person, if he’s good to you. But now I’m afraid to.”

  “Why?” I felt so guilty I could barely manage the word.

  “Because I don’t know how you could do this. How you could turn your back on your family, your faith, your heritage. But maybe I don’t know you anymore. If you lied to me about this, how am I supposed to know what’s a lie and what’s the truth. You kept him a secret,” her voice sounded empty, “and who knows what else you could be keeping from me?”

  “I’m not keeping anything else from you, Omi,” I said fiercely. “What else do you think I’m hiding?”

  “I don’t know,” she said sadly. “Maybe you’re not going to be Jewish anymore? Is that what’s going on?”

  “How could you even think that?” I asked. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Well, obviously you don’t care about our heritage. About who we are. About our history. Otherwise, this would be a very different conversation, wouldn’t it? I’m sure that if he was going to convert, I would have met him already. So I can only imagine that it’s going to be the other way around, that you’re going to go his way. You’re going to become one of them. And how is that supposed to make me feel?” I saw the color rising in her face, heard the anger in her voice. “After everything I went through?”

  I felt a burning in the back of my eyes. I didn’t know how to answer, so I didn’t. Instead, I looked down at my fingernails. After a few more minutes, she sighed and turned her face toward the television.

  I watched the news with her in silence for a little while longer, and then when I had finally had my limit of trials and terrorism and murders and missing children, I stood up and gathered up my coat and my bag. Before I left, I kissed her on the cheek, and she put her hand over mine for a moment before she shook her head and waved me away. And then I walked out the door and went home to Michael.

  Miss Jill Levin

  Museum of Jewish Heritage

  New York

  Dear Miss Levin:

  I know you will forgive my last letter. As I said to you, I am growing frail as the days pass, and sometimes it is hard for me to express myself clearly. I wish to tell you about how I managed to survive the camps. But first, I must tell you about those who did not.

  Signs were posted in the shops, in the streets, even on the trunks of trees along the road to the country villages – everyone was to report to the square in the center of town. It gave the date, and the time. It was like the voice of a judge pronouncing a death sentence. All of a sudden, a town that was once full of life, of friends, of the sound of children playing, was now silent and full of fear. No one could weep. No one could pray. We heard that the church was hiding mothers and children, that there might be a chance to save o
urselves. And then someone’s sister in a neighboring town told us that if the priest agreed to take you, the church would create a false death certificate in your name, saying that you had died in the typhus outbreak the year before.

  The week before we were rounded up, I went to the convent. I remember the face of the nun who opened the heavy door. She had merry eyes, and cheeks like ripening berries. Inside the church there were ghostly white statues with suffering faces, and the strange and suffused light from the Sacred Heart lamps. There were candles burning at the feet of the statues – not like our yahrzeit candles, the remembrances of light – but tiny, isolated flames in red and blue glass that cast strange colored shadows in the dim corridor.

  She led me down that long dark hallway, to a room where the priest sat at the head of a big carved wooden table, like a king awaiting the offerings of his subjects. A fire crackled in the fireplace, not for comfort, but seemingly as a reminder of the hell they believed in – a hell to which we were about to be condemned.

  I did not say a word. I waited for him to acknowledge me. I thought how he had once been our friend. I thought about how I wanted to save my mother, my sisters, and how once, not so long ago, he would have greeted each of us warmly as we passed by one another in the town. But now, things had changed and he was someone to be feared. So I knew that I could not ask him for very much. Even though I wanted to save my mother’s and sisters’ lives, I knew that I could only ask for the life of my daughter. I would not jeopardize her existence by expressing how I wished for them to be spared as well.

  I know why you are here, he said to me. I watched his face as it changed in the flickering light. One moment he appeared almost kind, almost wise. In the next moment, the light would change, and a frightening darkness crept into his features. I thought of how G-d asked Abraham to sacrifice his son, and how I was about to ask this man of G-d for my child to be spared. I did not have Abraham’s courage or trust in G-d. I could not obey the signs that said my child was to be taken away in a convoy. I had to take the chance that she would be rescued by an angel. I could not allow her to die.

  My Minna is strong, I said to the priest. She will help any way she can. She is a good learner, and she is a trustworthy girl. You have seen her in the street, I said. You know she is an obedient child, with a good temper and a pleasant disposition.

  She is a very pleasant child, the priest said, as if he were choosing a sweet roll from a box in the bakery.

  I did not want to beg him for my own life but I felt the words rushing out in spite of myself. If you were to take both of us, I said, I could help in the school, I could teach the children to play piano.

  He stood, his firelit shadow looming over me, his black cassock making him appear like a large dark bird, a vulture. I imagined us trapped in his claws, soaring above the earth, far, far away from our home, our town, to be – what? Dropped to the ground? Consumed by animal mouths, our picked corpses left to rot and wither? I thought I knew this man, so long ago, before everything changed, but now he was transformed, as everyone seemed to be, by hate and fear.

  A long moment passed, and then he finally said, “We will take the child. There is still time to save her soul.”

  The letter ended abruptly. I shifted a little in my chair, looked out the window at the gray skies over Battery Park, and laid the delicate sheets of typing paper on my desk and closed my eyes for a moment.

  The night before, I hadn’t slept much. After I left my grandmother’s apartment, I walked to the subway and waited for the train to arrive. The ride passed in a blur of stations and passengers getting on and off, absorbed in their books, their music, their conversations. I thought about how lucky they were, how lucky we all were, to be able to get on and off trains as we pleased, to go where we wanted to go. As the train pulled into a station a couple of stops before mine, I rose from the plastic seat and walked out the open doors and up the stairs to the street.

  It had been raining lightly and the garish reds and pinks of the neon signs were reflected like spilled paint on the wet streets. I walked for a while, past the apartment building where I lived with Michael.

  After a while, I found myself at Washington Square Park, standing by the arch and looking toward downtown, where my view was of a place where the Twin Towers no longer stood. I thought about that cool September morning, how I had believed I would never again be as afraid, or as disoriented, as I had felt during those terrible moments when I fled uptown, my clothes and hair covered with ashes and pulverized concrete and ground glass, covering my nose and mouth with my hands, my eyes so full of pain and dust that I could barely see the street in front of me.

  After a little while, I turned around and walked back home. When I walked in, Michael, alarmed by my tears, had thought at first that my grandmother had been more seriously injured. But once I managed to tell him I had finally told her about us, and about her cold and silent response, he led me to the couch and held me, stroking my hair, not saying anything, letting me cry.

  We didn’t look at the manuscript that night. We sat together on the couch and I told him the whole story – not that there was much to tell. As I spoke, I watched the emotions change in his eyes. He looked sad and angry and confused and hurt and then angry again.

  When I finished telling him what had happened, we sat holding one another. I could hear his heart beating beneath the familiar soft red cotton of the t-shirt that he slept in, and I breathed in the comforting scent of his skin and the fresh smell of detergent. After a few minutes he stood and held out his hand. I took it in my own and we went into the bedroom. He removed my clothes as if I were a child he was putting to sleep, and handed me my favorite old blue flannel nightgown. I put it on, feeling its warm, worn softness draping itself over my body. Then we lay down next to one another, and he gently traced my features with his fingertips until I fell asleep.

  I looked down at the letter again, and then turned the pages over. There was nothing on the other side. I put the papers down on my desk and leaned back in my chair. Outside the windows, the clouds had given way to a pale February afternoon sunset that looked as if it were about to surrender to the advancing clouds of another icy night. A fierce wind shook the lacy branches of the trees that lined the harbor walk, and the water below chopped and churned against the sea wall.

  It was getting late. Exhausted by another day of meetings and by a series of mild Braxton-Hicks contractions, Aviva had already left. The office was quiet. In a few moments, I knew I would hear the announcement that the museum was closed for the day, and then I would pack up my gear and head home.

  I had found the letter in my mailbox late in the afternoon, during a bathroom break between exhibition planning team meetings, but only now had I gotten the chance to read it. I wanted there to be more information about Chava – whoever she was. But now that it looked as if Minna had possibly lived, as what was known in survivor circles as a “hidden child,” maybe that would be another angle to search for the family’s identity.

  “Hey, Jill. You doing okay?”

  I turned to see Robert standing at the edge of my cubicle. “Oh, I’m fine, Robert. Thanks.”

  “How’s your grandmother doing?” He shifted the pile of books he was carrying to the crook of his other arm.

  “She’s doing well. Thanks for asking.”

  “No problem. I was worried yesterday.” He craned his head to look over my cubicle wall. “I was looking for Aviva. I saw her in the library taking out these books but I told her she shouldn’t be carrying them around.”

  “That was sweet of you,” I told him. “She’s gone for the day.”

  “Do you think it’s okay to leave them on her desk?”

  “I’m sure it’s fine to leave them.” I looked at the titles. “I highly doubt that anyone is going to be interested in stealing a copy of Talmud commentaries.”

  He pulled a couple of slim volumes out from the pile. “Tractate Gittin, Talmudic Tales of Virtue and Vice,” he said, reading the ti
tles. “I think you’re right about nobody wanting to steal them, although these sound a little intriguing.”

  “I don’t think too many of our colleagues can read Aramaic,” I said.

  “But Aviva can read Aramaic.” There was a real admiration in his eyes. “Although that worries me a bit.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Tractate Gittin explains the laws regarding divorce.”

  I didn’t say anything for a moment. “I’m sure it’s just research,” I lied quickly. “Anyway, speaking of research,” I made a quick decision, “there’s something I’d like you to look into for me.”

  “Sure.”

  “I’d like you to look into the artifact database and see if you can match up any donors with people who were hidden children. I’m specifically looking for information about a woman named Minna, or anything that sounds like an Americanized version of Minna. She would be the daughter of a survivor, and her date of birth would be sometime around 1938 or 1939. Do you think you can do that for me?”

  “Absolutely. When do you need the information?”

  “As soon as you can, really. But I don’t want it to interfere with your other assignments. If you have some time to run the search, that would be great.”

  I wearily turned my key in the lock. When I walked in, Michael had the table set for dinner, with lit candles and flowers and our good wineglasses and plates. The smell of porcini risotto – one of Michael’s many specialties – filled the apartment.

  “Hey,” he said, walking into the hall from the kitchen while wiping his hands on a dishtowel. “I’m glad you’re home.”

  “Me, too,” I said. “What’s all this for?”

  “Two things,” he grinned. “First, I want us to get through dinner because we still have quite a ways to go in the manuscript.” He put a hand on my shoulder. “And, second, to cheer you up.”

  “I’m okay,” I said softly. “You didn’t need to do anything.”

  “I know you’re okay. But you haven’t had the best couple of days, between everything at work with Aviva – I know a lot of the burden is falling on you. And last night,” he trailed off, not finishing his sentence. “Anyway, I want you to relax. We’ll have a great dinner, and then we’ll see what happens next with Margaret and her horrible husband, who probably never once cooked porcini risotto for her in his whole life.”