The Bookseller's Sonnets

by Andi Rosenthal

  I gazed at silver Kiddush cups, intricately carved spice boxes, woodhandled challah knives that had last been used decades ago. I thought about Friday nights, about my mother and my grandmother, and how her mother and grandmother before her had held objects like these in their hands, how their whispered blessings had been passed from one generation to the next.

  I thought about the years of artifact donation visits I had made, how I had heard the stories of nearly every object in every case, and how those objects had once been at home upon someone’s shelf, in a glassfronted wooden cabinet, on a Sabbath table gleaming with pressed white tablecloths and freshly polished silver. So many of these objects had been smuggled out, sent to relatives in America for safekeeping, or buried in the ground. Every one of them represented a story of loss, or of survival, or simply the story that a family like mine had been taught to tell itself about its own heritage.

  I continued through the first floor galleries, gazing at Torah scrolls rescued from burning synagogues, from pogroms, from the Inquisition. I wondered if perhaps I was looking at the very scroll that Daniel had shown to Margaret on the day they knew they loved one another.

  I closed my eyes for a moment and remembered the touch of Michael’s hand on mine, the kindness in his dark eyes, the quiet sound of his breathing as we fell asleep.

  Margaret was never able to fall asleep next to the man she loved, I thought. Because at the very moment they loved each other the most, they had to turn and walk away because they knew what would happen to them if they were discovered. They knew it would cost them their lives.

  And yet, Chava was born. Chava, who had no idea that her mother was a Gentile, who unwittingly told the great lie, the same lie that my grandmother told herself, the lie for which she has asked me to choose a life without Michael. Chava, who in spite of her learning, in spite of her heritage and her community, who according to Jewish law, wasn’t actually Jewish.

  The thought flashed through my brain. What does it all mean? I asked myself . If Chava wasn’t Jewish according to Jewish law, then what about the rest of us? What about my grandmother and everything she went through, everything she lost? Did her suffering mean less because she was – and we are — technically Gentiles?

  What is the true religion of our family? And does it mean we are not really whom we have always believed ourselves to be?

  I ascended the escalator to the second floor. All at once, I was assaulted with images of the Nazis coming to power – the bloodcolored propaganda posters, the spidery, sinister arms of the swastika, the harsh German words condemning all Jews to death. I could feel the hatred. I felt hated.

  Is this what makes me Jewish? I asked myself. The fact that I feel hated because of these objects? Objects that tell me I am meant to feel hated? That I fear – like my grandmother - that there will always be enemies who rise up against us, and the ones who hate us are always there, lurking in the shadows, waiting to come to power, determined that someday we will no longer exist?

  I walked slowly through galleries of documents that took homes, businesses, and identities away from Jewish citizens all over Europe. I read about laws that denied Jews their basic rights, their livelihood, even their ability to get married. I saw photographs of burning buildings and burning books, of children saying goodbye to anxious, desperate parents at train depots.

  I thought about Minna, my aunt, who had been hidden away before dawn one spring morning, and whom my grandmother would never see again. I thought about the little flower that Minna had given her that day, how it had weathered all the years underground, all the decades tucked away inside the book.

  I turned a corner and found myself face to face with photographs I could barely manage to look at: photographs I had been looking at for most of my professional life, but not really seeing – or letting myself see. Now I felt their impact as surely and strongly as if I were looking at them for the first time. The emaciated bodies, the threadbare uniforms, the shaved heads, the wasted eyes.

  I could hardly think of them as people, yet there they were, looking back at me, each one with a name, a history, a family, a story.

  I have thought of them as symbols for so long, I thought guiltily. I didn’t want to feel the connection. I let myself be distanced by history, by the black and white of the photographs, as if this could never happen in my Technicolor world. I let myself think about this only as a professional, as a curator.

  But I never wanted to think about this happening to her. I blinked my eyes to keep the tears from coming again. To my Omi .

  In the next gallery, I looked into a case containing several tiny objects: an embroidered handkerchief; a wedding ring; a sheet of music, the notes carefully drawn on crooked staffs; a tiny metal brooch on a chain. I didn’t need to look at the label to remember how all of these had been created by prisoners in the concentration camps.

  Or is this what it means to be Jewish? I wondered. Is it only about being another link in a golden chain? Or is it about having the will to not merely survive, but also to create beauty in the midst of horror? Is it about possessing the willingness to pledge one’s life to another, even when that life may have been nearing its end? Is it about being a person who does not lose hope even after losing everything else?

  I walked on, turned another corner and found myself in the gallery that had always been one of my favorites.

  Who saves a single life saves a world entire, the inscription read. The surrounding walls contained six stories of righteous gentiles from all different countries, and all different walks of life, who had willingly saved the lives of Jews.

  Not even these stories would have convinced, you, Omi, I said in my mind to my grandmother. Because you were only able to think of them as enemies, full of hatred, not wanting us to live. It was easier for you to hate them – all of them.

  You refused to accept Michael. You never got to know his kindness and his decency. Because the hate that made the Nazis hate us is the same hate that grew inside your heart for all of those years after the war. And it made you wrong, Omi. Because if only you had read the manuscript – if only you had opened the book – if only you had known Margaret’s story, you would know the truth. They are already part of who we are.

  By now I was crying once again. I wiped my eyes and kept walking.

  At the end of the second floor gallery, old newspapers and film clips showed the war finally ended, and how the joy of the Allies’ victory was mixed with the newly-realized horror of the destruction that had befallen the Jews of Europe.

  I sat on a hard wooden bench and looked around at the photographs of liberation, of parents reunited with children, of husbands and wives taking marriage vows, of family celebrations, of new babies being born.

  For a while, I stared at a photograph of one young survivor couple, a photograph that I had always loved. In it, a tall, fair-haired young man gazed tenderly at his dark-haired bride. She looked up at him with a face full of wonder, and just the tiniest shadow of disbelief, as if she couldn’t quite believe that such happiness had come to her, that such joy could ever happen again.

  And so it is, I thought, when hate has nearly destroyed a life. But there is a choice.

  I looked again at the bride and groom; the delight in their faces was like a benediction.

  I can heed my grandmother’s last words to me; I can let the hate that defined her life define mine. I can allow her legacy to make that choice for me. Or I can trust that even now, after knowing the terror and loss she endured, the murders of her parents, her husband, her children, I must understand that she did not really know the story of her own family, or who she truly was. But Margaret and Daniel have given me the truth of our family. And I know now that I do not have to carry Omi’s hatred with me.

  I do not have to separate myself from Michael the way Margaret separated herself from Daniel, the way my grandmother separated herself from the world. I can carry the blessings of her story the way that Daniel carried Chava to a new land, to a new lif
e. And because of the manuscript, my grandmother’s great gift, I will know who I am, and be who I will become. I can trust that even now, in this moment of losing Omi, even after her wanting me to lose Michael along with her, there can, and will, be joy again.

  I stood and looked at the photograph of the bride and groom for another moment, and then took the escalator to the third floor. But instead of walking into the galleries, I nodded to the security guard standing by the exit, and walked across the hallway that bridged the new wing of the museum and the core building.

  I pushed open the stairwell door marked “Employees Only” and walked down to the second floor.

  Walking through the nearly empty hallway, I opened another heavy glass door and went outside into the Garden of Stones, our museum’s garden of remembrance, which had been dedicated just a few years earlier. I remembered how my family had come to the museum for the dedication ceremony, and the planting of eighteen tiny dwarf oak saplings in huge granite boulders, which now stood like sentinels throughout the garden.

  It was unsure if the trees could actually survive, but that was part of the artist’s intention. The ones that did were expected to break through the rocks someday, the growth and strength of their trunks and leaves and branches proving that life could and did continue, even in the most difficult of circumstances.

  We had assembled on that warm, beautiful spring day; our staff, our leadership, and a number of Holocaust survivors, including my grandmother.

  I had a picture on my desk, taken by one of my colleagues, of my grandmother’s elderly hands, my mother’s hands, and my own as we eased the young tree into the black earth inside the stone. Now I walked over to what I always thought of as our family’s boulder at the very end of the garden. The tree inside it was little more than a weathered twig, seemingly undecided whether to live or die.

  I laid both my hands on the granite boulder, feeling its age, its solidity, its eternity. I thought about its being uprooted from the ground somewhere in New England and transported by truck to New York City, and then being hollowed out to make room for new life.

  I stood in the sunshine with my hands on the stone, and turned back to look at the museum and up at the sky. A few years ago, the twin shadows of the towers had fallen over this very space, but now there was nothing. Eventually, in a few years perhaps, something would rise to take their place, but for now I looked up into the sky and its emptiness, as blue and bright as it had been that September morning.

  This stone, this sky, this space, I thought, looking around. It is all part of the story. Margaret’s story, my grandmother’s story, my story. And in the end, all we have left of one another are the stories we that we tell ourselves.

  I could feel my hands as they touched the rough surface of the granite, the cool harbor wind upon my face, the smell of the ocean, the deep and heavy sound of the river as it flowed into the sea.

  I looked up again at the empty sky. They have already come for me once, the way they came for Daniel, the way they came for my grandmother. And they may come for me again. We have never been safe, perhaps we never will be. But if they do come for us, I told myself, thinking of Michael, they will come for us both.

  I did not walk back into the museum. Instead, I walked down the concrete staircase and through the tiny park next to the building. The flowerbeds were a mass of dead brown stalks, the grass dry and withered from the salt-laden air.

  I knew that the next few days were going to be hard. My parents would be arriving shortly, and we would have to get through the funeral, and the burial and shivah. I would somehow also need to find the time to let Robert and Larry and Aviva know what I had discovered about the manuscript.

  But first, I thought, I have something else I need to do. I took out my cell phone and dialed Michael’s number as I walked toward the subway.

  I heard the click of his phone as he answered.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Hey,” I said. “Where are you?”

  “Home.”

  There was a long silence.

  “That’s good.” I finally said. I knew he could hear the tears in my voice, and I felt a tightness in my throat. But I knew what I had to tell him.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, his voice sounding concerned over the crackling line.

  “I’m fine,” I told him quietly. “I’m coming home.”

  Epilogue

  We gathered at my grandmother’s grave a year later, for the unveiling. It was the end of February, and it was cold, but there was no snow on the ground. There had been a few flurries in the past weeks or two, but all in all it had been a mild winter so far.

  It was early afternoon, and weak winter sunlight streamed through the bare branches of the cemetery trees. Robert and Aviva were there, solemn in their long dark coats. They stood together, and Aviva’s little girl, Hannah, lay asleep in her pink winter coat, with her baby cheek pressed against Robert’s shoulder.

  Jacob had given Aviva a divorce three months after Hannah was born. He couldn’t give Angela up, he said, and he was willing to leave the community to be with her. So he did; he left his family, who disowned him, his shul, and his wife and daughter, and he and Angela had moved to the West Coast. Fortunately, however, before they departed, Jacob’s rabbi had convinced him to give Aviva a get, so she would be able to marry again, and their daughter would not grow up without a father.

  She and Robert started dating immediately after the Jewish divorce was final. Now they were waiting for the civil divorce to come through. After that, they said, they would marry quietly in the rabbi’s study.

  Aviva’s mother, naturally, was put out by the fact that her daughter was dating so soon after the breakup of her marriage, and furthermore, dating someone who was not interested in forcing her to cover her hair.

  But Aviva wasn’t interested in listening to her mother. For the first time in her life, she was with someone because she wanted to be, not because she was fulfilling the expectations of her family and her community.

  Now, I looked at her; her expression was sad, befitting the gathering. But she looked happier than I had seen her since she had first been matched with Jacob.

  Most people, seeing Aviva and Robert together with Hannah, assumed he was her father. They never corrected anyone. The baby even looked a little like Robert; they both had blue eyes. But whenever Hannah fussed, or tried to grab at something that didn’t belong to her – and Aviva assured me she did, quite often – Aviva always sighed and said, “She’s her father’s daughter.” But then she would smile and say, “And thank God she was a girl. If I’d had a boy, Jacob probably would have stayed.”

  Robert looked sad but contented also, as he held the sleeping baby. He had proven to be a great colleague and a great friend. In the days following my grandmother’s death and Hannah’s birth, he single-handedly managed the department. Under his guidance, the exhibition presentation came off without a hitch. He then helped Dr. Schiffman compose the museum’s reply to the Archdiocese. It stated that I was the legal heir to the Margaret More manuscript, and it was mine to do as I wished. They closed by telling Monsignor Tully – and His Eminence, for that matter - that if I chose to donate the manuscript to the museum, they were more than welcome to come and see it when it was on exhibit.

  Robert and Larry also deflected the inevitable harsh questions from the Archdiocese lawyers and politely informed them that they could discuss the matter with me – and the museum’s legal team, after I returned from bereavement leave.

  And when everything was finished, and the Archdiocese lawyers had backed down, and the exhibition from Berlin was safely installed, Robert painstakingly researched my grandmother’s family history for me, tracing her prisoner record from Dachau back through the Bad Arolsen archives in Germany, where he had some friends who helped him with the research.

  We discovered that Anna Blumenfeld, prisoner number 462735, had been interred at Dachau in March of 1942, and had been liberated by the 42nd Infantry Division on
April 29, 1945. He had traced, as well, the record of her marriage to Aron Blumenfeld, in June of 1937, and the birth of their daughter, Minna, whose death certificate indicated that she had died of typhus in 1942.

  Aron, as it turned out, had not been murdered on that summer day as my grandmother had feared. Instead, he had been shipped from labor camp to labor camp all around Poland and Germany. He became ill in late 1944 after years of starvation and incessant hard labor. Finally, he had been sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau in the final months of the war, where he died in the gas chamber. There was no record of their second child.

  Robert, along with Larry and Dr. Schiffman, had also contacted a lab that specialized in dating old papers. The lab examined the two sheets of parchment that Robert and I had removed from underneath the manuscript’s endpaper. We thought that sending those two separate pages would be less risky than sending the manuscript itself.

  The tests proved conclusively that the papers containing Daniel’s will and his sonnet to Margaret did, in fact, date back to the Tudor era. We knew from our own examination of the manuscript that the parchment bound in the book had similar characteristics to the paper we had sent them for testing.

  When the lab confirmed the test results of the two parchments, we shared with them our own findings about the manuscript. Although they were not willing to certify the manuscript’s authenticity without a thorough examination, they did tell us unofficially that we were, in all likelihood, dealing with the real thing.

  The manuscript changed everything. Upon hearing about the story of my grandmother’s letters, and upon learning exactly what was in the book itself, my mother’s immediate response was to contact an Orthodox rabbi and ask if she should undergo a conversion ceremony so that she could “erase the past.”

  The rabbi asked her what she meant. She told him about the manuscript and about my grandmother’s experiences during the Holocaust. To his credit, he assured her that such a ceremony would not be necessary. She told me he also had encouraged her to come in and talk to him about what was troubling her.