by Nomi Eve
FROM THE GRAFTER’S HANDBOOK BY R.J. GARNER
Eventually, Zohar did help Miriam shake out the blanket. It billowed between them, up and down, making a sharp, flapping noise. When they walked back into the house, passing by their firstborn son, their new soldier, this time they acknowledged his presence, smiling at him, Miriam’s hand straying to his shoulder, tousling his hair. Eliezer watched his parents go up the porch steps and disappear into the house they pretended was their own. He knew that he belonged in there with them, that they were all guests or ghosts in the golem’s house, in the golem’s history, in the golem’s garden. And though a part of him wished for a different address, a different answer, another part of him was relieved to know that he would always belong to the place where their images were etched into the fragrant earth and the oranges, whose rinds were bitter, defiantly tasted so sweet. One last time he pictured his family, all five of them, their outlines stamped into the soil—mother and father in the middle, sons on either sides.
Eliezer reached toward the forms and tried to hold the phantom’s hand. But the phantom’s hand was limp and the father’s faceless face was distorted and the mother’s nervous eyes were looking at a vacant spot on a vacant wall. The images receded. He took a deep breath. He told himself that he didn’t really mind that he couldn’t erase his own figure, that he couldn’t pry himself up from the queer tableaux of outsides without insides. Because otherwise, he would be alone, with neither family nor figments to love and hate and forget and remember. Miriam was calling for him to come in to dinner. The last of the pebbles fell out of Eliezer’s palm, down to the sand. When his hand was empty he walked forward, across the sticker field. Following the setting sun, he lost himself in the orchard.
MY FATHER WRITES:
After my three years of army service were up, I did seriously consider staying in the military. But after much thought, I decided that I would prefer a civilian occupation. Upon discharge, I studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem where I received a degree in mathematics. I paid for my studies by grafting piecemeal in the summers. I paid my way through Hebrew University by grafting three-fourths of all the orchards in Shachar in the late fifties. When I was finished with university, in 1961, I traveled to America. It was actually my father’s idea. He sent me to the United States in order to study for an advanced degree in agriculture. First I was to go to Boston, where we had cousins, and then I was supposed to travel to Kansas, in order to go to agricultural school. But quickly, once I got to Boston, I decided to stay there. Eventually I enrolled in Harvard University, where I received a degree in business.
Part Five
Chapter 17
REBECCA
I WRITE:
Rebecca was brought up blessed with the knowledge that her great-grandmother, her father’s mother’s mother, Chana Frieda, had been the “bakery woman to the czar.” David Lily would lift his youngest daughter up onto the edge of the baking table. “Yes, honey bun,” he would say while pounding a new dough with the heel of his hand. “My own Bubbie baked for the czar, the czarina.” Rebecca would nod her head and repeat after him, “Sar, sarina.” David kept working while he talked, pounding with the heel of his hand.
MY FATHER WRITES:
I met Rebecca Lily in Boston in 1962. I had just come to the United States and was staying with distant cousins of my mother’s in the Brookline section of Boston. I met Rebecca at a party that my cousins threw for me to meet their friends. Rebecca was born in 1942. She is an artist. Rebecca’s parents had a very well-known Jewish bakery, called Lily’s Famous, in Brookline. Her parents, David and Leah, were both immigrants from Russia. The family lived in an apartment above the bakery. David ran the shop in back, and Leah ran the store, up front. It was a wonderful bakery, with all kinds of cakes and breads.
I WRITE:
Rebecca dangled her little legs off the side of the table and looked expectantly at her father. David winked at her, and continued: “An illustrious family history ours is, and don’t let anyone ever tell you different. My grandmother had a tiny bakery. Very tiny, and yet with a big reputation. Known all the way from Chelminski to the river Volga.” And now David always stopped working, and drew a line in flour on the wooden table that grew from a river signified by wavy lines to another hieroglyphic that was supposed to be a crown but looked more to Rebecca like a tall fluffy hat that a chef would wear in the kitchen. Rebecca knew she could draw a better river and a better crown than her father, but because she knew his attempts were noble, she never wiped his drawings out. Instead she just took her own tiny index finger and happily traced the dusty white line in between the two illustrations.
David kept speaking. “One spring day after a particularly heavy winter, a royal messenger appeared at my grandmother’s cottage and summoned her to St. Petersburg. Chana Frieda’s reputation for ‘daring dough—particularly pumpernickel’ had reached the royal family. And the rest, as they say, is history—our history, the history of our family, our fortunes, and of course our pumpernickel bread. Chana Frieda, the redheaded Jewess, as she was known, became a court favorite. She was whisked out of her dirt floor cottage and given a staff of seventy-five clean-necked Russians and a fully appointed bakery in the palace with a huge cast-iron oven and an actual stone floor.” Over the din of the bakery (or perhaps just under it, under the clattering of metal pans, the voices of the workmen, the slapping and pounding of dough, the creak and belly rumble of the huge walk-in oven), Rebecca could hear the hooves of the royal messenger’s horse going clop, clop, clop. David took a deep breath and looked over to his own oven. He couldn’t tell this story without feeling somehow as if he and his long dead grandmother, whom he had never known, were connected. David’s oven was a magnificent walk-in machine ten feet long, recessed in the wall with shelves that revolved in a backward pattern and had what David liked to call “the warm glow of a good Hades” in its metal belly. And while Rebecca drew soft concentric swirls with her pinky in the flour, David watched with wonder as the plucky ghost of his grandmother Chana Frieda tended his newfangled oven.
Rebecca said, “Dad?” David reached out a floury hand and with his wrist—the only clean part of him—softly rubbed her freckled cheek, and then gazed proudly at her hair. She, the daughter of his head and heart, was a redhead just like him. Devoutly orange were her locks, and baking was in her blood, too. Rebecca would sit for hours “on the bench” watching her father’s hands orchestrate the day’s symphony of bread, cakes, and assorted cookies. Rebecca had an older sister and a big brother too, and she always felt like she had a whole shop full of additional siblings. The cakes and bread were beloved company. She grew up surrounded by crackly-thin onion boards and long, hard salt sticks that she loved to suck on when she was very little. There were mun cookies, which she hated, and chocolate babkes that she loved too much, there were white sugary bow-ties and black, black breads she pretended were made out of wheat from the planet Mars. There were cherry rolls, kaiser rolls, warm, plain white buns sprinkled with sesame, round challahs and honey cake for Rosh Hashanah, hamantaschen for Purim (her favorite were the prune), and of course their special “pump,” which, through the generations, hadn’t lost a pinch of its daring and which Rebecca loved hot out of the oven spread heavily with butter.
The bakery hummed and whirred and never slept. David presided over the shop, and Leah minded the store. Leah was a tiny dark-haired woman with a big chest and warm exuberant manners. She greeted customers not only by name but by knowing who they were and where they came from and where they might be going—to synagogue for a kiddush with that bag of rugulach, to a shiva house to pay a call with that chocolate chip loaf, to a grandchild’s bris with three boxes of assorted danish and a bottle of schnapps in the pocket, or just home to dinner with two warm little loaves. Leah was knowledgeable about her customers’ lives but never nosy, and her smiles as she handed out change or asked after a son or a daughter were always sincere.
There was a little room between th
e bakery in back and the store up front. In this room were the stairs that led upstairs to the family apartment. Here they kept paper goods such as unconstructed cookie boxes, rolls of string for tying the boxes, wax paper, and other such essentials. Also in this little room was a little table, and a phone for taking orders. David and Leah often met in the little room. They didn’t need to call to each other, they didn’t need to arrange a time for meeting. They were spiritually synchronized. When one came back, the other just knew to come front and vice versa. They met in the middle of their little world, like two explorers of an internal equator mutually charting the distance between their bodies, and needing every so often to calibrate equipment or check the weather conditions in a place that was both near and far.
David wiped his floury hands on his pants, and then held them out to Leah. And they stood there, giving each other what everyone called their “honeymoon” eyes. They were so completely in love.
Nine years after they married, David and Leah learned that they had both come to the United States of America on the same ship when they were children. A nephew of David’s had been doing research on the family history and had unearthed the coincidence. Ever since the nephew had told them about the boat, David and Leah had held each other closer, and there was an even stronger urgency to their love, as if they were terrified that they would once again find themselves in the middle of a crowd and be completely unaware of the nearness of their own beloved. They were in the little room in between the bakery and the store. David bent down and kissed Leah on the lips; she nodded up at him, and then put one hand on her hip before kissing him back and then breaking out into a big smile. It is true that their terror was made much less terrifying by the knowledge that they had indeed found each other after all, and that perhaps their coming over on the same boat when they were children was not so much a metaphor for potential loss as it was an affirmation that they had been traveling together all along.
On Sunday mornings there was always a long line of customers snaking out of the shop door. The family did not put on airs, but were privately proud of their imperial past. And while most in the neighborhood knew the Lilys as descendants of barrel-makers, gravediggers, even the occasional thief, they ran their business as if the court were still their best customer. And while walking out of Lily’s Famous with a cookie in one hand and a warm bag of bread in the other, one felt touched by something edibly majestic. So what if the czar was not a friend to the Jews? “A king is a king,” David would tell his three children, “no matter how you slice it.”
By the time she was thirteen, Rebecca had taken fast to the family mantel. She continued her father’s story in her head, telling herself as she stood by the bench, “I have been placed under house arrest with the czar and the czarina.” She looked around and instead of seeing the bakery workmen dressed in white, their faces always kindly, Rebecca saw the doomed Romanoffs. Their faces were kindly, too, but their kindness was sticky, not insincere, but structurally damaged, as if having been exposed to too much heat or sun. The royal family was dressed in rich brocades, fancy purple, red, green, glittery fabrics. They thanked Rebecca profusely for having accompanied them into their desperate exile. When they said this, Rebecca modestly looked down at her hands, which were covered in a thin layer of cake flour, and then she went to work. She tried to brighten the imperial family’s gloomy days by designing for them fanciful cakes in the shapes of animals. She fashioned her own odd zoo of cake tins out of spent cannon-shell casings, which were in unfortunate abundance from the recent revolution. Out of chocolate and vanilla batter she made lions and tigers and giraffes and bears with polka-dot coats and happy grinning faces. The young prince loved these creatures the most. He would prance around the bakery while Rebecca was working, telling everyone, as he stuck his fingers in the batter, that he was “going on safari.” And when, toward the end of the whole disaster, the princesses sewed their diamonds and rubies and aquamarines into their clothes for safe-keeping, Rebecca braided thin delicate breads into the shapes of precious jewels for them—so they could still feel “princessy.” She made cinnamon-twist bracelets for their china-white arms, and crispy sourdough brooches for their chests, even pumpernickel tiaras for their foreheads, which may have lacked glitter but at least gave off a rich glow from being coated with a layer of honey mixed with sugar. The princesses were so grateful, and didn’t mind at all when their foreheads were sticky, or the “jewels” left crumbs all over their fancy gowns.
But Rebecca was not always lost in imperial reveries. As she grew up, she worked hard in the bakery, after school or late into the night. She learned from her father how to braid challah into hearts for Valentine’s Day, Stars of David for Israeli Independence Day, crescent moons for the eccentric man down the street who liked his loaves celestially inspired. She was her father’s “right-hand girl” even though she was left-handed. She could do a six-braid, a nine-braid, an eleven-braid, and eventually the masterful five-foot-long “golden fifteen special.” She braided quickly, and with what her father called “a healthy dose of the old family spirit.” From the moment Rebecca came home from school, she, her older brother, and her father would work side by side, filling orders, telling jokes. But mostly they would work quietly, their ears soothed and their fingers made more nimble by the slapping sound of dough hitting the wooden table.
Rebecca realized early on that the bakery was not just about baking bread. There was art in her father’s hands, which were thick, huge, muscular, callused, and yet sensitive enough to detect the granular differences between kinds of flour.
But it wasn’t really the size of her father’s hands that made Rebecca think about art. It just seemed to her that her father could make anything out of flour, sugar, yeast, eggs, and water. And the anything usually appealed to much more than just the sense of taste. When she was a little girl sitting up on the bench as her father worked, and later, when she stood at the bench next to him braiding her own challah, Rebecca would forget that she was in her parents’ bakery on Harvard Street in Brookline and drift off into imaginings. She would daydream about the czar and czarina, or she would imagine that she had baked giant-sized chocolate-chip cookies for Paul Revere on the night of his famous ride. Or Rebecca would think about how she had been a slave in Egypt and how when Moses gave them instructions, she had bent down to the hearth and pounded dough into flat sheets and baked them unrisen. As Rebecca’s fingers worked the dough, and as her father’s huge hands pinched the ends of the challah next to her, they told each other stories, or imagined various sweet or crusty worlds in a yeasty silence. As she worked, Rebecca found herself not in a bakery but in a studio where the elegant strands of history and imagination were mixed into one fancy bread and then served not only for dinner but also for decoration. And that to Rebecca was what her father always held in his huge hands—a kind of kneaded art. The bakery was a tasty braided universe where the dough pressed and the spirit relaxed and the princesses wore bread for jewels and Paul Revere took a big bite out of a giant chocolate-chip cookie before mounting his horse, and the Israelites made their matzah out of Lily’s famous pump.
Yes, it seemed to Rebecca that her father could make anything out of bread. His breads were beautiful, idiosyncratic. It could even be said that they were amazing. Of course David was usually baking regular orders, but then there were the other times. Like when he was commissioned to make a wedding cake out of challah. It was a perfect wedding cake three tiers high, each tier made of delicate concentric braids. Rebecca had helped with the tiny roses for the sides and top. They made them by pinching the dough with the tips of their fingers. “This,” David told Rebecca, pointing to the bread-cake in progress, “is what my grandmother once made for a close friend of the czarina.” David baked the wedding cake tier by tier, and when the last layer came out of the oven, everyone in the shop stopped their work, whistled, and applauded. The next day at the wedding, the rabbi who performed the ceremony, upon first seeing the creation at the start of the
festive meal, had stood up on a chair and insisted that an eighth blessing be added to the traditional litany. And so, in addition to mirth and exultation, joy and gladness, the glowing bride and groom were blessed with “a local miracle concerning braids, David Lily, and challah bread.”
David always drew a new design before trying it. And Rebecca would watch her father sketch out a particularly hard or interesting creation. Her own first “serious” sketches were of the sacks of flour in the back of the bakery. The sacks were stacked near the oven, piled up halfway to the ceiling. She sat down on a huge tin of cocoa, put her sketchbook on her knees, and set about drawing while the men worked all around her, filling jelly donuts, rolling kmish bread, sprinkling seeds on the back of the pump. Later Rebecca would think of that first sketch and know that she had loved the flour sacks, how as a little girl she and her siblings had climbed all over them, pretending they were a fort, or the ramparts to an enchanted castle.