Scattered Seed

by Maisie Mosco

  “How do you know I do, when you’re hardly ever home at mealtimes?” Rebecca countered. The extra time Nathan now spent at his surgery probing patients’ psyches was a constant bone of contention between them. “Don’t let your uncle get at you, love. He’s a nosey parker,” she said to Marianne.

  “I’m used to people getting at me,” Marianne exclaimed tempestuously and rushed out of the room.

  “Go and calm her down, Martin,” Sarah instructed the only one of her grandchildren whom she knew Marianne would welcome.

  Martin shook his head. “It won’t do any good. These days she isn’t easy to talk to.”

  Hannah deposited baby Frank on top of the newspaper on Carl’s lap, where his twin was already seated. “I’ll go.”

  “But don’t fill Marianne’s head with your meshugah ideas!” Sarah called after her.

  Sarah’s admonition amused Hannah, though it would have had the opposite effect once. They had not got on well during their early acquaintance, but she had learned there was much to admire about Sarah and sensed that the forthright woman no longer disliked her. In some ways they were similar, prepared to battle for the things in which they believed, and the knowledge of this had earned a grudging respect for the other in each of them, though their values were at opposite ends of the pole.

  Marianne was curled up on the window seat in the dining-room, surveying the sprawling tangle of pinks and marigolds in the back garden. “There won’t be room for the Michaelmas daisies to show their faces this year if Zaidie doesn’t make some space for them,” she remarked when Hannah entered. “He could make a fortune if he plucked all those flowers and sold them, couldn’t he?”

  Hannah laughed, but Marianne’s expression remained pensive. “You’re not very pleased with life at the moment, are you, love?”

  “That’s no secret.”

  “Well you haven’t tried to hide it.”

  “Why should I?”

  “Is it because you got a bad report?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “I didn’t think it could be.”

  “You mean I’ve had a face like a fiddle for ages, don’t you? It didn’t start today.”

  Hannah went to sit beside her and noticed that her profile was a replica of Sarah’s, the same determined chin and aquiline nose. But strength of character in a child was not always an asset, it could make a girl of Marianne’s age unhappy because she couldn’t have her own way. “I don’t know you very well, yet, but you don’t seem the same girl who was my bridesmaid,” she said carefully.

  “How can I be?” Marianne answered. She untucked her legs from under her and smoothed down the skirt of her flowered cotton dress. “When five days a week my life is purgatory?”

  Her tone was as melodramatic as her words, but Hannah sensed the very real feeling from which both had emanated and let a sympathetic silence develop.

  “I hate my school,” Marianne declared breaking it. “And it isn’t right I should have to be there!” she added in a passionate outburst. “When I passed the same exam as Shirley.”

  Hannah played with her wedding ring for a moment, conscious of Marianne awaiting her comments. But she must be careful what she said in an irretrievable situation. “You’re entitled to feel cheated, Marianne.”

  “I do!”

  “But being resentful won’t make any difference. Nothing can, so you must make the best of it.”

  Marianne’s gaze dropped to her red sandals and her fists clenched into white-knuckled bails.

  Hannah surveyed the bent, black head and the thin little figure, stiff with anger, and saw herself at the age of twelve; a tall, fair-haired girl with the same bitterness as this small dark one, wanting to make the whole world pay for what life had done to her.

  “You’re not punishing anyone but yourself by not making the best of it,” she said to Marianne, thrusting her hands into the pockets of her sensible, serge skirt and contemplating the design on the carpet. “You know sometimes a person has to rise above the circumstances they find themselves in, let them be a spur instead of a handicap,” she added quietly.

  Something in Hannah’s voice impelled Marianne to raise her head and look at her. Hannah didn’t wear powder, like other women, and her blouse was a plain white, open-necked one, not trimmed with lace like Mam and Auntie Bessie wore with their best costumes on Shabbos. Hannah never wore beads or brooches either, and it struck Marianne that she was different from the other women in the family. But it wasn’t just the way she dressed. It was something special that shone from her.

  “Is that what you did?” she asked feeling instinctively that what Hannah had just said had been her own experience.

  Hannah nodded, her eyes misty with memory. “I usually talk to people from my head, not my heart, but I’m talking to you from both, Marianne. And this is just between you and me. I decided to make something of myself in spite of being raised in an institution because my mother abandoned me.”

  “I don’t know how anyone could do that to their child,” Marianne said with distress.

  “That’s how I felt, once,” Hannah told her. “Before I grew up and learned how religion and the society we live in exert pressure over people. My mother wasn’t married to my father. And you’re old enough to understand what that means. They told me she was Jewish, but my father wasn’t. You know what that means, too.”

  “Her family wouldn’t let her marry him.”

  “Right. And because they wouldn’t, I was dumped in an orphanage, as if my parents were dead,” Hannah said, with a brief resurgence of the anger that had once been her constant companion.

  “Did you hate your mother for doing it to you?” Marianne asked quietly.

  Hannah nodded. “But now I pity her. I hated everything Jewish, too, though I never knew her or her family. I told them at the orphanage I didn’t want to belong to her religion and I felt that way for a long time. Then a few years ago, I thought what am I doing? My mother’s blood is in my veins, why should I despise and deny what I am?”

  “Mam told me that in Jewish law a child is the same religion as its mother, no matter what the father’s is,” Marianne said.

  “Yes. But I’m not talking about the religious laws. Jews are a race and I feel part of it. When I think about what’s going on in Germany my heart bleeds as if it were happening to my kith and kin. That’s what woke me up to what I’d done. I’d turned my back on my own heritage. But we’ve wandered from the subject, haven’t we?” Hannah smiled. “Carl says I always do.”

  “Martin says that about me.”

  “That’s something else we have in common then.”

  Marianne liked what this implied and felt that she had acquired a new friend. Hannah hadn’t talked down to her the way adults usually did but had entrusted her with a secret. “I’ll never tell anyone what you’ve told me,” she promised.

  “If I’d thought you would, I wouldn’t have confided in you,” Hannah replied in her matter-of-fact way. She rose from the window seat and wandered absently around the room, halting by the sideboard to glance at a portrait of Sarah and Abraham with their young family.

  “Pictures like this used to make me jealous,” she told Marianne. “I couldn’t even see one in a book without feeling I’d been done out of something. I spent my whole childhood thinking life could never be the same for me as it was for luckier children, and if someone hadn’t given me a talking-to, I’d probably-have gone on believing it.”

  “Who was it?”

  Hannah smiled reminiscently. “The man I named Henry after. One Sunday, when he was giving us kids a ride in the country and it was my turn to sit in the front with him, he asked me what I was going to be when I grew up. I told him I wouldn’t mind being a teacher, but it was out of the question for a girl like me. ‘Why don’t you prove it isn’t?’ he said. ‘Teachers are educated people; how can I ever be that?’ I answered. ‘The same way I became the owner of a haulage firm. By making 'I’ll show ’em’ your motto,’ he replied.
I knew he’d been brought up in an orphanage, but until then I’d thought he was just employed by the company. It made me think.”

  “But how did you qualify for university?” Marianne asked. “Did the orphanage send you to high school?”

  “I was too old for that by the time Henry got to me. And I doubt if it would’ve been possible anyway, the standard of teaching I’d had was minimal. I worked in a paper factory after I left there and lived in a hostel with other homeless girls. But instead of idling away my evenings like they did, I went to night school and eventually passed the matriculation exam. The rest you know.”

  “It makes me feel ashamed of myself,” Marianne said quietly.

  “I’d rather it made you buck your ideas up,” Hannah declared. “Or I’ve wasted my breath telling you.”

  Chapter 13

  Sarah was outraged when she heard that Oswald Mosley was to address a public meeting at the Manchester Free Trade Hall.

  “How can they let him?” she exclaimed incredulously to Mr. Greenberg the fishmonger when he told her.

  Mr. Greenberg wiped his wet hands on his striped apron, shoved his dusty Homburg hat to the back of his head and scratched his bald pate with a fishy fingernail. “Neville Chamberlain you should ask, not me.”

  “All he cares about is having his picture in the papers!” Sarah snorted. “With his famous umbrella! Instead he should use it to drive those Blackshirts into the sea.”

  Gittel Lipkin, Moishe’s mother, was prodding a haddock speculatively. “In England they believe in free speech,” she said rejecting the haddock and examining another one.

  “Like vonce sey did in my country,” a neatly-dressed young woman said from beside a box of mackerel. “Nobody stamped on se acorn, so it grew into un oak tree und now only von voice is heard.”

  Her accent marked her as a refugee. Her bearing, too, Sarah thought, noting the erect carriage and proud tilt of the chin she had come to associate with the German Jews who had sought refuge in Manchester. “You’re living round here?” she asked her pleasantly.

  “Unfortunately, yes.”

  Sarah exchanged a glance with Gittel and gave her attention to a tray of plaice. Gittel did the same with the haddock and they did not raise their heads until the young woman had left the shop.

  “Who does she think she is?” Gittel exploded the moment the door had shut behind her.

  “She works for someone with a lot of children, on Cheetham Hill Road, helping in the house,” Mr. Greenberg supplied.

  “For my part, I don’t care where such highty-tighty persons work. Or where they live!” Gittel said, slapping a huge fish on to the scales to be weighed. “Moishe’s at home this week, he’s only travelling in Lancashire,” she explained its size to Sarah, then resumed her tirade. “When they first started coming here I was sorry for them. But the way some of them behave it’s hard to be any more!”

  “They’re lucky they don’t have to live in a district like Strangeways, the way we did when we first came, and not know where the next meal’s coming from,” Sarah agreed.

  “So, they’re not like us,” the elderly fishmonger shrugged. “But how can you expect them to be? They haven’t come from little shtetlach with muddy streets and no running water in the house, like we did.”

  “In Dvinsk the streets were clean,” Sarah informed him. “And if you don’t include the Russians it was a very nice place.”

  “Us, we didn’t even have windows to look through,” Gittel declared as if Sarah hadn’t heard this a hundred times before. “And a lavatory chain, excuse me for mentioning it, we’d never heard of. Me, I’m not too proud to remember.”

  Mr. Greenberg was removing the haddock’s head.

  “I’ll take that for my cat,” she told him.

  “Don’t you always?” He gazed into the bulging dead eyes absently. “Everyone has their own memories, and what a person has to compare things with is bound to affect how they feel. For us, Mrs. Lipkin, what we came to was a step up in the world. For that girl who was just in here, it’s the other way round. A banker’s daughter she is, no less. She talked to me about herself one day. From a beautiful apartment in the best part of Frankfurt, where she never had to put her hands in water. Now she’s a maid for people her parents could have bought and sold. Such a comedown can’t be easy.”

  “Is that a reason for her to be rude to us?” Gittel demanded. “It’s our community she’s come into, isn’t it? And if she goes around saying to the goyim what she just said to us, it won’t do the Jews any good.”

  “Oy,” Mr. Greenberg sighed, wrapping the haddock in a week-old Yiddish Gazette from the pile of discarded newspapers his customers saved for him. “You remind me of my wife, Mrs. Lipkin. She won’t let me have the wireless on loud, in case it disturbs our Christian neighbours. It wouldn’t matter if we lived next door to Yidden, she always says.” He smiled wryly. “All these years our people have been in England and we’re still trying not to offend anyone.”

  Sarah flopped her selection of fish on to the counter. “That’s all we need worry about here, so don’t grumble.” But what the young German woman had said about letting an acorn grow into an oak tree had lodged in her mind.

  “Remember how years ago you told me not to worry about the Fascists because they weren’t very strong in England?” she said to Nathan the next time he called at the house.

  “How could I forget it?” he grinned. “We ended up with a full-blown family row.”

  “And also, indigestion,” Abraham recalled. “It was the day your mother served up a lecture about Hitler and Mosley along with our Rosh Hashanah dinner.”

  “A lot of effect my lecture had,” Sarah said scathingly. “All it did was turn David into a Zionist, so now he raises funds to make Palestine a better place for Jews.”

  “You don’t think that’s important in times like these?” Abraham asked.

  “Sure. But what is anyone doing to make certain English Jews will never need to run there? A handful of Blackshirts in London is nothing to get worked up about, you all told me that day we had the row. And a few years later, Mr. Mosely is coming to speak in Manchester, in a great big hall!”

  “Calm down, Mother,” Nathan said soothingly.

  “Your bedside manner you can keep for your patients,” Sarah retorted, putting the kettle on to the fire with a thud that sent sparks flying up the chimney. “What I want to know is are my family as blind now as they were then? And also, what that Blackshirt is coming here to say to the goyim about us.”

  “So, go to the meeting and you’ll find out.”

  “You want your mother should get beaten up by thugs?” Abraham said hotly. “When the Jews marched against the Blackshirts in Cable Street, Eli’s nephew, who lives in London, got his lip split open.”

  “And what did the Blackshirt who did it get in return?” Sarah said. “Tell Nat the whole story, like you told me.”

  “A broken nose.”

  “But a meeting is not a march,” Sarah declared. “And in any case, I’ve made up my mind I’m going.”

  Abraham mopped the beads of perspiration his wife’s announcement had caused to break out on his forehead. “What can we do with a woman like her?” he said helplessly to Nathan.

  “What you can do is go with me. And my grandchildren who are old enough can go also. It’s time they found out what being Jewish really means.”

  Sarah raised the matter at her next tea party and her daughter and daughters-in-law turned on her irately.

  She had waited for Esther to arrive from the shop, so the furore she knew was in store for her would not have to be repeated. But Rebecca, whose own child was not involved, was the first to snarl.

  “What kind of grandmother are you? Sending the lambs into the lions’ den!”

  “A Jewish face is like a red rag to a bull with those people!” Miriam said vehemently.

  “When they get their anti-Semitic blood up, they’re like mad dogs!” Bessie shrilled.

 
Esther had blanched at the mere thought of it. “We have to protect our children from those Fascist pigs,” she declaimed.

  Sarah surveyed their set faces and heaving, maternal bosoms from behind her teapot. She knew how they felt but did not allow it to deter her. “If you’ve all finished shouting about animals, we’ll talk about it,” she told them calmly, handing Esther and Ben their tea.

  “There’s nothing to talk about,” Esther said.

  “Pass your mam and dad the strudel,” Sarah smiled to Marianne whom the exchange had momentarily silenced as it had all the children.

  Esther pushed the cake dish away. “We don’t want anything to eat.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Ben said, taking a couple of slices.

  “How can you sit there stuffing yourself, with what your children’s grandmother’s got in mind for them?” she flashed irrationally.

  “I don’t have to lose my appetite over something that isn’t going to happen,” Ben declared.

  “Listen, a father isn’t a mother,” Bessie shrugged to Esther when David helped himself to some cake, too.

  “A grandma isn’t, either,” Miriam said pointedly.

  Sarah was brushing some crumbs off the white lace cloth that graced her octagonal tea-table on Shabbos. “My life I’d give for the children in this room,” she said quietly. “And everyone here knows it. So why do I want to take them into the lions’ den, which Rebecca called it – and she isn’t wrong? Because their elders can’t protect them forever. And how will they recognize the beasts who want to gobble Jews up if they haven’t seen and heard them?”

  “Photos of Blackshirts they can see in the newspapers,” Esther countered. “And the kind of things they say, I won’t stop my kids reading about.”

  “It isn’t the same,” Sarah declared. “They see photos of film stars, too, and read about them. But who thinks of film stars as real people?”

  “Zaidie Abraham does,” Ronald said emerging from his uncharacteristic solemnity and giving his grandfather a playful prod. “He goes to the pictures a lot.”