by Maisie Mosco
“What, for instance?”
Nathan smiled. “I don’t blame you for asking. The only aspect you’ve experienced is the pain one of our laws causes those whose hearts come into conflict with it. And nobody knows better than me how that can cloud a young person’s judgement and make the whole thing seem nothing but strictures. I was affected that way myself once. Everything but that one aspect was blocked out of my mind.” Nathan studied his fingernails reflectively. “For two pins I’d have rejected Judaism. But I’m older and wiser now. I’ve learned it can’t be done. No matter how your brain tells you you’re not chained to it, there’s something that holds you fast.”
“Nobody could be as close as I am to Marianne without being aware of that,” Ralph said. “Only I’m damned if I know what it is. Maybe you can tell me?”
“I’ll try.” But how do you explain the intangible? Nathan mused. The indefinable feeling that encompassed your life. His thoughts roved to his childhood. Was that where it began? How did he know? It wasn’t something you were consciously aware of, but when you looked back as he was doing now, you knew it had always been there. Like an invisible blanket warming you. As a child, he’d felt it all around him and been comforted by it. Not until he grew older had it begun to stifle him. The indefinable something had a claustrophobic quality, too. But that didn’t stop you from gathering the blanket close around you in your bleak moments. How often had Nathan feasted his memory on its multi-patterned folds? His mother’s home with the Shabbos candles alight on her white-clothed table, come what may, every Friday night. His father blessing the wine with the Kiddush Prayer. All the timeless traditions they had passed down to their children to be respected in their family life; as their own parents had done with them. The Passover, with young and old gathered around the Seder table reading the story of the Exodus from Egypt, though centuries had passed since then. Rosh Hashanah, when Jews the world over celebrated their New Year. Yom Kippur, when they went without food or drink to atone for their
sins and returned home from shul cleansed in spirit to break the Fast with their loved ones. And the colourful Harvest and Tabernacles Festivals, celebrated amid fruit and flowers in synagogues alive with rejoicing.
“I’m waiting to be enlightened,” Ralph said, prodding him out of his thoughts.
Nathan felt as if he had been making a mental inventory of Jewish traditions. But reeling off the list to Ralph would not explain the feeling they evoked, or the special sense of belonging of which they were a part. “It can’t be put into words,” he said wryly. “You have to be Jewish to understand. But believe me, it has its compensations.”
“In that case I’ve got something to look forward to,” Ralph answered.
They got up to leave and Nathan put a friendly hand on his arm. “There’s the other side of the coin, too, Ralph. So don’t go rushing into conversion. Make sure the strange garment you’re thinking of donning is one you’re prepared to be seen in before you decide to wear it.”
Nathan remained in London long enough to see his niece married by special licence.
“Thank you for standing by me, Uncle Nat,” Marianne said when they emerged from Kensington Register Office into the July sunlight.
He kissed her affectionately. Less like a bride she couldn’t have looked, he thought, contrasting her simple navy-blue crêpe frock with the froth of lace Shirley had worn under the Chupah. But for Marianne there had been no marriage canopy. And no loving relatives around her to wish her well. Her Uncle Joe Klein was away on an assignment and her brother Arnold on holiday in the depths of Cornwall, where she was unable to get in touch with him. They would certainly have stood by her but were family pariahs as she now was herself. It was the blessing of those who would not give it that her heart sought and Nathan’s own hardened against them.
He watched her tilt her little red beret defiantly forward as they waited for a taxi to take him to Euston.
“Trust me to get married in a register office that’s in the grounds of a hospital!” she said dryly, glancing up at the windows of St Mary Abbot’s. “We should have waited till the spring, Ralph. Then you could’ve dropped me off to give birth after you’d put the ring on my finger.” The gamine grin that had briefly lit her face disappeared and she stared down at the gardenias Ralph had given her, twisting the stems with trembling fingers.
Ralph put his arm around her. “Brides are supposed to be happy, sweetheart.”
“I am,” she said, standing on tiptoe to kiss him. “But how can I help being sad, as well?”
Her poignant expression haunted Nathan throughout his journey home. What was that phrase his mother was always coming out with? The bitter with the sweet. An apt description of Marianne’s wedding day, he thought grimly. According to Sarah Sandberg, it epitomized the whole of life and you were lucky if yours was flavoured with both in equal proportions. She viewed happiness as if it arrived by accident. Maybe it did, but too often it was design that snatched it away from you. The ruthless engineering of others.
A cheerful cockney steward popped his balding head around the compartment door. “’Arternoon tea is now bein’ served, ladies an’ gentlemen!”
Nathan watched the portly man seated opposite heave himself up and lumber away to the dining car. A straw-hatted lady left close on his heels, smoothing her skirt over spreading hips. Nathan was tempted to follow them and comfort himself with the LMS Railway’s generous carbohydrate repast but resisted the urge. As you grew older, it was easy to take the road to avoirdupois, let sugar and stodge appease hungers that had no connection with your digestive tract. As his brother David’s burgeoning paunch all too amply illustrated.
He rested his head against the linen antimacassar behind it and closed his eyes, but his mother’s bittersweet recipe for life had lodged in his mind and gave him no peace. He would have no cause for bitterness if his family hadn’t made it so. And no gall would have diluted Marianne’s joy today, but for them. To spare her the initial explosion that would follow their learning of her marriage, he had elected to drop the bombshell himself and had instructed her to arrive with Ralph at this week’s Shabbos gathering. But not until it was almost over. After Nathan had said the things that must be said, which weren’t for her ears, or her Christian husband’s, he thought grimly.
He would not have any of the younger generation present to team of the conniving of which some of their elders were capable; of the damage it had wrought over the years. That the grandmother they worshipped was a master puppeteer; and David, whom they respected, her chief assistant, though he had been manipulated by her himself. Why should the kids have to know their idol Sarah Sandberg had feet of clay? Let them keep their illusions, time enough to lose them when they grew older. He had lost his own too soon.
As the train drew nearer to Manchester, the scene that would be enacted in his mother’s parlour on Saturday began to unfold in Nathan’s imagination. But the trepidation with which he approached any kind of collision with the family had always affected him that way. When he’d contemplated marrying Mary, he had imagined the Sandbergs sitting Shivah for him; finalizing his severance from the tribe with the rituals performed after a death, as had been the custom in those days.
In his mind’s eye now, he could see his sister Esther. Superimposed on the stout lady who had just returned to her seat and was taking a packet of indigestion tablets out of a lizard-skin handbag. Beside Esther, Ben was mopping his brow and his mother and David standing imperiously on either side of them. How would you like it if we took such a thing upon ourselves with your daughter? he could hear his sister shrieking. It will never be necessary, he would reply. With quiet dignity. His home truths would have been delivered before then. Because I’ll never stand in the way of my daughter’s happiness, he would declare finally. And that about summed it up.
The images flickered out abruptly and Nathan transferred his gaze from the stout lady’s pink tongue curled around a bismuth tablet to the newspaper he had not yet unfolded. How
many days had he been away? Out of routine, he’d lost track of time. He noted it was Wednesday 30 July. And that the strife in Palestine was escalating.
The inner conflict such headlines aroused in him made itself felt, but he stamped it out. What could the English Jews do about it? Except feel embarrassed. You got hot under the collar when you read what the Irgun were doing, but your own troubles took precedence over things that didn’t affect you directly.
Now, Nathan had shouldered Marianne’s, too. And would reap the consequences of his complicity. Why did the prospect no longer fill him with apprehension? A moment ago, when he was rehearsing his side of the confrontation, he’d been sick with it. Practically shaking in his shoes, like the time he’d faced David about not wanting to study medicine. But the dread had suddenly left him. Been purged from his spirit as if by some cathartic exercise.
Could it be that what he was doing for Marianne was, in effect, also for himself? For which he had not found the courage years ago? No matter. He had found it now. His fear of the family had been switched off with the images that had accompanied his final bout of it. He would never be afraid of them again. Nathan Sandberg had just been reborn. On a train speeding through the dingy perimeter of his native city. What was that his alter ego was saying? Albeit too late.
Chapter 6
The day after Nathan’s return home, the world awoke to the news that two British Army sergeants had been hanged by the Irgun Zvai Leumi.
“The Government won’t give in and move out the troops because of this,” David prophesied to Bessie over the bagels and jam for which they had just lost their appetite. He pushed his plate away and drank some tea. “How would it look if they did? The UN Assembly’s had a special session about Palestine. The whole world is waiting to see if Mr. Bevin can get the better of Menachem Begin.”
“Don’t mention that name to me!” Bessie exclaimed with revulsion. “I get the creeps every time I hear it.”
David was no less appalled than his wife. But this did not blind him to the Palestine situation in its entirety. “Which of the two names I’ve just mentioned do you mean?” he asked, though he knew. “The British sent three Irgun lads to the gallows the day before yesterday, don’t forget. They weren’t the first and the Irgun warned there’d be retaliation in kind if it happened again.”
“Two wrongs don’t make a right,” Bessie retorted.
“Have I said they do? But I have to ask myself what the British are doing there. It’s time they got out and left Palestine to the people it was promised to. And not just by God. You’d think there’d never been a Balfour Declaration the way Bevin’s behaving. And now he’s afraid to admit he’s bitten off more than he can chew. It was a bad day for Jewry when he became Foreign Secretary!”
“I can do without a lecture, thank you! My head’s aching,” Bessie said sourly. “And I’m not looking forward to the dirty looks I’ll get from the goyim when I go shopping this morning. Take the morning paper to work with you, I don’t want Lizzie to see it.”
Bessie’s sentiments epitomized the feelings of the Jewish community. They shared their Gentile neighbours’ horror about the hangings, but for them there was an additional dimension. The act had been perpetrated by their own brethren against soldiers of the country of which they were loyal citizens.
The gruesome, full-length picture of the two sergeants strung by their necks, that filled the front page of the Daily Express, was all too graphic evidence.
“Jesu, Mary’n Joseph,” Bridie whispered, crossing herself when she saw it.
“But it isn’t my fault, is it?” Leona said to her defensively.
Bridie removed her stricken gaze from the picture. “However cud it be, peteen?”
Leona refolded the newspaper with page one hidden inside, but this did not erase the hideously dangling figures from her mind. Why did the Express have to print it? The Manchester Guardian, which the family also took, hadn’t. “Some people will behave as if it is,” she answered Bridie. “Just because I’m Jewish. There’s a girl in my class I don’t get on with very well and once, when we had a bust-up, she accused me of killing Christ.” Why had she suddenly remembered that? Because it was the same kind of thing.
Bridie was clearing Nathan’s end of the breakfast table and clattered the toast rack on to her tray indignantly. “I nivver heard anythin’ so daft in me whole life! Anyone who’d lived wi’ ye since ye were born like I have’d know ye couldn’t kill a fly!”
“You’re like one of our family, Bridie. But – forgive me for saying this – most Christian people lump all Jews together. We all get the blame for everything.” Leona stared pensively through the window at the blaze of marigolds bordering the lawn. “I’m glad it’s the summer holiday and I don’t have to go to school today.”
“Why’s that?” Rebecca inquired, entering the room in her housecoat. “Make me a pot of coffee, will you, Bridie dear? I took a sleeping pill last night, that’s why I overslept. You didn’t answer my question,” she said to her daughter.
Leona unfolded the Daily Express and showed her the front page.
“Oh my God,” Rebecca breathed, avoiding Bridie’s eye.
But the shock and shame combined that summed up English Jewry’s feelings did not prepare them for the anti-Semitic backlash that followed.
Nathan and Lou emerged from their surgery that morning to find that their car tyres had been slashed. And Sigmund Moritz had an experience that left him trembling.
“We’re full up,” the conductor barked when he was about to board a bus to the city centre. “Why don’t you get on a boat to Palestine instead?”
Sigmund abandoned his errand and went to share his indignation with Sarah.
“Me, I didn’t have to go out of the house to get it,” she said after he had told her. “The window cleaner gave me a taste of it here! He doesn’t know how much longer he can go on cleaning Jewish windows, he said to me. ‘A pane of glass has a religion all of a sudden?’ I asked him. But my heart was thumping fifty to the dozen.”
Sigmund sipped the lemon tea she had made to calm his nerves and her own. “Only last year they finished trying the criminals at Nuremberg,” he reflected. A long sigh escaped him. “The holocaust outraged the whole world, Sarah. But the instinct to take it out of us is still there.”
Sarah put down her glass of tea and busied herself preparing to make her gefilte fish. “Isn’t that the reason Jews stick together? Who else dare we trust? It’s what I told Marianne when she said it isn’t right that we do.”
Sigmund snorted irascibly. “Marianne is another Hannah! Until we stop sticking together, our troubles will never end, my daughter-in-law says. Intermarriage she believes in, even.”
“And a few generations from now there wouldn’t be any Jews!” Sarah exclaimed tartly. “A solution like that to our troubles we can do without.”
Trouble met David the moment he entered his factory. He had called to see his accountant en route and did not arrive until mid-morning.
“Myrna and Joyce are waiting to give you their notice,” his secretary greeted him. “I’ll give you three guesses why.”
“I’m not in the mood for guessing games, Rita.”
“In that case I’ll let them tell you. I might gag on the words if I tried to.” Rita knocked on the glass partition and beckoned the two girls, who were standing sullenly in the workroom.
David sat down at his cluttered desk. Why did he have an uneasy feeling? Because of the way he’d started the day. And as a rule, notice wasn’t handed in until Friday evening.
“What’s all this about?” he asked when the stony-faced young machinists entered.
“Me brother’s in’t regular army,” Joyce informed him.
“I beg your pardon?” It took a moment for the implications of what she had said to sink in.
“But I won’t work fer Jews anyroad after what’s bin done by ’em t’our lads,” she added defiantly adjusting the purple scarf that did not quite hide her fr
inge of steel curling pins.
“Nor me neither,” the other girl declared.
“Suit yourselves,” David answered curtly. But his innards were churning with something akin to distress. Joyce and Myrna had worked for him since they left school. It was like finding out you’d been nursing a couple of vipers in your bosom for four years.
“Good riddance is what I say,” Rita told them.
“An’ we’d say t’same if you lot went back ter wherever it were yer come from,” Myrna retorted.
David felt as if he was having a bad dream. His tongue had cloven to the roof of his mouth and he could not speak.
“So now yer know,” Joyce said cheekily.
“Make up their pay packets,” David instructed Rita. “With an extra week’s money in lieu of notice. They can leave right now. I don’t want to see them again.”
He got up and went to the pressing room to make sure he would not have to, thankful that Shirley and Peter were away on holiday. His daughter might have torn the two girls apart.
“Oy,” Abraham sighed when David recounted the distasteful incident. “So what can you do?” he added inevitably.
“I’m beginning to think there’s nothing we can do,” David answered. He watched his father hang up a coat that was one of the new autumn range. The room was large and airy and equipped with modern presses. But the atmosphere was steamy nevertheless and did not help Abraham’s chronic bronchitis.
How many years had he watched this stubborn old man labour? Listened to the phlegm rolling around on his chest? Since David was a lad and they’d worked together in Isaac Salaman’s filthy sweatshop. Factory conditions had changed since then, as had the family’s fortunes. But for David, the journey over the years seemed in retrospect all uphill. He had clawed his way to something better. And until a few minutes ago had thought things that had nothing to do with material achievement had changed for the better, too. But some people were still only too ready to turn on the Jews. As if it was bred in them and that, nothing could change.