by Naomi Ragen
“So if the past doesn’t mean anything, why do you bother toiling away to change things? I mean, the minute you die everything you stood for and accomplished is going to become dusty and irrelevant anyway. I mean, why not just be like me? Get a good job, invest your money sensibly, buy a little place…? You know, like most people?”
For some strange reason, Suzanne couldn’t think of an answer.
“I’m falling asleep. That’s the effect alcohol has on me. Wake me when the food comes, will you?”
“You wouldn’t happen to have a copy of the memoirs on you, would you, Francesca?”
“Where’s your copy?”
She had a mental vision of a brown edge sticking out over a white enamel surface. “It’s in my luggage.”
“How could you travel without the itinerary? What if the luggage got lost? You wouldn’t know where to go or what to do.”
“I hate living that way, anticipating disasters.”
“You’re the piggy who built the house of straw, all right. Fine. I’ll give you mine, but don’t crease it or get it wet.”
“You’re still mad about that miniskirt I borrowed from you when we were in high school.”
“And the mohair sweater, and the silk blouse, and my Walkman…”
“All right, all right. I promise to take excellent care of it.”
“Here. Enjoy.” Francesca handed it over. “And now, if you don’t mind, I think I’ll just…” She yawned, folding her arms, closing her eyes, and twisting to find a comfortable place for her head. Her arm brushed Suzanne’s. “Know what, Suzy, I think this might be fun, don’t you? Like when we went to Niagara Falls, remember?” she said drowsily.
Suzanne looked at her. For all her competence and seriousness, and those uptight clothes, she was still a little kid.
“Sure. A barrel of laughs.” She leaned back as far as the seat would go and began to read.
It didn’t take her long. When she finished, she closed her eyes, her head pounding with a great avalanche of contradictory ideas.
As much as she fought it, she was strangely moved. Not just by the words, but by the whole idea of having a distant ancestor, who had lived, struggled, thought, and loved in a time so far past, in a world so very different. Someone who had passed down something of herself—at least genetically—to her and Francesca.
It was both predictably foreign (evil eyes, witchcraft, slitting of sheeps’ throats by Jewish scholars) and, at the same time, surprisingly familiar: Marriage is more than mutual desire—it is a partnership in which every member of the family, living and dead, takes part….
Obviously, it didn’t matter when they lived. Jewish mothers were always the same.
Family.
Everybody had one.
Like ear wax and belly-button lint.
She straightened the pages and put them carefully back into the envelope, brooding over Francesca’s question. If, indeed, the past had no meaning, why struggle so hard in the present, which would very soon became the irrelevant past?
The answer was, of course, that one’s own past was important. That’s all one had, really: what you’d thought, what you’d done. A person’s life was the sum of all those things. And of course the immediate past of those around you shaped the world one lived in.
The question was whether there existed such a thing as a shared and sacred past. Did history, the words and lives of ancient ancestors, really have anything of value to impart? What did it mean that all those things that people had been willing to die for were now barely remembered?
Was that progress? Or a terrible desecration?
She wondered.
She had come to a strange place in her life. It was like a sun-drenched forest clearing surrounded by an overgrown maze. She knew what she was doing for the moment: her job at the rape-crisis center, her boyfriends, her women friends, her causes. But she didn’t have a clue as to where it would all lead.
It would be something, she thought, to have a child, a grandchild—part of your own body and blood that would go on living long after you’d died. Perhaps that was the point: to direct your life’s work toward the unseeable future, for the benefit of the unborn. To keep the world, life, going.
“Is it cold in here?” Francesca murmured fitfully.
“Freezing,” Suzanne said, taking a blanket out of its plastic wrapping and tucking it tenderly around the almost childish breadth of her sister’s shoulders.
Niagara Falls. The mist, the powerful, awesome rush of cold water, and both of them in yellow raincoats on the Maid of the Mist, that tourist boat that took you under the falls into an astonishing silver haze of billowing, wet clouds. The dizzying step back, the sickening sense of falling hopelessly into the depths. And then—the benevolent forces, unseen, pulling you back. Francesca grabbing one arm, Gran the other.
Family.
12
Manuscript pages, handwritten, 23 × 33, unnumbered. Origin unknown. Circa 1570-1630(?). Private collection, Mrs. Anna-Laura Salvio, part of Solomon Dubno collection, acquired through auction by Ernst Salvio, Amsterdam, 1814.
How shall I make you hear it with my twelve-year-old ears, or feel it with the vulnerable softness of my twelve-year-old heart? I am not a poet, but a businesswoman, more comfortable with the simple grace of numbers that either add to profit or do not. Yet, even were I the most talented and sensitive of scribes, with words like shining orbs to illuminate all the dark corners of the firmament, still I could find no phrase befitting the wonder and horror of my family’s history, the path that led us to hide in cellars and celebrate in suffocating darkness.
I carry it with me always, the way one carries an unborn child, close to the heart. And, like a fetus, that knowledge, that history, rolls and kicks, keeping me awake when I am tempted to close my eyes and lean back, soft and vulnerable, to be charmed by dreams and confused by pretty faces and prettier words. It has kept my eyes and heart wise and sharp enough to perceive the outrage lingering in wait behind even the most skillful seduction.
When I was twelve years old, and thus responsible for my own sins, my mother—may her name and memory be blessed—led me down the secret passageway to our hidden rooms. There, by the light of a dozen candles, she gave me my history, beginning with the journey from Spain, and leading to the very day of my birth. Part of it I have already told you, my children. Here is the rest:
In 1493, Alvaro di Caminha was given the captaincy of São Thomé, an island off the coast of Africa. Islas Perdidas, the natives called it. And a cursed place it was! Burned by a pitiless sun, an abode to giant lizards, poisonous snakes, and crocodiles; home to criminals banished from the kingdom.
Wanting to populate his little kingdom, the captain proposed to King João that all the children of the refugees be seized and sent there to be instructed in the Christian faith. Undistracted by the influence of their Judaizing families, they would have no reason to question the truth of their teachings, and no opportunity for backsliding. This seemed to the King a worthy proposal. Too many of the children had failed to pay the head price, he claimed, and brought pestilence to the cities and countryside, filling Portugal with their graves.
My mother was not at home the day João’s soldiers came to the door. Through G-d’s guiding, merciful hand, she had gone with Alphonsa and Maria to gather olives in a far-off grove. Questioned by the soldiers, those good and faithful women had declared her their daughter and niece. And so she was saved from the fate of her cousin Joseph, whom the soldiers tore from his mother Constanza’s arms.
Grandfather Isaac took on the dangerous mission of traveling to Lisbon to enquire after Joseph and to win his release. But in the end, he could only stand in the harbor and watch as the ship set sail, little Joseph imprisoned with the others.
After that, nothing was the same. Peace, my family understood, was an illusion for those forced to squat on the head of a sleeping dragon.
All this happened years before my birth.
And yet, how ofte
n I have traveled with those motherless children to that cursed isle! I have seen their fragile white skin savagely burned by the sun, felt their bitter thirst and the aching of their hearts for their mothers and fathers. With them, have I taken the last stumbling, small steps down the gangplank to the island. My nightmares are filled with the terrible sound of the feasting, the crush of the small bodies in the pitiless jaws, the horrible spurts of innocent blood.
How can one explain it, that feeling in the heart that things that happened long ago are not merely a story well told, but the secret experiences of one’s own soul?
The ultimate retribution of our G-d may tarry, but is not to be denied. On the wedding day of Alfonso, João’s only son and heir, the King lived to see the child of all his hopes thrown from his horse and killed. Soon after, the King was himself struck down with a strange fever, which racked his body for many days before killing him.
My people rejoiced, not realizing that his successor, Manoel, would only deepen the horror.
And this is what happened next:
King Manoel wished to marry Isabel, the daughter of the Catholic Queen. Before she would agree—may her name and memory be blotted out for her sins and the sins of the evil mother who bore her—Isabel insisted that, if she were to be Portugal’s Queen, she could not abide Jews, Moors, or heretics in her kingdom any more than could her parents. Manoel, desiring both the dowry and the bride, complied, issuing his own Edict of Expulsion. It was no secret, though, that he was loath to lose the skilled newcomers and their wealth. Banking on their weariness, and on the terrors of sea travel facing them if they defied him, he expected the baptismal waters to fall gently on resigned heads.
He was, of course, mistaken. My grandfather bowed his head but not his back. Unlike Lot’s wife, he cast no backward glance of regret upon all he was once more forced to leave behind. His plan was to head for Lisbon and board a ship for the African coast, as King Manoel had promised to provide ships for all those who wished to leave.
Grandfather was not alone. And when Manoel saw the thousands of refugees determined to take leave of his dubious hospitality, his greed gave him the devil’s cunning, for only Beelzebub himself could have fashioned such a cruel and matchless snare.
[Next five pages unclear. Water damage.]
Gois, Damiano de Cronica de Felicissimo Rei D. Manuel. New edition according to the one of 1566. University of Coimbra. 1949.
Chapter XX: Of How the King Ordered That the Children of the Jews Who Were Leaving the Kingdoms Be Taken Away. And for What Reason He Did Not Do the Same to the Moors.
Many of the native Jews of the kingdom, and many of those who entered from Castile, took the baptismal water, and those who did not want to be converted immediately began to negotiate the things which befitted them for their departure and embarkation, at which time the King, for reasons which compelled him to do this, ordered that on a certain day the sons and daughters of these people under the age of fourteen be taken away from them and distributed among the villages and places of the kingdom where, at his own expense, they would be raised and indoctrinated in the Faith of Our Savior Jesus Christ.
This the King, along with his council, decided to do, being in Estremoz, and from there he came to Evora at the beginning of Lent in the year of 1497, when he declared that the assigned date would be Easter Day. Because of this lack of secrecy, it was necessary for the King to order that this execution should be immediately carried out throughout the whole kingdom, lest the Jews, by ways and means to which they could resort, secret their children out of the kingdom. [The decree and the haste of its execution] caused great terror mixed with many tears, pain, and sadness to the Jews, but also great astonishment and surprise to the Christians because no creature can endure, nor tolerate, to be separated by force from their children. Many Old Christians—moved by such compassion and mercy toward the screams, cries, and laments of the fathers and mothers whose children were being taken away by force—offered to hide the children in their houses so that they would not be taken away from their parents, saving the children even though they knew that they were doing so against the law and decrees of their King and lord.
The same law of nature led the Jews themselves to resort to cruelty. Many of them killed their children by throwing and drowning them in wells and rivers, and by other means, rather wishing to see them end this way than to be separated from them without hope of ever seeing them again, and by the same reason many of them killed themselves. While these executions were taking place, the King did not fail to take care of that which pertained to the health of the souls of these people, by which, compelled by mercy, he deceived them, without furnishing them with the boats he had promised for embarkation. Of the three ports of his kingdom which had been assigned for their departure, he closed two, ordering all to embark in Lisbon where he provided them with lodgings for shelter at Os Estaos and where more than twenty thousand souls were gathered. Due to these delays, the time which the king had assigned for their departure had passed, with all of them becoming prisoners there.
Many of the Jews, finding themselves in such a miserable state, entrusted themselves to the king [i.e., converted] so that the King returned their children, and promised them that for twenty years they would not be under official investigation about their beliefs. And to those who refused to become Christians, the King immediately ordered that they be given embarkation, ending the captivity imposed on them, and all of them crossed to the land of the Moors.
The reason that the king ordered to take away the children of the Jews and not the children of the Moors was that the Jews, by their sins, have neither kingdoms, nor domains, nor cities, nor villages, but they are—in all parts where they live—pilgrims and subjects, without having power nor authority to execute their desires against the injuries and evils done to them. But to the Moors, by our sins and punishments, G-d allows to occupy a great part of Asia and Africa and a good part of Europe, where they have empires, kingdoms, and great domains with many Christians living under their tributaries, besides many whom they hold as prisoners. For all of these [Christians] it would be very harmful to take away the children of the Moors….
Suárez, Fernandez Luis, Documentos Acerca de la Expulsión de los Judios, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, Valladolid, 1964.
Even after their children were seized, thousands of Jews persisted in refusing to be baptized. These were summoned to Lisbon by King Manoel, who pretended that he would allow them to leave on ships. Instead, they were herded into the barracks of Os Estaos, tortured, and starved. When after three days this still failed to win their consent to voluntary conversion, their bodies were tied up with ropes and they were dragged by their hair and beards to baptismal fonts. Many threw themselves into the sea, or into wells or from the tops of roofs….
And that is how my grandfather, my mother, my father, Aunt Constanza, her daughter, Elvira, and all the Jews of Portugal took the baptismal waters. But being forced, their conversion changed nothing in their souls and they continued to practice the religion of their forefathers almost openly, for the King—fearing their endless enmity—had promised them they would not be disturbed.
This, alas, was not to be.
In the year 1506, there was a drought and famine in the land. On April 19, Passover night, a family was found conducting a seder and eating matzoh. Preachers claimed this was the reason for G-d’s holding back the rain. To ask for G-d’s mercy, they constructed a crucifix from hollow glass and placed a candle inside. They told the people it would produce fire, proof of the great miracle, and that G-d would judge the Jews by fire.
A voice in the congregation rang out: “Would it were water and not fire, for it is water we need in this drought.”
The crowd, who recognized the speaker as a New Christian, and thinking he mocked them, tore him limb from limb, then burst from the cathedral, raiding New Christian homes, urged on by the priests who promised them one hundred days’ penance in the World to Come for every he
retic they killed. Three thousand died that night, including pregnant women who were thrown out of windows and caught on spears.
King Manoel put an end to it, and forty of the murderers were hanged.
But this was the end of the life aboveground for my family and the beginning of the windowless cellars filled with secret rituals. Children were sworn to secrecy and only instructed as to their true identity when they neared the age for marriage.
I try, sometimes, to imagine how it must have been for Grandfather. How his throat must have contracted when told to swallow the communion wine and bread! How his knees must have shaken as they crumpled beneath him, kneeling and bowing before figures of marble and wood, in bitter betrayal of all he held sacred!
The older I become, the more I understand the power of the wind into which he had lowered his proud, strong head. I understood the burden that had bent his back into a permanent curve of submission.
And yet, for all his weakness, he bequeathed to me a heart that remembers to beat with a steadfast pulse and eyes that cannot be deceived. And something of that unquenchable spirit that flowed through his veins flows through mine as well, sustaining the sacred, unshakable loyalty that has always informed my life and my deeds.
I know there are others who, sharing my history and ancestry, have nevertheless turned traitor. Indeed, they have become our people’s most despicable enemies. To my shame, I must admit that I have always understood them. For at first I, too, shed bitter tears over being one of those lowly people whom all despised. Only with time did I begin to fathom what a treasure had been bequeathed to me, and at what fabulous cost.