by Lois Ruby
But with school out and no chance of a job, I longed to see things outside the ghetto walls, so I began thinking of schemes to charm Ghoya. Erich had tried it the week before, and that turned out to be a disaster. He told me the sorry story as we were killing time. So much time on our hands.
Chang, the beggar whose territory was our lane, waited for us to pass, palm outstretched. Erich gave him the usual two grains of rice. To me he said, “Ghoya was in a rat-foul mood.”
“When isn’t he?”
“Worse than usual. Maybe he’d just eaten some spoiled sushi, or his wife had spent all his yen at the Race Course.”
“The toad is married? So, what lie did you feed him?”
“I told him, ‘I have to see Song Lingyu at the docks. He promised me a job,’ which isn’t true, but if I could get there and convince Song Lingyu to write a letter, that’s all I’d need.”
“Would a letter from Madame Liang help?”
“Are you crazy? Anyway, Song Lingyu wouldn’t have to hire me or pay me, just write the letter confirming that he had a job for me, and that would get me a work pass out of Hongkew.”
“Ghoya wasn’t buying it, right?”
We passed the table where Mr. Hsu ran his letter-writing business. He wore the long black gown and black skull cap typical of old China. An impatient line formed by his table, some people fanning themselves with blue envelopes to read, and others chomping to get their letters written.
“Man, Ilse, you should have seen the Little King.” That was our nickname for Ghoya. “He shouted, ‘Song Lingyu! Ghoya don’t like Song Lingyu!’ He started jumping up and down and calling me names in half a dozen languages. I tried to keep a straight face, but it was hilarious watching him dance around like Rumpelstiltskin. I couldn’t help it, I started laughing and couldn’t stop, couldn’t even catch my breath.”
“Oh, Erich! What happened?”
“Well, you do not laugh at this asinine little gnome.” My brother did his best to hold in howls of laughter; they exploded, anyway. Mr. Hsu looked up from his calligraphy, and all his customers stared at us loud westerners.
“No, you don’t laugh at the Little King,” I said, biting my lip. “Okay, so he didn’t give you the pass?”
“Worse. He put me on probation. I think he knows I’m the one who found Mr. Shaum. It’s a warning to me. I can’t apply for another pass for twelve weeks. But I have ways of getting out, and incidentally, I will personally strangle you if you try sneaking out yourself. Don’t be stupid like I am.”
“Dovid got out,” I said.
Erich registered only mild surprise. Maybe he already knew. “Lucky man.”
“I’ll never see him again. What about me? I’m the one that’s grieving.” I put my hands on my hips, elbows jutting out in indignation. “Erich Shpann, don’t you dare think about leaving me alone with Mother and Father. We’d never see you again. God only knows where Dovid’s gotten to, or if he’s still alive.”
“Lucky man,” Erich repeated, and I wondered if he meant lucky because he’d escaped or lucky because he was dead—which I refused to believe.
Father had very little paying work. The chamber quartet had disbanded. He still had two or three willing students but nowhere to teach them. Days passed and The Violin stayed in its case, propped on top of our rolled-up mattresses. Maybe Father would take it out and rub a little oil onto its belly, maybe tighten its strings; but he stopped playing, even at the free concerts. Instead, he sat by the hour in cafés grousing with other fathers who had no work. From Tanya I’d learned the Yiddish word mensch, man, but it meant more than that. It meant a real, full, functioning, righteous human being. I could hardly stand Father’s swimming in self-pity, and I’m ashamed to say, there were days when I just wanted to shout at my father: Be a mensch!
Not that Reb Chaim, the head of the Mirrer Yeshiva, was the perfect example of Jewish manhood, I quickly learned. He came to our house one afternoon while Mother was at Mr. Schmaltzer’s bakery. Although it was hot enough to burn your feet on the sidewalk, the rebbe wore a long black coat and a fur-trimmed black hat that covered his ears and floated on the edges of his bushy sideburns. He must have been sweltering, especially inside our airless little apartment. We’d scrubbed the window and pried it open, but you’d think it was an insult to its reputation to let a breeze waft in.
Father asked me to leave while he talked to the rebbe. I listened at the door, of course. After all, I was practically a trained spy, thanks to REACT—which hadn’t used me at all since I’d been in the ghetto.
Reb Chaim’s mission was almost too horrible to contemplate. He led a whole tribe of pimply, pious student scholars—future rabbis, no less! And they were all, as he said to Father, “in need of virtuous wives.” One had his eye on me. “His name is Shlomo Leibovitz. From very good stock,” Reb Chaim told him, as though Father were shopping for cattle. “But your lovely daughter—what is her name?”
“Ilse.” It sounded musical on Father’s lips.
“This is a Jewish name?”
“In Austria, yes,” Father replied.
“Austria, ah,” Reb Chaim said dismissively. “Reb Shpann, you’ve studied the holy books?” Fortunately, he didn’t wait for an answer, because Father was far from a scholar. “Ah, then you know that when the Holy One, baruch hashem, blessed be His Name, when He made the world, at the same time He matched all future brides and grooms. So your daughter, Ilse, maybe she meets Shlomo Liebovitz, and she doesn’t feel a spark. Not a problem. She can take her pick of a dozen of my boys, every one brilliant, I say with humility.”
Take my pick? I’d sooner jump in Soochow Creek. Father must have heard me groan outside the thin wall. He opened the door then and silently shook his finger at me, motioning me to go away so he could talk to the rebbe.
I waited in the lane until Reb Chaim left, then dashed upstairs to beg my father to be reasonable.
“Father, if you said yes, I’ll never forgive you. Never!” I shouted. I heard things go silent in the Kawashima apartment. It was their way of pretending they weren’t home when we had a family squabble. Calming down, I whispered, “Please don’t make me marry one of those rabbis. All they do is study, study, study. Please, anything. I’ll take up The Violin again. I’ll practice twelve hours a day. What did you tell him?”
Father wrinkled his forehead and gazed up at the ceiling. Oh, God, he’d promised me to one of those horrid boys; I was sure of it!
Then Father smiled mischievously. “‘Reb Chaim,’ I said—”
“Yes? Yes?”
“I told him ‘Thank you, my family is honored, but my Ilse makes up her own mind who she’s going to marry.’”
I leaped to my feet and hugged Father. It had been a long time between hugs.
“Violin lessons again, daughter? We can begin at once,” he teased.
The really odd thing was, Mother believed I should consider marrying one of those deathly students. “The yeshiva boys eat well, they have a nice roof over their heads—outside the ghetto, I might mention. They have winter coats, fur hats. They’re good boys, smart. Don’t thumb your nose at such things.”
“But they’re going to be rabbis!” I protested. “Besides, I’m only fifteen. Look at me, Mother. Do I look like a rabbi’s wife, really?” I made a face that brought laughter to Mother’s eyes, as she said, “Still, it’s not a bad prospect for a Jewish girl in China. We are Jews, I remind you.”
We were Jews, all right—especially to Hitler—but religion was a different matter. In Vienna we weren’t at all religious, and during our four years in Shanghai we’d only been to the synagogue once, on Pearl Harbor Day. Since we’d been penned in Hongkew, though, Mother had begun blessing Sabbath candles in halting Hebrew and talking about how we, too, should learn the Hebrew prayers of our ancestors. This religious awakening seemed to be happening all over the ghetto, and maybe it was comforting to some people in our dire circumstances, but marry a rabbi? That was going too far!
Tan
ya and I window-shopped along Chusan Avenue. We’d heard that the milliner had an exotic, new red hat in the window, perched on a blank-faced wooden head that someone forgot to give eyes and a nose and a mouth.
“Oy, the hat. So gorgeous,” Tanya said dreamily.
That’s how dull our lives in the ghetto were. A clutch of red felt, a tight ribbon bow, a couple of inches of netting, and a feather—that’s all it took to hold us enthralled at the window like spectators at a soccer match as the dummy head slowly rotated for our entertainment.
“Guess what, Tanya?”
“Hmm?” She had her nose pressed to the window to catch the hat at every angle.
“The rebbe from the Mirrer Yeshiva came to talk to my father about marriage.”
Tanya jumped back from the window as if I’d poked her with a stick. “You’re going to marry the rebbe? He’s at least fifty years old!”
“No, no, one of his ghostly boys.”
“But what about Dovid?”
“Who says we’ll ever see each other again? And anyway, I’m not going to marry the yeshiva boy.”
“He’s handsome?”
“How would I know? I never saw him, but he’s seen me on the street, and to hear the rebbe tell it, the boy’s totally love struck.” Okay, I was bragging, and pleased that Tanya fell for it.
“Oh, Ilse, that’s soooo romantic.”
“Romantic? Tanya Mogelevsky, look at me.” I slid between her and the window, blocking the hat. “Do I look like a girl who’d marry a rabbi? I’m not a bit religious, and we’d never, ever go to movies, because my brilliant husband would be studying a hundred hours a day, and anyway, movies aren’t allowed in the yeshiva world.”
“No movies? Well, I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it.” Tanya shouldered me away from the window and turned back to the hat. The peacock feather shimmered its rainbow colors as the dummy head turned. “I’ve given it a lot of thought.”
“Two seconds’ worth.”
“Enough to know what I’d do. I’d give up movies to marry a handsome, brooding rabbi.”
“Tanya, you can’t be serious!”
“Oh, yes, Ilse, very serious. I’ll make a wonderful rabbi’s wife. I’ll take care of everything so he can study as much as he likes. I’ll clean our cottage and cook delicious kosher meals and sew all his clothes after the babies are asleep. Lots of babies.”
“Sounds perfect … ly wretched,” I said, but she didn’t hear, because she was floating in her own dream.
“And I’m going to wear that gorgeous red confection under the chuppah on our wedding day, you’ll see. He’ll lift the veil and see my eyes, so full of love.”
I pictured the magnificent hat on Tanya’s profusion of black curls, its feather tickling the underside of the wedding canopy, and tried to dredge up some feeling of joy for my friend. Curiously, what I felt was … betrayed.
I told Erich about Reb Chaim and the yeshiva boy who had his eye on me. “Marriage to a scholar, it wouldn’t be so bad. At least you wouldn’t starve.”
“Erich!” I found myself drumming his chest with my fists, tears spilling down my hot face. So much to cry about. Losses piled on top of losses, and not a single gain. Erich let me carry on this way for a few minutes, then grabbed both my wrists and pulled me toward him.
“You’re a wreck since Dovid left. You’d be no good to REACT this way.” He paused, considering his next words. “I can’t stand seeing you so unhappy. A little brotherly advice? You need to get out of here. The King of the Jews, he has the key. Go get it.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
1944
I waited so long in the sun outside Ghoya’s office that I about melted into a puddle of hot jelly. But finally, a peek at the devil.
The loathsome man sat on the front of his desk, swinging his little feet. He looked cool, and why not? A powerful fan blew at him from each side, as if he were the meeting place of the east and west winds. Such extravagant cool air, and with electricity rationed for the rest of us! But the cool wind revived me, and I got to work trying to enchant the man, the way yogis charm snakes.
I smiled, waiting for him to speak. “Ilse Shpann, sir,” I answered when he asked my name.
“Ilse Shpann, it is supreme pleasure,” he said in his peculiar English where r’s were l’s, and vice versa.
He never asked me to sit down. “Kind sir, I need to visit a certain doctor outside, on Avenue Joffre.”
“You have many fine Jewish doctors in Hongkew.” He swung one ankle over the other knee. His eyes sparkled. The little reptile was flirting with me!
“Yes, sir, but I have a particularly delicate problem.” I let him draw his own conclusions.
“Ah, Ghoya understands. And not married?”
“No, sir.” I tried to look ashamed.
“This is a pity, such a pretty redheaded girl not married.”
“So, you can see why I must consult with this doctor at once, sir?”
“Doctor’s name?”
I handed him a slip of paper with the name and address of a German doctor, one of the refugees allowed to live outside the ghetto, since he’d come to Shanghai before 1939. Ghoya read it and read it, as though it were an indecipherable poem. Now his feet were together, swinging like a pendulum, with his heels thunking the desk.
He looked up at me with a zigzag grin. “Many pretty girls like you in Hongkew.” He smoothed back his greasy hair and pointed to my head. “Ghoya loves pretty girls with pretty curls. Ha-ha!” He laughed at his clever rhyme, eyeing me luridly.
I lowered my eyes as if his so-called compliment had enchanted me instead of turning me nauseous.
His eyes still fixed on me, he slapped the desk behind him, knocking over a fishbowl full of red and white wrapped candies. My mouth watered for just one of those peppermints and the feel of sticky candy lodged in my teeth. He left the peppermints spread across the desk, never offering me one, of course, while he located a pad, scribbled something in Japanese, and pounded it with a red stamp. Handing me a slip of paper, he said merrily, “Come back to see me. Ghoya likes redheaded girls!”
I’d charmed the snake into a one-month pass. As I backed toward the door—we weren’t allowed to turn our backs on Ghoya—he said, “You know the name REACT?”
My heart skipped about forty beats. “REACT, sir?”
He leaped to the floor, like a child jumping out of a swing. “Pretty girl like you don’t talk to REACT men. Bad men, stupid men.” He stared up into my face, his eyes cold and mean, then shouted, “Next!”
Mr. Schmaltzer generously gave Mother an hour a day to work at the bakery, but it was only a matter of weeks until he’d have to close. How could you run a bakery without flour or butter or sugar? And no one had money for his pastries, anyway. Even humble black bread was out of the reach of most of us. Instead of customers, Mr. Schmaltzer had flies and cockroaches and rats. Mother’s hour at the bakery was mostly spent sweeping up the droppings.
So, it was Mother’s hour at Mr. Schmaltzer’s, and as soon as Father went to join his fellow grumps at the cafe, I planned to flee Hongkew for a glorious day in the city. But before Father left, there came a knock at the door.
“Ilse, go and see who.”
It was Reb Chaim with a boy so thin, the rebbe could slide him under our door. As soon as the boy saw me, he cast his eyes to the back wall and pulled at his patchy beard with sinewy hands.
Reb Chaim blustered in. “You should excuse me, miss, your father is at home?” Well, it wasn’t like we had a gracious front hallway, with thick carpeting and flickering sconces. Reb Chaim could hardly overlook the fact that Father stood two feet away.
“Come in, come in.” Father jerked his head to remind me to vanish—this was man-to-man talk. I ducked into my corner of the room and dropped to the floor, with the sheet-curtain yanked around me. We called this privacy in the ghetto.
“Reb Shpann, let me not hit around the shrub,” the rebbe said in a conspiratorial whisper. “This is Shlom
o. I told you about him. You remember?”
“Yes, Reb Chaim, but I also told you my daughter has a mind of her own.”
“Of course, of course. What woman doesn’t? Our curse, ever since from Adam’s rib was formed Eve.” I heard him slap his knee, chuckling.
Father forced up a weak chortle. I peeked around the curtain. There was Shlomo standing in the center of the room, his hat brushing the fly trap that hung from the ceiling. Towering over Father and Reb Chaim seated at the table, Shlomo rocked to and fro, as if his feet were screwed to the floor.
“Reb Shpann, Shlomo is a very enlightened boy. A great scholar he’ll be someday. Already he’s memorized six tractates, and he studies fourteen, sixteen hours a day.”
Shlomo bent his chalk-white goose neck toward Father. His back was rounded from poring over the books so many hours. By the time he reaches sixty, I thought, he’ll be kissing his belly button.
He wasn’t at all like Dovid, who was so handsome with his back straight, his eyes dazzling, his cheeks smooth and rosy.
“Reb Shpann, here is the heart of the matter. Shlomo believes it is beshert that he should marry your daughter. You know beshert?”
“No, Reb Chaim, I do not,” Father said impatiently.
“Fate. Their marriage is ordained.” Reb Chaim looked up at the ceiling, then brushed his palms back and forth, as if to say, “See, Lord? We’ve taken care of that little earthly task for You.”
Father beckoned Shlomo to come closer, and the ghost shuffled over toward Father, who asked, “He speaks German, Reb Chaim?”
“Enough like Yiddish, he’ll understand.”
Father stood up and put his arm around Shlomo. I thought the ghost might flicker away with human touch. Father said, “I’m sure you’re a fine boy, a brilliant learner, and you’ll make a kind husband, but not for my daughter, you understand? With my daughter it is definitely not beshert.”
“So you say,” Reb Chaim singsonged like a warning. “Come, Shlomo.” At the door Reb Chaim said, “You’ll call me if you change your mind? You can find me at the Beth Aharon shul.”