Esfir Is Alive

by Andrea Simon

Six

  THE MEETING WAS held at the Zionist Center, a three-story building on Topolowa Street. It was a castle-like complex with an expansive courtyard where many events took place. At this time of the year, the guests gathered inside the main hall. A small lump of men stood by the entrance smoking cigars, but they may as well have been a hundred of them standing in the center of the room, because the dense fumes wafted inside and clung to the air like unlidded kettles of boiling cabbage.

  Dressed in a sweater and wool coat for the long walk to the Center, I was sweating since it was an unusually warm evening. Even though I was with Perl and the girls, I kept looking around for those rock-throwing boys.

  Once inside, I was in no mood to push through bodies to get a peek at the speakers. I was holding Perl’s hand, who was holding Ida’s hand, who was holding Freyde’s, followed by Rachel and the twins. Like a wired Chinese paper dragon that I saw in a magazine, we wound our way through the crowd until we condensed, accordion-style, to form a tight unit facing the stage. We were still in the back of the auditorium; at least we were close to the last row of seats.

  Some air must have come through the windows and leaked out under the closed curtains as they occasionally billowed out, but all I felt was the overwhelming oppression of stale breath, dank underarms, and coat residues of sulfuric stick matches and cigar ash. As we fidgeted, we all complained, except for Ida, whose olive skin was as smooth and cool and dry as the silk lining of my velvet muffler.

  I heard a woman address the audience in Hebrew. She was hesitant and hushed, and my Hebrew was not good enough to catch all the words without being able to see her lips so I missed most of what she said. I did get that she pledged her dedication to Palestinian settlement, calling for the participation of more women, and gave a schedule of future meetings. Then she introduced, “her good friend and comrade Menachem.”

  Suddenly, I got a jab at my side and Ida said, “That’s him. That’s Mendel!”

  “But the man’s name is Menachem.”

  “That woman, Shoshana, must have used the Hebraic name for Mendel. Shoshana is a Hebrew name, too.”

  Ida lifted me by the waist so I could see him, and I have to say I was surprised. The way the girls had spoken about him, I was expecting a movie star. He was nothing special. He had thick brown hair, tight to his scalp with a slight puffiness on top and a widow’s peak, and large ears that stuck out. His eyebrows formed a continuous line passing over the brim of his long and straight nose. Though he did appear neat, I had to admit, wearing a pressed white shirt, striped tie, and light-brown jacket. That’s it. He looked like any good Jewish boy, I mean “man.”

  We noticed empty seats as some people—maybe they had been with Shoshana—got up and walked toward the door. We snaked down the aisle and found seats midway to the stage. We couldn’t all be together, but I got to sit between Perl and Ida; the other girls were a few rows behind us.

  If I sat on my knees, I could see Mendel better. I was struck by his eyes: dark brown, set wide apart, and penetrating like darts that got you to stare him down. Mendel started out in similar soft tones as Shoshana, but in Polish, and I began to doubt his ability as a speaker. He discussed his brother’s life on a kibbutz in the Galilee region, when his eyes landed on Ida. Then he changed focus, his voice taking on a thoughtful, almost dreamy, tone.

  “My mother’s father was an orthodox rabbi,” he said, “who was deeply upset by the religious disillusionment of his daughter’s husband, my father. Later on, my mother, who tried to maintain a kosher home, lapsed into more secular ways. When I also abandoned my Talmudic studies and began to quote Karl Marx, my grandmother said she was glad her parents didn’t live to hear such a thing. It’s not easy being a disappointment to one’s close relatives—to those you love and respect. It still gives me great emotional pain. But I console myself with the realization that my parents were my first real teachers. They had the courage to thwart their tradition for what they believed in.” Mendel’s words were mostly right because Ida took careful notes and later copied and expanded them into the Journal of Important Words that she would give me.

  “As a young man,” Mendel explained, “I joined the Betar movement. I wore a uniform. I was drilled; I learned to shoot. I was ready for action in a way that was anathema to many of my relatives. I wanted to be a new kind of Jew, an independent and courageous person who could defend his people. Most of the youngsters in my neighborhood also joined, and we began to see the hopelessness of Jews living in the Diaspora, essentially nationless, who have been persecuted for generations.

  “And I am ready to go and fight for our people’s rightful land. My brother, who made his aliyah, his immigration to the Land of Israel, with the third major wave in 1924, has urged me to come. But first, he said, I must spread the word. I must gather more of us—our strong and able young people—to leave this land of oppression, which was never our true home.”

  He stopped to take a sip of water from a glass at the lectern. Nobody fidgeted, coughed, or whispered. Ida’s eyes were moist and transfixed. I could feel her breathing intensify, and I was afraid she would collapse in her chair and slide to the floor. This must have been how Perl felt when she heard Jabotinsky speak that night seven years ago.

  Then Mendel read a passage from Jabotinsky, whom he called, “the great Zionist visionary and warrior.” Mendel cleared his throat and his voice was strong yet soothing. “Jabotinksy wrote, ‘We are a people as all other peoples; we do not have any intentions to be better than the rest. As one of the first conditions for equality we demand the right to have our own villains, exactly as other people have them . . . . We are what we are, we are good for ourselves, we will not change, nor do we want to.’ ”

  Mendel ended with an excerpt from the great Yiddish writer, I.L. Peretz’s play A Night in the Old Marketplace, recited by the Jester:

  Life must be taken by force,

  And if you don’t have the strength,

  Pluck it from the cedar and the oak–

  Suck it from the juices of the grass–

  Steal it from the fire of the sun!

  Take from the lilies their white,

  From the roses—their red . . .

  Without waiting for the dying of the applause or for questions, Mendel did the strangest thing. He stepped off the stage and came to our row. Ida was in the aisle seat.

  “Come,” he said, now practically singing. He reached out his hand, spread his fingers, directing the pointer toward Ida like the picture of Michelangelo’s God that I saw in one of Ida’s art books. “Come,” he implored, “take my hand.”

  I felt Ida rise. She edged closer to him and stretched out her arm.

  “Yes,” he said fervidly, “yes, you, take my hand. Take my hand and lend your other hand to someone behind you. And that person lend a hand to another. Look at that person and without words, make a pledge: ‘We have work to do.’ ”

  A chorus echoed the words. Then the audience broke out in wild applause. I knew that Zionists were basically secular, but this exchange was the closest I had seen to a religious spell since I had attended a Hasidic shul with my devout cousin a year ago.

  Ida let her hand go from the human chain and fell into Mendel’s embracing arms. Perl reached out to Ida, tugging at her blouse. But Mendel led Ida down the aisle, passing the other girls.

  “Ida Midler!” Rachel screamed. “Come back here!”

  I didn’t know why Ida decided to listen to Rachel, a girl she distrusted. But she whispered something to Mendel and disengaged from him.

  We walked home after the meeting, each girl alone with her thoughts. After a while, Fanny complained that her feet hurt, and Rachel said the heat in that room was suffocating and she wouldn’t be caught dead stuffing herself in with all those smelly, poorly dressed people again. And Ida, oh Ida, Ida, Ida. She wouldn’t tell us how she felt for anything. She talked a little about having to improve her Hebrew, and that could mean only one thing to me.

  Later at Perl’
s, Rachel claimed that she prevented Ida from making a public spectacle of herself and from getting kicked out of school.

  “Don’t pretend that you care about me,” Ida said, touching her cheek where her rock wound was healing to a large scratch.

  “What do you mean pretend?”

  “I still can’t understand your friendship with those boys who hit us.”

  “They are not my friends. I don’t associate with people like that.”

  But Rachel didn’t fool us. We knew she had been up to something bad. We knew she was jealous, jealous so badly that she thrashed in her bed that night, making all kinds of sounds. I knew because Fanny grumbled that Rachel woke her up several times.

  From then on, there was a lot of talk about Mendel at the dining room table.

  Perl said, “I was very impressed with him and he almost lived up to Jabotinsky’s speech from my memory.”

  Liba, I think, suspecting that Ida was crazy about Mendel, wanted to help out her friend. She pried Freyde with more questions. “Come on, can you ask Yossel what he knows about the love life of our science teacher?”

  “Why are you so interested?” Rachel asked Liba. “You must have a crush on Mendel.” When I caught Liba winking at Ida, I was sure of her true intentions.

  But Freyde took her responsibilities seriously. She enlisted the least troubling girl, Fanny, and then went on a fact-finding mission; they would be the first ones to report to Ida. They would tell her as if they came across the information naturally, like maybe from Yossel, because they knew Ida would kill them if she knew their methods.

  Coming early to class, they began snooping around Mendel’s desk. They opened drawers and searched the laboratory area. When they heard someone opening the door, they got so scared somehow they knocked over chemical vials and there was a long bang with puffs of smoke. Thank God the person at the door was only Liba. The girls tried to clean up the spill, though the chemicals stayed on their hands. When Mendel came into the room, he wriggled his nose. “What is that smell?” he asked, narrowing his eyes and scanning the room.

  Fanny swallowed and raised her hand. Fredye glared at her and mouthed, “No, don’t.”

  Fanny said, “Mr. Feigen, I was thinking about crop rotation use in the Jewish community.”

  Freyde beamed. Just because Fanny was the docile twin, it didn’t mean that she couldn’t fling an arrow straight to the bullseye. And Mr. Feigen was like a noodle taking shape in boiling water, expanding and wriggling as the temperature got hotter. Before long, he was lecturing excitedly about “the necessity of water utilization schemes in the semiarid land of Palestine.”

  The girls were lucky then, but they scrubbed their hands repeatedly when they got home. I overheard one interesting tidbit of information. Fanny told Freyde that she did see some papers in his desk drawer, and there was a note with the name of Ida Midler and it was circled. I didn’t know how they were going to pass this information to Ida, but I had no doubt they would think of something.

  Seven

  THE DAY AFTER the Zionist meeting, Perl invited me to have a glass of tea with her in the living room. It was early afternoon. As an extra treat, she brought two plates, each with a rugelach. I just adored that little crescent-shaped pastry. This version was stuffed with apricot preserves, raisins, and almonds. She had been practicing for Chanukah, when she would present a basket, covered with a red-and-white checkered dish towel. Underneath, there would be the “cookies” with different experimental fillings.

  “Esfele, sit,” Perl said, patting the couch pillow next to her. “Nu, es!” She ordered me to eat, not that I needed a push. I felt so grown-up sitting with her as if we were about to discuss world affairs. After I had a bite of the rugelach, careful not to gulp down the whole thing, she asked me if I was happy with her.

  I couldn’t tell her that I was terrified of going to the park and those rock-throwing boys. I didn’t confess my fear about my father’s health and the well-being of my family. So I said, “Yes.”

  “Childhood should be happy,” Perl said, her eyelids fluttering as if she were drifting to sleep, “and I loved growing up in Brest.”

  “How was it?” I asked.

  I didn’t know much about those years; my mother didn’t speak about Brest. She had tried to make Kobrin, my father’s birthplace, her home and pointed out its virtues to us children, especially to me, at every opportunity. Seeing how I was drawn to Brest, she tried to brainwash me against it, which is funny because she’s the one who sent me to stay with Perl in the first place.

  Perl began her story. “When I was your age—yes even I was once young—at the beginning of the century, a million years ago, rich Jewish merchants would sit on the balconies of their newly built homes on warm summer days, drinking tea from samovars. Before the Great War, there were silent movies at the beautiful theatre, elegant shops displaying fruits and cakes, teahouses with cool cellars and gypsy violinists playing Russian songs.”

  With this memory, Perl closed her eyes and hummed a melody. I didn’t question her; it seemed private.

  “The old marketplace used to be busy during the week with Jewish shops on all four sides, overflowing with the best. I loved this tiny, old woman’s potato cakes—hot, hefty, and steamy.”

  “It sounds delicious,” I said.

  “I never could replicate them with my latkes.”

  I suddenly longed for a latke. We were a few weeks from Chanukah; I couldn’t wait.

  “As a family,” Perl said, “we had bopkes, nothing, compared to these rich people. We didn’t know we were any different.”

  “And now?”

  “Nowadays, everyone has bopkes. As you know, the Jews close their stores on Saturdays. With the new laws, they are not allowed to operate on Sundays, too. So they have less business, and their shops may as well be branded with the Jewish star. And the markets today, you’re lucky to find a ripe tomato and everyone is suspicious of everyone.”

  “Not everything is different,” I said, feeling the need to justify our current life like Fanny often did.

  “Before the Russian Revolution of 1917, during the tsarist regime, there were political rallies and speakers and singing of revolutionary songs. Jews, from the wealthy to the poor, gathered in plazas and parks. Girls even recited the poetry of Pushkin and Lermontov. It was a world, then,” Perl said in a sad voice. “Like always, there was Jewish suffering. But we were gay and full of life. Now, you know this already, is not a good time for Jews.”

  I knew we were poor, too, I mean this is why I went to live with Perl. Unlike how Perl was in her youth, my family felt it. Perl’s memories were making me even more worried about them. I wished I had been born when Perl was a girl.

  “Enough with the stories,” Perl said with a sigh. “Esfir, you do this to me all the time, with your questions. I have things to do.”

  I didn’t contradict Perl. I had only asked her two questions. She was like the samovar—all you had to do was turn the spigot and she poured out her heart.

  PERL DID ERRANDS and when she returned, I helped her change the sheets and towels. Before we knew it, the girls arrived. Rachel zoomed past us, announcing that she had to pee badly; Freyde sifted through the mail, piled on the parlor table, always anxious to hear from her parents; Fanny grabbed Perl’s untouched rugelach on the table; and Ida ran upstairs, motioning Liba to follow. I was as invisible as a bat in the evening.

  I went upstairs, planning to open my Journal of Important Words and write down some of the ones that Perl mentioned like Lermontov and tsar. Ida would surely admire my new vocabulary. I didn’t get the chance then because the door to my room was closed and I heard Liba and Ida talking. I didn’t catch everything but I understood enough. It seemed that Yossel met Liba outdoors during lunch break and invited her for a short walk. Behind an oak tree, he kissed her.

  The girls’ voices got softer. I could hear Ida ask, “How was it?” followed by murmurs. Finally, Ida screamed, “Esfir, if you’re out there, I a
m counting to three, and you’d better be gone.”

  I probably made some noise, but then I tiptoed down the hall, slipped inside Fanny and Rachel’s room, and closed the door. Thank God Fanny was alone. “What is it?” she asked, sitting on her bed reading a geography schoolbook.

  “Oh, nothing,” I said. “I just wanted to know if you need me to do anything.”

  “That’s nice of you, Esfir,” Fanny said. “I don’t need anything now.” Then seeing my scrunched face, she said, “But I could use a little company. Come sit with me and I’ll show you the map I’m studying.”

  I didn’t report that right now her twin was scheming with my “big sister” about boys.

  After dinner that night, Perl asked me to help her with the dishes. She dismissed the other girls, making it clear she wanted to have a special word with me.

  “Esfir, I spoke to your mother on the phone at the post office.”

  “When?”

  “After our tea.”

  “What did she say? How is my father?”

  “He is getting back to normal. Everyone is fine. But we discussed something about you.”

  “What? What did I do?”

  “Nothing, Esfir. Why must you always think the worst? When you came to stay with me, we thought it would be for a short while. Now, since your father is still a little weak and your mother helps him more, we thought you cannot stay with me this long and do nothing.”

  “But I don’t do nothing. I help you. And Ida teaches me. I’m learning more than I would in school.”

  “Yes, Ida has been wonderful. She has gone way beyond my wishes.”

  “Your wishes?”

  “When Ida became your roommate, I asked her to take an interest in you.”

  “An interest?”

  “Why are you repeating what I’m saying? An interest isn’t a bad thing. You are very young and here without your family, children your age. It’s good to have an older person watch out for you.”