Esfir Is Alive

by Andrea Simon

  My father was shoveling a path leading behind the house to a shed that stored firewood, and farther back to a small stable where Ben was protected from the elements. The way the horse was breathing was scary. My mother, Sheyne, stood in front of the house, screaming at my father, “Avrum, you’ll get another heart attack. Let Velvel do it.”

  Velvel, a walking snowman, grabbed the shovel from my father and took over without a word. My father, already hunched, looked like he was shrinking before my eyes.

  “Come in, come in,” my mother said, sweeping her arm as if to include all the neighbors. “You’ll catch your death from this weather.”

  We huddled in the hallway. My father put his wet coat and hat on hooks and took off his boots. He was panting and my mother yelled, “Rivke, bring your father a glass of water. And Drora, why are you standing there like a dummy? Can’t you see that your aunt and sister are wet also? Help them with their clothing.”

  Drora scrunched her thin lips, stood straight, and was even taller than she was when I left only a month and a half ago. Her saddle-brown hair was pulled back in a neck scarf, and I noticed that she had red pimples on her chin. When Rivke returned, I was so happy to see her round dimple-cheeked face and long rusty braids that I almost ran up to her, but I was stopped by her serious expression. She didn’t even look at me.

  Perl ignored all and said, “Who’s bringing us glasses of tea to warm our bones?”

  I gripped her hand, still afraid that my family was no longer my family. After Rivke gave the glass of water to my father, she ran to me and twirled me in a circle.

  “Oh Esfir, you look so grown up. I’ve missed you so.”

  In the train, I had decided I wouldn’t cry when I saw my mother. I wanted my family to think I was mature now that I spent time in the big city. It was no use. Another squeeze from Rivke and I was a blubbering fool, going around and hugging Drora, my mother, and, when I was about to approach my father, Velvel came through the door. He shook off the snow, hung up his coat and hat, and, without even taking off his boots, yelled, “Come here, feygele, give your old brother an official hug.” Little bird was his pet name for me. I looked at my father, who should have been next, but he went to the parlor.

  My mother screamed, “Avrum, aren’t you going to welcome Esfir home and say something to Perl?” I couldn’t believe my mother had such chutzpah. Usually, she deferred to my father and never said such brave things to him, especially in front of the family.

  There was no answer from my father. He looked very sad.

  When he was at his peak, my father was a master of all timepieces. He had a collection of antique parts and made new ones. He could not only fix old wristwatches and pocket watches and just about make them from scratch, but could repair a variety of clocks, the bigger the better for him. He had studied old drawings of clocks’ insides and memorized the intricate pieces and mechanisms.

  Nothing could give him more pleasure than to work on an old grandfather clock. One time he showed us a color drawing of an eight-foot cherry beauty he’d seen at a rich mansion in Pinsk. He had been intrigued with everything, from the massive shiny brass circle pendulum behind the beveled-glass panel in its coffin-like case, to the split swan-neck pediment crown adorned with elaborate carvings, to the golden clock face with black Roman numerals. I saved a magazine drawing of a similar clock that I found in one of Ida’s magazines and glued it into my journal. I liked to smoothe my fingers over the polished wood as if the real object was in front of me.

  I had been taken by this clock, more by its name and size than anything else. We had such a small house, I couldn’t imagine fitting one anywhere. Once I asked my father if there was a grandmother clock, too. You can imagine the laughter from my sisters and brother.

  “Don’t laugh at your sister,” he had said, chuckling with superiority. “There is a grandmother clock—anything over five feet. And believe it or not, there is a granddaughter clock that is smaller than five feet. The big daddy, over six feet tall, is the grandfather—as it should be called.”

  This was the one—and maybe only—time my father came to my defense.

  I had been curious about other members of the tall clock family, like about the grandson, but I didn’t press my luck. I sensed my father’s patience with explanations fading and I basked in my righteous rightness.

  From that moment on, I tried to learn as much as I could about the strange objects that made up my father’s trade. In his shop, there were lathes, tiny wheels, pinions, hairsprings. These miniature circles and gears fascinated me. When he’d bring such treasures home, my father studied these internal workings with intense concentration. His was a tiny world of ticking motion and he had the power to literally stop time.

  That afternoon, when I was in the kitchen with Drora, I learned more. She said that my father rarely went to his watch-repair shop. Occasionally, he attended one of his meetings in the big building with all the groups on Tragota Street. He had been a prominent secretary in one of them; I didn’t remember his organization’s name, but it had to do with going to Palestine.

  Before his heart attack, my father was the busiest person, not only as a respected watchmaker and secretary to the settlement group, but as secretary to a Jewish trade union and a local Jewish sports club. My mother had called him the “Number-One Secretary.” He had a different brown ledger for each group.

  If he still held those titles, they were dwindling to name only. The ledgers were gathering dust under a stack of magazines. Nowadays, my father sat in his big brown chair in the parlor, reading the Yiddish weekly newspaper, his favorite the Kobriner Wochenblatt.

  I didn’t see my father leave the house that first night we were home. But I was reading in the parlor when he came in the door. Hurriedly, I went to get him a blanket while he sat on his chair, returning to hear my mother yelling at him for giving money to the Jewish National Fund, which developed and bought land in Palestine for Jewish settlements.

  “Settlement, schmettlement,” she said, “people are hungry here, in this settlement, in this street, in this house!”

  My father didn’t respond; he reeked from shnaps.

  PERL USUALLY STAYED at my mother’s parents’ (Yankel and Elke) house a few streets away. They lived with my mother’s middle sister, Khane, and her three children. Feeling that my mother could use her help, Perl now slept on the couch in our parlor, which made my father even more grouchy since he couldn’t sit in his favorite chair whenever he wanted.

  Perl was her cheerful self and wouldn’t let anything or anyone spoil her holiday spirit. Before she went to bed, she came into our attic area carrying her thick cloth satchel. “I’m putting this in the corner,” she said, “and if anyone opens it, they’re going to get a knock in the head.”

  “Your things are safe with us,” Rivke said, giggling. “Though my little sister here has been known for her nosiness.”

  I hit Rivke with a pillow.

  “So Aunt Perl, how do you find our father?” Drora asked. Rivke took an intake of air and her face suddenly hardened.

  “I find him in your house?”

  “No, seriously Aunt Perl, he isn’t himself.”

  “Maybe Papa is just saving his strength,” I said.

  “That’s true,” Perl said. “After all, it’s only been six weeks since his heart attack.”

  “You don’t understand, it’s not only because of his health, but because people aren’t using him as much,” Drora said. “Mama says that repairing or buying watches and clocks are some of the first luxury things people give up. And the gentiles won’t come into a Jewish shop.” Drora’s voice was high-pitched, like she was going to say more but suddenly looked at me and stopped talking.

  But Perl wouldn’t let it go. “What else does your mother say, Drora? You can tell me. I promise I won’t say anything. And you, Esfir, you can get my shawl from the parlor. And see if your brother is home yet.”

  I started down the stairs, but stopped to hear the rest of t
he conversation. Drora was saying, “That’s why she goes to the shop nearly every day, mostly selling and making minor replacements like a new watchband since she can’t do repairs.”

  “Doesn’t he help her?” Perl asked.

  “He never asks her about the business, at least not that I know. He no longer wears his beloved watch, you know the one that he had got from his parents for his bar mitzvah.”

  I didn’t make out Perl’s response but I got the main part. It seems that anything to do with that part of my father’s life suddenly shut down like one of his unfixable clocks.

  “And that’s not all,” Rivke said, finally getting in her two cents. “Lately, Mama spends the evenings with dressmaking jobs.”

  “From who?”

  “Peasant girls from nearby villages. You know how word spreads.”

  I returned upstairs as soon as I could with Perl’s shawl. My brother had just come home and remained in the kitchen.

  “I have one thing to tell you girls,” Perl said. Her voice was stern.

  Drora and Rivke both said, “What?” in a way that meant they were expecting criticism.

  Perl said, “Happy Chanukah.”

  One by one, we wished each other a happy holiday and Perl gave me a big wink when she left. I loved her to death.

  Eleven

  EARLY THE NEXT morning, I was awakened by the moldy smell of grated potatoes. It could only mean one thing: latkes. We were expecting my grandparents (my father’s parents), Morris and Ruth, their daughter-in-law and son Sam and their three children, and my mother needed to prepare at least two dozen latkes. She hadn’t started to fry them yet; she waited for the last moment so they would be hot. While I helped form the patties, she fried one for me and topped it with sour cream, just the way I liked it. Now, I was in heaven—just me and my beautiful mother in the kitchen, like old times. It was hard to believe that only the night before, I had felt so alone in my own house.

  It had finally stopped snowing and the sun was coming up. I put on my coat and opened the front door, ignoring my mother’s protestations. I had to take a look at the house. Through the snow, I saw patches of corrugated metal from our low slanting roof; the brown-framed window of the attic where we children slept; and the big linden tree that hid the front entrance when in full bloom, fanning out like a large spread hand and casting spiked shadows on the walls of the pale-yellow wood exterior. I thought I was the only one up besides my mother, but there was Velvel on the street side of our house, his gloved hands wrapped in a big towel, wiping off snow from our light blue-gray, fancy fence—the pride of our family.

  My grandfather Morris had worked in a cement factory. After hours, he had fashioned a mold with twelve decorative spokes bisected by a horizontal band of embossed bumps. A curved bottom barely brushed the grass. The top of the mold had a graceful wavy scroll design like a cake’s frosting pattern. Morris made six molds, enough to form a unique and elegant fence that set our otherwise plain house apart from our neighbors.

  In their later years, Morris and Grandma Ruth moved from this house to a large room at my uncle Sam’s, saying they didn’t want the bother of taking care of such a big place. We all knew the real reason for the move—to give us our own house, my father being the oldest son. Before that, we were packed in a small apartment shared by another family, separated by a sheet for privacy. As my mother had often reminded my father, “This is no way to live.”

  My father, at first, didn’t want to take the house. He couldn’t replace his parents, he said. But my brother, who told us girls the story one night last summer, thought my father was afraid he couldn’t afford the upkeep and would lose face with his family. My mother, who had been pregnant with me, gave him an ultimatum. This was another time my mother had showed her chutzpah.

  That night, we lit the shamash on the menorah to begin the eight-day Festival of Lights. My father’s tea-colored eyes came alive at the table when he explained to my ten-year-old cousin Leah that the menorah symbolizes the miracle of a day’s worth of oil that lasted eight days. He bent his head to look down at the candles on the table. His sparse, gray-streaked, reddish-brown hair drooped to his forehead and he combed it back with his fingers. He sat down, cleared his throat, which rasped from smoking, and went on and on about the victory of the Jews called the Maccabees, who had recaptured their temple in Jerusalem from the ruling Greek-Syrians.

  We had a nice, but crowded, first night of Chanukah. My cousins, including Leah’s older brothers, Mottel and Alter, and my sisters and brother sang songs and played dreydl, spinning the top for the prize of nuts. We all longed for a little Chanukah gelt, but those times of extra money were gone. We did get to eat vegetable soup, kasha kreplach, and my all-time favorite dessert, mandelbrot.

  Before we went to sleep, I showed Rivke and Drora my Journal of Important Words, which had been entitled by Ida in black ink on the first page with my name on the bottom. I had left a few pages empty in the beginning, saving them for something extra important. On the first empty page, Ida had copied a sentence from the last will of Sholem Aleichem:

  “Wherever I may die, let me be buried not among the rich and famous, but among plain Jewish people, the workers, the common folk, so that my tombstone may honor the simple graves around me, and the simple graves honor mine, even as the plain people honored their folk writer in his lifetime.”

  Drora was very intrigued by this quotation. She had read Sholem Aleichem’s stories of simple village life, but this philosophy was underlined and starred by Ida. My oldest sister asked about Ida’s political and social views. I didn’t think I could explain them properly. So I showed her the chart in my journal that Ida made after I had driven her crazy with questions. Ida had explained that there are many subgroups and these are general categories. Here is her chart:

  Political, Social, Educational Movements in Poland and Russia

  (and elsewhere in Eastern Europe)

  Name of Movement Belief System

  Bund Non-Zionist, Socialist, Yiddish

  Halutz First Pioneer Zionist youth movement

  Hashomer Hatzair Left-Wing Socialist-Zionist youth movement (pioneering settlements, scouting)

  Betar Revisionist Zionism (Jabotinsky), military education, pioneer settlements

  Left Poale Zion Zionist workers, Marxist, Communist, Yiddishist

  Right Poale Zion Zionist workers, modern Hebrew, non-Marxist, moderate Socialist

  Mizrachi Religious, mainstream, Zionist

  Agudath Israel Religious, ultraorthodox (including Hasidim), anti-Zionist

  “Brilliant,” Drora exclaimed. “But where does Ida stand, since she likes the quotation about being buried among the plain people?”

  “She is her own person,” I said. “She goes to the Tarbut, which favors Hebrew, but she loves Yiddish. She’s a Zionist, yet loves her country and village and thinks Jews should be able to live happily there, and she wants to go to America someday.”

  “I can understand that,” Drora said, squeezing a ripe pimple. “I guess we’re all mixed up.”

  Before I heard where Drora stood and I’m sure chatterbox Rivke had her own views—or thought she should have them—I fell asleep.

  I WOKE UP early and found my handsome brother in the kitchen. Velvel had my coloring, light hair and blue eyes, from my mother’s side of the family, whereas my sisters were a cross between my mother and father, who had darker skin and brown eyes. Velvel was also tall like Drora, but he was muscular and lean. His hair was wavy on top and his features were perfectly sculpted—Perl said like a Greek God. I figured the girls all had a crush on him, but he was also very bookish and shy.

  Like Ida’s teacher, Mendel, Velvel was fired up politically. He went to meetings of Hashomer Hatzair, which was Hebrew for The Young Guard, and often wore the group’s shirt and neck scarf, borrowed from a cousin who was much smaller.

  Velvel was sitting in a chair by the stove, warming his enormous feet. “So how is life in Brest?” he asked nonchalantly
.

  “Good,” I said. “Perl has been wonderful to me and I have a roommate and teacher, Ida, and I made a friend in school named Ania.”

  “Is she Polish?”

  “Yes, why?”

  “Just asking.”

  Perl must have heard us talking from her bed on the couch in the next room and joined us wrapped in her woolen shawl.

  “It’s freezing in here,” she whined.

  “Come by the stove, tante,” Velvel said.

  In the midst of a warm and friendly conversation, with a lot of kidding and jokes, I began to see a new side of Velvel, one that wasn’t so serious. The line that stuck in my memory is when Perl said, “I’ve heard from my cousin in Brooklyn, New York City.”

  Dutifully, Velvel and I asked about this cousin’s news from America.

  “He wished us a Happy Chanukah, of course. And guess what? He says the Americans Jews copy the goyim about Christmas.”

  “Do they have a Santa Claus?” I asked excitedly.

  “Maybe some do. Bernard said that it is a custom there to exchange gifts for Chanukah like Christmas presents. Usually, a small gift is presented on each day of the holiday.”

  “Eight presents?” I was aghast, not only by the shock of the practice, but by the obvious wealth of American Jews.

  “We can be American here, too,” Perl said. “And I’ll show you all later.”

  Velvel guessed that Perl would give us Chanukah gelt—a zloty or two, or maybe a fake coin made of chocolate, wrapped in gold foil. I couldn’t wait.