The woman shuddered noticeably, but she recovered her composure. “I am Freidl,” she said. “I knew your father.”
He stared.
Her smile returned. “In town, the people called him Itzik the Faithless One. But your father had faith plenty, I can tell you. So much it broke my gravestone in two.”
Nathan still could not speak.
Freidl began to sing her melody.
Lou was gone. His lantern shone faintly in the distance.
“What do you want?” Nathan said.
She held Pop’s glowing handkerchief high above her head and beckoned him to follow. When he didn’t, she faded away, leaving Nathan alone in the night.
At seven the next morning, the telephone rang.
“Dad, I have fantastic news!” Ellen said.
Nathan rubbed the sleep from his eyes.
“We did my new dance piece tonight at the Ninety-second Street Y. Mom came. It went really well. Greg Moore heard I have a shot at getting that New York State grant I told you about. It could fund me for half a year. Isn’t that terrific?”
Nathan put on his glasses and sat up in bed. His daughter was now twenty-five. But when she told him about her work, her voice still rushed and tumbled the way it had when she was five. “That’s wonderful news!” he said, with as much enthusiasm as he could manage. Despite her fervor, he still wished she’d pursue a career more in line with her intellectual capabilities. Time and again he’d asked her how long this playing at being a dance choreographer would go on. She was jeopardizing her future stability, rejecting the help he could provide, to prove what? That she was her own person?
“It’s Ellen’s prerogative to make her own life,” Marion repeatedly warned him. “If you keep this up, you’re going to sour your whole relationship with her.”
He knew she was right and tried to hold his tongue, hoping that Ellen would eventually decide to move on.
“How did Mom like the performance?” he asked.
“She said some of it reminded her of Bread and Puppet Theater pieces, but that it had my stamp on it. By the way, I asked her to tuck Grandpa’s handkerchief into your suitcase. She didn’t understand why I wanted it to go to Poland with you. Did she do it anyway?”
Nathan was stunned. “I have no idea. Just a minute.” He stumbled over to his open suitcase, trying to imagine how Pop’s handkerchief had been transported from his dream to his waking life. Marion had indeed planted the handkerchief in the crimped pouch at the back. The sound of Ellen’s childhood voice in his dream returned to him. Nine takes five.
Flattening the crumpled ten-inch square on the bed, he recognized the raised lines on the fabric. He picked up the phone. “It’s here,” he said shakily. “What do you want me to do with it?”
“I’m not sure. Remember how once I told you Grandpa cried at the Seder because he was thinking about his childhood? That’s why I sent it. It’s the only thing I have of his, and since he never got the chance to go back, I thought the handkerchief could go back for him.” She laughed. “Big symbolism, right?”
Nathan wondered if Ellen really believed Pop had never returned to Poland because he hadn’t had the chance. Could she be so naive about the political and social realities of Jews in Eastern Europe? Of course she could. And whose fault was that? After two generations in America, he’d made sure she was an insider. She had no idea what it was to be a Jew in a hostile country.
“Actually, I thought there was something poetic about sending part of Grandpa back to Poland,” Ellen said, “especially since his handkerchiefs always reminded me that he was from Europe. I mean, Americans use Kleenex.”
Nathan remembered how his mother used to scrub the daylights out of Pop’s handkerchiefs before she ironed them into perfect squares. “Elli, everyone used handkerchiefs in Grandpa’s day. Kleenex weren’t invented yet,” he said.
She giggled. “Remember that time you made Grandpa come with us to the Adirondacks? He tied knots in all four ends of his handkerchief and put it on his head to protect his bald spot from the sun. He said that’s what they did in Europe.”
Nathan’s heart hammered as he remembered the knotted handkerchief in his dream.
“Dad?”
“I’m here.” He looked at the handkerchief, anxious yet amazed at the coincidence.
They spoke about other things after that. He carefully avoided mentioning his visit to Zokof. He didn’t want to excite her until he’d been able to get some perspective on his experience there. He told her instead about the interesting church he’d seen, where they kept Chopin’s heart in an urn. She liked that.
After they had hung up, Nathan held Pop’s handkerchief under the nightstand light and shifted it slowly over the prongs of his fingers. He thought about what an odd, loving pair Pop and Ellen had made. With Ellen, Pop had been childlike, knotting his handkerchief into animal shapes, manipulating it as a shadow puppet. With her, he’d been a prankster, tugging her hair and pretending someone else had done it. Nathan had envied their ease with each other, though God knows how she’d ever understood Pop’s heavily accented English. That she didn’t know a word of Yiddish hadn’t mattered at all when they had played the card game pisha paysha, laughing themselves silly for hours.
The last time Ellen had mentioned playing pisha paysha was at Pop’s funeral. He had given the eulogy because Pop hadn’t wanted a rabbi. In the hospital he’d said, “My whole life I kept those parasites away from me. They’re not going to get me after I go.” After his death, Nathan had closed himself off in his study and tried to find a suitable inroad to the map of his father’s life. He worked all night, but by dawn he was terrified the ideas he’d written down would not come together when he got up to speak. By the time he’d arrived at the funeral hall, his fear had made him manic. Who had he been fooling, thinking he could suddenly speak extemporaneously after a lifetime of memorizing all his addresses, word for word, to give his audience an impression of ease and jocularity?
Every face in the hall had lifted when he’d stepped forward to speak, as if certain that Isaac Leiber’s Harvard-professor son would give his father a eulogy to remember. He had watched those faces bloom with astonishment as he’d used the words unformed, uneducated, and dogmatic to describe his father. Soon after, the expressions of people he loved had withered with embarrassment and disappointment. They stared dejectedly into their laps.
His mother had slumped in her chair and twisted Gertie’s silk sleeve until the funeral director had interrupted Nathan and announced it was time to leave for the gravesite. His mother had refused to let him into the limousine reserved for the immediate family.
On the long ride to Mount Zion Cemetery in his car, he’d sat rigid with guilt.
“It wasn’t your best speech, but you’re not used to this,” Marion had consoled him. To Nathan, this meant religious ritual, and he’d felt a surge of gratitude toward his wife.
But Ellen hadn’t been so forgiving. “Oh, God, Dad,” she’d moaned from the backseat. “‘Uneducated?’ How could you say that about Grandpa? He wasn’t uneducated. He read that Jewish newspaper all the time. And besides, he was a terrific grandfather. Why didn’t you say that? Why didn’t you say that he taught me how to play pisha paysha?”
Marion had promptly turned and corrected her. “That’s up and down.”
“That’s what you call it. Grandpa and I called it pisha paysha.” Ellen began to cry. Nathan had tightened his grip on the wheel, knowing that she had gotten it more right than his wife had.
The sun was rising over Warsaw. Nathan stared at the white handkerchief, still dazed from the effects of his dream and his conversation with Ellen. He showered and dressed, shamed anew at having dishonored both his father and his daughter at Pop’s funeral. Tucking the refolded handkerchief into his pocket, he went downstairs to make arrangements with the concierge.
In life, I did not concern myself about what captures the hearts of children. I would have guessed the past is of little interest t
o them, especially if they are healthy and without real cares, as Itzik’s granddaughter seemed to me. But now, heeding my father’s warning to be vigilant, I took her interest in the handkerchief as a sign. What it signified, I did not know, but it gave me hope.
20
ONCE IN THE CAR, ON HIS WAY OUT OF WARSAW, NATHAN changed his mind. It was madness to spend his last hours in Poland in Zokof, making poetic gestures for his daughter, giving himself over to the lunacy of a dream. They were crossing the Vistula River. He leaned forward to instruct his driver to return to the Marriott Hotel. But it was too late to go back. His hosts were already affronted that he’d cancelled the appointments they’d made for him. Rescheduling would only compound the insult.
He slid back in his seat and absentmindedly wound Pop’s handkerchief around his fingers, grateful that at least this driver spoke little English. When they arrived in Zokof, he used his guidebook Polish and asked to be dropped off at the far side of the main square, thinking he might as well take a last look at the town. As he emerged from the car, a stocky man on a bicycle, in a cap and wool jacket, wobbled to a full stop a foot in front of him. The man narrowed his eyes, but the horizontal line of his thin lips did not move. Nathan awkwardly brushed past him and made his way toward the church, intending to follow the square around until he reached the side street that led to Rafael’s house. A pair of skinny teenage girls with bleached hair giggled as he passed, hiding their red-lipsticked mouths with their hands. Nathan kept his head down.
When he reached the side street he was looking for, a tractor lumbered by, pulling a trailer packed with standing men. Every pair of eyes on it was trained on him, so he thought, and not one showed the slightest indication of a greeting. He hurried down the narrow lane, past the fenced yards, the sleeping dog chained to a tree, to Rafael’s house. He mounted the splintered wooden steps.
Next door, behind a chain-link fence, a stout, kerchiefed woman with chafed, swollen hands watched him slyly as she raked the dirt in her yard, chickens squabbling at her feet. He knocked purposefully for Rafael, eager to be let in. When Rafael did not immediately respond, he felt a swell of panic that the old man might not be home. Where in God’s name would he go? Nathan wondered, shuddering at the thought of having to look for him.
Moments later, the door opened slightly, and Rafael’s familiar thick fingers beckoned him. “Come! Come inside! I was expecting you back,” he said brusquely.
Perplexed, Nathan crossed the threshold and blinked rapidly as his eyes adjusted to the dim light of the entryway. He jumped aside as his left shoulder touched a metal ladder, which extended up through a hole in the low ceiling. A repulsive, musty odor permeated the house. “How could you have possibly known I was coming?” he said.
Rafael arched his eyebrows. “From Freidl. Who else?”
Nathan’s temples began to pulse. Surely Rafael was playing with him. He slipped his hand into his pocket and felt reassured by the presence of Pop’s handkerchief.
“You saw her,” Rafael said.
“No, I didn’t see her,” Nathan said firmly. “I just had a dream.”
The remark seemed to so amuse Rafael that Nathan felt compelled to explain himself further. “It’s not surprising that I would unconsciously try to imagine Freidl, after everything you told me yesterday at the cemetery.”
Rafael’s eyebrows rose again. “From a dream a man can know his destiny. From a dream a man can accept what his rational mind cannot. You look frightened, Leiber. So, you saw her. You’re not the only one.” He beckoned Nathan again. “Come.”
Nathan followed the old man uncertainly through an interior door, into the yellowish, dust-filled haze of the long main room of the house. To his right, on the street side, a treadle-based sewing machine sat below a window hung with closed curtain sheers. Along the opposite wall were rows and rows of shelved books, which leaned floppily against one another, their bindings mostly broken, like a community of tired elders. In the spaces between the bookcases hung five or six extraordinarily intricate pictures made of paper, from which Hebrew lettering, menorahs, trees, animals, buildings, and designs had been cut. “What are these?” he asked.
“Oissherenishen,” Rafael said. “Paper cutouts.”
“Where are these from?”
“From my factory,” Rafael replied, with a puckish smile. “I have ten workers.” He showed Nathan his fingers. “The Talmud says we must observe His commandments with beauty. Hiddur mitzvah. So I took up the penknife and the board.”
He shuffled a few steps farther toward the round table at the far end of the room, then turned back to Nathan and looked again at the paper cutouts. “I’ll tell you, in my youth I didn’t have the interest. To my father I said, it is for the scholar to waste his time on such detail. But later, when I came back to Zokof, what did I have but time? And details, I didn’t mind. It took the mind off other things, you understand?”
Nathan nodded, assuming it impolite to question the connection between cutting paper designs and scholarship.
Rafael clapped his hands. “For us, this was always man’s work. But I, I learned from Freidl. She made oissherenishen all her life. Her secret children, she calls them.”
He smiled, dismissing Nathan’s obvious confusion. “You didn’t come back here to talk of paper cutouts.” He motioned to the two tall cane backed chairs at the far end of the room, which stood beside a round table covered with a stained oilcloth. “Come, sit.”
Nathan sidestepped the piled books balanced precariously on several footstools and joined Rafael. On the table lay a closed leather-bound book. A white kerosene lamp glowed weakly next to the copper samovar. He sat down and felt the samovar’s heat. Rafael sank heavily into the chair opposite.
“I didn’t come back only because of the dream,” Nathan said.
“So why?”
Nathan removed his jacket, stalling for time to compose himself. “I didn’t have the chance yesterday to thank you for telling me about my father’s town.” He hung the jacket on the back of his chair. “But I have to admit, I still don’t understand why it made him such a rabid socialist.”
He glanced at Rafael, unsure whether the old man could understand what he was talking about. “I don’t imagine Orthodox people know much about socialists,” he said. These exchanges with Rafael seemed to him like two strangers shouting across a wild river. They could see each other, but neither could entirely understand what the other was saying.
A checkered cloth, bordered by brown tassels, lay across part of the table. Nathan rolled a tassel in his palm and found it soft and reassuring.
Rafael gathered the strings of his tzittzit and combed them with his fingers, from the knots down. His dry lips parted slightly, and he rapped the cover of the book on the table irritably. “There is nothing so embarrassing to the secular Jew as a man like me.”
Nathan flushed, recalling all too well how he’d felt when he’d first laid eyes on Rafael.
“And why do I embarrass you?” Rafael persisted. “Because of what it might make the Gentile think of you.” He nodded, as if Nathan’s appalled expression was all the answer he needed.
“Let me tell you something I’ve learned in my life, Leiber. A Jew should not accept anyone else’s opinion about himself. You’re too afraid. We don’t stir up anti-Semitism by being pious, by wearing the tzittzit and the payess. Anti Semites don’t need us to stir themselves up. They’re already stirred up. This mishegoss has nothing to do with us. If a man hates Jews, he’ll find a reason to hate the secular one as much as he hates the religious one.”
“I suppose you’re right,” Nathan said, although he knew this would not change his embarrassment at the sight of a Hassid in the street.
“The question, Leiber, is what kind of Jew are you going to be when you go home?”
Nathan wondered why this would matter to Rafael. “I have to admit,” he said, “I don’t think I’ll have changed that much, despite all your patient efforts yesterday. I’m a Jew by birth.
That’s all. I still don’t understand your religiousness or what kind of God you believe in.” He didn’t think Rafael would understand if he said he’d always regarded his Jewish identity as having almost no weight or texture at all, something that could be stuffed into his back pocket, like a handkerchief, and pulled out at will for meals of lox and bagels or for the Passover Seder.
Rafael tipped back his head and roared with laughter. “All my life it’s been like that with me! My rebbe at our yeshiva, may he rest in peace, didn’t understand what kind of God I believed in either. A lot of tsuris I gave him.”
This aroused Nathan’s interest. “How so?” he asked.
“The rebbe always said we were God’s chosen people. This troubled me. We have a relationship with our God. Fine. But what good comes from calling ourselves chosen? Our God wants that we should make people resent us, or worse, that we should suffer for His vanity? It’s a chutzpah of God, really, don’t you think?”
Nathan smiled. “That’s a rather secular analysis.”
“My rebbe thought so too. A klop on the head he gave me for such questions. Feh!” Rafael squinted. “But I asked them. I had to know why I should suffer for such a God.”
This man would have been a star at City College, Nathan thought. “Maybe you should have asked your rebbe why being one of the chosen people was so important to him,” he said.
Rafael nodded approvingly. “For a man like my rebbe, a man of that generation, we were chosen because it is written in the Torah and that is the word of God. But now, as I think about it, we Jews in Zokof always knew the delicacy of our position, even as children. Maybe teaching us we were God’s chosen was the rebbe’s way to teach us to be strong, that a Jew must set God’s example.” He laughed. “Me, I had my own ways to show my strength.”
“How so?”
“I’m a fighter.” Rafael sat back, smiling mysteriously. “I remember, when I was maybe ten years old, some Polish boys stopped me on the street. They made a circle around me and called me a dirty Jew. To them, a Jew was a coward, and they expected me to hang my head. I told them, ‘Leave me alone. I’m a clean Jew.’ It surprised them, you see. One of them grabbed my shirt. ‘You killed Christ,’ he said. As if I did it, yeh? When I laughed, he punched me in the chest, hard, but I didn’t fall down, because I grabbed him back. I said, ‘You killed my Aunt Tzeitl,’ and punched him for everything I decided he’d done to her, hard in the chest, too.”
A Day of Small Beginnings Page 16