Rafael leaned toward Nathan. “You should have seen this boy’s face. All confusion. ‘I don’t know your Aunt Tzeitl,’ he said. ‘Well, I don’t know your Christ,’ I said. ‘So leave me alone.’”
Rafael shook his head. “Of course, they didn’t leave me alone. Oy, did they beat me that time.” He sighed. “This is how my rebbe was right to try to protect us. A Jewish child is vulnerable. He gets wounded. He never forgets the moment when he realized he is an object of hatred simply because he is alive. It pulls the earth out from under, no?”
Nathan flushed and looked down at the table, thinking briefly of Ellen, glad now of her naïveté. “In my old neighborhood, it was the Irish boys who came after us,” he said. “Why do you blame secular Jews for wanting to avoid that kind of punishment?”
“Because you can’t avoid the punishment. They beat you with or without the yarmulke.”
Nathan’s ears burned.
“The truth is, the Gentiles can’t leave us alone,” Rafael said. “And us. We can’t leave them alone. We’re tied together by the tail like two dogs, snapping at each other for two thousand years. And in places where there are the Muslims, it’s three dogs tied together. I ask God if this amuses Him, that we should spend eternity biting at each other’s hindquarters. Are we not men?”
“And what does God tell you?” Nathan asked, genuinely interested in the answer.
“Bubkes!” Rafael laughed.
Slightly disappointed, Nathan smiled. “Now you sound like my father.”
“Of course I sound like your father. Before the war, Leiber, I was a socialist too.”
“How could that be?” Nathan protested. Try as he might, he could not imagine Rafael beardless, much less young and wearing normal clothes.
Rafael calmly raked his beard. “Back then, in the twenties and thirties, I had to show the world I was no dog! I joined Brti Hachayal, to defend us from the anti-Jewish riots. I ran around with Zionists. We were young. We’d had some trayf education. Our fathers’ world was no use to us anymore. The world was changing. Back then, on Saturday nights, the sidewalks in Zokof were crowded with political speakers.” He smiled, his face awash with memories.
Nathan felt a gush of comfort. “In Brooklyn, where I grew up,” he said, “we had political debates on street corners too. On Saturday nights, the communists would take one corner, the socialists another, the Bundists too. They would all preach to the crowds and to one another, as if they could convert each other. Up and down Pitkin Avenue you’d hear them. My father used to go all the time, to heckle the communists.” He laughed awkwardly.
“Two Jews, twenty opinions!” Rafael said.
“And membership in fifteen organizations,” Nathan joined in.
Surprised by their spontaneous humor, the two of them laughed.
“We all wanted to believe in those fairy tales,” Rafael said. “Such a happy ending. All of us one big family. The goyim calling us brothers, not devils. Wonderful.” He teased Nathan with a smile. “And you know, socialism is so Jewish!”
Nathan stopped laughing. He didn’t want to hear this. Pop’s union affiliation had forced Nathan to have to dodge McCarthy’s 1950s communist witch hunt at his university. He’d come close to hating Pop for that. “Socialism is not Jewish,” he said. “Only anti Semites want people to believe there’s an international Jewish socialist conspiracy.”
“Ach, don’t make speeches. It’s just you and me here, Leiber. You want to know what socialism was for your father? It was Judaism for the twentieth century. It had a Messiah, even, the guarantee we’d be a free people among the nations. It set us on fire!” Rafael looked elated and wistful at the same time. “When the Poles cursed us and said, ‘Jews to Palestine,’ we cheered for their enemy, socialist Russia. You understand? We needed to believe in the socialist dream to go on living here, Leiber. Only later we saw that socialism was our Sabbatai Tzvi.”
Nathan had never heard of Sabbatai Tzvi, but he was encouraged by the surprising fullness of Rafael’s body of knowledge.
Rafael must have realized an explanation was required. “This was a false Messiah, in the seventeenth century. People followed him, but the End of Days didn’t come. It was the same with the socialists. In the end, they were corrupted, and we saw they were only men pretending they didn’t need God.”
A dog barked outside. Nathan rubbed his chin. “My father used to say, ‘A man is greeted by how he is dressed, but bidden farewell according to his wisdom.’ I owe you an apology, Rafael, for judging you by your orthodoxy first. I wasn’t raised to respect men of faith. I underestimated you.”
“Your father quotes Talmud.”
“No, that’s a socialist saying.”
“Feh! Stolen wisdom.” Rafael raised his hands resignedly. “What can you do?”
Nathan was amused at having discovered the origins of one of Pop’s favorite sayings. “At law, we require that people cite their sources.”
“You’d have made a good Talmudist.”
“My father would have disowned me.”
Rafael frowned. “Where do you think your ideas of right and wrong come from, Leiber? Do you have the chutzpah to believe that you and your father made them up?”
“I take your point,” Nathan said, aware that he was becoming increasingly confused about Pop’s relationship with his religion.
Rafael rose and shuffled toward the closed door on the wall with the bookcases. When he opened it, a ray of sunlight from the window lit the worn elbow of his white shirt, revealing the bony fragility beneath the cloth. Nathan noticed how Rafael’s shoulders, which yesterday had assumed definition under his black coat, now slumped under his misshapen gray wool vest, and how his trousers bagged at the knees. Through the open door, Nathan saw the corner of a white-tiled wood stove. He considered the hardship of gathering wood for the stove, of bending nearly to the floor to shove the logs through the metal door, of struggling to get it lit. How much longer could Rafael go on like this?
Rafael pushed aside a dented enamel pot on top of the stove and produced two glass cups. “Tea?” he asked, returning to the table. He poured a cup from the samovar for Nathan and one for himself. “Forgive me,” he said. “There is no sugar.”
Nathan waved this off, but Rafael seemed extremely embarrassed at not having it to offer. It occurred to Nathan that during wartime, sugar was a precious commodity. That it was still precious for Rafael suggested that the war had never really ended for him. He thought of his own crammed pantry at home, where grains, pastas, and cereals were always spilling from their boxes, waiting to be swept into the trash with Marion’s next housekeeping frenzy. When he returned home, he would send a check. He’d make a little joke so it wouldn’t look like charity. Something with the word sweeten in it. Something expressing his gratitude. He’d finesse it, give it a dignified sound.
“Look,” Rafael said, removing a small wood-framed photograph from the wall. “One of my neighbors found this in his attic and brought it to me.”
Nathan studied the photograph of about fifteen smiling young people casually posed on a hillside—a pretty girl in a checkered dress, a pair of clowning boys. Their faces looked so familiar, like his college friends. He smiled and handed the photograph back to Rafael.
“The house where my neighbor lives used to belong to a Bundist named Lazer Weitzman. When we were young, I argued day and night with Lazer. He said we shouldn’t need to go to Palestine. We don’t know from living in deserts anymore, he said. For a thousand years we’ve lived here in Poland—what we call Poyln in Jewish—that means, here, we rest.This is our country. We have a right to say so already.” Rafael shrugged. “I said different. But he was a good man, Lazer. They all were. Good hearts.” He thumped his chest and nodded back at the picture. “Not a single one of them survived the Annihilation.”
Nathan looked again at the photograph and tried to imagine those promising faces in a concentration camp, especially the earnest-looking young man in glasses, so like himself
at that age, so like Pop, too, perhaps. He looked at the wall where the framed photograph had hung. The fleur-de-lis wallpaper was faded. Its edges curled downward from the ceiling, as if exhausted from fighting gravity for so many years with so little paste to hold it. He felt depressed. He wanted to go home.
Rafael carefully returned the photograph to its place. “After the Destruction, Leiber, we had no right to play games with our Jewishness.”
“But I don’t understand why what happened made you more interested in finding God,” Nathan said. He pointed to the photograph on the wall. “It would only make me want to bring their killers to justice.”
Rafael shrugged. “The guilty ones don’t interest me anymore. I’m too old, too tired to fight them. I save my strength for wrestling with God Himself, for asking what is the nature of His will.”
“But wouldn’t you think it’s God’s will that the guilty be judged? How do you reconcile the slaughter of innocents with God’s will?”
Rafael took a deep breath and slowly exhaled. “Leiber, there is evil in the world. It comes from the darkness that existed before God’s creation, and it remained after God brought forth light and life. If I believed evil is there by God’s will, then I would also have to believe that it is God’s will that the innocent are slaughtered. A God like that cannot withstand my accusations. I do not accept Him any more than I accept the God of Choseness.”
Nathan was surprised and impressed at such candor from a religious man. For him, the matter had always been much simpler. To believe in God, any God, was for the soft and immature, people with a childish need for pat answers about life.
“I believe there is only one God,” Rafael continued. “He is the One who lights our souls at birth with a holy spark and watches how we burn our way back to Him. That is God. The rest is what we think He wants from us.”
Nathan again sought the handkerchief in his pocket, stirred by the first compelling argument he’d ever heard about God. “How did you come to this point of view?”
Rafael rubbed his knee, which seemed to pain him. “Freidl,” he said, as if this was the most natural answer in the world.
Nathan reached for his keloid. The sour taste of disappointment filled his mouth. He’d allowed Rafael to seduce him with an idea of God. And where had it taken him? Headfirst into the mushy pit of mysticism.
Outside, a group of men passed the house. Their muffled voices penetrated Rafael’s closed window. Again, he wondered why Rafael had remained in Zokof, the last of his kind, literally wearing his Judaism every day.
If Rafael noticed Nathan’s upset, he didn’t acknowledge it. “When I came back to Zokof in 1945, the summer after the war,” he said, “I had nothing left in me. I was like a dead man. Skin and bones and no heart, no desire. Freidl came to me the same way she came to you, in a dream. She said to me, ‘A Jew must join in his own traditions or his children will suffer in the darkness.’”
“My father would have said that raising children to believe in God is the same thing as letting them suffer in darkness,” Nathan said curtly.
Rafael twirled the long ends of his mustache. “Leiber, a man who forgets God withers. His roots wrap around a heap of stones and his life is drawn from rocks. The holy light goes out.”
Nathan closed his eyes and saw Pop, crying at the family’s Seder table. He dug his hand into his pocket again and clutched the handkerchief. “In my dream last night, the woman who called herself Freidl held a light in her hands.”
Rafael exhaled loudly. “In the dream she had a handkerchief, all lit up, yeh?”
Nathan opened his eyes. “How do you know about the handkerchief? Even I didn’t know I had it until this morning.”
“Freidl showed it to me.”
“But I have the handkerchief.” He produced it from his pocket and laid it on the table.
Rafael barely glanced at it. His whole focus was on Nathan. “You have the handkerchief. But the light that made it so beautiful stayed here in Zokof. It’s your father’s light. This is why you returned. You know this, Leiber. It’s in your bones.”
“What does light have to do with my father?”
Rafael leaned back in his chair and let his hand rest on the leather-bound book. “It’s his holy spark.”
Nathan was determined not to let Rafael think he would accept easy, fanciful answers to his questions this time. “There’s nothing left of my father. He’s been dead for years.”
Rafael shook his head impatiently. “When a man dies, his holy spark returns to God. The light you saw in your dream was an image of your father’s spark, the same that woke Freidl from the grave.”
Nathan wondered how the spark had gotten into his dream when he didn’t even believe in God.
Rafael stroked his beard. “Leiber,” he said quietly, “I’m not so far from the days when death will sit on my nose. I want you to know something before I go. I remember the night your father’s spark took flame.”
“When we met yesterday you acted as if you hardly knew my father!”
Rafael laughed. “I didn’t know you yesterday.”
Nathan suddenly felt shaky and weak. He gripped the sides of his chair. “What do you remember about my father?”
Rafael rubbed his thumb over the leather-bound book authoritatively. He regarded Nathan briefly. “In the cemetery,” he said, “I told you stories about the night your father left this town. You remember the three kinderlach—those little boys, walking home from cheder that night?”
Nathan nodded.
“They had names also. There was Tzvi Baer. The other was Chaim Apt. The third one, the three year old, carried the lantern. He was the one attacked, whipped on the face and hands by Jan Nowak. He was the one who called out your father’s name and blackened it forever in the minds of the Poles in Zokof. That boychik with the lantern, Leiber. That was me.”
I knew who he was from the first time he appeared in my blue exile. His guilt at betraying Itzik had led him there to me. The start of the dark night of his soul. That is what Rafael called the cold spring night when Jan Nowak died and Itzik fled to my grave. Many times I asked him, Rafael, what did the events of that night have to do with Miriam? Why Miriam? It was a shame, really, that he never had an answer for me.
21
NATHAN WAS SHOCKED BY RAFAEL’S CONFESSION, BUT HE COULD not make sense of it. He could accept as fact that if Rafael was three in 1906, he was eighty-nine now. But to comprehend that Rafael had known his father, that the story of Jan the peasant’s death was true, required more imagination than he could immediately summon. He said nothing.
Rafael smiled. “I have remembered your father all my life,” he said. “Itzik Leiber came out of the night like an angel—an angel with no meat on his bones.” He pointed to the other side of the room and shook his finger emphatically, as if Nathan should be able to see Pop there as clearly as he did. “He did not have to save us. He was safe, hidden in the dark. But he ran to our lantern, to that cham, Jan the peasant.” He shook his head. “Ach! You should have heard him. The man laughed like a devil. I was the first to see Itzik coming to us. Even in that dark, I saw he had a fury in him, a fire. How such a skinny boy could refuse to be afraid, this I would never forget.”
Nathan tried to imagine it. But the only fire he’d ever seen in his father was when Pop argued that one-note philosophy he called socialism and reduced every situation to the same equation. The strong oppress the weak. The weak have a duty to organize and to throw off the tyrants’ yoke. Increasingly, Nathan had found his father’s views intellectually irritating. Once, he stood up and left the room when Pop started in.
“What? You think this has nothing to do with you, Mr. Big Shot Professor?” Pop had called after him.
Rafael reached over and grabbed Nathan by the wrist. “Like this your father stopped Jan from bringing the whip down on me!” He yanked the startled Nathan’s arm above his head. “The horse went up on its back legs, took the wagon with it. Jan fell under a wheel. It crushed
his head. He was finished. We couldn’t believe it. Itzik said run, so we ran. We left them there, Jan and him. Two dogs tied at the tail, yeh?” Angrily, he waved the thought away, releasing Nathan’s wrist. “I never saw your father again.”
Gingerly, Nathan touched a corner of Pop’s handkerchief and, with some difficulty, said, “He never told me about you or this man, Jan.” A truck rumbled by the house, briefly blanketing the room in shadow. In the closed, dusty corner where they sat, Nathan felt a chill. “I’m sorry,” he said, adjusting his glasses, “I had no idea, and it’s hard for me to see my father the way you describe him. He became a very different sort of man. As long as I can remember, he always had plenty of meat on his bones.” He cleared his throat. “Pop argued with radio announcers and at the newspaper he read. He talked as if his socialist propaganda was going to change the world, but he never stood up for anything or anyone in public. When he wasn’t working, what I remember him doing most was sitting at the window.” He paused, recalling the image of Pop in his chair, like a photograph. His face burned with embarrassment as he realized how inappropriate it was for him, at this moment, to reveal the level of his bitterness and resentment toward his father. Nervously, he flicked the soft tassels of the checkered cloth around his fingers, anxious at how Rafael would respond.
“Freidl always said Itzik had the soul of a potato,” Rafael said quietly. “So it seems his soul didn’t grow in America. It’s a shonda—a shame. A man may only have one moment in his life when a spark flames in him. If this he doesn’t protect, it dies. But even so, Leiber, what your father did for me was the lesson of a lifetime. That a man must have courage to do what is right in the eyes of God, no matter the cost.”
A Day of Small Beginnings Page 17