I Am Forbidden

by Anouk Markovits

  Atara shared a room with girls who devoted the longest time to prayers; quiet girls who blushed when it was their turn to read aloud a verse; girls who would never raise a hand to ask a question.

  “Mila, here!” In the front row of the classroom, Zissi and Goldie, the two cousins from Switzerland, waved and pointed to the empty seat between them.

  Mila did not notice Atara entering the classroom, did not notice Atara’s surprise when she saw that Mila had not kept a seat for her. Now Atara and Mila would sit apart in class all semester. It was deemed unfriendly to ask to switch seats.

  When the lunch bell sounded, Mila’s neighbors whisked her to the dining hall where they steered her to their table, bubbling their admiration for Rabbi Braunsdorfer’s intellect and wit; the girls were agreed, Rabbi Braunsdorfer’s classes in Jewish Thought were the most uplifting.

  Mila noticed there was no seat for Atara at her table. When Atara entered the hall, Mila’s chest tightened. It would be hard to switch tables later.

  Atara found a seat in the rear.

  When Mila looked back, Atara was shredding a slice of bread, crushing the crumbs between her fingers, rolling the crumbs into pellets. Mila pushed back her chair and rose.

  “But Mila, you must say grace at the same table where you blessed the bread!”

  Mila’s hands gripped the edge of the table. It was important to make new friends. It was immature to do everything with Atara. She let herself fall back into her chair.

  Zissi resumed her story: “We were telling you about our Passover excursion on the Lac Leman.…”

  Mila turned her head. A T3 girl was whispering in Atara’s ear. Atara stopped rolling pellets of dough and brushed the crumbs aside; it was forbidden to waste bread.

  On the Sabbath, Atara went to fetch Mila for their weekly walk, but Mila had been invited to the home of a rabbi teacher, to take care of the babies. Mila’s roommates reminded Atara that it was a good deed to take care of a teacher’s babies, and it was also practice.

  Mila returned just in time for the Third Meal.

  When the girls rose to circle the holiness of the Sabbath, Zissi and Goldie held Mila’s hands as Mila’s gaze searched for Atara. When Mila saw Atara standing near the door, Mila’s eyes pleaded, inviting Atara into the round, but the circle spun faster, every three steps, the circle hopped, Mila between Zissi and Goldie.

  Atara noticed Zissi’s headband in Mila’s hair.

  She could still hear the girls’ singing as she climbed the stairs to the little library. She opened an Expanded Rabbinic Bible. As dusk filled the room, the letters blurred and lifted from the page, they turned, hopped, and circled. Her hand pressed onto the open book. The letters fell back into place, Scripture center top, gloss both sides and below.

  She started to read, but again the letters stirred, the lines written centuries apart joined and then marched together, circling her future in a changeless round of faith—nothing new could happen, not since Moses at Sinai.

  But then one letter escaped and spiraled out of the room. Soon more letters hovered and spun in their own directions. She pressed her hands on the open book but the letters kept lifting, hopping, unfurling into open shapes that turned, turned … turned into the lycée’s forbidden poems and math formulae. Laboratories, experiments, alembics, stylish bell skirts swayed on the horizon in dazzling galaxies.… Ah, to think gratuitous human constructs!

  Would Zalman ever permit college? Would he permit the baccalauréat? Or even the lycée? If she told him how hard she had tried at the seminary?

  Then, after the baccalauréat, she would propose to study … not painting, too frivolous; not literature either, where people made choices. Certainly not philosophy. Medicine? If she asked to study medicine … a life modeled on Albert Schweitzer’s, in Africa, such a life would be worthwhile and when she was not in Africa helping to save people, it would not be sinful to make a living.…

  She would speak to Zalman during summer break, she must.

  In June, news that the government of Israel might collapse spread through the classrooms. There were no newspapers, no radios, no televisions in the seminary. The girls debated whether the implosion of the blasphemous Zionist leadership meant that the Lord might soon forgive the sins of the People of Israel, whether the messiah was coming, the dead resurrecting. That Sabbath, the girls danced with special fervor. They asked that Atara lead an I believe. Atara hummed the melody and the hall filled with the girls’ longing voices: I believe with entire faith in the coming of the messiah.…

  Summer 1956

  BACK IN Paris for summer break, the girls divided the chores. Atara took responsibility for Zalman’s study. Every morning, she dusted the shelves of Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmud, the holy books that had come with the family from Transylvania, and the holy books Zalman ordered from Jewish presses all over the world. She would find the right time to speak to her father. She dusted the curved back of the walnut armchair, the studded leather armrests, the claw feet, and daydreamed about a day of classes at the Sorbonne, followed by dinner at home with her parents and siblings. She breathed in the faint, gamey smell of the piebald cowhide that held Zalman’s prayer shawl and phylacteries. She straightened the pile of Der Yid, the weekly from America that disseminated the Rebbe’s speeches and edicts.

  The editorial page raged against Zionist leaders who failed to warn Hungarian communities about deportations, against Zionist leaders who selected fellow Zionists for rescue and crossed off millions of God-fearers whom they did not deem fit for their state. It was forbidden to participate in the Zionist abomination; it was forbidden to enlist in the Zionist army; it was forbidden to vote—the Rebbe of Satmar was offering fifteen dollars’ worth of foodstuff to anyone agreeing not to participate in the Zionist elections—were six million not enough?

  IN AUGUST, Atara was still looking for the right moment to speak to her father. Every day she stood outside Zalman’s study and listened as he practiced for the High Holy Days service, his singing voice so full of grace and balance.… One afternoon, when everything was quiet on the other side of the door, she gathered her courage and knocked.

  “Nu?” Zalman called, his clear blue eyes lifting from a Talmud tome as she opened the door.

  “Tatta?”

  “Nu?”

  “I studied hard … I tried.…” Her voice shook. “Tatta, would you permit that I not return to the seminary?”

  Zalman’s lips widened into a smile. “Certainly you can stay home. I am still suspicious of these new schools for girls. Countless generations of Jewish mothers raised Torah scholars without knowing even how to read Scripture. And your help around the house would be a blessing. Of course you can stay home.”

  “I’ll help around the house and with the children.”

  “Nu?” Zalman still smiled.

  “Would you permit—would it be acceptable—at night, when all the work is done … would it be acceptable if I studied? With books. From my room. I would not come in contact with anyone.”

  “What kind of books?”

  “I was thinking … hoping—after I marry of course, I was hoping to study medicine to help—”

  “Medicine?” Zalman repeated, unbelieving. “You think there were not enough Jewish doctors in Germany? You know it is forbidden to follow a curriculum of secular studies.”

  “I was hoping to help save lives … to—”

  Zalman tried to calm himself. “You are almost a grown woman and soon it will be up to your husband, but until then, it is my obligation to protect you, even against your will. I must make sure you do not blemish the name of our family and jeopardize your future and your siblings’ future.”

  “Tatta, I have tried. I have not read the wrong books for more than a year.”

  “You have come under bad influences and you will come to your senses, you must, or I will lock you up in this apartment until I walk you to the wedding dais. And hear me well: If you do not follow our fathers’ way, you will fail at wh
atever you undertake. You will sink from one depravity to the next. You will wander the world and never find a home.”

  THE LAST summer afternoons in the Luxembourg Gardens, while Mila watched the children in the playground, Atara rose and circled the water basin, the ringing alleys, the park fence. She synched her steps to those of strangers so that they would take her to different fates. The postman on his bicycle, she envied him, envied his wheels kissing the cobbles, that he knew one language only, one country only, envied his undivided past, undivided from his future.

  September 1956

  T2

  “IF YOU were among the Great Ones in Israel, you might be permitted to inquire into Creation. But us? Us?” Droplets of spit shot out of Rabbi Braunsdorfer’s mouth, hung above the lectern, and settled on the first row. “Asked improper questions, the believer answers: I refuse! Asked about so-called contradictions in Genesis, the believer shows respect for the Lord and replies: I refuuuse—I refuse to think about it!” Bang, the fist landed on the lectern. Pause. “In our sweet Torahleh,” the voice dropped to a whisper, “the Lord gives us all that we need to know.”

  From Atara’s seat in the back row, the classes melded one into the other. The rabbi’s finger-wagging about “things not for us to ask” seemed remote.

  The previous year, Atara had looked forward to the classes in history, but at the seminary, the classes in history, too, were classes in faith. It was lack of faith that brought pogroms and destructions, and the person who failed to connect Jewish tragedies to sin caused further suffering.

  When she leaned sideways, Atara could see Mila in the front row, back erect when Mila followed the lecture, back slumped or chin lifted when she daydreamed. Mila found comfort in this ordered world where sin explained suffering. Sometimes Mila’s head turned back, her long lashes coming down just before her gaze met Atara’s. Mila’s head inclined as she took assiduous notes, her nape shaded by tendrils escaping her new beehive hairdo, modeled after Zissi’s.

  Atara started to skip afternoon study hours. She sneaked away after lunch, when the girls surged out of the dining hall. She ran past the Bewick and Eyre crossing, which was as far as she had ever gone on her Sabbath walks with Mila.

  Up the hill, a tall shaft sputtered an orange flame. She turned back.

  The door of a bar opened. A bent silhouette stumbled out, cupped cigarette to mouth, and teetered in front of a fender. Cracked singing spilled onto the curb, about a canary going silent in a mine. In another life, she might have known what the canary song was about, she might have spoken to these people; in her life, she could not be seen talking to a non-Jew. She walked on. The street ended in front of a slag heap. She turned back.

  A barge moaned downriver. On the tar-dark riverbank, blue-clad workers leaned over fires in tin drums, small hells in the early night.

  On High Street, a car veered and spattered her coat.

  • • •

  She heard the girls as soon as she turned onto the seminary’s block, heard the stamping feet—did passersby wonder what kind of life warranted so much singing and dancing? Time and again, the dining tables were pushed against the walls, the chairs piled high against the tables, and Atara sighed with relief; no one would have noticed her absence in the excitement that followed the news of a girl’s engagement. In the cleared space, the girls were wound in circles, some facing into the center, some facing out. Zissi, Mila, Goldie danced arm over arm.

  Atara’s study partner caught sight of Atara and broke away from the round. “I looked for you, Bless the Lord you are here.…”

  The girls’ speech pattern also grated on Atara’s nerves, the ready-made locutions.

  “Atara is here!” a voice called.

  “Is she singing, is Atara singing?”

  “Not now,” Atara whispered to no one in particular.

  “Atara will sing!”

  Atara stepped back.

  A T3 girl who stood by the door rebuked Atara: “It is a mitzvah to be happy on such a joyous occasion.”

  Atara wanted to quiet the singing; she wanted to speak up, loud, so that all the girls would hear; she wanted to share with them that in the library in Paris, she had read that the Nazis could have been defeated much earlier if forces had united, but religious leaders, fearing assimilation, chose to organize against the Bolsheviks who were fighting the Nazis, chose not to unite with less religious or secular Jews. Atara’s mouth opened but what came out was a sound like the bleating of a sheep. Her hands came to her ears, to block the echoing bleats. She stumbled out.

  Every morning, she woke to the same impasse. Could she marry a Hasid who expected a Hasidic wife to cherish orthodox life? Would she raise children, who, in turn, would be forbidden to read secular books?

  Climbing the stairs to the classroom, her calves cramped. Sitting in front of the Expanded Rabbinic Bible, her scalp itched.

  Was it not better to choose one’s death and die all at once?

  *

  March 1957

  MILA and Atara had been at the seminary a year and a half when the principal called Atara into his office. Zalman had written a letter, Hannah was having a difficult pregnancy and the doctor prescribed bed rest. Zalman asked that one of the girls come home. The principal thought Atara should go. Let Mila benefit a bit longer from the seminary’s teachings since her T2 year might be cut short … there had been inquiries.…

  “Mila is getting engaged?”

  “Shh … inquiries only. You mustn’t disturb Mila’s peace of mind.”

  Atara was packing when Mila came running.

  “Auntie Hannah isn’t well? I’m going with you. I am!”

  The girls boarded the train to London, they scanned the rows of tired upholstered seats, wiggled their heavy suitcases into an empty row, sat in the row behind.

  “You think Auntie Hannah is very sick?” Mila asked.

  “No, it must be as my father wrote, she’s having a difficult pregnancy and he needs help with the children and cooking. If it were serious, he would have asked that we both come home. Don’t be afraid, Mila.”

  “Then why are you so upset?”

  “I’m not … I … Mila, do you feel ready to marry?”

  Mila lifted a shoulder and let it drop; she smiled; she brushed her new short bangs to the side.

  “I don’t feel ready at all,” Atara said.

  The girls stared at the unfolding landscape, the row houses, mining shafts, once again painfully aware of the distance between them. Deaf Hill, Stony Heap.… What had happened? Newton Aycliffe, Doncaster.… They kept silent.

  They alighted in London and transferred from King’s Cross station to Charing Cross station, where they waited for the train to Dover. In the crowded waiting area, newspapers crackled as pages turned and folded.

  A headline caught Atara’s attention:

  ZIONIST OFFICIAL SHOT

  Collaborated with Eichmann

  Atara was familiar with the Rebbe’s fulminations against Zionists, but this was a secular paper. She nudged Mila. “Look!”

  Mila shrugged a shoulder. “What do you expect? Zionists have no morals.”

  Atara stepped up to the news kiosk. She stared at the black-and-white photograph under Collaborated with Eichmann: boxcars with open doors, people climbing up, down, standing nearby; some in Hasidic garb.

  She searched her purse for coins. She looked right and left to make sure no one from her father’s world or from the seminary’s world was there to see her.

  “You’re buying a Goyish paper?” Mila asked, alarmed.

  Dragging her heavy suitcase, Mila marched toward the train pulling into the station. “I’m not sitting next to you if you’re going to read that,” Mila said when Atara caught up with her.

  Atara dragged her suitcase down the narrow center aisle of the coach car, she thanked the man who helped her lift her suitcase onto the luggage rack, took a seat. Once more, she examined the photograph.

  The Kasztner Train, Budapest, June 30, 194
4, the caption said.

  She started to read. An agent of the Zionist Rescue Mission in Hungary, Rezsö Kasztner, had been accused of collaboration. A long trial in Israel surfaced conflicting accounts. Kasztner considered himself a hero for having the audacity to negotiate with Eichmann in Nazi-occupied Budapest and saving as many as he could, but the court concluded that Kasztner obtained safe passage for a few by agreeing to keep the rest from resisting deportation.

  Witnesses who had lost their families in Auschwitz testified that Kasztner’s people circulated fake postcards from Kenyérmezö—the Hungarian breadbasket: We are resettling. There is food, work.… Those who heard about the cards thought: Why flee and endanger anyone’s life? They boarded the cattle cars.

  Others testified that Kasztner sent Halutzim, Zionist pioneers, to warn Hungarian communities, but the people would not listen. One woman recalled that in the town of Szatmár, the rabbi, Joel Teitelbaum, threatened to excommunicate the Zionist youth who tried to warn his congregation.

  Atara paused. It felt odd to see the name of the Rebbe in a secular paper, a national daily. She stared again at the photograph and suddenly realized where she had seen the image before: in the countless tellings of Mila’s dream.

  Open boxcars with Jews in them.

  Atara sprung up, eager to confirm Mila’s version of her mother’s death: There had been a train of open boxcars in Hungary, in the spring of ’44. She stopped—the caption under the photograph mentioned Budapest, but Mila’s parents were fleeing deportations from Kolozvár. And the Rebbe lived in Szatmár. She needed more information before she awakened Mila’s memories, she needed to be sure, she needed the train’s itinerary and the date it departed, she needed a list of passengers.…

  In Dover, she caught headlines on a news cart:

  KASZTNER IN CRITICAL CONDITION

  THE KASZTNER AFFAIR

  She rushed down and bought two more papers. Once again, she saw mention of the Satmarer Rebbe. The prominenten, the people Kasztner had saved, had not come forward to testify in his favor during the eighteen-month trial; they had not wanted to be identified as owing their lives to him.