CHAPTER FIVE
IT WAS IN THE SPRING OF 1902 THAT I MADE MY first friend. I was in the market, standing at the edge of the small crowd that had gathered to watch a dancing bear. The performance was hardly inspired—the creature was so thin and ragged that his movements seemed more a pitiful attempt to escape future beatings than the humorous spectacle it was meant to be. Still, it had been a whole winter since we’d seen our last dancing bear, and when this one finally managed to rear up on his hind legs and wave his paws about, a murmur of appreciation passed through the crowd and coins began to clatter on the cobblestone.
“Pathetic,” I heard a voice mutter beside me, and I turned to see Sara Gittleman, the oldest daughter of Hodel the widow. A lively girl two years older than I, Sara had never directed a word toward me before.
“The poor thing’s half starved,” I ventured.
“I was referring to the audience, not the bear,” Sara said. “Why are they laughing and clapping? Are they so ignorant that they don’t even realize they’re watching themselves?” She turned to walk away from the crowd.
“What do you mean?” I asked, falling into step beside her. “I mean that the common people everywhere are no less in chains than that bear is, their children are as skinny and full of worms, and their lives are spent dancing whatever tune their masters demand of them.”
I looked at Sara in surprise. “You’re comparing us to that … that beast?”
Sara’s eyes flashed as they met mine and a flush of blood rushed just beneath her skin. “Tell me how we differ,” she demanded. “Tell me one way that we differ.” Her nostrils flared as she warmed to her outrage.
The comparison she was making was so absurd that had I dared to utter it to Tsila she’d have boxed my ears before demolishing my words with her own. “The bear can’t choose between good and evil,” I said without even having to think. “Nor does he know what it is to sanctify the Sabbath.”
Sara’s eyes narrowed as I spoke, and her nostrils flared even more dramatically. Normally such a look from a girl in town would have silenced me, but the subject we were discussing was so removed from my usual concerns, and Sara’s statement was so silly and easy to refute, that I felt liberated from my own awkwardness. “And furthermore,” I continued, “the master whose tune we dance to is the Almighty.”
She stared at me an instant longer, then asked me if I’d like to go for a walk with her.
I had often observed Sara as she talked and laughed with her group of friends, admiring her long chestnut hair and cheeks that dimpled when she smiled. It was beyond my fondest imaginings that she would ever take an interest in me. I was fourteen years old and no girl besides Lipsa’s daughters had ever asked me to join her on a walk before. I agreed immediately.
“I’ve been watching you for some time, you know,” Sara admitted as we left the market.
“You have?”
“Oh, yes. I’ve seen how you stand off by yourself, always alone.”
My cheeks flushed with shame, but there was no pity in Sara’s voice. She’d been drawn to me without knowing why, she was saying. But now, of course, she understood.
I nodded, not daring to ask what it was she understood.
“Serious girls are so rare in this town,” she sighed.
I nodded again, not sure what she meant by serious, and afraid, already, of disappointing and losing her interest.
“You’re stronger than I am, I can tell,” Sara said. “Younger, but already stronger. I’m drawn to such strength, you see.”
“I don’t know,” I muttered, and dared to glance at her. Her dark hair gleamed in the afternoon sun.
“Oh, yes,” she assured me. “You have the strength to stand by yourself, refusing to join the giggling silliness of the others, while I … I just can’t seem to help myself.” She sighed deeply. “I know I should be studying more, improving myself.” She brushed a lock of hair from her eyes, then turned a serious gaze to me. “Look at how you just bested me in our argument. Even though I know in my heart that my comparison is correct, it’s you who silenced me. And why? Because you obviously condition your mind by applying yourself to serious study, while I … I continue to fritter away precious time promenading with my friends.”
Had Sara only known how envious I was of girls like her, how often I watched her and her friends, how longingly I imagined one of them approaching me, taking my hand, leading me into their happy, giggling circle.
“The other girls … Sima, Mirel, Lena …” Sara uttered each name with a disdain bordering on contempt. “Their heads are filled with nothing but air.”
I knew that wasn’t true. Lena, for one, had a talent with a needle. Just a few weeks earlier, her mother had come to consult with Tsila about a possible apprenticeship, and Tsila, looking at samples of her work, hadn’t pursed her lips in disdain. And Mirel, Lipsa’s second-oldest daughter, might giggle, but it was she, I knew, who helped her mother compute the household income and expenses. I didn’t contradict Sara, though, and was rewarded with the sensation of her warm hand reaching for mine.
We walked up the incline through the wealthier part of town, past the Entelmans’ house and into the sweet pine forest that started at that edge of town. Sara told me about the job she had recently taken as an assistant in Mrs. Gold’s shop. Mrs. Gold had started out selling candles in the market from a tray that hung off her neck like an apron, but had expanded to soap, buttons, pencils, and other goods and now had a shop on the street that ran behind the market. The shop was so tiny and crammed so tight with goods that no more than two customers could squeeze in at one time. It was hard to imagine how she’d made room for an employee. “It’s dull,” Sara said of her work. “But she pays me on time and doesn’t yell at me. Nothing like that seamstress in Mozyr.”
Sara had been apprenticed to a seamstress, she told me, but had quit after two years. “The first year she paid me nothing,” she said. “None of them do. The second year, twenty-five rubles, and for that I had to take care of her squealing brats and run her errands in addition to the sewing. And the air in that room …”
We followed a wide, well-traveled path through the tall, sturdy pines, past stands of walnut and birch. “Still, it was good to be in Mozyr. When I ran her errands I took my time. There were intelligent people to talk to, unlike here—present company excluded, of course.” She flashed a deeply dimpled smile at me. “There’s a bookseller by the river there …”
“Horowitz’s?” I asked, to which Sara responded with a derisive laugh.
“Horowitz only sells religious books, you goose. I mean a real bookseller, with current thinkers and poets and novelists.” She began then to talk about the course of study she followed after leaving her mother’s heder, a stream of authors’ names that meant nothing to me. I stopped to admire a particularly huge old oak, enjoying the sound of Sara’s voice, the fragrant air of early spring, the feel of her hand in mine.
“What do you study with Tsila?” she asked me.
“Torah,” I said. “The prophets, Pirkei Avos … my Hebrew is as fluent as my Yiddish.”
The wrong answer, I could see from the scowl on my new friend’s face.
“At a time when thinking people are putting forward solutions for the great problem of universal happiness, our great Jewish thinkers are making a deep study of ancient tomes whose ideas are as dry and withered as leaves that have fallen from the tree.”
It took me a moment to understand that it was the Torah and Talmud she was referring to as dry and withered.
“Lilienblum said that. Have you read him?” I shook my head no. “How about Ansky?” I had to shake my head again. “Bialik? Darwin? Karl Marx?”
No, no, and no again, I admitted, my heart sinking as I revealed each new layer of ignorance. “But I do read and write Russian fluently,” I offered.
“That’s a start,” she conceded, and she told me about a novel she had just read that I might enjoy. “By Semyon Yushkevish. Have you read much of his work?�
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“Not much,” I mumbled.
We passed a pond, a small pond that seemed particularly inviting, surrounded as it was by willows, its waters smooth and peaceful in the late afternoon calm. “Would you like to sit for a while?” I asked Sara, and she nodded.
TWO YEARS HAD PASSED BY THEN SINCE THE ANNOUNCEMENT of Bayla’s engagement, and still she wasn’t married. A date for the wedding had been set, then postponed several times, already, and while there were always good reasons for the postponement—sickness in Leib’s family, a prolonged strike at the factory—there were those who were beginning to feel the presence of an omen.
“Will Bayla and Leib move to Bialystok?” I asked Tsila one evening after supper.
“Why would they move to Bialystok?” Tsila asked. “They both have work in Mozyr. It’s we who should move to Bialystok.”
It was just after Pesach, and my father had been laid off. Fewer people needed shoes in the warm months, so he was helping Noam the teamster load and unload coaches bound for the train station in Kalinkovich. The pay wasn’t good—three rubles a week—and as much as Tsila had hated Shlomo the Righteous for cheating Aaron Lev, she seemed to resent Noam even more.
“To think that you would be reduced to working for such a man,” she would say every night when Aaron Lev came home from work, and every night Aaron Lev would shrug that he had no other choice.
“We could move,” she would argue.
“To where?”
“To a proper city where people know enough to wear shoes through the warmer months.”
This would bring a smile to Aaron Lev. “Tsila, Tsila,” he would say, “do you think if we move to Minsk there will suddenly be an endless supply of customers lining up to buy my shoes?”
“More feet, more shoes,” she’d respond.
“More shoemakers,” Aaron Lev would mumble. He was not of the opinion that cities offered opportunity to Jews. Not the cities of the Russian pale. Montreal, maybe, where Yehuda seemed to be making a fortune in buttons. New York, of course. And wasn’t Hershel, Elke Leah’s son, making a nice way for himself in Liverpool? He had changed his name to Henry and had managed to learn a thing or two about scrap metal.
“So we’ll move to Liverpool, then,” Tsila would say, to which Aaron Lev would shake his head. Great leaps such as those might offer opportunity, but they were for men more agile than Aaron Lev, who, at thirty-four, already felt old and tired. His own ambition, he would tell Bayla, was to get out of shoemaking altogether and become a dealer in fruit. Not for any increase in riches—he was resigned to a life of limited means—but for the pleasure such a change might bring to his working days.
Tsila would sigh.
He was tired of feet, he would tell her. He was tired of leather too, a substance that filled him, more and more, with visions of death. As he stretched and nailed his strips of rawhide, he caught himself longing for the soft curve of a peach in his hand, the fragrance of apricots, the hard, shining flesh of ripe cherries.
“Who said anything about them moving to Bialystok?” Tsila asked me sharply now. “What have you heard?”
It was Rivka who had suggested that maybe Bayla and Leib would depart for Bialystok after the wedding. We were standing together in line to buy bagels from Freyde at the market.
“What wedding?” Freyde asked from behind her basket of bagels. “I’ll believe it when I hear the glass shatter.”
“He’s from Bialystok, after all,” Rivka went on, ignoring Freyde’s comment. “Why would they settle here, a young couple like that? I’ve heard he has a degree in pedagogy.”
“Never mind where he’s from or his fancy degrees,” Freyde droned. “So-called teachers like him have no homes. They move around like wild seeds, sowing discontent.”
“What, so-called?” another customer asked. “A cousin of mine attends his classes after work and says he’s a good teacher. A good man.”
Freyde shrugged. “I heard the mother’s cousin managed to find her some nice men. Fine men. Was there not a scholar among them?”
All eyes turned to me. “She didn’t like him,” I told them. Chippa had unearthed a disciple of a great rabbi in Lithuania for Bayla—a gaon, Chippa had intimated, but widowed twice already by the age of twenty-five. Bayla had shaken her head in refusal and walked out of the room.
“The Hero should have put his foot down then and there,” Freyde said to much nodding among her female customers. “Merchants and scholars he allowed her to turn away, but an agitator—that he decided to give his blessing to.”
“How was the Hero to know?” someone asked. “The cousin said he was a teacher.”
“He is a teacher,” said the cousin of Leib’s student. “Since when is teaching the alphabet and a bit of history agitation?”
“A man who knows he’s going to land himself in jail shouldn’t take himself a wife,” someone said.
“I don’t see him rushing to marry her,” Freyde pointed out.
“A man never knows where his life will land him,” Rivka said. “Should they all therefore stop marrying?”
“And anyway,” someone pointed out, “these days a man is arrested for the way his nose sits on his face.”
“Only if he displays it,” Freyde droned.
“WHAT DID YOU HEAR IN TOWN?” TSILA PRODDED ME.
“Nothing, really. I just thought that since Leib’s from Bialystok …” But Tsila’s eyes were too hot upon me. “Freyde said Leib’s an agitator.”
“She said what?”
I repeated what I had heard, incurring more of Tsila’s anger. “And did you say nothing in his defense?” she asked. “I don’t know Leib.”
“Who said you had to know him? Didn’t you tell them he’s a teacher?”
“Someone else did.”
“And you said nothing? You just stood there like a lump of a girl while those yentas were discussing your own family …?”
“Calm yourself, Tsila,” my father said. “What difference is it to us or to Leib what the likes of Freyde think?”
“What difference?’’ Tsila asked, but there was something else in my father’s tone that caught her attention. “It’s not just Freyde who says it, is it?” she asked my father.
“There’s talk,” he acknowledged.
“Talk like that in the wrong set of ears can ruin a life,” Tsila said, then turning to me: “He’s a teacher,” she said. “A man with high values. That’s what you tell those yentas, do you hear me? A teacher.” She shook her head in annoyance. “The man teaches people to read. That makes him an agitator?” She looked at me and my father in turn, but neither of us dared answer. “If Leib is an agitator, then Aaron Lev is the Messiah himself. That’s what you tell those chattering mouths. Do you understand me?”
My father smiled at that, then Tsila smiled too. “God forbid it should turn out that you are what our people have been waiting for all these years,” Tsila said.
“From your mouth to God’s ears,” my father agreed.
WITH BAYLA, HOWEVER, TSILA TOOK A DIFFERENT APproach. “Do you know what people are starting to say about this Leib of yours?” she asked when Bayla came for her fitting a few days later. Bayla didn’t answer.
“They’re saying he’s an agitator. That he’s going to land himself in jail.”
Bayla still didn’t answer but shrugged her shoulders as if such an eventuality was of little concern to her. “Since when have you started to bother yourself with gossip?” she asked.
“Since the consequences of it became a threat to my sister’s life.”
“My life is not in danger,” Bayla answered.
“Your happiness is.”
“My happiness?” Bayla asked. “What do you know of my happiness?”
“Nothing,” Tsila admitted. “Absolutely nothing. And do you know why? Because you no longer speak to me. Since you’ve taken up with this beloved Leib of yours, you’ve cut me out of your life entirely.”
“I haven’t,” Bayla started to prote
st, but Tsila interrupted.
“Oh, yes. All your life it was me you talked to. Every little problem, every little heartache, I listened, I helped you. I was happy to do it. I’m your older sister. But then you meet this man, this mysterious man whom I haven’t even met yet—do you realize it’s two years since your supposed engagement and you haven’t once brought him to meet me?—and all of a sudden a wall comes down. Your wall, not mine.”
“It’s not that …” Bayla tried to explain but Tsila waved her quiet.
“Still, you’re my sister,” Tsila continued. “I dare to think I may still know a little bit about you. I dare to think I’m not being overly presumptuous in assuming that if this Leib of yours is arrested and exiled to God knows where, that might interfere in some small way with your happiness.”
Bayla waited to see if Tsila was finished, and when it was clear that she was, Bayla nodded her head. “He’s a teacher, Tsila,” she said slowly. “He teaches people to read and to think. Might he land himself in jail? That I don’t know. These days a man is arrested for the way his nose sits on his face.”
It was the same statement I had heard from the customer at Freyde’s stall.
“Only if he displays it,” I said.
“Hush, Miriam,” Tsila chided me, but Bayla turned to me and asked if I would have my father trim his beard or uncover his head or not display his tsitsis. “To be a Jew and display it is dangerous too, you know,” she said.
Tsila bit the piece of thread she’d been pulling through the brocade. “I have a bad feeling,” she said.
“Now you sound like all the other bubbies with their omens and premonitions,” Bayla said. The two sisters locked eyes for a moment, neither speaking, then Tsila looked away.
“Come,” Tsila said with a sigh. She held up the half-finished dress. “Let’s see how it looks.”
The material Tsila held up was so substantial in form, and Bayla such a stick of a girl, it was hard to imagine how she wouldn’t break under the weight of it. Bayla took the brocade from Tsila and turned to the wall to remove her blouse and skirt.
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