Rashi’s Daughters Book I: Joheved

by Maggie Anton

  “Can you get a finger in?” Sarah inquired, and when Miriam nodded, she said, “Try to insert two fingers so you can massage the opening larger.”

  Eyes tightly closed, Miriam worked the aperture wider as gently as she could. When a contraction came, the countess thrashed and flailed, causing Miriam to think that her arm would surely break. But Aunt Sarah was encouraged that Adelaide still had strength enough to react so vigorously.

  Miriam finally managed to gain access to the womb, and there was the baby, wedged tightly on its side. But it was difficult to tell one part from another. Wishing she’d spent more time bathing baby Pesach, she decided that she’d found this babe’s shoulder, mainly by its proximity to his head. But all this maneuvering was taking its toll on the countess, just when she needed to be as strong as possible.

  Sarah gave new instructions to the ladies-in-waiting. “Any rubies Her Grace owns, bring them in immediately, along with two cups of strong wine and some ground pepper.” Then she threw some sweet-smelling herbs on the brazier, to attract the child so reluctant to be born.

  Aunt Sarah’s directions to Miriam were simple. “In between contractions, we will try to rotate the baby into a proper position, each pushing as hard as we can.”

  When Miriam whispered her concern about injuring the child, Sarah quietly insisted that she push with all her might. “The baby must be born soon, no matter what his condition.”

  The hours passed. Somehow Miriam found the strength to keep pushing, though she longed with all her heart to be home in her own bed. Count Thibault agreed to sacrifice one of his wife’s small rubies, now ground up in wine for her to drink. In addition, the countess gripped two larger stones, one in each hand. Sarah crushed a strange root into the other wine cup, but this potion she set aside.

  Dawn was lightening the room, and Miriam distracted herself from her cramping fingers by trying to figure out what scenes the colorful wall hangings depicted. Some were obviously from the Bible: Creation, the Flood with Noah, and so on down to King David. Others showed great battles. She had progressed from admiring the wall hangings to examining the ceiling, painted with signs of the zodiac, when the baby suddenly made a larger turn than before and Sarah yelled for Miriam to withdraw her hand.

  Now things happened quickly. Too exhausted to move, Adelaide was carried to the birth stool and supported there by her ladies. When the next contraction came, Sarah blew the ground pepper up her patient’s nose, generating a large sneeze accompanied by a glimpse of the baby’s feet.

  Sarah took hold of them and waited. One more sneeze, a firm pull, and the entire body was out.

  “A boy! It’s a boy!”

  One last dose of the expensive spice brought forth the head and afterbirth. At first the infant cried feebly, but his cries grew stronger as he was cleaned up and swaddled. Sarah hastily removed the agrimony, lest it draw the womb itself out afterwards.

  Miriam was physically drained, but emotionally elated. They had saved both Countess Adelaide and her baby boy! The new mother settled back into bed, her ladies trying to pretty her up for her husband’s expected visit. Only Miriam noticed that Aunt Sarah emptied the untouched second cup of wine into a chamber pot.

  Miriam heard roosters crowing as she and Sarah were escorted home. Somebody had given Aunt Sarah a purse full of coins, but she would not open it until she was secure at home. One thing kept Miriam awake. What had been in the untasted cup?

  “Powdered iris root, very hot and dry.” Aunt Sarah showed her where she stored the dangerous herb. “When a woman is feeble and the child cannot come out, it is better that the child be killed than the mother also die. The Merciful One be blessed that we did not need it tonight.”

  Miriam kept her eyes open long enough to don her tefillin and say her morning prayers. When Joheved entered their old bedroom, ready to put on her own tefillin, Miriam was sound asleep. She, and everyone else in the household, would have to wait to hear a firsthand account of the night’s events.

  Miriam was chopping vegetables in the kitchen a week later when one of the countess’s ladies-in-waiting knocked on the door. She jumped up and eagerly asked how mother and child were doing.

  The lady replied that both were healthy, the boy suckling well from his wet nurse. “Her Grace is especially appreciative of the part you played in the birth of her youngest son.” She held out a small wooden box. “And she wanted to reward you.”

  The box was intricately carved, and Miriam hoped it contained some valuable spice, perhaps pepper for use in future midwife duties. By now Rivka, Joheved and Rachel had gathered around the smiling stranger, who encouraged Miriam to show everyone the box’s contents.

  The room filled with awed exclamations. The box contained a small red jewel, and Miriam knew it had to be a ruby. She looked in awe at the countess’s lady, who explained that this was a twin of the one Her Grace had swallowed, one of a pair of earrings. Her Grace still had two ears, so she’d decided to send this lonely stone to the brave young midwife’s helper.

  Miriam couldn’t take her eyes off the ruby. “Please thank Her Grace for me. One day my future patients may benefit by holding it.”

  “Oh no, my child,” came the reply. “Her Grace thanks you. What is a ruby worth compared to her life and that of her son?”

  “A woman of valor who can find? Her worth is far above rubies.” Joheved quoted the final Proverb, its meaning clearly demonstrated.

  They urged the noblewoman to share some bread and wine with them, but she declined. If she tarried here too long, Her Grace might think she’d been waylaid and the jewel stolen. Rivka took upon herself the obligation of seeing their guest to the gate; it would be impolite for the lady to find her own way out. They were still admiring the ruby when Rivka came back.

  “Miriam, Joheved! Take my keys to the jewelry box and put that stone away before Claire comes downstairs.” Rivka trusted Marie’s replacement, but that didn’t mean she wanted valuables flaunted in front of the girl.

  Rivka’s position as mistress of the house entitled her to custody of the keys, which she wore pinned to her bodice like a brooch. She even had a decorated pin to hold them on Shabbat, so she would be legally considered to be wearing jewelry, which was permitted, rather than carrying keys, which was not.

  She was the one who locked the doors at night and unlocked them again at dawn. She kept a key to every chest and cupboard in the house, excepting Meir’s. If Anna or Claire needed pepper or cloves from the spice cabinet, she opened it for them, and it was she who unlocked the jewelry box before Shabbat or a festival, to take out what she and her daughters would wear on the holiday.

  Rivka handed a key to Miriam, and the three sisters climbed down to the cellar. The jewelry box should have been hidden behind a wine cask, but Joheved couldn’t feel it there.

  “Are you sure you put it back behind this cask, Miriam?” Her sister had been the last one to bed on Purim.

  “I thought it was this one,” she replied sheepishly. She had consumed a large quantity of wine.

  “Well, it has to be in here somewhere; you did put the box behind one of the wine casks, didn’t you?” Joheved snorted with impatience. Now they’d have to search behind all the casks.

  They started from where Miriam thought she had put the box. Rachel was too little to reach behind the casks, but she could look underneath them. “I see it,” Rachel squealed suddenly. “But I can’t reach it. It’s fallen behind this barrel.”

  It took Joheved’s entire arm’s length to reach the object. But it was a leather-bound volume, not the missing jewel box. “It’s in Hebrew and it’s mostly numbers,” Joheved announced after reading silently for a while. “I think it’s Grandmama Leah’s old ledger, but there’s more here than just accounts. Some of the pages are about things that happened to her, like a diary.”

  “Are there dates in it? Can you tell when it was written?” Miriam squeezed around to get a better look.

  “I can’t tell exactly, but I think the first
date is 4700-something. Goodness, that’s before Papa was born.” Joheved thumbed through a few pages. “We certainly get a higher price now than she did back then.”

  Rachel didn’t try to hide her impatience. “Never mind what wine cost then, read some of the diary part.”

  “All right, here’s a couple of pages near the beginning.” Joheved began to read aloud, “The townspeople are trying to ruin me with their taxes, and I shall have to go to the Bet Din (Jewish court) over the matter. They insist that my vineyard and grapes be taxed separately. They dare say that vineyards are the same as capital of a loan, while the harvest is equivalent to interest.”

  Joheved paused to turn the page. “They don’t understand that a vineyard cannot be compared to capital, nor even to merchandise. A vineyard requires not only a heavy yearly investment in both money and effort, but also a great deal of expensive labor to harvest the grapes. And even after all this, I am rarely sure of a profit. Every year the lords come and carry away their portion. Sometimes the crop is lost completely and I receive no return whatever for all my invested money and labor.”

  Leah’s complaints continued: “If the court upholds the townspeople and allows them to take away my painfully small profit and to even tax the land itself, I would be left with nothing. Heaven forbid! Such an injustice is a practice typical of Edom, not the Jewish way. The Jews should equitably allocate all taxes based on the person’s ability to pay, in accordance with the principle: Love thy neighbor as thyself.”

  Miriam sighed. “What a shame that Grandmama Leah’s profession gave her so much trouble.”

  “But imagine, she was ready to take her protest all the way to the Bet Din,” Joheved said, nodding in approval.

  “What about now?” Rachel asked. “Do we still have to pay taxes like that?”

  “Non, Rachel,” Joheved assured her. “As long as I can remember we’ve only paid tithes on the value of the wine itself, never on the vineyard or the grapes.”

  “Maybe Grandmama Leah did challenge her taxes at the Bet Din,” Miriam said. “And that’s why we don’t pay so much now.”

  “Find something else to read,” insisted Rachel, “something about Papa when he was little or when he got married.”

  But there was no mention of Papa, or of Mama, at all. In between the pages of numbers, there were sporadic complaints that bad weather or disease had nearly ruined the crop, but there were also many years when she wrote nothing except the accounting. Occasionally Leah objected to the harlots in the marketplace, which made it difficult for respectable women to do business there. Much to her granddaughters’ disappointment, it appeared that Leah wrote only about winemaking.

  “Wait, listen to this final entry,” Joheved said suddenly. “It’s dated 4825; that’s three years before Papa came home.”

  Leah had written: “I have had some distressing symptoms that I have not told anyone. New instructions do not penetrate; I hear them, but I can’t retain them. A thick fog begins to descend after a few sentences. I make the appropriate responses, but I am aware that I am not understanding. It is driving me mad.”

  Joheved fought back tears. “Even when I make a notation to trigger my memory, I have no idea to what the notes are referring. Instructions on how to get to someone’s house or a new recipe—these are old skills at which I excelled and now I cannot believe how this curtain always comes down.

  “I am reluctant to try anything new for fear I will come off as an idiot, and people will notice. There are parts of the city I know nothing about and I do not go there. I do not go out at night anymore. Everyone is always talking to me and giving me instructions, but I cannot seem to assimilate new procedures or ideas. My thinking process frightens me—my mind is spent.”

  Joheved stood stone silent. That was the last thing Leah had written. How terrible for Leah to know that her intellect was failing, how painful to suffer such a thing in secret. Leah had always been so proud of her learning; the shame and fear of losing it must have been unbearable, not to mention the humiliation of people thinking she was crazy.

  Tears were running down Miriam’s cheeks. “Why didn’t she tell us?” she asked helplessly. “We would have helped her. Poor Grandmama, so afraid and so alone.”

  Even Rachel, who barely remembered her grandmother, was sad. When they finally found the jewelry box, they no longer had quite the same enthusiasm for the valuable ruby. The stone’s beauty was tarnished by Grandmama Leah’s revelation. Miriam put the jewel away with their other valuables and carefully replaced the box behind the proper wine barrel.

  Joheved put the old ledger back behind its cask too. She suspected that Leah herself had been the last one to read it, and had never intended for anyone else to do so. The sisters couldn’t bring themselves to speak of what they’d found. Their grandmother had agonized so long over her secret, and now they had exposed it. It seemed best to leave well enough alone.

  Leah’s secret receded in importance as Passover approached. Rachel grew increasingly excited because this year she would finally join her sisters in making matzah, the unleavened bread that Jews are commanded to eat during the festival. For the eight days of Passover, it was forbidden to eat, or even possess, bread, cake or any kind of pastry. Consequently, the Jews of Troyes had to make enough matzah to last the entire community a week.

  For Joheved and Miriam, making matzah was the most, if not the only, pleasurable part of the festival preparations, and they volunteered to help at the bakery nearly every day. Rivka spent a few afternoons there as well, for both the camaraderie of her peers and to participate in the holy work.

  Rachel, and all the town’s children, wanted to help too, for part of their fun in baking matzah came from watching the adults working in such great haste. To eliminate any contamination by leaven, the women moved as quickly as they could. Those who mixed the flour with water, those who poured the dough and those who kneaded it, those who cut it into cakes and those who smoothed it, those who shoved the cakes into the oven, not to mention those who carried the dough from one worker to the next—they all raced through their tasks at lightning speed, taking care to insure that the dough never stood for a moment.

  One special task was delegated to the children, that of using the little cog wheels to perforate the dough and prevent it from rising in the oven. The children tried to make perfect pointed lines across the round cakes, and, for them, it was more game than work. Even for the adults, it was equally merry and pious labor. The women sang as they whisked the dough from one station to the next, songs as lively as their pace.

  Salomon accompanied Rachel on her first day of matzah baking. The most learned Jew in Troyes, it was his responsibility to supervise the workers and admonish them to remain diligent. But no one, not even Salomon, stood around and watched. Speed was unnecessary when it came to removing the baked unleavened cakes from the oven, and from this warm vantage point, he could make sure the dough was not delayed before it reached the oven.

  Rachel was so excited that she found it impossible to concentrate on making quick straight lines with her little cog wheel. People hurrying about, circles of dough practically flying from one hand to the next, these were far more fascinating to watch. It seemed as though collisions would be unavoidable, yet the workers always managed to move out of each other’s way in time. Then Rachel would let out her breath and return to her task, inevitably too late. But this learning period was expected; in time she would master making the perfect lines.

  Joheved and Miriam were experienced dough rollers, and, sitting next to each other at the large table, they rapidly yet calmly smoothed their balls of dough into flat circles. When it came time to bake the very last batch, the baker’s wife took out decorative molds for the workers to make fancy-shaped matzah for their own seders. Joheved used a bird-shaped form, and Miriam chose one shaped like a flower. Salomon made sure nobody took longer making the special matzah than the regular ones. Finally, the matzah was sorted and stored in tall stacks. As the festival week p
rogressed, each family would come and take what they needed.

  Meir’s family baked their matzah in the manor’s large oven, along with extra for other Jewish families in the vicinity. But they were distracted this Passover. Hannah had been bleeding off and on for the last month, painless bleeding, sometimes heavy and sometimes scant. But the babe remained inside her womb.

  Passover in Ramerupt passed uneventfully, and one week later, Meir was sleeping fitfully. Joheved was niddah again after a long interval, and he had been unable to hide his disappointment. This only heightened her sense of failure, and when he tried to comfort her, he succeeded only in making her feel worse. She finally asked him to stop talking and just let her go to sleep.

  Meir had no idea how much Joheved hated being niddah, and wearing the uncomfortable sinar with its associated mess was but a minor part of it. Niddah meant more than not being able to use the bed with her husband. To avoid even the temptation to sin, she and Meir never touched each other. For almost two weeks, they slept with separate linens, sat on separate benches, ate from separate bowls, and handed items to each other indirectly either by placing them somewhere for the other to pick up or by using another person as a go-between.

  After the miscarriage, when she first began her flowers, Joheved was proud of her niddah status. It proved she was a normal woman after all. During meals she sat with Rivka and Miriam and shared their dishes. She carefully avoided giving Meir anything from her own hand and vigilantly made sure that he never ate from anything she’d sampled. It was like a game.

  But a year later, niddah was more like a punishment. The abrupt changing of seats from her husband’s bench to her sisters’ was a shameful announcement that yet another barren month had gone by, and she now understood why Rivka preferred to sit with the women all the time rather than endure the monthly humiliation of moving her place. Joheved found it easier to not share her bowl with anyone during niddah, lest it inadvertently end up in front of Meir, even if it did make her feel like a leper.