by Méira Cook
To the east, in the Promised Land, the Israeli prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, had proclaimed our future: a new language for a new land. We who did not live in Israel but in the dead centre of the North American continent, in a city looped between two meandering rivers, one swift flowing, the other fat and sluggish, we too longed for a new language, a new land. Our names were the names of American actresses and television stars — Marilyn and Linda and Shirley and Barbara — but our children were the sons and daughters of biblical heroes, striding like conquerors across a parched and blazing land.
Rachel and Leah and Sarah: our daughters were ignorant of the hawking, throat-clearing, immigrant tongue of their grandparents. They were neither slaves in the land of Egypt nor shopkeepers in the diasporic cities of North America. They went to high school and summer camp, learned piano, wore dime-store lipstick, dated boys. Overnight they grew up, our little girls. The braces came off and the makeup went on. Then they began to roll their eyes at their mothers. But such pretty eyes! We were exasperated and awestruck. How did we produce such beauty, such intellect? Such willfulness? One by one they went off to university, our darling girls. We who had been housewives and librarians, teachers and bookkeepers, we who had toiled in dress shops and shoe stores — we couldn’t get over our daughters’ achievements. Doctors! Lawyers!
The world was their oyster, their seafood buffet, as we told each other knowingly. For they had never tasted oysters in our homes.
Adam and Daniel and Jonah: our sons declined to attend business school, to take over their fathers’ commercial ventures, the Meat Wholesalers on McPhillips or Fine Leather and Furs on Portage. Not yet, maybe never! Instead, they backpacked through India or raised chickens in the austere kibbutzim of the Galilee. For a time they turned their backs on the girls they had known all their lives and dated pretty blonde gum-snappers from the white bread and mayonnaise suburbs and, yes, sometimes married them. It broke our hearts because we had not been raised in the modern way. We did not believe that love conquered all.
Let them marry who they marry, we’ll still be their mothers, Minnie Binder would say. In time she even grew to accept her son’s gentile wife because her boy — Maxele, she always called him — was such a good son that he turned the words she had used merely to save face into a scientific fact. A proverb, almost! But Minnie was right. Whatever they did and whoever they married they were still our sons in whose adult faces with their newly squared-off jaws and sandpaper cheeks we could yet discern the sweet-natured, puppy-breathed boys they had once been.
And they came back to our city, most of them, fully grown salmon, labouring upstream to spawn in clear northern waters.
It was the kind of city that children often returned to, dragging their memories behind them like a beloved blanket. A summer camp they used to attend, the taste for a particular birthday cake only obtainable from a bakery in the city’s North End, the family cottage at a lake just two hours east. It was the way the rivers froze early in winter so that our children could skate for red-cheeked miles or organize a pickup hockey game with their pals.
“It was colder in those days,” Leah Silverstein would tell her nieces and nephews. “You kids couldn’t have handled it.”
And then our children began to have children and we became grandmothers. Once again we made a great big cupboard of ourselves for others to rummage in. Ah, but what a joy to hold a soft-boned newborn in our arms again, to feel the clutch of baby fingers around our calloused thumbs, to glance down and see a fontanel pulse with every heartbeat. They were fragile but they cleaved to life. Such delicacy! Such toughness! If we had known what fun grandchildren were we would have had them first, we joked to one another. One day our children became parents to children of their own, and we watched them suddenly apprehend that the world was ruled by gravity and the democracy of merest chance. That it bristled with sharp objects, barking dogs, and banging doors.
Oh tiny fingers, oh tiny toes! Oh little bones, green and supple as the branches of a sapling. The sun rose and set; not a day had passed but a year, a decade, a lifetime. Day and night we worried about our children and our grandchildren, reminding one another of our rabbi’s favourite joke.
“Four ladies sit down to play mahjong,” Mrs. Silverstein would begin.
We were used to Rabbi Zalman. He had his faults but he certainly knew how to tell a joke.
Some of our children didn’t marry, of course. Stylish, catty boys who were rumoured to be living with other boys. Well, we’d always had an inkling about Mrs. Goldstein’s youngest, who didn’t play soccer or hockey but would draw up a chair at our kitchen counters and help us pat out cookie dough. Fierce girls who grew up to ride bicycles, avow their allegiance to fish and their independence from men. Beneath their declarative T-shirts even their breasts required no external support.
“But a fish doesn’t need a bicycle,” Mrs. Silverstein had wondered all those years ago. Nevertheless, when Leah Silverstein eventually became an aunt she was the best aunt ever, losing her heart to her nieces and nephews, although she never entirely lost her critical faculties. “Oscar? Really?” she’d exclaimed, years before, at her eldest nephew’s bris. “What, are they all going to own delis?”
Leo and Rose and Molly. Harry and Oscar and Nathan. They were the Deli Generation! The years had come full circle and our grandchildren had inherited the shtetl names that had once shamed our grandparents. Assimilation was no longer the fashion; we were not milk to be poured into the cereal bowls of this gentile prairie city. Disappearing without a trace, diluting.
Ah, but we watched those children like —
“— like lighthouses,” said Mrs. Harvey Silverstein.
“A lighthouse on the Prairies?” exclaimed Leah. “No such thing.”
It was true that there were technically no lighthouses on the Prairies but sometimes young Leah missed the forest for the trees. Or, in this case, the waves for the rocks! What her mother meant was that we ourselves were the lighthouses. We watched those kids with 360 degrees of vigilance. Our searchlights revolved so fast that we gave the ships seizures!
If anyone had asked us to describe how we felt during the years when our children were becoming adults, our daughters women and our sons men, we would have said, “Busy.” There was so much to do, so many chores to finish, so many items to cross off our lists before we could put our heads on our pillows at the end of the day and say, “Done.”
Nothing was ever truly done, though. Lists branched into other lists, chores multiplied like brooms in the cupboard of a sorcerer’s apprentice. Our children were coming of age, and we could not allow the day to pass without the appropriate festivities. A big hoo-hah, Mrs. Silverstein as much as said, although who was she to talk, her daughter wanted to know. Leah’s bat mitzvah had been a ritzy do, one of the most elaborate of its kind in those days. We still remembered the speeches, the candy-themed centrepieces, and poor Leah’s party frock that had been ordered from Toronto three months before her special day, and unfortunately as many months before the growth spurt that strained the bodice, waist, and hips of her chartreuse off-the-shoulder evening gown. It was an oddly adult colour to choose — “Especially for such a sallow child,” remarked Bessie Naiman — but what is a mother’s love if not alert to beauty in all its variegated disguises?
“May she be as lucky as she is beautiful,” the late Harvey Silverstein said to all and sundry, all the well-wishers and onlookers and back-slappers.
“Who needs luck when you have such beauty?” Mrs. Silverstein had retorted.
Such defensiveness! Did she finally regret her extravagance in ordering a stylish frock from an exclusive dress store? In another city, yet! No returns and no discounts, she’d boasted. But who could wish the mother’s sins piled upon the daughter’s slumped shoulders? Leah’s ungainliness only made her more precious to us.
“She will grow into her luck,” the rabbi’s wife reassur
ed us. With all our hearts we wished Leah Silverstein a lucky life, for we could not imagine, despite our sage rebbetzin’s certainty, how the child would grow into her beauty.
Meanwhile, we had our own events to plan. We ordered food for our kiddush lunches, and reminded Debbie at Bouquet Boutique to deliver floral arrangements to the synagogue before the Sabbath began. We dithered over luncheon menus — Menu A or Menu B, we wondered, or perhaps we could persuade our husbands to consider Chef Hubert’s Premium Deluxe Menu C Buffet, which included tuna lasagna and cherry kugel, along with the party sandwiches and egg salad on bagels that were the mainstay of our Saturday kiddush luncheons. The party sandwiches were the real draw, of course. No celebration was complete without those white bread dainties with their trippy layers of salmon or tuna salad, chopped egg, cream cheese, and sweet pickle relish.
One year, Bella Shayowitz, who made exotic jewelry in her spare time and was always something of a maverick, persuaded Chef Hubert to conceal a maraschino cherry in the cream cheese centre of her party sandwiches, something sweet and unexpected to surprise her guests. Certainly her guests were surprised, as who wouldn’t be by the jauntiness of a cherry-centred sandwich?
“Does she think a party sandwich is a cocktail?” Mrs. Silverstein asked.
“Do you know how long it takes the stomach to digest a maraschino cherry?” Shirley Rubin protested. “Seven years!” she replied, before anyone else could hazard a guess.
“Who needs to eat a sandwich that lasts seven years?” someone else, probably Barbara Becker, inquired. It seemed we were all so astonished by that little syrup-soaked sweetmeat leaking its red dye into the cream cheese centre of our decorum that all we could do was exclaim.
“Well, well,” said the rabbi’s wife finally, summing up the matter in her usual astute manner.
We knew what she meant and besides, she was a saint, the kind of woman who refused to speak ill of anyone. The truth of the matter, as Bella’s great friend, Minnie Binder, pointed out to those who would listen, was that Bella Shayowitz had only one child, a thug baby who had surprised nobody by growing up to be a burly, buzz-cut fellow. Minnie too had only one child, one son, her Maxele, and so she understood the importance of getting it right the first time. No do-overs! Bella Shayowitz had one chance to shine and if she thought the cherry in her party sandwiches was enough to put the cherry on top of her celebration, then so be it.
Although he didn’t exactly look it, Michael Shayowitz was smart as they come, no flies on that one. But, unfortunately, the brain box had a tin ear, and when he took his place on the bimah that morning, we all hoped he would have the good sense to rush through his portion “like a Ferrari,” as the rabbi was inclined to tut. But instead, the boy chanted his Torah portion slowly and emphatically, so that every flat note, every off-key syllable, every cracked scrap of melody, seemed to tumble forever in the high-spinning dust motes of the sanctuary.
The night before, the custodian had — for the first time that year — turned on the heat, which, since it was the Sabbath, could not now be regulated. Oh, how we perspired into our shirtwaists and liberty-print blouses, the sweat trickling into our armpits and between our breasts so that we were obliged to use the weekly synagogue bulletin to fan ourselves. By the time the service was over our tempers, like the sanctuary, were overheated.
However, Michael Shayowitz’s unmusical performance was a side issue. What we really meant when we pointed out that he was an only child was that his mother had leisure to spare. Free time! But, as Minnie Binder pointed out in defence of her friend, even one child takes up one hundred percent of a mother’s attention. How much more time can two children take up? We were confused, for although we agreed with Minnie in theory, we also knew that the numbers didn’t quite add up. Do the math: time is time, but time divided by half is both more than half and less than all. What this meant in reality was that if Michael had had a little brother or a big sister, then Bella Shayowitz would have had no time to craft her unique trinkets and no time to think up her artistically filled party sandwiches.
On the other hand, as the rabbi’s wife pointed out, we were none of us physicists, capable of dividing time into matter, or at least into whatever matters most.
True, Minnie conceded. She herself had worked all her life in her late husband’s store, Elegance Shoes, and she ran a household and cared for her aged parents as well. In fact, she was so rushed off her feet in those days that she barely had time to have her hair washed and set once a week, her only indulgence. And yet, with all the work, the shopping and cooking, the standing on her feet for eight hours a day — in heels, no less — it was Maxele who had taken up all her attention, she was certain of it. Perhaps time wasn’t always a measurable commodity, like the hours in a day or the distance between years, Minnie speculated. Was it possible that time ran along different tracks, one track for all the things we had to do in a day and the other track for all the people we loved?
We all looked at our friend in amazement. What had happened to our practical Minnie?
But whether we chose to believe in love or time, housework or physics, we all agreed that with only one bar mitzvah to plan, poor Bella wanted to make a bit of a splash. Naturally she had chosen the Premium Deluxe Menu C Buffet, to which she had persuaded Chef Hubert to add an extra kugel — strawberry, with a choice of sour cream or applesauce. Debbie at Bouquet Boutique had outdone herself by fashioning five potted trees, which she had artfully distributed around the room. The trees were constructed of silver-sprayed branches draped with cutout menorahs, Stars of David, dreidels, and strings of non-denominational crystals.
“Jewish baroque!” scoffed Leah Silverstein. But we knew that the potted trees, with their gaudy decorations and their tendency to overbalance, represented the Tree of Life, which had given our people their direction and our synagogue its name. Yet even though it was only fall we couldn’t help noticing how these trees resembled the artificial Christmas trees that, in another couple of months, would ornament the shopping malls of our suburbs and the living rooms of our gentile friends. Poor Bella, we thought, so much sass yet so little sense.
But who could blame the woman? The truth was, with so many mitzvah celebrations to attend in those years, we were at synagogue every Saturday morning listening to someone’s child babble or mumble or whine their Torah portion. Afterwards we would sit in our strangling pantyhose and our tightly belted frocks, with our husbands and our friends, eating party sandwiches and egg salad bagels, either from Menu A or Menu B. Who could tell the difference anymore? The coffee in the enormous stainless steel urn could only be heated once on the Sabbath, so it was cold as piety and bitter as obligation, an uncomfortable combination and one that tended to cause acid reflux. Naturally, we all wanted to do something just a little bit different.
Sally Segal paid Chef Hubert a surprise visit two weeks before her daughter’s bat mitzvah. She found him taking stock of his dry goods — bags of flour and sugar, boxes of soup mix and matzo meal — and since they were already in the synagogue kitchen, she took the opportunity to demonstrate her skill with fancy garnishes. Radish roses and carrot curls! Orange spirals on toothpicks and artfully placed cucumber fans! No more parsley sprinkles, she told him. People get tired of picking dried herbs from their teeth.
In a daring break with tradition, Shirley Rubin went ahead and ordered four baked cheesecakes for her dessert table — one chocolate, one double chocolate, one chocolate-vanilla marble, and one turtle toffee — and Shirley’s sister-in-law, Marilyn Rubin, let it be known that she was planning to rearrange the buffet table altogether. A total overhaul. Put the dessert table up front, she instructed Chef Hubert, and the luncheon dishes and heating trays behind.
To all these suggestions, Chef Hubert nodded thoughtfully, or tapped his nose with the point of his wax pencil, or scribbled notes to himself on his expense sheet. It made no difference — he was French (his name was pronounced “U-bear
”) and glamorously confident of his superior judgement. Chef Hubert’s Gallic charm certainly lent a touch of class to the proceedings and, it was hoped, mightily impressed the out-of-town guests who had schlepped in from cosmopolitan centres like Toronto, Montreal, and even Minneapolis.
“Huh, let them have their chocolate fountains and their helium balloons,” Mrs. Silverstein would say. “We have our wonderful Chef Hew-bert. He’s French, you know.”
“Francophone,” corrected Shirley Rubin, a stickler for geographical accuracy.
Chocolate fountains and helium balloons were two of the prohibited luxuries we had all experienced at events in other cities, but our own stern rabbi had outlawed them since they encouraged feats of clowning (chocolate fountains) or tended to tug loose from their moorings and drift up to the lofty ceiling of the sanctuary (helium balloons). This last was a particular vexation because the balloons were as brightly coloured as they were indestructible. Their silent, gentle drift and bob was strangely hypnotic and proved such a distraction to daily services that the staff was obliged to hire expensive equipment to remove them.
“Francophone,” Shirley Rubin repeated. “Not French.” And impossible to deal with, she did not say. We knew what she meant, though, and most of us agreed with her assessment. But Chef Hubert was immovable on the question of how things were done since he had been doing them for years. He’d been the first caterer hired by the synagogue steering committee and he meant to go on as he had begun. Which is to say: without changing a sugarless cookie.
“Do you know how many diabetics attend Saturday morning services?” he asked Barbara Becker. “They have to eat too.”
Chef Hubert was as knowledgeable of the dietary requirements of the community as he was canny about their greed. He was of the advanced opinion that no one needed four cheesecakes at their mitzvah celebration since, although all would certainly be sampled, at least a quarter of each would remain untouched.