Sisters Weiss ~ A Novel

by Naomi Ragen

“You don’t know anything about him! What you’ve seen and heard is a stranger to me and to himself, a father crazy with grief for the dearest thing in his life, his precious daughter, his bas zekunim!”

  “You love each other?”

  “I never regretted my marriage for a moment. This was God’s plan for me, Rose, and you helped bring it about,” she said sincerely.

  How generous, Rose thought, her heart contracting. If the situation were reversed, I would never, ever have forgiven her. Never.

  “And what about your husband, Rose?”

  “Husbands. I wasn’t as lucky as you, apparently. The first time, anyway.” She was silent for a few moments, studying the dark dregs at the bottom of her cup. “Raphael, my first husband, was someone I met in the park. He wasn’t Jewish. All we ever talked about was politics. He was a radical socialist determined to save the world, involved in a million organizations. That left him very little time to help me out, even when I was pregnant. He believed in women’s rights, just not his wife’s. He thought my photography was a hobby and I should be spending my time vacuuming and typing up his political screeds. Any success I had was in spite of him.”

  “Sounds not so different from the groom you ran away from, no?”

  “What?” Rose had never thought of that. The irony of it astounded her. “Well, I left him, too.”

  “So, you were alone with a small child…”

  “Yes, but I was happy. My clients were sending me more and more jobs, and my reputation was growing. I began to work on my second book.”

  “You married again, no? Hannah’s father?”

  “Yes. Henry. And he was Jewish, just not very traditional. He was like me, a person who took risks, loved life. He loved me and our children…” To her horror, she felt the grief welling up inside her, unstoppable. She wiped her eyes. “I was widowed after only ten years of marriage. It was a terrible time for me and the kids.”

  “I’m so sorry! I didn’t know. What happened to him?”

  “He was a news photographer, and he was shot by some of the worst, most evil men imaginable. He gave his life to help some kids. It was like him.”

  “Were you angry?”

  “What? Angry?”

  “That he went off to a war, got himself killed…” Pearl said innocently.

  “Got himself killed?” Rose felt the fury rising inside her. But then she looked at Pearl’s honest distress. She hadn’t meant any harm. It was just the way she thought. A man going off like that to pursue his life without his family was utterly incomprehensible to her. “I was angry, but not at him. I wondered why God had done this to me. If it was some kind of payback, a punishment.”

  “You may have used your subway token to take your body out of Williamsburg, but if you can think that, your mind and soul are still there, Sister.” Pearl shook her head sadly. “Even I don’t think like that anymore. Tragedies happen, sometimes to very good people who have lived pious, generous lives. God is there to help us through them.”

  “Wow!” Rose nodded. “I really didn’t expect to ever hear that from you. We weren’t brought up to think that way.”

  “I also chose my own way in certain things. When I asked you about your life, I wasn’t judging you…”

  “I’m sorry I got mad. I’m so confused about so many things. I once read this story about Chaim Grade—a famous Yiddish writer who was even better than Isaac Bashevis Singer. Anyhow, Grade was teaching a course on literature at Hunter College. He had an ultra-Orthodox student in his class. Gradually over the year, the student changed, showing up first without his black suit, then shaving off his beard, and finally getting rid of his skullcap. One day, Grade pulled him aside: ‘You can do anything you want,’ Grade told him, ‘but you’ll never enjoy it.’ That’s a little bit how I feel.”

  Pearl shook her head. “I hope you don’t think this makes me happy.”

  “Doesn’t it?”

  “I don’t know if you’ll believe me, Rose, but I always hoped and prayed you’d enjoy your life. That would have meant that at least everything the family went through had a purpose!”

  Could she possibly mean that? Rose wondered, disoriented. “What was it you wanted to talk to me about, Pearl?” she said hurriedly to hide her confusion.

  “Isn’t it obvious?”

  “Not to me.”

  “Why did my Rivkaleh leave us? What did Zevulun and I do wrong? What did our mameh and tateh do wrong…?”

  Rose gripped her empty cup tightly. “I’m not sure if I can point to any one thing. I’m not even sure that if all the things I resented had never happened I wouldn’t have wound up in the same place. Maybe that’s true of Rivka as well. I can’t say. Because, you see, there is one thing our world doesn’t and has never understood: Freedom. The right of every person to choose. In our world, the rebbes and parents and teachers think they can rub out the desire for freedom with scary stories and excommunications, but they will never succeed. You can’t take that desire from a person. We are born with it; it’s God-given.”

  “We know that! We only try to help our children make the right choices,” Pearl protested.

  “No. You don’t. You try to convince them that there is only one right choice, that which was decided for them on the day they were born, even the day they were conceived.”

  Pearl was silent. “We’re not like you. We love our lives. We love the small, good, perfect world where we were brought up. We never want to leave it.”

  “Yes, that’s what they want you to believe. And they are very good at making you believe it’s your choice.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “What’s not fair is the idea that if a child opens a book and sees a photograph, you throw him out of the house.”

  “It was the Honored Rav’s idea.”

  “They were my parents, not him.”

  “They thought they were doing the best for you.”

  “They were wrong.”

  “And you never made any mistakes bringing up your children?” Pearl lashed out.

  Rose was silent. So many mistakes! Too many to count.

  She had left her children more or less to fend for themselves, telling herself that the long photographic assignments in faraway places, the monthlong speaking tours, had not affected her kids too much, that they had learned by example to be independent and fearless people. But every once in a while, she got an unwelcome glimpse into their hidden reserves of anger and resentment. Jonathan had married a girl from Wales and moved to faraway London. She hardly saw him. And Hannah often said things like, “It’s not like I don’t know how to take care of myself, Mom” or, “Motherhood is a part-time job, right, Mom?”

  She too had tried to lead them into living the kind of lives she approved of. Every parent did. “Like I said, I’m not sure it made a difference in the end. I wanted a certain kind of life, different from the one they envisioned for me. The same is true of Rivka. I’m sure she loves you and Zevulun. She’s young, confused, ashamed. Believe me, I tried to get her to go home to you … I think maybe that’s why she ran away.”

  “Now she has no one,” Pearl moaned, clutching her hands. “May God protect her.”

  “She’s smart, and she’s good. She’ll be all right,” Rose said hopefully, shaking inside with the knowledge that neither one of those qualities could really keep the girl safe.

  “That’s all I want. For her to be safe, for her life to be good. Even if she doesn’t want the kind of life I’ve chosen. I don’t agree with Zevulun. I don’t even think he really meant what he said. I’m her mother. I’ll love her no matter what. The way our mother and father loved you.”

  “Wish for something better for her than that! Mameh and Tateh wanted nothing to do with me after the police got involved.”

  “That’s not true! Every Friday night, Tateh said a blessing for you and Mameh answered amen, until the day he died.”

  Rose felt the door to that empty room inside her suddenly swing open. It was filled
with treasured memories she had not visited in decades. “I had no idea.”

  “But now you know,” Pearl answered, sipping the last drops of liquid from the bottle, then getting up to leave. She opened her purse and left some money on the table.

  “Please,” Rose said, handing it back to her and laying down some bills.

  “Thank you, Shoshi,” Pearl said.

  They walked out into the street. The late-afternoon light was gold with sunset, turning Pearl’s matronly wig the color of the hair she had once had as a little girl. She was still beautiful, Rose thought. Just like her daughter. Rose reached out hesitantly, touching her shoulder. “Take care of yourself, Sister.”

  Pearl suddenly turned. Burying her head in Rose’s shoulder, she wept.

  38

  New York University Campus, April 2011

  Hannah sat in the NYU library, mesmerized by the photo on the book cover in front of her: the young, pretty face; the sad, searching eyes; the nineteenth-century dress. With a shock, Hannah suddenly realized it reminded her of Rivka.

  That had happened often in the last three years. The back of the head of a blonde in the far end of a subway car, a People magazine with Reese Witherspoon on the cover, or simply any woman in a midcalf skirt. For some reason, it had happened much more frequently when Simon was still around. But since he’d left school—a year before graduation—the sightings had somehow grown fewer.

  Like Rivka, no one knew what had happened to Simon either. Rumor had it that he had gone to India to study meditation, while others said he had joined his father’s clothing factory, starting at the bottom. Presumably, that meant he would now be loading boxes or shoving racks. The idea charmed her.

  She turned the pages. The book was called To Reveal Our Hearts, by Carole B. Balin, and contained a number of fascinating biographical sketches of Jewish women writers in czarist Russia. It was a real find, filled with the rare, fascinating writings of nineteenth-century Jewish women rebels, and dealt with issues that never got old. They’d waged quite a battle, taking aim at their society’s most cherished and accepted norms. One of them, Hava Shapiro, had written: “A Jewish woman must stifle her own feelings a thousand times … whereas a Gentile woman is capable of drawing near to that which she loves [the Jewish woman] must sacrifice her soul and her freedom.” Indeed, she went on to say, “ambitious and intelligent women often don’t fit in anywhere, winding up … disillusioned dreamers … odd old maids … [or pathetic] … loners.”

  She’d found these words chillingly relevant.

  She’d been resolutely single ever since the relationship with Simon had ended, paralyzed by the idea of making another terrible mistake. But to have a relationship was to take chances. There was never any guaranteed armor against heartbreak. She wondered if Rivka was in the same boat, and wondered, too, if she would ever find out.

  Despite the best efforts of a very, very expensive detective, they had not been able to find her. It was as if she’d evaporated or been beamed up by aliens. At first, there had been some hope, her name appearing on the rolls of a city drop-in center for homeless women the very day she’d disappeared. But by the time they went over there, her name had disappeared, and so had she. From then on, her tracks had more or less been erased, like footsteps on the shoreline.

  The girl had made so many stupid mistakes! Still, her heart went out to her cousin. Poor Rivka! Misunderstood and condemned by everyone she knew, wandering around looking for a niche in which to live her own life, flitting from one branch to the next, determined to be herself, without even knowing who that “self” was!

  She had long regretted how their relationship ended, all those things she’d said and felt. While the Simon part of it had long ago become irrelevant, what still rankled was her cousin’s underhandedness, her betrayal of trust. All of Simon’s faults could not erase Rivka’s choices to behave in the way she did.

  Often, Hannah had tried to come up with exculpatory explanations to erase even that: Perhaps Rivka had simply been ashamed of her feelings for Simon? Admitting desire was never easy for women. It was always supposed to be the men who were the pursuers, the seducers. A woman cast in that role was always a villainess and a wanton. Maybe the girl simply couldn’t face openly what she was planning to do?

  In time, Hannah even admitted that she herself was far from blameless. After all, how could Rivka have known about her secret feelings for Simon, feelings, she now understood, that had been based on ignorance and fertilized by mystery, allowing them to bloom into an infatuation?

  Her cell phone, set on vibrate, began to shake. She took it out, looking at the number. Her mother. She gathered her notes and exited the reading room, leaving the book behind on the table, where she planned to return to it soon.

  “You’ll never guess!” Rose said exultantly.

  “Gee, Mom, you sound happy for a change. I’ll never guess what?”

  “The Metropolitan Museum of Art has acquired forty-three of my photographs and is inaugurating a permanent exhibition!”

  Hannah was speechless. All she could say when she finally caught her breath was, “Wow! Which photographs? No, forget it. I don’t even have to ask. The photos from Jerusalem.”

  After spending a year trying to find Rivka, her mother had finally shaken off a deep depression, traveling the globe again. She’d spent a year in Israel and a year in Jordan. The photos of women in Meah Shearim, Bnei Brak, and Amman had been hailed by critics as a triumphant return from her hiatus and praised as her best work ever.

  Hannah had had mixed feelings about that. To her, the photos looked like one long search for Rivka. “I’m so happy for you, Mom. You absolutely deserve it.”

  “Can you put the date of the opening down on your calendar?”

  “Wait a sec. Let me just get a pen.” She opened her day planner, cradling the phone between her neck and chin: “Shoot.”

  “The exhibit will be running the whole month, starting on June sixth. The gala is that evening. Get a cocktail dress and bring a boyfriend in a tux.”

  “The former is possible and likely, the latter is neither.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Well, Mom, I’ve got work to do. Talk to you later.” Her mother’s words rankled. When she went back to her cubicle in the reading room, the book was gone.

  Damn it!

  She looked around the table and underneath it and on either side.

  “I’m sorry, but are you looking for this?”

  He was tall and very slim, with sandy-brown hair and gray-blue eyes that were bright and intelligent. He had a small trimmed beard and a mustache that looked very nineteenth-century, or very cool, depending on how you looked at such things.

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “I saw it laying here and wasn’t sure you were coming back.”

  “Do you need it?”

  “No, no. I’ve got it at home. I was just looking something up. Wonderful book. If this kind of material interests you, I can recommend a few others.”

  “This kind of material?”

  “Oh, um, Jewish women writers of the enlightenment. You know, in Hebrew there is no word for enlightened women, only enlightened men: maskil. But now there is a whole group of mostly female scholars who have discovered numerous overlooked women writers, poets, and essayists who were enlightened intellectuals that participated fully in the renaissance of Jewish writing and political movements of the nineteenth century. They’ve even invented a term for them: maskilot.”

  Someone shushed him.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “We’d better go outside.”

  She followed him out of the building, suddenly noticing the skullcap on the back of his head.

  “I haven’t introduced myself. I’m David Adler. I’m a doctoral student in Hebrew literature.”

  “Here?” She had no idea NYU had such a program.

  “No. Harvard. But I did my master’s here at Skirball. When I come in from Boston to see my dad, I like to
use the library here.”

  “I’m just a lowly first-year master’s student in the history department, concentrating on women’s studies. My name is Hannah Weiss Gordon.” She looked for a flicker of recognition, an intake of breath that would precede, “Ah, the famous photographer’s daughter!”

  There wasn’t any.

  He put out his hand.

  She smiled, taking it. “So, you shake hands with women?”

  He laughed, adjusting his skullcap. “Whenever I have the pleasure and opportunity,” he said. “So, what are you researching?”

  “I’m fascinated by early women writers of Hebrew.”

  His eyes went wide with surprise. “Me too! I actually fell into this whole subject. I was working on a translation of Yehuda Leib Gordon’s poem ‘Tip of the Letter Yud,’ trying to understand where his feminism and support for women came from. That opened up the door to his correspondence with the writer Miriam Markel-Mosessohn, and then I just started researching the rest of these women writers. I have boundless admiration for them! First, the men denied them an education out of piety. And then, when women managed to educate themselves, they refused to recognize their talents.

  “I have a special place in my heart for the writer Sarah Foner. When other writers of the enlightenment were throwing their faith out the window, she didn’t understand why a person couldn’t be enlightened and devout; why secular and sacred knowledge couldn’t coexist peacefully. Too bad so many of her writings have been lost.”

  “I actually came across something about her on the Internet,” Hannah said. “I think her great-grandnephew, Morris Rosenthal, has published her writings in translation.”

  “I’ve read his book! But he only has the first half of her novel—the first one a woman ever wrote in the Hebrew language. The second half apparently never got published because some enlightened hotshot-male-chauvinist critic blasted it so badly.” He shook his head. “She died in nineteen thirty-six in Pittsburgh. I wish I could find out what happened to her papers and manuscripts.”

  “Yes, so do I!”

  “Well, I have actually been doing a bit of research on that subject…”