by Maisie Mosco
“Oy’d be surprised, Doctor surr, if the whole family wurrn’t doin’ a bit o’ rememberin’ today. It’ll do sum o’ the young ones gud to think on whut were sacrificed for their sake!” she added before departing.
Including my father’s health, thought Nathan. But how could today’s young Jews comprehend what it was like to work in a sweatshop? To live in a back street, in the shadow of Strangeways gaol, sit shivering in winter on a lavatory in the backyard. Bridie was right. With each succeeding generation, more and more was taken for granted, as the twentieth century gallops towards its end, sweeping aside religious beliefs and family values.
Now Nathan, like Bridie, was a dying breed, the familiar figures of his humble beginnings dead and gone, and he responsible for carrying out his brother’s posthumous instruction.
Like hell I will! he had wanted to exclaim when David’s lawyer laid upon him the task. Honouring the clan’s founders was fine with Nathan, and such commemorations not uncommon in the Jewish community. What went against the grain was David’s instructing Nathan to do what he himself would eventually have got around to doing.
Only, given the sort of folk his parents and the Moritzes were, Nathan would have commemorated their names in a manner of which they would surely have approved. With the endowment of a hospital bed. Or a bench in a park.
Instead – well, if there was a hereafter, David was now doubtless sitting plucking his harp strings, feeling highly pleased with himself! The well-meant, if often misguided, acts of kindness performed while he lived would have assured that he not be consigned to the other place, though many were the occasions when Nathan had told him to go there.
Nathan had nevertheless wept at David’s graveside, and had thought then, as he was thinking now, that if ever there were a love-hate relationship it was his own with David.
Meanwhile, snow was still falling outside the window. The way things were looking, Marianne would need a sledge to get to Manchester from Cheshire. And the planes bringing those of the family due to arrive shortly from far afield might be unable to land.
Though David would have employed emotional blackmail to ensure the show of family unity he had desired for this special occasion, that wasn’t, and never had been, Nathan’s way. What was the use of unity if it had to be imposed? If the loyalty instilled by Sarah Sandberg had, with her going, gone too, so be it.
Which wasn’t to say that Nathan wasn’t hoping that it was still there. Today would be the first test.
Chapter 2
In the event, Nathan had cause to be a proud and happy man. Though one or two twigs were missing, every branch of the clan was represented at the ceremony. Even Henry Moritz was there, which surprised no one more than it did his sister-in-law, Leona.
Since in an orthodox synagogue men and women are seated separately, Leona did not notice Henry slip into the seat beside her husband, and said, when her daughter nudged her and pointed, “But wouldn’t you know it, Carla, he arrived late.”
“Uncle Henry still can’t do anything right for you, can he, Mum?” Carla whispered.
Leona allowed herself to glance at her brother-in-law, who caught her eye and smiled. The same old handsome charming Henry! But unlike his twin, Frank, the sort who let people down. Leona hadn’t seen him since Sarah’s final birthday party, the last time he did the family the favour of showing up. Frank, on the other hand, had a strong sense of family. But they were not identical twins in any way. Nor would Leona be amazed if, when Henry left Manchester after this visit, he would leave with yet another handout from Frank.
Shirley was thinking that Marianne had a nerve to flaunt that jewellery this afternoon. But Shirley had one satisfaction that Marianne would never have – a Jewish grandchild. Though it would have been better if little Bessie hadn’t appeared as if from nowhere, as unfortunately she had. The six-year-old sandwiched between Shirley and her daughter, Laura, was a real doll, if an overweight one. But who her father was, only Laura knew!
Shirley would never forget the Sabbath tea-party, at Sarah’s house, when Laura announced that though marriage was of no interest to her, she had decided to have a child.
Laura’s resembling her mum was limited to her physical appearance, Shirley thought, re-living the ignominy she had publicly suffered via Laura. And she would far rather Laura had settled down to conventional domesticity than be the successful photographer she had become, roving the world camera in hand, her fatherless child left in the care of a housekeeper.
Shirley felt little Bessie’s hand creep into hers and gave the child a warm smile, wondering what her own mother’s reaction might have been to having an illegitimate granddaughter named after her. One who also looked like her, dark haired and sallow. Who hopefully wouldn’t when she grew up still be the pudge her namesake was!
Marianne, whose grandchild was seated beside his father, noted that the boy seemed fascinated by the service and by his surroundings. Like his mother, he was a Catholic, and this the first time he had set foot inside a synagogue. But Judaism as well as Catholicism was his heritage, as his name, Abraham Patrick, implied.
Though Marianne would not have wished him to be raised in the religious vacuum that was the lot of many children of mixed marriages, to later be faced with the adult dilemma of which, if either, religion to espouse, it seemed to her unfair that her daughter-in-law’s devoutness had kept him from enjoying the age old traditional aspects of his father’s background.
It was not unknown for gentiles to accept an invitation to a Passover Seder, or a Chanukah party. But when Martin came north to be with his family for a Jewish festival, Moira would not allow their son to accompany him.
Martin’s expression as he glanced at Abraham Patrick left Marianne in no doubt that this was a doubly emotional occasion for him. Though his own father was born a Christian, the strength of Martin’s Jewishness had never faltered, raised as he was in an atmosphere that had not pulled him two ways.
Marianne watched Martin straighten the threadbare yarmulke on his son’s unruly red hair, both the little cap and the fiery colouring passed down by Marianne’s grandfather, Abraham Sandberg.
When Martin arrived in the world shortly after Abraham Sandberg departed it, Sarah had given Marianne the yarmulke and told her to keep it for him. Martin, shabby though it was, had insisted upon wearing it for his Bar Mitzvah – a day on which Martin, still only thirteen, had indicated that family mattered to him.
That had to be why he had wanted his son to wear Abraham Sandberg’s yarmulke today, as if doing so would bring home to the boy that the blood of the immigrant Jew Abraham flowed in his veins no less than that of his Catholic grandfather, Lord Kyverdale.
A title that Abraham Patrick would one day inherit. To which Sarah Sandberg had never accustomed herself, Marianne thought with a smile, and how would she have? A descendant who was one of England’s aristocracy still seemed to Marianne herself a far cry from the story Sarah had told of sailing to England on a herring boat.
Equally difficult, if in a different way, it must have been for Sarah to believe that one of her descendants had German blood in his veins. When Marianne’s nephew, Howard Klein, married the fräulein he had met on a skiing holiday, it was as if a thunderbolt had hit the family.
It would take more than the years that had since passed for the Holocaust to recede from the Jewish memory. Marianne could not bring herself to set foot in Germany, to rub shoulders with the nation which had perpetrated that barbarity, innocent though its post-war generations were.
Her brother, Harry, whose son Howard was, had felt unable to show his face among the Jewish community, and his wife, Ann, had initially refused to meet her daughter-in-law. But before Howard returned from Munich with his bride, Sarah Sandberg, the arch-peacekeeper, had called the family together, counselling them to make the best of it since what was done could not be undone.
We didn’t yet know that Christina was pregnant, Marianne recalled, but my grandmother’s words to the family were proba
bly those she used when Laura did what she did. Making the best of the unarguable and the inevitable was how Sarah had succeeded in holding the family together. How many such family conferences had Marianne, over the years, attended? And in her youth, there would have been some at which this or that of her numerous rebellious acts were discussed, and her parents advised how to deal with her.
Despite everything, the rifts and resentments and disagreements, the family had in Sarah’s time shared their troubles, major and minor, as though what affected any one of them affected all. But would they continue to stand by each other now Sarah was gone?
Marianne shared a glance with her Uncle Nat across the synagogue aisle as the stained glass window, through which wintry sunlight was now filtering, was finally unveiled.
Neither could have known how uncannily Marianne’s thoughts at that moment echoed Nathan’s hopes.
Chapter 3
Lizzie, once the domestic pillar of David’s household, had emerged from retirement for the afternoon to help Bridie serve tea to the family and stood with her in Nathan’s spacious hall, greeting each of them as they stepped in from the cold, mindful to wipe the snow off their feet before doing so lest they receive a scolding from the two elderly women who were to them institutions.
Hearing the congratulatory Mazeltov trip from their tongues as they shook hands with everyone seemed as natural as Lizzie’s taking Shirley’s mink, to hang it up for her; and Bridie’s allowing Leona to hang up her own coat – tweed, not fur, since Leona and Frank were conservationists. Nor would their income from the neighbourhood law practice they ran together have allowed fur to feature in Leona’s wardrobe.
Leona, whom Bridie had not spoiled as Lizzie had Shirley, would not have let the kindly Irishwoman wait upon her and reflected, as she went to warm her hands by the log fire, that childhood sets the pattern for the rest of one’s life.
Here in this house she had spent her own young years. The adored only child of a still handsome man and a beautiful woman. Unaware, until they began using her as a go-between, of the emotional undercurrents which as she grew older had become unbearable.
Would she have married Frank, had it not been an acceptable way of escape? I could have done worse, she thought eyeing her brother-in-law. Lucky that Henry didn’t want me!
How many women had Henry lived with and scrounged from, since the days when Leona had thought herself madly in love with him, but had not let him know it? And many were the scrapes he had since got himself into, and Leona and Frank got him out of. Including, she recalled, the time he got involved in Danny the Red’s student uprising in Paris, in ’68, though he was by then years older than its participants.
Leona had on that occasion gone with Frank to get Henry out of gaol. What a source of anxiety he had been to his grandfather, and still was to Frank.
Everything from nuclear disarmament demonstrations to the Polish Solidarity movement had been actively supported by Henry. Nobody could say he wasn’t fearless. He had fought in the streets alongside Chilean dissidents, and that wasn’t all. But Leona had always suspected that the excitement, not the cause itself, accounted for Henry’s putting himself at risk as he so often had.
She could hear him now telling her son-in-law, Alan, who was studying for the rabbinate, that neo-Nazism was on the rise in Europe. As if that was inside information that he, the now middle-aged crusader who had made espousing political causes his way of life, was in a position to dispense.
“But those orchestrating it haven’t a chance of getting anywhere,” Alan replied, “which isn’t to say that Jews shouldn’t be vigilant. The signs are there all right that the evil we’re talking about wasn’t entirely stamped out by the war.”
A brief pause followed, and Leona remembered other such awkward moments when Germany and Nazism were mentioned in Howard Klein’s presence. On this occasion, though Germany wasn’t mentioned, the implication remained. And the family’s feeling about Howard having a German wife, delightful though the girl was, had not gone away.
Christina, however, was not among them, but visiting her parents in Munich, with her little boy, Ben, a child as Semitic-looking as his mother’s appearance was Aryan, and now three years old.
It was Laura who ended the silence with a remark no less embarrassing for Howard. “I seem to recall hearing that Germany went through a denazification programme, but I wouldn’t say it extended to those born after the war being made to face up to what their elders let happen.”
“Since when were you an expert on the subject?” Howard flashed at her.
“I’m not claiming to be,” Laura replied, “but I’m entitled to my opinion. I was in Berlin on an assignment recently and – you know me! – I deliberately raised the subject of the Holocaust at a party I was invited to. Those there were my age and younger, but nobody wanted to talk about it. What I’m saying is, though they were no more than the proverbial twinkle in their parents’ eyes when it happened, it seemed none of them could bear to look that bit of the German past in the face.”
“So they’re ashamed of it. What’s wrong with that?” Alan inquired.
“Shame isn’t enough,” said Laura. “And you could’ve heard a pin drop when I told them I’m Jewish. There was an immediate change in the atmosphere. Make what you will of that. And now I have an announcement to make. I’m getting married.”
Shirley stopped wiping little Bessie’s nose and sat down with a thump. Nor was it any wonder that the kind of silence Laura had just described preceded the family’s crowding around her to say Mazeltov.
When the excitement had subsided, little Bessie, always quick on the uptake, said happily, “I’ll be getting a daddy then, won’t I? And I’ve always wanted one.”
“But your mummy hasn’t yet told us who he is,” said Shirley.
Laura picked up the child and hugged her. “Can you guess, Bessie?”
“I think so, Mummy, and if I’m right, that means I’m getting a big brother and sister, too. Isn’t that lovely?”
“How big?” Shirley inquired.
“Well, they won’t need you to wipe their noses,” Laura answered with a laugh, “and Marianne thinks they’re nice kids.”
Shirley sprang from her chair. “Marianne has already met them? Their father as well, I suppose!”
Marianne tried to salve Shirley’s hurt feelings, and with the truth. “Last time I was in London to see my publisher, I dropped in at Laura’s and this man and his children just happened to be there.”
“Come off it! You’ve always been Laura’s confidante,” was Shirley’s cold response. “Who is he?” she asked Laura.
An expression Marianne had never before seen in Laura’s blue eyes entered them now. But then, Laura had never before been in love and it was of her beloved she was thinking as she replied to her mother.
“His name is Jake Bornstein –”
“A nice Jewish name,” Shirley cut in with relief. “But what does he do?”
“He’s what you might call an entrepreneur.”
“Which could mean anything,” said Marianne’s businessman brother, Harry.
“What he does isn’t important,” Laura answered. “I love him.”
Harry addressed Shirley. “All the proposals your daughter must’ve had and turned down, he has to be something extraordinary.”
“As a matter of fact, he isn’t,” Laura informed them. “And will you two please stop behaving as if I’m still a girl and in need of family guidance? I’ll soon be thirty-seven.”
“A good reason for your making the decision you finally have,” said Harry.
“But not the reason,” Laura countered. “And by the way, Jake is South African. We met when I was there last year, taking pictures of Winnie Mandela –”
“And little Bessie left at home with the chicken pox,” Shirley interrupted.
“She didn’t go down with it until after I’d gone.”
“And who got the call from your worried housekeeper? When she told me th
e blisters had spread to my poor darling’s throat, well – I couldn’t get to London fast enough, I drove all the way down the M1 in the fast lane. And may I say, Laura, that I wish you luck finding a housekeeper able and willing to take care of three kids. Have you told Jake what I don’t need telling? That you don’t intend giving up your career and staying home?”
“Anything I want is fine with him, Mum.”
“What sort of man can that be?” said Harry.
“The only sort likely to stay married to my daughter,” Shirley declared. “I just hope all the household help she’ll need won’t bankrupt him.”
“Oh didn’t I mention it?“ said Laura. “Jake is a millionaire. But I’d rather you left that out of the conversation when you meet him,” she added when her mother’s eyes lit up.
“And when is that likely to be?”
“It’s hard to say, Mum. Like me, he travels a lot. At the moment he’s in Amsterdam doing a diamond deal.”
“In that case, your mum can get hers cheaper from now on,” Shirley’s brother, Ronald, joked from his armchair by the window, and Marianne exchanged a smile with him. His opinion of Shirley was the same as hers.
The arrival in the room of Bridie and Lizzie, each carrying a teapot, diverted everyone’s attention to the spread on the table.
Marianne watched Laura seat little Bessie on her lap and tuck a table napkin under the child’s double chin. Laura was a devoted mother. But could she, given her many absences from home, cope with raising two older schoolchildren in addition to Bessie? There was a good deal more to bringing up a family than attending to the creature comforts a housekeeper could deal with as efficiently as a mum.
Marianne brushed aside her doubt, helped herself to strudel, and went to chat with her sister-in-law, Lyn, the coolness between Lyn and her husband emphasized by Arnold’s having stationed himself on the other side of the room.
“What’s up with you and Arnold this time, Lyn?” Marianne asked, sitting down beside her. They were not just sisters-in-law but friends and had never been less than direct with each other.