by Shira Nayman
The women and girls cleared away the food and resumed their places for the singing of the Birkas Hamazon, the lengthy, sonorous prayer sung after meals. Yossele proudly took the lead, lifting his voice high, closing his eyes, and swaying to the beautiful melody. He was singing from the heart; his youthful warmth, love, and commitment seemed to wash through the room, affecting everyone. As the prayer came to a close, I could hear Yossele’s clear voice, drawing out the melody line so that it wove languidly through the air.
Poteiach et yadecha, umasbia l’chawl chai ratson. Baruch hagever asher yivtach badonai, v’haya Adonai mivtocho.
I felt once more my mother’s presence: it was as if she were coming to me in the sounds of the prayer rising in this simple wooden house. I could almost hear her voice, singing along with the crowd.
I closed my eyes. A faint memory tickled at me—the sound of my mother singing those same Hebrew words as I slipped into sleep. An even fainter recollection—whispered words in my ear: That’s a Hebrew prayer, darling. Doesn’t it sound sweet? How old had I been? Three? Four? My mother singing me to sleep—I always had trouble falling asleep—with songs from old-time musicals: The King and I, Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music; perhaps having run out of things to sing she reached back into her own past for another song or two, retrieving the Birkas Hamazon she’d learned at Hebrew school.
I opened my eyes again to see the beatific faces around the table, transported by the ancient prayer to some place I did not know, and yet that did not feel completely unfamiliar. No one seemed to notice I was not singing. I felt a hollow ache in my chest and a tear leaked from my eye; though I often seemed equipped with the knowledge I needed on this remarkable journey, the Birkas Hamazon eluded me. How I wished I knew the words so that I might join in.
Why did my mother never teach them to me? How could I have reached the age of fourteen—a full two years beyond the age when Jewish girls back home in Brooklyn celebrate their Bat Mitzvah—without having celebrated a single Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur, or any of the other holidays that were central to my Jewish heritage? This surely came about by way of a well-thought-through and deliberate act—to cut my brother and me off from all of this; such a thing could hardly have been an accidental oversight.
It didn’t add up. Sitting there, aware of the feeling of connection in this simple room—extending beyond the family to an entire people with almost two thousand years of history—I recalled something else. My mother: not as the grown woman I knew as Mama, but as a young girl named Talia, sitting in the little square in Broken Hill, talking sadly, with a kind of brokenness, about how she’d never really felt like an Australian, for the simple reason that she was a Jew.
Sarah’s grown sisters and brothers-in-law took their leave, along with her aunt and uncle and their children, and her four older brothers, who lived in the dormitories at the yeshivah, where they studied. Yossele, happily exhausted, climbed the ladder to the alcove above his parents’ room where I assumed a small bed of some kind awaited him. Sarah and I were left alone with her parents. Her father had shed a little of his sadness with each cupful of wine, and now he smiled as he congratulated us both on our cooking.
“Let’s do the Torah reading together,” he said, rising and taking a somber-looking book from the bookshelf at the far end of the room.
I glanced at Sarah, who leaned across to me and whispered:
“We still do the holiday reading together on holy days. It’s one of my favorite things …” Her voice trailed off; she watched as her father returned to the table, walking slowly, carefully, the large volume open in his hands, head bent in the flickering candlelight to peer closely at the small print on the page. When he finally sat, he removed his eyeglasses and turned his attention to Sarah, fixing hovering eyes on her face.
“I always think of the Rosh Hashanah reading as my Sarah-le’s special passage,” he said.
He turned back to the page—hunched his shoulders a little and began swaying gently back and forth in his chair, slowly, at first, increasing his speed by shades. He sang in a voice that was both joyous and sad: Hebrew or Aramaic, I could not tell, and yet once again I understood every word.
“And God remembered Sarah as He had said, and God did to Sarah as He had spoken. Sarah conceived, and bore Abraham a son in his old age, at the set time of which God had spoken to him.”
Sarah’s father sang these words—straightforward enough in their meaning and sound—as if they contained within them deep wisdom and transporting beauty. He repeated the haunting chant once, twice, and then abruptly broke off and resumed in a spoken voice.
“She named her son Isaac—which means will laugh because, as Sarah declared, God has made laughter for me, so that all that hear will laugh with me.”
How strange, I found myself thinking; the man Sarah would marry, Grandma’s father, was named Isaac.
There was silence in the wooden house, but for the sound of the scholar’s voice. I wondered where Sarah’s mother was; she had disappeared. Absent, I thought. Even when she was in the room, it was as if she wasn’t there.
“And so, Sarah-le, may God bless you, too, with many, many reasons for joining in such laughter—the music of angels, the best music there is.” He reached over and affectionately patted his daughter’s cheek.
Could he have known that one day Sarah would give birth not to one or two children—but ten? One of whom would not survive—whose booties, knitted by Sarah many years forward in the future, Grandma had actually given to me! Sarah’s father turned and fixed his gaze on my face; there was something unsettling about his regard.
“Sons, yes—may you have sons. But also daughters.”
His eyes were boring into me, reaching for something—effortfully reaching for knowledge. Could Sarah’s father have intuited—even if not consciously—that I was the grandchild of Sarah’s future daughter? The daughter conceived to replace her precious, lost baby Rose? My grandmother the daughter she would tragically find herself unable to love?
“Daughters,” he said. “God’s sweet treasures.”
He turned back to the book before him and seemed to slip into a trance; he remained very still, suddenly taller in his seat, as if an invisible cord were pulling him upward. Warmth suffused his features as he focused intently on the book in a way that was both gentle and fierce. I was gazing at an unknown landscape of emotion; he took me with him, and I felt he was taking Sarah, too. Now, he seemed almost to be emanating light. I squinted tightly; an aura of illumination appeared around his body.
My eyes suddenly felt almost unbearably heavy. I allowed them to close and it was as if a door slammed, taking away the cocoon-like world of Sarah’s family home, leaving me stranded in a blank nowhere, curiously silent. And yet, the chanting of Sarah’s father still filtered in, as if the life of that room were both happening and not happening at the same time. I felt sure of only one thing: the breath coming in and out of my lungs, the whooshing feel of it, feathery and light.
A vague and yet powerful memory of elongated shapes and forms came over me, flashes of color, taste, smell, floating in a sea of sound. An image swam into my mind: an enormous candelabra, its shiny gold stems coiled like snakes, the flames pulling up from blackened wicks to rise like hot ghosts to the ceiling. Light fractured into a hundred colors and spread across a vast space.
A single voice: a man’s song loud in my ears. My own eyes blinking sleepily, my hands balled against something soft, oh! So very soft! Plush, a blanket. I un-fist my tight hands, stretch out my fingers—reach for the hot colored light pouring down over me, blue, pink, yellow, purple, broken into shapes by lines and curves of black. My eyes blinking, now open wide to see the stained-glass window above.
I turn my head; how different it all feels! My neck mushy, soft, my limbs circling, everything so different, so different, me and not me: someone else, but only me. I turn my head again and this time, the new sight slams into me, jolts me from this strange underwater domain: my mother, only dif
ferent, so different, her face—what? Like Talia’s? More like Talia’s in any case—the Talia of so long ago, so recent for me, and still so far ahead in the future, not yet born as I sit here, at Sarah’s table, listening to Sarah’s father chant ancient words.
I am a baby in a baby carriage, the young, Talia-like Mama I glimpse in this strange, early memory is my mama from then, from when I was a baby.
And I place the memory. I had, after all, been in a synagogue, only long, long ago. My mother must have taken me when I was a baby, still in a carriage. The memory of it lost long ago, or never fully formed, and yet something about being here, now, snagged the hidden recollection and made it bloom to life.
My eyes snapped open; Sarah’s father had finished his chant and was staring into the middle distance. Sarah, too, appeared to be in a trance. Finally, her father spoke.
“My dear girls. Now, it is time to sleep.” He bent and planted a gentle kiss on Sarah’s forehead. “May the Lord bless you and keep you.”
Then, he looked at me and for a moment hesitated. I felt as if he wanted to plant a kiss on my forehead, too. It was as if he was wondering if I were indeed family, since then, it would be permitted. Physical contact with a girl outside of the family would be forbidden.
I am family! I wanted to call out. I am your very own great-great-granddaughter, and I have traveled all the way from Brooklyn and back more than a hundred years … impossible, I know, but it is true!
He seemed to be listening to something, as if trying to make out the very words that were echoing in my own mind. Solemnly, he bent again, this time placing a kiss on my own forehead.
“And may the Lord bless you and keep you,” he said, before turning toward his room, his rough workman’s hands hanging heavily by his side.
Sarah watched him disappear behind the door. Silence, and then the authoritative sound of a small bolt being carefully moved into place.
“I’m not the least bit tired,” Sarah said, turning to me. “Are you?” Her eyes shone in the light of the single candle still lit behind her on the alcove in the wall. “Why don’t we go out and take a quick look at the river? Now’s our chance!”
I glanced about to see if I could sight a coat that might belong to me. I found nothing like that. Just as I was thinking how cold it was likely to be outside, Sarah spoke.
“You take the blanket. I’ll take Mama’s heavy shawl.”
I tugged the blanket up from the small bed, folded it into fourths, and draped it around my shoulders. It was incredibly warm. I reached to remove the candle from the alcove.
“We won’t need that,” Sarah said. “The stars are bright tonight—I saw them through the window. Maybe they know it is Rosh Hashanah and there is no moon—and they want to help us bring in the new year with the glory of light!”
We left through the front door, closing it slowly behind us.
The sky was indeed bright with what looked like ten thousand stars. They hung in endless layers, shimmering with unfathomable mystery. I looked up and down the dirt road to see small wooden houses, similar to Sarah’s, modest in the white wash of light.
Sarah turned her head up to the skies.
“Can you believe how bright they are? And just after our holiday reading about Sarah! Do you remember the passage from the story of Abraham, Sarah’s husband? From Genesis … ”
“No,” I said, “I don’t remember.”
“Well you know that Abraham and Sarah wanted children so badly. God takes Abraham outside and says to him, ‘Look up at the sky and count the stars—if indeed you can count them. So shall your offspring be.’”
My mind flashed back to Billy and how much he loved to count everything. I imagined him craning his neck upward beneath this impossibly bright sky—could almost hear his little voice in my ears. “Sis! How will we ever count all these stars! There must be a zillion, trillion, bajillion!”
We walked toward the glimmering sliver in the distance, beyond the town: the river.
The brisk air chilled my cheeks and nose, though my body, under the thick blanket, remained warm. We rounded the corner onto a broad dirt road and came to a halt before a much larger building than any I had seen so far. It was a simple structure, almost like an oversized cabin, made of roughly hewn wooden planks, several stories high. The roof also seemed to be made of wood, with two odd little red-brick chimneys sitting on top. The imposing polished wooden doors seemed out of place, to belong more to a stately edifice of stone. Mounted above the doors was an oversized Star of David made of the same dark polished wood as the doors.
“Are you sorry you missed services tonight?” Sarah asked.
I was curiously choked up and unable to speak, so I only nodded. Sarah took me by the hand, such a simple, sisterly gesture, it brought tears to my eyes.
“We’ll have our chance in the morning. Let’s get up even earlier than everyone else so we can be the first ones here!”
We stood a moment longer, the light-pricked skies wide above us. The old wooden synagogue seemed weary, as if sagging on its foundations, and I had the odd thought that it was only managing to keep from collapsing through pride.
“Come on,” Sarah said, tugging me away. I turned reluctantly from the synagogue, my anxiety spiking to dread. “Come on!”
We hastened along the road. Sarah seemed to be floating. I held tight to her hand and found myself floating beside her. Something had happened to her mood, I could feel it as if it were a ripple of heat—a delicate sense of freedom. We passed shops, shuttered in the starlight, Yiddish signs painted in bold calligraphy declaring their identities: butcher, grocery, bakery, ironsmith. The squiggly letters had a peculiar effect on me, rolling in my imagination with a physical vitality, as if tumbling against my palms. It all seemed—I don’t know, so solid, as if these simple wooden buildings had been here forever. Countless children through the ages must have moved along this street in the depth of a night like this, generation upon generation of girls just like Sarah and me, sneaking out on a late yontif evening, hungry for adventure.
We walked at a brisk pace; after all that rich food, it felt good to be moving, the blood pumping through my veins. The streets were silent. The houses we passed were shrouded in darkness, the entire village slumbering, the villagers sated from their own Rosh Hashanah feasts, dreaming, perhaps, of the religious services that would take place the next day, beginning at dawn.
The street seemed to go on forever, and then, abruptly, came to an end, and we stepped off the hard dirt road onto a field covered in short brown grass, chewed down, perhaps, by sheep or goats. The land rose and then dipped; we broke into a slow run on the downward incline and I felt a rush of cold air in my hair.
The river was closer than it had seemed from the road; we were now only three or four hundred yards away.
The silence was broken by a strange rumbling that I felt as vibrations in my feet before the sound reached my ears. The sound grew to thundering: hoofs, pounding the ground. It was coming from behind us, beyond the village. I looked back to see a posse of horses being ridden hard by young men riding low, their hair streaming behind them.
“Cossacks,” Sarah whispered. “They’re training for Dusetos.”
“Dusetos?”
“The races. On the shores of Lake Sartai. They couldn’t be more than two weeks away.”
We stood, frozen, watching the riders speeding along in the distance. Sarah glanced at me; her face was filled with fear.
“What is it?” I asked.
Sarah’s lip trembled; she shook her head, looked away. “Come on, let’s go down to the river.”
We ran swiftly toward the riverbank, our cares whisked away by the cold air. My heart pumped wildly, my speeding feet seemed to lift from the ground; I was flying through space and time, released.
And then, there it was: the expanse of gray water, no longer a shiny band of metal, but a surface of choppy little waves, crumpled by the wind. We stood on the bank panting, then plopped down on the gro
und.
I turned, smiling, to face Sarah. To my surprise, I found that she was not smiling at all; her face was unhappy and pinched.
“I can see why they called the river Sventoji—whoever it was who named it.”
In the starlight I could see a thin, shiny line starting in the corner of Sarah’s eye and moving down her cheek, a tiny river all its own.
“The Holy,” she sighed. “That’s exactly what it is.”
She looked at me full on, her eyes burning. “But then, all rivers are holy, aren’t they?” Her voice was thick and pained. “The source of life.” She paused, lost in thought. “Helpless, too,” she said, as if to herself.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said, feeling helpless myself.
“This beautiful river—oh, how I love it! It has been my closest friend the whole of my life—but it’s powerless to stop them from killing us. To stop them from wanting to kill us. How many centuries has it lain here, moving, always moving, toward the sea—toward freedom—while our own countrymen set fire to our homes?”
Sarah reached out and gripped my arm so hard I let out a little cry of pain.
“Those waters are dark! And I feel like I know something—some terrible truth. There is much more killing to come. I feel it here.” And she freed my arm to place her open palm on her chest. “It’s only going to get worse!”
The terror in her eyes spilled out, flooding over to me.
“What are we going to do?” I said.
“My parents have been talking about leaving. That won’t come as news to you; your parents are probably talking about the same thing.”
Did I imagine the shade of a frown in her face as she uttered the words your parents?
“So many people have gone to Southern Africa. It’s almost impossible, now, to get into America. Ever since Kishinev …”