Authors: Chaim Potok
I left them in the kitchen and went to my room.
Some days later my mother received a letter from Jakob Daw. It was in German and she would not translate it for me. She read it at the kitchen table, her face slowly stiffening. She looked at me. “You had no right,” she said angrily. “I have my own life to live.”
“Can’t I write to Uncle Jakob?”
“Write to him about the weather. Write to him about your school or his stories. Don’t write to him asking him to change my mind.”
A letter arrived from Aunt Sarah addressed to me and my mother. She was working in a Boston hospital and living in Newton Centre. She wished my mother well. She planned to spend the last ten days of December at the farmhouse. If my mother and I could somehow manage to break away for a few days we would be welcome. The beach had a special loveliness to it in the winter. She understood that Chicago was a raw and bitterly cold city with little culture and a pervasive odor from the slaughterhouses. Still, she wished my mother all the luck. Was it at all possible that we could come up in December?
“Whom else have you written?” my mother asked.
“No one.”
“You will not write anyone again about this.” I said nothing.
“Do you hear me, young lady?” “Yes.”
A letter arrived for me from Jakob Daw.
“Dear Ilana. I understand. But you must understand that your mother is young and beautiful and deserves her own life. You will be a good girl and not cause her sorrow. She has had at least two lifetimes of sorrow already. She is the kindest and gentlest of little birds, the sort whose suffering is almost never noticed. We must care for her and be gentle with her. Write to me again. Uncle Jakob.”
I was at my desk one night that November doing my Hebrew homework when the apartment door opened. I heard the harp and waited for my mother’s greeting. Always she called out, “I’m home!” Now, instead, she went with urgent steps through the hallway. The door to her room opened and quickly closed. The apartment was silent.
I went from my room into the kitchen. The newspapers which my mother always brought home with her lay on the table. I looked at the headlines and read a few paragraphs about a vengeance
shooting of a German embassy official in Paris by a seventeen-year-old Polish émigré Jew whose parents had been expelled by the Nazis from Germany back to Poland with nothing more than a few articles of clothing.
I read some of the paragraphs again. Then I looked up. How silent the air had suddenly become, how hushed—as if all the world were holding its breath.
I went from the kitchen and stood for a moment outside the door to my mother’s room. I heard nothing. I returned to the kitchen and read some more. I was slowly reading the piece in
The New York Times
when my mother came into the kitchen. She put on her apron and stood at the sink.
“Will it hurt Uncle Jakob?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. Her back was to me. “I don’t think so.”
“The Jewish man shouldn’t have done that.”
“He shouldn’t have, Ilana. You’re right. But sometimes if you hurt a person badly enough, you cause him to do crazy things. Are you done with your homework? Can you help set the table?”
Three days later, as I walked past the candy store on my way to school, I saw on the front page of
The New York Times
,
NAZIS SMASH, LOOT AND BURN JEWISH SHOPS AND TEMPLES UNTIL GOEBBELS CALLS HALT
. A second headline on that page announced,
ALL VIENNA’S SYNAGOGUES ATTACKED; FIRES AND BOMBS WRECK 18 OUT OF 21
.
My briefcase felt very heavy. I put it down and stood in the cold November air, reading.
“BERLIN
, Nov. 10.—A wave of destruction, looting and incendiarism unparalleled in Germany since the Thirty Years War and in Europe generally since the Bolshevist revolution, swept over Great Germany today as National Socialist cohorts took vengeance on Jewish shops for the murder by a young Polish Jew of Ernst vom Rath, third secretary of the German Embassy in Paris.”
I read it again. I picked up my briefcase and walked quickly to school.
David said to me during recess, “Did you see the papers? We have relatives in Germany.”
“I’m frightened, David.”
“Do you have relatives in Germany?”
“No. Won’t it happen in America?”
“What?”
“All the breaking and the burning and the hurting of Jews.”
“The government won’t let it happen here.”
“But there are Fascists in America. They demonstrate in the streets of New York. I’m really scared, David.”
My mother said to me that evening during supper, “The Nazis are barbarians and must be stopped. Do you understand now why I let your father go to Spain?”
I did not respond.
Faintly, through the walls, drifted the Shabbos songs of the Helfmans from the apartment below. Didn’t they know what was happening? Why were they singing? I wondered if the Jews in Germany and Vienna were singing Shabbos songs. Broken windows, plundered synagogues, burned Torah scrolls. Later in my room I looked out my window and imagined broken glass everywhere on our street and when I lay in bed I imagined broken glass all up and down Eastern Parkway and the windows of my school smashed and the synagogue thick with smoke and flames. Everywhere fire and glass; tiny glistening slivers along the sidewalks and in the branches of the trees and on the winter grass in Prospect Park and in the lake. I remembered a story I had read in a magazine one summer in the cottage at Sea Gate.
POGROM IN SEPTEMBER
! Someone had patented a special weapon called the Kike Killer. What had he said? “We’re not going to drive the Jews from this country. We’re going to bury ’em right here!” That was where I had first seen the word pogrom. But I had been too frightened then to ask my mother what it meant. Pogrom. I fell asleep and woke in the morning, tired and chilled with sweat. I pulled aside the curtains and raised the shade. Brilliant sunlight entered my room. I dressed quickly and walked along tranquil streets to the synagogue.
The room was unusually crowded by the time I arrived and my seat near the dividing curtain with the small tear in the ninon had been taken by an elderly woman. One of the few empty seats left was in the first row. I sat down and found myself facing the bare front wall of the room and with a hazy, distorted view of the other side.
The service sounded subdued, the singing restrained. A boy read the Torah, hurriedly and with no errors. When the Torah was returned to the ark, all sat down. Silence filled the room.
The synagogue did not have a rabbi. From time to time one of the men would deliver a brief talk before the Silent Devotion of the additional service.
Now a man began to speak and I recognized immediately the deep, slightly nasal voice of Mr. Dinn. I saw him vaguely through the curtain. He stood at the lectern in his dark suit and long prayer shawl and dark felt hat. I looked through the curtain for David but he sat among tall adults and I could not see him.
“We are confronted by a new Haman,” Mr. Dinn began, “one far deadlier than the Haman of old. This new Haman does not require the approval of a higher authority for his acts of brutality. This Haman is himself the highest authority in his land. Germany has returned to the age of Teutonic barbarism.
“Today’s Torah reading tells us about the destruction of Sedom and Amorrah. What terrible sins were committed by those cities? Our sages gave us a long list of their sins. But one sin appears to stand out above the others. The people of Sedom and Amorrah hated strangers who entered their cities. These were wealthy cities that refused to share their good fortunes with anyone unknown to them. The stranger would be defiled, dishonored. He would be given no recourse to the law. He would be killed. How would all this be done? Our sages tell us that when a stranger entered those cities he would be set upon and beaten. Bleeding, he would go to a court of law and ask for damages. Whereupon the judge would tell the poor victim to pay his attacker for the medical treatment of bloodletting! Indeed, a story is told by the rabbis about Eliezer, the servant of Abraham, who one day visited Sedom and was injured,
and sued for damages in the court and was told by the judge to pay his attacker a bloodletting fee. Whereupon Eliezer picked up a stone and struck the judge and said, ‘The money you now owe me for this bloodletting you can pay to the one whom I owe.’”
Soft laughter rippled across the room. Mr. Dinn waited a moment, then continued.
“Law that is used to victimize the stranger, the one who is helpless—that is the law of Sedom and Amorrah. Jews have lived in Germany for a thousand years. Still the Germans look upon us as strangers because we worship a different God, came to the land from the warm south rather than the frozen north, had our beginnings in a desert rather than on a tundra. We now know the true nature of Nazi Germany. It is Sedom and Amorrah. And it will be destroyed as were Sedom and Amorrah.”
He paused a moment. The room was very still. He went on.
“I’m not a politician. I’m a lawyer. But this much I do know. There are times when people must choose sides and tell themselves, ‘That’s my enemy, and the enemy of my enemy is, at least for now, my ally and my friend.’ Let us now find who our true friends are and join ourselves to them. Together with them, and with the help of God, we will destroy this brutal twentieth-century Sedom and Amorrah.”
A murmur of approval swept through the large room. Mr. Dinn sat down. I saw David lean forward out of the adults around him and hug his father. People were shaking Mr. Dinn’s hand. An elderly man rose and walked over to the lectern and resumed the service.
Later I told my mother about Mr. Dinn’s talk, and she said soberly, “The Fascists won’t destroy only Jews, Ilana. They will destroy decency everywhere. That’s why I work so hard for the party now. That’s why your father went to Spain. Who else is trying to stop the Nazis today? England? France? America? Who else?”
“I’m very scared of the Nazis, Mama.”
“Yes,” she said. “There’s good reason to be scared of the Nazis.”
• • •
A letter arrived from Jakob Daw.
The recently published French edition of his stories had been well received by all who were not involved in politics. And since nearly all the French were involved in politics, the voices of approval had been few, indeed. The right had called him a Marxist obscurantist and his writings a threat to moral decency, and the left had labeled him a voice of the decadent bourgeois class. Still, there were some who read his stories and understood. Here and there small islands of sanity were still visible in the fog of madness descending upon Europe. “How is our Ilana? Well, I hope. How old is she now? Ten, I believe. Tell her our bird still nests peacefully in our harp. Is it still your intention to move to Chicago? If so, I wish you well. The cough is bad and seems not to be helped now by the Mediterranean air. What a strange darkness I feel about me everywhere in this sunlit city! It is as if a curtain is being drawn across the entire vault of heaven while a drum beats a distant barbarous rhythm. I grow weary and must lie down now. Please remember me to Ezra Dinn. Jakob Daw.”
The winter months wore on. At the social work agency, my mother had begun to work mostly with Jewish immigrants, recent arrivals who were trying to bring the rest of their families out of Germany. Her days were filled with the desperation of frightened people. She came home, made supper, worked at her desk, went to bed. The party meetings continued. On weekends she went out with Charles Carter. Mr. Dinn no longer visited us. Ruthie told me that he and David planned to move into our apartment after we moved out.
That spring my mother was asked by her agency not to leave until the end of the year. She had a special ability with refugees, and the agency sorely needed her. They were short of people with her talents. They asked her to use the additional months to train the woman who would replace her. My mother agreed. Charles Carter would be leaving for Chicago in August, and we would follow a few months later—not in August, as had originally been
planned. My mother explained it all to me again and again. I said yes, I understood, I understood. But I did not really understand. I did not want to leave for Chicago, especially in the middle of a school year. There were fights between us. Our kitchen became a battleground.
The days were longer now and the winds warmer. I walked alone often in Prospect Park along the rim of the lake, gazing at my reflection in the water. Trees were returning to life, tiny shoots of grass were springing from the earth. Did the trees and grass grow green in Germany too? Somehow it seemed to me that Germany should be covered with darkness: black sky, black grass, black leaves, black trees, black sun. I didn’t want to share the loveliness of a green spring with Germany, my last spring in this neighborhood. Everything I saw now I was seeing for the final time. I thought of the Lag Ba’omer day of games that had taken place here last year. Had a year gone by already? Was it two years since my father had died? I had been told by the head of the Hebrew Department of my school that if I continued my good work I would be moved into my regular Hebrew class in September. I did not want to go to Chicago and live in an apartment somewhere with my mother and Charles Carter. Would they sleep in the same bed? Would I have to share a bathroom with him? Papa, why did you have to try to save that nun? For once, only once, couldn’t you not have done the decent thing, and stayed alive?
I walked slowly back through the park to the botanical garden. I had gone with my class to the garden during the past week and a man had talked to us about the different kinds of flowers that grew there. It was lovely in that garden in the spring: beds of flowers, a banked hill glowing with yellow daffodils, winding paths, scented air—an enchanted magical kingdom. My mother had not come to the park or the garden in a long time. Too much work to do. Too much to think about. Too much. A haunted brooding had settled upon her like a garment of mourning.
We rarely talked now. She was reading the galley proofs of the book of my father’s special writing and translating into English
the stories Jakob Daw had written while he had lived with us. She worked at the desk in her bedroom, in a nightgown, and often her door was shut. Sometimes she would wander out of the room with papers in her hands and sit near the living room window where she could look out upon the trees, and I would be able to see the tips of her breasts through the thin cloth of the nightgown and the vague hint of the triangular darkness at the juncture of her legs. I wondered when I would begin to look like that, breasts and nipples and hair between my legs—and a faint stirring would begin somewhere deep within me. My mother seemed no longer to care how she looked as she walked about the apartment or that, in her nightgown, as she stood by the window or before the living-room floor lamp, she was almost naked to my eyes. She would sit looking out at the trees or reading and playing with her hair, twisting long strands of it in her fingers. She would turn on the radio to listen to the news or to music. She listened often to the news. And the news was always bad.