Authors: Anita Diamant
“I thought only men can do that,” Tedi said.
“This is the twentieth century,” Shayndel said. “I’m not asking some stranger who
never met my mother and father to pray for them. Besides, if we go to the Socialists,
no one will care what I do.”
“Will you say it for me, too?” Tedi asked. “I don’t know the words.”
“Of course. I am saying it for Leonie, too. You can add the amens with everyone else.”
It was not clear how it happened. The Russians claimed that the idea was theirs, but
it might have been the work of the local rabbi, who had been seen talking to the Romanians
and Hungarians earlier. However it came to pass, as the sun moved toward the horizon,
the entire population of Atlit—nearly three hundred that day—gathered as a single
congregation. They streamed toward the promenade, dragging benches, chairs, and wooden
boxes through the dirt.
Although the crowd was quiet, there was something festive in the air as people arranged
seats into uneven rows. The injured and the pregnant were urged to sit first. Others,
dizzy from fasting and heat, sat down without prompting. The dust of the long day
settled around them in the golden light.
“Where are their shoes?” Leonie asked, pointing to a group of men who were standing
in bare feet.
“It’s an old custom of mourning,” Shayndel explained as she, Tedi, and Leonie sat
among the women who had, without direction or discussion, taken seats to the left
of an untidy aisle.
As the rabbi moved to the front of the crowd, everyone grew still. The mood dimmed
so quickly, Leonie looked up, expecting to see a thick cloud covering the sun. But
the sky was clear except for a single thin band of purple stretched over the mountains.
The rabbi covered his head with a large white prayer shawl and stood silently for
a long moment before he picked up a book and began to chant in a clear, reedy tenor
voice.
With the first note, Shayndel began to weep, silent and almost motionless. The tears
came not so much from her as through her, as every note and phrase called up random
shards of memory.
“Blessed, blessed,” said the rabbi, and she saw her father’s signet ring.
“Hallelujah,” he chanted, and she thought of her mother’s favorite blue apron.
“Open my lips,” the rabbi recited, and she remembered the little scar on her brother’s
forehead.
She was overcome by the weight of what she had lost: mother, father, brother, friends,
neighbors, comrades, lovers, landscapes. Odd details surfaced, like flotsam rising
from a sunken ship: her father would only eat the dark meat of a chicken; her mother
loved Laurel and Hardy films and the Beethoven piano sonatas.
She remembered the last formal photograph of her family, taken a week before Noah
left them, headed for Palestine. She had just turned sixteen. When her father brought
the picture home, he couldn’t get over how much his children resembled each other.
Her mother agreed. “Your noses, your chins!” she exclaimed, tracing her finger over
the glass. “Just like my father.”
All gone.
Leonie and Tedi sat on either side of Shayndel, but she could not bear to look at
them. She could do nothing but weep. The tears reached her lips, orphan tears; she
found them strangely cold.
Leonie put her arm around Shayndel’s waist. Tedi rested her hand on Shayndel’s shoulder.
They pressed their bodies against hers, holding her up, reminding her that she was
not alone, that she was still loved.
Leonie and Tedi wept softly, too, less for their own losses than out of sympathy for
Shayndel, whom they had never seen cry. She worked so hard, smiled so freely, and
seemed to forgive the everyday pettiness of Atlit so easily. She had made them think
she was different—undamaged and immune to grief. But of course she was as lost as
everyone else, as lonely and haunted by ghosts that only she could see and hear. Her
pain as bottomless. Together, the congregation of Atlit wept. As the sun dropped and
the sky blazed and blushed and dimmed, for nearly an hour, they rose for some prayers
and sat for others, reciting the sibilant Ashkenazic Hebrew liturgy of a thousand
gutted sanctuaries.
Tedi, Shayndel, and Leonie kept their seats, silent, holding on to one another. Zorah
watched them from a distance. She stood at the back of the crowd, a few paces removed
from the Orthodox girls—the ones who kept their arms and legs covered even on the
hottest days, the ones who never danced in the same circle as the boys.
Zorah kept her mouth closed throughout the prayers, pursing her lips and frowning
during the communal confession of sins and the plea to the great Father, the formal
outcry as the gates of judgment were closed, the somber wailing of God’s oneness,
the triple repetition of His kingship. Then, “Adonai is God,” repeated seven times,
each one louder than the last, sounding more and more like a demand for justice, until
finally the words stopped and only the bleat of the ram’s horn answered.
Zorah used to hear the last shofar blast as a call to wake up and begin again, a clarion
trumpet. But this was noise, a feral howl, signifying nothing. The final note drifted
and hung in the air. The sun had set and the twilight was soft on their heads. No
one spoke or moved until the sound faded and silence reigned.
But it was only a few moments before a loud sneeze broke the spell. Someone said,
“Gesundheit,” and laughter followed. People stood and stretched. Men began to fold
their prayer shawls and conversation began to percolate until the rabbi called out.
“My friends,” he announced. “A moment more. Let us end this Day of Atonement, this
Sabbath of Sabbaths, together.” The crowd turned back, reluctant but obedient, on
their feet as he lit a foot-long, blue-and-white braided candle and recited the blessings
that separate time into sacred and profane.
The evening prayer service followed—a rushed affair, murmured by only a few men, until
the rabbi announced the mourners’ prayer.
It was the slowest Kaddish Zorah had ever heard, every syllable weighted by groans
and sighs. Pious women on either side of her covered their eyes with their fingers,
soundlessly mouthing the words.
Glorified and celebrated,
they recited.
Acclaimed and honored, extolled and exalted beyond all tributes that man can utter.
Zorah knew that most of the people around her did not understand what they were saying.
For them, the ancient prayer was a kind of lullaby, a balm for the afflicted. She
wondered if they would be standing if they realized that they were praising the God
who had decreed the murder of their families; that they were expressing gratitude
and affection for the One who had annihilated everyone and everything they had loved.
We need a new Kaddish for 1945, she thought. An honest Kaddish that would begin, “Accused
and convicted, heartless and cruel beyond anything the human mind can understand.”
They chanted,
God who brings peace to His universe.
Silently, Zorah translated, “God who brings Nazis to His universe.”
Amen and amen,
they assented.
“No more and no more,” said Zorah.
“Amen, already,” came a shout from the crowd, ready to be finished, ready to forget,
ready to eat.
The last lines of the prayer took up the case for peace:
God who brings peace to His universe, make peace for us all and all of Israel.
Zorah wondered where peace might be located in a world burned beyond recognition.
Some of the boys started singing the last words,
oseh shalom,
picking up the tempo and transforming it into a folk song. They kicked away the chairs,
grabbed one another and started dancing in a tight circle, arms around each other’s
shoulders and moving so fast that the smallest boys were lifted off their feet and
carried along, shrieking.
After a while, they started singing a new song, a modern Hebrew hymn extolling the
bricklayers who build a new state. Zorah joined in, willing to praise miracles made
with human hands.
“I never heard you sing before,” said a familiar voice at her ear.
Zorah did not turn around. Meyer moved closer and asked, “Did you miss me?”
“Only when I was dying for a smoke,” she said.
“I thought about you all the time,” said Meyer.
“I assumed you were with your family—your wife and children.”
“I am not married, Zorah. I had to go home to make arrangements for my sister. My
mother died last year and my father can’t take care of Nili, or he won’t be bothered.
She is Mongoloid. Do you know what that means? She is twenty but with the mind of
a little child. I cannot care for her so I took her to a
place for women like her in Jerusalem. It was clean and pleasant, but I know that
my poor mother is turning in her grave. What else could I do?
“I’m here only to see you,” he said, close enough for Zorah to feel the heat of his
body and smell the sour breath of his Yom Kippur fast. “I won’t be coming to Atlit
anymore, but I am going to write to you. I don’t expect you to answer, and even if
you want to, I’m not sure I’ll be able to receive letters. This way, you don’t have
to pretend you’re indifferent to me, and I can pretend that you are not.”
The singing had stopped and the crowd was moving quickly toward the dining hall.
“I wish I could send you cigarettes,” Meyer said, slipping a packet into her hand.
“But they would only get stolen. Still, whenever you get a letter, you should know
that I was thinking about sending a whole carton of Chesterfields. I am a romantic,
right?”
Zorah fought the urge to face him, to wish him well, to say good-bye.
“Pray a little for my safety, will you, Zorah?” said Meyer. “I will kiss you good
night wherever I am.”
Zorah heard him walk away and counted to thirty before she turned. He had reached
the gate. Without turning or looking back, he raised his hand to wave. As though he
knew she would be watching.
It was late in the afternoon, and the infirmary was so quiet that Leonie and Aliza
had dragged their chairs outside. “Soon the days will be much cooler,” said Aliza,
handing a cigarette to Leonie. “It isn’t even two weeks until October.”
“October,” Leonie echoed. The cloudless skies and wilting heat had erased her sense
of time. In Atlit, new faces appeared almost every day, like leaves in spring, and
then scattered, sometimes within a matter of hours. The days dragged, yet somehow
the weeks flew. Two months had passed since her arrival, and soon she would witness
a change of season.
Leonie could no longer remember all of the women who had passed through her barrack.
Some of the recent arrivals had included the weakest and sickest she had seen; they
landed within days of a convoy of strapping girls who had spent the
war in England. Healthy or ill, it seemed that everyone was in transit—nearly everyone.
Whenever she saw another truckload of refugees leaving Atlit, waving and singing,
Leonie felt like a leper in quarantine. Sometimes, she wondered if she was under suspicion.
Had someone discovered how she spent those last two years in Paris? Would they send
a policeman to shave her head and drag her back to France?
But that fear did not keep Leonie awake at night. She assumed that her situation was
simply a matter of fate. Life was unplanned, purely random. That was the only logical
explanation for why Shayndel was stranded in Atlit. In a rational universe, Shayndel,
the partisan heroine, would have been released immediately and given a medal for her
courage during the war. Tedi, the tall, well-liked blonde, should have been settled
on a blooming kibbutz weeks ago. As for Zorah, she was no worse than dozens of bitter
survivors who had come and gone. Leonie knew that there was nothing sinister or sacred
about their predicament—it was just bad luck.
She looked up from the yellow dust on her shoes to the brittle thorns in the fields
outside the fence. Atlit was dull and dimly frightening, but unlike everyone else,
she was not desperate to leave. As long as she was here, she did not have to make
decisions and was free from disasters of her own creation. Besides, she knew it was
only a momentary respite and that soon, without warning, she would lose Shayndel and
Aliza, the only people in the world who cared what happened to her.
Leonie handed the cigarette back to Aliza and asked, “Did you bring the newspaper?”
The nurse nodded and unfolded the broadsheet she had in her pocket. She had to smuggle
the papers into camp; the British preferred to keep the immigrants ignorant
of the conflicts swirling around them, though of course, the news seeped in daily
in spite of regulations.
Aliza ran her eyes up and down the front page, searching for a story to read aloud.
She stuck to pieces about milk production, or reviews of plays and concerts, or heartwarming
accounts of holiday festivities; nothing she thought might cause Leonie to frown or,
God forbid, weep.
Leonie no longer had to ask Aliza to slow down as she read. As long as people didn’t
mumble or speak too fast, she understood what they said. The written word was another
story; on the page, she could barely puzzle out “pioneer,” which had been one of the
first Hebrew words she learned in the DP camp. Two eager young men from Palestine
had pursued her and spoken with breathless passion about how she could take part in
building a homeland. She was enchanted by the promise of a fresh start and by the
idea that she was needed.
But from the moment Leonie had gotten on the boat, she knew that she had added a new
fraud to her portfolio. She was surrounded by people who knew the lyrics to countless
Zionist songs and seemed to have the map of Palestine committed to memory. After two
months, Leonie was still confused about the geography of the country. Was Jerusalem
on the other side of the mountains in the east? Was it cold in the north of the country?
Could it possibly be any hotter in the south? She was too ashamed to ask anyone.