I Am Forbidden (21 page)

She pulled the stole from her shoulders and folded it in a perfect square. She placed the square in the drawer.

The next day, Josef opened the drawer. His fingers closed on the stole. He brought the soft silk to his nose.
Dear Lord, still my thoughts that they not turn to her; make me stumble and fall, that my hand not reach for her. Dear Lord, do not answer my prayer.…

• • •

R
ACHEL WAS
two when Josef began to teach her the aleph-beth.

“
, aleph,
one
, as in: Our Lord is One.

“
, beth, as in
(bereshith)
,
In the Beginning
.…” Josef guided the toddler’s fingers over the embossed wooden block. “Why does our Torah begin with the second letter of the aleph-beth and not the first? Feel how the shape of the letter
is closed to what comes before it? Feel how it opens to what is yet to come? We must not inquire into what comes before the Beginning.…”

At three, Rachel started nursery school. Every day her dimpled hands danced a puppet rhyme as words gushed through her milk teeth. “Yuditel and Saraleh and.…” The snow melted every day in little Rachel’s seasons.

“Speak more slowly, we have all afternoon,” Mila coached, but Rachel clutched Josef’s legs as more words tumbled from her lips. “Tatta not all afternoon … and Haya push de castle and teacheh say.…” When Rachel feared Josef’s attention might wane, she cried out “In de beginning! Tory of letters!,” and she sat very still until Josef began:

“Story of Letters. All the letters were hidden. God gazed upon the hidden letters and He delighted in them. Then God thought of Creation and each letter came forward and presented its case. Aleph said, ‘Wouldn’t it be fitting to open Creation with the first letter of the aleph-beth?’ And God replied,
‘You, Aleph, I have already chosen to begin my ten commandments.’ After each letter had spoken, God ruled: ‘I shall begin Creation with Beth because Beth,
two
, will teach that there are
two
creations: this world and the world to come.’ ”

“Tory of light, Tatta!” Rachel clapped her hands.

And the child’s rapture also broke Josef’s heart.

When she is four I will go. Surely I will go
.

When she is five
.

Six
.

It will be easier when Hannah visits
.

It was not easier when Hannah visited.

At twelve, she will be an adult in the eyes of the Law. I will go before her twelfth birthday
.

J
OSEF
was climbing the stoop to the Rebbe’s house when twelve-year-old Rachel came running down the block, school-bag bouncing on her shoulders, hand waving a report card. “Look, Tatta, look!”

Josef stepped down. This semester, too, Rachel was first in her class. “Mama will be proud,” Josef said.

“And you, Tatta, are you proud?”

Josef stroked the child’s head. “Of course I am proud.” He lifted the bag from her shoulders. “What a heavy load for a little girl.”

They headed home, Rachel skipping alongside Josef, Rachel asking over and over in her high singsong, “You, Tatta, are you proud, are you?”

There is no new sin before she is of marrying age. I will go then, I will not permit the seed to mix
.

Twelve-year-old Rachel yearned to be like her peers, seldom in the street without a pram or without holding the hand of a younger brother or sister. At every occasion, she offered to babysit her friends’ siblings, and Josef’s heart broke as he wondered whether Rachel imagined these were her own children, born happily within the community.

“Your father is strange,” her friends told Rachel, “he cries when he sees you.” “All of them cry when they see children, his whole generation,” Rachel replied. “His crying is different,” Rachel’s friends insisted. But Rachel did not perceive Josef’s anguish as particular to herself. She attributed the fervor of her father’s prayers, his longing and dejection, his heightened concern for her, his silences, to the way people from back there had a darkness in them that they could not escape, a darkness that stemmed from the war against Jews about which they did not speak.

*

S
EVENTEEN-YEAR-OLD
Rachel came home from school and described the joy that seized her class that morning. Lessons were suspended, tables and benches were piled high against the walls, and all the girls sang and danced, lifting the chair of the first girl to be engaged. “You should have heard her scream when the chair almost toppled! You know this step, Mama?” Rachel drew her mother into the living room; a true daughter of Israel shies from dancing even in front of her father.

Josef heard mother and daughter tap the new step between couch and coffee table; he heard their laughter, his head bowed.

What am I doing? What have I done?

The telephone rang more often in the Lichtenstein home. Such an accomplished daughter, and good-looking like her mother, tall like her father—

“My Rachel is barely seventeen!” Mila protested.

“You want to wait until all the good boys are taken? ”

Josef’s old teacher, Halberstamm, heard of Rachel’s devotion, of her bright disposition. He, too, called. “Blessed be the Lord, your daughter has come of age. Let me get to the point, Josef. You know my youngest.…”

Halberstamm’s boy would sit and learn—time was too precious for such a good head to work for a living, but a gifted girl like Rachel would find a job easily, teaching kindergarten or primary school. Later, when work would interfere with child rearing, God would provide.

• • •

Rachel Lichtenstein, seventeen, and Shai Yankel Halberstamm, eighteen, met across the dining table. Did Rachel want a husband focused on material pursuits or one who studied Torah? Torah of course. Where did Rachel want to live? Right here, in Williamsburg, close to her mother and father. Would she consider spending a year near his yeshiva after.…

He meant, after the wedding.

They looked down at the embroidered cloth, they blushed.

At the close of the evening, the two were engaged.

*

J
OSEF
started to fast every day of the week, not just the days of mourning for the Temple destroyed.

Faced with Josef’s anguish, Mila wondered whether
she
should go to a court of rabbinic law to prove her innocence at Enayim, for who knew better than the Lord that Rachel was conceived with His name on her mother’s lips? Rachel was as pure as King David, Rachel was beloved by the Lord. A court of law would proclaim Mila’s innocence and Josef would eat again, he would stand at the foot of her bed.…

But judges made mistakes; judges would have burned
Tamar and extinguished the line of King David had Judah not proclaimed:
She is more righteous than I
.

Who would come forth to save Rachel if judges erred in this case? Would a court’s verdict even matter? Who, in Williamsburg, would marry Rachel if the slightest doubt hovered over her status? Mila did not go to a court of rabbinic law.

T
HE
R
EBBE
himself danced at the wedding of this bride born of two rescued orphans. In his brocaded white caftan, white socks, laceless black shoes, the Rebbe danced holding one end of his white sash; the bride held the other. His feet traced mystical letter combinations in front of Rachel while she, eyes closed, swayed in prayer:
May Shai Yankel and I form a righteous couple in Israel.…

Then it was the father’s turn to dance with the bride. Josef nestled Rachel’s hands in his. Pitching from foot to foot, he knew this was his last chance to speak before this marriage was consummated, before another seed in Israel was corrupted. But he could hear Rachel’s wail as they left the court of rabbinic law:
My marriage invalid? My husband forbidden to me?
He could see Rachel huddled by the low wall outside the marriage hall, clasping her lapel as the men inside danced at other weddings.

The child is innocent! Josef protested.

Of course, the child was innocent. The Torah and the rabbis never claimed that a mamzer’s plight was ethical. The Lord commands; man obeys.

The Sages said that those brought to sorrow because they are mamzerim will be seated on thrones of gold, when the messiah comes. Tears coursed down Josef’s hollowed cheeks.
Thrones of gold?
Rachel needed her Shai Yankel, she needed her marriage to be valid, she did not need a
throne of gold
.

Some guests already whispered: To sadden a daughter’s wedding with such sorrow!

N
INE MONTHS
after her wedding, Rachel gave birth to a baby girl she named Judith, in memory of Josef’s murdered mother, Judith Lichtenstein.

Josef’s skin grayed. What degree of self-denial might redeem his silence now?

Rachel named her second child Chaim Yankel in memory of her husband’s grandfather deported to Auschwitz.

Josef’s nails became brittle.

She named her third child Gershon, in memory of Mila’s father.

Her fourth child she named Pearela, in memory of Josef’s little sister, and she added the name Alte so this Pearela would live to an old age.

Josef’s eyesight weakened. Always he was cold.

• • •

When Rachel gave birth to her sixth child, Josef suffered phases of muscle weakness during which he could barely walk. In his hunger-induced trance, he saw his beard swing from the nail in Jesus’s palm.

One entry in the Set Table, the authoritative rabbinic code of law, tormented Josef even as it offered some relief about the prospects of Rachel’s children:

Now that Rachel had children of her own, a court of law might not be permitted to believe him, if Josef spoke.

The Law would let him evade the Law? Josef wondered.

Even if he always knew?

Another entry related how one rabbi went to great length to avoid inflicting the stigma of mamzeruth, allowing for a ten-month gestation in the case of a husband who had been on a journey nine months earlier.