July 15, 1972
With G-d’s help
Dearest Tamar,
It is very hard for me to write this letter. As you can imagine, your last letter broke my heart. It was so unlike you, Tamar, to be so unkind. Okay, I deserved it. I had no business shooting off my mouth about the phoniness of Orchard Park…
I have been racking my brain about what to write you. You know how dear you are to me. You’re my sister in every way. I want so much to undo the harm, to take back the hurt. But what can I do? If I forced myself to lie, it would lie beneath our friendship like some wound, festering and festering, an infection that would invade the bloodstream of our lives and poison everything between us.
So I’ll tell the truth. You and Josh don’t belong in Brooklyn. You, both of you, who believe in the Torah, in the prophecies, who try to live lives devoid of any connection to American culture and history, what are you still doing there?
Hadassah’s father was right. America is just too powerful for anyone to resist. It is too beckoning with its luxuries, its easy life, its cornucopia of opportunities and chances for good times. Sooner or later American Jews—even dedicated, sincere ones—are going to get absorbed. Like a sponge. They are going over the mountain.
And the attempts to preserve our religion and values by keeping congregations huddled together in the decaying pockets of inner cities, places like Orchard Park and Williamsburg, Borough Park and Crown Heights, is just becoming too dangerous. When will our religious leaders finally realize it isn’t right to bring more daughters and wives into these violent streets?
Please forgive me for hurting you. I’m just trying to be a good friend.
Now, I’ll take a deep breath and turn from all these painful subjects to a glorious one: Marc and me.
We’re in love.
And this is the way it happened:
About a month ago I moved into my own little place. It’s a second-floor walk-up in this charming, quaint (you’d say it was a slum) area near the shuk called Nachlaot. I have high, domed ceilings, green shutters, and lovely black iron grillwork. I also have outdoor plumbing, pipes dating from the Ottoman empire, and lovely green mold around the sinks. I painted the walls a light rose and bought a mint rose chintz fabric for curtains and bedspreads. (I’m sure it’s not real chintz, it was much too cheap. I bought the last ten meters on a roll at the shuk and bargained for an excellent price.)
When I moved in, I decided to invite all my absorption center friends over for a Friday night dinner. I went all out. I spent hours shopping at the shuk: the house smelled of lovely ripe peaches, cantaloupe, nectarines, fresh coriander, and parsley.
It was a very hot day. The air was full of that desert dust that sometimes settles on everything like a thin layer of white scum on the top of boiled milk. But toward the evening, as always, the fresh breezes came up out of the Judean hills and blew through the windows. I remember sitting by the open window, opening some buttons on my blouse, letting the coolness wash over me like a waterfall in some desert oasis. I think it was only my third Shabbat at home, and I was feeling excited and jittery about how everything looked. And pleased, too. All my things were where I wanted them. All the food crisp and hot and tender, waiting on the hot plate. The table was blooming with vases of tea roses and carnations in pretty shades of red and peach and pink with lots of baby’s breath. And I remember thinking: Almost, almost perfect.
And then Marc knocked on the door.
He was dressed in a clean, new white shirt and dark pants. His dark hair was still wet, combed so carefully, the way a mother combs a little boy’s. His arms were strong and tan and his fingers long and tender somehow. He had brought a bottle of wine.
We sat down on my awful straw-filled Jewish Agency mattress on my awful Jewish Agency metal bed frame, which I use for a living room couch and then he said, sort of of-fhandedly, that he had been looking forward to seeing me again. That the absorption center had never been the same after I left. And I sort of looked down and said: “Marc.” And then we looked at each other and at that moment, I had this sense of wholeness: Him in the living room. The cool breeze from the hills of Judea. The fresh peaches from Mahane Yehudah shuk. The Sabbath. It was all one perfect thing. Had any thread been missing, the whole fabric would have unraveled completely.
I was terrified to look into his eyes. I was hoping and praying the others would show up soon and rescue me.
And then he said: “It’s not good for a man to be alone.”
And I looked up and felt this crazy urge to cry. Quotes from Genesis! This is what I was going to get in the way of romance! But he looked so sincere and so shy and so utterly lost. And there was just so much boyish yearning in his eyes. And so much kindness and a sort of uncertain, quivering expectation.
“We could live a good life together, Yehudit,” he whispered. “We believe in the same things, we want the same kind of life. We could have lots of kids, and lots of guests, and…”
“And who would diaper them and who would do all the cooking and cleaning?” I said sternly. “I am not the pushover you think I am.”
“Well, I’d do anything for you. Anything,” Marc said to me.
The truth was, it was almost enough. But not quite.
“But what about love?” I asked him.
“Our sages teach us love is divine, that it grows from compassion and understanding. From being kind and sensitive to another’s needs…”
I blush to tell you what happened next. I just slipped my arms up his back and shamelessly kissed him until I was sure if I stopped, he would not have another thing to say.
But I didn’t figure on his response.
There is something to be said for repression of carnal feelings among yeshiva men. Once they unrepress…
well
.
It was a good thing Ariela and Joseph turned up.
We made kiddush and announced our engagement.
The wedding will be in Jerusalem!
You must come!
Love and kisses,
Jenny
Tamar folded the letter carefully. The paper was yellowing and crisp, like dead leaves. She placed it carefully back into the shoebox along with all the other letters, invitations, birthday cards and pictures she had especially treasured for the last twenty years.
Why had she never answered it?
Vaguely, she remembered her fury. She’d been insulted—no! More. Outraged! She tried to call some of it back, to remember exactly what it was that had so upset her. How dare Jenny say all those things about Orchard Park? Who does she think she is to give me
mussar?
To imply that my husband is a hypocrite, that I am putting my children at risk! . . . How dare she tell me what to do? Why, my husband is a respected rebbe… I am Rebbetzin Finegold…
But now, so many years later, the fury seemed inconsequential and meaningless, like a rusty warning bell on an old beached ship rung without conviction, just to see if it still worked. Had she ever really been angry? she wondered. Or simply looking for an excuse to break off contact with the last person who knew her secret?
She thumbed through the box. Jenny’s wedding invitation, the picture of the slim, serene bride, the tall, gentle groom.
Jenny’s wedding.
She had not responded to the invitation. She had never
even sent a gift. She felt the hollow thud at the bottom of her heart echo. And even so, Jenny had sent the picture with her love.
Her heart contracted with loss. Twenty years. A whole lifetime of friendship. No one had ever taken Jenny’s place. There was just a blank, an empty space. Like that religious custom of leaving part of a wall in a new home deliberately unfinished as
zachar lechorban
, a reminder of Jerusalem’s destruction, of exile.
She got up, restless, her eyes roaming the room. There were the photographs of the family on the walls, smiling, filled with self-satisfaction and pleasure; sunny bright pictures, chronicling the milestones of a blessed, calm, untroubled life. Aaron’s first day in heder.
Mameh
, may her memory be blessed, holding two-year-old Sara, the child’s wild blond hair futilely restrained by ribbons, her blue eyes sparkling with mischief. Malka in her playpen, her gray-green eyes serene and smiling, her light brown hair a silky scarf down her back, so fine it outlined the delicate shape of her ears.
Twenty years had passed so swiftly. Good years, rich years, where there had always been something happy to occupy her time. Preparations for Rosh Hashanah—the honey and apples, the festive meals, the circular twisted challah with raisins. Gathering willow and myrtle branches for Succoth. Making flags for Simchat Torah. Getting the bags of candy together for the children of the synagogue. Purim costumes. Passover cleaning… And always the poor brides who needed help with trousseaus, sick congregants to be visited, charity drives to organize. Prayers to say. Dinner to make. A husband and children to care for. Religious obligations that gave form and content to her days, filling them like harvest baskets with good and more good, packed tightly, filled to the brim, so that there was no room for idle speculation and dreams. So that there was no room for thoughts to roll about to the past or the future or into speculation about what it would have been like to live a different kind of life.
She rummaged through the shoebox, picking out the family photograph from Aaron’s Bar Mitzvah. She sat down with it, scrutinizing it.
Aaron. Small, pale, unsmiling, with serious black eyes and short cropped black hair beneath a large black silk skullcap, an exclamation point between his smiling blond parents and sisters. How well he had read not only the haftorah, but the whole Torah reading! How beautifully he had delivered the
pilpul
on the Talmud before the entire congregation!
“You must be so proud, Rebbetzin Finegold, so very proud!”
“Mazel tov! May he continue to give you
nachas!
Such a fine boy! So intelligent, so learned. Like his father.”
He was the joy of her life. She thought of his childhood, the pages of droll stories and clever drawings that always littered his room; the glass jars full of convalescing insects being nursed to health with lettuce leaves that always lined his windowsill; the precious cards: “Dearest Ima, I love you, from your son Aaron…”
He had grown from a beautiful active baby to a sweet, curious, affectionate toddler to a diligent schoolchild who worked hard to fill report cards with As and Bs, and paeans of praise to his good character. His teachers always said the same things about him: that he made up with hard work for any lack in his natural ability. That he was helpful to others, respectful and diligent.
He did not have Josh’s easy brilliance. But he was climbing up the same mountainside of accomplishment with endless toil and dogged determination. And Josh was always there beside him, helping him up. The two were inseparable, bonded together by such love and mutual admiration, Tamar often felt left out. But somehow she didn’t really mind. Each time she looked at him, something bright and warm flashed secretly inside her. Her tall, handsome, affectionate, respectful boy. Her Aaron. A son like his father.
Blessed child, she thought. Blessed, blessed child.
She touched the photograph’s frayed edges. It was seven years old. Could it actually be fading, like those yellowing portraits of girls in bottle curls and mididresses in her mother’s album? She looked at Aaron, short compared with the tall young man he had become, his face wreathed in an uncertain smile, proud and full of childish dignity, his shoulders rubbing against his father’s arm; Sara, petite and golden; and little Malka, the fuzz of light brown hair, the little gold earrings. And there was Josh, straight backed and youthfully slim, yet somehow making her think of the word
venerable
. And there was herself, the white expanse of her neck rising out of the festive, flowered dress, the skin so smooth and firm—so young. Not that she was old now, she comforted herself. But that woman in the photograph was a young mother, flowing with baby milk and hormones that made her skin glisten with health, elastic over her bones. Her young arms, white and full and proud, lightly touched the shoulders of her young son, the Bar Mitzvah boy.
And now her young son was a young man who wanted a wife like that, a young woman with smooth, elastic skin. And she would become like her mother before her, a woman with faded photographs and dull flesh through which the sap of young life no longer flowed.
She would become a grandmother.
She cringed.
A grandmother… She mouthed the word. Your little babies grew up and turned into handsome young men and women and married and had babies, making you a grandmother.
That was the very best thing that could happen. That was what happened if you were very, very lucky.
The best thing that could happen was that you got to fade, to grow old.
That was life.
She wasn’t ready. But Aaron was. He had been for two years. He was twenty years old. Many of his friends already had two small children, having married at eighteen. The matchmakers were banging loudly on her door. And why not? He was the son of Reb Joshua Finegold, head of Yeshiva Mesifta Kavod ha-Makom in Orchard Park, a Talmudical academy rivaled only by places like Lonovitch in B’nai Brak or Chafetz Chaim in Jerusalem. Josh had turned it into one of the most respected and influential Talmudical academies in America, she thought, allowing the idea to fill her with a brief but heady sense of pleasure.