A Day of Small Beginnings Read online

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2006 by Lisa Pearl Rosenbaum

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

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  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  www.twitter.com/littlebrown

  First eBook Edition: July 2008

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Excerpt from the poem “Separation” by Juliusz Słowacki. English translation copyright © 1995 by Walter Whipple. Used by permission. Quote from Rabbi Bunam from Pzhysha from Tales of the Hasidim. Copyright © 1948, 1972 by Martin Buber. Schocken Books, Random House and Company. Excerpt from the poem by Adam Asnyk from Poles and Jews: A Failed Brotherhood by Magdalena Opalski and Israel Bartel. Copyright © 1992 by the Trustees of Brandeis University. Reprinted by permission of the University Press of New England, Hanover, NH. A History of the Jewish People by Max Margolis and Alexander Marx. Copyright 1927 by The Jewish Publication Society of America.

  ISBN: 978-0-316-03391-6

  Contents

  Copyright

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  PART I: ITZIK

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  PART II: NATHAN

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  PART III: Ellen

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  To my family, related or of the heart

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  They say we stand on the shoulders of the generations that came before us. Years ago, my uncle Lloyd Rodwin told a story about his trip to Poland in the late 1970s. It wasn’t much of a story, but from its dry bones this novel was born. As head of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, he had been invited to speak at Warsaw University. Afterward he was offered a car and driver, a protocol of the Communist era when the government exercised control over the whereabouts of foreign visitors. He asked the driver to take him to łomże, my grandfather’s birthplace, which he assumed was some backwater town. When they arrived at a small city with a cathedral, he realized he didn’t know of a single landmark by which he might recognize his father’s world. Over a lifetime, my grandfather had never described his hometown and my uncle had never asked. At a loss for what to do, he took a quick tour of the cathedral and the city and returned to Warsaw. The story, scarcely an anecdote, suggested to me something so uniquely part of the American experience, the loss of one’s family history once the journey to the New World has been made. I wondered, what if a gatekeeper had remained in the Old World to tell the tale. And so began A Day of Small Beginnings.

  PART I

  ITZIK

  Hear our voices and we will return to you.

  1

  WHEN I WENT TO MY REST IN 1905 I WAS EIGHTY-THREE AND childless, aggravated that life was done with me and that I was done with life. I turned my face from the Angel of Death and recited the Psalm of David: What do You gain by my blood if I go down to the Pit? Can the dust praise You? If God’s answer was punishment for my sins or praise for my good deeds, I cannot say.

  Understand, I did not call Itzik Leiber to my grave that spring night when my return to the living began. The boy had already jumped the wall of our cemetery, our House of the Living, as we call it. He was down on all fours, like an animal, looking for a place to hide. What’s this? I thought.

  Sleep, Freidl, sleep, I told myself. An old woman like you is entitled. What did I need with trouble? I was a year in the grave. My stone was newly laid, still unsettled in the earth. I had no visitors. In death, as in life, people kept their distance. In our town, a childless woman’s place was on the outside.

  And yet, from the hundreds of gravestones that could have hidden him that night, Itzik Leiber chose mine. His knees, his toes dug into the earth above me. His fingers scraped at the bird with open wings engraved on the dome of my stone. He panted and he pushed against the indentations of my inscription like an insistent child at an empty breast. Freidl Alterman, Dutiful Wife, it read there, as if this explained the marriage.

  Itzik Leiber’s small, skinny body smelled of fear’s sweat and the staleness of hunger. But through his fingers his soul called out to me. Plain as a potato, his soul.

  From the outside, he didn’t look like much either. A poor boy, maybe a year past his Bar Mitzvah. He had a head the shape of an egg, the wide end on top. And kinky brown hair, twisted up like a nest. His cap was so frayed the color couldn’t be described. But under the brim, the boy had a pair of eyes that could have made a younger woman blush—big, sad ovals, and eyelashes like feathers.

  I remembered him, of course. In a town like ours no one was a complete stranger. Itzik the Faithless One, they called him. Faithless? I can tell you Itzik wasn’t faithless that night, not when he whispered against my gravestone, his voice thin as a thread, “Help me! Please, God, help me!”

  God should answer him, I thought. A child’s tears reach the heavens. Listen to the boy and leave me to my rest, I prayed. But God had other ideas. Rest would not return to me. Itzik wrapped his arms around my stone, his body curled there like a helpless newborn. How could I ignore him? I wanted to cradle the petrified child, to make him safe.

  In life I liked to say, God will provide. But who could imagine He would wait until after I was gone to the dead to provide me with a child? Such a joker is God.

  A night wind gathered like a flock of birds around our cemetery wall and swept through the thick confusion of graves. The soft soil began to pound above me with the heavy tread of men. They were so near I could feel their boots making waves in the earth. What had he done, this Itzik of mine, to incite the Poles to come out so late at night?

  Raising myself, I saw torches in their hands, murder on their faces. The faint whiff of alcohol floated over our neighbors like a demon. You never know what a Pole will do. One minute he’s ready to kill you, the next he’s offering to sell you apples, smiling, ingratiating, like nothing’s happened. There were as many Poles in our town as there were Jews. But we never counted them among us, and they never counted us among them.

  Itzik whimpered. He gripped my stone with a frenzied, furious fear. His eyes rolled towa
rd heaven. Make them go away, he prayed. In the moonlight, his breath formed sharp white puffs that disappeared in the shadows of the gravestones.

  I prayed too. God help him, I said. Give the boy’s poor soul a chance to cook, to become a man.

  What else could I do for him? I knew I was no dybbuk that could invade the world of the living. I had made my journey to Gehenna already and eaten salt as punishment for my pride. About this, all I can say is that at least for me it was short, not like for the worst sinners, who stay in that place eleven months, God forbid. After my time there, I returned to Zokof’s cemetery to sleep with my earthly body and to wait for Judgment Day.

  Itzik pulled at my gravestone so hard it fell over at his feet and broke in two. Who could have imagined that a boy’s clumsiness would stir me so? My soul tugged and beat at me. Gevalt, how it struggled to tear itself from death’s sleep. Such a sensation—frightening and wonderful—the feel of it pushing upward, freeing itself from the bony cavity once softly bound by my breasts.

  I asked God, Is this life or am I again in Gehenna? I never heard of such a state as I was in. But fear was not in me. When my soul was finally released from my resting place, I hung like a candle-lit wedding canopy over Itzik’s unsuspecting head. In my white linen shroud, my feet bound with ribbons, I felt lovely as a bride and as proud and exhausted as a mother who had just given birth.

  A tree near Moishe Sagansky’s grave gave a snap. So new was I to being among the living again, I could not be certain who did this, me or God. The Poles stopped to listen; then one of them looked in my direction and began to holler, “A Jew spirit’s out!” They took off. Just like that. Such a blessing that the Poles of Zokof were scared of dead Jews. If only they were so scared of live Jews, maybe we’d have had less trouble with them.

  My Itzik, terrified boy, lay stiffly on the ground until silence returned. He crawled to Ruchelle Cohen’s tall stone, and without so much as a glance at the carved floral candelabras engraved there, he swiped a pebble that had been placed on top by one of her children. With the loving care of a son, he laid it on top of my fallen stone, respecting my memory. Regret at my childlessness passed through me again. When Itzik rose, unsteady as a toddler, I could not help being moved by him. He held out his arms and unrolled his clenched fists. Grass fell from his fingers.

  I shook with pain and thanks to God for this boy, delivered late, but maybe not too late. A child, at last. Oh, the joy I felt! My heart! He had gathered grass for me. I swept close around him, ready to receive his prayer for the redemption of my soul. I waited for the words: May her soul sprout from this place as grass sprouts from the earth. I waited, pregnant with expectation.

  What came instead was a sharp, thin cry, quickly stifled, and the insult of his foot kicking apart the little mound of blades he’d dropped on my grave.

  2

  SWEEP THE HOUSE, PEOPLE SAY, AND YOU FIND EVERYTHING. When the Angel of Death came for me I was a widow already. My husband, Berel, was four years under his stone on the men’s side of our cemetery. The attendant from the Burial Society took the feather from my nostrils and said I breathed no more. “God has taken our Freidl, smoothly as a hair removed from milk,” he said. My neighbors opened my windows and covered the mirrors so that no ghosts would be captured. They came to ask my pardon for shunning me, a barren woman. They recited the psalm, He shall cover you with His feathers and you shall find shelter under His wings. But they did not find the secret I had kept inside my house all those years.

  I was not barren. All my life it was plain to me that my womb could have held a score of babies. My breasts could have suckled children and delighted an attentive husband. But from the day we stood under the wedding canopy, my husband, Berel, could not perform his marital duty.

  Her conjugal rights a husband shall not diminish, God commands married couples. Sabbath evenings, those first weeks, we went to our bed with pure thoughts, knowing it was a holy thing to make a child. But Berel’s seed came too fast, or not at all. In the beginning I thought it was my books that drove away his desire. A woman should not be more learned than her husband, my mother always said. I put my books out of sight and discussed with him only household matters. This changed nothing between us. I watched for signs that he wanted someone else. But my husband did not look at women, plain or beautiful. After not even a year, he stopped with me entirely.

  I admit the sin was mine, lying for a husband who had defied God’s commandment to be fruitful and multiply. The Talmud teaches that our abstinence was like shedding blood, taking life. I should have brought my case before the elders of our community and pleaded to end the marriage. I could have argued it was his share to love his wife at least as much as himself, to honor her more than himself. But if I had brought about the end of the marriage, what a scandal for us both.

  Instead, I hid his shame. At first I hid it out of pity, though, God forgive me, in time my pity turned to disgust. Later, I hid it because I realized I didn’t mind so much, being childless. I could study in peace, like my father. I prayed to follow in the tradition of Edel, the Baal Shem Tov’s daughter, a woman of such valor and intellect that all who met her said the Divine Presence shone on her face. To me, it was an impossible combination that Edel was also a mother, who raised the brilliant Feyge, mother of the Storyteller, Nachman of Bratslav. I thought I was a woman who would only lose herself in mothering and come to resent her children. Not for me, to let my books gather dust in the corner while I slave to feed twelve children, like Ruchelle Cohen, all worn out at fifty.

  Twenty years into the marriage, when it was too late to make a change, I realized I had not only disobeyed His commandment to be fruitful and multiply, but also turned my back on my own nature by not becoming a mother. There was part of me that would never grow because of this. What was the purpose of all my study if it did not reach a new life I had tended? Whose mind would I shape, like my father had done for me? Whose hands would take up the penknife and the board, my secret pleasure, and glorify our God with intricate oissherenishen—my paper cutouts?

  A woman has no right to be so bitter about her husband. She is his helper in life, his footstool in heaven. That is God’s will. But for the rest of my life hot, painful anger at my childlessness stirred me up inside. Not a day went by that I did not taste the sin in this and serve it to my husband like a poisoned meal. Eventually, it killed the marriage.

  At his funeral, I was a dutiful wife. I hired the mourners to tear their hair and wail for him. But I stood silently at his grave, the anger reawakened by the finality of my loss.

  At the moment of my death, regret rose again like a demon, and I refused to be still. When the mourners placed my body in the ground, seven blades of grass beneath it, and proclaimed over me, Blessed art Thou, the True Judge, I argued with God for more time to redeem myself. Let me teach someone what it is to love You. Let me pass just that much on, I begged Him.

  God’s answer, I believe, came to me on that cold spring night, one year later. Itzik.

  Of him, I knew certain things. I knew they said Itzik’s mother was a pious woman, a woman who gave money to Rebbe Fliderbaum for the yeshiva. This she did even after her husband, Mordechai the Ragman, left her for who knows where. Five young children Sarah Leiber had to feed, poor soul. People said the Leibers would have starved if Itzik hadn’t left school and gone to work at Avrum Kollek’s mill.

  Everyone agreed it was all for the best that Mordechai the Ragman had abandoned his family. The man had dressed like a Hassid, but he’d been no blessing for a husband. What kind of Hassid, what kind of person, boasts in shul that he’d stamped his muddy boots on his wife’s wedding dress just to show her what’s what? Their neighbor Rivka Fromin said Mordechai called the poor woman a crazy cow in front of her children. Such a father must have made Itzik feel like an orphan even before the man left home.

  After, when his father was gone and Rebbe Fliderbaum came by to offer the family help, Itzik threw the rabbi out of his mother’s house. Called
him a thief. “Prayers don’t feed my family,” he’d said.

  So people called him Itzik the Faithless One. Faithless? Anyone could see the boy was just angry at his father. Anger like this is passed down, generation to generation. Mordechai the Ragman had been angry like that at his father, Yankl the Porter, maybe even became a Hassid to spite him.

  But even from so bad a match as Sarah and Mordechai Leiber, good children are born. I followed Itzik when he left my grave.

  3

  WHEN THE POLES WERE GONE, ITZIK WENT LIKE A THIEF TO the center of our cemetery, where all the paths connected like spokes in a wheel. Every few steps he stopped and listened.

  For myself, what a blessing, what a joy, to float in the air with no effort at all. I settled like a scarf around the inside of his shirt collar—such a filthy thing. I flew over him, around him, wherever I wanted to go. True, my vision was double or triple, and the colors were not right. There were too many shadows, and things didn’t look so clear. But at least bad eyesight wasn’t going to kill me.

  As for Itzik, he had no idea I was swooping like a crazy woman around him. Maybe if he had seen me he would not have looked so grim when he pulled the cap over those eyes of his and headed down the main stone path, past the monuments and mausoleums of the generations. We reached the stones of the Kohanes and the small marker of our oldest resident, Israel, buried in 1568. I stopped, out of habit, to pay my respects.

  We passed the burial house at the entrance. Exalted, I flew outside the iron gates. I turned for a last look at our town’s House of the Living and got a shock such as I never had in life.

  The walls around our sacred grounds had risen into a dome of crisscrossed gray hewn blocks. He, God of My Destiny, Creator of All Boundaries, had locked me out of my resting place, my Eden. The words of the Book of Lamentations, alive in my memory as they had been in my father’s study, came to me: He has blocked my ways with cut stones. He has made my paths a maze.