Saving Grace (4 page)

Though she blamed Jacob for splitting their family, Clara, to her credit, never denied she had been warned. The very first time she met Jacob Fleishman, at a dance in the basement of her aunt’s synagogue, he told her: “One day I’m going to live in Palestine. I’m going to join a kibbutz and make the desert bloom.”

“That’s nice,” she’d replied. His hands were so white. He was a furrier. What would a furrier do in the desert, skin rattlesnakes? She knew it was important for a man to have dreams; woman’s job was to harness them. He wanted to make things bloom, she’d buy him a geranium. Jacob was a socialist, a union man. Clara didn’t know from socialism; she knew from bread on the table and a decent place to live. They both had responsibilities, family to bring over. Clara was certain that a baby or two would lay the ghost of Jacob’s dream.

Two years after they married, their first baby was born, a girl they named Fanny after Jacob’s grandmother Faigele. The next year they bought a two-family house in East New York, Brooklyn.

They sent money to their families in Poland, begging them to get out while they could, for an ominous cloud was settling over Europe. Jacob’s sister wrote to say that they were coming, but that was the last they heard from her or any of them. No one came. When Jacob and Clara wrote home, their letters came back marked “Addressee unknown.”

Every day Jacob rode the train home from his workshop on the Lower East Side, sank into his armchair, opened the radio, and listened darkly to the news, ignoring his wife and child. When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, he began reading the Bible. Clara thought at first that he was getting religion, but his reading seemed only to incense him, and he never set foot in synagogue, not even on Yom Kippur. Not even the birth of his son, Jonathan, could dispel the fog of his depression. Without telling Clara, Jacob tried to enlist in the United States Army, but was rejected for a triviality— flat feet.

On the day the Warsaw ghetto fell, he came home early from work. Clara was in the basement, hanging laundry.

“What’s the matter?” she asked through a mouthful of clothespins.

“We’re going to Palestine,” he said.

Her shoulders tensed, but she took a pin from her mouth and clamped a diaper onto the line. “
Vus is dus?”

“We’re going to Palestine.”

She turned to look at him. Something settled and certain in his face made her cry out so that the clothespins spilled out of her mouth and down her front. “We can’t,” she cried. “We have the house, the children.”

“Sell the house,” he replied inexorably, “keep the children”; and a wholly unaccustomed grin split his face.

Clara rented the house (she wouldn’t sell it, no fool she) and they sailed away to Palestine. Jonathan was a toddler, Fanny eight years old. Now Jacob was the one who sang all day, while Clara paced the decks, frowning and muttering to herself.

Jacob had a
landsman
on a kibbutz in the Negev, and it was there they went after landing in Jaffa. Jacob and Fanny fell instantly in love with the primitive settlement and surrounding wilderness; but Clara hated the kibbutz, that bare, ugly outpost sandwiched between the Dead Sea and the towering, sere cliffs of the Judean wilderness. When they took her children away to the children’s houses, she wept inconsolably. The scorpions, snakes, and desert beetles the size of rats terrified her. Their little room with its concrete floor was an oven, and ventilation could only be had at the cost of privacy.

Clara mourned her house in Brooklyn, her beautiful furniture bought all new, never secondhand, her carpets, her electric stove. Here the bathrooms and kitchen were communal. Even in the shtetl, Clara’s mother had had her own kitchen; and though their outhouse had been primitive, at least it was theirs alone. In Poland, even the poorest of the poor had some link to the civilized past—a pair of Sabbath candlesticks, a hand-stitched linen tablecloth, something of value. Here there was nothing; like primitives, the people subsisted on visions she could not perceive.

“You call this a home?” she cried to her husband. “This is a prison camp.”

“No, Clara, no.” Jacob patted her awkwardly. “Here is our home, come look.” Outside, the stark, massive hills of the Negev cradled them, the sky of a blueness so pure and sharp the heart soared to see it. In the air was the arid smell of undisturbed time, of a land unmodified by man, a majestic continuum.

“It’s ours,” he told his wife, holding her with one arm and with the other tracing a broad sweep of the land. “It was given us to take and make into our very own. ‘For the Lord thy God bringeth thee into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and depths that spring out of valleys and hills; a land of wheat, and barley, and vines, and fig trees, and pomegranates; a land of oil, olive, and honey.”

But Clara said scornfully, “Him who eats
trafe
and never goes to shul, not even on Yom Kippur, he talks about God? This one who don’t even believe?”

“Just because I don’t believe in God,” he said with dignity, “don’t mean He don’t have to keep his promise.”

In his eyes she saw a reflection of the land of brooks and fountains, ripening fields of wheat and barley, green vineyards and fragrant orchards. But when she looked around her, all she saw was barren wilderness, savage, useless, intimidating beauty.

“Fool,” she scolded. “You don’t live from scenery. You can’t eat hope.” She pointed back into their dark shack. “This
nothing
is all there is.”

But it was as if they spoke different languages, and neither could understand the other’s. To Jacob, a large house or a small room, fancy furniture or plain, was no matter. To him it was the dream that mattered; to her, the bed. He took his wife’s hand and said passionately: “Here is a great canvas, and we hold the brush. Clara, we can build a whole new society, a light to the nations.”

“Let them light their own light,” she said. “I want a decent home.”

“Here we can live free in our own country, we can shape this land to our dreams. Clara, this is where we belong.”

“What was so bad with Brooklyn?” she cried. “We had a home, carpets on the floor, drapes on the windows, all from our own work: what was so bad?”

“It wasn’t our land,” Jacob said patiently.

“I don’t want a land,” she cried. “I want a life.”

They gazed at each other in perplexity. “Ach, what’s the use?” Clara sighed. “For stubbornness there’s no cure.”

She was assigned to work in the toddlers’ house, where Jonathan lived. By day Clara tended to the six babies domiciled there, and at night she traded off with the other mothers, spending one night out of seven on a cot in the children’s room.

She made no effort to get along with the other women or to learn the language. Several months after the Fleishmans arrived, a group of veterans accused Clara in a general kibbutz meeting of favoring her own child over others.

“Of course I love my own children more,” she replied scornfully. “I’m not their mother?”

A pall of collective disapproval settled over the room. The kibbutz secretary said sternly, “Our children are loved, not only by their parents, but by every member of the community. We love our children without smothering them in bourgeois family bonds. We treat them as people, not possessions. And we never, ever favor one over another.”

“Ha!” crowed Clara. “You think I don’t see how Rivka gives her boy the biggest bowl of soup, and Miriam skims the cream off the milk to fatten her little Rochele? And you think I blame them? I don’t blame them! They’re mothers, like me. If a mother don’t look out for her children, who will?”

Jacob and Clara were asked to wait outside. The discussion lasted only a few minutes: the kibbutz had held longer, more impassioned debates on buying milk goats from the Bedouin. The secretary came out alone. “Maybe you should try a moshav,” he told Jacob.

Jacob put his arm around his wife and they walked back to their room. As the door closed behind them, Clara said calmly, “I’m going home.”

“Home,” said Jacob, “what home? We
are
home.”

“Home to Brooklyn, and I’m taking the children with me. You can come or no, it’s up to you.”

“We don’t need this kibbutz. To hell with them. There’s others. Or we’ll go to a moshav. Would you like that, Clara?”

“I’m going home,” she said.

“We’ll move to a city—Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. You’ll like that.” In her face he saw that inexorable intent that she had seen in his the day the Warsaw ghetto fell. “I can’t go back,” he said.

“So.” Clara turned up her hands, saddened but not surprised. Jacob wanted something she couldn’t understand, much less give him. That he wanted it more than he wanted her and the children seemed to her a terrible betrayal, but she did not argue. Even if she could force Jacob to come home, what good would it do? What use would a bitter, resentful man be to her?
“Zai gesunt,”
she said, in sorrow and anger—Go
in health,
as if it were he who was leaving.

Not for a moment did she anticipate Fanny’s reaction. The child had grown away from her mother, going so far as to change her name—she answered now only to the name of Tamar, Hebrew for the date palm. Tamar flatly refused to leave Israel. “If you try to take me back to Brooklyn,” she said, “I’ll run away.”

“Is this my daughter?” Clara cried, striking her breast. “I gave you life, nursed you, fed you, and now you spit on me?”

“I can’t leave. This is my true home.”

This mystical nonsense was precisely what Clara could neither understand nor abide. “Your home is with your parents. With your mama,” she amended, casting a defiant look at Jacob, who stood listening silently with his arms folded.

Tamar looked from one to the other. “You want to stay too, don’t you, Papa? Mama, you can’t leave us.”

Clara groaned. “This is all your fault,” she told Jacob, “you with your Palestine
mishugas!”

He replied: “Remember Ruth’s words to Naomi. ‘Whither thou goest, I will go, and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, thy God my God.’ “

“She could talk. What did she leave behind, a tent in the desert? I left
mein
own house. You want I should follow you? From Brooklyn to Queens I’ll follow you. From Queens to Long Island I’ll follow you.”

“God gave us
this
land, not Brooklyn or Queens, not even Long Island.”

“Don’t talk to me about God, you atheist! And who asked him anyway? Some gift He gives! A desert full of scorpions, snakes, and Arabs, and by you fools it’s Paradise. He can keep his gifts, the big spender! Oy,” she cried, “what am I doing so bad? All I want is to make a life for myself and
mein kinder;
and for this I’m a criminal?”

But Jacob did not relent, nor did Tamar. One month later, light one child and a husband but laden with a bitterness that would last a lifetime, Clara boarded ship with Jonathan in tow.

Who was right and who was wrong? Clara knew: the proof was in the children. Clara’s boy had grown into a fine, wealthy, successful family man. Jacob’s girl had a good profession, but nothing to show for it. Tamar’s husband had been cut down by an Arab’s bullet, her only child was adopted. So who was right?

3

HEY, HEY, LBJ, how many gooks did you kill today?” the two men chanted, then slapped hands and laughed.

The locker room, which stank pleasantly of sweat and Lysol, was deserted except for the club attendant, and if he found anything incongruous in this juvenile greeting between two impeccably dressed middle-aged men, he was far too well-trained to show it. They themselves saw nothing strange in it, for though on the outside they might look fiftyish and comfortable, inside they were still twenty-three year old radicals.

“I really appreciate you coming,” Michael Kavin said, clasping Jonathan’s shoulder.

“What the hell? We’ve been golfing together for twenty years—suddenly you’ve got to kiss my ass?”

“That was before I came down with leprosy,” Michael said.

They finished dressing and left the locker room for the clubhouse, where a dozen men and women were waiting their turn to tee off.

“Good to see you, Mike,” the club manager said as he handed over their scorecards. “How’re you doing, Mr. Fleishman? You guys want caddies?”

“Not today,” Michael said.

“Go right ahead, then.”

As they walked past the people waiting on benches, straight out to the first hole, Michael cast a proprietary glance around him. He owned a piece of the club, a gesture of appreciation by the club’s directorate for his help in settling a zoning dispute with the municipality. Though his interest was too small to matter much financially, it was good investment property and it did wonders for their waiting time. Gone and unlamented were the days of rising at six to tee off at ten.

Jonathan teed off first and hit a long straight shot down the fairway. Michael’s shot went wide. When they converged at the hole, Michael laughed and said, “Darling, we can’t go on meeting this way.”

Jonathan looked at him. “Why not?”

“I wasn’t kidding about the leprosy. Did you see Callaghan duck into the john as I walked by?”

“Fuck him. He was happy enough to see you coming a month ago-”