Art of a Jewish Woman (3 page)

“Thank God,” the professor answered. “It’s a syphilitic gumma.” It was the first appearance of congenital syphilis that Samy’s father had passed on to him through sex with his mother when she was pregnant. His mother had been spared. The spirochete had lain fallow, encapsulated in a cyst somewhere in Samy’s body. The disease was endemic in Europe at the time, and in fact some people lived their whole lives without knowing they were infected. But when Samy was twenty-eight years old the spirochete started attacking him.

No reliable treatment existed yet for congenital syphilis; the slow course would unfold over months or years gradually toward infection of the brain, dementia and death. Felice and Samy could never have children, for the children would be in danger of being infected themselves. Nor could Felice and Samy have unprotected sex without putting Felice at risk herself.

Later in the day they began to talk. Samy gallantly said, “You must leave. You can’t stay with me. There is no future for us, no future for you here.”

“There is no future for me in Poland.”

“Palestine?”

“I will write Papa. He will know what to do. So many young people from our district are leaving for Palestine.”

“You will have many children.”

“I only want two. I will name the first one for you.”

“I will write you. I will visit.”

“I will call you as soon as I am settled if I can find a telephone.”

Then they hatched a further plan with Samy’s good friend Pierre Mendelson. Pierre had an older unmarried sister in Bucharest who did not care about having children. She wanted to come to France. She would be a good companion for Samy. Maybe she would even nurse him when the time came, but that they did not talk about.

Part Two. Palestine

Felice knew Palestine’s history. It had been part of her courses in ancient history. She knew that Judaism had arisen there, that Christianity had been founded there, and that the Romans had dispersed most of the Jews from Palestine in the early days of Christianity. She also knew that Islam had come from the Arabian Peninsula, and had held sway in Palestine since the 7
^th
Century in spite of the efforts of the Medieval Christian Crusaders to retake the land from the Ottoman Turks.

But she barely knew the tales of the Jewish patriarchs because religion, the Bible, had not been part of her life at home. And she knew nothing of the struggles in Palestine in the year she was arriving. It didn’t dawn on her that she was entering a place where she would be personally caught in the midst of more violence than she had ever known. In that moment in 1935 there was a comparative lull in the tensions between the Palestinian Arabs and the Jews who were arriving by the thousands from Poland, Russia and Germany. The last anti-immigration demonstrations had been in 1933, sparked by Arabs losing jobs to new arrivals. The last violent clash, in which hundreds died, had been in 1929, triggered by Arab fears of losing access to their holiest site in Jerusalem. She had heard from schoolmates and family friends that Palestine—the Land of Israel—was a promised land, but what kind of promise was this? Another false one? It barely meant anything to her in comparison to her dream on the train of the life she had anticipated with Samy in France.

The train settling to a stop at the open Tel Aviv station startled Felice out of her reverie. She caught a new scent, eucalyptus, a bit like peppermint but not peppermint, and saw the fronds of eucalyptus leaves waving in the breeze, like willow trees but different. She and her husband crossed the tracks and boarded another train for Jerusalem. The old carriage filled with light-skinned European Jews, olive and brown hued Sephardic Jews from the Mediterranean lands and further south into Africa and Arabia, and brown and olive-skinned Arabs. Then the train clanked southeast past vegetable gardens and acres and acres of harvested fields and orange groves. Soon it was spewing soot as it started its climb through a barren rocky canyon and up steep hills. Felice wasn’t thinking about the fabled city at the end of this leg of her journey. Amidst the polyglot of languages, she was wondering in Polish, “Why did this journey befall me?”

“What if the syphilitic sore had appeared on Samy’s arm a year later and the disease had infected my first child? What if there had been no syphilis; would Samy and I have lived happily ever after? How did it happen to me? I’m just a young girl trying to make my way. Where is the logic in this? What is my destiny?”

She couldn’t ask these questions of the silent man in the dusty ill-fitting black suit sitting beside her. There was nobody for her to talk with, and she loved to talk. She had never felt so alone in her life. The train started its last ascent with a long series of switchbacks. It was late in the day and the sun falling into the Mediterranean 25 miles to the west glowed rose on the granite cliffs and ramparts that millennia had polished smooth. The City on the Hill came into view, and the Dome of the Rock glowed with a golden light.

The husband seemed to relax and breathe more deeply in cooler, less humid air. He took out his ivory phylacteries and began to pray, rocking to and fro, lost in piety. Felice examined her cuticles, took from her purse the cloisonné compact that Samy had given her, and reapplied her lipstick.

In the days that followed, she didn’t meet the British officer for dinner. She followed her father’s instructions and moved into her husband’s family’s apartment. They lived in three crowded rooms in an early 20th century building in Mea Shearim that must have been old and shabby almost as soon as it had been built. The husband moved to another family’s adjoining apartment, giving his bedroom to his fictive bride. Two sisters shared a room, and the parents slept on oriental settees in the living room-kitchen. So Felice had privacy of sorts. She was an exotic creature to them, a bird alighted. In fact, as a child in Poland, one of her nicknames had been Fegele, meaning quick little bird in flight, another was Fela, which was short for Felizia, another Felushka, which meant little Fela. Her husband and his family followed her wherever she went—the privy in the courtyard, the outside shower behind a curtain, the mirror when she brushed her hair and put on lipstick and eyeliner. Curious eyes followed her in the streets of the orthodox neighborhood.

They wouldn’t look at her directly. When the false husband’s father came home the first night from the synagogue where he earned pennies copying prayer books, he turned away from her at first, afraid to face her. He gestured for her to cover myself. “Cover myself?” She didn’t understand what he meant because he was looking at her hands. “Cover my hands?” Finally she caught on and opened her suitcase to find a blouse with sleeves. They gave her a black shawl, which she put over her shoulders. Then the father and husband were able to look at her. She felt as if something unbelievable was happening to her and despaired that she was trapped in a medieval world. She thought she needed to escape or she would die. But then she decided to look for the humor in the macabre, and reasoned that if she stayed, she could write a book about it.

She read her father’s letter again for reassurance, the part that said that part of the financial arrangement included their providing her with a dental job. The next day Steinberg took her to his boss, an aged Arab dentist for whom he worked as a technician making false teeth. The clinic was in the patriarch’s home, which was a palazzo on a rise across from the Damascus Gate to the Old City, with a fine garden with fig, orange, and olive trees. Felice could pick from the garden when her stomach grew tight with hunger.

The dentist didn’t need the newcomer for her skills, for he had trained his relatives to see the patients. Rather he needed her freshly minted European license to satisfy the British occupiers and their new regulations. They were trying to impose their ideas of order and professional standards on the Middle Eastern outpost. He paid her five pounds a month for the license (approximately $580 today). He also made available to her a room in the palazzo, which provided her with an escape from the false husband and his family. Their contract was fulfilled. The Steinbergs had the money to provide the dowry for the older sister so she could marry. Felice had emigrated from Europe and been given a job. On October 26, 1935, she obtained a precious British Mandate passport at the Jerusalem consulate by dint of the marriage certificate.

In a sense her papers were false, but that was the way it was often done to escape Europe and Russia and get into this new, ancient promised land when the legal quota was full. Felice’s ruse was fairly simple. Others hiked across the borders at night. Some even invented completely new identities as far-fetched as the Jewish family who arrived on a tourist visa pretending to be Polish nobility on a pilgrimage to Christianity’s holy sites. Then they lost themselves in the Jewish community.

Even though she had escaped Europe, Felice still languished. Her employer literally kept her and didn’t allow her to work. She feared losing her newly acquired skills and was still suffocating. They assigned her a personal servant, Mustapha, a dark, Ethiopian Muslim. He was a beautiful young boy to look at and attend to her needs, but she couldn’t get rid of him. He would bring her hot water and stand in the door while she undressed to wash. She thought she would die. She kept telling him to get out of her room in French and gesturing him away, but he wouldn’t budge. Finally she really used her hand and slapped him in the face, something she didn’t believe she had in her. He started screaming, “Aaieee!”

Her patron heard the yell and came running. “Listen, Doctor, this can’t go on. I can’t wash every morning with the boy staring at me,” she announced. The doctor gave the boy new orders to wait in the hall, not inside the door.

The clinic had a telephone, the first one to which she’d had access since her arrival, and she could now try to reach Samy as she had promised on the dock in Marseilles. It felt as if she was trying to hold onto the tatters of their relationship for the sake of kindness even though there was no way it could ever be made whole again. Her host gave the young doctor permission to use the phone to call France, and an operator painstakingly routed the call through Istanbul, Greece, the Balkans, and Italy to France and Neufchateau-des-Voges. The familiar voice of his office nurse came on the line.

“May I speak to Dr. Jakarkina?”

There was a pause. Something stifled at the other end of the line. Then, “It is not possible. He is dead. He has suicided. He gave himself an injection right after he returned from Marseilles.”

“No. That isn’t possible,” Felice yelled. “He promised to come and visit me. He didn’t keep his word.” She sank to the floor in tears, rocking back and forth, not so much in shock but at the finality of it, the sad, tragic inevitability of this ending to her student years. The sad, pointless death of the fine man she had loved.

She understood now that he had lied to her on the dock about writing and visiting. He had taken the train back to Nancy, then driven into Lorraine, past the farm of Joan of Arc’s childhood, to the village where he practiced. She saw him circling the little square with the statue of Joan in arms, astride her stallion, with the names of the villagers who died in combat in The Great War inscribed on its base.
How can any war be great?,
she thought.
They are all abominations of mankind
. Then Samy drove one more block to his office. He knew which medicine to pick, probably morphine, and how much to inject. Then he lay down to sleep and never woke up.

I Thought I Would Never Leave

Felice knew then that she was really on her own. It felt like the first time that she would really have to make her way by herself. She was beyond the reach of her father’s influence or support in a place where she scarcely knew more than a few words of the language. She was twenty-five when Samy died, and she knew she could no longer look at life as a lark, even though she told herself that she would always look for the humor in her dilemmas.

As the days went on, she grew bored and insulted at her employer’s refusal to let her work, trying to figure out her next move. During her free time she walked the cobbled lanes of the Old City—a great oriental bazaar where vendors sold food, cloth, household supplies, art, and religious artifacts. Coffee roasted, copper and brass smiths worked their metals with hammers and forges, and incense seeped from the open doors of myriad small mosques, churches, and synagogues.

She was curious, yes, but religious feeling did not move her. She could appreciate the beauty of the sanctuaries, but she did not understand ritual. It escaped her how people could order their lives in worship of a deity she did not believe existed. People and art interested her more.

She was fascinated by the stylized way the Islamic artists rendered people because Muslim tradition looked askance on realistic depiction of the human figure, birds and animals too, to the point that their paintings were almost abstractions. Was the art’s avoidance of the human form somehow emotionally connected with her father’s proscription that his daughter shouldn’t be a doctor examining men’s bodies? What was the harm in looking, she wondered?

She wanted to take home the bright ceramic tiles with their geometric flowers, whose stems and leaves wound in arabesques, but she had no home to take them to, nor money to buy them. Nonetheless, she couldn’t resist the entreaties of the Arab rug merchants, especially when they spoke French, as they did frequently because French had often been used as the administrative language of the Ottoman Empire. They’d welcome her into their shops, even though she insisted that she had no money with which to buy anything.

The merchants seemed to take great pleasure in her visit and laid out carpet after carpet, which she admired with unrestrained excitement. Then they would invite her through tiny courtyards with doors to the living quarters, up barely lit narrow steps to rooftop garden terraces with chairs and sofas. Over mint tea with honey and cardamom or sweet black coffee served in thimble-size cups, the merchants would tell Felice about their families and she would describe her nostalgia for home.