Leah's Journey (26 page)

“This is Madame Goldfeder, a coreligionist of yours from New York City. I had the good fortune to meet her at a showing this afternoon.”

“Ah yes. The Chanel showing. Was it interesting?” Herr Schreiber asked, leaning forward. His wife coughed in annoyance.

“This surely must be the peak of absurdity, Madame Goldfeder. Our only son is interned somewhere in a camp. We do not even know where. We have lost our possessions—everything we worked for. We live among cockroaches in this flat for refugees and we do not even know where we shall take refuge, but my husband must know about Coco Chanel’s latest fashions.”

Frau Schreiber, taller than her husband, her blue-gray hair swept elaborately upward, flicked a piece of dust from her black linen dress and clapped her hands together as though the movement might magically spirit her out of the tiny hot apartment and back to her beautiful home on a tree-lined Berlin boulevard where her faithful maid, Hilde, would shortly serve iced tea in the tall frosted glasses bought on a shopping trip to Venice.

The sounds of an argument in Yiddish rose from the street below and Ilse Schreiber moved to the window, her eyes filled with sudden tears. She had loved those glasses and had punished her son severely once for dropping one on the tiled kitchen floor.

“Ilse. Leave the window open. It is hot.” The small man’s voice was firm. “Perhaps our guests are thirsty.”

“Yes. Of course.” Immediately she was the considerate hostess and the cold coffee she offered them came on a battered aluminum tray which she had covered with an elegant linen cloth.

They talked over coffee and Leah listened with horror to their stories of life in Germany.

“If you have eyes to see what is happening and you are Jewish, you have only two choices—suicide or emigration,” Herr Schreiber said in a stoic, matter-of-fact tone that made Leah shiver.

“It will pass,” Frederic Heinemann insisted, but his voice lacked conviction. His friend shook his head.

“No, Frederic. We are a people who have survived many things. Our entire history is founded on the supposition that things will pass. In Hebrew we have said again and again ‘Gam zeh yaavor’—This also will pass.’ We have repeated this after pogroms, persecutions, even forced conversions. We will wait. We will endure. It will pass. But even we, history’s most patient, most optimistic victims, now know that this sickness that has consumed Germany, this Nazi fever, will not pass so quickly. Do you know, Madame Goldfeder, that in the weeks before we left Berlin, Ilse and I went to a funeral almost every day—and each funeral was that of a suicide. We are a people who glory in life. We raise our glasses and call out ‘L’Chaim!’ ‘To life!’ Yet each day another Jew chooses to surrender that precious life. Why, Madame?”

But it was Ilse Schreiber who answered, her voice dry and bitter.

“We went to the funeral of Professor Ehrenkrantz who was forced to leave the university. Of Dr. Eisenstadt who could no longer perform surgery at the clinic he himself had established. Of Frau Riegenbaum whose son was arrested because, like our own Leon, he committed the crime of falling in love with a German girl and might contaminate her with his Jewish blood. Ach—when people lose their livelihoods and their families and, in some cases, even their homes, to what purpose do they go on with their lives? Your questions require no answers, my husband.”

Leah stirred her coffee and felt her heart thunder with a fear she had almost forgotten. She remembered, suddenly, the vegetal odors of a summer woodland and the sour breath of fear.

“But surely the German people will soon realize the insanity of the situation,” she protested, not wanting to acknowledge a reality she could not escape.

“The German people. Forgive me, my dear Frederic, but there are very few with your courage and humanity in our country and you yourself know that your safety and that of your friend Heinz is not assured if you continue to befriend Jews like us. Picture, Madame, a citizenry which passes the office of a veterinarian who has, in all seriousness and adherence to the law, posted a sign saying ‘Jewish Dogs Not Treated.’ The passersby nod, as though such a legend were reasonable, understandable, and walk on. Think of people who have been friends and neighbors for many years, who go to the cabarets which are now all the social life of Berlin, elegantly dressed, some of them in gowns purchased in my husband’s own establishment on Tautzienstrasse and still unpaid for, where they listen to anti-Semitic songs and jokes, so pleased at being able to forget the debts they now do not have to pay to Jews who lent them money in good faith or allowed them to charge in their shops. Surely a Jewish pharmacy is not an international banking enterprise, yet our friend Teutsch, the pharmacist, had to close his shop because his Aryan customers declined to pay ‘filthy Jewish debts.’

“Quite suddenly, a woman who has belonged to my reading group for many years crosses the street to avoid talking to me. The greengrocer, with whom I have had an account for many years, faithfully paid on the first of each month, ignores me as I stand at the counter. But all this is nothing. Believe me, they do not want only our money and our possessions. They want our lives as well, our friends the Nazis. And the people will not object. The people will cheer them on as the Romans cheered their gladiators.”

Frau Schreiber sat back quietly and her husband put his hand over hers, wordlessly acknowledging the truth of her words. Finally, he spoke and his gentle voice was laced with exhaustion.

“Yes. They have a dream now, Hitler and his gangsters. They have a cure for all of the Fatherland’s ills—for inflation, unemployment, and war debts. All evil is caused by the Jews and to save Germany it must be made ‘Judenrein’—free of Jews.”

“And it will not stop with Germany,” his wife added. “The world is to be turned into an Aryan wonderland, ruled by blond, blue-eyed giants and served by untermenschen—therefore the world itself must be made Judenrein.”

“You think then that Hitler will truly plan another great war?” Leah asked.

“With all due respect to Frederic who disagrees with me, I think it a certainty,” Herr Schreiber replied. “Hitler talks now of the Sudetenland and claims he wants that poor piece of Czechoslovakia because of the German population there. But what of the German population in Alsace-Lorraine, in Rumania, in Hungary, and in the Netherlands. Surely he will want to ‘protect’ all those nationals. With such a pretext and with the rest of the world idly watching and posing no opposition, he simply refuses to recognize borders and treaties.”

“My husband—he is a psychiatrist in New York—agrees with you,” Leah said slowly. “That is one reason why I came to Europe now. I mean to try to go to Russia—to persuade my parents there to leave. David, my husband, is convinced that no place in Europe will be safe for Jews in a few years.”

“It is not safe for Jews now,” Frau Schreiber agreed. “Think of it, Madame Goldfeder, I sit here and drink coffee with you and I do not know where my son is—whether he is alive or dead. Is that possible? You too are a mother. Tell me, is it possible to add sugar to coffee and try to decide between a green scarf and a blue one when one does not know whether one’s child is alive or dead, healthy or in pain?”

She did not cry but stared at the flimsy white curtains that hung at the narrow window, encrusted with grime that weighed them down, as though the grim fears of all those who had sought refuge in the furnished flat on the Rue des Rosiers clung to the gauzy fabric.

“Life must be lived, Madame,” Leah replied, but did not meet the other woman’s eyes, fearing the encounter with familiar grief.

“But please, my dear friends, let us talk now of the future,”

Frederic Heinemann urged. “I have the presumption to think that perhaps Madame Goldfeder can be of service to you.”

“Only if it is in your power to offer us affidavits, Madame,” Mr. Schreiber said. “There are those who ask why more Jews do not leave Germany if the danger is so great. The truth is, many have nowhere to go. Other European countries hold similar dangers or are opposed to Jewish immigration. The British have closed off Palestine to all but very limited numbers of Jews. The South American countries are asking exorbitant fees for entry permits and the United States has exacting quotas and requires affidavits of support. My wife and I are eligible under the quota but we have no family or friends to provide the affidavit. If you could help us in that way we would be most grateful.”

“I shall cable my husband tonight and tomorrow morning we shall go together to the American Embassy. I shall do anything I can to help you,” Leah said.

She and Frederic Heinemann rose to leave and when the two men shook hands Leah saw Frederic Heinemann slip a folded bill into Herr Schreiber’s hand. Impulsively she pressed her lips to Frau Schreiber’s cheek. The German woman’s skin was paper-thin.

“Have courage,” Leah said in Yiddish. “We will do what mothers have always done. We will hope.”

Tears blazed brilliantly in the German woman’s pale eyes. She made no move to hide them but stood erect and said firmly, in a clear voice, “Of course, we will hope, Madame. Hope—Hatikva—you see how well we have chosen the title of our people’s anthem.”

That night Leah wrote long letters to her brother Moshe in Palestine and to her family in New York. Her meeting with the Schreibers had convinced her that the situation in Europe was even worse than they suspected. She told both her brother and her husband of her increased determination to make the arduous journey to Russia as soon as her business at the Italian showings was completed.

*

The Bessarabian Express moved at a rapid pace during the daylight hours, but as night swept across southern Russia, with a stern, dark swiftness that banished daylight without the gentle benediction of sunset, the wheels turned more slowly and occasionally ground to a full stop as though the motorman himself had been narcotized by the thick folds of night. Leah Goldfeder had drawn the thick green-velvet curtains of her compartment even while the silvery-pale summer daylight still lit the forests where slender pines swayed gracefully and stretched skyward, interspersed by narrow birch groves that shimmered with ghostly luster.

The Russian farmers had had a good summer and when they passed cultivated countryside, the feathery wheat was thick across seemingly endless acres. Field workers, stripped to their waists, vaulted upward on their tractor seats and waved to the passing train. At short station stops, crowds of children boarded the train and sold the passengers the first fruits of the summer harvest—thick green pears and strangely shaped cylindrical apples with a fruit of tender, sweet whiteness beneath the gleaming red peel. The children were barefoot but sunburned and cheerful, and the most enterprising group—on whom the lessons of the Communist collective had clearly been lost—carried with them garlands of braided wild flowers which they sold to the women passengers. Leah had bought such a necklace, remembering then how she and Malcha had braided similar strands on lazy afternoons, lying near the small creek and hiding from their mother who searched them out to help in the kneading of dough, the chopping of fish, or to assist in the small dusky stall she called her shop. Malcha had used the long-stemmed wild lilacs while Leah searched out the bright-red blossom they called “Blood of Russia,” which she threaded with delicate golden buttercups. She had made just such a braided floral crown for Yaakov during the brief lost days of that marriage which seemed to her a dream now except when she looked at Aaron’s flaming hair.

As the train sped on through the fields Aaron’s father had known and loved, she recalled the lean toughness of Yaakov’s body and remembered how that garland of red and gold flowers had sat atop his coppery curls and fallen at last to the clean, newly cut wooden planks beside their marriage bed. In the morning it was wilted and the proud “Blood of Russia” was tattered, drying petals.

As the train sped through fields aglow with the soft-petaled sunlight of the fragile buttercups, her eyes unexpectedly brimmed with tears. She wept then, for the first time in many years, for the brief months of her first marriage and for the terrible years of uncertainty that had marked the childhood of Yaakov’s son who had been denied his father’s name. She had advised Frau Schreiber to hope, but how often, in those lost years, she herself had turned from hope. It was then that she had drawn the drapes of her compartment and turned in sad resignation to the papers in her portfolio.

The sketches she had made at the French and Italian shows had been mailed to Seymour. She and Frederic Heinemann had agreed to work together, comparing their drawings and pooling their ideas. They had arranged to correspond with each other and Frederic Heinemann had been pained when Leah suggested that her letters to him should be signed by Charles Ferguson and posted from Charles’s address.

“If Aryan veterinarians are forbidden to treat Jewish dogs, I do not think the authorities will look kindly on your relationship with a Jewish firm in New York,” she said gently, trying to inject some weak semblance of humor into the situation that those who gathered in the Schreibers’ tiny rooms on the Rue des Rosiers regarded as ludicrous.

But Frederic Heinemann had not laughed.

“All this will pass. It must. If I did not believe that it would pass I would be fearful for myself and Heinz. Such a regime tolerates no irregularities, no friendships that are too involved and beyond the norm.” He sighed and clasped and unclasped his fine long fingers.

But as her stay in Europe was prolonged, Leah was convinced that there was little cause for optimism. In Italy she watched Mussolini’s blackshirted young Fascisti march up and down dusty boulevards. They were much admired by citizens and tourists, who spoke admiringly of the wonder of trains that now ran on time and the new highways and bridges that were solving unemployment problems in Italy the way Hen Hitler, in his wisdom, had solved them in Germany. On the small steamer that carried her across the Adriatic Sea to meet her rail connections for Russia, she saw groups of Jewish passengers huddled together. Unable to obtain visas elsewhere, they were en route to the Asian countries, carrying their battered suitcases, their sacks of cooking utensils, and their carefully shrouded Torah scrolls to the mountains of Japan, the teeming streets of Hong Kong. She was relieved then that Seymour had been able to obtain visas for the Schreibers and had written offering Herr Schreiber employment with S. Hart.