The Sisters Weiss (8 page)

7

She went into a kind of shock those first few days in Bais Ruchel. Classrooms were in an ancient public school building leased from the city meant to hold half the number of students. Badly and cheaply renovated to hold the overflow, the building even had some bathrooms that had been turned into classrooms, the toilets, basins, and fixtures removed, leaving behind unsightly bumps and bulges beneath the badly cemented walls.

But the biggest shock was the language, the morning’s religious studies conducted completely in Yiddish. Yiddish! The secret language of her parents and other old people; the language of tragic old countries long abandoned across the sea for a better home. Even when learning the Bible, they were given no access at all to the actual Hebrew text. Instead, a teacher “explained” the story of the Torah portion of the week to them in Yiddish, thus removing the possibility that they might read the commentaries or question the interpretation of the text in any way. It was like being read a children’s fairy story, she thought.

This week it was the story of the plagues of Egypt: “And God hardened the heart of Pharaoh so that He might increase His signs and wonders…” the teacher said in singsong Yiddish.

She couldn’t stand it. “But Rashi says God only hardened Pharaoh’s heart after the first five plagues. Before that, Pharaoh hardened his own heart, because he was wicked,” she blurted out, not even waiting to raise her hand and be called upon.

“Vus?” the teacher asked, eyes narrowed in suspicion and disapproval, her voice incredulous. “And you are saying there is something the Eibeisha, May His Holy Name Be Blessed, does not do? That His will was not on Pharaoh from the first moment?”

“But we were taught we have freedom of will to choose between good and evil, no? Only after Pharaoh kept choosing evil again and again did God take away his power to choose good. As Rashi explains: ‘In the first five plagues, it is not stated that God hardened the heart of Pharaoh.’ If you give me a Chumash, I’ll show it to you…”

“Silence! Step outside immediately!”

Rose, not exactly surprised, got up with a calmness bordering on insolence, walking slowly out the door, a secret smile playing around her lips as she turned her back on her classmates. She knew the rumors about her had been circulating. Hardly anyone spoke to her anyway. And that was fine with her, she told herself. With each other, they were like puppies: soft, cheerful, full of playful good humor. She wondered if a single one even realized they were all caged pets, whereas to her, the bars became more visible, blatant, and intolerable with every passing day. How could she befriend such girls?

She waited in the ugly hallway, filled with contempt. What could they do to her? Hang her? Cut off her tongue? Send her back to Poland? How much worse could it be, after all?

Rebbitzin Brindel, her teacher, soon followed. Clutching her gray wig at both temples, she yanked it down lower on her forehead, looking sternly into Rose’s sullen eyes. “I understand you have been sent here in order to purify yourself so that you might be worthy of a blessed match,” she said in Yiddish. “Here, you will be taught only what is important for a woman to know. Do not taint this classroom with impure knowledge you’ve acquired before coming here. Do you understand?”

Rose stared at her. Is that what I am doing here? Getting ready to be a sacrificial lamb on the altar of some holy shidduch to an arrogant yeshiva bochur who will do me the big favor of lording it over me and letting me support him for the rest of his life? Her eyes filled with tears.

Totally misunderstanding her distress, Rebbitzin Brindel softened. “Sha, sha. Don’t worry. Because you are a new girl, you will not be punished this time. But remember that you are forbidden to speak in Hebrew, the impure language of the Zionist apostates. We also do not learn Rashi here. That is for the men. We learn al pi taharas hakodesh. In purity.”

“Yes, I’m sorry,” Rose stuttered, appalled. Rashi, the great medieval Torah commentator who questioned and explained the holy text, making it comprehensible to any intelligent person, for men only? Was she no longer a person, then, but a helpless baby sparrow to be fed knowledge digested and regurgitated?

She returned to her seat. For the rest of the morning, she studied the paint peeling off the walls and the wooden floorboards peeking through the worn linoleum, waiting for the afternoon and her secular studies to begin.

Her relief in having the lessons in English soon faded. While, like Bais Yaakov, Bais Ruchel was supposed to adhere to New York State requirements to teach English, science, history, and math, she noticed the books they were given had pages missing and sentences that had been blacked out. In none of the stories they read did girls and boys appear together. Mostly, they were about boys and horses, or boys and dogs. None of the science or history books mentioned dinosaurs.

She felt her brain shrinking. Just being there made her feel stupider, the subject matter and teaching methods like an ill-fitting shoe that rubbed her mind and spirit raw. She returned to her grandmother’s exhausted, her fury against her parents growing, determined to have it out with them. She called her mother. “I need to speak to Tateh!” she demanded. “You have to take me out of this place! I’m not even allowed to learn Torah in Hebrew, to learn Rashi. They won’t even let us read from the Chumash, or the Prophets! How can this be what God wants!”

But her mother refused to even put her father on the phone. “Your father is resting. I’ll tell him what you said. He’ll call you back. But remember who made your bed when you don’t like sleeping in it!” she added unsympathetically.

Each day, she waited, praying for her father to call, for her parents to relent, for something to happen. Weeks went by, her sharp hopes dulling, a gray cloud settling over what was once the clear, blue sky of her understanding of life. The warm feeling that had once enveloped her when she prayed, taking three steps backward and three steps forward and bowing to declare: “Oh, Lord, open my lips so that my mouth may declare Your Praise,” suddenly evaporated. “He sustains the living with loving-kindness, revives the dead, supports those who fall, heals the sick, unchains the imprisoned, and keeps faith with those who grovel in dust.” The words withheld their meaning, becoming gibberish, a senseless song whose tune she remembered but whose words she had long forgotten.

Where was He, that God? That loving, creative, powerful Being she had spoken to every day of her life? Had He too moved away, turned His back on her, for such a silly reason as looking at photos in a book? Was He in league with the Honored Rav, with her parents, then? She didn’t want to believe it. But what other explanation was there, after all, for all that had happened to her? As Rebbitzin Brindel declared: “His hand was in everything that happened.”

She felt confused, anguished, and full of doubts. The sincere joy she had once taken in learning and praying, in discovering the wonders of the Creator in everything around her, faded and darkened. In many ways, being cut off from God was even worse than being cut off from her family. For had she been able to take Him with her into exile, she would not have been so profoundly alone. She would have had her familiar companion and guide and protector. Without Him, she was lost, living in a foreign country.

She tried hard to find her way back to Him, to come home, searching for hidden signposts. But the way offered by her new school and her family and especially the Honored Rav (who she had come to hold most responsible for her plight) was only leading her further away, she realized, deeper into the silence of a Godless wilderness. She, who had always taken her faith as a given, never realized until now how delicate a thing it was, like a tender, newly opened flower so easily trampled and destroyed. Lost and alone, what choice did she have but to become an explorer, to forge a new path, drawing her own map, with only her mind as compass? The only way to do that was to read.

The stringent lectures against the evils of books, magazines, pamphlets, or anything else not specifically approved by the school only made her more determined to get her hands on some reading material not approved by her school. But high on the list of Bais Ruchel’s forbidden places—along with cinemas, theaters, and homes with television sets—was the public library. Being caught in one meant immediate expulsion.

At her grandmother’s, she found some relief in immersing herself in simple, mindless chores, almost enjoying plunging her hands into hot, soapy water; getting down on her knees to scrub the linoleum; straining her elbow to scrape off the dried beans and potatoes from the Sabbath chulent pot.

But as she scrubbed and polished, she thought of the phrase “dying of boredom.” Could it, she wondered, be taken literally? Could the restlessness ballooning inside her finally stretch her heart so thin it would burst? Was it then a matter of life or death, for which even God allowed one to commit transgressions in order that one might live to eventually perform good deeds?

The day she decided it was, everything changed.

“I have a cooking class after school today, Bubbee,” she said, telling the first lie in her life. She waited for her body to dissolve into putrid waste. But the only thing that happened was her heart began to beat faster. She felt faint.

“Are you feeling all right, maideleh?”

Rose touched her face, which was growing hot. She nodded, stuttering: “I … I … am in the woman’s way.”

“Ah.” Her grandmother nodded, without further comment. This, like any subject to do with womanliness, intimacy, bodily needs or functions, was best obscured, the way Victorians covered table legs, referring to them as “limbs” so as not to arouse impure imaginings.

That day after school, she walked quickly away from her fellow students and teachers. Not daring to wait for a bus or be seen riding the train, she walked and walked until her feet were blistered and sore. But there it was. The public library! The very shape of the building, with its large windows revealing the treasures inside, filled her with a joy that banished all her fears. Pulling open the large heavy doors, she hurried inside like a pilgrim seeking sanctuary.

She sat on the comfortable chairs, a pile of Life and Look magazines on the table in front of her, leafing through them the way a sultan counts gold coins. Exploring the shelves, she discovered the National Geographic magazine and the Saturday Evening Post, which she added to the pile. Drinking her fill, she then roamed the room, finding the books on photography, studying the way the light fell, the way the people stood, the landscape and the composition. Finally, assessing the amount of time it would take her to walk home, she rose. But before leaving, she walked with determined steps over to the librarian’s desk.

“Excuse me?”

The woman with her large glasses and tight bun adjusted a plain pearl earring as she studied Rose. She wasn’t a St. Rose of Lima parochial-school girl. Those Catholic girls didn’t wear stockings, and she’d never seen one with a skirt less than three inches above her knees. She wondered for a moment if the girl was some kind of foreigner.

“I would like to take out a library card,” Rose said with an accent that only a non–New Yorker would consider odd, putting the librarian’s doubts to rest.

“Your name?”

“Rose … Monroe,” she stammered, giving an address that she’d written down as she’d walked along.

Having to choose only four books from among the stacks was an agonizing challenge. She finally made her choice, reminding herself she would soon be back to exchange them for four new ones. She hid them inside her school bag.

“You’re late! I was worried! So, you cooked something?” her grandmother questioned her when she came in.

“What?”

“In your cooking class?”

“Ah, right. Challah, Bubbee. We learned how to make challah.”

Her grandmother sighed. “For this you need to come home after dark? This I can teach you, believe me. Go eat something.”

“I’ll eat, but first I want to do my homework,” she said, anxious to hide her treasures in a safe place.

“First, eat!” her bubbee commanded.

She ate, tasting nothing, thinking about how only the first lie was hard. The rest came so naturally, it almost felt the same as telling the truth.

*

That night, and every night that followed during that period of her life, she lay under her bedcovers holding a dime-store flashlight that illuminated rows of words strung together with magical skill. Slowly, they dissolved the fetters on her spirit, which had felt like shoes bogged down with mud from tramping through the jungle. Dried, polished, repaired, she danced with them through the night, slowly at first, then kicking up with joy, roaming freely, transcending the rigid strictures of her life, the little apartment in Borough Park, her family in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York, America. She sat cross-legged on a magic carpet that floated over lands and lives so very different from her own.

There, in secret midnight rendezvous, she met Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, and Anne of Green Gables, standing side by side with them, viewing the world through their eyes. What photos she would take, she thought, of the onion-spired churches of St. Petersburg, the French countryside, or Prince Edward Island as it burst into life each spring!

And that was how one night she met David, the sensitive little boy aching with loneliness and fear in Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep. For the first time, David saw a coffin. He asks his mother about death, and she answers him: “They say there is a heaven and in heaven they waken. But I myself do not believe it.”

Her mind lingered over these shocking words. “They say there is a heaven … But I myself do not believe it.”

It was the first time in her life that she considered such a shocking idea. It was not so much the idea of dismissing heaven, but of disbelieving things that were taken for granted by everyone around you. That you had the right, the power, the freedom not to believe. It was a stunning revelation, both miraculous and terrifying.

The next night, she sat in the kitchen watching her bubbee’s small, heavy figure bent over the old stove, stirring the contents of a steaming pot with her large wooden spoon. This is real, she thought. This you could know. But as for the rest … everyone was simply guessing, rabbis, parents, teachers … They believed what they wanted, what they had been taught, what their parents before them believed.