To Live in Peace

Whenever Rachel gave her name, Klopman, in the antenatal clinic, she was aware of a frisson that passed between herself and the clerk behind the counter. When her name had been Shelton, conjured by her grandfather from Solomons, she had not, as often as she was required to identify herself, been made conscious of a difference which was impossible to quantify but had resulted in the expulsion of the Jews throughout the ages from so many countries of the world. They had been persecuted if they were poor, resented if they were rich, were the objects of opprobrium in both religious and secular societies, and to the Third Reich responsible for an economic depression for which the punishment had been the
gas-chamber
. Since the emergence of the Jewish State, antisemitism – blamed at various times on the need for scapegoats, ethnic hatred, xenophobia and religious bigotry – had acquired a new and “respectable” image, changing its name to anti-Zionism, a euphemism heard more often since the day, one month before Rachel’s wedding, that three Israeli armoured columns had rolled purposefully into the Lebanon.

Patrick’s father had referred to the event briefly in his wedding speech. “We are condemned for not fighting,” he said, “and we are condemned if we fight.”
He was right of course. The Jews of Europe had been accused of not rising up, although Rachel had yet to hear of the threatened passengers of a hijacked plane, in a parallel situation, indicted of the same crime.

The war in the Middle East, two months old now, which many had expected, Israeli-style, to be over in days, had had a curious effect. It had forced diaspora Jews to take a stance, set them at each other’s throats. To their horror, on their honeymoon, Rachel, the hawk, and Patrick, the dove, had found themselves on opposing sides. “Operation Peace for Galilee” was, according to Rachel, Israel’s response to fourteen years of terrorist warfare – avowedly dedicated to her destruction – launched from Lebanese soil. To Patrick it was an obsession of inept rulers and vain military men who were running a nation created by moralists and dreamers. In the interests of harmony the subject was, as far as possible, avoided.

Fortunately, Rachel had other matters on her mind, not the least of which was the child she was carrying, whose movements in its aqueous nest were a source of never ending astonishment and pleasure to both herself and Patrick. She had experienced the first of these beneath the marriage canopy. Rabbi Magnus had just proclaimed them man and wife, delighting vicariously in the forthcoming kiss, when Klopman junior, without warning, made his presence felt. Rachel, almost dropping her bouquet, had put a hand to her belly, causing an expression of alarm to cross her mother’s face, and felt with amazement the inapt protrusion through the lace of her dress. It was as if the baby had waited for the ceremony to be completed, as if he had bided his time, as if he knew.

She was sure that he would turn out to be an exemplary child, co-operative and manageable, that there would be none of the alarums and excursions of
rearing that beset her sister Carol, and that she and Patrick would set a new and enviable trend in the art of parenthood. There was nothing to it. Take pregnancy. Carol, who was in the midst of her fourth, would regale Rachel with tales of indisposition and matinal nausea, while her sister-in-law Sarah, who made the hat-trick, had in the first trimester clung on to the child she was carrying only by the skin of her teeth. Rachel, who was certain the whole thing was in the mind, had never felt better. Her son, for she had never had any doubts that this prize-fighter, this acrobat who made his existence so manifest within her, was anything but male, took his cue from his host. Unless the subject of the Lebanon was broached, Rachel was a model of serenity – a state which she hoped would communicate itself to the foetus – acquainting herself with every nostrum of pregnancy in the absence of her mother, whose departure to New York with Maurice Morgenthau had brought Rachel closer to her sister Carol, with whom previously she had never had much in common.

Keeping her options open, Kitty had not sold the flat. Widowed now for two years she was ambivalent about Maurice Morgenthau. She had agreed to go to New York with him, to live in the apartment that he used as his studio, but there had been no talk of marriage. Rachel, remembering her father and the special bond between them, hoped there never would be. Her brother, Josh, said her attitude was selfish. Carol, who had met Maurice only briefly at Rachel’s wedding, wasn’t sure. She was living in Kitty’s London flat (an arrangement which had worked out most conveniently) with her three children who were on summer holiday from school, while her husband, Alec, remained in Godalming to care for his patients and supervise the renovation of the Queen Anne house they had bought there. Rachel found it strange to go
into her mother’s home and find Carol – who so resembled her – as beautiful in her pregnancy as Rachel knew from the family records Kitty had been. Rachel’s condition seemed to have overlaid her features with an unattractive mask.

“How could you have married me?” she’d say to Patrick in the mornings, examining her unfamiliar features, the novel contours of which confronted her from the mirror.

“You trapped me into it.”

“What if I don’t get my looks back?”

The question was rhetorical. Patrick’s regard for her had grown stronger with the marvel of each successive month. He practised sensual massage as he had been instructed at the clinic and took photos of her gravid body with its shadowed planes, contact sheets of which – “Rachel with Child” from a hundred miraculous angles – he passed round the family, profoundly shocking Carol.

“You don’t look at the mantelpiece when you’re poking the fire,” Patrick said.

Rachel stood still. It was the first time she had heard Patrick make a joke. His father made jokes. Herbert Klopman. He was renowned for them, cynicism covering the feelings he was unable to express. She could hear the ring of her own father’s voice in her ears repeating the family aphorism, which had been handed down, concerning apples which did not fall far from trees.

“Klopman,” the clerk repeated Rachel’s name, isolating her from the Wheatleys and the Frasers, the Stylianides and the Obodos. She was happy with “Rachel” (she had been called after her maternal grandmother) from the Hebrew for “ewe”. She liked the names, lyrical and poetic, derived from scriptural objects: Leah, a gazelle; Zipporah, a bird; Jonah, a dove. Rachel’s son would be named Sydney after her father who had not lived
to see him. They would have to find a derivative, something more contemporary, to go with Klopman, which, according to Patrick’s grandmother, had originated when the first census was taken and the Jews under the Austrian Empire had been required to provide themselves with Germanic names. Those who had not objected to the decree had chosen Blumenthal (Valley of Flowers), Rosenberg (Rose Mountain), Bernstein (Amber). The Orthodox, unwilling to dehebraise their names, had been at the mercy of spiteful officials by whom they had been saddled with Eselkopf (Ass’s Head), Stinker, Lumper, Fresser (Glutton), Elephant and Weinglas.

Rachel’s own recent name change, Shelton to Klopman, had, she supposed, brought to the surface her ambivalence about her Jewishness. She was not observant, as her father had been and as her mother and sister still were. She did not go to synagogue, cooked bacon and eggs for breakfast and disregarded the Sabbath with its injunctions. Even so, looking around the waiting-room at the polyglot mothers in their various stages of gestation, she realised that she was not as others, and like Israel herself aspired to be like the whole world yet to be apart.

Unlike Patrick’s background – his father had been more concerned with producing an accomplished professional than an accomplished Jew – Rachel’s had been steeped in religious values. When she went to college, regarding her parents’ lifestyle as alien, she had felt herself to be Jewish but not uncomfortably so. As a freshman she had gone along to the Jewish Society but found that the mise-en-scène was a replica of the parental home on Friday nights and that she had nothing in common with the members. The following autumn she became involved in the Students’ Union; but it wasn’t
until her final year that she became increasingly disturbed by, and could no longer ignore, the activities of the far Left, who passed resolutions equating Zionism with racism, and put forward provocative views in their official handbook which roused ancestral voices in her, forced her to take a stand. Now it was the war in the Lebanon which led her to reappraisal.

Unlike her father, and Carol who had always followed blindly in his footsteps, Rachel – as far as Judaism was concerned – was uncommitted. She could no more identify with her sister than she could with the Hassidim (with their long black coats and side-curls who walked the streets of Stamford Hill or toured the suburbs with their mitzvahmobiles), or the Anglicised practices of Reform and Liberal congregations who recited the liturgy in the vernacular and summoned women to the Reading of the Law. Sometimes she had difficulty in identifying with herself. There had been heated discussions with her father – which upset Kitty, disturbed the equilibrium in the home and ended invariably in deadlock – in which Rachel challenged as outmoded the need for organised religion. Wasn’t it OK, she argued, to be a good individual, someone who didn’t hurt anybody? Not hurting anybody, Sydney said, was not good but merely not bad. To be a worthwhile person involved the active pursuit of good. It was not enough to refrain from abusing fellow human beings, one must intercede on their behalf. Jewish law – unlike secular laws which were almost all negative, forbidding criminal acts – demanded positive action: to give charity, silence gossip, visit the sick. Involvement was required which, to be effective, needed (like political parties and other social systems) organised operating procedures of law and ethics. Ideas such as Rachel’s were the product of woolly
mindedness and were not sufficient to create responsible people and a moral world.

It was easy for Sydney. Like Tevye – the Jewish Everyman created by Sholem Aleichem and popularised in Fiddler on the Roof – he seemed to have an intimate and personal relationship with his Maker, a direct line to God. The pious milkman had prayed three times a day, understood his history and the meaning of continuity, yet had little interest in the outside world and no particular measure of parental insight.

In the shtetls of eastern Europe there had been a pattern to existence, of tradition, of oppression. Life had dictated the terms which must now be redefined. In Anatevka they were born, married and died within the community. Today there were choices. Get blue eyes and assimilate; intermarry as her brother Josh had done; opt out of Jewish life but identify by means of token barmitzvahs, a smattering of Hebrew words and nostalgic foods the tastes of which had persisted from the ghetto; join anti-Jewish causes in a process of
self-destruction
.

The State of Israel itself had not solved the problem but at least, although there were political and religious rifts, there was a Jewish ambience and to be a Jew did not require, as it did in Britain, affirmation.

There had been no necessity, until now, to give these matters too much thought. But what about her son, hers and Patrick’s? Was Jewish consciousness to be maintained, and if so how, and to what extent? What acts would they teach him of Jewish significance? Prayer? Language? The basic tenets of tolerance and righteousness in human relationships? The older Sydney had been a firm believer in inculcating children by example. Rachel wondered how much of an example she and Patrick would show their son. She could see that the
future held problems other than merely the safe delivery of her child but these she would face as she came to them. At the moment she was devoting her entire attention to the manner of his birth.