The Sacrifice of Tamar (15 page)

Tamar got the book next. Ruth eyed it doubtfully, discussing it with Aaron when he got home from work.

“Should we let her?” Ruth asked him. He shrugged.

They were both survivors. But they’d decided early on in their marriage that they hadn’t survived in order to pass the horror on to their children by talking about it. One of the main tenets of their parenting had been to shelter their children from the ugliness and brutality of the past, to see that the work of the Germans did not live on to destroy the gentle, sweet dreams of yet another generation of Jewish children. And so, they did not speak of the past, of gassed grandparents, murdered aunts and uncles and cousins. As far as their children were concerned, their parents’ lives began the year they moved to America.

“Do you know what it’s about, Tamar?” Ruth asked her.

“About a little Jewish girl, just like me.”

Were her survivor friends right, Ruth wondered once again, that the only way to prevent another Holocaust was to educate
the next generation, to make them strong and wary? To shove their faces in the ashes of the crematorium, to make them sick by showing them the inventions of sick, perverted minds? She looked at the delicate pink blush on her daughter’s young cheeks, her shining, untroubled eyes. Let the Germans show their children the crematoriums. Let German and Polish and Hungarian and Ukrainian children learn all about Zyklon B and the gas chambers and the medical experiments until they were ready to pass out. Why should her children have to know?

“You can’t find a nicer book,
maideleh?
”

“All my friends are reading it,
Mameh
. They all like it. Please!” the child begged.

“So read,” she said, sighing deeply.

Tamar read it straight through. Strangely, she did not identify with Anne Frank. The more she read, the more that little girl’s life seemed like the life of a Zulu or a Martian. What had Orchard Park to do with a strange European city where brutal sirens wailed in the night? Where Jewish families celebrated St Nicholas Day? Where someone wanted to kill you because you were a Jew? Except for a few Italian children who were very friendly and playful, she didn’t know a single person who wasn’t a Jew.

The idea that anyone could think bad things about people like her mother and father, her teachers, the rabbis in the synagogues, was incomprehensible to her. No, it had nothing to do with her, nothing at all, she decided. In some unfathomable way, her mind did not connect Anne’s fate to her parents. Vaguely, she knew they too had been in something called “concentration camps,” which were terrible places. But her parents never talked about it. Her parents were alive, healthy, beautiful, loving. Everyone her parents’ age she knew were survivors. In a strange way, to have been in the camps seemed normal rather than heartbreakingly shocking.

Why hadn’t Anne and her sister and mother survived the camps, the way her mother had? she wondered. And the conclusion she came to was St Nicholas Day. If Anne had been more religious, had kept more of His laws, then she, too, would have survived. She was simply being punished, which was very sad. Why couldn’t everybody just keep every
halacha
, and then no one would ever have bad things happen to them? She just couldn’t understand people. It seemed so clear, so easy.

A few days after finishing the book, she went to her mother. “
Mameh
. . .”

“Umm?” She was hanging out the laundry. Her mouth was full of clothespins.

“
Mameh
, do you hate the Germans?”

Her mother turned to her, the pins falling out of her mouth. She bent down to retrieve them and stayed there, crouched near the floor, a little longer than necessary. When she finally rose to her feet, Tamar saw her mouth was tight and the light dulled in her merry eyes. “I don’t think about them.” She paused, biting her lips. “And G-d will pay the Germans back.”

Tamar had been about to ask exactly what it had been like in the camps, but something about her mother made it impossible. She did not want to hurt her mother by dragging her through bad memories. She felt suddenly very protective of
Mameh
.

“Was it very hard for you?” Tamar whispered, and then was sorry she’d even asked that.

“Hard,” Ruth repeated, her eyes blank and distant. And for a long time, she said nothing.

Tamar waited expectantly.

Finally, her mother looked at her and said: “Tamar, darling, why don’t you go to the library and get a
nice
book to read? Zissel’s reading
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
. That’s a good book for a girl your age.” She filled her mouth with pins again, turning back to the laundry.

Tamar lingered silently, unsatisfied, until another idea occurred to her. “
Mameh
, could you buy me a diary?”

“
Vus is dus, kleinkeit?
” her mother asked.

“A diary. You know, with dates, and you write in it every day what happens to you.”

Ruth looked at her daughter. “The teacher told you to do this?” For Ruth, anything to do with books or reading or writing had something to do with school. She couldn’t imagine it in any other context. But in that context, it was sacred.

“Well, not exactly,” Tamar said, hating to lie, but pressing her advantage. “But she said it would be good if we spent part of the summer reviewing our vocabulary. And if you buy me a diary, I can practice using the words in sentences,” she argued brightly.

The diary was red imitation leather with gold, cursive lettering across the front.

Dear Diary
, Tamar wrote, feeling rather foolish using such personal terms. After all, it was just a bunch of blank paper. But she thought of Anne’s opening remarks. After all, something might happen to her, something dramatic and world-shattering and they would dig up this diary and it would become millions of copies in thousands of bookstores…

I asked Mother
. . .

That sounded high class, American, she thought, which would be wise just in case of publication.

to get you for me because I like to have a diary to confide in. I will tell you things no other mortal but I and you know about. I will trust you with my secrets. I will confide in you with my troubles, and I will also keep in you a record of my daily happenings.

Very nice. But what troubles did she have? After all, in Orchard Park no one was threatening her life, except Rivkie, and
only when she touched her napkin collection. And even Rivkie didn’t really mean it. Tamar closed the diary a little chagrined, deciding to wait for a day of suitably dramatic events before beginning her confession.

Dear Diary,
Today I am sick in bed with swollen glands. I’m so sorry to miss school.

This wasn’t true. She was actually thrilled to miss school, but she felt that if it was published, she wanted the adults who read it to think well of her.

Maybe it wasn’t as dramatic as Anne’s trials, but it was moving in the right direction.

Dear Diary,
Today I went to school, and we had a party in Hebrew. We had it because we finished the book of Barashis and started Shemot.

She looked that over and crossed it out, replacing the transliteration of Genesis and Exodus with laboriously written Hebrew letters. She hated using English letters to spell out Hebrew words, seeing in it a dangerously confusing overlapping.

The pattern of her life, like the schedule of her days, was strictly compartmentalized. There was the Jewish part and the American part. In the morning, she was taught Bible lessons, stories of the Hebrew prophets, ritual laws for preparing kosher food, and certain rules of Hebrew grammar. Her teachers were bewigged and head-scarved rebbetzins, who wore long, dark dresses and thick, seamed stockings. But after lunch, the rebbetzins disappeared, replaced by pretty young English teachers in red lipstick and high heels and attractive, mysterious middle-aged math
teachers from the local public schools, who were the only men allowed into the school except for the principal, a rabbi, and the janitor, a friendly Puerto Rican.

Her identity was equally divided.

She was an American, nurtured by
Father Knows Best
, Ed Sullivan, Hula Hoops, commercials for new Ipana toothpaste, and the Good Humor ice-cream truck. Yet her real life, and that of her family and all those she knew, had nothing to do with America, or New York City or State. It was
halacha
, and tradition, and custom, and cherished family practices handed down from father to son, mother to daughter. Her Saturdays were Shabbos, festivals of candles and wine and sweet challah bread, a holy day spent in the synagogue and prayer and in delightful
oneg Shabbos
groups full of storytelling, tag games, and cookie eating.

What did that have to do with Bud mowing the lawn on Saturday morning, taking long bike rides? With Elinor Donahue’s sleeveless dresses, her ham and eggs for breakfast? With Santa Claus and the Easter bunny? They were simply the manifestations of a distant foreign planet, which like some astronomical oddity at regular intervals crashed into her own, needing to be observed and dealt with.

And yet that planet, like the sun, had
everything
to do with her life. As much as her outward appearance and her activities were governed by a loving and faithful adherence to the special ways of her family and community, her values and dreams were undeniably American. Happiness was not something you felt. It was something you bought. The Jewish concept of “Who is happy? He who is satisfied with his portion in life” crumbled almost totally before the bulldozing philosophy of American advertising executives of the 1950s: “Who is happy? Whoever has the latest model.”

For all the trappings of impermeability, all the carefully constructed dams and intricate stone breakwaters put up by parents
to preserve the cherished values of the past, the streets of Orchard Park were flooded by the immense power of the American dream, which swept away effortlessly the minds and hearts of the American-born children who lived there. Their parents never even suspected.

Chapter eleven

Orchard Park, 1960

It was Saturday afternoon, a lovely spring day. The streets were hot with human movement, with dainty little girls in neat braids and satin hair bows, with howling little boys in
payot
and blue knickers. Matronly grandmothers in dark head scarves, bewigged middle-aged daughters, and slim, long-haired granddaughters linked arms and promenaded down the wide, tree-lined avenues. Their footfalls fell in perfect unison.

The occasional gentile wandering through felt oddly threatened by the strange holiday atmosphere, though a more broad-minded outsider might have been more appreciative, discerning a gentler bygone era, a street scene by Renoir come to life. The little girls would have stared at such an appreciative stranger with frank disapproval, noting the absence of a skullcap or wig, clothing not exactly like that of their parents. The little girls, like smoke detectors, whiffed immediately the scent of anyone who was not “one of us.” They would not have made such outsiders feel welcome.

There was no room for tourists in Orchard Park. No room for diversity of opinion, practice, belief. Even the houses, long rows of attached buildings, seemed knitted together, erasing all separations. Homes, lives, human beings, bonded together seamlessly.

Three girls skipped down the street. They were nearly twelve, with lovely shining hair in delicate shades of black, blond, and honey brown. They took frisky strides, like colts, on long legs promising shapeliness.

“They control everything,” one announced to the others, her voice earnest and indignant. “Everything. They make you wear uniforms to school. They tell you how long your Shabbos dresses have to be… what to eat, what to say, what to think… But there’s one thing they can’t control.”

The other two girls looked at her breathlessly, waiting for some revelation.

“They can’t tell you what socks to wear!”

“
Oh!
That is so not true!” Jenny shook her head. “You’re wrong about that, Hadassah. They can tell you about socks, just like everything else.”

“No they can’t. As long as you cover your legs up to your knees, they can’t say anything. You can wear any color, any style.”

“So why doesn’t Ohel Sara let us wear red tights, then?” Tamar asked, perplexed. She had lost so much weight in the last year that the idea of emphasizing her now slim legs was very tempting.

“They can’t stop you! You can just tell them it’s not the
halacha
.”

“
You
can tell them, Hadassah, but
I
can’t.” Jenny shook her head.

“You can get away with anything because of your father,” Tamar chided.

“This has nothing to do with my father.” Hadassah bristled.
“This has to do with what’s right. And as long as your feet are covered they have no control.”

The three girls, their arms linked, walked briskly, studying their legs.

They wore summery dresses of bright floral prints, white tights, and hair barrettes. Their faces were earnest and lovely in the dappling shadows of the heavy trees that met over the roads like a bower.

“Don’t look, don’t look,
don’t loook!! I will kill you if you look!”
Tamar hissed at Hadassah and Jenny.

“But he’s looking at us!” Jenny protested, glancing across the street at the crowd of young Ruach Chaim yeshiva boys sauntering slowly up the avenue on their way to Sabbath afternoon Talmud lessons.

“Don’t be such a creep, Tamar. Boys don’t bite!” Hadassah said contemptuously, giving the fellow a sly once-over. “Uch, look at all those pimples!”

“Ah—” Jenny sucked in her breath. “He’s going to cross the street, look!”

The girls glanced up at the young man in question. He was two or three years their senior, wearing a black suit and fedora. He was wavy haired and clear visioned but—alas!—destined for acne scars of monumental proportions. He did indeed seem to be changing directions, waiting on the corner for the light to change.