The Sacrifice of Tamar (9 page)

“Go to your local Orthodox rabbi. Or better yet, go to my father, the great Kovnitzer Rebbe. He knows everything. I thought you knew that,” she said, lighting a cigarette and taking a deep, nervous drag.

“Please, Hadassah. I know a lot has happened. But I need to talk to someone who won’t judge or preach. Hadassah… I’ve been raped. He was black. I’m pregnant. I don’t know what to…”

The smoke caught in her lungs, choking her. She gasped for air.

“Hadassah?”

“I’m here,” she replied, stunned, appalled, and feeling somehow vindicated. “I can meet you at four, but no later.”

The Past.

Chapter six

Orchard Park, Brooklyn, 1955

In the late 1940s, New York’s Hasidim and the Orthodox middle-class children of devout immigrants trickled, then flooded across the Brooklyn Bridge, relinquishing the keys of Williamsburg, Bedford Stuyvesant and Lower Manhattan to the black and Hispanic families who had come after them. Joined by streams of young Orthodox families from East New York, Crown Heights, and Brownsville, they joined forces to found a new outpost in the wilderness where they could build a private little world governed entirely by their own religious beliefs and practices. The result was Orchard Park.

To outsiders, the neighborhood often seemed like a fortress. But for those who knew which buildings housed friendly private Sabbath prayer services, warm soup kitchens, welfare centers, and women’s study groups, there was no safer or more hospitable place in the world.

If America were to be compared to the planet Earth, then
Orchard Park, Brooklyn was the moon, a benign presence circling at a safe distance. The survivors of death camps who assembled there were not like earlier immigrants who had come to better their lives. They had run away to America because they couldn’t go back to where they belonged. And though their bodies were in America, their hearts were in Europe and their souls in the little, struggling independent State of Israel.

It was a second life for most of them—new wives and husbands and children to replace the irreplaceable dead—new lives most of them really didn’t want. They fought hard to bring the old life back. They fought hard to keep America out.

And so they listened to the news on WEVD in Yiddish read by Shlomie Ben Yisroel, who spoke of America as:
Fer Einick Da Shtates Fon Amerika
, and of Europe as:
Der Alter Heim
(the old home). At home they read the news in Yiddish in the
Daily Forward
. In Yiddish, the Korean War seemed far away, as did Ike and Mamie. And no one dreamed of buying the newfangled barbecue grills or Schwinn bikes they viewed contemptuously in the homes of American relatives.

And so in Orchard Park in December, one would find no Santa Clauses, but row upon row of lighted Chanukah menorahs. In April, no store would boast marshmallow Easter chicks, but rather boxes of hand-rolled Passover matzoth stamped with rabbinic approval. And when the rest of the country was languishing in holidayless March, Orchard Park was gearing up for the carnival, drinking feast, and general merriment that is Purim.

It was Tuesday, seven in the morning, holiday eve. The laughter and squeals of excitement spilled over from the kitchens and living rooms of Orchard Park into the streets.

“If you don’t hurry, Tamar, Rivkie, you’ll be ready in time for Passover and not Purim,” Ruth Gottlieb said, attempting severity but, as usual, achieving indulgence. She just had that kind of face, sweet and round and full of humor, with only her gray eyes
betraying an incongruous darkness. Even when she was really angry—a very rare occurrence—there always seemed to be an irrepressible giggle lurking just beneath the surface, as if she were overcome by the whimsy in any situation, however bad. It was a characteristic that thoroughly confused her children, who as a result were very merry and quite undisciplined.

Ruth watched her two little daughters buried in heaps of pretty scarves, unraveling sequinned gowns and piles of sparkling costume jewelry. “Girls, you’ve got school in an hour—you have to make up your minds already!” she begged, exasperated and yet awfully pleased they were having such fun. Their only reply was an increase in the wild giggling that filled the comfortably furnished, fairly new three-bedroom home.

It was a home clearly in the hands of a
baleboosteh
, an accolade that described Ruth Gottlieb as nothing else ever could. She was nothing if not a
baleboosteh
, a worthy successor to countless generations of Jewish women whose lives had been spent keeping the surface of life as scrubbingly clean, thriftily comfortable, and respectably ostentatious as possible. And so she bought soup meat—flanken, not steak—but cooked it well and served it appetizingly on pretty dishes. Her clothes were never fashionable but new and absolutely clean and well ironed. And in furniture and lighting fixtures, she never lagged behind her neighbors. Her furnishings were always the most expensive items offered in Jewish-run stores on the Lower East Side.

Indeed, in this area there were often periodic wild splurges that left her indulgent husband drained and that filled her heart with great joy. A case in point was the large chandelier that hung over the dining room table, almost, but not quite, ludicrously large for the dimensions of the room. It pleased her to always leave the shades up and the drapes drawn open in front of it, leaving it comfortably visible to those passing in the street below.

“Now what have we here,
mamalehs?
” Aaron Gottlieb said
with mock horror, a broad, kind smile creasing his placid face. It was a face a little more careworn than those of the other men in their late thirties in the synagogue where he prayed. Ever since coming to America after the war, he had gone from job to job, trying to find a respectable way to support his growing family. First he had tried his hand at teaching and had enjoyed it. But teaching Talmud in the yeshiva hadn’t paid enough for flanken, let alone large crystal chandeliers. So he had enrolled at Brooklyn College night school, earning a degree in accounting, and finally becoming a CPA. Now, tempted by a fellow shul member, he had with great trepidation gone into business importing perfumes from Europe. He had also considered watches from the Far East but, after consulting with his wife, had decided perfume would be better. After all, who in the prosperous, modern world of the 1950s would want a watch (or anything else?) that was “made in Japan”?

He was a yeshiva boy at heart. A family man who loved to be home perusing his beloved religious books. The suit of a businessman hung limply from his shoulders. And his hands, folded placidly over his modest black briefcase, had nails that were harshly bitten down, the cuticles savagely ripped and slightly bloody.

He crouched on the floor next to his little girls. He hated to leave for work.

“
Tatee
, guess who I am, just guess?” eight-year-old Rivkie begged him.

He looked at the gauzy veils of old scarves that hugged her slender waist; at her round little arms weighted down with the bedazzling sparkle of cheap glass sapphires that picked up the color of her shining eyes; at her mysterious half smile; and at the paste tiara that crowned her bouncy auburn curls. She was the prettiest little thing imaginable.

“Well, I think I’ll guess a nurse.”

“Oh,
Tatee
, a nurse!” she screamed in hilarity, as he had hoped she would, her rosy face and eyes incredulous with pleasure. “A nurse wears white, white!” She danced around the room.

“Well, then…” He shrugged as if completely baffled. “If you’re not a nurse, then…” He felt his trousers tugged urgently.

“Guess who am I!” six-year-old Tamar demanded, as usual imitating her older sister, her mentor and last authority in all things.

Tamar was a head shorter and about ten pounds heavier than Rivkie. Her round cheeks, blessed with a constant rosy blush that made her always seem in the midst of some maidenly embarrassment, created a false impression of shyness where none existed. Sadly, “cat’s eye” glass frames hid her best feature, enormous gray eyes with amazingly thick lashes, eyes as exquisite as they were hopelessly nearsighted. She was wearing a heavily hemmed old evening gown, and the tulle ballooned out around her waistless figure to amazing proportions. Her cheeks had been relentlessly rouged, and great joy had been taken with a tube of dark red lipstick. Her hair, usually neatly braided by her mother, now fell wildly around her shoulders in a profusion of blond curls. She reminded him of an overweight little witch.

She looked up at him hopefully. “Guess!”

“This,” he said very seriously, swallowing hard, “this can only be one person. One person. Esther, the beautiful Queen of Persia? Am I right?”

“Oh,
Tatee!
” She swung herself into his arms and he lifted her cuddly round body, crushing all its little-girl sweetness to him, breathing it in. He buried his forehead in her fragrant hair, closing his eyes for a moment, letting the creases of his face relax.

“You can’t be Esther also!” Rivkie stamped her foot. “We can’t both be Esther!”

“Oh, so that’s who you are!” Aaron Gottlieb exclaimed in
a tone of absolute amazement, putting Tamar down and lifting Rivkie up. “Why, of course!” He slapped his forehead. “Just look at the crown!” he exclaimed loudly, trying to head off the waterfall of tears he saw coming with the inevitability of floodwater rushing toward a cliff edge. “A beautiful queen you are. The most beautiful!” He glanced nervously at his younger daughter.

“The most beautiful!” Tamar agreed readily, hiding her hurt and disappointment at being demoted to the second most beautiful Queen of Persia, heroine of the Purim saga. Her body still tingled from her father’s warm embrace. There had been nothing second best about that. Besides, it wasn’t nice to be jealous. It wasn’t nice to throw tantrums or to cry or act spoiled. Everything was so much nicer when you didn’t. And your father looked at you proudly, and your sister was smiling and satisfied. Besides, there was nothing surprising about Rivkie looking more beautiful than she. She always did. That was simply normal, like rain or the sun shining.

There wasn’t a jealous bone in her body, sweet little thing, her father thought proudly, taking both his little daughters’ hands in his own: “The most beautiful women in all the world,” he said very seriously as both girls collapsed into paroxysms of hysterical giggles over being called women.

“What’s Zissel going to be for Purim,
Mameh?
” Tamar asked.

She saw her mother bite her lower lip as she always did when her niece Zissel was involved. “Oh, Zissel’s too young for a costume!”

“But Aunt Malka will bring her to shul this year, won’t she, to hear the Megillah?” It was the highlight of the holiday, the recitation of the Purim story, during which children were not only allowed, but encouraged to make a tremendous racket each time the villain Hamen’s name was mentioned.

She saw her parents glance at each other significantly.

“We’ll talk about it later. Hurry, you’re late, darling.”

It was suddenly very quiet in the room.

Around the corner, in a sumptuous ten-room apartment above the magnificent synagogue of Hasidei Kovnitz, a little girl stood on a high footstool in the dining room. She was six years old, very slim, with silky honey-brown hair and eyes the color of golden topaz. She had a very pretty face: high cheekbones, a slender nose, and a rosebud mouth. She stood very still as the seamstress sewed the finishing touches on the magnificent russet velvet costume. Only a very acute observer would have noticed the fidgety restlessness of her fingers, which tore rather savagely at the expensive beaded embroidery.

“Is it long enough?” the child’s mother asked the seamstress.

The woman didn’t answer, having known Rebbetzin Surie Mandlebright long enough to understand that the length of hems or sleeves was not a question of style, but of religious observance—an area in which the pious seamstress felt herself hopelessly out-classed in the company of the wife of the Kovnitzer Rebbe, world leader of Kovnitz Jewry.

So she said nothing, engrossed in admiring her handiwork so much that she almost forgot the little girl inside it whose forehead was beginning to bead with perspiration and fatigue. The gown was very heavy.

“Just turn a little this way, Hadassah,” the seamstress ordered her once more, finding a tiny imperfection in the length of the sleeve.

The child hesitated, her fist clenched.

“Why, Hadassah, what is it, darling?” Rebbetzin Mandlebright said sweetly, feigning motherly concern to hide her growing dread. There wasn’t going to be another tantrum was there, not this morning, when her husband’s study was already packed with dozens of prominent Hasidim come to bring him gifts and receive
his blessings in honor of the holiday? There just could
not
be another shouting match with Hadassah this morning! Already she felt her head beginning to ache.

“It looks like doody,” the child fumed.

“Hadassah!” her mother gasped, humiliated in front of the crestfallen seamstress.

“It’s not what I told her!” She stamped her small foot in its russet velvet party shoe. “I said blue. I said make it blue for Vashti, not Esther. It looks like doody,” the child repeated nastily, mightily pleased with the word’s effect, “and it itches!” she whined, tearing at the lovely stand-up lace collar that grazed the bottom of her chin.

“Well, maybe we could fix the itching,
kleinkeit
,” her mother said with deadly good cheer, her nostrils flaring. “Six-year-olds.” She shrugged, forcing a smile, inviting the shocked seamstress into the conspiracy of womanly indulgence toward difficult children.

The woman didn’t accept the invitation. “Vashti!” she sniffed, shocked. “Vashti was the evil queen! And a shiksa. The one the king beheaded before he married our beautiful Jewish queen Esther, who saved the Jewish people from the wicked Haman,” she instructed the child, who knew the story perfectly well. “Why would you want to be Vash—”

“Because nobody tells Vashti what to do! Her husband, the king, tells her to come and show off in front of the men, and she doesn’t.” She stamped her little foot again. “Esther’s just a goody-goody…”