A Day of Small Beginnings (25 page)

His mother had slumped in her chair and twisted Gertie’s silk sleeve until the funeral director had interrupted Nathan and
announced it was time to leave for the gravesite. His mother had refused to let him into the limousine reserved for the immediate
family.

On the long ride to Mount Zion Cemetery in his car, he’d sat rigid with guilt.

“It wasn’t your best speech, but you’re not used to this,” Marion had consoled him. To Nathan,
this
meant religious ritual, and he’d felt a surge of gratitude toward his wife.

But Ellen hadn’t been so forgiving. “Oh, God, Dad,” she’d moaned from the backseat. “‘Uneducated?’ How could you say that
about Grandpa? He wasn’t uneducated. He read that Jewish newspaper all the time. And besides, he was a terrific grandfather.
Why didn’t you say that? Why didn’t you say that he taught me how to play pisha paysha?”

Marion had promptly turned and corrected her. “That’s
up and down.
”

“That’s what
you
call it. Grandpa and I called it pisha paysha.” Ellen began to cry. Nathan had tightened his grip on the wheel, knowing that
she had gotten it more right than his wife had.

The sun was rising over Warsaw. Nathan stared at the white handkerchief, still dazed from the effects of his dream and his
conversation with Ellen. He showered and dressed, shamed anew at having dishonored both his father and his daughter at Pop’s
funeral. Tucking the refolded handkerchief into his pocket, he went downstairs to make arrangements with the concierge.

In life, I did not concern myself about what captures the hearts of children. I would have guessed the past is of little interest
to them, especially if they are healthy and without real cares, as Itzik’s granddaughter seemed to me. But now, heeding my
father’s warning to be vigilant, I took her interest in the handkerchief as a sign. What it signified, I did not know, but
it gave me hope.

20

O
NCE IN THE CAR, ON HIS WAY OUT OF
W
ARSAW,
N
ATHAN
changed his mind. It was madness to spend his last hours in Poland in Zokof, making poetic gestures for his daughter, giving
himself over to the lunacy of a dream. They were crossing the Vistula River. He leaned forward to instruct his driver to return
to the Marriott Hotel. But it was too late to go back. His hosts were already affronted that he’d cancelled the appointments
they’d made for him. Rescheduling would only compound the insult.

He slid back in his seat and absentmindedly wound Pop’s handkerchief around his fingers, grateful that at least this driver
spoke little English. When they arrived in Zokof, he used his guidebook Polish and asked to be dropped off at the far side
of the main square, thinking he might as well take a last look at the town. As he emerged from the car, a stocky man on a
bicycle, in a cap and wool jacket, wobbled to a full stop a foot in front of him. The man narrowed his eyes, but the horizontal
line of his thin lips did not move. Nathan awkwardly brushed past him and made his way toward the church, intending to follow
the square around until he reached the side street that led to Rafael’s house. A pair of skinny teenage girls with bleached
hair giggled as he passed, hiding their red-lipsticked mouths with their hands. Nathan kept his head down.

When he reached the side street he was looking for, a tractor lumbered by, pulling a trailer packed with standing men. Every
pair of eyes on it was trained on him, so he thought, and not one showed the slightest indication of a greeting. He hurried
down the narrow lane, past the fenced yards, the sleeping dog chained to a tree, to Rafael’s house. He mounted the splintered
wooden steps.

Next door, behind a chain-link fence, a stout, kerchiefed woman with chafed, swollen hands watched him slyly as she raked
the dirt in her yard, chickens squabbling at her feet. He knocked purposefully for Rafael, eager to be let in. When Rafael
did not immediately respond, he felt a swell of panic that the old man might not be home. Where in God’s name would he go?
Nathan wondered, shuddering at the thought of having to look for him.

Moments later, the door opened slightly, and Rafael’s familiar thick fingers beckoned him. “Come! Come inside! I was expecting
you back,” he said brusquely.

Perplexed, Nathan crossed the threshold and blinked rapidly as his eyes adjusted to the dim light of the entryway. He jumped
aside as his left shoulder touched a metal ladder, which extended up through a hole in the low ceiling. A repulsive, musty
odor permeated the house. “How could you have possibly known I was coming?” he said.

Rafael arched his eyebrows. “From Freidl. Who else?”

Nathan’s temples began to pulse. Surely Rafael was playing with him. He slipped his hand into his pocket and felt reassured
by the presence of Pop’s handkerchief.

“You saw her,” Rafael said.

“No, I didn’t see her,” Nathan said firmly. “I just had a dream.”

The remark seemed to so amuse Rafael that Nathan felt compelled to explain himself further. “It’s not surprising that I would
unconsciously try to imagine Freidl, after everything you told me yesterday at the cemetery.”

Rafael’s eyebrows rose again. “From a dream a man can know his destiny. From a dream a man can accept what his rational mind
cannot. You look frightened, Leiber. So, you saw her. You’re not the only one.” He beckoned Nathan again. “Come.”

Nathan followed the old man uncertainly through an interior door, into the yellowish, dust-filled haze of the long main room
of the house. To his right, on the street side, a treadle-based sewing machine sat below a window hung with closed curtain
sheers. Along the opposite wall were rows and rows of shelved books, which leaned floppily against one another, their bindings
mostly broken, like a community of tired elders. In the spaces between the bookcases hung five or six extraordinarily intricate
pictures made of paper, from which Hebrew lettering,
menorahs,
trees, animals, buildings, and designs had been cut. “What are these?” he asked.

“Oissherenishen,” Rafael said. “Paper cutouts.”

“Where are these from?”

“From my factory,” Rafael replied, with a puckish smile. “I have ten workers.” He showed Nathan his fingers. “The Talmud says
we must observe His commandments with beauty.
Hiddur mitzvah.
So I took up the penknife and the board.”

He shuffled a few steps farther toward the round table at the far end of the room, then turned back to Nathan and looked again
at the paper cutouts. “I’ll tell you, in my youth I didn’t have the interest. To my father I said, it is for the scholar to
waste his time on such detail. But later, when I came back to Zokof, what did I have but time? And details, I didn’t mind.
It took the mind off other things, you understand?”

Nathan nodded, assuming it impolite to question the connection between cutting paper designs and scholarship.

Rafael clapped his hands. “For us, this was always man’s work. But I, I learned from Freidl. She made oissherenishen all her
life. Her secret children, she calls them.”

He smiled, dismissing Nathan’s obvious confusion. “You didn’t come back here to talk of paper cutouts.” He motioned to the
two tall cane backed chairs at the far end of the room, which stood beside a round table covered with a stained oilcloth.
“Come, sit.”

Nathan sidestepped the piled books balanced precariously on several footstools and joined Rafael. On the table lay a closed
leather-bound book. A white kerosene lamp glowed weakly next to the copper samovar. He sat down and felt the samovar’s heat.
Rafael sank heavily into the chair opposite.

“I didn’t come back only because of the dream,” Nathan said.

“So why?”

Nathan removed his jacket, stalling for time to compose himself. “I didn’t have the chance yesterday to thank you for telling
me about my father’s town.” He hung the jacket on the back of his chair. “But I have to admit, I still don’t understand why
it made him such a rabid socialist.”

He glanced at Rafael, unsure whether the old man could understand what he was talking about. “I don’t imagine Orthodox people
know much about socialists,” he said. These exchanges with Rafael seemed to him like two strangers shouting across a wild
river. They could see each other, but neither could entirely understand what the other was saying.

A checkered cloth, bordered by brown tassels, lay across part of the table. Nathan rolled a tassel in his palm and found it
soft and reassuring.

Rafael gathered the strings of his
tzittzit
and combed them with his fingers, from the knots down. His dry lips parted slightly, and he rapped the cover of the book
on the table irritably. “There is nothing so embarrassing to the secular Jew as a man like me.”

Nathan flushed, recalling all too well how he’d felt when he’d first laid eyes on Rafael.

“And why do I embarrass you?” Rafael persisted. “Because of what it might make the Gentile think of you.” He nodded, as if
Nathan’s appalled expression was all the answer he needed.

“Let me tell you something I’ve learned in my life, Leiber. A Jew should not accept anyone else’s opinion about himself. You’re
too afraid. We don’t stir up anti-Semitism by being pious, by wearing the tzittzit and the
payess.
Anti Semites don’t need us to stir themselves up. They’re already stirred up. This
mishegoss
has nothing to do with us. If a man hates Jews, he’ll find a reason to hate the secular one as much as he hates the religious
one.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Nathan said, although he knew this would not change his embarrassment at the sight of a Hassid in
the street.

“The question, Leiber, is what kind of Jew are you going to be when you go home?”

Nathan wondered why this would matter to Rafael. “I have to admit,” he said, “I don’t think I’ll have changed that much, despite
all your patient efforts yesterday. I’m a Jew by birth. That’s all. I still don’t understand your religiousness or what kind
of God you believe in.” He didn’t think Rafael would understand if he said he’d always regarded his Jewish identity as having
almost no weight or texture at all, something that could be stuffed into his back pocket, like a handkerchief, and pulled
out at will for meals of lox and bagels or for the Passover Seder.

Rafael tipped back his head and roared with laughter. “All my life it’s been like that with me! My rebbe at our yeshiva, may
he rest in peace, didn’t understand what kind of God I believed in either. A lot of
tsuris
I gave him.”

This aroused Nathan’s interest. “How so?” he asked.

“The rebbe always said we were God’s chosen people. This troubled me. We have a relationship with our God. Fine. But what
good comes from calling ourselves
chosen?
Our God wants that we should make people resent us, or worse, that we should suffer for His vanity? It’s a chutzpah of God,
really, don’t you think?”

Nathan smiled. “That’s a rather secular analysis.”

“My rebbe thought so too. A
klop
on the head he gave me for such questions. Feh!” Rafael squinted. “But I asked them. I had to know why I should suffer for
such a God.”

This man would have been a star at City College, Nathan thought. “Maybe you should have asked your rebbe why being one of
the chosen people was so important to him,” he said.

Rafael nodded approvingly. “For a man like my rebbe, a man of that generation, we were chosen because it is written in the
Torah and that is the word of God. But now, as I think about it, we Jews in Zokof always knew the delicacy of our position,
even as children. Maybe teaching us we were God’s chosen was the rebbe’s way to teach us to be strong, that a Jew must set
God’s example.” He laughed. “Me, I had my own ways to show my strength.”

“How so?”

“I’m a fighter.” Rafael sat back, smiling mysteriously. “I remember, when I was maybe ten years old, some Polish boys stopped
me on the street. They made a circle around me and called me a dirty Jew. To them, a Jew was a coward, and they expected me
to hang my head. I told them, ‘Leave me alone. I’m a clean Jew.’ It surprised them, you see. One of them grabbed my shirt.
‘You killed Christ,’ he said. As if I did it, yeh? When I laughed, he punched me in the chest, hard, but I didn’t fall down,
because I grabbed him back. I said, ‘You killed my Aunt Tzeitl,’ and punched him for everything I decided he’d done to her,
hard in the chest, too.”