What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank: Stories Read online

  “Then you will convene a rabbinical court, over which I myself will preside. And I promise you, even if it’s an hour before Shabbat that you come to me, I will find another two rabbanim, and we’ll settle the matter right then. But I will not bring one of the two mothers of this community, who has just lost her last son, to stand in judgment today.”

  “All right,” Yehudit said. “If Aheret is willing, I will let her stay until Rena rises from mourning.”

  · · ·

  The period of shiva was not like it was for Mati, and not like it was for Yermiyahu. It better resembled how it had been when she’d lost her husband, Hanan. The new people of the city did not know Rena. And the staunch Mizrahi religious had forgotten her son when she herself had cut him off. Many others in town, though they did not say it, felt the boy had been punished for his evil ways, and they worried that, in visiting his mother, such a thought might show up in their eyes. So they made themselves busy with other things, and they told themselves they would visit on another day, until all the days were done.

  Once again, the minyan at Rena’s shack was comprised of volunteer boys sent from a yeshiva down the hill. The main difference was that the girls were sent along with them to try to cheer her, and, of course, there was Aheret, taking care.

  When Rena addressed Aheret, she’d say, “Daughter, some tea,” or “Daughter, a biscuit.” And those bright student girls who sat with Rena could not understand why this woman grieved for her son but her daughter did not cry over her brother. To them, Rena would say, “A very long story, how I alone sit shiva and the sister does not mourn.”

  For Aheret, sleeping on a cot in that one-room shack, her only peace was on her nightly walk to the outdoor bathroom. Plumbed though it was, it was separate from the house. On her way, Aheret would sneak over to the boulder on which the memorial obelisk stood. She would read the names of the town’s fallen by flashlight and understand that her sacrifice was small.

  Yehudit came every day to pay her respects, and to see that the girl who had been her daughter was well. She took it upon herself to bake a simple cake for the final service of the shiva, so that she would be there when the bereaved stood up from mourning and first exited the house.

  Poised in the sun with Aheret at her side, Yehudit watched in silence as Rena circled the top of the hill, enacting the traditional walk that marked the week’s close. When Rena arrived at the door once again, Yehudit wished her a long and healthy life, then took Aheret’s hand and said, “Come, my child, let’s go.”

  Rena tilted her head, quizzical, just as Yehudit had when Rena came around the house, dragging Aheret her way. “Where do you take my daughter?” Rena said. “The end of the week does not end the bond.”

  Yehudit had planned for this moment, rehearsing it ceaselessly in her head. She pulled from her pocket the original bill with which Rena had paid her. She’d saved it as a keepsake all these years.

  Rena laughed. “Lirot?” she said. “Not even valid currency anymore.”

  “Then I’ll pay in shekels, or dollars. You name your price.”

  “A price on a girl like this?” Rena said. “What kind of mother would sell her daughter?”

  “You know why I did it,” Yehudit said. “To save her.”

  “I also know when you did it. And I know what has changed.” Rena signaled all that was around them. “What did we pay for these hills so many years before? Now think of what it would cost to buy the city that sits atop them. Understand, Yehudit—I’m alone in the world but for my daughter. For all the riches this world contains, I wouldn’t sell her away. She is my peace, and my comfort”—and here Rena stepped over and put a delicate touch on Aheret’s cheek, “my life.”

  Then Rena’s touch changed, and she circled that hand around Aheret’s wrist, holding tight.

  “Mother,” Aheret called, now truly frightened.

  And again, it was Rena who answered the call.

  · · ·

  Three rabbis sat under the shade of the giant olive tree. They were perched on molded plastic chairs, a plastic table before them. Rena had defied their order to appear in their court, on the grounds that a case so obvious was no case at all. And when Rabbi Kiggel (the man with the ice cream) offered to bring the panel of judges to her, Rena said only, “My door has been open to all comers since before there was anyone to come.”

  And so the rabbis drove up to where the road ends, the plastic furniture tied to the roof of their Subaru, and they took their places under the tree that would offer the most shade. Since none of the rabbis knew to look, they did not notice the scar at the tree’s base, grown over in keloid fashion, and healed up in the interim twenty-seven years.

  Across from the rabbis stood Aheret and her mother, Yehudit. And in a chair carried from the house, Aheret’s other mother, Rena, sat facing the rabbis, waiting for her turn to speak. Yehudit spoke passionately and with great urgency, and Rena did not listen. She just stared at the two rabbis flanking Kiggel’s side. If Kiggel was ten years older than Rena, then the one to his right was another ten years older than that. As for the child rabbi to his left, Rena didn’t believe he’d yet been bar mitzvahed. Before he’d been allowed to sit in judgment of her, she’d have preferred if they’d pulled down his pants to make sure that, at the very least, he had his three hairs.

  When Yehudit was done, she again presented the single bill with which Rena had purchased her daughter. This, the rabbis placed on their table, under the weight of a stone.

  “A boy” is what Rena said, pointing at the young rabbi. “A child who has never known a world with a divided Jerusalem. Who was raised in a greater Israel, where he can pray at the foot of our Holy Temple in a united city, where he can cross the Jordan without fear and stare down at his country from atop the Golan Heights. And here he sits in judgment on my land, in the heart of Samaria, because of the sacrifices made before he was born.”

  Kiggel went to speak, but it was the young rabbi who put a hand to his arm to answer on his own.

  “This I acknowledge,” the boy rabbi said. “But in this life, I’ve already achieved—and this court would appreciate the respect it is due.”

  “And what respect is that?” Rena said.

  “The respect that comes with law. You have sacrificed,” he said. “You have fought. And I continue the fight my own way. Look at us. We live in a Jewish country, with a Jewish government, and yet its false, secular courts send Jewish soldiers to knock down the houses we build. They arrest our brothers as vigilantes, who only protect what God has given. And those same judges, in those same courts, give Arabs the rights of Jews—as if a passport is all it takes to make a person a citizen of this land. You fought your battles, and now we fight ours. I am thankful there are avenues in this country where one may be judged by Jewish law, as the Holy One—blessed is He—intended.”

  “You will judge me as God intended?”

  “We will judge based on the law that is within the grasp of humble man.”

  “That is all I wanted to hear.” And Rena stood up from her chair. She approached the three rabbis. She looked to Yehudit and to Aheret, her daughter.

  “It is not far from here,” Rena said, “where Esav returned from the hunt, tired and hungry, and traded away his birthright for a bowl of red lentils. It is among these very hills where Abraham, our father, took a heifer, three years old, and a goat, three years old, and a ram, three years old, and a turtledove, three years old, and a young pigeon and split them all, but for those birds, and left them for the vultures in a covenant with God, which gives us the right to this land as a whole. And for four hundred shekels of silver, Abraham bought the cave in which he lies buried—and over which, with our Arab neighbors, we spill blood until this very day. So tell me, these contracts, with God and man, written down nowhere, only remembered, do they still hold?”

  And the rabbis looked at one another, and the ancient rabbi on the right, the white of the beard around his mouth stained brown, said, “Do not turn t
his day into one of blasphemy. Do not dare compare our modern trivialities to what was done in biblical times.”

  “I ask only does the verbal contract with which God granted us this nation stand, or does it not? With respect, with honor, I ask.”

  “We do not need a paper when the contracts are with God. And the ones you list that are between man and man—those, too, are recorded in the Torah, which is also, every word and every letter, whispered by God into Moses’ ear. The answer is, they are valid, and unquestionable, and, also, do not compare.”

  It was Kiggel who then spoke. “I ask you, Gveret Barak. I know you do not intend blasphemy, I know this matter is charged. But let us use perspective. Let us keep things in their right size.”

  It was Yehudit who screamed at this, “My daughter, my daughter’s life—do not treat it as small.”

  “My daughter,” Rena said, correcting her. “My daughter, as much as this is my city, as much as this court convenes at my home. If you want to reject our ancient covenants as irrelevant, then let us talk about modern times. From the very first day Yehudit and her husband bought their hill, and my husband and I purchased the one on which you sit, the Arabs in the village right there below have claimed it a false contract, a purchase made from a relative who had no right to sell.”

  “This is the Arab way,” Rabbi Kiggel said.

  “Well, is our city built on a lie? It is not three thousand years old, but thirty. If they claim their contract false—a contract entered into the same year as the one now in dispute—do we give up our homes? Do we give up our city? For they, too—like the bill that flutters on your table—are willing to pay back the amount they received.”

  “A Jewish court,” the young rabbi said. “It is not the same what happens between the Jew and the Gentile. And it is not the same what happens between peoples at war.”

  Rena looked to Yehudit and Aheret and then to the rabbis before her.

  “I see,” she said. “This is a false court. You try to trick an old woman in mourning, a lonely woman. Judgment has already been passed, hasn’t it? There is no way I can win.”

  “No,” Kiggel said, “you will be awarded motherhood, if you are right.”

  “Promise it,” Rena said. And pointing to Yehudit and Aheret, she said, “Make them both promise that they will follow what this beit din decides. I will not have this settled by emotion. If it is a valid court, and an honest court, I will have it settled by what is right.”

  “You will,” Kiggel said.

  “We will follow the court’s ruling,” Yehudit said.

  “From her,” Rena said, pointing at the girl. “From her I want to hear it.”

  “I am a founder of this city,” Aheret said, “the same as you two, only more. I was born to these hills and to these hills I will return. I know no other place. And no other world. If this is what the rabbis decide, if this is the law of the land, then so be it. My life, it’s in God’s hands. I will follow the ruling of this court.”

  “Tomorrow is Rosh Hashanah,” Rena said. And Yehudit blanched at the news. When, in her life, had a holiday been forgotten? Her children would all be home; she’d need to start her cooking. And then she wondered if, at her table, she’d have eight or nine. “From tomorrow, we move into the Ten Days of Repentance, when God decides who will live and who will die. Let each of you pledge to judge honestly, or be written out of the Book of Life. Then I, too—I promise—will accept whatever it is you say.”

  The rabbis conferred among themselves. They were going to judge honestly. They were honest men. But to take an unnecessary pledge set a dangerous precedent. It was not to be done lightly—and not an easy thing on which to agree.

  “We’d prefer to avoid that kind of extremism,” Kiggel said to Rena.

  “Then you do not have my trust.”

  Again they conferred, and finally they consented, and the young rabbi said, “We will judge honestly, or let us be written out of the Book of Life.”

  “Then I need raise only one simple point,” Rena said, “and the case will be resolved.”

  The rabbis nodded, allowing it.

  “If you three pious men will grant me that you are kosher, then you will also grant that the girl is mine.”

  “One,” Kiggel said, “does not follow the other.”

  “But it does,” she said. “You’re going to side against me because my contract with Yehudit, you will say, is symbolic. Because my contract with Yehudit can’t be considered to be a contract at all.”

  “I don’t want to say one way or the other,” Kiggel said, “but there are many facts that lead a logical person this way.”

  “So, I ask you, once again, are the three of you kosher? Have you knowingly broken the rules of what is fit to eat?”

  “We have not knowingly done so,” the young rabbi said.

  “Tomorrow is Rosh Hashanah,” Rena said. “Do the three of you observe the Jewish holidays? Are you faithful in carrying out Jewish law?”

  Once again the young rabbi answered, saying, “It is safe to assume.”

  “Then tell me,” Rena said, “if you are willing to state that my deed on this land is sound, and ignore the Arab claims against it, if you are willing to accept biblical contracts as eternally valid, though we have no proof beyond faith that they ever were, I ask you, very simply, every year, on Passover, when you sell your hametz to a Gentile so as not to break the edict of having any trace of it under your roof, when everyone in your congregations comes to you and says, ‘Rabbi, for this week when it’s prohibited for a Jew to have even one crumb of bread in his house, sell all that is forbidden to a Gentile so that we may inhabit our homes,’ is that contract real?”

  “This is the tradition,” the young rabbi said. “And that contract is as legal as any other.”

  “And in all your years, have you ever heard of a single Gentile anywhere in the world stepping into a Jewish home to open a cabinet and take what is rightfully his? Is there known to you such a case?”

  The rabbis looked at one another, and their answer was no.

  “So tell me, if the selling of the hametz is based on a contract that’s never once been exercised in all the years of your lives in all the world over, can you still say that it is a valid contract in your eyes? Or do you admit that, really, each one of us—each one of you!—is in possession of hametz every Passover, and that no Jew really observes the holiday as commanded?”

  “God forbid!” the rabbis said, all three.

  Then the old rabbi said, “You find yourself on the edge of blasphemy once again. But if there is a point to be made, then, yes, that contract is valid, exercised or no.”

  “If that contract is valid, if you three can still call yourselves kosher, then you have to admit, equally valid is mine. Just because it’s assumed that one party will never exercise her rights doesn’t mean the rights are not hers.”

  And here the rabbis whispered, and all three took out their pens and began passing one another notes, looking terribly concerned. For a judge can know how his heart would decide, but his obligation is always to the law. And they had sworn, these three. Sworn on their lives. A terrible promise to make.

  “And tell me this,” Rena said. “When a little bar mitzvah boy says to a pretty girl as a joke, ‘You are my wife,’ and he gives her a bracelet as a token—”

  “A divorce is arranged,” the young rabbi said. “We have done it before. Yes, if it is uttered and the gift received, they are married, the same as any two people in the world.”

  “Even if neither really meant it?” Rena said. “Even if an innocent joke between two young adults at play?”

  “Even then,” said Rabbi Kiggel.

  “That is all I’m saying,” Rena said. “That a contract doesn’t require either party to intend to exercise its terms, or even for both parties to be mature enough to grasp them. And likewise a symbolic contract, like that of Passover, whose intent at signing is that it would never be put into use, is as valid as any other in the e
yes of God. So all you’re really deciding in this case is if the money on the table before you was of any value at the time the deal was made. That is all the court is being asked. If you are religious men, following religious law, then there is nothing to say but that the girl belongs to me.”

  “The same as a slave, though,” Kiggel said, a finger raised. “That’s how it would be.”

  “Call it what you will, but the girl is mine.”

  · · ·

  Aheret stood in the dark on the western edge of the hill. Rosh Hashanah dinner had finished. And she’d come out to the edge of the grove to stare across to the hill opposite, where she could see that her mother had left a light burning in the window so Aheret would know that she was not forgotten.

  It was the second night since the verdict, and so different from those first days when she’d tended to this woman during her week of mourning. Aheret was hopeless, and—since suicide was forbidden, a grave sin—she could only wish and pray that the world, for her, would come to an end. Let me be left out of the Book of Life, she thought. Let my fate be decided this week. Let the sky up above come crashing down.

  And it was, right then, as if Aheret’s prayers were answered.

  Though it was not the sky that was falling, but the earth shaking as if it planned to swallow up the whole hill. There was nothing to see from the side of the summit on which Aheret stood. No dust rose up in the distance, as when Hanan had caught the armored corps rolling down toward the Yom Kippur War.

  It was from the other side of the little shack that the sound of great conflagration came, and anyone who hadn’t been raised on those hills might have thought they were already surrounded. It took a lifetime to learn how the specific echoes bounced off the range.

  Aheret hadn’t wanted to stand on that side of the house ever again. That’s where her fate had been sealed. Where her two mothers had stood silent before the rabbis, as stiff as the trees around them, as abiding as the sister hills themselves.