“What do you mean?”

“The newspapers. They are not covering the pogroms….” How should he put it? Yiddish is so clumsy on his lips. “They…”

He looks up, but she is gazing at her fingers. The slight crease on her forehead tells him that she is concentrating. An icy wind blows in from the open door, lifting the tablecloth. There is no fire. And he is bringing in the cold. He should give this up, just stand and thank her and leave.

“Leib’le, go bring your Mama a shawl.”

The boy hesitates, then jumps off of the horse and returns with a gray, coarse woolen shawl. She wraps it around herself, then Leib’le puts his arms around her.

“You are keeping me warm, too.” She laughs and strokes his head.

“I want to ask you for your story,” Felix says again.

“Story?”

“Yes. You fled your home. I don’t know what other… events you have endured.”

“You mean my husband’s death.”

Death. She uses the word so easily and he wants to flinch from it. Soft city boy that he is.

“I want to spread the message of what is happening to Yidden in Russia.”

She thinks for a moment. “You want to spread the message? Or do you want to get an exclusive scoop, move up in your profession?” Harsh words but spoken softly.

He is quiet for a moment. She is a village woman. A Yiddish speaking Ostjude, who surely never even went to school. Even if her words are true — and he is not sure that they are — how did she get so piercing?

“My uncle, a talmid chacham, wrote to me when I began this job. He told me I should take as my guide the verse ‘speak truth to those near and to those far.’ ”

“That is your imperative. It is not mine.” A little smile plays on her lips.

“My publisher, he will not give people the facts of what is happening in Russia. He says that doing so will put other Yidden, those living in cities, who have not fled and who will not flee, in danger.”

She nods. Does she agree? Or does she merely understand?

“So I suggested that if we do not write criticism, but merely tell people’s stories, then we will open the eyes of those who need to know.”

“Who needs to know? How will it help them?”

He is about to talk politics. Or slip into the efforts of the international community to prevent attacks on the Jews. How after the Damascus affair, the Alliance Israelite Universelle was established, and one of its goals is to prevent such atrocities. But they need information. Or enough of a whiff that they will send an envoy to investigate.

But instead he says, “In knowing and feeling what is happening, they will not be cut off from their brethren.”

“You mean they will not be cut off from themselves?”

“I do not understand.” He tries not to shiver in the cold.

“I believe — my grandfather taught me — that all Jews are mystically linked in their souls. Thus, if another Jew is in dire straits, one’s own inner being is affected.”

He shakes his head. “That is a foreign idea for me. I can barely identify my soul and I am but one man. Were I to start feeling the travails of all of my nation, I could not survive.”

She laughs. “You take this literally.”

“How else?”

“Well, it is true. It is literal, but not physical. There is a place inside through which we are connected to other Jews. As your mother told me, her sister is in Turkey, educating the Jews there.”

“Yes.”

She pulls the shawl tighter around herself. “A Jew who has no concern for the fate of the other Jews in the world shows intolerable self-absorption. If we are all connected then it does not do us good if we close ourselves in our own little ghetto and have no concern with the affairs of others.”

Ghetto? “The ghetto in Prague was opened years ago.”

“The ghetto of the mind.”

He gives a stiff nod. What is it with this woman? Definitions shift and change as she speaks; words become slippery, undulating between meanings. All he wanted was her story.

*****

It is Friday night and Emmy is locked in her bedroom. Twice, Hannah has knocked on the door, asked her to please come down, for Papa is waiting. There has been no response.

Ernst will not start the meal without both of his children present. As he tells her, lifting the chain of his watch-face so he can check the time, although he knows very well what the time is, he has never done so and is not about to start now. And yet, he also has a concert to play at.

He has not said as much. They still live in a fog of gentle denial. But every so often, a few bars of Beethoven escape him; not the tuneful ones that fill your heart and make it feel like it will burst. The technical ones. The tricky ones. His mind is on his concert.

Ernst looks across the table at her. “Can you not call her again?”

It is useless. Still, Ernst’s eyes are upon her. She crosses the room, climbs the stairs. Knocks.

No answer.

“Emmy? I know that this is hard, but Papa has called you down to the Shabbos meal.” Still no answer.

Obedience. It is the one thing expected of every child. It is the one thing expected of every mother to instill into her children. Emmy’s failure is her own, but rather than blame his daughter, Ernst will surely hold her up as a faulty role model.

“Hannah?” Ernst calls up.

She leans over the stair rail. “Ernst, dear, perhaps you should come.”

He sighs, and climbs the stairs. They are too young and also too old for this. The glass beads of the chandelier dapple their prism onto his blond hair, and she sees he is turning silver.

She remembers locking herself into her bedroom. Well, there was no lock on their bedroom, not even a door, just a curtain in blue that had faded to gray. Shneur had come to see her.

“Hannah, you must come out. Ernst is here to see you.”

“What have I got to do with that man?”

At first, she had thought he was grateful to her father. Papa had found him wandering around the village one day. A music student, arrested during a protest — this is what students do, he had told Papa, who was bewildered by the strange creature — he’d slipped away from the police as they were entering the police station, and fled to the countryside. The poor man was shaking, exhausted, famished, terrified he would be arrested and his parents would be mortified.

He had stayed a day or two, and none of them had thought much of it. Until he had returned a few months later. And then again. He charmed Papa with his music and Mama with his manners. But when she noticed that his eyes followed her as she served and cleared the Shabbos table, Hannah had hidden from sight.

Shneur had been the one to fetch her. “Chanalle, our lives are not our own. They’re put into motion by the One Above. And who knows what He has decreed for you. He might be different from us, but there is nothing wrong with simple Jews. And I’m impressed. There’s a feinkeit to him, an eidele neshamah.”

She had faced the wall and pretended not to listen.

“Bow to the Hashgachah of this, Channah. For your life is not your life alone, it has been given to you to serve your Creator, and if this is His will, then you say yes, and you say yes b’chein.”

“But what about —”

“What is it you want?”

She had shrugged, not knowing how to put it into words.

He raised both arms to the heavens. “How many of us get what we want in life? We learn how to want what we are given.”

Now, more than 25 years later, Ernst speaks to their daughter through the door. He orders her out. When she does not respond, he starts to coax. Eventually, he shakes his head, and returns downstairs. He lifts the becher for Kiddush, rushes through the words, and they wash for challah. The loaf is golden and soft, but it is hard to swallow.

Ernst looks up from his fish. “I think you should take her away.”

“Away?”

“For a visit. Go to Vienna. See my parents. Go to the theater and the concerts, take in a ballet. See some new people.”

Hannah adjusts her white Shabbos apron and calculates quickly.

Doing so will only lead her daughter further away from her. The night they arrive, Ernst’s mother will call in the dressmaker. Emmy will stand in a room, surrounded by swathes of fabric: the finest muslin, Belgian lace, silk and satin and samples of appliquéd flowers. The next day she will be shown hats; small hats to be worn at jaunty angles, wide-brimmed hats to be tied with a large ribbon that will save your complexion on a sunny day.

And there will be dances. At home, she and Ernst had a long discussion about the dances. Ten eligible men lined up on one side of a large room, ten silk-bedecked girls on the opposite. At front, a small band — violin, clarinet, percussion, perhaps with a piano accompaniment — playing waltzes or dance tunes. Men bow. Girls curtsey. Both step forward and begin the steps taught by patient dance masters. And thus matches are made.

In Prague, there are not only dances. There are literature societies, where the young people get together and read a new publication. There are musical societies, and even welfare societies, where the girls busy themselves with making lists of improvements.

When she presented her case to Ernst — that she would not want Emmy to find a husband this way, for the Torah forbids an unmarried girl and man to so much as touch each other, he had laughed. “Is that so?” he had said. “How very quaint.”

He had thought for a moment. “I don’t know how they can dance to such bad music,” he’d said. “They call themselves musicians, but the violinist doesn’t play, he saws the strings and by some miracle, a sound comes out. Very well, my dear, Emmy will meet her intended in a different way. No dances.”

She had breathed again. Slightly incredulous, awash with relief.

In Vienna, though, her wishes would be trampled. Emmy would side with Ernst’s parents, who would protest, there is nothing wrong with an old-fashioned dance. It can’t be a Christian practice if there have been dances for as long as they can remember, now, can it?

She swallows, places soup in front of her husband. “If we were to take a trip, Emmy and I,” she says hesitantly, “then for a long while I have been wanting to see my parents. They have been in poor health for some months already.”

Ernst loves her soup. It is golden, with a rich flavor that comes from extra chicken and boiling it overnight. The knaidelach are light and fluffy. He lifts a spoonful and swallows. “Ah,” he says, in satisfaction.

“Your parents.” He takes another spoon and thinks for a moment. “Perhaps. Perhaps that would be an idea.”

Felix raises a single eyebrow.

She knows his thoughts. It would take a miracle to get Emmy to the shtetl.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 693)