Chaim Grade’s ‘Sons and Daughters,’ Chapter Four

As an unmarried girl, Tilza had been a moody bundle of emotion, constantly gazing out the windows of her father’s house with big, black, dreamy eyes. Behind her shoulders dangled a pair of long, thick, chestnut-colored braids. Tilza was plump and olive-skinned, with a high bosom, wide, sensuous lips, and thick eyebrows. Because of her perpetual daydreaming and moodiness—though she didn’t really know what was gnawing at her—Tilza somehow failed to notice she had developed a voluptuous, womanly body, which young men ogled hungrily. She paid no attention to status and had friends from simple homes. When she spoke, it was from the heart, usually with her pale, chubby hands clasping her bosom. Some townspeople claimed Tilza wasn’t very sharp; others felt she was too soft and sincere. Her parents thought she was simply a dreamer. Even in her sleep, she dreamed of flying birds.

Tilza enjoyed strolling down flat, bare stretches of road, her long braids flapping behind her. The decaying shed in her family’s backyard pained her. “Why does it bother you? We don’t even have any animals,” her mother wondered. But merely looking at decrepitude made Tilza sad. Even wood that had been sliced from tree barks and was lying in a pile in the yard, the slats still releasing a fresh woodsy fragrance, made her ache. The pile brought to mind the big trees that had been recently chopped down, falling to the ground with a hushed sigh. If she saw a baby carriage with rusty wheels atop a pile of trash, she averted her head. She couldn’t bear seeing an object that had formerly brought everyone joy now wallowing in the trash. The worst were the days before the holidays, when women would come to their home with slaughtered chickens to ask the rabbi about their kosher status, and her father would stick his soiled fingers into each chicken’s craw. On the day before Yom Kippur, when all of Moreh-dalye performed the kapparos ritual, Tilza’s face twisted with revulsion, and she felt like crying. Why did the day before the holiday have to be so common, and why on the eve of this holiest day did there have to be such shrieks from creatures about to be slaughtered?

Tilza borrowed thick novels from friends but never finished reading them, not even halfway. It was enough for her to skim a few pages and then go back to daydreaming. According to her father, all novels were taboo, immoral. But Henna’le persuaded him to allow Tilza to read novels and to be friends with anyone she chose. As long as they presented no danger and Tilza was obeying her parents and not lying, she should be allowed her daydreams. And, indeed, until one day, her father let her be.

Ezra Morgenstern, the Hebrew teacher in the talmud torah, had come to Morehdalye from a town somewhere in Volyn. While he taught the children, he wore a yarmulke. But when he socialized with the town’s youth, he wore no hat and his hair hung down to his nose, as he made fun of diaspora Jews and their political factions.

One day, Tilza went for a walk with Ezra along the outskirts of Morehdalye. Ezra stretched out on the grass and Tilza stood beside him, her chestnut braids swinging in front of her like the falling leaves on a tree. Ezra was an admirer of the chalutzim and his ridicule of their opponents distressed her, even though there was no one around to hear him.

At one point, Ezra sat up and spoke more softly, pointing to the bridge above the Narev River. “Do you see? The Morehdalye youth stand on the bridge and see a wide river, blue sky, vast fields. But in the midst of all this abundance, our youth are trapped like prisoners. I understand why you hold the Narev so dear. You’ve bathed in it, and there at the shore the waves wash over the tombstones in the Jewish cemetery. So many engraved stones of grandfathers and grandmothers, great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers! But let a young gentile throw a stone at a young healthy Jew, and a piece of his heart shatters. It’s not the gentile or stone that scares him, but the fact that he knows he’s in a land of enemies, and the old graves won’t help him. Neither these graves—the stone witnesses to the many years the Jewish community has been here—nor the lineage of the Morehdalye Jewish community recorded on parchment protect the Jew when a gentile hurls a stone at him.”

Agitated, Tilza plaited and unplaited the edges of her dark braids. She sat down on the ground next to Ezra. In a conspiratorial tone, she said, “I’ve heard some people say that the land of Israel is also filled with stones, graves, and ruins.”

Physically Ezra Morgenstern looked like a mere boy next to Tilza, but in intelligence he was way ahead of her. He didn’t dare hug her or kiss her full, voluptuous lips; she was liable to take offense and burst into tears. Instead, he picked up one of Tilza’s braids, placing it in the palm of one hand as if to weigh it, and with his other hand stroked her hair.

“It’s true,” he said, “that the land of Israel is full of stones, graves, and ruins; full of hot sand, thorns, swamps, and salty water; full of the sort of heat that peels your skin, and malaria that turns your face yellow and burns your bones. But when the chalutz sees ruins, he yearns to rebuild them. When he sees swamps, he longs to dry them out. And when an enemy lies in wait around some corner, the chalutz feels that at least he’ll be buried under the stones of his own home. He protects himself in a different way than when he’s accosted in a foreign land. And the nights in the desert are inky black, the stars as big as your eyes peeking through your braids.”

Ezra stretched out on his back again, hands clasped behind his neck, and began to hum a Hebrew tune, “How Beautiful Are the Nights in Canaan.” Tilza stared at the Narev’s high shoreline and at the Jewish cemetery, where tombstones overgrown with moss lay tightly squeezed one on top of the other. She gazed at the green meadows speckled with white and yellow flowers, at the town with its little houses that looked like sheep huddling together against a gust of rain, at the horizon dipping below her father’s house—it seemed such a loss to leave it all behind. She imagined telling her parents that she wanted to leave their old house with its low rotting ceiling, their yard with its dilapidated shed—that she wanted to leave it all to go to the land of Israel.

But before she could talk to her parents, her father spoke to her. People had informed him that she had been strolling about with the Hebrew teacher outside of town.

“Not only will you never again exchange another word with this degenerate, but I’ll hound him out of the talmud torah, too. His words poison the young men in town. He tells them to travel to the land of Israel and live on a kibbutz where people don’t put on tefillin, don’t observe Shabbos or kosher or the laws of family purity—they don’t believe in God at all. So long as I’m rabbi, this heretic will not be a teacher here.” Sholem Shachne fumed and frothed. Back then, he was still very sure of himself. He had many pious townspeople on his side, so he fought against every transgressor.

On one hand, Tilza ached when her father was ridiculed by the freethinkers. But on the other, she cried for nights on end in sympathy with the teacher whom her father and the other devout townspeople had harassed until he left his job and Morehdalye as well.

After this incident, Sholem Shachne brought Yaakov Asher Kahane to Morehdalye to meet Tilza. Since Yaakov Asher didn’t have a beard at the time, the yellow-flecked skin on his face and hands and his thick red hair were even more conspicuous. But his blue-green eyes, which emanated kindness and respect for every person, warmed Tilza.

Yaakov Asher was immediately enchanted by Tilza’s dreamy, mournful eyes and her long braids. What touched him even more were her words, which were somewhat childish but openhearted. At their very first meeting, she told him she had always longed to live a life of beauty. “Where can more beauty be found than in Torah?” he replied. “What can be prettier than a woman lighting Shabbos candles or Jews walking and singing on Sukkos, holding their lulavim?”

Rebbetzin Henna’le was unmoved by her husband’s awe over the young man’s brilliance and Torah scholarship; she could tell that her daughter wasn’t enthusiastic about him. Nevertheless, the rebbetzin agreed that Yaakov Asher was a mature man and a suitable match for their daughter. Tilza needed a man who would also be a father figure.

Only later did her father realize that although Tilza had agreed to marry Yaakov Asher, she had hardly changed at all. After the wedding she cut off her braids and covered her hair with a scarf. She became a rebbetzin and the mother of a little boy. But she still looked around her in the midday brightness with dreamy, nocturnal eyes.

When her father came to visit her in Lecheve, he couldn’t believe his ears. That the wife of a rosh yeshiva could have such complaints about her husband’s students! Why do the boys have such long peyes and tzitzis? Why do they walk around in rumpled clothes and have such dirty hands and filthy nails? The married yeshiva men pray and study, but these young men rock and shout in the most bizarre way. On Purim, the entire town of Lecheve gathers to stare and laugh at the yeshiva boys acting like idiots, singing and dancing wildly. Lecheve is a muddy hick town, and the men and women look so shabby. Why does everyone have to know when the women’s mikveh is being heated and which women are immersing for their husbands that night? They’re all so shamelessly pious.

“Is that so?” Sholem Shachne stared at his daughter, astonished. “But you know that the yeshiva boys are poor. Where they live, the water practically freezes in the buckets. So they dress poorly and don’t bathe, so what? Here I was thinking you’re unhappy because the students steal from people in the street or fall down drunk in the gutter. I thought you were unhappy because your husband is rough with you. Or because he’s stingy, or a bad father to your child.”

“Yaakov Asher is very attached to our child and is nice to me,” said Tilza, smiling sadly as she searched for the words that would make her father understand. Her husband cared about her, yes, but he didn’t know how to be tender—just as he knew the proper chant for Talmud study but didn’t seem to know how to sing. “What I’m lacking from Yaakov Asher is the Song of Songs,” Tilza finally said, her cheeks burning like wine-red leaves.

“A Jew sings Song of Songs to God, not to a woman,” Sholem Shachne admonished his daughter. “Your husband is at fault. He’s spoiling you by not demanding that you tend to his students, like the wives of other roshei yeshiva.” Then he informed Tilza that in the summer Refael’ke would be joining Yaakov Asher’s yeshiva. Her youngest brother was also creating problems: he didn’t want to attend a yeshiva where he would have to eat at strangers’ tables. So, by all means, why not have Tilza hold him to her standards, make sure he’s washed and his clothes are clean, that he doesn’t rock and sway over the Talmud, doesn’t scream during prayers. He can even have trimmed peyes; it makes no difference, as long as he’s studying the Talmud.