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

Besides having a taste for handsome young men, Tzesneh Ginsburg also enjoyed strangers’ secrets. And a secret hovered over Zindel Kadish. A riddle: Why had Zindel’s parents gone to Canada, gotten divorced there, and abandoned him to his grandfather? When Tzesneh asked him if his parents ever sent letters, he looked uneasy and mumbled something incomprehensible. But with the sharp, sinister eyes of a thieving cat, she treaded noiselessly, extracting bits of information from the townspeople about the old dayan, his son, and his former daughter-in-law.

The dayan, she was told, had a stomach disorder and had to eat stale challah dunked in warm milk. He was a “tidy woman,” losing no crumbs in his long beard. His frock coat, shirt, and even his boots were always clean. Pinned to the buttons on his vest, a pocket watch dangled on a silver chain. In his bookcase, not a single volume lay askew; on the stove, not a dirty dish in sight. Tzadok had become a widower when he was still middle-aged and he’d never remarried. A few times a week, a woman came to clean his home, and she claimed she had almost nothing to do there. Even the bed he slept on looked practically untouched, as if he had no body at all.

This was the sterile, cold-white cleanliness in which his son Beinush was raised—Beinush who, it seemed, was born tired and surly. In town they barely noticed him growing up, so detached was he all through childhood and adolescence. Later, he left to study in another city and came back knowing Russian, Polish, and especially Hebrew. No one, it was said, had a better grasp of Hebrew grammar. But he wanted nothing to do with the youth studying modern Hebrew, the ones preparing to emigrate to the land of Israel. Visitors to the dayan’s home would mention how Beinush always sat in the same corner, silent, with a sulking, disgusted expression, as if he were sitting in an empty railway station in the middle of the night and could hardly wait for a train to spirit him away.

In the Morehdalye talmud torah, his classmates were terrified of him. If another boy wronged him in some way, Beinush would dig into the boy’s muscular flesh with such sharp nails, would glare at him with such ferocious, glittering eyes, that the victim was too stunned to even scream. The other boys disliked Beinush and poked fun at his persnickety manners. During lessons in class, he wore a large black silk yarmulke, which was constantly falling off his long, narrow head. He had to keep holding it in place with his hand, but he refused to wear a different one.

“With Beinush Kadish you can’t win”: those around him mocked his obstinacy, and no one doubted that he’d end up an old bachelor. Little could they have imagined that Shterke Teitelbaum would fall in love with him and marry him.

Shterke was a baker’s daughter and the director of finances at the talmud torah where the orphans of Morehdalye and its environs learned, ate, and slept. Next to Beinush, Shterke looked like a strong, many-branched maple beside the thin, crooked root of a skimpy bush. Shterke had masculine shoulders, overlarge eyes, lips, and teeth, too-wide cheeks, and a thick neck. When she spoke, it sounded like a thunderous trumpet. Only her eyes twinkled with maternal goodness. Her large, warm hands seemed to have been created for cooking and cleaning, for caressing and calming. Friends asked her bluntly why she was attaching herself to such a bitter, dry soul. Was it because he was educated? Shterke laughed, marveling at them. “Don’t you see that he’s also handsome? And the reason he’s so bitter is because he’s been motherless since he was a child.”

The Morehdalye girls of marriageable age had kept their distance from the dayan’s son, so they hadn’t noticed Beinush’s deep, dark eyes and silky eyebrows, his well-wrought nose, precisely formed lips, and beautifully carved hands. But Shterke Teitelbaum—perhaps because of her masculinity—noticed, and because of her goodness she assumed she’d be able to transform him into a mellower person by clasping him to her breast as she did with the other orphans in the talmud torah.

Right after the wedding, Beinush Kadish and his wife left for Bialystok. He worried that if he stayed, Shterke would invite her family and friends to his home, where they’d make themselves much too comfortable.

But news soon reached Morehdalye of the couple’s glum situation. Although Beinush had attained an excellent position as a teacher in a Yavneh school, and they’d found a nice apartment, Beinush still looked irritable, his brow perpetually furrowed, as if he’d misplaced an expensive object. He invited no one to his home, visited no one else, and demanded that his wife do the same.

A woman by the name of Mariasha Blum came back from Bialystok saying she’d visited her friend Shterke. With her own ears she’d heard Beinush Kadish harassing Shterke for having invited a friend over—two weeks earlier!—who wore her hair cropped and had stubbed her cigarette out in a tea tray filled with water. Though half a month had passed, Beinush shouted, he still felt like puking every time he recalled the cigarette filter smeared with the red tint of that visitor’s swinish lips. “But if a woman allows herself to be called Shterke,” he yelled, “it’s no wonder she has a friend with no better taste than to crop her hair and dip a cigarette in a tea tray.” Mariasha Blum said that the louder he shrieked, the harder his wife laughed, most likely out of embarrassment that her friend from town was there to hear this. “But you knew my name was Shterke before you married me,” she laughed. And he replied that earlier he hadn’t given much thought to what it meant that a woman should allow herself to be called Shterke all her life.*

Beinush Kadish never came to visit Morehdalye because of his loathing for the townspeople, and his wife never came because she was ashamed. Her relatives, too, upon returning from a visit to her in Bialystok, had no desire to speak about it. But when, after visiting Bialystok, the dayan Reb Tzadok was asked how the children were doing, he wrinkled his face up and said, “Good, very good.” No one believed him. People in Morehdalye felt that beneath his big scraggly beard, the old dayan was just as evil as his son. But then the Morehdalyians found out that Shterke had become a mother. So perhaps the dayan hadn’t fooled them. His son and daughter-in-law, it appeared, were living as husband and wife.

This same Mariasha Blum was burning to uncover the truth. So half a year later she traveled again to Bialystok, and came back wringing her hands. “Dearies, I really shouldn’t say.” But she did say, telling them what Shterke had told her: on his free days, she noticed, her husband left home with little sacks of kernels and bags filled with pieces of bread. She wasn’t going to ask him what it was all about. If he didn’t tell her on his own, she knew she could never pry it out of him. But one time, she followed him and watched as he sat down on a bench in the city park and fed the birds. Shterke was touched. The thought flashed in her mind that all of Beinush’s peculiarities would vanish in smoke if, instead of feeding birds, he had a child to love. But as soon as their little infant came squealing into this world, the father squealed, too. He cried that he’d never felt lonesome when he’d been on his own, that all he’d desired his entire life was silence. Now it was worse than death for him. This time Shterke didn’t laugh. She squealed, too, and even louder than her husband. He knew she was pregnant, she yelled. So why had he sat silent and let her have the child? He couldn’t have imagined, he said, what his life would be like with a screamer in the house. According to Mariasha Blum, Shterke sobbed her heart out, beating her chest. “It’s my own fault. It’s not in my nature to get divorced. It’s not!”

Even when Zindel began attending school and grew into a relatively quiet boy, his father went on screaming about the lack of peace in his home. The hatred between Beinush and the students in the Bialystok Yavneh school increased, becoming even greater than the former hatred between him and the Hebrew teachers in the Morehdalye talmud torah. Added to that, he began to fear that war would break out again. That the Bolsheviks, who held that all were equal and should intermingle, would again invade Poland. Beinush decided to leave Europe for Canada. On that side of the ocean, at least, it was quiet, and the vulgar and the educated didn’t mix. He would leave Zindel with his grandfather in Morehdalye, meanwhile. Shterke, however, would accompany him. Beinush got his way. Shterke went along with the plan and left her little Zindel at his grandfather’s.

Although Shterke had cried to her friends that divorce was against her nature, the truth was, she didn’t know herself well enough. From the moment she settled in Canada with her husband, her world felt bare and desolate without her son, and she turned her husband’s life into the same hell he’d made of hers in Bialystok. In a letter to Mariasha Blum, Shterke referred to Beinush not by his name but as “the epileptic,” though he’d never actually suffered from epilepsy. “The epileptic,” she wrote to her friend, “demanded that I accompany him here, because he’s accustomed to me caring for him. He promised that as soon as we settled in, we’d send for our only son. But now he says that Zindel should stay with his grandfather a while. So I’m leaving him. Even if ‘the epileptic’ convulses and shakes like a madman, you can be sure that this time I’m leaving, especially knowing he’ll be even more terrified to live in a strange country on his own. And, with God’s help, as soon as I get myself organized, I’ll bring my little boy here.”

One-half of the plan Shterke carried out successfully. She divorced her husband. But the second half she could not achieve. No matter how much she pleaded in letters to her father-in-law, begging that he send her little son, her life’s sole consolation, the old man replied that he, too, had no other consolation left but this one grandchild. Besides, such a young boy would be defiled the instant he set foot in the Americas. In Poland, meanwhile, Zindel would behave like others in town and learn both Torah and secular knowledge.

So year after year went by, and Shterke, who’d never remarried, continued writing letters to her former father-in-law and her growing son. Zindel replied with caution and trepidation, as if he weren’t sure the one writing him was truly his mother. Zindel’s grandfather, on the other hand, replied in a friendly, peaceable tone (with what seemed to Shterke a snide undercurrent), saying that Zindel had grown into a beautiful young man. He was studying in a Warsaw yeshiva that was also a university. Shterke in Canada and her relatives in Morehdalye were certain that the mad old dayan with the sickly stomach was taking revenge on his former daughter-in-law at the bidding of his son. In Morehdalye they discovered that Beinush Kadish had left his job as a teacher in Canada, finding it too chaotic to be involved with the students. He’d always had a good head and a certain diligence, so he studied English conscientiously and took courses to become a pharmacist. Now he was working in a pharmacy, filling and dispensing prescriptions.

Hearing this story, Tzesneh Ginsburg laughed heartily, displaying her cold, dazzling teeth. She pictured Beinush Kadish the pharmacist—standing between shelves of beakers and glass pots, stirring and weighing remedies, handing them with jittery fingers to his customers. And all the while uttering barely a word, his sour face never flashing a smile.

Whom did Zindel take after, his father or his mother, Tzesneh wondered, her chin becoming even bonier as she smirked. She counted on using Zindel’s secret, the history of his divorced parents, to poke and prod him.

At the next lesson, Tzesneh again observed him obliquely, speculating that he’d inherited the pretty lines on his face from his father and his broad, strong body from his mother. But from what she’d seen, Zindel was neither as pathologically crazy as his father nor as good-hearted as his mother.

After Tzesneh’s English lesson with Zindel, she stretched and yawned and explained that this time she wasn’t in the mood for a Hebrew lesson. Just as before, she persuaded him to sit beside her on the couch. But instead of looking at Tzesneh, Zindel had become entranced by a picture on the wall—of two inky-brown horses in a sea-green meadow. The mare was standing and the foal was lying down.

“Every time I look at the colt, I feel like kissing his moist nostrils and raised ears. Just look at his sweet muzzle!” Tzesneh said, inching closer to Zindel. But he continued to sit stiffly, now riveted by another picture: dressed in long, old-fashioned pleated dresses, holding parasols over their wide-brimmed hats with colorful, fluttering ribbons, two women stood on a yellow sand dune observing the blue ocean. Zindel turned his head away from the painting and looked out the window, to the yard, where the linden tree teemed with golden autumn leaves. In the room it had begun to darken. Tzesneh’s catlike eyes glittered more brightly.

“So how do you say in English ‘I like you’?” she asked, and as he slowly enunciated the three words in English she tossed her arm around his neck. “You pronounce it exactly right. You must have already said it a few times in Polish or Yiddish to Bluma Rivtcha,” Tzesneh teased.

“Not true,” he replied calmly. “Bluma Rivtcha and I aren’t all that interested in each other.”

Tzesneh, too, wasn’t all that interested in Bluma Rivtcha at the moment. All at once, Zindel felt a pair of damp, puckered lips on his mouth. A narrow, supple body, with taut breasts like hard gooseberries, pressed against his chest and forced his back to the sofa, lips still stuck to his mouth. Zindel couldn’t catch his breath. He pushed her off.

“Are you not attracted to me, or do you not want to touch a woman because you’re preparing to become a rabbi?” She gave a hoarse little laugh, and her hot breath scorched his face.

“What do you mean?” he answered, affecting innocence, and sat up slowly, still confused by her lustful lunge.

“Explain to me the difference between Orthodox and Progressive rabbis,” she said, as if she were really curious, as if she hadn’t intended to play around with him and therefore wasn’t shaken by his rejection.

Zindel spoke enthusiastically, almost as if he’d been waiting to be asked. Meanwhile, Tzesneh ran her fingers through her tousled, chestnut hair. Shivers of unfulfilled desire coursed through her body. She was glad the darkness had dimmed the room, masking her feverish face. Only with me is he such a cold fish, she thought. Just look at how passionately he talks about the clashes between rabbinical dynasties! She interrupted him with a wicked little laugh. “I get it. The old-fashioned rabbi from here prefers long beards and wild, coiling peyes that have never seen a comb, while you hold with the modern Orthodox rabbis with their well-groomed beards and trimmed peyes. Am I right?”

“You’re talking exactly like Bluma Rivtcha, and with even more derision.” Annoyed, Zindel began to sulk.

“Bluma Rivtcha? I hadn’t realized she was that sensible,” Tzesneh prodded him again, hurt by his indifference. Then she threw both arms around his neck, as if to test whether he really wasn’t afraid of women, like the other yeshiva boys. This time, Zindel didn’t push her away. Surprised and elated, Tzesneh felt his fingers running down her spine to her hips, where he began stroking the cheeks of her skinny bottom. Soon he’ll be lying supine at my feet, she thought, and wanted to show him how clever she was.

“Do you want to learn English and travel abroad so you can be an enlightened rabbi,” Tzesneh exhaled into his ear with her hot breath, “or do you want to go to Canada to reunite your parents?”

Gnendel had always said it was this she-devil in Tzesneh, driving her to flaunt her cleverness, that frightened the desire out of boys. Tzesneh instantly felt Zindel’s hands slipping from her body. He turned mute, not even bothering to utter his innocent “What do you mean?” Tzesneh tried to say something, to laugh, to kiss him. But he remained unflinchingly silent. So she switched on the electric lamp, and its pale reddish glow blinded them both.

“What’s so terrible about what I said that has you offended?” she asked, astonished.

“How would you know if I’m thinking about going to Canada to make peace between my parents?” he asked. “And why should anyone go poking their nose into another person’s life, anyway? How does anyone know what happened between my parents?” He became increasingly agitated. “You see? Bluma Rivtcha never speaks about these things with me.”

If she didn’t find him so attractive, she would have opened the door right then and told him to leave, or else stuck her long tongue out at him and laughed right in his face. Just look at how anxious he is, this yeshiva boy, thinking people shouldn’t remember his parents’ divorce. Must take after his father, the epileptic, the Hebrew teacher, and after his grandfather, the dayan, the pious stickler. A family of religious fanatics who turn everything into a secret. On the other hand, she had to admit, there was a certain boyish charm to his secretiveness. Well, for the time being, she wouldn’t worry over what would come of all this. For the time being, what she wanted was to enjoy life and make her Morehdalye friends burst with envy. So she patted Zindel’s forehead with her narrow hand and pacified him: starting today, she would no longer ask him anything or want to know anything he himself didn’t tell her.

* The Yiddish word shter means “to spoil; to hinder.” Shterke is a diminutive form of Shterne, which means “star.” But in this case, it seems Beinush considers Shterke to mean “a woman who spoils things.”