Read an Excerpt
1
In the beginning there was a warm room with a table, a black iron stove and old red-flowered wallpaper. The child lay on a cot feeling the good heat while the mother moved peacefully from the table to the stove. When the mother sang her small voice quavered over the lulling nonsense-words; the song was meant to be gay but the child felt sadness in it.
“Don’t sing,” she commanded and the mother stopped. She was amused.
“Imagine,” she told her husband, “Anna doesn’t like my voice! She made me stop singing today!”
The father laughed and picked Anna up. He had a sandy beard and dim blue eyes. He was slow and tender, especially when he touched the mother; the child was comforted when he put his arms around the mother.
“Kiss Mama!” she said.
They laughed again and the child understood that they were laughing at her and that they loved her.
For a long time the days and the years were all the same. In the house the mother moved between the stove and the table. The father hammered boots and cut leather for harness in his front-room shop. On the big bed in the room back of the kitchen the mother brought new babies to birth; one year there were twin boys, red-haired like Anna and Papa.
On Friday nights there was a linen cloth on the table; there was sugar in the tea, and white bread. Papa brought beggars home from the synagogue; the beggars were dirty and had a nasty smell. They were given the best food in the house, the plum jam and the breast of chicken. The room was shadowed; the white light of the candles burned through Mama’s hands as they moved in blessing and flickered on the pearls in her ears. There was a lovely and lofty mystery in her words and on her face.
It seemed to the child that the world had always been and would always be like this. She could not imagine any other way for people to live. The road through the village was dusty in the summer, muddy and icy in the winter; it stretched to the river where there was a bridge and went on for miles, it was said, to other villages like this one. The houses were strung along the road or clustered around the wooden synagogue, the market and the school. All of the people who lived here knew you and called you by name.
The ones who did not know you—the Others—lived on the far side of the little river where the church steeple rose over the trees. Beyond there cattle grazed, and farther still you could see the wind make tunnels “through the growing wheat. The milkman came every day from that direction, two heavy wooden buckets swinging from his yoke. People seldom went there. There was no reason to go unless you were a peddler or a milkman, although sometimes you did go with Mama to buy vegetables or extra eggs.
The days were measured and ordered by the father’s morning, afternoon and evening prayers; by the brothers in their black coats and visored caps going to and coming from school. The weeks ran from Friday night to Friday night. The year ran from winter to winter, when silent snow fell and voices rang like chimes in the silence. The snow turned to rain, drenching the lilacs in the yard, strewing petals over the mud. Then before the return of the cold came the short, hot summer.
Anna sits on the step in the breathless night, watching the stars. Of what can they be made? Some say they are fire. Some say the earth is fire like them, and that if you could stand far off and look at the earth it would glitter like the stars. But how can that be?
Papa does not know; he does not care about such things. If it is not in the Bible he is not interested in it. Mama sighs and says that she does not know either. Surely it would be wonderful if a woman could be educated and learn about things like that. A rabbi’s wife in a far-off district runs a school for girls. There, very likely one could learn about the stars and how to speak other languages and much else besides. But it would be very expensive to go to such a school. And anyway, what would one do with that kind of knowledge in this village, this life?
“Although, of course,” Mama says, “everything need not be useful. Some things are beautiful for themselves alone.” Her eyes look into the distance and the dark. “Maybe it will be different after a while, who knows?”
Anna does not really care. The stars glow and spark. The air is like silk. Clouds foam up from the horizon and a little chill comes skimming on the wind. Across the road someone closes the shutters for the night with a clack! and click! She rises and goes back into the house.
Sometimes she listens to scraps of talk, the parents’ evening murmur that repeats itself often enough to form a pattern. They talk about America. Anna has seen a map and knows that, if you were to travel for days, after a time you would come to the end of the land called Europe, which is where they live. And then there would be water, an ocean wider than the land over which you have come. You would sail for days across that water in a ship. It is both exciting and disturbing.
Of course, there are many people in the village whose relatives have gone to America. Mama has a second cousin in New York, Cousin Ruth, who has been there since before Anna was born. Tales arrive by mail:
in America everyone is alike and it is wonderful because there is no difference between rich and poor. It is a place where there is equality and justice; every man is the same as every other. Also, America is a place where it is possible to become very rich and wear gold bracelets and have silver forks and spoons.
Papa and Mama have been talking for a long time about going, but there has always been some reason they cannot leave. First, there was Grandmother who had suffered a stroke. The people in America would not have let her in, and of course the family could not just have gone away and left her. Then Grandmother died, but Eli and Dan, the twins, were born. After them came Rachel. Then Celia. And Papa had to save more money. They would have to wait another year or two.
So they would never go, Anna knew. America was only something that they talked about in their bed at night, the way they talked about household things and their neighbors, about money and the children. They would stay here always. One day, a long, long time from now, Anna would be grown, a bride like Pretty Leah whose father had the chicken farm just past the bridge, led under the canopy to the dance of violins, with a white gauze veil over her face. Then she would be a mother, lying in the bed like Mama with a new baby. But still it would be the same life; Papa and Mama would be here, looking no different from the way they looked now.
Yes, and the sheltering house would be here, too. And Rachel stirring in the bed. The old dog jingling his chain in the yard. The blown curtain; summer nights of pine and hay and Mama’s bush of yellow roses at the gate. Rustle of night-birds, trill of frogs: I am alive, I am here, I am going to sleep.
