Mitla Pass - Leon Uris [111]
The business for sale was a good-sized store, nearly three times as large as his shop in Queenstown. It was perfectly located on St. John’s Street on the riverfront, with living quarters above the shop. With the help of a Jewish lawyer from Baltimore, he secured the deal. Twelve hundred dollars, cash, bought him the building, the inventory, and the goodwill of the late proprietor.
Balaban merchant tailor, the storefront window read. Thus Moses once again picked up his singular, semi-monastic life, a wandering Jew among the gentiles. It didn’t bother him the least that there was no Jewish life in Havre de Grace. After all, Baltimore was only a short train ride away and it was grander than Constanta and Cork combined on the holidays.
Moses Balaban had long ago conditioned himself not to hear what he did not wish to hear or see what he did not wish to see. He personally crammed his sons with several hours of nightly instruction in Hebrew and the Talmud, to ensure they would grow up to be good Jews, but he did not look at the world in which they were existing.
Saul, now seven, and Lazar, now eight, were among five Jewish children in Havre de Grace of school age. For the first time in their lives they heard the words and learned the meaning of “kike” and “sheeny!” In such isolation, they either had to fight or drown.
Uncaring about their bloody noses, black eyes, cuts, and bruises, Moses was concerned only about their torn clothing, for which he slapped them about automatically, without listening to their explanations. The boys grew very tough and became accepted to some extent by the gentile children, but they were almost always singled out for punishment by the teachers. They received so many slaps of the ruler over their knuckles, their hands were constantly swollen. Living in this state of precarious balance, Saul and Lazar became painfully aware that they were different, and grew both wily and wild.
Moses sewed and prayed and stuffed the Talmud down his sons’ throats. When the occasion required, usually weekly, he relieved himself, as he had done in Ireland, with a prostitute. Here it was a negro woman who lived with her six children in a shack on a small farm on the outskirts of town.
With the boys growing up rapidly and becoming more untamed by the day, Moses realized he had to make a drastic change. He needed a permanent woman, a wife to make him a home, cook his meals, take care of his sons, comfort him at night.
Each Friday morning he closed his shop, took the train to Baltimore well before the Sabbath started, and availed himself of the social circles that specialized in matchmaking.
One Friday evening after services, his eyes fell on Hannah Diamond as she came from the women’s balcony of the synagogue. For the first time in his life, a spark of love flared in his dark soul.
HANNAH DIAMOND sat before the vanity mirror in the dressing room in the rear of her shop. Her expression was pensive, mostly sad. She pinched her cheeks to liven them up.
Hannah would soon be nineteen and remained a spinster by choice. This was America, dammit! Despite her having no dowry to bring into a marriage, there had never been a lack of suitable proposals. Moreover, both her parents were dead and she had only herself to please.
America had given her this choice, this freedom. Yes, it was difficult to retain her independence. Marriages were being made all around her. People were starting to point their fingers.
Whenever she tottered close to acceptance, she backed off, invoking the memory of her mother and the living example of her older sister, Sonia. Hannah rationalized this way and that. The basic truth was that she was terribly uncomfortable around men.
She became determined to avoid the life of struggle that her mother and sister had been condemned to. Back in the old country, Momma had ingrained into her the canon that all men, and her father in particular, were put on this earth for the purpose of making women suffer.
Make Momma suffer