Mitla Pass - Leon Uris [88]
“I’ll make first a glass tea,” Sophie said. The fire in the stove was down to a whisper. She stirred it and reached into the wood basket for a small log.
“Woman! It is still the Sabbath. Since when do you cook on the Sabbath?”
“I need a glass tea,” she repeated. “You can pray for my soul all week; I’m having a glass tea.”
“So, I’ll have a glass tea too,” Yehuda agreed. “Nu, Matti, what world-shaking decisions required a meeting last night at Lufka’s?”
“The district received a special grant from Baron von Epstein in Geneva to send another of our members to Palestine. I was voted the one to go.”
“Nathan was at the meeting?”
“Yes. He doesn’t attend often, but he was at this meeting.”
“He likewise voted in favor of you?”
“No, Poppa. He screamed at us that the decision was unfair. He raged out of Lufka’s. When I ran him down he called me ten thousand dirty names. Poppa, I swear to you, I had no idea Nathan even wanted to go to Palestine anymore.”
Yehuda Zadok emitted a groan that had taken the Jews of the Pale a thousand years to develop. Matthias leaned against the window frame and touched the curtains, very fragile from age and too many washings.
“It’s all right,” Matti said. “Nathan deserves to go first. So what if it takes me a little more time? I’ll get to Eretz Israel.”
“You are certain you want to give Nathan your place?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
Yehuda patted his son’s shoulder affectionately.
“I told the comrades we’d meet again tonight. I’m sure they’ll honor my wishes and send Nathan.”
Sophie peered into the boys’ bedroom. Nathan’s bed had not been slept in. “I wonder where he is?” she said.
“In the woodshed,” Matthias said.
“In the woodshed,” his father repeated with an ironic laugh. “Nathan is in the woodshed.”
“I’ll try to talk to him again,” Matthias said.
“No, no, Matti, take for a walk your girlfriend. I’ll talk to him.”
When Matthias left, Sophie and Yehuda stared at their untouched glasses of tea. “You see what happens when you cook on the Sabbath,” Yehuda managed to say.
“For me personally,” Sophie said, “I’m glad he’s going if only to make him stop listening to this Bolshevik dreck. More and more he listens.”
“Lenin has decreed that there is no longer a Pale of Settlement for Jews. We can travel anywhere in Russia, even Moscow. Who knows, times may be changing.”
“Yehuda, you’re a first-rate crazy. Do you think one scratch of the pen will change a thousand years of Russian history? Russia will be a good place for the Jews to live when it stops snowing in Siberia. Lenin may be able to convince the Ukrainians they’re Russian, but he’ll never convince the Jews.”
“So what do you want, woman?”
“I want you should encourage Nathan to go to Palestine before he gets too mixed up in this Bolshevik business. What does he think? If he goes to Moscow they’ll throw flowers at his feet? The Russians are the biggest liars in the world.”
“So what are you breaking your head on, Sophie?”
“What? What? Look in every direction, Yehuda. Everyone wants the honor to destroy us. This place will end up being one big graveyard. The sooner the children leave, the better.”
“Sophie, you don’t understand nothing at all.”
“I understand what I understand and I understand it perfectly.”
“You’re speaking cows, I’m speaking horses. Sophie, our son Nathan doesn’t know what he wants. He never has. He probably never will. If he goes to Palestine, I tell you he is going to fail. If he goes to America, he will fail.”
She blinked at him, not understanding.
“I say the following with a stone in my heart,” Yehuda continued, “but Nathan is a shtetl Jew. He knows how to survive in this atmosphere, but put him in another place and he’ll create a misery. Some people are meant to be born, live, and die in the shtetl, just like you and me.”
Tears came to Sophie Zadok’s eyes. “Let him go to Palestine. I cannot go on living if another of my children is in the Wolkowysk cemetery.”
TO PALESTINE
Warsaw, 1920
THE NEWLY RE-CREATED state of Poland was actively and openly anti-Semitic by national policy, a policy