“No.”
Don’t stop, Michael thought. Go on, Mom, get it all from him.
“But you were married?”
She heard me!
“Yes,” the rabbi said.
A pause. Michael moved his chair to be able to see the rabbi without staring. The ache eased in his head.
“His wife’s name was Leah,” Michael said. “She died during the war.”
“That damned war,” Kate said.
A vagrant piece of music drifted from the yards. Bing Crosby, singing about faraway places with strange-sounding names, far away over the sea. Then Kate said: “Tell me about her.”
Rabbi Hirsch stared at his tea the way Michael had often stared at the photograph of Leah. Small beads of perspiration appeared on his forehead. He held the teacup in a clumsy way.
“Forgive me,” Kate said. “I don’t mean to be nosy.”
“Nosy, no, no, that you are not. But… a hurt, a bad hurt, maybe better we shouldn’t talk about.”
“Sometimes it’s better to talk about things, instead of holding them all inside.”
He glanced at her and exhaled.
“True,” he said.
His eyes grew cloudy with the past. He stared into the teacup.
“Well… it’s in another life.”
And then in the warm Brooklyn evening, with the sound of foghorns drifting from the harbor through the open window, the rabbi told the story to the widow from Ireland and her American son. And perhaps even to himself.
“We met in Prague in 1937,” he said. “A Zionist she was, full of, how do you say it? Passion? She was from Warsaw. Eighteen years old. You know what is a Zionist?”
While Rabbi Hirsch tried to explain Zionism, Michael slipped again into Prague, a city where automobiles and trolley cars moved, where Rabbi Lowe and Emperor Rudolf once held secret meetings in the fog. Michael could see Leah Yaretzky, slim and dark-haired, a student from Poland, speaking German and Yiddish and a little Czech, her eyes blazing. He stood beside young Rabbi Hirsch as he watched her at a crowded meeting at Charles University, everybody smoking, eyes intense, full of alarm and fear.
“It goes back before that night I seen her first time,” the rabbi said. “It goes back to 1923, when the swastika we saw for the first time, in pictures from Munich,” he said. “Hitler’s name we heard in the wireless radio and the newspapers and the magazines, and in Italy, Mussolini already has came to power. Hitler, a putsch he tried already in November, out of a beer hall, and failed and everybody laughed at him. He’s a Charlie Chaplin, who cares? But some smart people said: He is the future. My father said I would have to choice.”
“Choose,” Michael said.
“Choose. I can become more of a Jew, he said, or I can be no Jew at all. I choosed to be more of a Jew.”
Before the end of the year, his father was dead. Michael could see Judah Hirsch at his father’s hospital bed, promising to become a rabbi. Saw him in school. Studying holy books and listening to white-haired old rabbis explain Torah and Talmud. Working as an assistant in a modern synagogue in Prague. And then it was 1937, when Michael was two years old and his father was still alive and waltzing with Kate Devlin in the Webster Hall. And Michael could see Rabbi Hirsch going to the meeting where he first heard Leah Yaretzky speak.
Her words meant little to him. “A Jewish homeland, in Palestine, it was like a myth,” he said. “Like something in a song. Nothing it meant to me. Jews had been in Prague for a thousand years. We were doctors, lawyers, businessmen. Jews were artists. Jews were writers. Why go to the desert to be farmers?”
But when Leah Yaretzky rose, she did not deliver a polite speech. Nor a sentimental speech. Certainly not a religious speech, and definitely not the kind of speech you would expect from a woman. Michael heard her speaking in beautiful Yiddish, silencing the crowd with talk about Hitler, who was in absolute power now in Germany. Hitler was not a Charlie Chaplin. She warned the audience about what was certain to come with Hitler to all of Europe, including Prague. Michael could hear her, as he stood beside Rabbi Hirsch, and Leah Yaretzky spoke about death and destruction. Her hands were waving as she insisted that they all must leave Central Europe for Palestine, so that the Jews could survive. She talked about Israel. She talked about Zionism. She talked about guns. Rabbi Hirsch had never heard a woman speak this way. Neither had Michael.
“She said if Jews were going to live they must be ready to die,” he said. “And she was right.”
“She wanted to use guns against the Nazis?” Michael asked in a thrilled whisper.
“Yes. And the British too, in Palestine. The British, she said, they never understand anything unless you shoot them.”
“Well, she was right about that,” Kate Devlin said, with a faint smile.
The tea was finished now, and Kate Devlin stood up and went to a closet and took down the bottle of wine from the top shelf. She placed it on the table.
“A glass of wine, Rabbi?”
He peered at the label of the pint of Mogen David.
“You keep kosher?” he said in a pleased way.
“I like the sweet taste,” she said, taking two clean water glasses from the rack on the sink. “Most wines are too sour. But this, I like this.”
“Me too.”
She poured the dark purple liquid into both glasses. The rabbi nodded and sipped, and his tongue grew even looser, the past more powerful, as he told about how he kept returning to the meetings, more to see Leah Yaretzky than to learn about Zionism. In private rooms, after the great meetings, Michael saw her charting the secret routes to Palestine. He saw her handing frightened men and women the lists of contacts along the way. He heard her arranging jobs in Tel Aviv. And he saw her late at night, rushing along the fog-slick streets, holding hands with Rabbi Hirsch, moving closer to him.
“It was, how do you say? A great love,” he said, groping for words, but surprisingly — to Michael — not embarrassed. “For me, there was no mystery why I love her. She was good. Beautiful. She have, had, what I don’t have, that passion. Still I don’t know why she love me, a poor rabbi, who didn’t believe what she believed.”
“Nobody has answers to such questions, Rabbi,” Kate Devlin said.
“No. We don’t never know.” He paused. “But there was one thing we could not to do. I saw her, I heared her, I loved her, my Leah. But I have in my head this one thing: to dance with her. Before I am a rabbi student, I love to dance. I love the cabaret, the music. I love when on the radio from Vienna we hear Strauss, a waltz. I love the jazz we hear too, Bix Beiderbecke? Paul Whiteman.… So I want to go with her to some place, not in rabbi clothes, some place with music and laughing and no worry about time and Hitler. Just to dance. Just that. To dance with Leah Yaretzky, to dance with my woman I love.”
Kate Devlin’s eyes watered. She sipped her wine.
“Could you waltz?” Michael asked, picturing his father at the Webster Hall.
“Of course, boychik! We are only a day from Vienna, the world champion of the waltzes.”
Judah Hirsch and Leah Yaretsky never found time to waltz. And Michael pictured the rabbi at a newsstand in Prague, reading that Hitler’s troops were moving into the Saar. He saw him rushing about with Leah to meetings, dodging spies and informers. He was with Rabbi Hirsch on the steps of the synagogue as frightened Jews arrived in Prague from a place called the Sudetenland, to sleep on floors or in wagons, and together they heard Hitler ranting on the radio that the Sudetenland was German. Everybody wanted visas to America, like Ingrid Bergman in that movie Casablanca. But Michael heard them saying that the Americans didn’t want any more Jews. And wondered if this was because in America there were also people who painted swastikas on synagogues.