ТОП просматриваемых книг сайта:
The Book of Israela. Rena Blumenthal
Читать онлайн.Название The Book of Israela
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781532658501
Автор произведения Rena Blumenthal
Жанр Религия: прочее
Издательство Ingram
I was back in Kiryat Yovel by 3:00, with just enough time to shower and change before joining the exhaust-choked pilgrimage along the Jerusalem–Tel Aviv highway. It was an unusually cold and stormy spring, and the dark, low-hanging clouds perfectly mirrored my state of mind. I was in a petulant mood from Jezebel’s condescending note and in dread of the evening ahead. My parents had called to wish us a happy Passover and had been crisply informed by Nava that I no longer lived there. We had always spent holidays with Nava’s family, which had riled my mother for years. I would have been happy to skip the whole rigmarole, but what excuse could I possibly give now? Not that my parents believed in any of this religious stuff, but seder was seder, and without the convenient excuse of pushy in-laws, there was no way to avoid the family gathering.
The nation was on high alert for the holiday, and convoys of soldiers were making the highway even more clogged than usual. Two international peacekeepers had been killed the day before near Hebron, and a major attack thwarted at the Malha mall. After an interminable stop-and-go ride, I finally arrived, just as the first fat drops of rain began to fall, in Petah Tikva, the faceless little city east of Tel Aviv where I’d grown up. In my childhood, the town still retained remnants of its rural past, fragrant with orange groves. But the orchards had long since been paved over, and it was now a featureless suburb, a maze of white stone buildings, indistinguishable from all the other flat, crowded little towns that sprawled across the coastal plain.
Mainly due to my own reluctance, Nava and I had rarely visited the homestead, a comfortable, third-floor flat full of overstuffed furniture. I trotted up the stairs, avoiding, as I always did, the claustrophobic two-person elevator. The door to the flat was wide open, a buzzy commotion emanating from the kitchen along with the greasy smell of frying potatoes. My father sat at a corner of the already-set dining room table grating fresh horseradish, his nose a cartoonish red, tears streaming down his face.
“You can buy that stuff already grated, you know,” I said by way of greeting.
He didn’t miss a beat. “That’s how weak this generation is, even fake suffering is too much for them. A little bitterness in the food is beyond their tolerance. Prepared horseradish? As bitter as life with a bunion. What would they do with a Holocaust, I wonder.”
“Right,” I said. “That’s the problem with modern Israel, there isn’t enough suffering.” I looked around. “Is Anat here yet?”
“If Anat was here, you wouldn’t already hear her yammering?” He wiped the tears from his eyes with his handkerchief, stuffed it back in his pocket, then resumed grating. “Anat called an hour ago from the highway. The road out of Samaria is jammed. She’s not the only one with the sense to escape that self-made prison for a week. Between this freaky weather and the multiplying checkpoints, it will be amazing if she gets here before dark.”
“They’re staying the whole week?” I asked.
“She may be a religious fanatic, but she’s not crazy. You think she wants to prepare her own house for Passover when she’s got a slave of a mother who’ll do it for her?”
“How are you going to survive a week with Habakuk?”
“I survived Hitler, you think I can’t survive Habakuk?” He shot me a look. “You were no better, you know.”
“You were a bit younger then,” I said.
Before he could answer, his face convulsed into another paroxysm as the horseradish made its way back up his nose. I left him whinnying and cursing at the knobby root as I ventured into the kitchen to find my mother, aproned and mitted, bustling between bubbling pots and sizzling pans, the queen of her steamy domain.
“Kobi, you made it!” She beamed at me but never stopped moving. “And with this horrible weather. To the last minute, I told your father, I wonder if he’ll really come. He so hates being here, maybe he’d rather sit alone on seder night than be with his old parents.”
“Ima, don’t be ridiculous.” I reached over and pecked her on the cheek, the steam from the open pot fogging my glasses. “Everything smells so good. What are you cooking?”
“What, on Passover there’s a choice? Chicken soup, matzah balls, potato kugel, tzimmes, inedible pastries. Why do you ask? You don’t even remember what a Jewish family eats on Passover? What did they feed you in that sabra household?”
“Same thing. You’re right, a silly question.”
She took a sip from the soup pot, then shook her head in disapproval, scanning her spice rack for options as she spoke. “Kobi, it kills me, thinking of you living all alone in some horrible flat.”
“You haven’t even seen it.”
“You expect us to travel to Jerusalem at our age, with all that traffic? Never mind all the bombings, and the crazy haredim throwing stones at your car. I never understood why you wanted to live in that ghost-ridden city. You should move back to Petah Tikva, get your own flat a few blocks away. We’ve got plenty of crazy people here for you to cure. You could open your own practice. It’s not normal for a man to live alone like that, without a wife and family. How could she do that to you? And just a month before Yudit’s big party.” Having spiced the soup to her satisfaction, she pulled a kugel out of the oven, slamming the oven door.
“She didn’t do anything to me. It was a mutual decision,” I said. There was no point trying to explain. “Did you speak to Yudit when you called the house?”
“I never speak to Yudit; she’s always busy when I call. She already has a young, fancy-shmancy, Israeli-born savta—what does she need an old-world bubbe for?”
“Don’t be silly, Yudit loves you.”
“Yudit barely knows me, I see her so rarely. Now I’ll see her even less.” She sighed deeply, poking at the edges of the kugel. “Maybe she’s better off that way. Our generation, we only represent suffering and shame. That’s why your wife, that Nava, kept her away from us. And now we can’t even celebrate her bat mitzvah.”
“You’re being completely unfair—Nava never kept her from you. And besides, who says you can’t go to the bat mitzvah?”
She turned from the stove, brandishing her wooden spoon like an orchestra conductor. “What, you think we would go without you? So that Nava of yours can shunt us off to some distant, shadowy corner of the room? Far from her elegant, sophisticated parents? Just because their grandparents escaped the ghettos a couple of generations ahead of us, they think they can look down on us. Shtetl Jews, that’s what they call us.” I started to protest but she cut me off. “No, no, no—if you don’t go, we don’t go!”
“OK, OK, don’t get upset. Although what you’re saying about her parents . . .”
“It’s all true, and you know it.” Her face suddenly softened. “But still, that Nava was good for you. You would have never settled down without her. Kobi, what are you going to do to get her back?”
A whooping shriek saved me from having to answer. Habakuk, in a soaking yellow rain jacket, came bounding into the little kitchen, grabbing my mother’s legs in a brutal grip. She tried to shake him off, but he only dug his nails in harder.
“Habe’le,” she yelled, “you’re hurting your bubbe!”
In the living room I could hear my younger sister, Anat, lecturing my father at full tilt. I peeked out of the kitchen to see her huge form rooted in the center of the living room, her raincoat dripping audibly onto the floor tiles. She was already well into a detailed complaint about the soldiers at the checkpoints who’d caused the delay. Her skinny beard of a husband was dragging in stuffed suitcases and an odd lot of water-logged paraphernalia. Habakuk zoomed out of the kitchen, flung his soggy jacket and kipa onto the couch, and began racing figure eights around their legs, yelling wildly into the cosmos.
I followed him into the living room. “Hey, Habakuk,” I