Chapter 14

Sitting in Rivka’s kitchen, facing this crisis amid the signs of her poverty, Gershon thought back to another crisis caused by their meagre beginnings. The winter that Gershon was twelve was unusually cold and the peasants who farmed in the countryside made fewer trips into town to shop at the Mendels’ grocery store. To help out, Gershon got a job assisting the baker. The work was heavy, but as his muscles got stronger, he was allowed to carry sacks of flour from the grain merchant’s delivery van into the baker’s shop. Sometimes the merchant himself, Yetta’s father, showed up to negotiate a big sale.

Two weeks before Chanukah, Yetta accompanied him. Gershon, covered in flour and red-faced with embarrassment, had tried to keep his back to her, but was forced to turn around to set down a tray of steaming loaves fresh from the oven. He wiped his brow with his sleeve.

Yetta opened the mother-of-pearl clasps on her coat. “It’s hot in here. I’m sweating too.” She dabbed the tip of her nose with a linen handkerchief and handed it to Gershon.

He held it at arm’s length, intimidated by its heavenly lightness and delicate embroidery.

“My mother taught me to sew last year. Now that I’m eleven, I’m learning how to bake.”

Gershon eyed the coarse brown loaves cooling on the counter. Yetta would bake with the white flour her father sold his wealthy customers, using Viennese honey from bees who dined on lavender and roses, not the honey Gershon and his friends collected in the nearby clover fields.

“I’ll bring you a piece of nut cake the next time we come here,” Yetta promised.

Her father was speaking to the baker. “My porter will make the delivery next week, then I’ll come in to settle up.” He looked around the shop and said, “I see you’ve found an industrious young man to help you out.” Turning to Gershon, he asked if he were a bar mitzvah.

“Next year, sir, I’ll turn thirteen and be called up to the Torah.”

“Industrious yes, but not quite a man,” he said and smiled. While he shook hands with the baker, Yetta took her handkerchief from Gershon’s paralyzed fingers and slipped it into his shirt pocket. Striding to the door, her father caught them exchanging a shy smile. His expression grew puzzled, then alarmed. Gershon heard a whip crack as their carriage sped down the icy street.

A few days later, the baker promised Gershon a Chanukah bonus. Gershon’s father, Julius, wanted to use the money to repair the wooden bins where he stored matches, which got ruined when damp seeped through the rotten boards. Feigel, his mother, hoped to make his sister a new coat. Rivka was two years too big for her old one, and when she came in from hauling water or wood, her exposed skin was chafed. She’d developed a cough that was getting louder and deeper.

Gershon had other plans. He told his parents that rats had raided the flour and the baker, rather than giving him a bonus, was sending him to the city for more. Then he asked the baker if he could borrow the cart to buy lumber for his father. The baker handed him the reins and gave him the afternoon off. Gershon drove to the city where he bought a hand mirror for Yetta. It was made in Germany and the enamelled back was as blue and yellow as a summer sky.

The following week, Yetta’s father held her arm tightly as he escorted her into the bakery. Gershon had to find a way to give her the mirror. Unloading a tray of rugelach, he suggested to the baker that they give some of the cinnamon-raisin cookies popular at this time of year to their esteemed guests. The baker readily agreed and when he handed over the money for the flour, Yetta’s father reluctantly released his grip on his daughter to count it. Gershon beckoned her toward the oven and walked in front of the counter to hide Yetta from view. With his right hand, he gave her a cookie; with his left, the mirror. “Happy Chanukah,” he whispered.

She held the glass so that both their faces were reflected in it, his glistening with hope, hers radiating delight. They smiled at their image and then, briefly, directly at each other, before Yetta slipped the mirror into her coat pocket. She skipped back to her father. “Papa, these are better than Mama’s. Do you think she’d be upset if we brought some home?”

He suggested it would be kinder to disguise the baker’s cookies by mixing them in with his wife’s. The baker told Gershon to wrap them up as a gift. Gershon was clumsy tying the string around the box, but Yetta’s deft fingers made a neat bow. Their hands touched as he handed over the package. Her father grabbed it and swept his daughter out into the cold.

Rivka lay in bed the first night of Chanukah, too sick to eat potato latkes. As she alternately shook with chills and sweated with fever, her breath came in rapid bursts between dry, hacking coughs. Feigel used scarce wood to keep water boiling on the stove in hopes that the warm, moist air would sooth her daughter’s lungs. Still, over the next four days, her condition worsened. Rivka vomited back even a sip of tea, and his mother was terrified when her lips and nails turned blue from lack of oxygen.

“Send Gershon for the doctor,” Feigel told her husband.

“We can’t afford him.”

“Then get the feldsher. He’s cheaper.”

“We can’t afford him either.” Julius threw another stick of wood in the stove, but relented as pain spread from Rivka’s chest to her abdomen. The feldsher confirmed she had pneumonia. He said to apply clay poultices every hour, and wrote a prescription for a serum to take to the apothecary. Julius nodded, but put the slip of paper in his pocket. In lieu of payment, he agreed to give the feldsher kerosene and matches for the rest of the winter. “The matches better be dry,” the feldsher said, wrapping a scarf around his neck. “Not like the last batch you sold me.”

Two days later, Rivka coughed up phlegm streaked with blood. Feigel thrust out her hand and Julius turned over the prescription. Gershon raced to the drug store, paying for the serum with his mother’s promise to sew a new coat for the apothecary’s wife. Feigel hoped to use any leftover scraps of wool to lengthen Rivka’s coat if—no, when—she got better. But the wife was so fat that the coat used up every bit of material.

As Rivka drifted in and out of consciousness, each member of the family held a private conversation with God. Gershon imagined Julius venting his anger at being too poor for a real doctor, and Feigel asking for a miracle like the one being celebrated at this season. He listened to Rivka, in fevered dreams, ask to race through summer fields, picking fruit. But guilt made any attempt at prayer stick in Gershon’s throat. His chest ached as though he too had been stricken with pneumonia. At last, the words came to him. “Dear God, let Rivka live and I will forget Yetta and devote myself to study.”

On the eighth and last day of Chanukah, Rivka’s fever broke, answering Feigel’s prayers. The harsh winter ended as early as it had begun, followed by a mild spring. God softened toward Julius. Cheered by the warm weather, peasants came into town more often and bought extra supplies at the store. Berries ripened ahead of schedule. Eager to help Rivka regain her strength, everyone in the family poured fruit, cream, and condensed milk into her bowl.

Gershon left his job with the baker and ceded the championship of nuts-in-the-hole back to Avram. He took advantage of the lengthening days to sit in the rebbe’s study and pore over the ancient texts. Being inside also lessened the likelihood that he’d have a chance encounter with Yetta. He willed his mind, heart, and spirit to think only of the sacred Torah scrolls.

Alas, banishing thoughts of Yetta was impossible. After his bar mitzvah, Gershon had been admitted into the Hevra Sha-as, the town’s Talmudist society, of which her father was a member. Debating minute points of law with him was a weekly reminder that the rules of wealth and poverty kept Gershon from his daughter. Nevertheless, for six years after Rivka’s recovery, he made no attempt to contact her. The honour he brought his family through his studies continued to keep Rivka and his parents healthy. Even if he regretted the Mendels’ lack of money, they didn’t.