BERLIN, PRUSSIA
Summer 1816
Peace reigned. Napoleon had been defeated at Waterloo a year ago.
On this lovely day, Sara sensed the air itself trembling with life. Fountains tossed spray into the sunlight, creating rainbows. Geometric-patterned flower beds bloomed in a wash of color. Statues of Greek and Roman mythological figures stood on plinths arranged in a procession: Diana the Huntress, Daphne becoming a laurel tree, Leda and the swan. In the near distance, stands of lime trees framed the scene.
When Sara’s father bought these acres years ago, he hired the royal gardener to design them. The landscape had grown to resemble the gardens surrounding the royal palace of Sans Souci. The family possessed another garden, too, a wild, rustic retreat that was their summer estate, outside the city gates: the Bartholdy Meierei, with its petite palais and broad meadows, its dairy farm and windmill. But the Luisenhof was the place that her father had loved best. Once when Sara was eleven or twelve, he had brought her here (his valet following at a distance, the coachman waiting at the garden gate). He’d shown her the view from the orangerie. She’d stood beside him during his meeting with the gardener. She’d shared his company throughout the afternoon. Those hours were the longest time she’d ever spent alone with him.
She could still sense her father’s presence, today as she walked with Lea. Lea’s children fanned out around them. The group was like an Oriental caravan making its progress across the landscape: Sara herself and her maid, who maintained a suitable distance behind her; Lea and Lea’s maid, also at a suitable distance; and the four children . . . Fanny, almost eleven, with her tutor; Felix, seven, with his tutor; Rebecka, five, with her nanny; and Paul, almost four, with his nanny.
“Mama, Mama!” Rebecka, braids bouncing, ran across the lawn toward Lea and Sara. “Paul pushed me, he pushed me,” she shrieked as her nanny chased her. “And he hit me.”
The girl stood before them. “Now, Rebecka,” Lea said, “that sounds unlikely.”
“Fräulein Rebecka,” said the nanny, catching up, panting in the heat, squinting from the sun, “you know very well that you were the one who pushed Paul, and hit him, too.”
Paul was crying in his nanny’s arms amid the faux-Greco-Roman statues.
“You must apologize to your brother,” Lea said.
“I will not.”
“Rebecka,” Lea cautioned.
“I won’t.”
“Nanny can take you home if necessary.”
“Come with me, Fräulein Rebecka,” said the nanny. “You apologize to Paul now, or home we go.” The nanny took Rebecka by the hand and led her to her brother, who wailed as she approached.
“Ten times a day, this happens,” Lea said.
What could Sara say? Lea had the proverbial patience of a Christian saint. Sara had longed for children, but the daily bickering, which went on despite the nannies and the tutors, would have been a strain to her. As she grasped this fact, she laughed at herself.
“What is it?” Lea asked. “What makes you laugh?”
“Ah, dearest.” She wouldn’t share the truth with Lea. “Your children are marvels. And you’re a marvelous mother to them.”
Lea smiled, her expression combining happiness, pride, and a hint of wistfulness. “They can be little monsters, I’m not blind to that. But thank you.”
“I think of them as my own grandchildren. Fanny, Felix, Rebecka, Paul. Each one dear to me.”
That was an overstatement. Sara felt little empathy with Felix and Rebecka, and Paul was too young to have much personality. Fanny was the child she felt drawn to—Fanny, gazing at a lily while her tutor appeared to be explaining to her some fact of botany. Fanny, brilliant at her music and her studies, one shoulder higher than the other, her features heavy.
“You must always consider them your grandchildren. That’s what I expect. And what I want.”
How earnest Lea was. How concerned. Sara wished never to be a source of worry for Lea. “Thank you, my dear. The day is gorgeous, let us walk.”
Arms linked, they continued their promenade. Behind them, Felix called to his siblings for a game of hide-and-seek.
Sara and Lea reached the welcome shade of the allée beneath the giant plane trees. On the far side, visible through the trees, was the open-air theater where Sara and her siblings had performed theatricals for their parents. Soon Lea’s children would do the same.
And so it would be, throughout the generations.
“Is the garden different now, from when you were young?” asked Lea.
“It’s exactly the same, except more magical, more beckoning.”
They reached the octagonal garden house, half-hidden by peach trees. Its wide-windowed room held a piano, comfortable chairs, books, and a stack of notebooks going back decades, recording the names of the birds observed within the garden.
“The garden house meant so much to me when I was a girl,” Lea said. “It was my little paradise. My imagination took flight here.”
“And what did you imagine?”
“My future.”
“Has your future matched your imaginings?”
“Yes, it has. My husband and I are most happy together.”
Sara’s private opinion of Abraham Mendelssohn, that he was unworthy of Lea, hadn’t changed over the years, but Lea’s contentment made his unworthiness acceptable.
“A happy marriage illuminates life,” Sara said. “I felt such fulfillment with Samuel. I feel it still, in his memory. Our happiness has been the unwavering center of my life.”
“I understand,” Lea said.
The children’s game of hide-and-seek continued, with shouts of surprise and triumph.
“My children exceed my imaginings. Everything I’ve read and studied, the piano pieces I’ve played—all this I now teach to them. Tante,” Lea squeezed Sara’s hand. “I must speak with you in confidence.”
“Yes?” Sara feigned surprise. She’d suspected that a secret needed to be discussed today. The formality of the invitation had alerted her. A note, delivered this morning by Lea’s footman, requesting a rendezvous, suggesting this meeting place. Perhaps Lea was once more enceinte . . . another pregnancy, that would warrant a formal invitation.
“You mustn’t tell my mother.”
Yes, probably a pregnancy. Babette worried terribly.
“You must promise not to say anything to her. Not yet.”
With the request repeated, Sara wondered if it was disturbing news that Lea was determined to protect. Was Abraham Mendelssohn’s work with the bank taking him away? Were they leaving Berlin, moving to a foreign city? This would be a blow to Babette. And to Sara.
“I’ve always spoken to you more . . . frankly than I’ve been able to talk to my mother.”
Sara couldn’t deny that this pleased her.
“I want your blessing.”
“My blessing? For what, my darling?”
Lea stopped walking. The shifting shadows of the sunlight through the trees softened the anguish on Lea’s face.
“What is it, Lea?”
“Several months ago, we had the children baptized.”
“Pardon?”
“We had them baptized.”
“I don’t understand.”
“As Christians. They’re Christians now.”
Sara still couldn’t grasp what Lea was saying. “They’re only children.”
“Children can be baptized.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
Of everything Sara had expected to hear, she hadn’t expected this. More than once, Sara had heard Lea express disdain for friends and family who’d converted.
“Shouldn’t your children be allowed to choose for themselves, when they’re grown?”
“They have to be raised as Christians. Educated that way. So they’ll really be that way, and have no regrets, no past to look back to.”
“But why?”
“You must already know why.”
“I don’t.”
“First, because of people like Arnim. Because of what he did and said at your home.”
Sara was silent. She didn’t think about that afternoon much anymore, but in the months immediately afterward, the memory of it had returned to her in waves of horror.
“His words expressed an ever-more-common view in Prussia.”
“That was long ago, Lea.” It wasn’t long ago, even though Sara tried to convince herself that it was. “And it had nothing to do with your children and everything to do with Arnim himself.”
“It was only five years ago. Fanny was there, remember? I told her that the shouting man was ill and had to be taken home. I don’t think she understood what he was saying. I don’t like to call attention to it by pursuing what she did or didn’t comprehend.”
Sara said nothing.
“If she’d been a few years older, she would have understood,” Lea said.
The other smell, Arnim had said. The stench. The foetor Judaicus. Once more Sara heard his brutal, cutting laughter.
“I know you never talk about it.”
And Sara wouldn’t discuss it now. Within herself, she raged. She felt sick with humiliation and revulsion. But Sara wouldn’t burden Lea with these feelings.
“The rest of the family, the rest of the city—we discuss it for you.”
Sara knew this was true. The notorious Itzig and Arnim affair. Newspaper articles, essays, even a play centered on it. There had been a sensational judicial case, because her nephew Moritz had attacked Arnim on the street, beating him with a stick, and Moritz was arrested for it.
The grand irony was that the judge, as well as Arnim’s peers in the nobility, sided against him. Arnim was discredited. Dishonored. During Prussia’s final battles against Napoleon, the army wouldn’t accept him. The nobleman who’d refused to duel a Jew had spent months holed up at his country estate, while the Jew died as a hero fighting for Prussia in the Battle of Lützen in 1813.
Sara would rather have Moritz alive than dead in the glory of battle.
“Yes, the nobility did side against Arnim,” Lea said, as if they heard each other’s thoughts, “but that doesn’t mean they sided with us.”
Staring at Lea, Sara felt the gulf between them that her own silence had created.
“I don’t want that kind of hatred to be directed toward my children. Talk like that, where does it lead?”
Sara couldn’t contradict her: anti-Jewish violence recurred again and again.
“And for the boys . . . Abraham and I have to think about their professional futures. As Christians they’ll have the full rights of citizens. Felix’s profession, Paul’s, whatever they choose, they’ll be able to pursue.”
Lea was right about this. Even the much-heralded (among Jews, at least) Emancipation Edict of 1812 had changed little for the Jews of Prussia. They still didn’t have full citizenship. Certain professions remained closed. And alas, most of the edict’s provisions had been withdrawn by the Prussian king after the defeat of Napoleon.
“In order to have a future in this country, they must be Christians. That’s what Abraham says.”
“And you?”
“I must keep them safe.”
“Your brother—”
“That’s why we can’t tell mother.”
About fifteen years before, Lea’s brother Jacob had converted to Christianity and changed his name from Salomon to Bartholdy, taking the name of the family’s rustic retreat outside the city gates. Afterward, Babette had disinherited him.
Sara said, “This is why I must promise not to tell your mother—my sister—something so important? So that you won’t be disinherited? Money is the reason you ask me to betray my duty to her?”
“My mother lives in the past. She would never understand.”
This was true. Babette was only twelve years older than Sara, but she seemed to belong to a different generation.
“You live in the world as it is, Tante. What about my duty—to safeguard my children?”
“You think converting will shield them? You think no one will remember that they were born Jews? That their grandfather was Moses Mendelssohn, the philosopher? You think baptism will give them blond hair and blue eyes?”
“I have to do whatever I can. To try to keep them safe. To give them a future. And besides, Christianity teaches morality, and ethics. It teaches everything good and fine, everything we Jews can believe in, too.”
“In theory, yes. But in practice? How ethical are today’s Christians, really, if Jews need to be protected from them? I regret to say that many Christians have strayed far from the teachings of their Lord.”
Lea turned and hastened away. Was she crying? Sara suspected she was. Sara felt tears, too, for Lea’s rejection of their heritage. Sara and Samuel had fulfilled their early vow never to convert. Each week, Sara joined her family and friends at the synagogue. Even so, Sara knew that many of their brethren felt compelled by the society around them to make the choice that Lea and Abraham had made.
After giving Lea a few moments to herself, Sara followed her, waving off their ladies’ maids. She found Lea sitting upon a secluded bench beside a lily pond. Purple hydrangeas surrounded the pond, and a stone nymph emerged from the flowers.
Sara sat down beside her as Lea wept. The laughter and shouts of the children reached them from a distance, on the other side of the copse.
After a time, Lea composed herself.
“Lea,” Sara said gently, “have you and Abraham converted, too?”
“No. Only the children.”
“But someday you might.”
“Someday. To keep the family together. What choice do we have?”
“Over here,” Fanny’s voice reached them as she called to her siblings.
“Tante, I hope you’ll still love me, after what Abraham and I have done.”
They’d arrived at the moment of choice. Sara’s choice. The moment of saying, I promise not to tell my sister. And, you have my blessing.
Sara’s love for Lea was stronger than her disapproval. Lea and her children would live in a future that Sara would never see. Lea had to do what she believed was right.
Misinterpreting Sara’s silence, Lea said, “If you can’t give me your blessing, please say you don’t despise me for what I’ve done.”
Sara made her resolution. She’d mourn Lea’s choice later, in private, alone.
“Lea Salomon Mendelssohn, now you have truly shocked me. You and your husband must always do what you believe is best for your children. That is indeed your duty as parents. And you, my own dearest niece—my cherished niece, from the time you were little—you could never do anything that would cause me to stop loving you.”