Now it was Rebbe Schiffman’s turn to dine at the King David, and he dressed for the occasion—fresh white shirt, black suit and tie. His wife even brushed his best black hat.
But there was an air of mystery about the luncheon. His host was referred to only as “Philadelphia.”
He had spent the morning reading a dog-eared manila file with cryptic markings, which to Deborah—who had dared to peek when he was out of the room—had looked like Japanese.
“Okay.” He sighed, closed the file, and rose to go. Half to himself and half to Leah, as she was helping him on with his black coat, he said, “When it comes to ‘Philadelphia,’ the wife makes the decisions.”
Leah squeezed her husband’s hand. “Good luck, Lazar.”
He smiled gratefully and left to catch the bus.
Deborah did her best to pry the secret out of the rebbitsin.
“This must be a very high-level meeting—what sort of business?”
“None of yours, so mind your own,” Leah cut her off firmly. “Besides, Rav Luria—may his name be for a blessing—must do the same sort of thing.”
Deborah was swimming in confusion. She could not recall an instance when her father had to attend a luncheon meeting at the Waldorf-Astoria with “Philadelphia” or any other city.
The rabbi returned just before evening prayers, flushed with excitement.
“So nu?” Leah asked impatiently.
“Thanks be to God,” her husband answered, “ ‘Mrs. Philadelphia’ liked the idea. They’re in for half a million.”
Deborah, who was beginning to fear that the Schiffmans were involved in some illegal practice, was eavesdropping intently but could hide no longer.
She entered the front room and asked ingenuously, “Did I hear someone say half a million dollars?”
And then an astonishing thing happened: Rebbe Schiffman did not get angry. Instead, he smiled broadly and replied, “This is a wonderful day. The Greenbaums from Philadelphia have given us the funds to build a dormitory for our yeshiva. Now we can take in more students.”
“Wonderful,” Deborah said. “That means you’ll be able to afford a larger house.” And a warmer one, she thought to herself. “Maybe with a garden so the children can get sun—”
The Rebbe scowled, cutting her off with a wave of his hand. “Bite your tongue. God forbid that I should use a penny of this money for myself. This isn’t America, where congregations give their rabbis Cadillacs.”
Her chagrin at Rebbe Schiffman’s scolding was overwhelmed by a momentary respect for his altruism. But that did not prevent her from detesting him.
He was still allowing his own family to live in squalor, not to mention treating her as the pharaohs did her forebears when they were slaves in Egypt.
Deborah knew she had to break free. She could no longer bear the condescension of Rebbe Schiffman, or the tyranny of his wife, who regarded her as a mere extension of the washing machine.
Had her father really known where he was sending her? Could he have told Rebbe Schiffman to combine the penalty of exile with the rigors of a labor camp?
She could not know for certain, for he never wrote. Her mother did—to say that she was pressing Moses to be reasonable and set a limit to their daughter’s punishment.
Moreover, as she had secretly promised, Rachel sent money with each letter. Clearly, she was sacrificing, for it was always at least ten dollars—and occasionally more.
Deborah kept the bills in an empty Elite coffee tin in the single drawer she was accorded in the girls’ dormitory.
On the morning of her eighteenth birthday, there was no celebration. Not that she expected a fanfare or a cake. But what would it have cost the Schiffmans to offer congratulations, or at least a smile?
At least her mother had remembered. And her affectionate letter was accompanied by a lavish gift of money—a ten and a twenty!
Deborah’s coffee can was full to overflowing, with nowhere to put her new largess. Leah had already advised her that, although there were—God forbid—no thieves in Mea Shearim, a person shouldn’t leave that kind of money in a drawer. Why didn’t she open a savings account?
It seemed a sensible idea. Early the next morning, Deborah left the house to walk to the Bank Discount on Hanevi’im Street.
Though it was the height of summer, the men wore heavy caftans and fur hats. Whenever she came close to any of them, they averted their gaze as if she were the Medusa.
She herself was overdressed for the season. Even if she had not known from her upbringing to wear long sleeves and a closed neckline, she could not have missed the omnipresent posters exhorting women to sartorial modesty.
Still, she felt a modicum of happiness just to be free of the stifling Schiffman household.
A block from the bank, while waiting to cross the road, she glanced up at the sign and realized that she was on the corner of Rechov Devora Hanevia—the street of Deborah the Prophetess. It seemed amazing that the Orthodox male residents would countenance even the mention of a woman in public, yet here was a street sign honoring her biblical namesake: Deborah, the Jewish Joan of Arc who had led forth the army of Israelites to confront the nine hundred iron chariots of mighty Canaan.
Could Deborah Luria not muster a scintilla of the same courage? Here she stood on a Thursday morning, several hundred yards from her dungeon, with ninety dollars—and her passport—in her pocket!
Afraid of losing her nerve, she broke into a run, racing by startled pedestrians, past the bank, down the Jaffa Road, across Nordau into the Central Bus Station.
Deborah stopped, breathless but exhilarated. She had escaped—almost.
Now the only problem was—where to go?
The signboards offered her a dizzying array of destinations: Jericho—the oldest city in the world, Tel Aviv—the most gaudy and nouveau. Or the Galilee.
The last seemed most attractive, not only because of its fabled beauty, but because it was as far from the Schiffmans as she could get.
Suddenly she had second thoughts. I’m a woman. No, be honest—I’m a girl. I can’t go traveling around on my own. I need … other people.
She paced the station anxiously, ransacking her mind for ideas and trying to bolster her faltering resolve.
Then she saw the little sign marked Egged Tours.
Two hours and fifty-six dollars later, she joined a busload of pilgrim-sightseers from Atlanta, Georgia, for a three-day guided trip through Haifa, Nazareth, and northward into the Galilee. She had seventy-two hours—and thirty-four dollars—to decide her fate.
They stopped for lunch in a tourist restaurant atop Mount Carmel in Haifa, and were seated at long tables by the picture window. Several hundred feet below, the shoreline looked like a huge sapphire on a white marble table.
As the tourists snapped photographs, Deborah went to the cashier and bought three tokens for the telephone.
She glanced at her watch as she began to dial. It had been nearly five hours since she had left for the bank. Had the Schiffmans begun to worry? Had they called the police?
Not likely, she assured herself. She was so insignificant they might not even have noticed she was gone.
“Hello?”
“Leah—it’s me, Deborah.”
“Nu, Madam Princess—where are you? I had to serve lunch all by myself.”
The reference to her servitude only strengthened Deborah’s resolve. “Listen, Leah, I’m not coming back. I can’t stand it anymore.”
“What craziness is this? Besides, who gave you permission?”
“I don’t need it anymore. I know you didn’t notice, but I’ve turned eighteen. That means I’m free to go anywhere I want.”
Suddenly Leah shifted gears. “Listen, darling,” she implored, her tone betraying panic. “I know you’re upset. Just tell me where you are, and I’ll get Mendel to drive and we’ll pick you up.”
“It’s no business of yours anymore. But I’ll make a deal with you.”
“Anything—anything.”
“Don’t tell my father, and I’ll call you in three days at this same time.”
“From where, Deborah?”
“From wherever I am,” she answered and hung up, herself wondering where that would be.
When she returned to the table, there was only a single empty seat. Her neighbor—a portly woman who introduced herself as Marge—clucked, “You’ve missed the soup, honey. You should tell the waiter.”
“That’s okay,” Deborah answered blankly, reaching hungrily for the bread.
“No,” her new friend insisted, “you paid for it. Waiter!”
As a bowl of soup was placed before her, Deborah was pleased that Marge had been a stickler for her “rights.” With less than forty dollars in her pocket, she would need every calorie to which she was entitled.
Indeed, as they were getting up at the end of the meal, she took an apple from the center of the table and stuffed it into her pocket.
The bus then proceeded to Nazareth. Here, oblivious to the commercialism that seemed to Deborah to have paganized the city of Christ’s childhood, the pilgrims prayed. They sat in the newly built Basilica of the Annunciation, gazing at the spectacular mosaics gathered from the four corners of the Christian world.
Much to their tour leader’s irritation, they overstayed their schedule, and it was nine P.M. when they finally reached the Roman Villa Hotel in Tiberias on the shores of the Sea of Galilee.
The hotel was merely a glorified four-storied concrete bunker, with no elevator or air conditioning. In the dining room, old-fashioned ceiling fans stirred the heavy air, keeping most of the flies at bay.
“I was really moved today,” Marge sighed at the dinner table. “It was one of the great moments in my life. How about you, Debbie dear?”
Deborah replied simply, “Yes … it was fascinating.”
“Are you here on your own?” Marge inquired.
“Sort of,” Deborah temporized. “Uh, I’ll be joining my parents later on.”
The dining room was airless, and the prevarication only made her sweat more profusely.
“Why, I think that’s wonderful,” the older woman remarked. “Most young girls nowadays are hippies, travelin’ with their boyfriends—if you know what I mean.”
Unsure of how to respond, Deborah pretended to concentrate on their dessert of canned fruit salad—incongruous in this land of Jaffa oranges and abundant fruit trees.
“Aren’t you hot in those long sleeves, dear?” Marge continued chattily.
“Yes,” she replied. “In fact, I’m going to take them right off.”
Even at the far end of the table, her fellow tourists were startled at the sound of Deborah ripping off first her right, then her left sleeve.
For Deborah, it was a double liberation. She was not only making herself more comfortable physically, she was also tearing away the past.
Though she would have preferred to be alone, Deborah could not spare the twenty-dollar surcharge for a single room.
Her roommate was a straitlaced teacher from a Baptist college in the South, who knelt by her bed for several minutes, palms together, looking upward.
She shot Deborah a disapproving look, and remarked, “I hope you won’t think I’m impertinent, young lady, but this is the Holy Land. Don’t you think you should say your prayers?”
“I did,” said Deborah to avoid more conversation, “while you were—you know—down the hall.”
The next morning, Deborah said a special inward prayer—blessing Israeli breakfasts, which offered not merely eggs and assorted breads, but yogurt, fruit, and salads.
This time, she appropriated two bananas.
Their tyrannical leader herded them into the bus at eight A.M. sharp to tour the ancient city and the Sea of Galilee—where St. Peter fished, Greeks raced in the stadium, and King Herod built a mint for the Roman emperors.
Afterward, they traveled past the city walls built by twelfth-century Crusaders, and proceeded to the final stop of their explorations: a visit to one of those idiosyncratic, altruistic communities known as a kibbutz.
This one was particularly radical—founded by European Jews of the Ha-Shomer Ha-Tza’ir movement, who had divorced themselves from religion to regain their kinship with the soil.
The pilgrims found Kfar Ha-Sharon interesting if, in Marge’s words, “a teenie bit too communistic.”
But Deborah was smitten. Here were Jews completely different from any she had ever known. If the Torah student was characterized by cadaverous pallor and stoop-shouldered frailty, the kibbutzniks were at the other extreme—bronzed and bursting with vitality.
Here, men in shorts, working side by side with women in still shorter shorts, tended orchards, planted vast fields of potatoes, and made honey from the hives in their enormous apiary.
The tour’s host was none other than the kibbutz leader, a Falstaffian man named Boaz, who spoke to them in Hungarian-accented English.
“Nowadays, little kibbutzim like ours cannot survive from agriculture alone. If you glance up the hill, you’ll see a building that looks like a small factory. Here we take the produce that we pick, then quickly freeze and pack it to be shipped to foreign markets.”
He paused and then asked, “Would any of you ladies and gentlemen like to observe the freezing of a thinly sliced potato?”
The Americans demurred. They had not traveled five thousand miles to see what Birds Eye showed them nightly on television.
But what did impress them was the idealism of the place—that an entire community could work for mutual benefit and not be paid in money. Yet, as Boaz commented, each member was supplied with everything he or she needed—physically and spiritually.
“For example, when we know we’ll need a doctor in, say, six or seven years’ time, we send a clever boy or girl to university in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv.”
To Deborah this was a revelation. Boaz had said, “We send a clever boy or girl.…” In the kibbutz, whether the fields were agricultural or academic, Jewish men and women were seen as equals.
And there was more. At almost every work site they visited, the young men looked at her—indeed, some even looked her over, and actually smiled.
During the early dinner that concluded the tour, Deborah determined to speak with Boaz. To her surprise, he had intended to do the same thing.
“Tell me,” he asked, “what brings a girl like you on a tour of Christians from the Bible Belt? Are you a convert maybe?”
Deborah smiled. “If I’d stayed another week in Mea Shearim, maybe I would have been.”
Boaz raised his eyebrows. “Mea Shearim—and you ate dinner at our table?”
“Was it pork?” Deborah asked, unable to conceal her distress.
“No,” Boaz answered. “But that was real butter we served with the chicken, not margarine. You’ve mixed milk with meat. By any rebbe’s standards, that’s unkosher.”
“Oh,” said Deborah, feeling shocked and guilty. “I didn’t even think of that. I just took it for granted that everybody in Israel was kosher.”
“You have been spending too much time in Mea Shearim.” Boaz smiled. “Now, tell me how you got on this crazy tour.”
Deborah spilled out her story—that is, most of it. She did not feel it necessary to explain why she had been exiled from her father’s house.
“So,” Boaz concluded when she finished her narrative, “now you’re homeless in the homeland of your own people.”
“That’s about it,” Deborah shrugged. “So when my money runs out …” She stopped.
In truth, she had been afraid to give serious thought to what she would do when her remaining dollars were exhausted. She knew only that she would not go back to the Schiffmans’.
Boaz sensed the words that would most comfort her. “Why don’t you stay here on the kibbutz for, say, a month while you think things over? Of course, you’d have to work like everybody else.”
“Don’t worry, I’m used to hard work,” she responded eagerly, then diffidently asked, “Could it be outdoors?”
“Outdoors, indoors—in the fields, in the kitchen, with the chickens, with the children. Everybody here does a little bit of everything.”
“Then I’ll do a little bit of everything,” she affirmed with a tiny smile—and for the first time since she had left America felt the stirrings of happiness. “When do I begin?”
“Well, officially, tomorrow morning—unofficially, right now. I’ll have my wife find you a bed in one of the girls’ dormitories, and,” he added with a smile, “get you something to wear besides that shmatta you’ve got on. Meanwhile, I’ll go explain things to your tour leader.”
“Will he be upset?” Deborah asked uneasily.
“No,” Boaz answered, with a hearty laugh, “we pay him a commission on every recruit he brings us.”
The next day she made her final call to Mea Shearim to announce that she intended to stay at “a kibbutz up north.”
Leah’s first questions were not unexpected. “Are they Orthodox? Is the food kosher?”
“No,” Deborah replied, “but the people are.”
“Will you at least give us your address? We have to call your father. Please, Deborah, out of respect for—”
“No.” She cut Leah off. “I’ll call my parents myself—when I’m ready.”
After a moment she added, “Thank you for your hospitality.”
In other words, thank God it’s over.
For all her bravado with Leah, Deborah did not call her parents immediately. It took her several more days—and many bitten fingernails—to work up the courage.
Surprisingly, her father did not lose his temper.
“Deborah,” he murmured sympathetically, “you must be under enormous stress.”
“On the contrary, Papa. I feel calmer than I’ve ever been in my life.”
“But a kibbutz is no place for a girl like you—certainly not one of the Ha-Shomer Ha-Tza’ir. They’re immoral people.”
“That’s not true,” she retorted, hurt and angry. “Besides, I don’t care what you say, I admire them.”
She was deliberately goading him now, venting the rage that had accumulated since he had cast her off, but the Rav simply answered softly.
“Listen to me, Deborah,” he said. “I have no time for squabbling. Tomorrow they will come to take you home.”
“Papa, this is my home now. Anyway, who do you mean by ‘they’?”
“Some of our people … from Jerusalem.”
“You make them sound like the Mafia.”
“Deborah,” her father cautioned, “you’re trying my patience. Now you will do what I say, or—”
“Or what? I’m eighteen, Papa. I’m officially an adult. And if any of your ‘people’ try to drag me from this place, they’ll have to deal with two hundred kibbutzniks.”
For a moment there was silence. Then she heard her exasperated father remark, “Rachel, you try and talk some sense to her.”
Now her mother was on the phone.
“Deborah, how can you do this to your father? You’re breaking his heart.”
“I’m sorry, Mama,” she answered, “but I’ve made up my mind.”
The tone in Deborah’s voice convinced Rachel that she was immovable.
“You’ll write at least?” her mother pleaded in capitulation. “Even a postcard—just to let us know you’re well.”
Deborah tried to speak, but her throat tightened. She was saddened for her mother, trapped in a Brooklyn ghetto in a medieval marriage and a Dark Age mentality.
At last, despite the tears that almost choked her, she responded.
“Yes, Mama. I would never hurt you. Please give my love to everyone.” She stopped, took a breath, and then added softly, “Including Papa.”