She was named after her grandmother, Sarah, a name no one else had then because it was considered old-fashioned. Eight days after the naming, her father’s brother died, and they gave her a middle name. The brother was Yosef—Joseph—so her mother went down to City Hall, Bureau of Births and Deaths, and Josephine was typed in the space after Sarah. “A name with class,” her Aunt Rosie said. Sarah hated it.
When she got to school, the kindergarten teacher sent home a note. The family read it together, sitting around the kitchen table. “Dear Mrs. Levi, we have decided to call the child Sally for the purpose of school as it will help her to integrate and make the adjustment easier.”
“What’s to adjust?” the brother next to her asked.
“Shah,” her father said.
Her father was a gentle man, remote, inaccessible. The books that covered the tables and chairs in their small apartment were the most constant factor in his daily life, and the incongruity of raising seven Orthodox children in the enlightened secularism of the Upper West Side never penetrated his absorption in Torah. Sarah grew up beside the families of Columbia intellectuals who were already far enough from Europe to want to teach their children civilization. The girls in her class had radios, then TVs, then nose jobs and contact lenses. They grew more graceful in their affluence, and she grew a foot taller than all of them, early. There were many blonde girls each year, and she’d stare at their fair, delicate arms whose hair was almost invisible. “Sally, how does your garden grow?” the boys would tease her in the hall, staring at her breasts, the dark hair covering her arms to her wrists, the wild hair that sprang from her head independent of her. She’d look down at her bigness, ungainly, and think, “Peasant, you peasant” to herself and the grandmother who’d bequeathed her these oversized limbs. No one would fall in love with her.
Her mother was intense, passionately arguing, worrying about people, disdainful. “She married for money,” “he could have been a scholar,” indicting these neighbors who were changing their names, selling their birthright. “Sarale,” she’d suddenly gather her in her arms late at night when her brothers were sleeping, “remember who you are, and you’ll have yourself. No matter what else you lose—” She never finished the sentence. Sarah would look into her mother’s face, full of shadows, ghosts, and touch the cheek that was softer than anything. “You’re a big girl, Sarah.” Her mother shook herself free, always. “Go to bed.” Her mother would sit at the kitchen table, alone, head in her hands, thinking. Once, long past midnight, Sarah saw her that way, shaking her head between her clenched fingers, and tiptoed in to say, “Mama, I understand.” Her mother looked up, uncomprehending.
When she was seventeen and had given up hope, she suddenly bloomed. Her hair calmed down, and a kind of beauty emerged from within her. The boys in her youth movement started to talk to her after meetings, inviting her places. First, she said no, then she believed them and went gladly to rallies, campfires, lectures to raise money for the new state of Israel. She dreamed of Israel often, folk dancing in the orange groves of her imagination, fighting malaria, drowning in jasmine. None of the boys touched her heart.
At school, boys were thinking of college, and girls were thinking of boys. Graduation came on a hot day in June, and her parents watched her get a special award for poems she had written that no one but the teacher would ever read. “Poetry, Sarale.” Her father was pleased. “My dreamer,” her mother whispered. “We have a surprise for you. From Israel.” The word was still strange on her mother’s tongue.
Yakov Halevi was her cousin, a first cousin from Jerusalem she’d never met. He got up to greet her from the couch in her parents’ living room, the room reserved for company, and she watched his thin, energized frame spring forward. He was meant to be dressed in black like the rest of her cousins whose pictures she’d seen, side curls swaying in an overseas wind. But his hair was short, startling, red, and the hair of his chest showed in his open-necked shirt. He spoke seriously, with a heavy accent, and she loved to watch the words form in his mouth before he released them. Yakov was a poet, only twenty and known already for his fervent lines. Great things were expected of him, and he carried their weight on his narrow Hebrew shoulders. Her Bible knowledge wasn’t enough, and she struggled with the new language to read his book, tracing the letters of the title page, alarmed. Jerusalem Fruit, by Yakov Peniel.
“Who’s Peniel?” she asked him. “Why did you change your name?”
“I didn’t change it, I lost it.” He laughed. “When the editor wrote to me accepting my poems, he had to ask my name, for I hadn’t sent it. ‘Hagidah na shmekha,’ he wrote, what Yakov our forefather asked when he wrestled the angel. ‘Why is it that you ask my name?’ I wrote back, as the angel answered, and he published me under the name Yakov gave that place, Peniel.”
“But your letters come to you in that name. How did it happen?”
He shrugged. “People wanted to meet the bright young poet, Peniel. Then I was asked to talk, introduced that way. On the street, they would say ‘That’s Peniel,’ and so it came to be.”
“But you’re the tenth generation of Jerusalem Halevis. You can’t give it up, it’s your name.”
“Just a name.” He smiled. “The soul underneath is the same, in better and worse.”
She loved that humility, and the heart of Eretz Yisrael she heard in his chest when he held her. He loved her and loved her America. “It’s not mine,” she’d insist. “I don’t belong here.” But he stood in the middle of New York, looking up. “So big,” he would cry in his foreign tongue. “So big.”
He wanted to cross the country sea to sea, to marvel at mountains and chasms. She had waited so long to go home, to Israel, she could wait a little longer. Then he was her home, she became him, she loved every bone of his self, every line. The words of his mouth were her thoughts, what he touched she found worthy. It thrilled her, their sameness, and she’d wake in the mornings eager for the coming confirmation. They would say the same things at one time, and reach for each other, marveling. She wasn’t alone anymore, she had found a companion. When she tried to explain about the Upper West Side and the girls in her class, he would say, “Everyone is alone. Man is alone before God, that’s our state.” Hearing him say it bound her to him even more. She wanted to breathe his breath, use his language, and searched through his poems, word after word, for her hidden presence.
“My muse.” He sorted her hair. “Sarale,” saying it the old Jewish way, as he’d heard his mother, also a Sarah, being called.
They knew they would marry, she floated for months on that knowledge, walking down Broadway to the rhythm of Solomon’s Songs. “Sarale”—Yakov drew her to him one night—“we must talk of the name.”
“It’s all right. I don’t mind Peniel. It’s better in a way than Halevi, which is almost my name. No one would know I was married.”
“It’s the other name—Sarah. My mother’s name. A man cannot marry a woman with his mother’s name.”
She turned white. “A man cannot marry?”
He noticed her face. “Oh, no, no, he can marry, but she, she must change the name.”
She said in relief, “But what name? Sarah was my name.”
“Do you have a middle name?”
She scowled. “Josephine.”
“A goyische name, Josephine. So what do we do?”
She thought for a while. “I don’t know. Josephine is Josie, but that’s no good.”
“Jozzi.” It was clumsy. “There isn’t a Jozzi in Hebrew.”
She had no suggestion.
“Wait,” he told her. “Jozzi is Joseph, Yosef, is that right?”
She nodded.
“Well, then, it’s Yosefah.” The Hebrew sound spun in the air. “Yosefah.” He turned her around and around until the trees flew in front of her, dizzy.
They married in spring, and all summer they travelled as he fell in love with America. He loved New York City, the place where they’d started, he fingered the wheat of Midwestern fields, and stood on a rock high over the ocean as if he’d discovered the water. In the evenings and as she woke up, he was scribbling. Poems, letters, stories poured from his hand. She sat, amazed, as the papers grew and multiplied in hotel rooms, in the trunk of the car. The strange Hebrew letters leaped from the pages, keeping their secrets against her straining will. “Are you writing of me?” she wanted to know. He smiled. “They are all of you.” He told her he sometimes took phrases she said and transplanted them into his work. She was grateful and mystified, peering through the foreign marks, not finding resemblance.
Yearning for Israel, they moved to New York. He studied small Talmudic matters on which great things depended. She had a son, then another. The boys laughed and cried with her all day in the house, surrounded by papers and books of ancient, cracked binding. When he finished his doctorate, they would live in Israel, and she counted the days as they lengthened to months, alone with her children and her longing. She was America to him, aspiring to be free, and he envied her readiness to leave such abundance behind. “It’s your home,” he tried to soften her, frightened by her single burning.
“It has nothing to do with me,” she’d reply. He trembled in the face of seduction—the grandness of America’s gestures, hundreds of plains crossed by rivers whose opposite shores were too far to see.
“We must leave,” he said. “We must go.”
She stopped her daydream of years and started to pack. The boat left in winter, and the grey piers of New York, city of her birth but not her death, she was sure, were left behind, unmourned. He stood watching the gap of water widen, then turned to her and was thankful.
There were cypress and palm trees as they traveled in, and a perfume heavier than air. Jerusalem approached them at twilight, her gold roofs and domes aching for heaven. She recognized the city as a lover, missing past time, a shock of remembrance. The boys were crying, tired, afraid, and she sheltered them under the sleeves of her coat. “We are home.”
Jerusalem was designed for the world to come more than for this one. She washed, cleaned, shopped, scrubbed over and over again, as the dust blew in the summer and the winter wind seeped through the cracks. The boys got sick and well, and she was sick in the morning, pregnant with the next child. Yakov laughed as he smoothed her hair. “A girl, a maidele next.”
From America letters came. A brother was hired, her mother was sick, Aunt Rosie was worried, family troubles, her mother was sick, Papa retired, a nephew converted, her mother was dying, gone. There was no money for planes, and the pregnancy was hard, so half a world away she guarded her pain, talking to her mother about the coming daughter. Her mother, sitting now at a kitchen table that was not of the earth, holding her head in her hands. Night after night, she lay on her back, her stomach a dome in her arms.
When the child was born, she could hardly know, groaning in a voice unfamiliar to her in this not-American hospital. Outside, the war in Sinai was sending soldiers into her ward, and sending her into the hall and then home, almost before she could stand. She bore the child alone, Yakov at the front, and when she looked down at her daughter, resting on her breast, she was full and at peace with this breathing body of her secret prayers, in love with the child, flesh of her flesh, bone of her bone, not a stranger. Yakov came home, exhausted, off for three days to see her and rejoice in his daughter. When he finally was there, she stared from her bed unbelieving, two ones loved so dearly, both whole in limb, wondrous. She ran her fingers up and down those tiny arms and legs hundreds of times. And Yakov, unmutilated, only tired, spoke to her, saying, “We must give the child a name.”
“But I know the name,” and she did, waiting for him to come home from the war, reading the Book of Psalms. “She is Ayelet Hashachar, the dawn star.”
Yakov smiled over her, indulgent, “This is not a name.”
“This is the name,” she said firmly. “Ayelet, Ayelet Hashachar, it’s beautiful.”
“Yes,” he said gravely. “It is beautiful. But it’s not the child’s name. Yo-sefele”—the smile—“your mother.”
“My mother would love the name. She would love it,” remembering her mother alone at the table dreaming her dreams long past midnight.
“Your mother was Dinsche,” he told her, “and the child must be Dina. It is the Jewish way.”
She looked at him, trying to find in herself some agreement, even a small accord and she’d bend to his will. But there was nothing.
“Yakov,” she pleaded, “my mother won’t care. I represent her, I know.” Her mother holding her head in her hands. “It cannot be Dina. It can’t be.” Her voice was rising, new sounds that surprised her. “There’s blood on that name.”
She rose from the bed. “Look,” and held out the Bible, shaking, to him. “Read.” She tore through the page in her haste. “And when Shechem the son of Hamor the Hivite, the prince of the land, saw her, he seized her and lay with her and humbled her.”
He stood before her in silence. “Rape,” she said. “You want a daughter named for a rape.”
“It is out of respect,” he said. “For your mother. I don’t understand what you want. A goyische name like Diana?” he asked.
“Ayelet Hashachar,” she whispered in mourning, swaying like a rebbe in prayer.
“So what is it?” he asked.
“I don’t care what you do,” came the words in that voice, the one she had heard from herself giving birth. “Do what you want,” turning her face to the wall. He stroked her hair straight back from her forehead until finally she was asleep.
When the day of the naming arrived, she was numb, jabbing the pins of her headcovering into her hair. She walked with her sons and her husband to the synagogue, and left them to climb the steps to the balcony for women. Below her, the men were lifting the Torah, opening and closing it, dressing, undressing it, reading the day’s portion. The people in the synagogue were singing quite loud, and some of the women sang, too. The women around her moved their lips to the words. She stood still. She stood in her place, the place where the mothers always sat for their children. She closed her mouth, her lips pressed together, one on top of the other, and waited to hear her daughter’s name.