“Let them praise His name
with dancing.
With drums and harp
let them make music.”
Psalm 149: 3
I am not the kind of girl people would think to see on stage. I have red hair, and some say that doesn’t deserve the spotlight. My skin is pale and I’m usually half sick. That is why it means so much when my teacher picks me to dance in the school performance. Through dance, I have discovered a place where I can be myself more than anywhere else. Dancing isn’t just for the stage—although to be perfectly honest, it is the place I like best to dance. Although the stage is a world of make-believe and pretend, the imagined flowers that fall at my feet as I take my bows are as real as the straight A’s my little sister gets on her report card. Since my mother’s work, feeding the students at the yeshiva, relies on her so much and she relies on her job to feed her children, she is never in the audience, but still, it is nice to hear the resounding applause when I finish my steps.
In my head, I am constantly aware of a rhythm that the entire earth dances along to. The wind itself is the choreographer, using the air to make music and movement happen. It pushes the current in the stream to make them ripple, whistle, and plop. It rubs on the strings of a violin, just taken from its case, even before being touched by the bow. It squeezes in and out through the throats of humans and animals. Musicians in the Town Square capture swift gulps of air into their lungs, and then force them down into the mouthpieces of their trumpets and tubas, until they rush out again, with a reinterpreted sound that bellows in the ears of anyone who is listening. I imagine a master conductor opening his hands and moving the wind one way or another, until the whole world is a swirling mass of dance and song. That is why, since my first dance lesson, it has always felt so natural for me to move my body and dance when music is played.
Even in our morning routine, I feel movement and rhythm pulsating through everything. Mama churning the milk into cheese (thump, thump, thump), Leah slicing the warm sourdough bread (sliver, sliver, sliver), and Yecheskel easing each foot into his shoes as I hold them (step/press, step/press). There is a dance as we set the table for our morning meal: plate down, knife down, fork down, sit! Take bread, smear cheese, have a bite, swallow! We quickly eat the hot bread, letting it slide down our throats until our bellies feel warm and full. There is a rhythm in the way we pile as many cucumbers as we can onto our forks and pop them into our mouths, while Mama keeps time with her pleading, “Won’t you all hurry up?” There is a cadence to the way the door swings open just as we finish our meal, when the boys from the yeshiva who pay for Mama’s homemade breakfast march in and sit themselves down to eat. It is in the way we kiss Mama goodbye, one by one, and walk to school: turn the corner, cross the bridge, drop off Cheskel, and then run!
I have always felt that finding rhythms and music in life is the best part of living, and today is going to be the best day of the school year—the day we have been looking forward to! Today we will finally find out which groups we have been assigned to for the Grand Performance! The performance is the highlight of the school year. Sure, we work hard and study every day, but the main event, around which everything else revolves—like the earth around the sun—is the festival in which we will perform. We are the only school in Crasna, besides for the yeshiva, so everyone has or knows a child in the school, and everyone will come to the performance. We had tryouts a few weeks ago, and then the teachers (who know exactly how to find the talent in each girl), placed us into groups.
When I get to school, there is a huge group of students crowding around the bulletin board. As I inch closer, reading the postings and looking for my name, my heart is pounding like a big bass drum. I find my assignment right where I hoped it would be, under the big letters that read: DANCE.
We suffer through an hour of arithmetic, and then we all disperse into our performance groups. I find the classroom where the dance group is meeting; it is quickly filling up with girls and boys from all different grades. The English teacher, Miss Elias, stands in front of us and claps her hands. “Girls and boys, welcome to your very first dance practice of the year!” A few older girls clap their hands in excitement. I feel lucky to be in the presence of all these grown-up girls.
“All of you have shown promise in the art of dancing,” continues Miss Elias. “I am excited to help each of you find and hone your talent. We will practice every day. For me, dance is the most beautiful expression of what is deep inside, so while I can show you techniques, the real beauty of it must come from you. Therefore, today I will not be teaching you any of the specific steps we will learn for the festival. Today, you will play with what dance feels like to you.” She motions to the drummer boy and his partner, a boy with a trumpet, who are both standing on the side of the stage. The drummer boy promptly starts to hit the drums with his hands. Boom, boom, boom. Thump, thump, thump. Miss Elias puts her hands to her chest and then opens them wide. “Dance!” she says. “The only rule is not to be shy. I want to see you all dance!”
The older girls start swaying to the music. Some twirl around. I close my eyes so I will not see anyone looking at me and I get up on my tippy toes. With my hands at my side, I swing around. The music gets faster, it pounds in my ears. A feeling inside my chest opens and spills out over my entire body. As I sway and twirl, something is born in that moment. The rhythm of life, and of dance, comes alive inside of me.
Once, my Zaidy1 told me that there is a world where all the souls stay before they are missioned to come down to our world.
“Do you know what language the souls speak in that world?” he asked me.
“Yiddish?” I guessed.
“Souls don’t have mouths, they cannot speak.”
“So then how do they have a language?”
“The souls talk in the language of music,” Zaidy explained. “They talk in beats and strings, in drums and harp.”
“Really?” I asked, trying to imagine this beautiful language.
“Of course! That’s why babies calm down when you play them music, they are remembering. That’s why music speaks to us in a way that nothing else can.”
When Miss Elias tells me to dance, I finally understand what Zaidy meant. If music is the language of the soul, then dance is the way my body speaks to those souls from here on earth.
“Move to the rhythm!”
I open my hands like Miss Elias, exactly as she did when she started dancing a moment ago. I twirl around and kick up my feet to the drums.
“Very good,” Miss Elias claps when the music stops. “That was beautiful dancing!”
When we get out of school at the end of the day, I am still on a high from the dance practice. “Let’s go play in the stream,” I suggest.
“Race you there!” Leah says.
We run past the houses, the market with flour and chicken and eggs, the store fronts, and the church. We run down the hill so fast until we almost flip over. The sweet scent of grass and sunshine fills my nose and chest. The clouds hang low in the bluest of blue sky. We stop when we get to our spot in the stream where the water falls over the rocks in a rush from the mini lake. The bushes along the edge of the stream burst with little bouquets of white flowers that lean down over the stream. Dozens of butterflies swoop around the flowers. The trees whisper to each other through their leaves, and the birds sing as they hop from the branches to the rocks and then back to the branches again. The stream lets off a cooling mist that ruffles my hair. Our friends Gitta and Raizel are already playing in the stream. Leah kicks off her shoes and jumps in. “I won!” she announces. She is younger than me but aside from our race into this world, she usually beats me in just about everything else. I jump in after her and we play in the stream until the sun turns pink in the sky and spreads out like strawberry marmalade on white yogurt.
When we get home, there is chicken for supper. It is only one small piece of chicken for all of us, but Mama knows how to stretch it in so many ways, so we are never hungry. Next to the chicken there are potatoes—plump, smelling of apricot, and dripping from the chicken juices. There are vegetables cut up in a salad and farfel on the side. I cannot get it down my throat fast enough.
After dinner, Zaidy comes for his nightly to visit. Zaidy is Mama’s father and really like my father, too, because we don’t have our own anymore. He lives ten minutes away and he walks over every night to spend time with us. I don’t love anyone more than him in the whole world.
“Where are my girls?” he booms as he bends down to fit through the door. Leah gets to him first. He picks her up in his arms and throws her in the air. He can lift anything with his big, strong arms.
“As for you, young lady,” he turns to me with a stern face, “aren’t you too old to be picked up by an old Zaidy like me?”
Before I can answer Leah is back down on the floor and I am almost touching the ceiling! “And my prince!” he says to Yecheskel, who giggles as Zaidy tickles him and holds him up high.
We sit down to have tea together. Mama brings out the steaming kettle and cups. Zaidy sits at the head of the table (after he checks the cabinets to make sure we have enough flour, oil, and eggs). He looks like a king with his long gray beard and deep blue eyes. A magical king, drinking a goblet of liquid gold.
“How was your day, Chaya Necha?” he asks Mama.
“It was good, the usual.”
“I got to learn in front of the whole class today,” Yecheskel says.
“My Talmid Chacham,”2 Zaidy says.
“We started dance practice for the festival,” I say.
“How was it?”
“Really good.”
“I am sure you’re going to be a great dancer.”
I beam.
“Leah got full marks on her arithmetic exam,” Mama says. “The highest in her grade, actually.”
Leah blushes and smiles.
“My little smart granddaughter,” Zaidy says to her, “I am so proud of you.” He looks at his watch. “Oh, it is late. Got to get back home to Bubbe.”3
I run to get his hat.
“Thank you, sweetheart,” he says. He kisses us all and opens the door. We watch from the window as he makes his way up the street.
Mama takes out her book. Yecheskel sits down and practices his reading like his Rebbe4 told him to. Leah and I get busy with the dishes.
“It’s my turn to dry,” I say.
“It is somehow always your turn,” Leah says, but she dips the plates in the long wooden basin and starts scrubbing anyway.
“Not true, don’t you remember yesterday I washed?”
“No, that was two days ago, but whatever.”
I shrug and pick up the clean folded towel, wipe the plate dry, and set it on the shelf—dead center, just like Mama likes it.
And there is the rhythm again, the rhythm of a day turning to night. A day that opened with a burst of beats is now closing with the soft swish-swash of water in the basin and the light clink of the dishes as they are stacked. There is the rustle of pages being turned, the murmur of bellies that have been filled, and the ping of silverware as it is polished and put away. All the sounds that sprung open in the morning, and hustled, and lived, and were used all day long, are now being put sweetly back to bed. This is what I miss most when the music changes and nothing is the same.