“How great are your deeds God
Exceedingly profound are your works.
A boor cannot know
And a fool
Cannot understand this.”
Psalm 92:5–7
When I turn 11 and Leah is almost ten, Mama brings us to a seamstress to learn from her. We work for her for free, and in return she teaches us the basics of sewing and dress making. Leah turns out to be not only a genius in math and geometry but a genius in dressmaking as well. She sits down at the sewing machine and the seamstress gives her a big piece of gray fabric and tells her to make a dress. Leah sits as still as the pins on the pin cushion, then murmurs to herself, “22x16, 17x55, 33x4.” She bends over the sewing machine and gets to work without another word. Within days she has made a beautiful dress. Leah has magic hands. She is the princess who spun gold from hay. Me, not so much. I look at the fabric and a hopelessness comes over me. How am I going to take this huge piece of material and turn it into a tailored dress? It would be easier to swim to America, or maybe learn to fly. I fumble with the gray fabric. I try to make the right calculations. I prick myself with the pins. When I am finally finished and I try on the dress, it won’t go over my head because I have made the neck hole too tight. The seamstress assigns me the ironing. There is a huge iron in the corner of the room, and I must heat coals to make it hot so I can use it. The iron is bigger than me and I must drag the whole thing over to the clothing. When I am done, I am sweating but also glistening with pride because you have never seen more pin-straight dresses as the ones that have had the good fortune to pass under my iron.
Our apprenticeship with the seamstress ends, and we get our first job with the Kellers.
Benny Keller was once a student of my father. Now, Mama has a job as a cook in his house. His father is a doctor and his mother hosts grand parties. One day Mama comes home from working for the Kellers and sits Leah and me down to talk.
“I know you girls are so young, and I don’t want you to have to work too hard, but this is an offer I do not think we can refuse.”
“What is the offer?” Leah asks.
“Mrs. Keller complimented me on my dress when I came to cook in her kitchen today,” Mama says, smiling at Leah, “so of course, I told her my daughter Leah made it for me.”
“Ma,” Leah groans.
“Nothing to be all modest about, you have a talent,” Mama says firmly and Leah blushes.
“OK, so what did she say?” I ask.
“She was completely blown away that Leah could make such a dress as this at such a young age, so before I left, she said she was thinking about it, and she would love if Leah can come to her this whole summer every day and make all the gowns for her daughters and herself for the wedding!”
“Oh, my goodness! Like one of the famous seamstresses that come to town before a wedding?”
“Yes, can you believe it? She said she would pay you very well.”
“Wow!” Leah says. “But what about Rosie?”
“I told her that Rosie can iron better than anyone I know, and she said she definitely needs that for the wedding and all the parties afterward. So, she invited Rosie too. This is going to be fun for you! She has a beautiful big house and oh my goodness, you should see that library, it is out of this world. Books from wall to wall, floor to ceiling.”
The Kellers are excited to see us, and I am excited to be part of the exclusive team that will help to make the wedding grand.
“I knew you would be good,” Mrs. Keller says as Leah copies the dress Mrs. Keller wants for herself on her sketchpad. “I am going to look like Anne Chevalier,” she sighs. “You can start now, 7:30 is dinner, please join us.
“We can’t go to dinner,” I say after she leaves the room.
“Why not?”
“Because they don’t keep kosher here.”
Leah rolls her eyes. “We can’t not go every day, that would be rude. Let’s just sit there with the family and eat vegetables and fruits.”
“That’s a good idea.”
All summer long we stay inside the sewing room and sew dress after dress. Each one of Mrs. Keller’s four daughters needs a gown and then seven new dresses for the week of parties after the wedding. I help Leah with the easier stitches, and I iron everything to absolute perfection. One day, just before we are to leave for the night, Mrs. Keller shows us the library.
“It is like I am in a dream,” Leah says when we walk in. Mrs. Keller laughs.
“My girls don’t even like reading. Enjoy it.”
I look around at the walls. They have built-in shelves of cherry wood and are filled from top to bottom with books. There are two ladders, a big arched window with a soft window seat, and three huge dark-red armchairs around a fireplace with a cozy fire burning in it. We immediately set about finding books! Leah takes War and Peace and I take Anna Karenina.
We walk home that night with books in our bags and leu1 to give to Mama.
No one is as proud as me when I run to my mother with it. This is the best thing about working for the Kellers. When there is bread on our table it is because of me and Leah.
In my spare time I read the books from the library. I don’t understand most of them, but I love the books and their stories. I love the way a whole life was sucked into the letters and when I read them, the story pushes itself from the letters on the page, up into the air, and into my head. Each character is a life that could almost have been and with that, truths, dreams, love, and hate. Zaidy tells me that the Talmud says a person must think the whole world was created for him. Even if he was to be the only one born, ever, God would have created this whole magnificent world just for him. When I read of the lives of other people, I understand this a little better. Each life is so full of revelations and beauty, it seems worth it to me to have the whole world for each and every individual person.
We take Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. We get lost in the pages and when we are finished, we lend the books to Lily, Raizy, Gitty, and Chani. Leo Tolstoy is unanimously our favorite author. His books are thick enough to last us till the next job we have with the Kellers, and it certainly takes us long enough to get through them. I love the books but to be completely honest, I did not understand all the themes in the stories. I enjoyed the love, but I did not like the betrayals.
It is Lily Lieberman who suggests we start a literary group. We meet in her garden on every Shabbos afternoon. Lily puts out watermelon and sometimes there are even cookies.
We sit in her garden on the wooden bench that her father made, around the wooden table with the white tablecloth covered with the needlepoint dragonflies. Lily holds the book. She is the smartest of us and she leads the group. She is probably the only one of us who really understood what the book was trying to tell us, but we do our best to join in.
“So, War and Peace,” Lily says. “Have you all read it?”
We nod our heads.
“OK, shall we discuss our thoughts on the themes? There were so many,” Lily says.
“I liked the part where Pierre says that you have to believe in the possibility of happiness in order to be happy,” Raizy says. “That spoke to me. ‘Let the dead bury the dead but while I’m alive I must live and be happy.’”
“I loved that too,” Lily says. “Sometimes I question the right to be happy, while so many are at war. But we must always try to be happy.”
“It is so wonderful how they loved,” I add, “so romantic!”
“Makes me want to get married and start a family,” Raizy says.
“Me too,” I say. We smile.
“Let us hope it is not as complicated for us as it was for them,” Gitty notes. We laugh. I finger the tablecloth and imagine it as a silky white gown.
“Although sometimes there is no peace without some war,” Lily says.
“I wish it did not have to be like that,” Raizy replies. “Why cannot there only be love?”
“That would be nice.”
“Why couldn’t God create a world like that? He is God! He can do anything.”
“There are probably many answers to that,” Lily says. “But I do like what Tolstoy said. Where is it? I folded the page.”
“You can’t fold the page! It is the Kellers book. I told you!” Leah exclaims.
“Sorry, I will smooth it down.”
“It is not the same.”
“What is the quote?” Raizy asks, trying to divert the tension.
“Here it is, ‘We can know that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.’ Tolstoy wrote that right here. I liked that a lot. As much as I try to understand, I know I know nothing. It’s too big for me,” says Lily.
“My father said we are like an ant on a leaf, contemplating why there are some bumps on the surface that we have to go over,” Chani says.
“I like that,” says Lily. “Did you know there are millions of stars in the sky, all bigger than the earth itself? We are smaller than an ant in comparison!”
I did not know that. But my mind is still on Natasha’s love and in front of my eyes the tablecloth turns into a beautiful couture gown.