Raquela (10 page)

The two weeks sped by.

Carmi was to leave early Sunday morning. They decided to spend his last night in Jerusalem, in the university garden on Mount Scopus, looking down at the Old City. The campus was empty; silence was their lone companion, a presence they could feel with their fingertips.

On the stone bench, he pressed her to him. “I want to marry you, Raquela, but I don't even dare ask you to become engaged to me until this is all over. If anything happens to me—”

She dug her head into his shoulder. She could feel the patch he wore so proudly on his left arm, with its blue and white stripes and gold star of David embroidered in the center. Below the patch, in a separate strip, were the words:
JEWISH BRIGADE
.

“You won't believe how I feel, Raquela,” he said. “On the one hand, I'm so happy and excited that we have our own brigade, our own unit, our own flag; I can't wait to set foot on the soil of Europe—to get a chance to destroy Hitler before he destroys the world. On the other hand, I want desperately to come back to you.”

“You must come back,” she whispered.

A rustle in the garden startled them. A young intern approached. “Hello, Raquela.”

Carmi dropped his arms abruptly.

“Hello, Shmuel,” Raquela said. “I'd like you to meet my friend Carmi.”

Shmuel extended his hand. Carmi shook it limply.

“Beautiful evening, isn't it?” Shmuel said, and walked away.

“Who's Shmuel?” Carmi demanded. His eyes followed the white-jacketed figure.

“Just a young doctor in the hospital.”

“Is he in love with you?”

Raquela stared at Carmi in amazement. “In love with me? I hardly know him.”

“I didn't like the way he looked at you.”

Raquela moved away on the bench. “Carmi, are you jealous?”

“I'm sorry, Raquela. I can't help thinking every doctor in the hospital must be in love with you, you're so beautiful.” He tried to embrace her.

“You didn't like it when Debby was jealous of you. Now are you accusing me? You've got no cause, Carmi.”

“I can't help it, Raquela. In camp I went crazy in my bunk thinking somebody was kissing you.”

“Well, you can put your mind to rest. Nobody's been kissing me except you.” She knew she was in love with this man, but his unfounded jealousy troubled her.

It was after midnight when they walked along the ridge of Mount Scopus toward the nursing school.

At the door Carmi held her fiercely in his arms. “There's still so much to say,” he said. “I don't know how long I'll be in Europe. I can't bear to say good-bye to you.”

“Let's not say good-bye. I'll try to get permission to come to the railroad station tomorrow morning to see you off.”

His arms dropped. “You mustn't come.”

“Carmi!”

“Please, Raquela, don't come.”

“But why? All my friends see their boyfriends off at the train.”

“
You must not come to the station
.” His voice had an edge of harshness she had never heard before.

She was silent, distraught. “You know a man,” Papa had always said, “by his anger.”

Finally she asked, “Don't you want to spend your last minutes in Jerusalem with me?”

“Don't come, please. Let's not talk about it anymore. Just know that I adore you, Raquela.”

OCTOBER 24, 1944

Dearest Raquela,
     It is just thirty-six hours since we said good-bye. I walk around the camp like a lunatic, bereft of my senses. You wanted to come to the train Sunday morning to say goodbye; but I didn't want it. Don't be angry with me; you can't imagine the terrible scenes that take place at the railroad station—the weeping, kissing, hugging, and more weeping. I didn't want to make a spectacle of myself. It's not my style.

She stopped reading. Was that it—that he didn't want to make a spectacle of himself? Or was he afraid that she too might lose control? How could he know that she would never cry in public, not Señora Vavá's granddaughter.

She picked up the letter again.

     On the train back from Jerusalem I relived every moment we spent together. I will love you forever. I will love you as long as I live. Is it true? Am I correct that you feel the same?

FIVE

NOVEMBER 5, 1944

T
he tile floors were sponged and flooded with pails of soapy water, the French doors flung open, the carpets whacked with wicker beaters on the terrace, the rooms aired, the beds changed.

Henrietta Szold was coming to the nursing school directly from the hospital. The legendary American woman who had founded Hadassah in America and helped build the hospital and the nursing school in Palestine was to convalesce after a near-fatal bout with pneumonia. Mount Scopus was to be her magic mountain.

The whole staff waited at the garden door. A frail woman with soft white hair walked slowly through the pergola, assisted by a doctor and two nurses.

“Welcome, Miss Szold.” Mrs. Cantor stepped forward. “We've set up two rooms for you on the second floor, overlooking the Old City.”

“You're very kind.” She spoke slowly, in a low musical voice. “I hope I haven't inconvenienced anyone.” Even her voice had dignity.

“Not at all,” Mrs. Cantor assured her. “It is an honor to have you here.”

Miss Szold's presence pervaded the school. For the next three months the staff and students seemed to focus on one thing—making their famous, gentle, undemanding patient comfortable.

Few visitors were allowed to see her in the nursing school, yet she mapped each waking hour. She read reports and publications and books; she answered much of her correspondence in her own neat, flowing handwriting.

Each morning, Raquela saw a tall handsome woman with raven hair enter Miss Szold's room. She was Emma Ehrlich, who had come in 1921 as a young woman from Boston and started working immediately as Miss Szold's secretary. She was now her confidante.

“Since none of you can sail the Atlantic and visit me, because of the war,” Miss Szold had written her family, in Baltimore, “Emma has become my sister, my friend, my mother.”

Raquela soon discovered that to Emma, who knew her better than anyone in Palestine, Miss Szold was “a saint and a genius.”

Another daily visitor was Miss Szold's beloved disciple Hans Beyth, director of Youth Aliyah, the Children's Migration. Since 1933 Youth Aliyah had been rescuing children from Hitler's Germany. Now, Germany and Europe were sealed; no one knew how many millions of children were in danger of annihilation—perhaps already annihilated.

Yet, despite the war and despite the White Paper, children were still being smuggled into Palestine—many of them filtering in across the northern frontiers, from Syria and Lebanon.

One day Raquela overheard Hans Beyth describing how these children had walked hundreds of miles, fleeing from Arab lands where there were Nazi sympathizers and where Jews were now in danger.

“How do you tell if these children are Arabs or Jews?” Miss Szold asked him.

“When they come to the border, I meet them,” he answered, “and I begin by saying ‘
Sh'ma
.' If they continue, ‘
Sh'ma Israel, Adonai Elohenu, Adonai Ehad
—Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One'—I know they're Jews, and we take them immediately to a Youth Aliyah village.”

Miss Szold leaned back in the bed, and shut her eyes. She breathed a sigh of contentment. Of all her myriad activities, rescuing children during these war years was closest to her heart.

The student nurses were given two assignments. The first was the special privilege of arranging the flowers and tropical plants that admirers sent and cutting fresh flowers for her from the garden. The second assignment, a rotating one, was to change Miss Szold's sheets, their reward for the backbreaking hours they had spent learning to make beds properly.

The first time it was Raquela's turn to change the sheets, she entered the room with trepidation. Would the distinguished patient be remote, austere? With no patience for a young admirer, or for small talk?

Miss Szold looked up from a book and smiled.

The room smelled of honeysuckle and roses. Miss Szold was in a frilly bed jacket, her long white hair brushed softly around her face. Pneumonia and a heart attack had left their mark. The gentle, compassionate face with huge brown eyes that Raquela had seen in newspaper photos was now sharper, lined. Only her hands were youthful, artistic, well cared for.

Silently Raquela moved about the room, replacing the flowers, helping Miss Szold out of bed, into a chair, changing her sheets, trying to fathom how this frail woman had become the first lady of Palestine.

In the next weeks Raquela learned some of her story. She had been born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1860, at the outbreak of America's civil war. Her father, a rabbi from Hungary, treated her as the son he never had. He became her teacher, her guide, her mentor, instilling in her his spirituality, his scholarship, and his sense of the truth and beauty of Judaism. She became his secretary, his deputy rabbi, and his researcher. Many young men were attracted to the brilliant young woman, but when any of them came to the house in Baltimore, Henrietta would tell her sisters, “You take him off my hands; I'm busy.”

When her father died, she moved to New York City with her mother and began to publish her father's papers. To understand them better, she applied for admission to the Jewish Theological Seminary, the first woman allowed to enroll. She was accepted on the condition that she would not become a rabbi.

She was at the seminary a short time when she met Dr. Louis Ginzberg, a newcomer from Germany, dark and bearded, like her father, and a great scholar, like her father. For Henrietta, it was love at first sight. She was in her early forties.

As she had worked with her father, so now she worked with the man she loved, translating his material from German into English, editing it, polishing it, giving it her felicitous touch. Each Saturday he came to the apartment on Riverside Drive for lunch, and evenings they walked along the Drive while he tried out his ideas and let her shape them into publishable form.

The first volumes of his
Legends of the Jews
acknowledged her role as translator and editor.

For her, at least, the relationship meant fulfillment, commitment, happiness. She once wrote, “Why should one expect that a woman great in intellect should not love greatly, too?”

Then, one summer, Dr. Ginzberg returned to Germany. Sitting in a synagogue, he looked up at the women's section in the balcony. An attractive young woman caught his eye. After the service he arranged to meet her, and soon he asked her two questions: are you interested in keeping house, and are you interested in having children? Her answer to both was yes.

He returned to New York and announced to Henrietta that he was engaged to a young German-Jewish woman.

Henrietta ended her relationship with Dr. Ginzberg abruptly.

Her mother, seeing her brokenhearted daughter grow depressed, suggested they go to Palestine. It was 1909. The two women, traveling through the Holy Land, were shocked by the neglected land, by the filth and poverty, by the women who died in childbirth, the infants decimated before they were one year old, the schoolchildren blinded by flies stuck to their white-filmed eyes.

Henrietta's pragmatic seventy-seven-year-old mother made a suggestion. “Here is work for you. You have a study group of ladies at home. Let your group do something for these children instead of talking, talking, talking.”

They returned to America, where Henrietta organized her women. On February 24, 1912, they met in Temple Emanu-El in New York and created Hadassah. The meeting was held during the festival of Purim, and “Hadassah” was the Hebrew name for Queen Esther, who had saved the Jews. They took their motto from Jeremiah 8:22:
Arukhat bat ami
—“the healing of the daughter of my people.”

Hadassah was to become the world's largest organization of Jewish women.

In 1920, at the age of sixty, when most women might retire, Henrietta Szold brought a team of American doctors and nurses to Palestine. They established hospitals all over the country; they opened outpatient clinics; they built laboratories attached to the hospitals. Miss Szold insisted that they must establish a school for nursing as an integral part of medical care. Her approach to teaching was, “Work and study, theory and practice: the two must go hand in hand. You must not stop studying because you work, and you must not stop working because you study.”

Some of the established male doctors in Palestine looked upon her nursing school with contempt. Why did a nurse need to study for three years? A month of practice in a hospital should be sufficient. And why do women need to become so professional? We never had this under the Turks; we don't have it under the British. And no self-respecting Jewish mother will let her daughter leave home for three years.

Miss Szold was adamant. Her answer to her critics, delivered in her firm, carefully controlled voice, was, “You can't expect a girl to support herself honorably and earn a living unless she is trained professionally and on a professional standard. You cannot train a nurse in one month. Our school will be of the highest standards of nursing and medicine in America.”

And now here she was, convalescing in the nursing school she had built, cared for lovingly by the nurses whose professionalism she had fought for and secured.

Raquela helped her walk out of her room to the large rounded terrace at the front of the building. She settled her into a soft lounging chair, and watched her smiling with pleasure as she looked down at the Old City.

Work and study
. The words kept ringing in Raquela's ears. Miss Szold had gone on, carving a legend as she pulled medicine in her adopted land into the twentieth century.

The Jewish leaders of Palestine recognized her impact and in 1927 chose her to be a member of the Zionist Executive. Three years later she was elected a member of the
Vaad Leumi
(National Council for Palestine) and was put in charge of social welfare. She revolutionized the social services as she had revolutionized medicine.