The Singing Fire (28 page)

“I won’t,” Gittel said. “I’m sitting with Mama.” Heaven, Gittel imagined, was a kind of coffee house where men placed bets and, because they were dead, also studied Torah. But among the women there would be singing. All the grandmothers were sure to want to learn the new songs from Gittel, for after being dead so long, they would be tired of the old ones.

“You don’t have a choice,” Libby said. “It’s written in the Book of Life.” She meant the book in which God wrote a person’s fate on the Jewish New Year. Libby thought that heaven was something like a wedding banquet and the Book of Life was its seating plan. “You have to sit with your real mother and your real grandmother and not your bubbie that you were named after,” she said.

“Then I’m blessed if I’ll die. So there.” Gittel stood between the old stone posts at the top of the steps where Old Montague Street met Black Lion Yard.

“Make room! Make room!” a man in an overall was shouting as he herded cows down the steps toward the dairy.

Gittel leaned against the post of the old gate, listening to the music of Sunday, the bells and the moos, the talk of men going to prayers and placing bets and women going to buy an ounce of tea or take a shirt to the pawnshop. The cows clattered past a jewelry shop with fish knives and wedding rings in the window, hoofs churning up the mud under the sign that said, “Best and cheapest funerals.”

“My other mother,” Gittel whispered to Libby, “is a baroness. And when she comes, she’ll make us both princesses.”

At the wooden gate of Jones the Cowkeeper, a sign in Hebrew letters said,
“Frish fun di coo.”
Fresh from the cow. Inside the byre a milkmaid, with ashes on her kerchief and a smear of manure on her apron, took the jugs. “So girls, what’s doing?” she asked in Yiddish. “Are you ready for Passover? A new ribbon for the
seder
, maybe. Or even a new dress—yes?”

“I have a new dress,” Libby said. “With ruffles on the collar. Her mother made it. She’s having the same one.”

“We’re sisters,” Gittel added. If she could have two mothers and an auntie that was no blood relation but had nursed her, then why not a sister? Gittel craved a sister. She craved any number of relations, but they all seemed to be in the
heim
or dead or unknown.

The milkmaid looked at one, then the other. Libby’s round shoulders and Gittel’s skinny ones in her pinny. Libby’s untidy red hair, a mischievous grin as she hopped on one foot. Gittel’s smooth braids, her square chin, her stillness. “Of course, who could miss it? I look at you and I see her. Like a mirror. Well, girls, the boss is coming to tell me to stop talking and start selling. What will you have? A wedding ring, maybe. Or a pair of candlesticks.” The girls shook their heads. “Oh. Could be you want some milk? Lucky for you that we have plenty.”

“From the speckled cow,” Gittel said, peering around the milkmaid as she handed over her tuppence. There were thirty cows in the stalls and plenty of flies for each of them. The milkmaid dropped the
coppers into her pocket and headed to the back, where a dim figure was shoveling manure onto a pallet for sale to Kew Gardens.

Libby waved away the flies. “What happens if your real mother comes to take you away?” she asked.

Gittel hadn’t considered this. Crowns and gowns, yes, but not leaving her mama and her
tatteh
—her father. “What do you mean?”

“You’re not going to be a princess and that in Frying Pan Alley.”

“Then I won’t be one.”

Libby looked at Gittel with the force of her twelve years. “Your real mother can do as she pleases with you.”

The milkmaid was returning with their jugs. Gittel held herself carefully. “Libby Feffer,” she said, “you’re a liar and you jump rope like a cow.”

“She’ll just haul you off to wherever she is, mark my words,” Libby replied, though she didn’t say where because she was a good friend.

Gittel kicked a stone down the yard. She could kick a stone and not spill a drop of milk from her jug.

In the Lane, no doubt Pious Pearl the beigel lady was saying to Mrs. Flacks, “Let me tell you, a lady she was for sure. But she run out of money, and in London, God doesn’t send manna down from heaven, only fog. So what did she do? Well, I’m telling only you. A lady doesn’t have hands for a sewing machine, am I right? She does what any abbess may do in Dorset Street.”

So what? Gittel had heard it a hundred times. She’d just think about the shoes Mama had promised her for Passover. In those she would jump to the moon.

Petticoat Lane

The Jewish Board of Guardians funded asylums for the aged, the deaf, the orphaned, the infirm, and the insane, a soup kitchen, schools, evening classes, a workingmen’s club where neither drink nor gambling was allowed (and hence few members), a boys’ club with military uniforms (very popular), a girls’ club (also very popular) run by a wealthy spinster who was in love with a rich, but unfortunately married, Spanish Jew, lunch programs, boots and school uniforms for children, sanitary inspection and building projects (which promised a reasonable profit to investors). The board’s most popular program was its capital
loans. A few pounds could set up a newcomer in business—a very small one, to be sure, but one that made him self-sufficient. It was, after all, a Jewish precept that the highest form of charity is to provide someone with the means of earning his own living. It is also a Jewish precept that when a beggar asks for charity, it is a duty to provide it without scrutinizing his merit, but this precept was cast aside with other old-fashioned and superstitious rituals.

The trustees of the board were Jewish gentlemen of wealth and peerage like Baron de Rothschild and Lord Montagu. The donors were middle-class Anglo-Jews whose hearts went out to the oppressed in Russia and recoiled from them in East London. Oppression, close up, was rather rank, and there was concern that English gentiles might not be able to distinguish so well Jews of one type from Jews of another. Hence the board’s open-passage program, which offered tickets, immediately on request, back home. Or to America. Or at the very least out of London. There were five million residents of the County of London; one hundred thousand were Jews. Enormously visible. The Jewish question was debated in Parliament. What that was, exactly, it was hard to say. But it made the Anglo-Jews anxious. After all, it had been only seven hundred years since the Jews were expelled from England and seven since they’d been driven out of Moscow. The need was great, the money never enough, the newcomers vastly outnumbering the established community that was attempting to help and subdue them.

The office of the Jewish Board of Guardians was in Petticoat Lane, the interview room looking down on stalls of secondhand goods. Along three walls there was a strip of greasy dirt behind the heads of newcomers who sat on benches, arguing and chattering and speaking in Yiddish undertones. The women nursed babies, the men studied racing forms, they all read the newspaper, ate peanuts and dropped the shells on the floor. Some of them wondered if they’d made a mistake. It was true that in the
heim
, to be a Jew was much worse. You could easily die of it. But on the other hand, Jews had their own towns and the
goyim
were the guests there. Until you left, you didn’t know what it meant to be the stranger.

A little pale around the edges from the smell of newcomers who had no water to wash and sweated fear, a gentleman sat at his shining desk under the portrait of the queen. He had two grown sons, one a
doctor, the other an author. The gentleman wasn’t young anymore, and he had volunteered for the thankless task of these Sunday interviews. No one seemed to appreciate the fact that it took him away from his own business. The trustees wanted to know why he used up the month’s budget in the first three weeks; the newcomers that were turned away heckled him. All this Nehama had heard during her previous visits to the office. Not that the gentleman spoke to her about any of it. He was speaking to his secretary as if the newcomers, like servants, had no ears or at the very least no intelligence to understand what they heard.

The gentleman’s name was Mr. Zalkind, and he was a man of olive complexion with a silver mustache that made his skin seem as dark and smooth as that of the builders of the pyramids. He’d spent the fall in Egypt, avoiding the November fog that burned the lungs with sulfur. But the spring fog, if not quite as poisonous, had driven a yellowish tinge into the hollows under his eyes.

“When did I last see you, Mrs. Katzellen?” he asked. Beside his desk there was a tea trolley with a plate of biscuits, a cup, and a Wedgwood teapot. The gentleman’s secretary poured tea while he pulled a report from one of the piles on his desk.

“I don’t wish to bother you, sir.” She spoke in a loud London voice so he could hear her above the din of street noise coming through the window behind him. “I come about something what’s important.”

“And what might that be?” he asked, drinking his tea. There was a small ink stain on one of his white cuffs. When she had her shop, she wouldn’t sell cuffs; a gentleman did not buy in Whitechapel Road.

“A good boy, sir. Very clever and that,” she said.

“Then his parents ought to come in.”

“They only speak the
mama-loshen
, so they sent me.” She would have shirtwaists in her shop; skirts and blouses were the new fashion, and a girl earning a wage could buy two, maybe three, even four shirtwaists for one skirt.

“And you are what relation to them, Mrs. Katzellen?”

“A cousin, sir.” She would do alterations, make over old dresses into something new and stylish. And she’d sell books. There should be a place where working girls could buy books and not be embarrassed. A book that was a person’s own made her someone.

“I believe you came about a cousin last week, too,” the gentleman said. “Tell me—are you related to every Polish Jew in Whitechapel?”

“My little
cousin
should go to the Jews’ Free School. And he’ll need boots, Mr. Zalkind, sir. He wore his shoes clean through trying to sell lemons alongside them Irish boys. How’s he to have a chance when he stutters like Moses our Teacher?”

“You must realize the fact that there are only so many places,” he said. “On registration day, the child’s mother may line up—”

“She’s lame. She can’t,” Nehama interrupted.

“I’m afraid there are no exceptions,” he said.

“And this is something else. She has want of proper crutches. The ones as she got don’t fit. They’re too short. She walks like a hunchback.”

He peered at her over his spectacles. “Mrs. Katzellen, this is not a village square where you can haggle like a fishwife.” Through the window behind him, she could see the new warehouse coming up, another half-demolished. There was no work crew on a Sunday, so people pilfered wood and bricks; guards were chasing them.

“Am I someone to argue with you, sir? My cousin—she only wants crutches so she can get around to sell beigels, sir. It’s not for charity, sir, but her business.”

“I see.” Mr. Zalkind picked up some papers and looked them over. “There’s a waiting list for the clinic, but I shall put her under the general fund. Her name and address, please.” While Nehama answered, the gentleman wrote in his ledger, then turned to his secretary. “Get her a ticket for the hospital.”

“I have another cousin, sir.”

“How surprising, Mrs. Katzellen.” He rubbed his forehead. “And this cousin?”

“Poor Mrs. Flacks. Her middle daughter can’t see, her eyes is that runny. Oozing, sir.”

“What shall I do with you, Mrs. Katzellen—ought I to ban you from this office altogether?” He wore a lounge coat with slits in each side seam. It had a casual look, but Nehama was not misled. This was the latest style. A gentleman who wore it thought of how he appeared to others.

“You know, sir, if I might say so. Everyone speaks well of you.”

“Really,” Mr. Zalkind said, casting a glance at the people waiting
on the benches. “I did not suppose any of them were thinking of me at all.”

“Charity is a great virtue,” she said emphatically. “It will stand you in good stead when the Holy One, blessed be, writes our names in the Book of Life and the Book of Death. You don’t look so very well, sir. The weather disagreeing with you?”

“The damp disagrees with everyone.” Mr. Zalkind rearranged his papers in even piles.

“As it is written, Open your mouth for the poor and plead the cause of the needy. It was a Jewish mother who said so. The mother of a king, Mr. Zalkind. In the Book of Proverbs.”

“I’m familiar with it,” he said dryly.

“A girl with oozing eyes is very needy. To save a child’s sight, can there be a better
mitzvah
? It won’t be forgotten. And then before you look around, she’ll be working herself and earning a living.”

“Well.” Mr. Zalkind passed his hand over his tired eyes. “I should not wish this girl’s disease of the eye to infect others. It would burden the office needlessly.” He wrote something in his notes.

“And the school for the older boy?” she asked.

“Yes, yes.” He frowned and shut his record book. “But do not tell me of any more cousins.” He waved for the next petitioner. “I don’t wish to see you anytime soon.”

Very good. She’d come in with the rest of her list after Passover. Soon, soon she’d be a shopkeeper, and everything for her neighbors would have to be done now because in the first year of the shop she’d be working night and day. She could just see the sign above the door,
Davka Bicher un Kleider
, and underneath, in smaller English letters, “Necessarily Books and Blouses.”

Whitechapel Road

As Gittel popped through the narrow end of Black Lion Yard, she craned her neck to see if she could find her father among the Jewish tailors gossiping in clumps as they did every Sunday between the Yard and Great Garden Street. The men stood in the fine drizzle, a crowd of them in caps and wool jackets, hands shoved into pockets or cupping matches, her father standing over there on a step to light his cigarette in the shelter of a doorway.

No one could pull a tooth like Papa. Some fathers used string and a doorknob. Some just waited till the tooth dropped out of its own accord. But with a quick flick of his finger, her
tatteh
could present her with the tooth that just a second before had been hanging by a tough string, its underside sharp against the tip of her tongue. When she was small, he’d tell her that he was collecting the teeth for a display in the British Museum, paying her in toffee or monkey-nuts. Now she went along with the game for the pleasure of it.