Fervor, page 7
In Oxfam, after finding copies of To the Lighthouse and The Waves, my eye was drawn to a large hardback in the memoirs section: Gehinnom and Afterwards by Hannah Rosenthal. According to the blurb, it was a biography of her father-in-law, centred around his experiences in Treblinka. The book’s cover showed a barbed-wire fence, ten feet high, stretching to the horizon. There were no people in shot, and the land on either side of the fence was barren. Inside the cover was another photo, this time a man late in the winter of his life, his eyes having receded deep into his skull. Evidently the book’s subject, Tovyah’s grandfather. The face was dimly familiar, and I wondered if it had featured in an advert I’d seen on the tube or in some literary magazine. The quotation on the back described it as an “unflinching journey into the dark heart of the last century, a journey all the more remarkable for the author’s unwavering belief in humanity, her ability to wrench some scrap of hope, even from the teeth of genocide.”
In the middle of the book, on fat, glossy pages, yet more photographs. First, depictions of life before the invasion. A little girl, six years old, hugging a wooden horse to her chest. Veterans of the Great War in their uniforms. A long-suffering father, eyes pleading as he marshals uncooperative children. A young woman brandishing a copy of Herzl’s pamphlet, Der Judenstaat. Is she already preparing for the journey east? These were Jews, all of them Jews, those who would leave and those who would remain. Jewish parents and Jewish children, unaware that history was widening its jaws. As I turned the pages, the pictures went from poignant, to heartrending, to obscene.
Including the two Woolfs, my bundle came to £8.50.
Back in college, I googled reviews. Certain critics took issue with Hannah’s explicitly religious view of history. Even the title, which conflates the furnaces of the death camps with the ancient Hebrew name for hell, was met with hostility; she was accused variously of aestheticism and obfuscation. In general, believers liked the book and atheists did not. No, that’s the wrong word. Believers might have praised the book, but you couldn’t like it.
On the Thursday night, I went out with Ruby, Carrie, and Jan—term’s last hurrah. Though I was bent on having a good time, the evening was a blowout; boring, loud, repetitive, and inescapably squalid. Standing in a seemingly endless queue for either the bar or the toilet (the lines were indistinguishable), I wondered what portion of life people could spend drinking vodka Red Bulls from plastic cups. Compared with the Schultz talk—when listening to an old man at a lectern seemed, for the first time ever, urgent—this last night on the town was simply time wasted, and I resolved not to repeat it.
Back in college, too drunk and caffeinated to sleep, I was tempted to knock on Tovyah’s door. Suddenly, the argument we’d had the other night seemed more like a foolish misunderstanding than a genuine clash of personalities and I wanted things straightened out before I left for the holidays. Thankfully, I lacked the nerve to follow through with the drunken impulse, and so didn’t further alienate my neighbour by banging on his door in the small hours.
In the morning, I pressed “dismiss” rather than “snooze” when my alarm intruded at eight, and I slept into the afternoon. By the time I’d showered, dressed, and hastily packed, it was one o’clock. Glancing at my phone, I saw that I had several missed calls from my father, who’d been waiting in the car.
“You took your time,” he said, when I emerged at last, and opened the passenger door.
“Sorry, Dad.”
“Long as you’ve had fun,” he said. “Now, guess who I’ve just seen.”
We hung back for a moment and there she was, Hannah Rosenthal, the latest author to join my bookshelf, dressed now in a dark skirt suit, carrying more than her fair share of her son’s luggage, and striding quite upright as she came through the gates of the porters’ lodge. She was smaller than I expected. Behind her, eyes lowered to the floor, walked Tovyah. He was kicking his feet and looked sick of the world. I waved but he didn’t see me.
“Is that her son?” my father said, taking one more glance in the rear-view mirror before moving out into the road. “Not a happy bunny.” It was true, Tovyah looked awful. His eyes were puffy, and his face drained of colour. At the corner of his mouth was the fresh stamp of a lipstick smile, the consequence of a theatrical reunion with his mother. “Friend of yours?”
“Jury’s out,” I said.
Once home, I unpacked Hannah’s book, intending to read the opening paragraph to see if it whetted my appetite. But I found myself unable to take my eyes from the photo on the inside cover. I now knew why the face was so familiar; it was the man who sat next to Tovyah in the lecture. An image search on my laptop revealed that his white robes were tachrichim, the traditional garb for a Jewish burial. And his ornate scarf was his tallit, a prayer shawl given to Jewish boys at thirteen, the year they become men. In death, the shawl is wrapped around the body and cut off at one end, to symbolise release from the obligations of the living.
SIX
When Hannah first started talking to Yosef about his experiences during the war, she had no thought of publication. Or so she claimed. Now that Zeide was dying, it was simply important that someone listened while he unburdened himself. Her interest in the story, however, was long-standing; it dated right back to her courtship with Eric. They’d met in the drab lobby of a North London hotel, a venue he picked from a choice of three, apparently, though she couldn’t see why he liked it; the tables were topped with fake marble, and the striped wallpaper reminded her of hard-boiled sweets. Hannah was then in her mid-twenties, a rising journalist who still got a kick out of seeing her name in print. Eric was the second man that Ziegler, the marriage broker, suggested; the first was a nineteen-year-old yeshiva student called Mordecai, whom she dismissed without meeting. Eric, by contrast, was a barrister of good family, with no skeletons in his closet, and virtually her own age. By skeletons, Ziegler meant broken engagements, and by virtually Hannah’s age, he meant thirty-four. So why still single? “A romantic! Been waiting for the right woman.” Having recently embraced the religion her parents long ago abandoned, Hannah struggled at first with the idea of a marriage broker. But Rabbi Grossman, her newfound spiritual guide, assured her that this was how it’s done. She only had to meet the guy. If it was a disaster, no second date.
Eric got there first and did not stand when she arrived. He neither hugged her nor kissed her cheek in greeting. Wouldn’t even shake hands. Though Hannah knew such intimacies between unmarried men and women were forbidden, being on the receiving end was another matter. She did not grow up like this. All he did to acknowledge her entrance was sit there and nod. His beard was thick, his features dark and nervous. In his right hand was a glass of water, crammed with ice and garnished with a wheel of lemon. This was the real thing, then, a man who knew no other way of life.
“Had many of these meetings?” Hannah asked as she sat down.
“A few,” he said. “Your first time?”
“Oh, I’ve had dozens of these,” she said. Eric looked at her like she was raving mad. Then he saw that she was joking and gave a polite smile.
Catching the eye of a passing waiter, Hannah ordered a glass of white wine. “A large. Wait, sorry. Make that two.” When Eric said he didn’t want one, Hannah said, “They’re for me. As in, both.”
She felt very worldly all of a sudden, thinking how naïve this older man was in matters of the heart. She told him all about herself; the God-free childhood, her studies at university, the career so far. She didn’t mention her exes, the last of whom had the nerve to get down on one knee, in Blackpool, on a badly timed weekend break. (It rained throughout. She left him drenched and miserable on the beach at low tide, cradling the gold band.) Eric, having listened patiently to Hannah’s life story, had not touched his wine. Assuring him that she was joking earlier, she encouraged him to take a sip. Which he did. Precisely one small sip, then pushed the glass away.
“I’m no expert,” he said, “but it tastes a little bitter.”
Tipsy now and irritable, she suggested they move to a livelier bar. Eric said he thought where they were was fine. Their eyes met and he looked away.
She asked if she was boring him.
“Not at all.”
“You don’t seem to be having much fun.”
“In fact,” he said, “the complete opposite. Do you know how extraordinarily beautiful you are?”
As he said it, Eric was transformed into an eleven-year-old boy. How could this man stand up in court, arguing points of law?
“Would you mind if I ask you a personal question?” he said.
“Go ahead. If I don’t like it, I won’t answer.”
“I want to know what it was like for you as a kid.”
Hannah laughed, not sure if she understood.
“Bacon sandwiches,” he said, “homework on Saturdays.”
“You mean what was it like growing up without all the rules?”
“Without Judaism.”
Hannah came from a family long-established in this country. Her mother was a doctor, and her father taught chemistry at an independent school in Dulwich. Affluent, liberal, and fully assimilated, they had no need of old-world hocus pocus. As a girl, seeing a congregation filing into the sunlight after mass one Sunday, Hannah asked her father why they never went to church. Because we’re not Christians, he said. But why don’t we go to synagogue? Because we know better. She looked back at the line of people breaking up into threes and fours, some walking hand in hand as they made their way towards the broad street. They didn’t seem to lack the ordinary faculties.
“It wasn’t like anything,” she told Eric. “Everyone I knew was secular.”
He frowned, then nodded. “And what brought you to God?”
When asked, she liked to say it began at primary school. A maths lesson, in fact, on symmetry. She’d been given a handheld mirror to learn about reflection. Little Hannah had drawn a shape on squared paper, held the mirror across the page, and watched the lines double. Placed correctly, a mirror could transform a triangle into a square, a square into an oblong, and a splayed hand into a comical undersea creature. The afternoon took a vertiginous turn when Hannah placed two mirrors on either side of her pencil, which replicated itself endlessly, tip touching tip and rubber touching rubber. Only later did the enormity of the vision grip her. She told her parents she was terrified of living forever. The thought of all those days, stretching out one after another in an unbroken chain, turned her stomach. But you won’t live forever, her father said. She was not consoled. The alternative, being hurled into spinning darkness, was no better.
“You were frightened by imponderables,” Eric said. “And you turned to God for answers.”
“That’s not it. The fear, the inescapable terror, that was how I came to understand God. It’s like I could feel something otherworldly inside of me. I’m afraid I’m not making much sense.”
“You’re making perfect sense. Didn’t Moses find God at the top of the mountain, where the ridge of death is all around? Look on his face, we are warned, and you will not be suffered to live.”
Hannah nodded. Perhaps this lawyer was not the dope she took him for.
“Have another sip of wine,” she said. “It grows on you.”
He sipped and then grimaced. “You got freaked out as a kid. Then what happened?”
The crisis had come on not long ago, when she was alone in the flat she rented with an old school friend. She’d just thrown out some mouldy bread and put on the radio. Self-recrimination burned within her. What had she done? Nothing terrible. Hers were the usual failings, the run-of-the-mill screwups. Casual lies, selfish impulses, small-time erotic betrayals. A dark stain on the wall caught her attention. And as she contemplated the stain, that bruise on the plaster, she felt she was being watched. How you know you’re being followed even before you hear footsteps, the coarse breathing at your shoulder. The difference between being alone and not being alone. Then came a palpable thinning of the air. As she closed her eyes she was aware of a crowding presence, infinitely perceptive; a judgement more intelligent, more penetrating than her own; an eye without dimensions; an ecstatic vision, searingly hot. The dizzying realisation that she and everything else was turning. Forever. How there was no such thing as a secret thought, no dark, unfathomable chamber of the mind, no getting away with it, no silent passions, no forgetting, and no solitude either. Every act of cruelty or kindness is both known and recorded, everything we’ve ever done weighed in the balance. And we are never, any of us, isolate. Think these thoughts, take them seriously, and you must change your life. That same night, light-headed and fever-bright, she swept out of her front door and bore down the streets in search of a synagogue.
* * *
She didn’t tell all this to Eric. She finished the second wine and said she was sorry, but she had to go. As she stood up, he asked her for another meeting and to her surprise, she consented. A week later, they went for dinner at a kosher restaurant near Cricklewood. Over starters, she mocked him affectionately, pretending to believe this was his first time in a restaurant. She felt exposed and vulnerable after their last meeting and wanted to put him in his place. When their knees touched under the table, he recoiled.
“You really don’t know how to behave with a woman, do you?” she said.
To which he replied, “I was given to believe there’s more than one way.”
She continued to make fun of him. She said he was no more than a child, a total innocent. “Hence the beard, right? You want people to think you’re a grown up.”
“Beautiful Hannah,” he said. “Would you like to know why I wear my beard?”
“Go on.”
“Bistu zikher?” Eric said. Hannah stared at him, uncomprehending. “Mamaloshen. It means, ‘are you sure.’ ” There was nothing playful in his tone. Hannah said yes, she wanted to know.
“When my father was a teenager, he and his brother both had full beards. Payot too, the whole bit. I’ve seen pictures, my uncle looked like Rasputin. One day, their mother comes home and orders them to shave. Beards, sidelocks, everything. You have to understand, this is completely out of the blue. Mame, they say, what are you talking about? This is crazy. ‘No discussions, shave! Now! I want two clean faces.’ I never met my grandmother, but I understand she was feisty, and the boys did as they were told. Only later did they find out why. Earlier that day, my grandmother saw a group of men lined up beside a wall. They were told to remove their hats. Then two Germans, one with scissors, one with a meat cleaver, hacked the facial hair, hacked the payot, hacked everything. She watched the blood running through the gutter. Afterwards, they didn’t know where to go, looking like they did. They just knelt by the wall, bleeding and crying, covering their faces with their hands.
“So you see, beautiful Hannah. The reason I wear a beard today, is because I can.”
Such stories were the stuff Eric had grown up on, the myths and parables that shaped everything he believed. Hannah stopped making fun. If Eric was overly polite, cautious, and reluctant to assert himself, he had reasons. If he made quick judgements and held them close, he had reasons. And if he readily opened his heart before a lovely, God-fearing Jew, if he asked her to marry him after only a few brief meetings, he had his reasons for that as well. “At last,” she wrote in the autobiography she published years later, “I had met a man with greater moral authority than either my parents or my rabbi. What could I say but yes?”
A decade and a half passed before she returned to the story of those two clean-shaven boys, imperilled in Occupied Warsaw. By now she was married with three children. The early promise of her career had come to nothing; breaks fell to rivals and colleagues, and the demands of motherhood continually scuppered her hopes of advancement. Now that Tovyah was almost ready for secondary school, a time she had long anticipated, it seemed too late to rebuild her professional life. She had no steady job, and few prospects. Editors who had once encouraged her now looked embarrassed when they met. “I’d heard the word, of course,” she later recalled, “but until then I didn’t truly understand what depression was. Now each day rose before me, a wall of hours, impossible to climb over. Three or four times I sat in the window on the second floor of our house and considered hurling myself to the pavement. Just a moment’s fall, then whatever’s next. But I was scared. Scared because G-d was watching.”
It was during the period of her unemployment that Hannah began to research and write her account of her father-in-law’s confinement in Treblinka, entitled Gehinnom and Afterwards. The same book that, years hence, Kate would take home after her first term at university.
When, shortly after the death of his wife, my father-in-law came to live with us, I knew only the bones of his story. Born in Poland at precisely the wrong time in the twentieth century (the exact year was unknown, even by Yosef himself), he was among the walking corpses who escaped from Treblinka during the rebellion of ’43. Sheltered by peasants in a dank basement until the end of the war, he did not see the sun for two years straight. When at last the war was over, he emerged from the basement, only to step into the grey dawn of the new Europe that had sprung up behind Stalin’s Iron Curtain.
Somehow, between then and now, he’d made his way to England.
Knowing these blunt facts, one could make allowances for behaviour that was otherwise inexcusable. Even so, I found him easier to admire than to love; he was combative, bad tempered with the children, and impossibly stubborn. Before I had any notion of a book, I wanted to hear my father-in-law’s story from his own mouth, to fill in all those tantalising blanks, and, hopefully, to come to a better understanding of the grim-faced man who shared our house. It came as no surprise that getting him to tell me this story was one long fight.
