A Dream That Vanishes

By Judith Civan

People have dreams which animate their lives. But are people themselves dreams perhaps? Shakespeare said so in The Tempest: we are the stuff dreams are made on.

Follow one family of dreamers, enthusiasts of social justice, Zionism, music and literature, who escape from pogrom-ravaged Russia to the challenges of pre-World War I Turkish Palestine, and then on to the safety and prosperity of America.

Growing up in America, Leah Isaacson tries to balance her American identity with loyalty to the Zionism of her father, but her marriage to the anti-Zionist editor Pinya creates problems. The nightmare of the Hitler years changes Pinya, reconciling him to the Zionist dream. He creates a newspaper to support renascent Israel. The family joins in this effort, linking their lives to the rebirth of a dream.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499038897

Judith Civan

Judith Civan studied English literature at Radcliffe and Columbia, then worked as a reporter and feature writer at the Newark Star-Ledger and was a columnist for the New York and Washington Jewish Weeks. She is the author of “Abraham’s Knife: the Mythology of the Deicide in Antisemitism”, a literary and historical study of the origins and ramifications of the deicide accusation, and the novels “Leaving Egypt” and “Choosing”.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

W e took the elevator up to the third floor and a nurse pointed the way to Grandma’s room. There were three beds lined up against one wall with small nightstands adjacent and a few chairs to sit on. From her bed Grandma could not quite see the spectacular view of the Hudson River and the sheer rock cliffs of New Jersey rising from the far side of the water. She lay propped against a heap of white pillows, a white sheet draped over her shrunken body, her shoulders covered by a sweater worn in shawl fashion, regardless of the heat of the summer day.

But then in the last decade or so of her life she had always seemed to be cold. I could remember so many times when she came into the house on a warm day, the smell of mothballs announcing that Grandma’s coat, with Grandma sheltered inside, had survived another subway ride from Queens and made it to Manhattan. Mothballs always remind me of Grandma, of her need for warmth, of the prudence of the good middle class housewife. Why do the elderly feel the cold so much and cannot seem to feel the more than adequate heat around them? Is this a presage of the future, some sort of intimation of the coldness of eternity? But I myself, even when young, have always dreaded being cold, although I can hardly remember any occasion on which I actually suffered from the cold.

I bent over to kiss her and at first she was happy to see us. "Mein kind, she said, grasping my hand. Sheine, kleine maydele," she murmured, just as she always did when I was indeed still kleine, small, and these words, just about the only Yiddish I learned from her, reestablished the bond of those years.

But then she began complaining. People in old age homes are expected to complain, even in such a well-run and enlightened home as this one. The woman over there, that one, she said, pointing with some scorn, she’s such a coarse person. She has no culture. She won’t let me listen to mein opera, the Metropolitan Opera. She calls it noise. She calls the nurse and says I am disturbing her with noise. I want to hear Aida and she says it is noise.

The institutional food, the confinement of the room, her aches and pains were not Grandma’s chief concern. Mein Metropolitan Opera was still what mattered. She had aged and shrunk, in truth almost disappeared but she was still the same person I had always known, probably the same person she had been before I existed. I used to think in my skeptical adolescence that her much vaunted love of music was a little phoney, a strategem to show off her Culture the way other women showed off their mink coats. Yet here she was, at the end of her road, waiting to embark for one last time, and she held on fiercely to her old desire.

A couple of weeks later she was dead. We were about to fly to Israel. The funeral was somehow sandwiched in between last minute packing and errands. I felt Grandma wouldn’t mind my preoccupation with the preparations for a trip to the land where she had lived, only briefly it is true, but still where she had spent the crucial years of her life, or so it seemed to me. She may not have liked it there in Turkish Palestine, but she never really got away, got free of it to the point where she could stop reliving it in her mind. Or perhaps she was only haunted by the years in Palestine after Grandpa was dead. When he was still alive I was too young to really know what and where Palestine was. Grandpa never mentioned it to me when he read me my Raggedy Ann and Andy story books although he did later show me some pictures of a strange land in an old book he owned.

I do remember seeing some other old books, foreign language books, when I went to stay in their house in Forest Hills but I think those must have been in Russian. I don’t remember seeing any Hebrew print and the illustrations showed mounted soldiers in a big open square with imposing official-looking buildings ringing the paved space. Years later, when I was in St. Petersburg and standing in the great space before the Hermitage, I said to myself, I’ve been here before, I know this place. It was the strangest feeling. I’m almost sure I was remembering those books. But where were the Hebrew books? Surely Grandpa must have had Hebrew books. But as I think of it, it was Grandma, not he, who put these strange Russian volumes in my hands so that I might look at the pictures.

I also remember other things from their house. The big brass samovar, for example, which Grandma always kept as shining as if it were brand new and not a wedding present from some forty or fifty years before which had been dragged from continent to continent and then halfway across America and back before it had come to rest in Forest Hills. And two pictures on the walls. One, a forest scene with tall dark trees, I took for a glimpse of that Russian forest on the fringes of which she had grown up. I was shocked and disappointed when I learned with the wisdom that comes with maturity that my Russian forest primeval was really French, a Corot reproduction showing the woods at Fontainebleau. But I suppose that Grandma chose it because it did remind her somewhat of the great trees of her youth. She liked to tell me stories of the lumbering industry which went on around the little inn her father kept near the river Dnieper, and how in the winter the men piled logs on the frozen river so that in the spring with the melting of the ice the logs would float downstream to the sawmills.

The second picture was a mysterious one, even more mysterious than the misty Corot forest. It was the face of a man with a black beard, and all of him, his head and shoulders, even the features on his face, was composed of tiny black letters in a language I could not read. The trail of tiny letters turned this way and that, growing thicker and darker in some places, such as on his eyebrows and brooding eyes, and thinning out at times, for example, across his cheeks, to such a paleness that his face looked very real and three-dimensional. I had no idea of who he was. I thought that perhaps he was a prince who was caught in an enchanter’s spell, for there was something in his face which was burning, intense, and yet arrested, frustrated. I was not exactly in love with him. I was obsessed by him. It took me even longer to identify him than to label the forest a Corot, for my education in Western art took precedence over my Zionist education. And it was as much of a shock to discover that the man over whose strange face I had been puzzling since my earliest years was the famous Theodore Herzl of the history books.

The funeral chapel on Amsterdam Avenue seemed to be full as usual of people holding their breath, holding their bodies stiffly and correctly erect. The back bent in despair, the heart-broken sobbing were privileges reserved for only the closest mourners, but even they sometimes failed to exercise their prerogative of grief. In the case of Grandma, it would have been pretentious to exhibit too much emotion for a woman who had died at the age of ninety-two after a long and healthy life. Even her children were subdued.

All of us were mourning not so much Grandma’s death as death itself and the knowledge that we too, all of us, would have our day in this establishment, or another like it somewhere, when we would be boxed and slipped into the earth and that would be that. Or at any rate, with respect to our bodies. For it was hard to believe that the stiff, painted dolls who lay in these coffins were really our relatives and friends. Perhaps if one of them had sat up, blinked his eyes, fixed us with a look, wiped away a tear or broken into a smile, we could have recognized our dead one and felt a real paroxysm of grief. But as it was, the death of the one we knew seemed untrue, and the presence of a corpse was no evidence to the contrary but just an additional proof that whatever had happened, this was not he or she whom we now lacked.

My grandmother was already gone. Perhaps she had set off again for Palestine, to retrace the path of her life back to its beginnings, for our end must surely link up in some way to our beginning; the time before we were and the time when we are no longer, have so much in common. At least in our eyes.

A man stood up in front to address the crowd, a rabbi whose name I had never heard before. Grandma had not had much to do with rabbis during her life but I suppose some words had to be said in her honor and in America a large part of a rabbi’s job is to make such public pronouncements. He had a musical voice and a dramatic manner so people paid attention, at least to his opening words. I, on the other hand, thought I knew Grandma’s story so I was letting my mind wander about between the initial My friends and the worthy wife of the late Shlomo Isaacson and the other, later, wholly predictable cliches of the eulogy.

But then a change in the tone of the rabbi’s voice caught my attention. "And in the year 1905 they made the difficult journey from Ekaterinaslav in Russia, fleeing the violence of the pogroms, to the Holy Land, the land of our fathers, the desire of all our hearts over the centuries, the goal of all Jews in whom there still beats a Jewish heart, a spark of that eternal spirit of which our poet Yehuda Halevi, zichrono l’shalom, so movingly wrote: ‘I am in the West, My heart is in the East.’ And this woman, Hannah Isaacson, was among the pioneers, the builders of Zion reborn, who labored with their sweat and blood to reclaim this precious land for us." As he spoke the words, his face awoke, as if these ponderous and rolling phrases genuinely moved him.

"In the wilderness, and you must remember that in 1905 Jaffa was merely an outpost in the wilderness, this brave woman came with her husband and two babies to make a home amid the heat and dirt and danger of a wild land. Not for her to cower in terror before the violence of the Russian mob, nor yet to flee to the safety of America as so many of us did, but for her the challenge of a new, free Jewish life, in that ancient land of our forefathers.

Times were hard in Palestine. Hunger and disease were her next door neighbors and bandits roamed the paths through the sands. Her husband struggled to earn their bread just as she struggled to care for their babies. They participated in the Zionist life of their community; they spoke the reborn Hebrew of Eliezer ben Yehuda and his comrades. They were a living part of the old-new land."

He paused for breath and no one even coughed. But now tragedy struck. The two babies, the children of her youth, were buried in the sands, victims of that perilous wilderness with its dirt and disease. More children were born to her there, two daughters, but she feared for their lives too. And so it was that Hannah Isaacson, a mourning mother, left Palestine.

His voice dropped to a murmur. "Left, but never forgot. If I forget thee O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its cunning. No, she never forgot in all those subsequent years of exile, of galut, the home she had found on the soil of her ancestors. She remained true in her heart to that great vision, that animating ideal of her youth, that Zionist ideal beside which all the trivialities of daily life pale into unreality. He paused. A dream, a ghost of a life. I am in the West, My heart is in the East."

He sighed, and stepped down from the rostrum. So passionate only a moment ago, he was now a thin, colorless old man. His eyes were very sad. In fact, he seemed to be grieving more than the rest of the assembly. Later, as we pushed out of the room and down the stairs, I saw a cousin accost him. Rabbi, that was a very moving talk. You must have known Mrs. Isaacson well.

Who? Mrs. Isaacson? The rabbi seemed confused, lost in thoughts of his own. You mean the deceased? No, I never met her.

But, but then how did you know- all that story you told? The cousin was amazed.

The home has records. They always interview everyone who enters and they give me the facts so I can make a eulogy. He walked away from the cousin and made his way out to the first car following the hearse, the job for which he was being paid now almost done.

The facts, I wondered. The facts. His facts and mine were perhaps not quite the same.

CHAPTER 2

S omewhere in my education, I cannot at this late date say where, I picked up an image of boats filled with disembodied souls being ferried across a river, probably the Styx, probably by the boatman Charon, crossing the boundary between human life and eternity’s realm into a timeless nowhereness. But not utterly disembodied souls after all, for I could see insubstantial bodies in my mind’s eye: pale faces, anxious eyes, expectant poses of trunk and limbs as they peered through the mists rising from the river and wondered if this ride would simply continue, continue, continue, or if they would come aground somewhere with a bump and disembark. On the Lexington Avenue bus going to school, I used to feel I was such a soul in such a craft, passing other boats (buses) full of suspended souls going past me on the current. I don’t know why I played this somewhat inappropriate little game, perhaps just reluctance to get to school with all the facing up to life and time which that entailed. I always did come aground at 89th Street, and yet the next time on the bus, I would be off again in my Stygian fantasy.

But airplane flights across the Atlantic are really like Charon’s boats, ferrying us from a past which has as good as vanished to a future which may or may not await us, while in the encapsulated present we can only sit helplessly and peer out through the mists of cloudbanks at an empty sky.

That is why coming over bits of land again is so exciting, so reassuring: the world we knew still exists and we will, God willing, return to it. Then comes Europe itself, an unrolling ribbon of plowed fields and grassy fields; a panorama of Alps strewn helter skelter before the advancing plane; then the Mediterranean, not so remote and forbidding as the Atlantic, even broken here and there by inhabited islands. And then the longed for coastline is suddenly below, a froth of white, a rope of sand, and the buildings, roads, lights of Tel Aviv. Even the dozenth time I am still excited. Improbable as it seems, Israel never stopped being, going on even when we were halfway round the world from it, oblivious of it, and now we can step off the plane into the midst of life again, into a present rushing into a future, and headlong into the past.

We gather up exhausted children, packages, rain coats, join the procession down the aisle and down the steps to the tarmac. It is evening now. The air is damp and warm and the lights look friendly. Only passport control and baggage and customs (straight through the green line) and out into the crowd of greeters to find our cab, and we are nearly home. Alive and in the midst of life. Waves of Hebrew break against us, splattering our ears with "Shalom and Bruchim habaim, hello, welcome; and Imah, Abba", Mama, Papa. Crowds of families reclaiming their own, hugging, kissing.

Lights twinkle in the distance and sounds float across the water. Hebrew? Arabic? Who can tell from this distance? Yiddish? Russian? All sounds are as one, merging with the lapping of the water against the side of the ship. Across the gap of water sits Jaffa, high on its headland, the stuccoed domes of its houses rising along its streets up from the harbor to the heights where the tower of St. Peter’s Church makes a Christian statement.

I thought we were done with churches, she said. I thought mosques, synagogues only, from now on.

No, Aneuta, we are not done with churches. This is after all their holy land too, he answered quietly. And it was in a church that we hid, on the roof. You remember?

Remember? Do you think I can ever forget? On the roof of a church in Ekaterinaslav? The pogromists below and the children in our arms, and I didn’t know which I was most afraid of- the mob in the street or our babies who might cry and give away our hiding place. Do I remember?

It will be different here, he pleaded. You will see I was right about coming.

I don’t know, she murmured. I only hope so. You and your Zionists. We could have been in America now, with your uncle in Rochester. Rochester sounds very nice.

They have churches there too. Lots of churches.

They don’t have a wilderness. They have a civilized country. I am holding Ussishkin personally responsible if any harm comes to my children. When your uncle sent those tickets, I was so happy, I thought we were saved. And then you had to go to your Zionists, to ask Ussishkin what to do, and the madman said: cash them in, go to Palestine, we need you in Palestine. And like a fool, you listened to the madman. I married a fool who hangs out with madmen.

Aneuta, you’re tired from the journey. Come to bed now, he urged, and in the morning when we go ashore, you’ll see. It’s a fine land and we can build a good life here, a life of our own. Not to be always hanging onto the coattails of the Russians, the Americans, begging for a chance to breathe a little, but to stand on our own feet and live a free life. Once, he said, you listened to these ideas and liked them. Once, you seemed to believe in them.

Once, she laughed bitterly, I was very young. That was before I had children, before I survived a pogrom, before I almost had tickets to America.

But she let Shlomo help her down from the deck to their cabin where the babies were sleeping quietly, lulled by the slapping of the waves against the hull of the ship. After all, they were here already. Out of Russia at least. Thank God. There was no point in sailing back to Odessa. Russia had become a land of nightmare, of drunken mobs and knives and blood-drenched corpses. And the tickets to America were gone, vanished, as if they had never been. Just pretend, she told herself, there had never been tickets to America, and then you would be happy to be able to come to Jaffa. Grateful for the chance to escape. Glad of these moon-struck Zionists, these luftmenschen who were going to build a new world in the wilderness and make the desert blossom and all the other miracles they dreamed of in the dark days of the Russian winter; glad of their company and glad of their help, for she and Shlomo would need help getting settled here in this God-forsaken corner of the Ottoman empire. God-forsaken? She could hardly call it that. Man-forsaken was truer, forsaken by everyone else but God, and a few poor fellahin who didn’t have the energy to look beyond the edges of the fields they tilled, and a few primitive Bedouin who meandered about with their mangy flocks. Even the effendis didn’t stay; they took their rents and went off to Beirut or Cairo or Damascus. Beirut, she wondered? Cairo? Could Shlomo be enticed? Not yet, of course. Not until he got the dreams beaten out of him by the realities of Palestine. But maybe later, in a while… . She too slept, lulled by the sea and her prospects of a future after all.

The porter’s arms were full of their baggage but there were still the featherbeds, great clumsy parcels of goose down wrapped about in sacking in a hopeful effort to keep them clean (Aneuta was finicky about dirt), and the brass samovar, Aneuta’s most treasured wedding gift, wrapped in more sacking, then crated to protect it from dents. She always polished it until it shined like gold, not plebian brass, and she felt that wherever she set it up, there indeed would be their home, even in this Turkish wilderness. The porter motioned to Shlomo to pile the things on to his back and Shlomo was doubtful one man could carry more, but urged on by the porter’s encouraging grunts he piled on the last of their belongings. At least the quilts are light, he told Aneuta, light as a feather, he joked.

The porter started off up the street at a trot, the superstructure on his back bouncing and swaying. Allah, Aneuta thought she heard him cry out, Allah! She cradled Devorele in her arms and Shlomo carried the heavier Yitzhak as they followed the porter up the rise. Does he know where we’re going? Aneuta asked.

Shlomo shrugged. "My Arabic is not too good, only salam aleikum, and I don’t know if he understands Russian but he doesn’t seem worried. I think we just follow him." He looked at the address on the paper in his hand but it was as rudimentary as it could be: Rabinovitz, Jaffa. At least, he reflected, Jaffa in 1905 was not exactly a metropolis, and the number of Jews there was not enormous, so the chances of finding themselves at the right house were not too bad.

The porter suddenly vanished into a passageway and following him, they came out into a small courtyard. He was rapidly unloading all their worldly possessions onto the pavement and Aneuta saw with horror that her precious featherbeds were about to slide into an evil looking puddle lurking in a depression of the pavement. Hey there, she shouted and ran up to restrain him, but the porter paid her no heed and