As Sol’s voice once again fills the room, Nechuma’s gaze slips to the chair she’s left empty for Addy, and her chest grows heavy with a familiar ache. His absence consumes her.
Addy’s letter had arrived a week ago. In it, he’d thanked Nechuma for her candor, and asked her please not to worry. He would return home as soon as he could collect his travel documents, he wrote. This news brought Nechuma both relief and concern. She had no greater wish than to have her son home for Passover, except, of course, to know that he was safe in France. She’d tried to be honest, had hoped he would understand that Radom was a dismal place right now, that traveling through German-occupied regions wasn’t worth the risk, but perhaps she’d held back too much. It wasn’t just the Kosmans, after all, who had left. There were half a dozen others. She hadn’t told him about the Polish customers they’d recently lost at the shop, or about the bloody brawl that had broken out the week before between two of Radom’s soccer teams, one Polish, the other Jewish, and how young men from each team still walked around with split lips and black eyes, glaring at one other. She’d left it all unsaid to spare him pain and worry, but perhaps in doing so, she’d exposed him to a greater danger.
Nechuma had replied to Addy’s letter, imploring him to be safe in his travels, and then assumed he was en route. Every day since, she’s jumped at the sound of footsteps in the foyer, her heart thrumming at the thought of finding Addy at the door, a smile spread across his handsome face, his valise in hand. But the footsteps are never his. Addy has not come.
“Maybe he had to wrap up some things at the firm,” Jakob offered earlier in the week, sensing her growing concern. “I can’t imagine his boss would let him leave without a couple of weeks’ notice.”
But all Nechuma can think is: What if he’s been held up at the border? Or worse? To reach Radom, Addy would have to travel north through Germany, or south through Austria and Czechoslovakia, both of which have fallen under Nazi rule. The possibility of her son in the hands of the Germans—a fate that might have been avoided had she been more forthright with him, had she been more adamant in asking him to remain in France—has kept her lying awake at night for days.
As tears prick at her eyes, Nechuma’s thoughts cartwheel back in time to another April day, during the Great War, a quarter century ago, when she and Sol were forced to spend Passover huddled in the building’s basement. They’d been evicted from their apartment and, like so many of their friends at the time, had nowhere else to go. She remembers the suffocating stench of human waste, the air thick with incessant moans of empty stomachs, the thunder of distant cannons, the rhythmic scrape of Sol’s blade against wood as he whittled away at a log of old firewood with a paring knife, sculpting figurines for the children to play with and picking splinters from his fingers. The holiday had come and gone without acknowledgment, never mind a traditional Seder. Somehow, they lived three years in that basement, the children surviving on her breast milk while Hungarian officers bivouacked in their apartment upstairs.
Nechuma looks across the table at Sol. Those three years, though they nearly broke her, are now as far behind her as possible, almost as if they’d happened to someone else entirely. Her husband never speaks of that time; her children, thankfully, do not recall the experience in any palpable way. There have been pogroms since—there will always be pogroms—but Nechuma refuses to contemplate a return to a life in hiding, a life without sunlight, without rain, without music and art and philosophical debate, the simple, nourishing riches she’s grown to cherish. No, she will not go back underground like some kind of feral creature; she will not live like that ever again.
It couldn’t possibly come to that.
Her mind turns once more, to her own childhood, to the sound of her mother’s voice telling her how it was common when she herself was growing up in Radom for little Polish boys to hurl stones at her kerchiefed head at the park, how riots had erupted all over the city when the town synagogue was first built. Nechuma’s mother had shrugged it off. “We just learned to keep our heads down, and our children close,” she said. And sure enough, the attacks, the pogroms, they passed. Life went on, as it did before. As it always does.
Nechuma knows that the German threat, like the threats that came before it, will also pass. And anyway, their situation now is far different than it was during the Great War. She and Sol have worked tirelessly to earn a living, to establish themselves among the city’s top-tier professionals. They speak Polish, even at home, while many of the city’s Jews converse only in Yiddish, and rather than live in the Old Quarter as the majority of Radom’s less affluent Jews do, they own a stately apartment in the center of town, complete with a cook and a maid and the luxuries of indoor plumbing, a bathtub they imported themselves from Berlin, a refrigerator, and—their most prized possession—a Steinway baby grand piano. Their fabric shop is thriving; Nechuma takes great care on her buying trips to collect the highest-quality textiles, and their clients, both Polish and Jewish, come from as far as Kraków to purchase their ladieswear and silk. When their children were of school age, Sol and Nechuma sent them to elite private academies, where, thanks to their tailored shirts and perfect Polish, they fit in seamlessly with the majority of the students, who were Catholic. In addition to providing them with the best possible education, Sol and Nechuma hoped to give their children a chance to sidestep the undertones of anti-Semitism that had defined Jewish life in Radom since before any of them could remember. Though the family was proudly rooted in its Jewish heritage and very much a part of the local Jewish community, for her children Nechuma chose a path she hoped would steer them toward opportunity—and away from persecution. It is a path she stands by, even when now and then at the synagogue, or while shopping at one of the Jewish bakeries in the Old Quarter, she catches one of Radom’s more orthodox Jews glancing at her with a look of disapproval—as if her decision to mix with the Poles has somehow diminished her faith as a Jew. She refuses to be bothered by these encounters. She knows her faith—and besides, religion, to Nechuma, is a private matter.
Pinching her shoulder blades down her back, she feels the weight of her bosom lift from her ribs. It’s not like her to be so inundated with worry, so distracted. Pull yourself together, she chides. The family will be fine, she reminds herself. They have a healthy savings. They have connections. Addy will turn up. The mail has been unreliable; in all likelihood, a letter explaining his absence will arrive any day. It will all be fine.