The Tin Horse A Novel

AH, THANKSGIVING!

I wake up on Thanksgiving morning feeling … not terrific, that would be too much to ask for just two weeks after my car accident. But for the first time since the accident, I’d dare to call myself “energetic”—and looking forward to my favorite holiday.

I put on a sweat suit, pop Tai Chi for Osteoporosis into the DVD player in the den, and do my morning exercise. I’m still creaky and moving gingerly, but between my regular tai chi and water aerobics, I was in good shape for an eighty-five-year-old prior to the accident, and my doctor says I’m making “an A-plus recovery.” I quoted the doctor to Ronnie and Harriet when I pushed to host Thanksgiving dinner here, as we’d planned. They didn’t really try to talk me out of it. This will be our last Thanksgiving in the Santa Monica house, and they want it, too.

Thanksgiving is the one holiday that never held any traps for me. Not like Rosh HaShanah or Passover or Purim, which stirred up a maelstrom of feelings, my parents’—and later, Paul’s and my—pleasure in the traditions and special foods coexisting with discomfort at old-country religiosity. And there was a sense of otherness about the Jewish holidays, of being separate from mainstream America, that brought up a complicated mix of pride and alienation. And fear: both Zayde and my mother had experienced pogroms in their shtetls, and when my kids were young in the 1950s, we were only a decade away from the Holocaust.

As for the holidays celebrated by mainstream America, Christmas especially became inescapable—and hugely tempting—when my generation settled outside Boyle Heights. Every December, most of the houses on our block in Santa Monica were festooned with twinkling lights, and the choir and orchestra at the kids’ school gave a concert filled with glorious carols and Handel. One year, Paul and I gave in to the kids’ pleading and got a tree—of course, emphasizing that our family didn’t believe in Jesus, calling the tree a Hanukkah bush, and topping it with a silver Star of David. It was Papa, whom I’d seen as my assimilated parent, who refused to set foot in our house as long as the tree occupied the living room. (We moved it into the den.)

Thanksgiving, however, is celebrated by everyone fortunate enough to live in America. And we were happily, without a whiff of ambivalence, Americans.

Once I’ve done my tai chi, I prepare my contribution to our Thanksgiving feast, pumpkin pies. I’m nowhere near the cook Mama was, but pumpkin pie is easy as long as you use pre-made crust; it’s hardly fair, but you get rave reviews for doing nothing but following the directions on a can of pumpkin and providing plenty of whipped cream.

The pies are baking and I’m eating cornflakes and reading the Los Angeles Times when Ronnie arrives. It’s not even nine, but coming early to help was the condition he set, in our negotiation about having Thanksgiving here.

“Coffee!” He makes a beeline for the coffeepot, this six-footer who mysteriously emerged from Paul’s and my compact family lines.

I may be the only one who calls him Ronnie, now that Paul’s gone, but I still look at him—a gangly fifty-one-year-old whose fringe of hair, surrounding a bald spot, is more salt than pepper—and see the relentlessly logical boy who could outlast me in an argument. A born lawyer, as Cousin Mollie used to call me. Ronnie’s mind works like mine, as if all the cogs and connections were built from the same materials and set of instructions. My easy child. (Carol won’t be here. She’s coming down from Oregon in two weeks to help me with the move.)

Over coffee, I ask him about his work. We’re still talking, debating strategy for one of his cases, when Harriet comes over at ten. And then it’s not too early, and there’s plenty to do.

Ronnie gets the turkey, a twenty-five-pounder, into the oven, and then he, Harriet, and I figure out where to put extra tables and chairs. We’re having a real gathering of the clan, twenty-two people, to bid farewell to the Santa Monica house, whose large dining room and yard made it the primary site for family events, even several weddings in the backyard. The yard is beautiful, still. I took out tension by gardening. Oh, I’m going to miss the garden, especially the fig tree, grown from a cutting I took from the tree behind our house in Boyle Heights.

By one, starting time for the touch football game at a nearby park, nearly everyone has arrived. Ronnie’s wife, Melissa, insists on holding down the fort, staying in the house to baste the turkey and welcome any later arrivals, and I join the trek to the park two blocks away. Younger, fitter family members have brought lawn chairs and set them up for the spectators. I sit next to Harriet—and debate, as I have for the past two weeks, whether to tell her what I’ve found out about Barbara.

But what have I found out, really? Only that some hotel detective in Colorado Springs thought she might be a blonde named Kay Devereaux. I’ve done a bit of investigating since Josh dropped that bombshell, and I’ve discovered just one thing I’m sure of: the threatening reach of the Internet into every corner of our lives is overrated. For example, you can get online records of marriage licenses issued in Colorado Springs if the marriage occurred after 1981; otherwise, as I learned the old-fashioned way by making a phone call, you have to go to the county clerk’s office and search microfilm—and there’d be acres of it, since I have no date for her marriage. Not to mention that I have no idea if she even stayed in Colorado Springs or got married there.

I’ve considered taking Josh up on his offer to help me search. Or hiring a detective, someone based in Colorado. But how far do I want to pursue this? Say I did find her, might I regret it? And the greater likelihood is that I’d invest time, money, and emotional energy, yet come up empty-handed. All over again. There’s so little to go on—only her name and the fact that she worked at the Broadmoor Hotel in … I don’t even know that, because Carl Logan didn’t date his letter. But it must have been in the early 1940s, during the time—or not long afterward—that Philip was looking for her. And then … did Mama and Papa write her a letter? But why didn’t Papa jump on the first train to Colorado Springs? And why didn’t they tell me? Did they imagine they were protecting me? I had a right to know!

“Earth to Lainie,” Harriet says.

“Yeah.” I turn to my sister, who’s wearing a Day-Glo lime green jacket and a Dodgers baseball cap.

“Are you doing okay with all of this? The move?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. I’m thankful. For all of this. For them.” I nod my head toward our progeny scrapping and yelling over the football. “And for you. What about you, what are you thankful for?”

“The same. And I’m grateful that you only drove into a cactus when you … um, got it into your head to drive to Barstow.” The look in Harriet’s eye reminds me of Mama in those moments when I suspected she could see through me.

“Know what else I’m thankful for?” I say. “That we don’t have to play football anymore.”

“Nobody forced you to play.”

“Ha! First I had to because all the Kennedy women played.” Our Thanksgiving touch football tradition began in 1960, a few weeks after JFK was elected. Not that Paul and I were naive enough to mistake Kennedy for a real progressive, but who could resist the sense of hope, the youthful energy of those rollicking, tousle-haired Boston Irish Democrats? “Then it was because of the women’s movement, having to set an example for our kids.”

“You’re feeling better, aren’t you?”

“Much.”

“Good. Look, there’s something I’ve been thinking about since the day we went through those papers and books. But I didn’t want to bring it up right after your accident …”

“What is it?”

“About Barbara.”

“Barbara?” Did I say something out loud a moment ago? Or can my Wise Woman sister simply read my mind?

“You were asking, what if we could find her now. And I wondered, did you ever mourn for her?”

“Of course I did! The day she left, I cried my eyes out. At Pearl’s.” Even as I say it, though, I realize my mistake. It’s true, I sobbed at Pearl’s—the memory of my tears drenching the love seat is so strong, I can almost feel damp brocade under my cheek. But that happened the day before Barbara left. And my tears weren’t for her.

“I mean grieving,” Harriet says. “Acknowledging the loss. Saying goodbye.”

“Like sitting shiva? I couldn’t do that unless I knew she was dead.” And I happen to know, because I’ve checked the Social Security Death Index, that there’s no death record for a Kay Devereaux who’d be anywhere near the right age.

I have to tell Harriet! She has a right to know, too.

“Not sitting shiva,” she says. “But what about creating some kind of ritual? We could do it together. Maybe on a trip to Rancho La Puerta this spring?”

“Definitely yes on the trip to Rancho La Puerta.” We used to do an annual sister trip to the spa just south of the border, she, Audrey, and I, but we’ve gone less often since Audrey died (like Zayde and Papa, she had a stroke) six years ago.

“And think about doing a ritual?”

“Sure, I’ll think about it.”

I won’t bring up what I’ve found now, during a holiday celebration. But sometime this weekend …

Still, it’s one thing to have been told at the time, when there were decisions to make and things to do. All these years later, what do I achieve by sharing this news with Harriet except to torment her, too, with the suspicion that Mama and Papa lied about something that caused us such anguish? Our family tragedy, the loss that, she’s right, we never mourned. Did we ever even call it a “loss,” did we use that word? At first, when we found Barbara’s note and couldn’t locate her, she had simply “left.” Over the following weeks and months, she’d “run away.”

Her leaving wasn’t like a death, unconditional. Clean. Marked by ceremonies brilliant in their power to tighten the screws on your anguish and push you into the physical release of weeping. Now you walk to the edge of the grave, jab a shovel into the damp, freshly dug earth, and drop the earth on the casket. Now you retreat from ordinary life for seven days, not going out and covering the mirrors. Now, when the seven days are over, the rabbi takes you on a walk around the block to symbolize your return to life.

Shiva or not, I’ve long been reconciled to Barbara being gone; I accepted it years ago. And yet, on this sunny Thanksgiving afternoon, as I wonder if I might have known where she was, might at least have known that she was, if it hadn’t been kept from me … I feel the hole her disappearance left in my life as if the ground has ruptured and swallowed my children.

“Elaine?” Harriet says with alarm.

“What?” I say as my eyes race over the football players, atavistically seeking my own first: Ronnie, his daughter Zoe, Carol’s son Dylan. Carol? In Oregon. And Brian in Argentina. They’re all accounted for. Safe.

“Are you okay? You just moaned.”

“That was a yawn.”

Why put her through what I’m feeling now? As if I’d opened our family albums and every picture of Mama and Papa were corroded by acid?

FORTUNATELY, THE BLEAKNESS DOESN’T stay with me. At dinner, I revel in my raucous family, seated at three tables that spill from the dining room into the den. There’s such a sad but sweet nostalgia when I catch, in the living, glimpses of the dead: Ronnie plunges a carving knife into the turkey with the same gleeful expression that used to come over Paul’s face when he carved. I’m reminded of Papa’s gravity in the serious eyes of Harriet’s youngest granddaughter. And all the tastes—Mama’s sweet potatoes, now made by Harriet; Audrey’s cranberry compote, the recipe passed to one of her sons. It’s as if I can look around the room, enjoy the feast, and relive every Thanksgiving dinner that’s taken place in this house … and before that, our Thanksgivings in Boyle Heights. Harriet and I are the only ones left from those days, the sole carriers of that history.

But that’s not entirely true, I realize. Danny was there, too; Mama always invited him and his father. It’s the second time today I’ve thought of Danny, and he stays in my mind as everyone pushes back from the table with happy groans of satiation. I keep thinking about him during a game of charades, and when we decide we finally have enough room for dessert. My pies are a big hit, with reason; they’re scrumptious. As I said, you use pre-made crust and pile on the whipped cream, you can’t go wrong.

Then, three and four and five at a time, they say goodbye, and they’re gone, leaving my house cleaner than when they arrived. Danny, however, lingers; multiple versions of Danny—the waif he was as a child, the muscular young man who built himself up lifting weights at Venice Beach, the soft-eyed Danny I saw in private moments.

I check the international time zones. It’s already eleven here, so it shouldn’t be too early to call him.

But I must have miscalculated. My call wakes him.

“Ken,” he mumbles.

“Danny, oh, I’m sorry, I thought it was nine in the morning there.” In Israel, where he went to live after World War II—though it was Palestine then. He put down his gun from fighting the Nazis and immediately picked up another to fight for a Jewish state.

“I just sleep in some days. An old man’s prerogative.” His voice crisp, he’s gone from groggy to fully alert within seconds. The discipline of work that he still, even in retirement, refers to vaguely as “imports and exports.” I’m certain he was high up in the Israeli intelligence agency, the Mossad.

“Aviva lets you sleep in?” I say.

Danny’s wife chose her name, which is Hebrew for “spring,” when she immigrated to Palestine after surviving a concentration camp. Danny changed his name, too, from Berlov to Bar-Lev—“son of the heart.” He and Aviva met when they were doing a sabotage mission against the British for the Haganah, the underground. Aviva is a formidable woman, a life force, whom I profoundly admire. She is also, not to mince words, intrusive, a person who, when you’re enjoying your rye toast in the morning, will insist on slicing a cucumber and tomato for you, “an Israeli breakfast.” And then stand over you until you eat it all. Aviva is one of the reasons that although Paul and I took half a dozen trips to Israel, we stayed with Danny and Aviva only once.

“Aviva …” He lets out a heavy sigh. “Is it that long since the last time we talked? Aviva has Alzheimer’s.”

“Oh, Danny, I’m sorry.”

“Americans, always with the ‘I’m sorry.’ ” Whatever hint of vulnerability crept in at the mention of Aviva’s illness, it’s gone now, replaced with combativeness—just like Danny as a kid, chin up against his father’s poverty. Do we ever really change? “Could be worse. She’s still at home. There’s a nurse who comes, and our daughter, you remember, Shuli? She’s just a few minutes away. Lainie, it’s great to hear from you. How are you? Staying healthy, I hope?”

“I’m fine. I just had the whole family over for Thanksgiving.”

“Thanksgiving, right. So what’s new with you?”

“I’m moving. In two weeks.”

“Mazel tov. You finally see there’s no place but Israel for a Jew to live? There’s an apartment by Shuli coming on the market. Owners are in a hurry to sell, they might offer some great incentives.”

“Like armor plating for my car?”

“Like a sense of pride in being a Jew and realpolitik about the fact that the Arabs do want to push us into the sea, no matter what their prettied-up representatives say to get foolish American liberals to sympathize with them.”

This is why Danny and I don’t call each other often. He lives in a settlement on the West Bank, and you’d think, at our age, we’d be able to live with our political differences. For God’s sake, I can do that with my grandniece who became a Mormon and a Republican! With Danny, though, too many conversations over the years have deteriorated into my shouting about the destruction of Palestinian olive groves and his shouting about getting pushed into the sea; now it’s as if just hearing each other’s voices brings up all the old fights.

But that’s not the discussion I want to have tonight.

“Danny,” I say.

“What is it?” He’s known me since we were five, and he picks up something in my voice. “Are you really all right?”

“Did you … Getting ready to move, I’m going through old papers. Old memories. Did you ever hear from Barbara?”

“Oy, that’s ancient history. Why not let the past stay the past?”

“Did you?”

“Not a word.”

“Did you try to find her?”

“I was already gone when she left.” He joined the Canadian army in September 1939; he couldn’t wait to get into the war.

“I meant later. You knew how to find people.”

He chuckles but doesn’t bother to deny that he was a spy.

“Not to get in touch with her,” I say. “Just to know what happened, if she was all right.”

“First of all, you’re overestimating my capabilities. And I never had any doubt she was all right. All the stories I’ve heard from people who were forced to leave their homes and go to concentration camps, I wasn’t going to waste my time worrying about … to be blunt, a vain, selfish girl who left of her own free will.”

He’s protesting a bit too much, but I have no idea if that means he actually did look for Barbara and won’t admit it, or if it’s because of what happened between him and me, wounds that penetrated deeply because we were so unguarded then, so young.

If we had slept together, just once, would it have eased the prickliness between us, the edgy subtext that turns stray remarks into jabs? (Is that the real reason for our intense political battles?) One time we came close. What a disaster. It happened on the first trip Paul and I took to Israel. We were staying with Danny and Aviva, who at that time lived in a spacious if decrepit old house in Jerusalem. One afternoon I stayed behind with a headache while Paul and Aviva went on an outing with the kids, theirs and ours. I was lying on the sofa in the living room, the coolest place in the house, when Danny came home from work. He massaged the base of my skull, a surefire headache cure, he said. Then … I mean no disrespect to Paul when I say that purely in terms of technique, no one could kiss like Danny. Kissing, shedding clothes, hungrily touching places our hands remembered, we made our way to the screened back porch (rejecting by tacit agreement the beds we shared with our spouses). It wasn’t until we were lying together completely naked that I knew I couldn’t go through with it. It wasn’t that I was being noble or even that I feared getting caught. I saw it as a failure of imagination. Sleeping with Danny when I was married to Paul simply wasn’t in me.

“I don’t mean to sound harsh,” he says. “But Barbara always had one foot out the door. Like your mother, I guess. Didn’t she run away, too? With the, what were they called? The immigrants from Romania?”

“What do you mean, she ran away?” It must be just a figure of speech. There’s no way Danny could actually know.

“What does anyone mean by ‘ran away’? She snuck off in the middle of the night. Isn’t that right?”

“Yes. But how did you find out?”

“I must have heard it from either you or Barbara.”

But I didn’t tell a soul, not until after Mama died. I’m certain of that, because sharing the story for the first time—with Audrey and Harriet—was a big deal. I saved it for one of our trips to the spa in Mexico and waited until we were on our second bottle of Cabernet to bring it up. And it stunned both of my younger sisters, albeit in idiosyncratic ways: Audrey got upset at having been excluded from yet another family secret, while Harriet expressed delight at having a new image of Mama as a sort of fugitive.

Barbara was the one person I was tempted to tell at the time. For the first few days after Mollie confided in me, I could barely keep from blurting out the story to her. But then time passed, and if I happened to think of the story, one of us was always on the way in or out, and it just didn’t seem to be the right time. And why feel any urgency, when I saw Barbara every day?

Later I wondered whether it would have changed anything if I’d told Barbara about Mama. Barbara must have thought she was making such a bold move, doing something that forever set her apart from our humdrum lives. Yet all the time, she was unwittingly (or so I thought) playing out our mother’s drama of escape—unwittingly and far less spectacularly, compared to Mama setting out at twelve, on foot and penniless, for a country where she didn’t speak a word of the language. Had Barbara only known, I wondered, would she have found some other way to distinguish herself?

But she did know.

“Is something wrong?” Danny says.

“No, not a thing … You remember Ronnie’s daughter, Zoe? She just started graduate school in oceanography at UC San Diego.”

As Danny and I brag about our grandkids, I chew on the new mystery he’s given me. How did Barbara find out about Mama running away? Who told her? I suppose she might have heard the story from Mollie, as I did. Except Barbara wasn’t at all close to Mollie. What about Papa or Pearl? I could see Pearl confiding in Barbara. On the other hand, Pearl tended to reveal truths to both of us; hard to imagine her telling Barbara and not saying a word to me. There’s one more possibility—that Barbara’s source was Mama herself. And as I absorb what Danny said, it’s not a huge stretch to imagine Mama telling her favorite daughter that she’d run away, an act that had taken such courage. Surely, that was all she had confessed; Mama wouldn’t have abandoned the face-saving fiction she’d created and revealed the heartbreaking truth—that the brother she worshipped hadn’t sent for her. So why can’t I shake the feeling that she was willing to be that transparent … to Barbara?

And now I’m no longer on the fence about looking for Barbara. I’m determined to find her, and not just to find out what happened to her. I want to know who she was, to understand the complicity between her and Mama, a complicity I always recognized but which went deeper than I had ever imagined.

It’s midnight when I say goodbye to Danny, so rather than phoning Josh, I send him an email asking if he can do a data search for Kay Devereaux.

His reply arrives moments later. Piece of cake.





ONE OF DANNY’S JOBS AT CHAFKIN’S GROCERY WAS TO TAKE care of the signs around the entrance to the store and on the walls inside. He would tack up the latest advertising posters for Campbell’s soup or Maxwell House coffee or Palmolive soap, and he kept an eye on the cork-board just inside the door, where people were allowed to post notices; the board in the 1930s was covered with offers of rooms to let and men willing to take any kind of work and “Rosenthal china, perfect condition: must sell.” To keep the board tidy, Eddie Chafkin had a policy that no notice could stay up longer than two weeks, and Danny weeded out any whose time had expired.

There were also two prominent places, right next to the message board and directly behind the counter where people would look when the bill was being totaled, that Eddie dedicated to a rotating collection of posters. These advertisements (really, they were works of art) featured such images as smiling, sunburned youths carrying hoes, or luscious, crimson-fleshed watermelons—the handsome young pioneers and bounteous harvests of a life spent farming in the promised land of Palestine.

Eddie Chafkin was a Zionist, as everyone in Boyle Heights knew. And what a crackpot idea, most people agreed. You want palm trees and nice watermelons, open your eyes—you’re in Los Angeles.

I doubt that it’s even possible to look back at that time and not see it through the lens of the Holocaust. And in 1947, I wept when the United Nations voted to establish the State of Israel; everyone I knew was in tears. But in Boyle Heights in 1935, Zionists were seen as a fringe, even an anti-American organization.

As Aunt Sonya said, “Hershel Chafkin gets himself from Kiev to Los Angeles, breaks his back pushing a cart and selling vegetables door-to-door, and finally the man saves enough to start his own store so that when he drops dead of angina at forty-eight he can leave his beloved son a good business … and Eddie wants to go be a farmer in Palestine?”

I usually tuned out Sonya, who dripped scorn on virtually anyone of her acquaintance who wasn’t within hearing. But Papa, who prided himself on his objectivity, also got heated on the subject of Eddie’s Zionism. “The ‘Promised Land,’ that’s the gift Eddie’s father gave him by letting him be born in America,” Papa said. “He should be grateful to be an American citizen. What if Franklin D. Roosevelt came to Boyle Heights and saw those posters? What would he think, that Jews aren’t loyal Americans?” At least, Papa said, it was a relief that few people felt the way Eddie did; he’d heard that the Zionist Organization of America, to which Eddie belonged, had no more than fifty members in all of Los Angeles.

All of the adults had an opinion, and all of them were negative. Mollie—who wrote to me from the various cities where the union sent her—considered Zionism a reactionary movement because it made Jewish workers identify as Jews rather than uniting with workers of all faiths.

Zayde, too, despite occasional sentimental references to Eretz Yisrael, had no desire to actually go there.

So I was stunned, one day in April of 1935, when Danny was complaining as usual about working for Eddie, and I mentioned the ridiculous Zionist posters—and Danny jumped down my throat.

“What’s so ridiculous about a Jewish homeland?” he shot at me.

“We have it a lot better here. In Palestine, it’s all swamps with malaria,” I said, parroting comments I’d heard for years.

“What if you were in Germany?”

“You think Eddie Chafkin’s a fool. How come you sound just like him?” I said, automatically bristling against Danny’s fourteen-year-old arrogance—and because I, at fourteen, bristled at everything. Either that, or I fought humiliating tears.

And I didn’t know what to think about Germany. Adolf Hitler had become chancellor two years earlier, and he’d done crazy things, like firing Jewish government officials, boycotting Jewish businesses, even staging public burnings of books by Jewish authors. But that was just it: Hitler was crazy, and when the adults talked about him, the prevailing opinion was that the craziness would soon, like the bonfires of books, burn itself out.

“Shouldn’t the German Jews be allowed to go to Palestine?” Danny said.

“If they want to, sure. But I bet they’d rather come to America.”

“Wake up, Elaine! Haven’t you seen For Rent signs in Los Angeles that say ‘No Jews or Dogs Allowed’? You know how many hospitals here don’t allow Jewish doctors to practice?”

“Do you want to go to Palestine?”

“I … yes.”

I seized on his flicker of hesitation. “You want to be a farmer?”

“I want to live someplace where I don’t have to apologize for being a Jew. Where a Jew can be free and safe and proud of who he is.”

“That’s America!”

America, not Palestine, was where our relatives from Romania wanted to come—and they wanted it desperately. The world might be keeping nervous eyes fixed on Germany, but things had gotten every bit as bad for Jews in Mama’s native country, where two of her brothers and two sisters still lived, as did most of their children and a growing number of grandchildren. In letters that made Mama weep, they wrote about the harsh restrictions on Jewish employment and mentioned a popular political party that actually stated in its platform, “The sole possible solution to the kike problem is the elimination of the kikes.” One of my uncles was kicked and punched in the street by uniformed thugs called the Iron Guards. A girl cousin escaped the Iron Guards by diving into a pile of trash, and she had to stay there for three hours until she felt it was finally safe to emerge from her hiding place. Mama and the Chicago relatives had agreed that each of them would file papers with the Hebrew Immigration Aid Society to sponsor one Romanian family member to come live with them—a young person, unmarried and healthy enough to take any kind of job. Mama and Papa had applied to sponsor the son of one of Mama’s brothers, a boy named Ivan who was two years older than me.

“The point is,” I told Danny, “they don’t want to go to Palestine, they want to come to America!”

I made this point often, since Danny and I had the same argument again and again. And he always replied, “Jews from Romania, you think America’s going to let them in? Jews need a place where, if they say they want to come, they’re in.”

Danny, I suppose, wouldn’t let the subject drop because Zionism became a mission for him. He got involved in the Boyle Heights chapter of Habonim, a Zionist youth group, and he was constantly after me to join. And I railed against Danny’s Zionism because I experienced it as a betrayal. I was the all-American girl that Papa had raised me to be, and I felt free and safe and proud living in the United States. How could Danny reject that? How could he feel more loyal to some abstract “Jewish people” than to America? I battled Danny over Zionism as if I were defending the law of gravity and the world would fly apart if I lost. And I battled well. Mollie had been the first to see the fighter in me, and she’d been right. I was actually developing a taste for combat, and Danny, persuasive and impassioned, made an ideal adversary.

There was another reason I persisted in these debates: to hang on to my friendship with Danny now that we’d entered the confusing terrain of adolescence. Instead of playing together in the park the way we’d done as kids, now he invited me to Habonim programs; I grumbled but went anyway, and we argued afterward. Just the two of us, since Barbara refused to have anything to do with Zionism. Which didn’t seem to diminish her attractiveness to Danny. My sister and Danny found another way to preserve their childhood connection: they became sweethearts.

At first, when we got into our teens and there started to be dances and boy-girl parties, Danny asked both Barbara and me to dance, to the extent that he or any of the boys got on the dance floor at all. Then one night, the summer after we’d turned fourteen, everything changed. At a dance at one of the community centers, I was chatting with friends, and I saw Barbara come in from outside. Danny was right behind her. Both of them looked flushed, and they were holding hands. He put his arm around her, and they wove through the crowd to the refreshment table, never losing contact. As he filled two glasses of punch, she kept her hand on his arm.

I didn’t know for sure what I’d observed, or maybe I just refused to accept it. But over the next few weeks, whenever a group of us went to the movies, Barbara and Danny sat next to each other; I’d glance from the screen and see that his arm had slipped around her shoulders. Then they had their first real “date,” with Danny picking her up at the house. When she returned that night and came into the bedroom we shared (she’d joined me in the room off the kitchen after Mollie left), I feigned sleep.

Just as I’d loved Danny Berlov from the first time I met him, I had always noticed a special energy between him and my sister, a charge I would recognize when I saw the first Tracy-Hepburn movies in the 1940s. As a child, I had moments of hurt when I sensed that intimate friction between them. Those childhood pricks of distress were nothing, though, to the hideous toad that now squatted inside me, spewing out misery and envy, along with hatred toward myself, for not being the one Danny had chosen.

Barbara had movie dates with Danny, evening walks, times when they disappeared from a party for half an hour and came back smiling mysteriously. I maintained my closeness to him by having fights over Zionism.

It was after a Habonim lecture, one muggy night the following August, that Danny and I took our argument to the dark playground of our old elementary school. He had snuck a Schlitz beer and a handful of Chesterfields from Chafkin’s. Sitting on the ground, my back against the school building, I smoked—which I enjoyed despite the harshness in my throat—and forced myself to sip the warm, nasty-tasting beer from the bottle that we passed back and forth.

“You don’t like it, do you?” he said after he’d taken a swig and was about to hand the bottle to me.

“Yes, I do.”

“Think I’ll finish it myself.” He raised the beer to his lips.

“No fair!”

I reached for the bottle. He grabbed my wrist, then pulled me closer and kissed me. It was a rough kiss—and awkward, my glasses jamming into his forehead, and beer splashing onto my hand.

I jerked back. “What was that for?”

“Guess I figured you should have your first kiss.”

“That’s generous of you. But I’ve been kissed, thank you.”

“By Fred the dwarf?” he cracked. So he’d noticed one of the two times I’d gone off at a party with Fred Nieman, a brainy and witty boy who was cursed with being short and baby-faced. Not like Danny, who followed a regimen of push-ups and calisthenics he’d learned from the bodybuilders at the beach. Danny was no more than medium height, but he was muscular and tough, a boy the school bullies avoided.

“Fred’s not a dwarf,” I said. “And he kisses better than you do.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah.” I tossed my head.

Danny’s kisses began softly, like Fred’s. But they were also teasing, and he didn’t just kiss my mouth; his lips touched my cheeks and eyelids and—who knew it could be such a thrilling place?—the hollow of my throat. With Fred, I had watched myself being kissed. Danny, I kissed back. He eased me from sitting against the building to half-lying on the ground, and something inside me melted.…

“No!” I tried to twist away, but he had me pinned. All that bodybuilding he’d done, he was strong. “Danny, no!”

He moved then, enough that I could turn to the side, but kept his arms around me. “Just a little more?”

“We can’t do this.” I pulled away. He didn’t stop me.

“Right. Sorry, I shouldn’t have.… You won’t tell, will you?” he added as we stood and smoothed our clothes.

I knew whom he didn’t want me to tell, and I briefly, intensely, hated him. “What kind of person do you think I am?”

“Smoke?” He held out a cigarette.

“No … Okay.” Smoking offered a lull in which my hectic cheeks could stop burning, so I could face Barbara when I walked in the door.

As we smoked in silence, it occurred to me that I might be able to avoid seeing Barbara tonight. If I got home ahead of her I could use my standard ploy, pretending to be asleep, when she came in from spending the evening with the Diamonds, her club of eight girls who gathered at one another’s homes, played big-band music on the radio, and danced. I joined them sometimes when they came to our house—Barbara had to include me—but I didn’t fit in with the Diamonds, pretty, socially adept girls who acted in school plays, took “modern dance” classes, and were popular with boys.

I had my own club with Lucy Meringoff, Jane Klass, and Ann Charney. All four of us were great readers—hence our official name, the Brontë Sisters—and had been told ever since grade school that if we fulfilled our early academic promise, we might get college scholarships. Though we privately made fun of our reputations by calling ourselves the Plain Brains, our get-togethers were often study sessions—we thirsted for those scholarships—and we cultivated a smart, ironic detachment from the melodrama of high school romance.

Irony was an attitude I did my best to summon as I smoked after necking with Danny. It had a lot of competition. My body thrummed with sheer physical excitement, and my emotions ricocheted from guilt at betraying Barbara to rage and shame at the suspicion that Danny was using me. Maybe I was the one using him, my ironic self suggested, but without much success. (Irony would prove to be an ally throughout my life, but in those days I was an amateur at irony.) And on top of all that, I couldn’t help it—I felt hope. Even the Plain Brains sometimes turned on the radio and swayed together with our eyes closed, imagining we were being whirled across a ballroom by Fred Astaire or Clark Gable. Or Danny Berlov.

“Walk you home?” Danny tossed the butt of his cigarette onto the playground, and the last shreds of tobacco glowed, then went dark.

“No, that’s okay.”

What if, I had dreamed, I were the sister Danny really loved? Barbara was lively and fun, and she was somehow born knowing how to flirt—a skill that, when I attempted it, made me feel like a giggling half-wit—and what boy wouldn’t want to date a girl like that? But I had heard the Yiddish term bashert, the idea of two people destined for each other; when Danny was ready to get serious, I’d thought, would he choose Barbara, or would he pick his bashert, me? Could he have kissed me like he just did if he didn’t love me? Coming home, I nearly danced down the street.

Audrey must have been watching for me, because when I was two houses away, she burst through the door and flung herself at me, sobbing. “Where were you? Where were you?”

“Habonim. What’s wrong?”

“Zayde. They said you’d be home right away, and—”

I grabbed her shoulders. “What happened to Zayde?”

“He’s in the hospital.”

All I could get out of Audrey was that Uncle Leo had called and said Zayde was sick, and Mama and Papa had rushed to the hospital. They’d told Audrey to call Barbara at her friend’s house and said I’d be home any minute—

“But you weren’t!” Audrey cried. “And I tried and tried to call Barbara, but the line’s busy.”

Giving up on learning anything more from Audrey, I phoned Leo and Sonya’s. My cousin Stan, now twelve and as sober as his father, reported that Zayde had been sitting listening to the radio, and suddenly he cried out and lost consciousness. Sonya and Leo couldn’t revive him, and they’d called an ambulance. “The ambulance men think it’s a stroke,” Stan said.

I didn’t need to ask which hospital Zayde had been taken to. The Boyle Heights hospital was the Seventh-day Adventist White Memorial, where my sisters and I had been born. It was close enough that I could walk there, but Audrey would have a fit if I left. Oh, no, poor Audrey! Having satisfied my urgent need to find out what had happened, I realized Audrey was ashen and trembling.

“I’m sorry, honey, it must have been scary for you.” I opened my arms to her. As cross as I’d been, she still nestled into my embrace. I wasn’t a completely terrible sister.

“Will Zayde be okay?” Audrey snuffled.

“He’ll be fine.” I rubbed Audrey’s back and gave in to my own tears. When I was little, Zayde used to cuddle me in his lap and tickle me. He blew wet raspberries on my belly, and I shrieked in delight. Once I got too old to sit in his lap, we challenged each other to games of gin rummy and traded jokes we’d heard on the radio. Most of the adults in my life—Mama, Papa, my teachers, Uncle Leo at the bookstore—expected me to act responsible. But Zayde played with me.

Audrey and I were both crying when Barbara got home. What with having to deliver the upsetting news about Zayde, there was absolutely no danger that Barbara would take one look at me and know what I’d been up to with her boyfriend.

I never again felt so worried that my guilt would be written all over my face.

Not that I intended to repeat my act of treachery! Especially not after Zayde died the next morning. It wasn’t that I felt I’d caused Zayde’s death by kissing my sister’s boyfriend at the very time he fell ill; whenever that idea crept into my mind, I chided myself for being as superstitious as Mama. But I was no longer the kid who’d necked with Danny. Though only a few days had passed, I was no longer a child. In fact, Barbara and I were considered old enough to attend Zayde’s funeral, which took place, following Jewish custom, the day after he died.

At the service, held in the Home of Peace cemetery just east of Boyle Heights, I held myself straight even though I felt dizzy from sadness and from having to wear my navy wool, my best dark skirt, under the August sun. Looking at Zayde’s coffin (a fancy, expensive one; it was Pearl who insisted) and at the grave with freshly dug soil mounded beside it, I was grateful for Barbara, standing so close that we leaned together, gripping each other’s hands. Because I’d studied Yiddish, which uses the Hebrew alphabet, I could sound out the words on a card given me by the rabbi, and for the first time I said kaddish, the mourner’s prayer.

I balked, though, after the coffin was lowered and I saw what was happening. There’d been a shovel stuck in the damp earth, and people were walking up and placing a shovelful of earth right in the grave—Papa first, then Sonya, then Pearl, and everyone else was lining up to take a turn. I glanced at Barbara; she looked as stunned as I felt. “I’m not doing that,” she whispered.

“Me neither,” I said, and we hung back.

“Girls.” I turned toward the gentle, Yiddish-thick voice—Mr. Berlov. “This is to help your zayde’s soul know it’s time to return to God.”

He soothed us forward. Through a blur of tears, I took the shovel, scooped up a clod of soil, and dropped it on the coffin. I handed the shovel to Barbara. She did the same and then ran crying—into Danny’s embrace.

OVER THE NEXT SEVERAL months, Danny, as always, urged me to attend Habonim meetings, but he gave no sign that our kisses lingered in his imaginative life, the way they stubbornly did in mine. I said I was too busy to go to the meetings. It wasn’t a lie. That fall we had entered Theodore Roosevelt High School, and I had a new set of teachers to impress, the crucial ones who would have the most say about whether I grasped the brass ring of a college scholarship.

Then in November, Habonim, along with several other youth groups, presented a talk I didn’t want to miss, by a professor who had fled Nazi Germany and now taught at UCLA. Many people, not just members of the youth groups but adults, were going to the program being held in the meeting hall at the Yiddische Folkschule. Papa planned to go, and I thought Barbara might be interested, too.

I mentioned it while she and I were doing the dinner dishes that evening.

“Go sit in a boring lecture after I had to sit in school all day?” She plunged the soup kettle into the sink, splashing greasy dishwater. I jumped back—I’d already changed into a clean blouse for the talk.

“It’s really important to Danny,” I ventured.

I couldn’t help being curious about whether Barbara and Danny fought over his love for Zionism and her disdain for it. Did she encourage his involvement in Habonim even though she had no interest, like asking a boy about his favorite sports team? Was the subject off-limits between them? Though I couldn’t imagine Danny saying nothing about his passion in life. Ah, but maybe he and Barbara didn’t waste time on conversation when they were together. Certainly that was Mama’s fear; she hovered like a hawk whenever Danny came in with Barbara after a date, and she often issued the warning that pubescent girls seem to provoke in adults the world over: “Boys only want one thing.” She also muttered darkly that women in our family were so fertile, barely a touch of a finger could cause a pregnancy. She had sat down with Barbara and me and, with unusually explicit language, made sure we understood exactly where babies came from and what we should never let any boy do to us.

As much as Danny might enjoy necking, however (and as skilled as he was at doing it, I thought with a shiver), he also loved to talk and argue, and he had always sparred with Barbara. When I was older, I would have said Danny used argument as a form of foreplay. So, did they argue about Zionism? I was hardly going to ask. I rarely talked about Danny with Barbara, or Barbara with him. Dangerous territory. As it proved this time.

“Is that why you’re going? Because it’s important to Danny?” She gave me a mocking smile, and I felt ripped open, my impossible love for Danny Berlov naked and pathetic like a newborn bird fallen from its nest. Did she know? Danny would never have told her; some other boy, a boy who was compulsively honest, might have felt a need to confess, but not Danny. Barbara must have just been referring to the torch I’d always carried for him; that was bad enough, a humiliation that made me squirm.

“Don’t you care what’s happening in Germany?” I lashed back. A crude defense, and she laughed.

“Oh, Elaine. You’re going to spend two hours listening to a lecture, and you think you deserve a medal?”

“It’s better than spending two hours giggling with your friends and trying out new hairstyles.”

“What does it matter if I care? You’re the serious one, the smart one.” Her voice went raw, but for just an instant; then the mocking tone returned. “Say hi to Danny for me.”

YOU’RE THE SERIOUS ONE, the smart one. Maybe it was just a dig, a reminder that she was the pretty, popular sister, the one Danny loved. Yet there’d been a crack in her voice, I was sure of it. As I sat in the packed hall, waiting for the talk to begin, I wondered if I’d received a glimpse of what Barbara suffered by being constantly compared to me. Though how smart could I be, if in my resentment at being not-Barbara, I’d never imagined it might be hard for her to be not-Elaine?

It hit me that, of my two most important childhood companions, I had made an effort not to drift apart from Danny. And I knew Danny: I understood what he cared about and could easily fall into a conversation with him. When it came to Barbara, on the other hand, I guess I’d figured it was enough to live under the same roof and share a room. But it was my sister who’d become a mystery to me. We rarely talked about anything bigger than “Did you see my hairbrush?” And the occasional times when our conversation went beyond the mundane, how often did I belittle her—as, I realized with dismay, I had done just an hour earlier? Barbara didn’t get the grades I did, but that hardly meant she was stupid. As the speaker walked to the podium, I promised myself I was going to get closer to Barbara; I would make a real effort to find out what she thought about life and the world, and I’d take her ideas seriously.

Then the talk began, and I was riveted. The professor, Dr. Blum, wasn’t the gaunt, hollow-eyed refugee I’d expected but a portly man with a rather pedantic speaking style. His ordinariness made what he said more awful. He spoke about losing his university post with no protest from Christian colleagues he’d known for years, having his children barred from sports facilities, and being stripped of citizenship and even forbidden to fly the German flag by the Nuremburg Laws. And there was the constant fear of physical violence, but how could you complain when the attackers wore government uniforms?

The story had a familiar ugliness. Many people in Boyle Heights were immigrants who had experienced similar injustices. But those things had happened in eastern Europe and Russia, not in “civilized” Germany! And there was a relentless pettiness to the Nazis’ anti-Semitism. A relatively minor law that chilled me was a ban on the use of Jewish names to spell something to a telephone operator—you couldn’t, for instance, say “A as in Abraham”—a rule that burrowed so deeply into the minutiae of daily life, it was as if the Nazis wanted the Jews, and I suppose all Germans, to be aware of them from the moment they woke in the morning to when they lost themselves in sleep at night.

Soon I was dabbing at tears; so were many people around me.

Following the speech, the first people who asked questions were leaders of the youth groups that had sponsored the talk; they were in seats of honor onstage. Mike Palikow, a senior who was the president of Habonim, asked Dr. Blum about pressuring the British to allow more Jews to enter Palestine.

“Is this a Zionist organization?” The professor looked startled.

“My group is,” Mike said.

“Well,” Dr. Blum said, “I hope all of you here will pressure your government to allow more people to enter America. I’m sure you’re aware that the United States has a strict quota for immigrants from Germany, but did you know it is not even accepting half that number?”

Danny leaped to his feet in the front row and shouted, “How can you say that and then not support a Jewish state in Palestine?”

People shushed him, and Mike Palikow said, “Danny! We’re not taking questions from the audience yet.”

Dr. Blum smiled. “I’m sorry to disappoint you, young man. I don’t happen to be a Zionist. Next question, please?”

Danny persisted, his voice hoarse with emotion, “You got into America because you had friends who guaranteed you a job. What about all the people who don’t have important friends?”

Several people called out, “Show some respect!” and a burly boy—Dave Medved, a star of the high school football team—ran over and locked an arm around Danny’s shoulders.

As he was muscled out of the hall, Danny kept yelling, “There’s only one place where Jews can be safe—Palestine!”

On the stage, Mike Palikow began to apologize, but the professor said, “It’s good to see a young man who stands up for what he believes. And good to be in a country where such a thing is permitted.”

After a dozen more questions, posed with extreme politeness, the formal presentation ended, and there were refreshments. Dr. Blum particularly asked to talk to the ardent young Zionist, but apparently Danny hadn’t lingered outside the hall. Someone even ran over to the Berlovs’ rooming house but couldn’t find him there, either.

I had a hunch where he might have gone. I went upstairs to his father’s classroom in the Yiddische Folkschule. Gershon Berlov had set up a corner for Danny when he was little, with a few toys and a blanket where he could nap; he used to play there quietly while his father taught.

The room was dark except in his corner, where a cigarette glowed.

“Danny.” I inched toward him, feeling my way past desks as my eyes adjusted to the darkness.

“Elaine?”

“Yeah. He wants to talk to you.”

“That pompous yekke?”

“That’s not fair.” In our neighborhood of mainly eastern European immigrants, yekke was a slur, a term for German-born Jews who looked down their noses at us in both the Old World and the New. In Europe, the yekkes prided themselves on their urban, cultured ways, compared to Russian or Polish Jews who lived like peasants in shtetls. People who came to America from those shtetls at the turn of century discovered that yekkes had arrived decades earlier. They had established fine banks and department stores and carved out a place in America’s gentile society—and they offered charity but cringed at being associated with their crude eastern “cousins.”

“Cigarette?” he said.

“Thanks.” I sat on the floor next to him and took the cigarette he offered. “Aren’t you going to talk to him?”

“What, and apologize?”

“I don’t think that’s what he wants. He said he liked seeing a young person stand up for something.”

“Did he? Well, I’m not going to go back there.” Danny lit a fresh cigarette from the butt of his first. “What about everyone else? Are they all saying I’m a putz?”

“No one’s even talking about you.”

“Elaine Greenstein, if you lie to me, I won’t believe anyone for the rest of my life.”

“Some people thought you were rude.”

“Dave Medved told me I was a putz.”

“He did?”

“A little putz.” He started laughing, a kid’s release-of-tension giggle.

I laughed, too. And then I was crying, I didn’t know why—the distressing things I’d heard in the talk, the still-fresh loss of Zayde, my being alone with Danny in the dark?

“Elaine, are you okay?”

“Fine.” I shook with tears.

He wrapped his arms around me, in a way that started out as a comforting gesture between friends. Then the embrace became something else. I tried to shrug away, I swear I did. I pictured myself getting up and leaving. Virtuous, a good sister. I pictured the scene with that good Elaine as if it were a movie—detailed but two-dimensional, distant—while Danny kissed my teary cheeks and a shivering started inside me.

I tilted my face toward his, my mouth.

MY SEASON OF DUPLICITY began in earnest that night. For the first time I practiced the adult art of splitting myself into two Elaines, one who betrayed her sister and the other who—and this was the art—genuinely made nice with her. I had decided, on the night of the talk, to reach out to Barbara, to be not just a sister to her but a friend; and I did. We both did.

At first I tried to start the kind of probing conversations I got into with Danny or my friends in the Plain Brains. But Barbara didn’t mull over ideas or devour books the way I did. Nor did it help that the one burning subject I could have discussed with her, Danny, lay like a stone on my tongue.

Perhaps because she noticed I was making an effort, however, she reciprocated. She invited me to her modern dance class. Me, dance? But she warmly urged me to give the class a try, and one Saturday afternoon I swallowed my self-consciousness and went with her to the community center, where Helen Tannenbaum taught the class.

Miss Helen, I learned, studied with Lester Horton. I had read about Lester Horton in the newspaper. He’d made a dance called “Dictatorship” about the evils of fascism, and another that celebrated the Mexican revolution. Miss Helen, too, combined dance and politics. After she led a series of warm-up exercises (which, despite my clumsiness, were fun), she told us to imagine we were garment workers, shackled to sewing machines but struggling to break free. I twisted and panted, so absorbed I didn’t even notice Miss Helen watching me until she said, “Yes, you’re a dancer!”—praise that made me giddy with pleasure.

“Why didn’t you tell me you did antifascist dances?” I asked Barbara on our walk home.

“Antifascist?” She rolled her eyes. “You can go for the politics. I go to dance.”

Dancing turned out to be reason enough, a balm for my inner voice that relentlessly analyzed, interpreted, and judged. Not that dancing was mindless. Watching Miss Helen demonstrate a movement and working to reproduce it in my body, I discovered a realm of physical intelligence; she called it “muscle memory.” Yet dance was also intoxicating and primal, my bare feet on the wooden floor, the occasional exhilarating times when I didn’t just do steps but inhabited a dance’s essence—it was like the lines from Yeats I loved, “O body swayed to music, O brightening glance / How can we know the dancer from the dance?”

I experienced that blissful state in rare glimpses. Barbara, however, had a gift for immersing herself in an emotion or character. She could shed her identity like shrugging off a sweater and transform into someone or something else. Our class did a recital, and a woman ran up to her afterward and gushed that seeing her dance was like watching an angel. We giggled over that for weeks. Still, I thought the gushy woman had a point. Barbara was an artist.

Our shared love of dance—and my recognition that in the world of physical intelligence, Barbara was the smart one—helped us regain some of our childhood closeness; it even made us willing to be vulnerable with each other. She came to me for help with her schoolwork. I quizzed her for tips on attracting boys, which I applied with surprising success. Not that I ever became the bright, chatty girl she was, but I got in the habit of taking off my glasses around boys and casting glances at them; the boys didn’t have to know that until they got close, I saw them as blurs. It didn’t hurt, either, that I got breasts. In the fall they weren’t much more than hopeful bumps, but by the time I turned sixteen in March I had a figure. Although there was no one special, I got asked out on dates.

Between my brighter social life and my renewed friendship with Barbara, it was inconceivable that I would go behind her back with Danny again.

Inconceivable but true. At first, like the time at the playground and after the speech, it happened only when circumstances threw us together. He came by one night in January to see Barbara, but she was at a friend’s, I said; I was sitting outside on the porch, my retreat even on winter nights from the chaos in our cramped house. “I’ll visit you, then,” he said, and sat beside me, and …

The next time, a few weeks later, Mama had sent me to Chafkin’s to pick up a few last-minute things for dinner. Danny was just getting off work. “I’ll walk with you,” he said. “Just come back for a minute while I sweep the storeroom.” We ended up on a cushion of potato sacks. His tongue darted into my mouth. Danny had tried this in the past; so, by now, had a couple other boys. But this time, I didn’t pull away; I French-kissed him back.

Soon we dropped all pretense and simply arranged to see each other. And even though I necked with boys I dated, Danny was always the first: my first French kiss, the first boy I didn’t swat away when he put a hand on my breast through layers of sweater, blouse, and underclothes, and later the first to slide his hand under my clothes and actually touch my breasts. Our trysts took place every two or three weeks, often in Chafkin’s storeroom—where else could we have privacy?

I didn’t split completely in two. I felt guilty and insisted that we discuss how we were wronging Barbara. But he maintained that he didn’t love Barbara any less because he cared for me, too.

“So you wouldn’t mind telling her about us?” I said. “Or going to the movies with me sometime, instead of sneaking around?”

“If we were in Palestine, I would. The pioneers in Palestine are creating an entirely new society.”

“But we’re not in Palestine.”

“What about your cousin Mollie?” he countered.

“What does Mollie have to do with—”

“Bet she believes in free love.”

Mollie did believe in free love, and in one of the stories I told myself I was a forward-thinker, a revolutionary. Alternatively, I was an ironic intellectual who had no patience for the silly conventions of high school courtship, the dates and moony looks and fantasies of marriage. These were identities I struggled to claim on evenings when Barbara and Danny stole a few private moments on the living room sofa while I lay in bed with a book in front of my face, unable to take in a word. Or when I swam up from dizzy kisses into Chafkin’s storeroom, into the shame of being kissed in secret amid the dark odors of root vegetables and slightly rotten greens.