—
THE IMMEDIATE DIFFICULTY, FLORENCE realized while riding the high rail back to Brooklyn, was how to break the news to her parents. Even if she could convince them that being a chaperone to six foreign men was a legitimate occupation for a twenty-three-year-old girl, even if she were to contrive some smooth elision denying the political nature of her work and claim she was merely a bookkeeper, even then Sol and Zelda would certainly take charge of her accommodations. They would call up the roster at Midwood Synagogue until they found a family with respectable relations in Cleveland who could install her in a spare room and chaperone her in loco parentis. But what choice did she have? A paycheck could not win a girl’s independence.
—
THE SKY ABOVE THE ELMS was turning violet by the time she got back to Flatbush. She let herself in through the kitchen door. Hearing her parents’ voices coming from the dining room, she braced herself to plead her case on the subject of Cleveland. But someone else was in there with them—a familiarly didactic voice declaiming loudly. “We understand that some of the boys this age might have certain injudicious reactions to the more sensitive materials in the Toy-rah—the laws dealing with bodily purity, discharges, and so on and so on….”
Florence pushed the door a crack and saw Rabbi Soffer sitting at the table, his huge palm squeezing Sidney’s bony shoulder. “Jokes have their place, but we also expect the boys to exercise certain mah-toority, especially given this important preparation for entry into Jewish adulthood.”
“What exactly did he say in class, Rabbi?” her father inquired cautiously. “Sidney?”
The accused was silent.
“Shmuel?” the rabbi asked, calling Sidney by his Hebrew name. Having brought the boy before justice, he now appeared to be acting in lieu of counsel, trying to persuade Sidney that if he only paraded his contrition everything would be righted. But Sidney was taking the Fifth.
“What he told the boys was that a ‘kosher’ woman was one who waited three hours after the butcher leaves before, er”—the rabbi cleared his throat—“engaging in relations with the milkman.”
A single snort of laughter escaped her father’s nose. “I don’t know where he heard that, Rabbi.”
“It does not matter if he heard it in the street, or at home….”
“Certainly not at home,” Zelda objected.
“Rabbi, he’s usually a good, respectful boy,” said Sol. “I don’t know what’s gotten into him.”
It pained Florence to see her brother on trial. She of all people knew what a mouth the kid had on him, yet she also knew that Sidney was usually wise enough to keep his jokes out of earshot of his teachers. She tiptoed unnoticed up the stairs to her room. Soon she could hear her parents, full of apologies, escorting the rabbi to the door. The minute the door was shut, the full force of their rage erupted on Sidney.
She went quietly to her bed, lay down, and squeezed her eyes closed, the better to shut out the sounds of the shouting downstairs. She awoke a half-hour later to find her mother standing over the bed. “Did you tell Sidney it was his fault we let Sissy go?”
Florence sat up.
“Did you tell your brother we were going to be eating turnips all year because of his Bar Mitzvah classes?”
With small blue eyes and thin lips, Zelda’s was a face made for disappointment.
“I meant we had to tighten our pockets. I heard Daddy say so himself.”
“What you meant, I don’t know. I know that child listens to everything you say. He does whatever you tell him, and now he’s trying to get himself kicked out of Hebrew school on your account.”
“I didn’t tell him to do that!” But there was no uncowardly way to defend herself. “Can I talk to him?”
“Don’t you dare! Do you know what that boy feels the absolute worst about?”
Florence said nothing.
“Telling on you.” Her mother’s face was heavy with disapproval as she left the room, as though to suggest that even her brother’s loyalty was evidence of her selfishness.
And where, Florence wondered, was Sissy now—the woman who had practically raised her? Was it so selfish to care about others besides her family?
As she heard the resolute sound of a door closing in its jamb, Florence felt an equal resolve in her heart. She would not ask. She would not plead. She would not argue or supplicate. The next morning, she let Scoop buy her a ticket for Cleveland.
“Fueling the Future”—that’s our slogan, hanging right above the doors I walk through each morning into our lobby, an acre of black and white marble that runs past Reception and up to a back wall of blue and red pixels pulsing with the movements of Continental Oil’s three hundred–plus ships as they set sail from ports all over the globe. This breathtaking lobby is the first place I took my old friend Yasha Gendler when he paid me a visit in D.C. In hindsight, this was an error.
Half a decade had passed since Yasha and I had seen each other. He had flown in from Haifa, a trip he undertook every few years to visit his adult son in Bethesda. “Come downtown, I’ll show you where I work,” I offered when he called. If anyone could appreciate the wild course my life had taken, it was Yasha, the one person alive who not only knows my childhood nickname—Yul’ka—but feels it necessary to repeat it at every opportunity. As boys of six and seven, we’d played jacks and nozhiki on the same common hallway, over oak floorboards ruined with lye soap. By 1945, when my parents brought me from Kuibyshev to Moscow as a teething toddler, the apartment (whose original owners had escaped the Bolsheviks in 1922) had been partitioned and subdivided so many times that there were seven families sharing it in schismatic harmony. My mother had been in the Soviet whirlpool for eleven years by this point. Enough time, I imagine, to unlearn the bourgeois habits of her native Brooklyn, to accustom herself to the farting and shouting of her neighbors, to doing her wash by hand in the collective tub, to keeping her dry food locked up in her wardrobe. But where Florence was alien, I was native—Yasha and I both products of that pinnacle of evolution known as the Communal Apartment. Western scholars like to say our Soviet kommunalki were places devoid of personal space. This is not true. What better testament to private dominion could there be than the dense tangle of seven separate buzzers on the front door? The seven separate kerosene burners in the kitchen? The seven separate wooden toilet seats, which each tenant scrupulously tucked under his arm as he marched to the single communal toilet?