The Pale of Settlement by Margot Singer Read Free Book Online

what reminds her she’s alive. The dogs sniff at the wooden crates of produce at the grocer’s tin-roofed stand. She buys a loaf of bread, a wedge of cheese, some tomatoes, cucumbers, and grapes. There’s no real coffee these days, not even Nescafé. Some days she has to force herself to eat. She counts out the money carefully in German; the tinny coins all look the same. She carries the groceries in a string bag, which cuts into her palms. Across the
merkaz
, she climbs the steps to the post office, checks the box. There’s not often mail from home. From time to time a thin blue aerogram arrives from London, from one of Josef’s sisters there. Lila tells herself that it rains too much in England, that even Britain is no longer any place for Jews. Of course, the British are here, too, red-kneed and stiff in their high socks and shorts. They smile at her dogs. They are too polite to smile at her; even the younger ones avert their eyes.
Lila’s Story
    We were very lucky. From a cousin, we got entrance papers for Palestine. He was a doctor and by this time the Nazis no longer permitted him to leave. Josef’s sisters went to England; his parents were,
Gott sei Danke
, by then already dead. My parents and sister stayed behind. They believed,
nebekh
, that everything would be all right. My sister was much more beautiful and clever than I, only she had no luck. We learned, after the war, that my parents were sent to Theresienstadt in 1942. My father died there, but my mother was sent on a transport from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz on October 23, 1944—imagine, only days before the gas chambers were shut down, weeks before the liberation of the camp. What became of my sister, I do not know.
View
    Back at the hotel, I cross the shiny lobby floor, past the tour groups waiting amid piles of luggage, past the buzz around the front desk. It is strange staying at the Dan Carmel alone, but my aunt and uncle’s place is small, and of course my grandparents’ flat is gone. I take the elevator to the sixth floor. My grandmother never rode in elevators; even in her eighties, she always took the stairs. The doors open to a wall-sized blown up photograph of the Old City in Jerusalem, peeling where it’s come unglued along the center splice. The view from my room, onto Haifa bay, is another classic tourist shot. I push aside the drapes and step out on the balcony into the failing light. I can see out over Panorama Street to the golden dome of the Baha’i Temple, its gardens spilling down the mountainside; a glimpse of the taller buildings on the Hadar; and to the north, the oil refineries’storage drums, the curved arm of the coast. As the sky fades from pink to gray, lights begin to twinkle from the battlements of the U.S. Sixth Fleet gunships at anchor in the bay.
    I go back inside and pick up the pile of old photographs my aunt has given me, shuffle through them one more time. Here is the one of my grandmother leaning against that railing by the sea. She is smiling, her head tipped back, her lips slightly parted, as if she were about to speak. There is a flower—a narcissus, maybe—in her hand. If she had looked up then, she would have seen the ridgeline of the Carmel, green with cypresses and olive trees and pines. She would have been looking at the spot where this hotel now stands. Now she gazes up through time at me and I gaze down at her. What am I looking for? Something tiny in the background—a half-glimpsed face, an out-of-focus sign. A footprint, a fingerprint, a trace of scent, a follicle of hair.
    No. I am looking for myself.
Palestine 1941
    So you could say that they survived, but they were not
survivors
, not exactly, not in the new sense of the word. They were never in the camps. They never had to hide out in a gentile’s barn or forage in the forest with the partisans. They were not displaced persons— not officially, anyway—even though they were among