The Pale of Settlement by Margot Singer Read Free Book Online Page A

the refugees, the dispossessed. They were immigrants, among the lucky ones. Lila had packed their belongings in trunks and crates—a wooden angel that had hung over her boys’ crib for luck, an oil painting of the Weinerwald, her dolls, her gilt-edged dinner service for sixteen, a Gallé table lamp, their goose-down quilts, the bedroom set her parents gave them when they were married, several reels ofsixteen-millimeter film containing footage of ski trips to Kitzbühel and Zürs, her jewelry, a gold watch, her silverware engraved with her initials, a box of photographs, thirty-two Moser crystal goblets—and they set sail for Haifa, as if they were going on a holiday. They were Europeans, not exactly Zionists, but there was no escaping being Jews. Now they were yekkes, German-speaking Jews, with their poor Hebrew and assimilated Prussian ways. They were always punctual, drank
Kaffe mit Schlag
in the
merkaz
cafés, kept their jackets on even in the stifling summer heat. The old Russian socialists, who had been in Palestine for generations, made fun of the yekkes, of their stiffness and bewilderment and fear. Everyone was talking about the new Jews, the pioneers, which all their children would doubtless be. The posters showed blond, blue-eyed, snub-nosed kibbutzniks grinning in the sun. The yekkes had never seen Jews like these before. These boys and girls had sun-bronzed skin and calloused hands. They worked the land. They would fight back. They would show the world.
Lila’s Story
    Things were different by us, back home. We were Jewish but we were not religious, do you understand? We had many wonderful friends. In the winter, we went skiing—in those days, you climbed up and passed the night in a hut, then skied down the next day—and ice skating in the park. We went mushroom picking in the forest in the spring. When I first knew your grandfather, he took me on his motorbike. He told me that once he’d lost a girlfriend off the back—he found her later, of course, back at her parents’ house, but as you can imagine she refused to speak to him. Later, he got a sidecar, and we used to say that when we had a baby we would put itin the sidecar in a basket, tied on with a bow! Of course, we never did. By then we had a car.
The Married Man
    The last time I saw my grandmother, just over a year ago, she was in a nursing home and my grandfather had been dead for nearly six years. I sat on the only chair and she sat on the single bed. She smoothed her knotty hands over her skirt, a girlish gesture. Her shoulders curved forward and the skin hung in wrinkled folds along her neck. But her faded gray-green eyes were clear. Do you ever wish you’d married him? she asked. We were talking about my ex-boyfriend. No, I said, although the truth was I wasn’t sure. How could you be? He was married to someone else now and had a child. You don’t have to get married, my grandmother said. I just wouldn’t want you to end up old and all alone. Israelis marry young; at thirty-three, I know she thought that I was over the hill. Although it’s possible, of course, that she was just thinking about herself. There was a sweater folded by her pillow, a gray V-neck that had been my grandfather’s and that, she told me, still retained a faint trace of his smell. I speak with him every night, she said. By all accounts, my grandparents loved each other well. As long as I knew them, they called each other by the same pet name—
mükki, mükki
—as if they were reciprocals of one another, two parts of the same whole.
    I didn’t tell my grandmother about the man I was seeing at the time. The man was married, though I didn’t think of what we were having as an affair. I never wanted him to leave his wife and kids for me. I wasn’t really in love with him, although later, after it was over, I felt betrayed. He once told me that he knew we’d be close forever, and so I had