Make It Concrete Read online

  Make it

  Concrete

  Miryam Sivan

  Cuidono • Brooklyn

  For my grandmothers Nechama and Pila

  Who lost so many and loved so well.

  Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  The Caves

  The Libels

  The Sites

  The Dogs

  The Waters

  The Arts

  The Keys

  The Stairs

  The Lights

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Guide

  Cover

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  The Caves

  About the Author

  Now Europe, O Europe, my hell on earth, what shall I say of you, since you have won most of your triumphs at the expense of my limbs? O Italy, depraved and bellicose, for what shall I praise you? Famished lions have fattened themselves within your borders by tearing apart the flesh of my lambs. O France, in your luxuriant pastures my ewes have grazed poisonous herbs. O Germany, haughty, rough and mountainous, my goats were dashed to pieces as they fell from the summit of your craggy Alps. O England, my cattle drank bitter and brackish drafts from your sweet cold waters. And Spain, hypocritical, cruel and lupine, ravenous and raging wolves have been devouring my woolly flock within you.

  —Samuel Usque

  Consolation for the Tribulations of Israel

  Ferrara 1553

  Yidn, shraybt un farshraybt!

  —Simon Dubnow

  Riga Ghetto 1941

  (“Jews, write and record!”)

  The Caves

  1

  On an early morning at the end of September, the second grade children gathered in the stone courtyard of Yehuda HaNassi’s burial cave. It was the most famous grave in Bet She’arim. Dark green cypress trees framed the park’s manicured lawns. Limestone facades softened the harsh light of the Middle East. And along the road that twisted above the grounds, scattered stones from a synagogue, a few homes, an olive press, and a gate were all that remained of the community Rabbi Yehuda HaNassi, a prince from the line of King David, brought with him out of the cauldron of Jerusalem. 200 C.E.

  Isabel Toledo stood at the edge of a large lawn. Yelling and laughing, children ran in all directions. Adults spoke in clusters. Three dogs chased one another, tumbling, barking, growling. Under a wide oak their people sat on a blanket drinking coffee from a silver thermos and watched.

  “Ema,” Uri, Isabel’s seven year old son, tugged at her arm. “Do you have the book?”

  Every September, a few weeks into the school year, the town held a ceremony presenting its children with their first copy of Genesis. Yehuda HaNassi’s cave was chosen for the occasion because, as head of the Sanhedrin during the Second Kingdom of Israel, he had set himself and his scholars to writing down those parts of the Bible which until that moment in history had been transmitted verbally from teacher to student, father to son. But spoken transmission relied on safety, continuity, face to face instruction. Conditions not guaranteed under Roman rule. So they scribed the oral tradition: insurance for an uncertain future.

  “Ema, the book!” Uri pulled at her backpack.

  “Yes, of course.” Isabel reached into the backpack and handed him the Genesis textbook. Clutching it tightly, Uri moved through the swarm of eager seven-year-olds to Idit, his teacher, and his book was added to the growing pile beside her.

  Isabel’s eyes swept the landscape in what Alon, her ex, mockingly referred to as her preemptive surveillance. He didn’t understand that it was reflexive, that she couldn’t help it, even now at a community event, in this stunning natural venue, during a relatively quiet political period. Beyond the people, beyond the dogs and trees and lawns, Isabel found shadows on the hill, indications of caves and narrow paths in the rock face. She calculated it would take thirteen minutes total from her house to here. Three minutes to put Uri and Woody in the car. Another seven to reach the park. A final three to run from the car to the second tier of caves. Just enough time to slip past the round-up at the end of her street, the roadblocks, the house-to-house searches. Just enough time, barring hesitations and unpredictable delays, since every minute was critical to escape. Unnecessary movements could diminish their chances of survival.

  Isabel forced herself to stop calculating. She pulled her eyes away from the hill and its shadows and walked towards Yehuda HaNassi’s burial cave. Parents and children flitted about the stone courtyard in a state of heightened expectation. Soon the ceremony would begin. Isabel spied a felled Doric column at the back and went and sat on it. The cold stone soothed her. Other adults began to gather round.

  Isabel stared at the tall arches and low rectangular doors to the entrance of HaNassi’s cave. Soon after they became lovers Zakhi had brought her here. To the park. To the caves. He loved these limestone doors carved to resemble wooden slats, metal bolts, and hinges.

  “The common construction material at the start of the Common Era,” Zakhi said. “Watch this.” He moved a heavy stone door back and forth. “Two thousand years later and the hinges are still operable. Impossible to replicate such craftsmanship today.” He grinned proudly as if he were the stonemason responsible for such beauty.

  ✶

  It took time for the assembly of children, parents, grandparents, and teachers to move into the courtyard and calm down. It took time for the ceremony to begin. Isabel sat on the cold stone pillar and realized she had no idea what to expect. Uri had come home the week before with a square of white linen and instructions from Idit: parents were to sew a cover for the Genesis textbook. Isabel had not been asked to do anything like this for her two older children. She flipped through the textbook’s pages. There seemed to be very few changes in the dozen plus years since Lia and Yael were in second grade. The colors seemed brighter, yes, and the reproductions sharper. But God was still God. Not a character exactly, not a myth, nor merely an historical personage. A simple given. Creator and Master of the Universe. The stories of Creation, of Babel, the Flood, of Abraham the first monotheist and his family, all presented matter-of-factly. Faith left off the page. A not unwise policy in their region of fundamentalism and violence.

  When Lia, now twenty-three, and Yael, now nineteen, were in second grade, they lived on kibbutz. Jewish holidays were celebrated as agriculture festivals. The girls came home with their Genesis textbooks without fanfare or solemnity, just one of many textbooks to be worked through that year. But now they lived in town, and Uri went to the neighborhood school, and the novelty of this rite of passage—the invitation for seven-year-old children to join the conversation going on among Jews for thousands of years—was compounded for Isabel by not having an Israeli childhood of her own.

  She had gone to P.S. 9 in New York. Every morning at nine o’clock sharp the school bell rang. The children rose from their wooden desks and faced the American flag in the corner of the classroom. Following cues piped in through the PA system, they placed their right hands over their hearts, pledged allegiance to the flag and to the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Then, too, God wasn’t a subject but a given. And Isabel learned to tell her right hand from her left.

  Of course Isabel did as Idit instructed. She sewed the square of white linen into a book jacket. In the middle she embroidered two tablets resembling the ones Moses brought down from the mountain. She chain stitched the numbers one to ten on them in gold thread
. In the bottom left corner, she added a small silver candelabrum. And above it, in blue and silver thread, she stitched Uri’s name. All in all the book cover came out better than expected and Uri loved it.

  Isabel leaned her head back and took in the thick autumn-blue sky. An early coolness flushed the air. Large clouds drifted overhead. She thought of Zakhi kissing her good-bye the day before. They had stood outside the Winkler house in the neighboring village. Leaning against his truck she saw a large bank of clouds. The first in many months.

  “The rains are coming,” she said.

  Zakhi turned towards the house under construction. “An early rain’ll be disastrous. We’re far from closing up the house. Stone mason’s holding everything up.”

  “Without the stone sills the blind frames can’t be fitted,” Isabel mimicked Zakhi. “Which holds up the plasterer who can’t seal the gaps between the frames and the walls, and then other trades, like dear Zakhi the electrician, can’t come in and finish his work.”

  Zakhi laughed out loud.

  “Construction’s a three dimensional jigsaw puzzle,” she delivered lines she’d heard him say over the last two years. “Each piece overlaid and built on the other. One contractor’s delinquency,” her voice dropped dramatically, “paralyzes all.”

  “You’re good, Isabel Toledo.”

  “Good enough to get a job?”

  “Career change?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Jaim Benjamin’s book?”

  “Killing me.”

  “Softly.” Zakhi leaned into her and kissed her mouth. “Back to the mines.” He turned back to the Winkler house under construction.

  And Isabel drove back to her house and her desk. To World War Two. To Jaim Benjamin’s life. To northern Greece. To Nazis. To her fifteenth ghostwrite in twenty years.

  “You’re pale, Isabel. I’m worried about you.” Molly squeezed in next to Isabel on the cold Doric column.

  “Huh?”

  “You. Pale as a ghost. What’s going on?”

  “I’m fine, really.”

  Molly stared at her. She was Isabel’s best friend and a shrink and knew her as well as anyone. Maybe better. They met years ago through their children. Yael and Molly’s middle son, Yiftach, were in the same junior high and high school class. Now Uri was with Molly’s youngest son, Eden. Their second school cycle together as moms. Molly was originally from Dublin. These two English-speaking immigrants had found each other, to their mutual and great relief.

  “Don’t believe you.” Molly continued to stare at her.

  Isabel didn’t answer. She was in no mood to be chided. Eventually the second grade teachers gathered their pupils and sat them down in neat groups. Eventually the seven year olds and their families calmed themselves enough for the mayor of the town to address them. And it was his presence—standing before them in his crisp white shirt and maroon tie—that did the trick. Silence in the face of his ultimate authority. The mayor!

  Uri kept turning around. Each time Isabel gave him huge smiles. Such a beautiful child. Silky auburn hair, grey almond shaped eyes, and a small upturned nose. Like Alon. With a face like that he could have survived the war. But his skin, pale in winter, tanned easily in summer, like Suri’s, Isabel’s Ukrainian-born mother. And like Lia, her eldest. These two fair children of hers didn’t resemble Isabel or her father’s Toledo clan at all. Only Yael, her middle child, looked like them. Olive skin. Heavy lidded dark eyes. Thick black lashes. A long face defined by high cheek bones and a narrow chin. Iconographic. Like a woman in an El Greco painting. A Jewish woman from Toledo itself. The Jerusalem of Spain.

  It took some time for Isabel to understand that Uri kept looking back because he was searching for Alon. Isabel was suddenly self-conscious that she was the only one of their family there. Other children’s parents, grandparents, and siblings had come to celebrate with them. But Lia was in India and was due back in a week, days before her semester began. Yael was in the army, her request to leave base denied. Alon’s parents were dead. As was Dave, Isabel’s father. Suri, the only grandparent, lived in New York and wasn’t due to visit Israel until the following summer. And Alon? Mr. Segev was late as usual.

  With every turn of Uri’s head Isabel’s heart stung. Every nod reeked of disappointment. Each held breath an acknowledgment that sometimes things didn’t work out. How to explain to Uri that families were created in good faith. That children were made to be loved, often within the framework of the family. But when the frame broke, and the family dispersed, the child remained there, somehow, still contained within the picture.

  The mayor stood next to the cave’s open doors. He cleared his throat and smiled at the children. He caught the eyes of those closest to him. His smile, a straight lined toothy grin, was a cross between Mr. Rogers’s and Mr. Ed’s. American references Isabel would have to explain to her Israeli children and to Molly. All tittering stopped.

  “I want to welcome here this morning, all the second grade children of our town, their parents and other family members, their teachers, and school principals. Every year when I come to this ceremony of presenting each child with his or her very first Bible, I am overcome with the power of our connection as a people to this book, to this language, to this land.”

  Molly let out a small groan. Isabel put her hand on Molly’s knee. “No political commentary now,” she whispered.

  “Everything here is politics. Everything.”

  “Molly behave.”

  She nodded. She would cooperate.

  “We are gathered here today before the burial cave of one of the greatest Jewish minds that ever lived.” The mayor beamed, happy to have such esteemed company in his small town. “Rabbi Yehuda HaNassi. Judah the Prince. He wrote down the oral tradition, the Mishna, in Hebrew that is the model for the Hebrew we speak today. It is my privilege to be a part of this ongoing chain of transmission. And today, when you children receive your own Genesis, you will become part of this chain.

  “Good luck in your studies. You are among the millions and billions of stars God promised to Abraham when he said, ‘Look now toward Heaven and count the stars, if you are able to, and He said to him, So shall thy seed be.’ You are children of the future about to embark on the journey of learning the book of our people. I wish you all a fruitful and enriching adventure.”

  Tears welled up unexpectedly in Isabel’s eyes when the children filed past their teachers and reached up for their books nestled in white linen. The ancient and the present merged and Isabel remembered that this was one of the reasons she moved here. Isabel looked over at Molly. Despite herself her eyes were damp too. The children smiled widely, proud of their own achievement of reaching second grade, of their entrance into this larger world of the mythical and mighty Sanhedrin and of history. A hand fell on Isabel’s shoulder. Startled she turned and saw Alon. He too wiped tears from his cheeks.

  “Since when do you fall for religious-nationalist speeches?” Isabel asked.

  “We’re Diaspora. We’re excused.” Molly gave Alon a quick kiss on the cheek.

  “But a son-of-a-kibbutz like you?” Isabel grinned.

  “I guess you infected me.” Alon grinned back.

  “Aba.” Uri ran to them and Alon picked the child up. He kissed his mouth and forehead, held him close. Old new versions of the same face. Uri shoved the book at Alon.

  “Just beautiful. Ema sewed the cover?”

  Uri nodded yes.

  “Apparently not all schools are like the ones on kibbutz,” Isabel said.

  Alon shrugged his shoulders. “Greek to me.”

  “Did the pony arrive?” Uri asked Alon.

  “Yes, a real beauty.”

  “I want to see him,” Uri demanded. “You promised I could help train him.”

  “Okay then. Let’s just clear it with the boss,” Alon said.

  “U
ri can go to kibbutz,” Isabel said. Hours of work waited at her desk. Better to have the child occupied. “But have him back by six, okay.” She glanced at her watch.

  “No problem. Let’s do it.” Alon slid the boy to the ground.

  Isabel bent down on one knee to kiss Uri. “Congratulations, my big boy. I’m very proud of you. Now you can teach me to read the Bible in Hebrew. Your sisters didn’t have the patience.”

  “I will, Ema, I promise.” He hugged her tightly around the neck. Gave her a long serious kiss on the cheek.

  “Thank you, love.” They walked towards the parking lot. The dogs rested in the shade. Their people sat on a blanket and ate sandwiches. Isabel thought of Jaim Benjamin trekking through the hills bordering Yugoslavia. 1943. The burning in his chest for his mother who sent him into the mountains sure that the people there would give him refuge. She put bread, olives, water, a few photographs, and her wedding ring into a large shawl and ordered him to walk and not look back. A few days later Florina’s few hundred Jews were sent to death camps in Poland.

  Alon and Uri got into Alon’s truck. Isabel waved good-bye and waited by her car. Molly and Eden drove by.

  “Going home?” Molly asked, slowing the car down.

  “Sure.”

  “You need a rest, darling.”

  Isabel looked up at the sky. A cloud with a hole in its middle like an open eye drifted along the blue dome. Storks flew toward Africa in a rolling V. Isabel took a notepad from her bag. Do storks winter in Madagascar?

  2

  Isabel didn’t want to go home. She didn’t want to be inside Jaim Benjamin’s life. She was tired of the war. The terror. The losses. The haunting. Weeks ago she admitted to Emanuel that a skulking trepidation had taken over her work days. Even some of her nights. She regretted her words as soon as she spoke.

  “Time to stop, Izzie,” Emanuel said. He was a mathematician. And the official boyfriend. “I calculate you’ve been in this Holocaust business too long.”