Israel Book Shop presents Chapter 17 of a new online serial novel, Nine A.M., by Esther Rapaport. Check back for a new chapter every week. Click here for previous chapters.
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From an article in Nugot Heyet (“Fortified Place”), the Reform monthly journal:
A Real Failure or Something Else?
There is no doubt that the Orthodox leadership is celebrating a victory in light of the results of the preschool issue. Based on the signatures that were gathered, it emerges that out of fifty-eight students in the preschool, only twenty-six of them signed up for a liberal education. Thirty-two subscribed to the religious track. The dispute between Miss Naomi Schvirtz, who at first took upon herself the job of “everyone’s teacher,” and the assistant, Mila Orenchik, who speaks clearly about resigning because of what is considered to her to be a resounding failure, has now come to an end. But there is no clear information about how the division will be implemented, on a practical level.
What is clear without a doubt is that something about the results requires some thorough clarification. Because although the religious community is numerically larger than the other residents, still, among the names that requested a religious education for their children are some which raise prominent question marks. Is this really what they chose, or is it a clever forgery? It’s hard to believe that someone would try to forge something that can so easily be refuted. But how else can the idea be explained that families that are very connected to the Sherer group have gone and chosen the other option? It seems that there is something here concealed beneath the surface…
“Who wrote this article?” Suzy Elkovitz, Dror’s mother, asked her husband. “Was it my cousin Ernie?”
“Very possible,” her husband, David, replied. “You can see he tried hard not to offend your father: ‘families that are very connected to the Sherer group’… Anyone who doesn’t know will not understand.”
“Who doesn’t know now?” she asked in frustration. “Tell me, who needed this whole story? Until now, we could all continue doing what we wanted, quietly, at home. And in preschool, Dror received a really nice religious education, and no one knew what I really wanted.”
“Well, you also relied on Dror not to say anything.”
“So he talked, okay, I know, but it wasn’t anything serious. Who heard him say something about it, his teacher? They treated it just like they treat all childish chatter, and even if they thought that something was happening to me, it’s alright. But now that we had to actually go and choose…”
“Look, you could have chosen the other option,” David pointed out. “Then no one would have thought anything about us.”
“Choose the other option? I should sign that we want Dror to get an education of heresy?”
He smiled. “It’s true, we don’t want that.”
“And I’m happy about our choice, that we picked Miss Schvirtz’s group for Dror,” Suzy continued. “He is thrilled about it too, although I have no idea what exactly he understands of this whole mess. I tried to explain it to him a little bit, but I don’t exactly want to explain the whole thing to anyone else who wants to know what’s going on and what’s being ‘concealed beneath the surface,’ as Ernie writes.”
“If people ask you about it, you can always say that you simply love Naomi very much, so you wanted to send Dror only to her.”
“I actually made a point of keeping a distance from her and their whole group. I didn’t want anyone to figure out how much I’m interested.”
“So say that Dror gets along better with her than with any of the other teachers.”
“All these excuses and answers may or may not help, but you know who they will definitely not satisfy.”
“Your father,” he agreed quietly.
“From the next room, they could hear the bed moving. “It’s Dror,” Suzy said.
“No, it’s Janku,” her husband said, as he was sitting closer to the door and saw the child who arose. “What’s the matter, son? You can’t fall asleep?”
“Will Grandpa be very angry?” the boy asked, his forehead lined with worry.
“Let’s hope not,” his father replied.
“Is he going to ask me if I put on tefillin?”
“Maybe, but it’s more likely that he won’t even think about details like that.”
“And if he does ask?”
“Then you will say that you do.”
“And I’ll tell him that it’s yours, a private pair, from Grandpa Elkovitz, z”l, who put them on until his dying day without telling anyone. So he should know that they don’t belong to someone from the religious group.”
His father smiled. “They do belong to someone from the religious group, Janku. They belong to me. And you can say that, according to some people, yesterday afternoon we officially switched to this group.”
“My friends asked me about it this morning,” their thirteen-year-old son said, looking worried. “And I told them it’s none of their business. Do we need to decide who we belong to, Mama? Even if you registered Dror in the religious teacher’s group, does that say something about all of us? In any case, in two years, Dror will be able to leave the preschool and join me at the kennels. So what difference does it make which group he belongs to now?”
“Anyone who wants can evade the question,” his father replied. “A minute ago, I suggested all kinds of responses for Mama. But maybe instead of giving a hundred half-truths, you can say one simple truth: Your grandfather and your father have always put on tefillin, and that’s why you do it. And your mother began to take an interest in the whole thing, as well. Does that say something about all of us or not? We can decide that it does, or that it doesn’t, or that we just don’t want to decide right now.”
Janku sat down on the wooden floor. “What will you tell someone who asks you, Papa?”
“I’m not sure; we’ll see,” his father replied calmly.
“And you, Mama?”
From the inner room, they could hear Dror’s sleepy voice: “Mama said that now it doesn’t matter if people know that she lights candles for Shabbos, like Naomi told us!”
His words brought a small smile to all of their faces. But a moment later, the smiles disappeared. After all, no one in this place liked to receive uninvited guests in the middle of the night.
“Your father has no restrictions about being outside, is that right?” David asked in a low voice, as he carefully listened to the sounds from outside.
“That’s right.” She got up and went to the door. “On condition that he maintains a complete blackout, of course.”
“So I think that’s him now. There’s no reason to think it’s someone from the manor house, right?”
“It’s him,” she confirmed, one ear pressed to the door. “Them, to be more precise. My mother got the approval together with him, years ago.”
“And still, this is the first time we’ve ever had the privilege of them coming over late at night,” he said quietly, just as there was a knock at the door. “And we’ll have to decide if it is indeed a privilege…”
***
Bentzy’s eyelids drooped heavily as he ate the meal his mother had warmed up for him, though he tried to smile at Dena. He asked her how her day had been, and how the children were, and how Vienna was treating her, and how she was handling her homesickness. So many “hows” that Dena couldn’t insert a single “how” of her own. So she didn’t ask him how it had been to be in the factory a whole day, and how he was managing with davening, and how it was to oversee a group of non-Jewish workers, and how it worked there with the kashrus organization.
But on the fourth day, when he remarked that Duvi and Shloimy would really enjoy a visit at his father’s factory, and they should come see it one day, she did ask him how they would get there.
“With you,” Bentzy replied naturally. “I mean, my mother would have to bring everyone, but I’m sure that you would also enjoy a tour of the factory. You’d enjoy seeing the organized way that things are run there, on such a large scale. It’s a huge place, and I think you’ll like seeing it.”
She really did enjoy the visit to the factory, perhaps even more than the children did. They had exhausted their enthusiasm after twenty minutes there, but she was still standing and staring, fascinated, at the huge, humming machines she saw all around her. One machine kept making a rhythmic “voom” sound, and with every “voom,” it emitted a small mound of red powder that got dumped directly into a long, plastic pipe, whose end disappeared into the depths of another huge machine.
“Premium Israeli paprika,” her mother-in-law said. She was serving as their unofficial tour guide. “The pepper crops in Israel are excellent, and the paprika made from them is very much in demand.”
“Everything really does look very fresh and of high quality,” Dena said. “How do they pack it?”
“That machine closes the bags and cuts them into separate packages. There’s also another pipe on the other side that transfers the paprika into half-kilo containers, or one, three, or six kilogram containers.”
“Who buys six kilograms of paprika at a time?” Dena asked, walking carefully on the PVC floors. The factory was clean, in principle, but the air was filled with all kinds of tiny particles of spices that managed to get out of the machines, and then fell to the floor in a thin layer.
“There are institutions, hotels, chefs who cook in industrial amounts,” her mother-in-law said. “And our paprika is very popular, baruch Hashem.”
“Not only in Hungary?” Dena asked with a smile.
“No, certainly not only there.” She chuckled. “Uh-oh, where is Shloimy?”
Dena spun around quickly. The child was standing on the other side of the packing hall, staring wide-eyed at a transparent pipe from the ceiling, which was full of something that also looked like paprika.
“That’s hot paprika, perfect for fish,” her private tour guide supplied. “But go and call him; he might start sneezing if he stands there for too long.”
“Your fish is delicious; I imagine that it’s the paprika you use.” Dena smiled again at her mother-in-law and then hurried over to her son.
Bluma Hanter followed her daughter-in-law. “That’s right. There’s nothing like those peppers from the Holy Land, huh? And you needed to come all the way to Vienna to see it up close… Sometimes you need to go to a different place, to see how things that look so simple, familiar, and not so special, can actually become high-quality products.”
Is there a woman in the world who likes to be preached to by her mother-in-law?
Dena nodded politely, though she was ninety-nine percent sure that this last statement of her mother-in-law contained some sort of message for her, and she continued on toward Shloimy.
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