Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

Ruben cast a disdainful look at the twins, who couldn’t even stop squabbling during the table prayer. In the excessive zeal of his new-found religious severity, he even felt obliged to put an admonitory index finger to his lips, which sent them both into a fit of giggles. Girls were silly, his sisters especially.

The twins had got their names because Zalman had said when they were born, ‘I’m like the patriarch Jacob. If I’m not going to have twelve sons, at least I’ve got a Lea and a Rachel.’

Anyone who didn’t know them would never have thought the two seventeen-year-olds were sisters, let alone twins. Lea took after her grandmother, she had inherited Chanele’s unbroken monobrow, and a dark complexion that nothing would lighten, however much she tried to stay out of the sun. Rachel, a quarter of an hour younger, was almost a head taller than her sister and had — never in living memory had such a thing appeared in the Meijer family — flaming red hair. Her freckled face and bright green eyes didn’t match the rest of the family at all, which was why Zalman affectionately called her ‘my goyish daughter’. In one respect, however, Lea and Rachel conformed precisely to the image that people have of twins: they were inseparable. They would have liked always to wear the same clothes, but that was a luxury the Kamionkers couldn’t afford. They had to make do with what Zalman was able to procure cheaply from his employers, either rejects or last year’s models. So on this Seder evening Lea was wearing a dark red velvet dress cut far too old for a seventeen-year-old, while Rachel, in a white cheviot dress with a Bengaline collar, looked even more pale-skinned than usual.

Déchirée, on the other hand…

A late arrival in Mimi and Pinchas’s life, their daughter wasn’t really called Déchirée. Her name was Désirée, the longed-for one. For Pinchas, Deborah, his daughter’s Jewish name, would have done just as well — Désirée and Pomeranz were two worlds that didn’t really fit together — but as the French elegance made his wife happy, he didn’t resist.

Although… French names… If François had stayed plain Shmul, perhaps he would never…

Such thoughts were to be avoided.

After the difficult birth Pinchas had fulfilled Mimi’s every wish; the torture had lasted over twenty-four hours, and Désirée had been an unusually big baby. Mimi had been poorly for all those years. Sometimes she didn’t leave her bed for days at a time, drank only camomile tea, ate chocolates and played patience on the bedcovers. She nurtured the complaints of her motherhood as devotedly as she had once tended the torments of her childlessness. Today, for example, when they sat down at the Seder table, stressing her weakened state, she had had Pinchas and Arthur give her their cushions, and made herself a proper little sofa, on which she now reposed in splendour, a sovereign long weary of ruling and who still refused to give it up.

From childhood Désirée had been a model daughter, a child who caused few problems, and yet if she did anything to discomfit Mimi, laughed too loudly or wanted to play the piano when Mama was resting, she was put firmly in her place with the same rebuke, ‘ Ah, ma petite, mais tu m’as déchirée! ’ Mimi used this irrefutable argument so often that it eventually became a nickname, and even Désirée had stopped minding when it was applied to her.

Today, once again, she was wearing a dress that couldn’t help but make Lea and Rachel envious. Although she was only nineteen, just two measly years older than her cousins, it wasn’t an outfit for a flibbertigibbet, but a very grown-up, hand-embroidered crêpe-voile dress with Valenciennes insets, a model, Zalman had established with his first expert glance, that must have been imported from France; nothing of such quality was produced here in Switzerland. Her dark hair, parted severely in the middle, was held in place with an ornamental comb that actually seemed to be made of real silver. In spite of all her finery, Désirée, mollycoddled and always, since childhood, put to bed for the slightest indisposition, had an attractively helpless quality. She sat there with her eyes lowered and her hands in her lap, and during the communal singing her lips moved only silently.

The second-last sentence of the table prayer, observant practice decrees, is only whispered, because the words ‘I have been young and now am old; yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging for bread’ might hurt the feelings of a needy dinner guest. But today there was no one who had been invited out of pity, apart perhaps from Mina, who as a married woman and mother had to go alone to someone else’s Seder because her husband…

There was an extra cup on the table, filled to the brim with wine, waiting not for François, but for the Prophet Elijah. It was more likely that the prophet would seek out this flat — 12 Rotwandstrasse, third floor — and this date — 21 April 1913 — to announce the imminent arrival of the redeemer, than that François Meijer, store-owner and successful businessman, would once again celebrate such a feast in the family circle.

For that was what they were being so noisily silent about at this Seder table: François Meijer had had himself baptised.

Had had himself ‘geshmat’.

Had rid himself of his Jewishness like an annoying pimple.

It was seven years ago now, and the question of ‘Why?’ after ‘How could he?’ and ‘Why did he do that to us?’ still prompted the most violent debates in the little circle. Not today, of course, because today Mina was sitting at the table. Mina, Francois’ wife. It had been hardest of all for her, everyone agreed, a Jewish wife with a goyish husband, and still she hadn’t divorced François, but had gone on living with him as before. The cynics among the Zurich Jews — and there was no shortage of those — said she probably couldn’t part from his money, because François Meijer had become rich more quickly than others and, it was whispered, hadn’t always kept his hands clean in the process. Milder temperaments traced Mina’s surprising fidelity back to quite practical difficulties: ‘How can a goy write a Get?’ A Get is the letter of separation that a husband must issue to his wife to make the divorce legal and enable her to marry someone else, and as it is also a religious document, of course it cannot be issue by a non-Jew.

The true reason was that Mina didn’t want to lose her son, because François — and Hinda resented this more than anything else — had also dragged Alfred along into being geshmat, an innocent twelve-year-old at the time, who couldn’t have guessed at the momentousness of the event. ‘He didn’t even allow him a bar mitzvah,’ she said every time she talked to Zalman about it, as if this particular detail was the most contemptible aspect of the matter.

Arthur, the brooding theorist, was the only member of the family who thought it possible that François — even though it didn’t fit with his calculating nature — had experienced a genuine epiphany, that a sudden insight, whether genuine or putative, had led him to renounce his ancestral religion and adopt another. But Arthur, as everyone knew, had always admired his brother beyond all measure, and was far too easily inclined to find an exculpatory explanation for the errors of others, ‘as if he himself were hiding something he hoped to be forgiven for,’ as Chanele had once thoughtfully observed.

The affair had taken its toll on her and Janki; Chanele because she feared that her eldest son would never be able to find equilibrium as long as he lived, and Janki out of concern for his reputation in the community. In the first flush of his fury he had even sworn never again to exchange a word with his son, and would have stuck to his principles had it not been for all those unavoidable business meetings. Francois’ shop had been set up with Janki’s money, an investment that had made Janki a wealthy man. But for seven years he had repeatedly turned down the invitation to come to Zurich for the Seder, and preferred to endure a joyless ceremony on his own with Chanele in their echoing Baden dining room. In Zurich he would have had to go to the synagogue, where he would have met the Kahns, Mina’s parents, who always looked at him as reproachfully as if he had personally dragged his son to the font. Mina herself had never reproached anybody. She endured her husband’s decision as she had endured her polio as a young girl, patiently and without complaint.