Chayei Sarah

Things were never quite the same between the world and Sarah. Someone well acquainted with the family told me that Sarah knew your mother had done this to her kid sister. Sarah knew it was like the stronger chick pushing the weakest sibling from the nest. Tormenting the weaker one, pecking its neck, sucking up all the nutrients of the regurgitated worms from her mother’s bill. Eventually the weak and tormented and friendless younger chick falls quietly from the nest and into the hungry mandibles of the predators on the turf below. Sarah knew also that just as the stronger bird pushes its sibling from the nest, so your mother had acted on instinct and therefore she could not fundamentally be to blame.

And yet there was this resentment, even hatred, which welled up in Sarah’s body, so overwhelming that she felt she would go mad. Yes, she hated your mother, and yes, she knew it was wrong. Wrong in the same way it would be wrong for a mama bird to hate her strongest offspring for pushing the runt out of the nest. This was, after all, the will of the creator of all things.

And this hatred she bore for her surviving daughter, and this self-abnegation, grew together like an invasive two-headed vine or a hydra-headed python. It strangled the lifeblood out of her emotional and spiritual garden, such that nothing remaining there could thrive nor indeed could grow at all. Everything withered in the unlight of her moribund gaze. She found vowels unbearable, detecting in each monophthong the voice of creation which had deserted her. She heard your mother’s clear bell tones calling forth Shedim to torment poor Kittie, to peck at her neck and force her from the nest. Sarah spoke less and less, withdrawing ever further into a dark inner world.

The change was striking to her social circle. Before Kittie’s illness Sarah had been known as a personable woman, someone the Sunday school girls, preparing snacks for the kids or raising funds in the community, wanted to have around. She had taken pride in this.

As she withdrew deeper into herself, she found the Sunday school, and the group of striving mothers she had surrounded herself with, to be both overwhelming, and annoying. She stopped attending Sunday School or Synagogue functions. She stopped replying to handwritten notes. She stopped answering the telephone. When the rabbi came, she refused to answer the door.

Your mother missed her Confirmation. It was to be an important occasion on that season’s social calendar. Sarah was then Parent Liaison and your mother was a standout pupil in both Hebrew and Torah Study. What made the cancellation, which occurred without notice or explanation on a Thursday evening before the Saturday service, so appalling to the girls was that Sarah herself had made the Sunday School an important social platform. And even though the parsha Ki Tavo wasn’t particularly moving for either mother or daughter, who believed that the g-d of the Tanakh was senselessly cruel and clearly created by small men, and that Moshe’s recitation of all the evils which would befall the benighted Hebrews should they fail mindlessly to follow his law, like so many fireflies blinking stupidly into the heavens, was yet another example of man’s senseless and inexorable cruelty, the fact that your mother would be delivering the Aliyah that September 21, and that the rabbi had asked her for a d’Var as well, which such honor none could recall the synagogue placing on a girl in at least a generation, seemed to mark a very important occasion for them both, and for the congregation as well.

Had it been another’s daughter who died, the girls understood that Sarah, along with her two charming and diligent daughters, would have been the most demonstrative in her sympathy. She would have led the congregation in lifting the grieving family and supporting them in their mournful passage, however deep and long and bitterly cold the valley, however dark and foreboding its shadows. And yet in the event, when it was Sarah who needed the community, and when the girls were so deeply moved to support their beloved co-congregant, she hadn’t merely turned inward. Sarah had showed her back to the very social circle she had so carefully cultivated. She was intentionally cruel, even to those who loved her best.

Alma Bekhar and her husband emigrated to Dorchester from outside Sofia in ‘25. They turned up at the door of the Fowler Street Synagogue one spitting October Thursday. She wore her most resplendent dress and apron, black curls spilling from her finest silk tichel, an infant swallowed in heavy muslin at her breast. He appeared to have worn the same wrinkled suit of heavy wool, a black fez capping his dark visage, since they first boarded a boat on the Iskar over a month before. Sarah happened to be on hand, preparing for the first day of Sunday School after the Holidays. Alma conveyed with some words, some plaintive looks, and a great deal of gesturing that they had only just arrived in Dorchester. Why they chose this city or this neighborhood, or how they had made their way here, was unclear. What was apparent was that the family was utterly hapless. They had turned up at Fowler Street’s doorstep in need of a every form of assistance. With her characteristic alacrity, Sarah settled them in the lobby with some water and tinned fish and crackers. She went up to the rabbi, borrowing his telephone to reach out for Mrs. Kerner and Mrs. Zelikovitch of the Welcome Committee. Although it took the full resources of the Committee, and a holistic effort of the broader congregation, led by the rabbi, to help the Bekhars settle in, Alma always felt a special connection to Sarah, who had been kind to her when others were less welcoming.

And the Bekhars needed welcoming. They didn’t know how to operate a telephone. They didn’t understand how to board a streetcar. Poor Alma was so lost in America that even the girls on the Committee, those who had volunteered specifically to help newcomers like the Bekhars, found her provincial ways and, truth be told, her dark complexion, off-putting.

Alma clung to Sarah. Her quiet husband quietly found his way in America, establishing himself within the small Sephardic community as a dependable broker of discreet arrangements. Alma established herself as best she could within the congregation, adopting western dress, contributing to every congregational cause, volunteering on seemingly every committee. Yet the girls still treated her, even five years later, as an outsider. Only Sarah made her feel fully welcome.

That her daughter Rosie and Kittie were the same age, and had become close friends, meant that Alma was often about the apartment. She came a little early to pick Rosie up. She lingered in the kitchen long past the polite time when a Boston girl would have taken a hint and bustled back out into dusky city. But Sarah loved Alma as much as Alma adored her and hung on her every word. Chatting away amiably at the table, Alma laughing uproariously at every slightly amusing thing that Sarah might say. Their friendship was the burning joy in the heart of the home. When Sarah became Liaison to the Lay Leadership Committee it was only natural that Alma, who still didn’t read or write the Latin alphabet, would become her secretary. She and Sarah, as well as Kittie and Rosie, spent even more time together.

And then Kittie got sick, and within a month she died, and the death was as painful for Alma as it was for Sarah. And as Sarah descended deeper into the shadow and the valley, as she stopped using vowels, as the shadow of your mother’s culpability settled fully upon her, as she in fact renounced, in the phantasm of her stewing mind, the green pastures and the still waters as so many illusions cast by the parching blackness of Sheol, Sarah turned from Alma as well.

She rebuked Alma and she deplored her before your grandfather Abe and your mother and trembling Rosie. Sarah bade Alma leave her home and never return. Over a devastating six months, Alma flooded the home with mail, with telephone calls, with timid knocks on the door. Sarah refused even to acknowledge her. Finally, Abe sat with Alma in front of the building, Alma sobbing shamelessly into his chest, tears and snot and drool adhering to his cotton shirt. Abe begged her to give Sarah some time, and that eventually she would relent. Alma agreed, and in this way, Abe finally put an end to the death throes of this beautiful friendship. But Sarah did not relent, and she and Alma never did speak again, nor indeed did they ever see each other again, save for the briefest moment at Rachel and Al’s wedding reception. At least this is what your uncle told me.

Sarah died in 1941. Alma, alongside her quiet husband and gorgeous 17-year-old-Rosie attended her funeral and sobbed.

One of the girls related to me that Sarah had begun turning her back on the circle almost as soon as Kittie took ill. She said it was so disconcerting not only because they wanted to help, but also because each of them thought of herself as Sarah’s friend. The woman had spent years reflecting upon what had transpired. She realized they were all wrong about Sarah. They had mistaken Sarah’s unaffected sensibility for sincerity when in fact she was more calculating, more striving, than any of them. She realized Sarah was carefully cultivating the Fowler Street set since she herself had been in Sunday School, and that drawing Abe into her social ambit was an early bit of calculation. I was at first surprised by this observation, given that Abe was not an obvious choice for Sarah, the doyen, after all, of cultural royalty from Berlin and Kiev. But the woman insisted that Sarah had always been practical, and she recognized in Abe, the loyal and diligent son of a laboring father and a house cleaning mother, a certain klezmorim enculturation to American life which she sensed might eventually be important to her own family. Even then her father Aaron seemed to be living, though not thriving, between two worlds. His heart still lilted to Joel Engel, still clothed in the fine fabrics of Kyiv and Vienna, his soul softly fraying in Boston. That this project bore good fruit, first in the form of two beautiful daughters and a devoted husband who, even after the catastrophe, or perhaps in part because of the catastrophe, held the family together through force of will, ingenuity and an utter inability to imagine any path forward other than that of dogged determination, was taken by this woman as the grim realization of Sarah’s calculation.

A more sympathetic acquaintance told me that Sarah turned her back because she had no choice. Her revulsion was physical, it rose in her throat like stomach acid, and she choked and spit the old obligations out like vomiting into a bowl. It was unbidden. She was powerless to hold it down.

‘I feel so angry all of the time,’ Sarah told Abe one afternoon, after dressing your mother down unfairly and in the meanest tones and language, sending her to her room to plow piteous sobs into her pillow. ‘I feel like I am losing my mind.’

This is what I heard, and it has the ring of truth. The change in Sarah was physical, and it was manifest in physical ways in addition to these more demonstrable changes in her emotional state. She was constantly fatigued. She had taken such pleasure in her physicality. She loved hiking and going to the beach in summer, and cross-country skiing in winter. In the past when she returned from running errands, she would put her shopping away, put the apartment back together and begin preparing the next meal, David Cherniavsky or possibly George Gershwin on the phonograph. Now she ran a shower, where she noticed that her hair was beginning to come out in clumps, and then she slipped into something comfortable, and crawled into bed, and flipped on the radio, listening to Clara, Lu, ‘n Em or the Jack Benny Program or Amos and Andy until sleep came. Her nails began to break, and she no longer cleaned her cuticles or applied nail polish.

Her periods became sporadic, and occasionally heavy, and painful. She no longer desired Abe’s attention or his touch. She suffered hot flashes. Sex, which had always been a joy for her and for them, became a chore. Intercourse was painful for her. And these sudden failures as a wife, and a mother, and a lover, caused Sarah even greater emotional distress. ‘I feel that I am failing you as a wife,’ she said to Abe on more than one occasion.

And yet like Ulysses perishing beside his crew, Mt Purgatory at last in sight, Abe was sinking gently into his own miasma of work, and grief, and ceaseless worry about his wife’s health, and her relationship with her surviving daughter, and with her friends within the congregation. He did not wish for Sarah to be worried on his score, too. And although he was still susceptible to an occasional rush of fantasy, he was no longer a young man nor a slave to his urges, and whether he and Sarah had sex once a week or once every two weeks, or occasionally but once a month, and that these encounters now felt more a duty she was satisfying than even an urge for closeness, even though they apologized to each other afterward, she for failing to feel any sexual desire, he for hurting her through their intercourse, Abe told her that he didn’t actually feel deprived of sex. In fact, he felt closer, in a way that wasn’t easy to explain, and more in love with Sarah, than he had ever felt in their relationship before. In this near proximity, if not hand in hand, they descended.

Yet Sarah was no longer capable of feeling, or reciprocating in this way, and she came instead to feel increasingly isolated, even within her own family, and joy, which had filled the home before Kittie died, seems to have been buried alongside the child.