Read Online Jerusalem Maiden by Talia Carner - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Talia Carner
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Iâm good at it. Itâs all I hear in my head day and night.â Asher swallowed. âSomeone in the Christian Quarter has shown me how to read music sheets. I canât keep copies, but I can memorize the notes and sing them to myself. Or play the flute here.â As if just remembering his sidelocks, he released them with knotty fingers from behind his ears. âThe monk is teaching me how to play the pipe organââ
âA monk?â Esther cut him off.
Just then Mlle Thibaux said to Asher in French, âIt was a pleasure listening to your music,â and started back.
âWhat did she say?â Asher asked.
âWe have to go,â Esther replied, and ran to catch up with her teacher.
A cold wind began to blow. A monk was teaching Asher! At least he hadnât seen her paint. Esther buttoned her coat. âWhat kind of musical instrument is a pipe organ?â she asked Mlle Thibaux.
âA room-size multilayered piano, but its sound is fuller, deeper.â Mlle Thibaux smiled. âHere in the city of the divine, when the music bounces off the churchâs walls, it gives a true sense of holiness.â
Church music? Yishmor Hashem! It was well known that missionaries lay in wait for Jewish children to convert them. Why, even Pierreâs Alliance Française offered poor Jewish children free educationâeven free mealsâonly to teach them about Jesus. Aba had set up a special tzedakah fund to save such boys by paying their tuitions at yeshivas before they were snatched by these foreigners. Estherâs own school combated the missionariesâ lure by giving the few poor families who agreed to educate their girls free clothes, books and food.
Forgetting the promise of a beautiful day, the sky gathered its clouds, and winter dropped again upon the earth. As Esther collected the paints, the enormity of Asherâs betrayal filled her head. She could guess the urge that compelled him to play music; it coursed in his veins the way the urge to paint coursed in hers. But her gift of art was Godâs, she was certain, while her cousinâs must be the lure of Satan cloaked as a monk. In befriending a missionary and setting foot in a church, Asher was hanging over the abyss of obliterating his Jewishness. No Jew could ever twist away from the offense of learning the ways of the goyim . It was more dangerous than venturing into the mystical orchard of the kabbalah, where uninitiated men, too young to grasp the complex knowledge, lost their minds.
If only she could tell someone, for Asherâs sake, to save him from the Christiansâ clutches before he became a goy . If only she could do that without revealing her own secret.
FEBRUARY 1912/ADAR 5672
A fter morning services at the synagogue, Ruthi looped her arm in Estherâs, and, ignoring the cold, the two of them set out to do the mitzvah of walking outdoors on Shabbat to cleanse themselves of the weekday mundane. They ambled around the caves gaping in the chalkstone, where the Sanhedrinâs wise men had been buried. They didnât dare to enter the caves, though their imaginations ran wild with tales of crazed biblical prophets who had once lived there, of ferocious lions sometimes spotted coming out of them, and of tragic lovers who had run away from their objecting communities to die here. They hunted for mushrooms that hid fat and docile in the woods underneath blankets of pine needles, the fungiâs webbed underbellies signaling that they werenât poisonous. They picked feathery dill stalks and mustard seeds for their mothersâ cooking.
Yet something had shifted between them. Ruthiâs betrothal and Estherâs discovery of Godâs gift carried each of them over a different threshold into a realm that had no room for the other. Estherâs new love of art was between her and God; talking about it might betray her special bond with Him.
And in spite of her entreaties, Ruthi
âA monk?â Esther cut him off.
Just then Mlle Thibaux said to Asher in French, âIt was a pleasure listening to your music,â and started back.
âWhat did she say?â Asher asked.
âWe have to go,â Esther replied, and ran to catch up with her teacher.
A cold wind began to blow. A monk was teaching Asher! At least he hadnât seen her paint. Esther buttoned her coat. âWhat kind of musical instrument is a pipe organ?â she asked Mlle Thibaux.
âA room-size multilayered piano, but its sound is fuller, deeper.â Mlle Thibaux smiled. âHere in the city of the divine, when the music bounces off the churchâs walls, it gives a true sense of holiness.â
Church music? Yishmor Hashem! It was well known that missionaries lay in wait for Jewish children to convert them. Why, even Pierreâs Alliance Française offered poor Jewish children free educationâeven free mealsâonly to teach them about Jesus. Aba had set up a special tzedakah fund to save such boys by paying their tuitions at yeshivas before they were snatched by these foreigners. Estherâs own school combated the missionariesâ lure by giving the few poor families who agreed to educate their girls free clothes, books and food.
Forgetting the promise of a beautiful day, the sky gathered its clouds, and winter dropped again upon the earth. As Esther collected the paints, the enormity of Asherâs betrayal filled her head. She could guess the urge that compelled him to play music; it coursed in his veins the way the urge to paint coursed in hers. But her gift of art was Godâs, she was certain, while her cousinâs must be the lure of Satan cloaked as a monk. In befriending a missionary and setting foot in a church, Asher was hanging over the abyss of obliterating his Jewishness. No Jew could ever twist away from the offense of learning the ways of the goyim . It was more dangerous than venturing into the mystical orchard of the kabbalah, where uninitiated men, too young to grasp the complex knowledge, lost their minds.
If only she could tell someone, for Asherâs sake, to save him from the Christiansâ clutches before he became a goy . If only she could do that without revealing her own secret.
FEBRUARY 1912/ADAR 5672
A fter morning services at the synagogue, Ruthi looped her arm in Estherâs, and, ignoring the cold, the two of them set out to do the mitzvah of walking outdoors on Shabbat to cleanse themselves of the weekday mundane. They ambled around the caves gaping in the chalkstone, where the Sanhedrinâs wise men had been buried. They didnât dare to enter the caves, though their imaginations ran wild with tales of crazed biblical prophets who had once lived there, of ferocious lions sometimes spotted coming out of them, and of tragic lovers who had run away from their objecting communities to die here. They hunted for mushrooms that hid fat and docile in the woods underneath blankets of pine needles, the fungiâs webbed underbellies signaling that they werenât poisonous. They picked feathery dill stalks and mustard seeds for their mothersâ cooking.
Yet something had shifted between them. Ruthiâs betrothal and Estherâs discovery of Godâs gift carried each of them over a different threshold into a realm that had no room for the other. Estherâs new love of art was between her and God; talking about it might betray her special bond with Him.
And in spite of her entreaties, Ruthi