Read Online What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank: Stories by Nathan Englander - Free Book Online

healthy and happy, and with a husband she loved who was often far from her side but who sent back Jew after Jew in his stead. Benevolent, Yehudit sent Aheret with her. And Aheret, only half filled in on the story and half comprehending,was a dutiful daughter and understood the strange favors that sometimes fell to a neighbor when someone was in pain.
    As the pair started to walk down the hill, Aheret turned back toward her mother, hoping for a signal, trying to communicate while maintaining respect under this watchful woman’s eye. And Rena said, “I can see the question you are trying to ask, daughter. The answer is simple. You were sold to me as a child. And, for all intents and purposes, you are mine.”
    “Mother!” Aheret called to Yehudit, unable to contain herself.
    But it was Rena, again holding her skirt, who gave the girl a yank and said, “What?”
     
    · · ·
     
    “It is the madness of grief,” the rabbi said as Yehudit trailed after him in the supermarket. She’d tracked him down, first by calling the shul, and then the kolel , and then the school, where his secretary said he’d run out to the supermarket for supplies. That’s where Yehudit found him, pushing a cart tumbled full with cartons of ice cream, a treat to the students for some charitable act. He’d said, “We do the right thing because it is right—that doesn’t mean a child can’t be rewarded just the same.” As for the story he was hearing, he said, “When the shiva is over, I can promise you, bli neder , that Mrs. Barak won’t want to treat such a trivial pledge as a binding contract at all.”
    Yehudit stood there in the freezer aisle and looked as if she was going to weep. The rabbi nodded in the way thoughtful rabbis do. He was a tall man, and slim, and even into his later years his beard had stayed black. He looked twenty years younger than he was, and so when he smiled at her kindly, there was a separate sort of calm that Yehudit felt, a husbandly calm,which was very fulfilling in the moment, with her own husband so far away.
    “I know you don’t want to say it,” the rabbi said, “but it is not lashon hara to point out between us that you’re afraid Rena’s heart has hardened over all these lonely years.”
    “That is what I fear,” Yehudit said.
    “Then let me pose for you a scenario of a different sort. Even if she takes you to rabbinical court, and you face the beit din over this case, can you imagine such a thing holding up?” When she did not answer, he said it again. “Well, can you imagine me taking her side?”
    “No,” Yehudit said.
    “So let us remember that without that woman, as much as without you, the great miracle that is our lives in this place would not be. And even if she’d contributed nothing to its founding, even if—God forbid—she had only taken, and done harm, still, can we not pity her in this time of grief? Especially a woman who has known sadness so much more than joy?”
    “Yes,” Yehudit said. Though the question was not wiped from her face.
    “Go on,” he said, “what is it?”
    “Can you tell me, Rebbe—and I understand the word—but what, with my daughter taken, does pity mean?”
    “It means would it hurt Aheret to stay by this woman’s side through to the end of the period of mourning?”
    Yehudit went to answer, and the rabbi raised a silencing hand. “After their ice cream, I will send up the boys to pray. I will send up some girls to help. Your daughter will not be left alone. And if harboring such a fantasy allows Rena to survive this week, how bad is it to indulge for a little while?”
    “And what if she doesn’t give it up?”
    “Then you will convene a rabbinical court, over which I myself will preside. And I promise you, even if it’s an hourbefore Shabbat that you come to me, I will find another two rabbanim , and we’ll settle the matter right then. But I will not bring one of the two mothers of this community, who has just lost her last son, to