The Bookseller's Sonnets Page 2

  She nodded. “Yes, when I visited your museum a few months ago with my daughter, we saw a group of young children gathered around one of your docents, as she showed them a pair of Shabbos candlesticks. As she talked, I could almost hear my mother’s voice whispering the blessings. That was when I decided to call you.”

  She carefully laid the spoon in front of my teacup, her aged hands shaking slightly. I took a pair of white cotton gloves from my bag, put them on, and tenderly picked up the spoon and turned it over. On the back of the tiny bowl, I noted the infinitesimal marks that had become so familiar to me after five years at the museum – the state crown and crescent of Germany that was imprinted on all silver pieces created after 1884 – the number .835, denoting the purity of the silver content, and the tiny, almost unreadable six-pointed star of the maker’s mark.

  In all likelihood, I thought, this had been made by Lucas Posen, a German-Jewish silversmith who had - not inexplicably - stopped production right around the end of the 1930s, when Jewish businesses, by law, were forbidden to exist, and Jewish merchants found themselves arriving at ruined and burned shops, and they and their livelihoods suddenly began to disappear.

  The silver mark reminded me of a briefing I had read in a recent circular from the Stolen Art commission of the Holocaust Claims Conference. Several of Posen’s most beautiful and elaborate Judaica pieces were currently under investigation as being stolen property in a suit brought by the grandchildren of a survivor.

  The circulars came to us regularly, since we were asked to be on the lookout for people who might try to sell us stolen items. In fairness, however, many people – generations later - didn’t even realize that the treasures that they wished to sell, loan, or simply have appraised had been taken from interned and deported Jewish families in the certainty that no one would ever return to claim them.

  Mrs. Feinberg’s spoon couldn’t have weighed more than an ounce, and it was scarred and tarnished, as if its very history had become ingrained within. I gently placed it in a sleeve of lamb’s wool, and then tucked it into a small protective case that I had also brought with me. I didn’t speak, and Mrs. Feinberg watched me in silence.

  Years of curatorial work meant that I was used to such scrutiny. Artifact donors wanted to know – wanted to trust – that you would care for their item with the reverence it deserved, and after hearing her story, I did not want to disappoint her. Placing an artifact in a case, for some, was not unlike closing the coffin over the face of a loved one and I had learned to treat the moment with silence and respect. We always wore white cotton gloves when handling artifacts, to keep them safe from the oils that occur in our skin. Many people, however, seemed to interpret this gesture with almost the same respect accorded to an honor guard.

  Removing the gloves, I shut the case with a soft click, gently placed all of the items in my bag, and started to gather my things.

  Outside the window, the winter sky was darkening to a shade of smoky gray tinged by the pink glow of the neon signs that lined upper Broadway.

  “That’s all of the information I need,” I said. “I’ll bring your spoon back to the museum, where we’ll take a closer look at it, and as soon as the registrar has a chance to look it over and assign it an accession number, I’ll send the deed of transfer for you to sign, and the rest of the ownership agreement paperwork.”

  She nodded. I felt a tickle of sadness in my throat as I rose from the sofa, put on my coat, and extended my hand to her.

  “Thank you so much for trusting us with your story, Mrs. Feinberg.”

  I wanted to hold on to the elderly, age-spotted hand that she placed in mine, instead of simply shaking it cordially and walking away. The end of an artifact donation visit was always a moment when I disliked myself for my professionalism, even though I knew, from years of training, that such professionalism was there to make the moment easier for us both. I didn’t want her to feel as if she was saying goodbye to her past, or to her mother, simply because I was walking out the door with a tiny silver spoon. But I saw a brightness in her eyes as she held my hand for a just a moment longer than was necessary, and then, together, we walked haltingly to the door.

  “Thank you for listening, Miss Levin,” she said, her voice strong and clear, as she undid the locks from top to bottom. “It is not an easy story to tell, nor to hear. And I imagine that after a while, in your line of work, all of these stories must sound the same to you.”

  I didn’t know what to say. She had, unerringly, identified the things I loved and hated and feared the most about my job. I had heard so many stories of survival, of terror, of murdered mothers and fathers and children, and horrors and sadnesses so great that I could hardly bear to listen, much less record them for posterity. And when the nightmares came, as they inevitably did, I sometimes didn’t recognize the specific stories that gave rise to the terrifying moments of my dreams.

  I walked out of the building towards the subway, marveling at the few old shops that peacefully coexisted with the bright bodegas and taquerias of Washington Heights. Long ago, this place had been a German-Jewish survivor community. Now as the stories faded from memory, and the children had created their own Diaspora of wealthy towns north and west of the city, it was home – again - to new immigrants.

  My grandmother still lived a couple of subway stops north, in Riverdale, in the apartment she had lived in ever since her arrival with my grandfather from a Displaced Persons camp after the war. My mother was the person in the family who talked – incessantly -about my grandparents and what they had endured, but I had never heard much about the war from either of them. It was a subject about which they preferred to remain silent, even when I had asked them directly about their experiences. Ironically, even though I had heard so many survivors speak, I actually knew very little about their lives in Germany before the war. No matter how many times I asked about what had happened to them, my questions were met with a shake of the head, with a small, sad smile, with silence.

  In the years that had passed since my grandfather’s death ten years ago, my grandmother started to talk to me a little about what had happened to some of her friends in the years leading up to the war, but unlike many survivors, she never expressed an interest in formally sharing the story of what had actually happened to her and her family following their deportation. And even though my grandmother refused to sit in a brightly lit room and give testimony to the cold metal and plastic and glass of a video camera, I was sure, in some oblique way, that among the ghosts of the six million were members of my own family. The truth of the Holocaust was something I had lived with ever since I could remember; in the way that the play of darkness and sunlight can change the color of the walls in a room, a shadow of fear and loss tinged the very air that I breathed in my grandparents’ home.

  Now, nearly every other day, Monday to Friday, between the hours of nine and five, while other people worked for banks or marketing firms or law offices, I went to the home of a survivor, or a survivor’s child, and took gentle custody of another symbol of their history and of their loss. I knew that I was good at my job because I could balance on the tightrope between professional empathy and personal involvement. But sometimes I was afraid that without my carefully recorded notes, I would confuse one story with another. It wasn’t so much that they sounded the same; it was just that - all too often - they had the same ending.

  Once I got back to the office, it took some juggling to unearth the heavy package from under the pile of mail, which in my absence had grown like a recriminatory stack of dirty dishes, now perched precariously on the corner of my desk. Envelopes, memos, junk mail and small parcels were jumbled one on top of another like a haystack. The rectangular package wrapped in plain brown paper was the only obviously interesting item.

  I put it on my lap and postponed the pleasure of opening it while I did a quick sort-through. Invoices to one side, waste-of-time brochures and outdated memos in the trash, letters that required a reply to the other side. What
I really wanted to do was plug in my camera to the office computer and upload last week’s vacation photos so I could email them to Michael. After that, I wanted to spend the rest of the afternoon remembering the two of us wandering barefoot down that pink sand beach.

  A drifting smudge of frozen clouds outside the window brought me back, with a sigh, to the task at hand. January, with its inherent darkness and cold, is traditionally a bad month for museums. Despite the city’s pride at being one of the most cultured places in the world, anyone who works in a museum can tell you that a lot of people won’t bother to brave bad weather just so they can stare at art for a couple of hours. And in our case, I couldn’t think of a single person who would venture all the way downtown to the damp, windy edge of Manhattan to spend a depressingly dark and icy afternoon being reminded of the Holocaust.

  Settling into my chair, I looked around at the office I had shared for more than three years with Aviva, the senior registrar in our department, my closest colleague. On shelves surrounding the room were dozens of objects waiting to be catalogued: ragged canvas shoes and silver synagogue candlesticks, fragments of photographs and delicate china plates, faded books, tarnished silver, bits of blankets. Each belonged to a victim or survivor; each represented a remnant of an interrupted life, and each came with its own story. The question I often asked myself was whether I could bear to listen to yet one more testimony, one more unimaginable narrative of death and loss.

  During the ten years I had worked as a curator, the thrill of examining newly donated artifacts had long ago worn off. Enthusiasm for my job waned as the past, on many days, seemed to overwhelm the present. Often, I wondered if my family, my friends, and my relationship with Michael were enough to balance the living side of the equation. But whenever I contemplated leaving, maybe even someday soon, the guilty thoughts reared up again. “What about your family, your heritage? Doesn’t that mean anything to you anymore?” My grandmother’s voice again: “Or has that goyische boyfriend of yours made you forget who you are?”

  In truth, Michael was all for telling my family how serious our relationship was, but I knew what we’d be in for if they learned the truth. Even going on vacation required a complicated and wearying set of lies. I told my parents I was going away with a group of girlfriends. Now, I’d have to edit the photos I showed them so the guy with the fair skin and freckles would not be seen standing next to me. It was a ruse I had kept for three years, needless to say at great expense of our relationship. I knew that I didn’t want to do it anymore. But I couldn’t figure a way without hurting someone. I just wasn’t sure who it was going to be.

  I lifted the parcel and turned it over in my hands. It weighed more than it appeared to; I could feel padded layers of wrapping cushioning the thick brown paper. Probably another photo album full of dead people, I thought, or a memorial book from a destroyed synagogue. I had seen so many of them. I sighed, scanning the disarray on my desk. If I wanted to fix things, I’d have to get to the bottom of the mess on my desk before I did anything else. I put the package down on Aviva’s chair and tore into the mountain of mail.

  “Don’t even think about it,” Aviva said, waddling into the office, hands clasped over her pregnant belly.

  “What?”

  “The package,” she said, gesturing to where it lay on her seat. “Don’t dump it on me. Either deal with it or pass it on. The senior registrar has enough to do.” Her smile erased the harshness of her words.

  “I wasn’t leaving it there for you. I’m just trying to clear off my desk.”

  “Serves you right for being out for a week. I’m still jealous,” she grinned.

  Aviva’s green eyes sparkled from beneath the bangs of the auburn wig – she called it a sheitl. I still marveled that this lovely young woman willingly covered her hair every morning, unable to imagine a life when I would actually have to do more in the morning than pull my hair up in a ponytail and run for the subway. But Aviva was meticulous in her religious observance, taking a rigorous approach to her modesty and dress. Once she was married, her beautiful blonde curls disappeared from view. And I had never seen her in a skirt with a hemline higher than the top of her ankle, or a blouse with a neckline lower than her collarbone.

  Given our religious differences – her orthodoxy, and my tradition of going to synagogue twice a year – I hadn’t expected us to get along so well. And in the beginning, when we had both been promoted as a team to senior curator and registrar positions, our relationship was cordial, but purely professional.

  That all changed on the morning of September 11 – when from our office window four blocks south of the World Trade Center, we saw the two planes strike the two towers, and then watched the buildings as they fell, one by one. Terrified, and unable to handle the long walk home to Queens, Aviva came back with me to my apartment on the Upper West Side.

  That was the first time she met Michael. Our dating was still a secret to everyone but a small circle of my closest friends.

  Aviva was nervous about staying with us. We didn’t keep even remotely kosher, and I assumed she was anxious about the possibility of sharing a space, even for a night, with a colleague who was in an intimate relationship with a man to whom she was not married. My life must have seemed like a different planet to her; she had never even so much as shaken the hand of a man who was not a family member. But I pleaded with her to join us. And when Michael returned from the store with paper plates, plastic utensils, and ready-made food from the strictest kosher supermarket on the West Side, a real friendship emerged.

  Aviva became one of the very few people in my life who knew of Michael’s existence – that we lived together, that sometimes we talked about getting married, and that he wasn’t Jewish. Even though by her religious standards she couldn’t possibly approve of our relationship, it was obvious she genuinely liked him.

  A little more than a year ago, at the age of twenty-nine – an old maid by Orthodox standards - Aviva married her husband, Jacob, after an intense, abrupt courtship of eight weeks. I counseled and soothed her after every call from the matchmaker, a pushy, exhausting woman who was known to have an unblemished record of success in finding mates for even the most stubbornly unmatchable candidates. Aviva’s mother was clearly placing what remained of her hopes on this shadchan, after her daughter’s rejection of all previous suitors.

  With every call, and each date, the stakes had grown more significant for both families, until finally the terms of the engagement were agreed upon. The wedding was unlike any I had ever attended – four hundred guests at a catering hall in Borough Park, separate seating and dancing for the men and women, and no less than seven elderly, whitebearded rabbis present to bless the union.

  I’d had my doubts about Aviva marrying someone she had known for such a short time, but she seemed happy. At times I found myself missing the tangle of her blond curls over the low wall of my cubicle, and I wondered how she felt about hiding her true self from the world. In spite of our friendship, the religious barriers between us made such questions too intimate to ask.

  She was certainly a refreshing change from most of the junior-level curators and registrars who came and went with alarming speed in our department. Usually they were vehemently secular art history graduates who lived in Brooklyn or the Lower East Side, with dyed hair, black clothes, and an array of body piercings. But Aviva had a sweet and unassuming way, without ever really saying a word, of teaching them how to curb the worst of their bad language, show appropriate respect in the galleries, and treat the artifacts with care and reverence. It was a quality I hoped to emulate during her impending absence.

  “Here,” she picked up the package from her chair. “I’ll open it.”

  “Gee, how awfully nice of you.”

  “Well, I do need somewhere to sit.”

  I continued to go through the mail as she slit the package open. The outer paper rustled as she removed an object encased in bubble wrap and tape. “Looks like another book,” Aviva said, re
aching for her scissors.

  “That’s what I thought.”

  I turned in my chair and watched as she carefully cut through the wrappings and unfurled them to reveal an ancient-looking, battered album.

  “This one’s in worse shape than usual,” she remarked.

  “And it’s getting dust all over you.”

  “Ugh, gross.” She swiped at the fabric of her long skirt.

  “Here, let me take it.”

  I carried the book over to the conservation area counter, set it down and looked at it more closely. The cover was scratched and worn, the spine in thready tatters, as if it had been opened and closed countless times. The corners of the binding appeared to be separating, and from what I could see, the edges of the paper inside looked as if they had yellowed with age.

  Tucked inside the cover was a sheet of white paper folded in thirds, its edges crisp and neat. I unfolded it and saw that it had been produced on what appeared to be a very old typewriter with uneven keys. Some of the letters were heavily inked while others were only half-visible.

  I smoothed out the paper and began to read.

  2

  Miss Jill Levin, Senior Curator

  Museum of Jewish Heritage

  36 Battery Place

  New York, NY 10280

  Dear Miss Levin:

  I have had the pleasure of meeting you on several occasions during your time with the Museum. In recent years, I have donated several of my family’s artifacts to the museum’s collection, and you have visited my home a number of times.

  During one of your visits some years ago, you told me that you were the grandchild of a Holocaust survivor. It made me very happy to see that such a vibrant young person had committed herself to remembering what we endured, and it gave me hope that my story would continue to be told to future generations.

  I am enclosing a book that has been in my family for some years. I am giving it to you because it is very important to me that it continues to be cared for, as I have taken care of it for many years.