Leah's Children Read online

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  The Children

  Leah's Children

  PROLOGUE New York, 1974

  LABOR DAY - 1956

  AARON Budapest, 1956

  RHODES - 1960

  MICHAEL The Sixties

  KIBBUTZ SHA’AREI HA-NEGEV - 1966

  REBECCA - 1966–1967

  JOURNEY’S END Sha’arei ha-Negev, 1978

  Leah’s Children

  By Gloria Goldreich

  Copyright 2012 by Gloria Goldreich

  Cover Copyright 2012 by Ginny Glass and Untreed Reads Publishing

  The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.

  Previously published in print, 1985.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., for permission to reprint a line from “Howl!” by Allen Ginsberg.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold, reproduced or transmitted by any means in any form or given away to other people without specific permission from the author and/or publisher. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to the living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Also by Gloria Goldreich and Untreed Reads Publishing

  Leah’s Journey

  http://www.untreedreads.com

  They were their mother’s children—passionate, willful, strong…

  Aaron—The Eldest. The successful attorney. Riddled with the unrelenting grief of past tragedy, he finds solace in the arms of a beautiful Hungarian physicist—and finds new life as he joins her heroic struggle for freedom.

  Michael—A child of the sixties. He translates his civil rights beliefs into action in a Mississippi freedom school—and finds himself torn between the love of two courageous women.

  Rebecca—The youngest. An artist like her mother. She gave up her life of luxury to become the wife of an Israeli freedom fighter. And as she is forced to confront her own conflicts and desires, she discovers how much she really is her mother’s daughter.

  These are the lives of Leah’s children. Their determination and passion. Their destinies…

  Leah’s Children

  By Gloria Goldreich

  PROLOGUE

  New York, 1974

  THE YELLOW POLICE BARRIERS had been set up in front of the Ellenberg Institute early that spring morning, but it was not until late afternoon, when the television crews arrived, that small crowds formed and the wondering whispering began. “Some kind of conference,” someone suggested. It was not unusual for the Institute to host a meeting of policymakers and social thinkers. A small Chinese boy wearing a bright red windbreaker insisted shrilly that a sequence for a television show was to be filmed.

  “Maybe Kojak,” he said hopefully.

  The crowd considered the possibility. It was not unlikely. The neighborhood was often the setting for films and documentaries. Paul Newman himself had raced down Eldridge Street pursued by a gleaming black Trans-Am sports car. Dan Rather had leaned against the mailbox on the corner of Avenue A and sipped coffee from a paper cup during the shooting of a documentary on drugs. The narrow streets of the Lower East Side, with their graffiti-splashed buildings, bustling street vendors, and crowded shops offering Chinese vegetables, sacred Jewish books, discounted designer clothing, and corner trade controlled substances, pulsed with excitement and life. Producers and directors were drawn to the neighborhood, and oddly enough, the presence of the cameras and sound equipment seemed to soothe the junkies and the hoodlums. Films shot on the Lower East Side were usually completed on schedule.

  “It’s not a movie,” a young mother said as she lifted her small daughter so that she could see the two mobile cameras, one labeled ABC and the other NBC, as they were wheeled up the ramps usually used by wheelchairs and baby carriages. “If it was a movie, she wouldn’t be here.”

  She pointed to Kathryn Conyers, the anchorwoman, who stepped carefully down from the ABC van and walked briskly toward the white brick building. The Ellenberg Institute was a neighborhood phenomenon—during the five years of its existence no graffiti had defaced its tempting surface, and although the front doors were fashioned of glass and the rooms inside were girdled with wide windows, not a single pane had ever been shattered. The drug pushers and their clients, by tacit agreement, stayed clear of the Institute, and the homeless, who slept in the doorway, always left before dawn, carrying away with them the sad debris of their wandering lives.

  Kathryn Conyers paused at the entrance of the building and read the simple bronze plaque. She turned and studied the crowd with the detached concentration of a surgeon preparing to operate. These people were the subjects of her cinematic scalpel. She would instruct the cameraman to pan from the milling crowd to the sober, sedate gathering that would assemble in the Institute auditorium. The street people stared back at her with a commingling of curiosity and hostility. She saw them, they knew, not as individuals but as the poor and the dispossessed, alien outsiders who conveniently provided the background for a good news story, a colorful show.

  Briefly, the young mother, whose child had begun to whimper, resented the newscaster for her carefully combed and lacquered cap of dark hair, for her well-cut navy-blue suit and shapely legs, and for the calculating coldness of her gaze. But she would watch her program that night, after returning from her design class, and tell her husband, who would not care, how she had seen Kathryn Conyers walk up the steps of the Institute that afternoon.

  “Don’t cry,” she said to her daughter. “Don’t cry and I’ll take you to the story hour at the Institute.”

  “There is no story hour today,” a middle-aged Hispanic woman told her. “They said yesterday that all the Institute afternoon programs are canceled today because of the award.”

  “What award?” an old man asked querulously. He was stooped beneath the weight of books that he had planned to return to the Institute library. His eyes glittered with the irrational anger felt by the very old and the very young when their plans are interfered with.

  “The Woman of Achievement Award. I heard it on television. They’re giving it here today to Leah Goldfeder,” the woman replied.

  “Leah Goldfeder.” The name traveled through the crowd, murmured with recognition, affection, repeated more loudly with admiration.

  “Leah Goldfeder—you know, the artist who made that mural in the Institute auditorium.”

  “She comes sometimes still to teach a class. I seen her car.”

  “The judge’s mother—yeah, I know who she is.”

  Some nodded vigorously, others shrugged. They knew her, they knew of her. She was not a celluloid personality to them. Some had watched as she painted the vast mural that spanned the eastern wall of the auditorium. The teenagers had vied for the privilege of holding the ladder steady as her brush flew to paint the windows of the tenements, the flapping laundry on the roofs, the small children concentrating on their street games.

  “Hey, watch yourself, be careful,” they had told each other roughly. They had feared for the safety of the aging woman in the bright purple smock who captured their world on the bright white walls. But the artist herself had not been fearful. She had hummed as she painted, and smiled at them, and occasionally she had sent out for Cokes and distributed Hershey bars—her children’s favorite treats when they w
ere younger.

  “Aaron and Rebecca—my son and daughter—they would go to Librach’s candy store after school. But I suppose Librach’s is gone now,” she had said musingly.

  No one remembered anyone named Librach. The neighborhood had changed and was changing still, and it had taken them some minutes to establish that the Hernandez Bodega had once been a candy store where a man named Moshe Librach had mixed egg creams and sold chunk chocolate and candy bars. Still, some things had remained the same. They watched as she painted a woman standing at a window, staring wistfully down into the street. “That’s Rosa Morales,” someone said. “No. That’s Lucy Chin.” Many young women stood at tenement windows and looked yearningly down at the busy world below.

  “Who is it, Mrs. Goldfeder?”

  “It could be anyone,” she had said softly. “It could be me.”

  The children had laughed. How could it be the artist? Her hair was white and she was old; the woman she had painted was young, and her long dark hair fell to her shoulders.

  The mural had been completed, but Leah Goldfeder returned occasionally and held open studio classes. The young mother had attended a few sessions and watched the artist demonstrate brush-work techniques. Shyly she had offered her own portfolio for comment, and Leah Goldfeder had flipped through the drawings.

  “You’re talented,” she had said at last. “But you need training. If you worked you could develop your talent—use it as a basis for a craft—perhaps fabric design. You have an eye—a good eye—and a flair.”

  “But how can I study?” The mother shifted her child from one arm to the other as though to demonstrate the reality of her encumbrance.

  “I did it.” The statement was matter-of-fact, unpitying, unrelenting.

  “But I have the child.” She would not mention her poverty to Leah Goldfeder, who fingered a necklace of pearls as she spoke.

  “I had two small children. And I could barely speak English.”

  She had told the young woman then how she, a newly arrived immigrant, had taken art classes at the Irvington Settlement House. Charles Ferguson, who now owned a Madison Avenue gallery, had been her teacher. He had prodded and encouraged her, and she had worked and studied.

  “Nothing happens by itself,” she said. “Nothing happens unless you make it happen.”

  Her reply angered the young woman. Leah Goldfeder could talk. She had it made. A chauffeured car waited for her outside, and a diamond ring glittered on her finger. What did she know about stretching hamburger meat and waking up in the middle of the night in a cold apartment to comfort a crying child? Still, she had noticed that Leah Goldfeder’s hands were work-roughened, and she had seen the flash of recognition in her eyes.

  A week later she saw an ad for an evening course in design at Cooper Union. Nothing happens unless you make it happen. The remembered words spurred her to register. A small step, but she had taken it. If Leah Goldfeder had succeeded, she might have a chance—if she could get her head together, get her life together.

  There were those in the crowd who had seen Leah Goldfeder when she visited the Institute with Joshua Ellenberg. Always, the elderly woman and the middle-aged man walked slowly down the corridors, glancing into rooms where classes and discussion groups were held. The work of the Institute was varied, almost eclectic. It offered classes and clinics, services for groups and for individuals. There were no rigid guidelines for Institute projects. It had been established, the directors of the Ellenberg Foundation patiently explained, for the betterment of the neighborhood where Mr. Ellenberg had grown up.

  Leah Goldfeder and Joshua Ellenberg had once taken seats in the bright, airy day-care center and watched the resting children stir uneasily on their plastic kinder mats. Leah had whispered to him, and a week later small folding cots, easily stored in a corner, had been delivered. They had spent an afternoon in the library and listened to the volunteer librarian translate Help Wanted ads to an attentive Puerto Rican couple. The next day the library was authorized to subscribe to the daily Spanish and Chinese language newspapers.

  “She sees everything,” the librarian had observed wonderingly.

  Leah Goldfeder’s children were also familiar to neighborhood residents. Her son Aaron, the judge, got his picture in the paper often enough and there were those who remembered visiting the judge’s office during a time of trouble. The other son, Michael, the college professor, lived in their midst, in the same house on Eldridge Street to which his parents had come as newly arrived immigrants from Russia. He gave lectures and ran a clinic for learning disabled children at the Institute. And the Goldfeder daughter, Rebecca—she lived far away but she, too, came to the Institute and had once given a joint session with her mother at the studio workshop. She also was an artist, but her work was very different from Leah’s. Leah always worked in oils, but Rebecca experimented with medium and style, sometimes working in pastels and then dashing off graceful pen-and-ink drawings. The neighbors were prepared to concede that Rebecca was a fine artist, but nothing, they agreed, could compare with Leah’s mural. She had captured their world and touched their hearts.

  Suddenly, a new excitement swept the crowd. Two police department motorcycles careened down the street, their sirens screaming.

  “The mayor’s coming,” someone yelled.

  “You’re kidding!”

  “Oh yeah? Wait till you see him.”

  “I heard on the radio that the governor was coming also—or maybe it was a senator.”

  A cordon of police officers stood behind the barriers now, tall, smiling men who did not touch their nightsticks. They did not expect any trouble here this afternoon—not for an occasion like this and not for someone like Leah Goldfeder. They were there purely for crowd control. They grinned at the Chinese kids who came too close to the barrier and stood on tiptoe to read their badge numbers. They frowned at the overweight, dead-eyed Moonies who milled around selling flowers and fingering the municipal licenses pinned to their jackets. The young mother bought a bunch of daffodils, digging the money out of a tattered wallet. It was her milk money, but some days flowers were more important than milk.

  A long, gray limousine pulled up, and Joshua Ellenberg and his family stepped out. The crowd cheered, and Joshua raised his black leather prosthetic hand in acknowledgment and flashed his familiar smile. Everyone knew the Ellenberg myth. His picture had even appeared on the cover of Time magazine. “A Jewish Horatio Alger,” the caption read, “the man who turned rags into riches.” They knew that he had grown up in the Eldridge Street apartment that his family had shared with the Goldfeders. He had been a peddler as a child, collecting fabric scraps from one sweatshop and selling them to another. He had gone off to fight in World War II, and a German bullet had smashed his hand on a French battlefield. He had returned to start a small business, which mushroomed into Ellenberg Industries, but he had never forgotten the neighborhood of his boyhood nor his allegiance to Leah Goldfeder and her family.

  His wife was beautiful, the women agreed as Sherry Ellenberg hurried into the building, followed by the children. It was a shame about their daughter, though. “What happened to their daughter?” someone asked, but no one offered an answer.

  Joshua Ellenberg, too, paused at the bronze tablet and briefly, gently, touched his fingers to the raised lettering. The crowd was silent. They all knew the legend on the tablet and why that particular plot of land, empty and weed-clogged for so many years, had been chosen as the site of the Ellenberg Institute.

  Now the limousines arrived in rapid succession. The mayor and his entourage flashed obligatory smiles and hurried inside, glancing nervously at their watches. Andy Warhol came with Charles Ferguson, the gallery owner, who looked wistfully across the street to the Irvington Settlement House. He had taught painting classes there, and Leah Goldfeder had been his student. Now the building was a methadone center plastered with posters in Chinese and Spanish. The Lower East Side had changed since the days he had wandered it as a young man, sketching th
e new arrivals from eastern Europe, the bearded men, their bewigged wives, and the wide-eyed children who trailed behind them.

  A steady parade of newcomers hurried into the building. State senators, the chairman of the President’s Commission on Women’s Rights, the youthful president of Columbia University. The entire ensemble of the Dance Theatre of Harlem emerged with heart-stopping grace from a sleek blue-and-silver minibus. Leah Goldfeder had painted the poster for their successful fund-raising effort; Joshua Ellenberg had underwritten their international tour.

  “There’s her son, the judge,” someone shouted, and a small burst of applause greeted Aaron Goldfeder and his family.

  Aaron waved, his cheeks burning with the fiery blush characteristic of redheads, although his hair was silver now and only his shaggy brows were copper-colored. Aaron’s oldest daughter reminded some of the elderly retired garment workers in the crowd of Leah Goldfeder as a young woman. She had worked to organize a union in her own shop—the Rosenblatt Shirt Factory, and they still remembered that Friday afternoon when a fire had destroyed that factory. The old man, who stood clutching his books, had been a young pants presser then, and he had stood almost on the exact spot where he waited now, and had watched the young Leah, poised on a window ledge, her white blouse streaked with soot, her dark skirt scorched at the hem by the flames that leaped about her feet. She had jumped at last, and he had wept when she plunged to safety.

  The judge’s daughter walked with her grandmother Leah’s grace and smiled her brilliant smile. She had inherited the family height, and someone said that she was a student at Harvard. The crowd marveled at that—the magic of America. Her grandfather, David Goldfeder, after all, had been a factory worker who had studied on the subway as he traveled to evening classes at the City College of New York. And now his granddaughter went to Harvard and one son was a judge and the other a college professor.

  Michael Goldfeder and his family arrived next, and Leah’s younger son squinted at the crowd with a scholar’s myopia. His wife walked beside their children—startlingly beautiful youngsters, dusky-skinned and dark-eyed, with fanciful foreign names. Michael was the only one of the three Goldfeder children who had not grown up on the Lower East Side. He had been born when Leah’s husband, David, had already completed medical school and qualified as a psychiatrist. Yet it was Michael who had chosen to live in the neighborhood. He had renovated the building to which his father had brought the pregnant Leah when they arrived from Europe. Aaron Goldfeder had been born in the room where Michael’s own children slept, and Leah, when she visited, always avoided that room, as though she were haunted still by the conflict of that pregnancy, the violence of that birth.