Leah's Children Read online

  Michael, too, glanced at the building’s plaque as he entered, and a barely discernible shadow crossed his face.

  “There she is! That’s Leah Goldfeder!”

  Excitement swept the crowd as the familiar black Lincoln Continental pulled up. The first to descend was a graceful woman in a bright red suit whose long dark hair, silver-streaked and curling, was coiled into a thick chignon. That was Rebecca, Leah’s daughter. Wasn’t she the one who had gone to Europe after the war and been involved in smuggling Jewish children into Palestine? They searched their memories but could not be certain. She was an artist, though—she had inherited her mother’s talent, her mother’s courage.

  A tall man with iron-gray hair followed her—her husband, it was supposed, although no one knew his name—and then two boys who turned their faces away from the curiosity of the crowd and bent forward to assist the elderly woman who slowly eased her way out of the car.

  Leah Goldfeder stood erect in the bright sunlight and smiled to acknowledge the spontaneous burst of applause that greeted her. Although the afternoon was warm, she wore a turquoise silk cape over the simple white wool dress, woven through with silver, that exactly matched her hair, which was plaited into an intricate coronet. Her weathered skin had a topaz glow, but the lines of age and loss were cruelly carved across her even-featured face. Still, a half dimple danced at the corner of her generous mouth, and golden shadows glinted in her large dark eyes. Her grandsons stood beside her, but although she smiled at them, she walked forward alone with a graceful dignity, slow-stepped but steady. As she passed the police barrier, the young mother, clutching her child, rushed forward and offered her the cluster of daffodils.

  “How lovely,” Leah said in the musical voice that still retained the trace of an accent. She accepted the sun-colored bouquet, removed a single flower, and gave it to the crying child, who pressed it to her tear-stained cheek and was quiet.

  Leah studied the younger woman’s face.

  “You look so familiar.”

  “We spoke once.” The reply was cautious, shy. Leah Goldfeder would not remember her.

  “It will come to me.” The sadness and courage in the young mother’s face teased her memory. She balanced her child with tender strength, and Leah thought of herself, so many years ago, lifting the child Rebecca and straining to see the pastel streaks of an urban sunset. She smiled and the young woman smiled back. Again, recognition flashed between them.

  She paused at the entry to the Institute and selected another daffodil. She placed the golden flower on the edge of the bronze plaque, with the care of a graveside mourner balancing a small stone on a slender marker. Only then did she hold her hands out to her grandsons and allow them to escort her into the building and down the blue-carpeted aisle of the auditorium. Thunderous applause swelled as the audience rose to cheer her in her slow walk to the stage.

  The mayor was the keynote speaker. Briefly, he outlined the history of the Woman of Achievement Award, which was jointly sponsored by the municipality, the American Association of University Women, and the President’s Commission on Women.

  “This is one of the highest honors that can be paid to a woman in the United States,” he said, and his eyes rested on the silver-haired woman who sat, tall and attentive, in the blue leather armchair. It occurred to him that he had not yet been born when Leah Goldfeder reached the shores of the great city that he now governed. Still, he came from a union family, and she had been part of the mythology of his boyhood. His mother and his aunt had worked as finishers at the Rosenblatt Shirt Factory, and once a year, on the anniversary of the fire, they journeyed to the cemetery in Queens and visited the graves of the girls who had not survived the fire. Always, they told him, they had met Leah Goldfeder there, sometimes alone, sometimes with her husband, David.

  “It’s like her to remember the dead,” his aunt had said.

  “And it’s like her to care for the living,” his mother had added.

  The mayor’s mother had died five years ago, and he winced now at the knowledge that he had visited her grave only once in all that time. Quite suddenly, he departed from his text and spoke of himself as a small boy, listening to the stories of Leah Goldfeder.

  “I heard about her first as a woman of the people, a woman who honored the past and looked to the future. Later, I learned that she was a woman who could cause things to happen. During the war she mobilized the ready-to-wear industry and broke production records. She was responsible for the development of enterprises that provided jobs for thousands of citizens. Always, she remained first and foremost an artist.” His eyes rested briefly on the mural, and then he continued. “She never considered it demeaning to use her art for the greater good of the world she lived in. She proved that a woman could be a loving wife, a nurturing mother, without abandoning personal fulfillment and communal responsibility. Her greatest achievement is the exciting life she has lived, which she continues to live with joy and dignity—a life that serves as example and inspiration.”

  Aaron Goldfeder was the next speaker: Judge Goldfeder, whose landmark decision on the rights of political refugees would soon be tested in the Supreme Court. He was familiar to most of the audience. He appeared regularly on public television panels, and although he spoke softly and slowly, viewers leaned forward to listen to him. Always his opinions were carefully considered and resonant with the authority of intellectual soundness and humane understanding. Now his voice was controlled, but those who sat in the front rows saw that his hands trembled and that his green eyes glinted with dangerous brilliance.

  “I want to thank his honor, the mayor, for his tribute to my mother. I would like to take the liberty of adding to his remarks from a very personal perspective—that of a son, a firstborn child.” He glanced at his mother, as though requesting her approval. She inclined her head, and he turned back to the audience, his voice imbued with a new strength.

  “I ask you to think now, not of Leah Goldfeder, mother and grandmother, distinguished artist and designer. Rather, I ask you to think of a young Russian woman, a girl really, not yet out of her teens but already widowed and cruelly exposed to the brutality of irrational hatred. That girl, pregnant and married for a second time to a young man scarcely older than herself, undertook to cross a continent and an ocean, to begin a new life in a new land. A journey toward hope, an odyssey of optimism.

  “She might have questioned that hope, that optimism, during her early years in this country—long, difficult years when my adoptive father, David Goldfeder, struggled as a sweatshop worker and our family shared a railroad flat on Eldridge Street with other immigrants as poor as ourselves. There are those who would romanticize poverty, but let us be honest. Poverty is interesting and dramatic only in retrospect, as the fodder of nostalgia. Poverty, in reality, is soul-destroying and, often, life-threatening. But Leah, my mother, would not allow it to destroy her soul, to threaten her life. She rose above it and seized control of her own destiny and the destiny of our family.

  “She took my father’s place in the sweatshop so that he could attend medical school and qualify as a psychiatrist. She studied design, and her talents became our salvation. She was, as the mayor said, a woman of the people who believed in social justice. She knew that hope must be coupled with perseverance, and she hoped and persevered and worked toward the formation of a labor union.

  “That union was hard-won. Flames, blazing on this very spot, consumed the lives of those who fought for it, and my mother herself was saved by miraculous fortune.” He paused. His voice broke and his eyes burned. Tears streaked Rebecca’s cheeks, but Leah sat quietly, her face veiled in sadness. She had been saved by love, he knew. She had been saved because Eli Feinstein, with a lover’s ruthlessness, had thrust her free of the flaming factory to the safety of the street below.

  “I ask you to think of my mother,” Aaron continued, “as a young woman who had at last savored some success, achieved some comfort. Still, she chose to leave the warmth of her hom
e, her husband, and her children, in an effort to save the family she left behind in Europe. That effort was among her few failures. I never knew my grandparents. They are numbered in that grim census of the six million, and I do not know how or where they died. But I do know that I fought on their behalf, and my mother endured the uncertainty and the sorrow of that war without surrendering to despair.

  “Leah and David Goldfeder fought their war in this country. He soothed the souls of the bereft, and she worked to clothe the warriors for freedom. Together they dreamed of peace, of our family safe and united. They could not have known how brief that peace would be for our people, or that the same irrational hatred that killed my natural father on an Odessa street would kill my adoptive father on a Negev kibbutz. Again, my mother was stricken with grief and loss, and again, she did not submit to despair.” His voice was very low now, yet every word was clearly heard, and the audience did not stir when he wiped his eyes. There was dignity in his sorrow, and gentle acceptance. It occurred to some that he was his mother’s son: he, too, would refuse to submit to despair.

  Now his voice rose with new strength.

  “I ask you, finally, to think of a mother who endowed her children with the greatest gift of all—the freedom to live their own lives, to forge their own destinies. My sister, my brother, and I myself—we three are heirs to a precious legacy, an inheritance of hope, a birthright of faith. We honor our mother, Leah Goldfeder, with our love, and we hope that our lives, our journeys, reflect her own.”

  There was a moment of silence, shattered by reverberant applause. The audience rose and continued to clap rhythmically, and the dignitaries on the stage also stood. Aaron, Michael, and Rebecca glanced at one another, and tears glinted in their eyes as remembered sorrow struggled with remembered joy. Aaron took Rebecca’s hand, and she in turn reached for Michael’s arm. Thus linked, they reclaimed their seats as their mother advanced to the podium. She turned first to them (always, they thought, she had turned first to them) and then to the audience. Her musical voice was very low, strained by emotion, weakened by age, but every word was clearly heard in that silent room.

  “Your Honors”—she nodded to the mayor, to the state senators, and to the serious-eyed woman who was the president’s personal representative—“my friends, and of course my children, I thank you for the honor that you pay me today. It is wonderful that we have gathered at the Ellenberg Institute, which my friend Joshua Ellenberg built as a gift of love to the community that nurtured him during his boyhood and that offered me and my family safe haven and opportunity during our early years in this great country. It is fitting that Joshua selected this site for a building that offers opportunity and promise to all who enter it. Perhaps you noticed the plaque on the entry; it is a memorial plaque for those who once came to this very location to earn their daily bread, for those whose lives were consumed in the flames that destroyed the building that once stood here—the Rosenblatt Shirt Factory.”

  The name stirred recognition in the audience. A susurrant murmur wafted through the auditorium, and then they were quiet again.

  “That fire happened decades ago, but the creation of the Ellenberg Institute on this site proves that hope cannot be consumed, that creativity will fight destruction, that life will endure even where death has briefly triumphed. This belief has guided my own life. Through the darkness I looked toward light. During moments of despair I clutched at fragments of faith. Always, I sought to light my single candle.”

  She paused, and her children, hands still clasped, exchanged a secret glance. Was their mother remembering the war years when she had been consumed with worry about her parents in Europe, about Aaron, who had been taken prisoner in Ethiopia? Did she think of the risks Rebecca had confronted in Israel, of the dangerous roads Michael had traveled, of their father’s tragic death? Aaron pressed Rebecca’s fingers hard and teasingly; she scratched Michael’s palm—the reassuring gestures of their childhood asserted themselves as they listened to their mother.

  Leah turned to her sons and daughter. Her lined face was wreathed in the smile they knew so well. She was pleased because they were together and because their hands were linked in love. Her daughter’s husband, her sons’ wives, her grandchildren sat in the front row, their bright faces turned upward toward her. She trembled with gratitude for the gift of her long life, for generations spanned and generations promised.

  “This is what I tried to teach my children,” she continued. “To wrest hope from despair, to seize the moment, to recognize the strength of tenderness, the power of caring. I thank you for the award you give me today. I accept it on behalf of all those who know that flames leap skyward, yet are subdued, that although ashes cover dead land, green shoots press upward through scorched earth, and that a white building can rise on foundations of charred rubble. This I have learned from my life and from my children’s lives. I thank you.”

  Again the audience rose, and now the applause was deafening. Men reached for their handkerchiefs and wept without embarrassment. Women turned to one another, muted secrets sealed in their eyes.

  The ceremonies were concluded, and slowly the audience filed out of the white brick building, past the bronze plaque with its message of hope and survival, past the much-diminished crowd.

  Leah Goldfeder remained on the stage in the cavernous room, her gnarled fingers caressing the golden medallion. The Ellenbergs and her own family clustered about her.

  “You must be tired, Mama,” Rebecca said.

  “I’m tired. But they need some pictures for publicity still. And this reporter, Kathryn Conyers, wants a short interview—she’s doing a story on the Institute, and it could be important for fund-raising—so a few more minutes. Could I say no?”

  “We’ll wait for you in the lounge, then.”

  The photographers’ lights flashed. She followed their directions, leaning forward, settling back, turning her face in profile, smiling. They grinned at her, impressed by her composure, her quiescent compliance, and they thanked her with a gentleness atypical of their profession as they packed their equipment and left.

  “I have only a few questions.” Kathryn Conyers settled herself into the chair next to Leah’s. She smiled with the radiant confidence of a woman who knows what she wants and is assured of getting it. The great statesmen of the world had been vulnerable to her smile, to her gentle, probing questions, her incisive conclusions.

  “Mrs. Goldfeder, I came here today planning to do a brief spot on the Institute and on the Woman of Achievement Award. But I think there’s a bigger story here—your story.”

  “I’m an old woman,” Leah protested gently. “Old women don’t have big stories.”

  “I don’t mean a news story. Something more than that. I want to do a show on you and your children. You know, everyone is floundering for direction these days, yet you and your family steered a straight course. You seem to have always known exactly where you were going, and you were able to guide your children toward their own fulfillment. We’d like to share your secret compass with our viewers—do some in-depth interviews with your children.” Kathryn Conyers’s researchers had given her some background on the Goldfeder children. Aaron, the judge, had somehow been involved in the Hungarian revolution. Rebecca’s name was recognized throughout the art world, and a profile on Michael Goldfeder, written at the time his sociological analysis of the sixties was published, recalled his own dramatic involvement in the civil rights movement.

  “There is no secret compass, no blueprint.” Leah’s soft voice grew even fainter, as though drained by a sudden weariness. “Life happens to you. You start out with hope and dreams, with scraps of talent, shreds of ideas. David and I tried to give our children some direction, some impetus. We had known a great deal of sorrow before we came to America, and we spoke to our children about strength and belief, about courage and choice. But always we knew how chance balances choice. A man and a woman meet, and both their lives change. A child is born with a gift, a talent. The
re is possibility and promise, and then a car moves too swiftly down a city street, a man moves through the night toward an unfamiliar sound. In the space of a heartbeat, a life is changed. In all our lives—in all our journeys through the years—everything is possible and nothing is predictable. And my children’s journeys were, perhaps, more unpredictable than most.” In her mind’s eye she saw Aaron walking alone down a Budapest street, Rebecca poised at her easel straining to capture a Negev sunset, Michael standing on the steps of a Mississippi courthouse. Such complicated journeys, undertaken without the aid of a steady compass, a reliable map.

  Her voice had drifted into a dreamy whisper, and Kathryn Conyers understood that there would be no swift interview revealing the facile secret of parental success. The stories of Leah Goldfeder’s children were entangled in memory and dream, in tales of summer days and autumn nights. They would not lend themselves to crisp, fast-paced cameo sequences, to the rapid crossfire of question and answer. She closed her notebook, picked up her tape recorder.

  “Goodbye, Mrs. Goldfeder,” she said. “I congratulate you and I thank you.”

  The newscaster left, but Leah sat on in the darkened auditorium. It was an old woman’s prerogative, she thought, to sit quietly in the dim light of late afternoon, to unravel the skeins of memory and toy with discrete strands.