The Allure Of A First Love

       

            What had attracted me, at age fourteen, to choose a long daily commute to a high school far from my home, when I could have attended a similarly high academic school merely two blocks away?
            French. Having mastered basic conversational English, I was ready for the challenge of taking a second foreign language. I also loved the new, spacious building of the new school in the outskirts of the city, so unlike the crammed classrooms in the center city of Tel-Aviv where I lived.
            We, the student body of Alliance Française, soon became Francophiles. We loved the language and the music of it. We staged plays in French, sang songs in French, and cursed each other in French. As a romantic teenager with three languages at my disposal, I wrote poetry in French.
            Fast forward, in my twenties, I moved to the United States and found myself immersed in the language and culture of my adoptive land. I soon entered the corporate world, where I never encountered Israelis or French, for that matter. In the early 1980s, it was a world of white American men, and I was a woman breaking the glass ceiling while raising a family in secrecy, because my boss told me, “We don’t hire women with children.”
            Many years later, in 2005, I was deep into a second career as a novelist, in English, when my protagonist took off from Jaffa to Paris. I had not planned that move as I was writing Jerusalem Maiden. What was she doing there? I had to follow her.
            In the two weeks between Esther’s fleeing to Paris and my arrival to discover her whereabouts, I bought a French dictionary. For the first time in decades, I knew, I had to use the language. I reflected on all my visits over thirty years to France with my American husband, where I acted like an American tourist, never using the language in which I had once been fluent. I never even asked a waiter, in French, for a glass of water….
            Now I followed Esther in Paris of 1924, and realized it had been the avant-garde era. What was Jewish life here between World War I and II? I found myself at libraries poring over tomes of material, in French. For the first time in decades, I actually spoke French with art mavens and historians. I was surprised at how much of the language I had retained, and disappointed at how much of it I had forgotten.
            This is when, seeing the city through the eyes of my protagonist, living there, that I made Paris my own.
            But there was no time to reflect on any of it. I had a novel to finish and a life to live in New York.
            In 2009, I reconnected via Facebook with a woman who had attended my French high school. Our lives had intersected many times, starting even before our births, when our respective grandfathers had been business partners. She still lived in Israel, but in recent years had purchased a magnificent apartment in Paris. I was delighted when she invited me to stop there on my way from Tel-Aviv to New York.
            The weekend I visited, I accompanied her to a day-long party at close friends’ castle. The family welcomed me warmly, and for the first time in so many years I actually had long, social conversations in my no-longer-good French.
            The following summer, while waiting for Jerusalem Maiden to be published, I decided to trace the history of a painting that had been in my family since the mid 1930s. It had belonged to the grandparents of a pair of cousins, a brother and a younger sister, each of whom I had met only once, in our youth. I found them both living in two areas in France, married to French-only speaking spouses.
            The bond was instantaneous, starting with the one hour and forty-five minute phone conversation with the sister, and followed by an hour-long conversation a week later with the brother, who then put his Swiss-French wife on the phone. Turned out that while they had not been on my radar screen all those years, they were up-to-date on my life.
            Since my husband had to be in Europe for a meeting in November 2010, we all decided to meet in Paris. The three couples spent four glorious days together, and although my husband speaks only English, he got along extremely well with the French-only speaking spouses. And I had to chat with them from morning to night, filling all the blanks of our lives. I managed well enough to speak, but was fully aware of how poor was my language level.
            In 2012, in the midst of an extensive two-year book tour for Jerusalem Maiden, I had a conversation with a young man in New York who was on remission from cancer.
            He asked me, “If you had one year to live, what would you do?”
            “I’d eat chocolate,” I said.
            He looked at me with astonishment. “That’s it? You’ve done everything, you’ve been everywhere?”
I gave a humble nod, “Yes.”
            Back home, I thought that my response had been pathetic. I no longer had dreams. Had there been something I ever wanted and simply suppressed?
            Yes.
            Back in high school, I had dreamed to one day take a semester at the Sorbonne in Civilization Française. But after a two-year service in the Israel Defense Force, I had to rush my university studies along.
Suddenly, this old dream began to bloom. Studying in Paris had been the only thing I had once desired strongly, yet never fulfilled.
            There were two issues with reviving this dream: First, I did not wish to uproot my life for a whole semester. The other was that the student body, which had so appealed to me when I was fifteen and sixteen, was still made of twenty-year-olds….
            I broached the subject with my husband and asked it as a birthday present—not the funding as the time off to do something he had no interest in sharing. I coached my request for only one month, and, thanks to the internet, was able to stitch together a full day program of language and culture immersion.
            April 2013 was my debut month, the first time ever to be on my own, (an experience that I chronicled in a series of blogs.) When Ron visited for a few days, a visit that cut on my language immersion, I asked him “to try to incorporate Paris into our life.”
            “I am not saying ‘No’” he replied.
            And so, today, a year later, we arrived in Paris for four weeks, this time with the idea of feeling the pulse of life here. My French is improved, and although I had not reached the level of my post high-school years, I will take only a few classes. I’ve been learning some slang; even though I will not use it, I must understand it.
            At dinner at a sidewalk café, we chatted with a couple from Bordeaux. The wife commented on my excellent vocabulary, and when I expressed astonishment, she said that all I needed was the proficiency of speed. Luckily, she hasn’t seen my writing samples.
            As Ron and I are settling in the apartment we’ve rented in the heart of the historic Saint Germaine area, I am feeling the return of that first blush, of first love, and I feel happy about somehow living a version of my youthful dream.
            Stay tuned.

 (To read previous Paris posts, please click  )

Crossing The Street

There were several influences and inspiration to my writing the novel Jerusalem Maiden. Here I recount odd friendships that have haunted me over the years and which opened a window into the world of religious girls’ and their limited choices.
This story appeared in the eZine 614 (May 2011).

 

* * *
            I had been playing hop-scotch for an hour with Deena, a sixteen-year-old Orthodox girl who lived across the street from my grandmother in central Tel-Aviv. The summer heat scorched the sidewalk and baked the asphalt in the street. Deena shook her calf-length skirt to cool her stockinged legs and tried in vain to blow into the top of her neck-to-wrist blouse. A year younger than she, I drank water from the faucet in the yard and splashed water on my prepubescent exposed midriff above my short shorts.
            My friend cupped water near her mouth, and asked, “Will you come to my wedding?”
            Even though I assumed she meant light years away, the notion of marriage had never crossed my mind. “You’re getting married? Seriously?”
            She shrugged, her eyes downcast. “Tuesday.”
           
            From the entrance to the wedding hall, I could see hundreds of bearded men in the Hassidi garb of black hats and long, belted coats. An usher blocked my way and directed me to the women’s hall, where the ceiling was lower and the harsh fluorescent lights made the panels on the wall look like Formica. Holding glasses of orange and grape juice, women in long modest dresses and head covers eyed my white-and-red mini suit with disapproval. I pushed my way through a cloud of fruity and sour smells and hordes of children running about until I reached a throne chair.
            There was Deena, crying.
            She didn’t just weep. She wailed aloud, her words garbled by the cotton handkerchiefs with which her mother and another woman dabbed her face. “Shhhhhh, Shhhhhh,” they repeated, but their tones suggested they were ready stuff a handkerchief into her mouth.
            I was about to approach her, when a woman yanked my arm. “Where do you think you’re going?” She tossed a glance at my exposed legs. “Don’t contaminate the bride.”
            I gulped and took a step back. There was something else strange about Deena I couldn’t pinpoint from under the veil pulled back over her head, until it dawned on me: She was wearing a wig. Her a thick black braid had been cut, never again to present a temptation to men.
            I watched with horror as more women surrounded Deena, speaking to her in Yiddish, their tones ranging from comfort to indignation. Her hysterical crying continued unabated. Finally, they pulled her to her feet. From the main hall, the men’s singing crescendoed as if preparing for the messiah’s arrival. I could just decipher the line calling for the bride and the groom. “Yavo’u ha’chatan ve ha’kala.”
            Carried by the wave of women, I was herded through a narrow passage into the back of the main hall. Moments later, squeezed against a wall, I managed to climb a chair.
            The field of chanting and dancing black hats parted like the Red Sea.
            There walked a gangly, tall teenage boy, led by two men, all three dressed in satin black coats and hard-rimmed black hats. Unlike the men’s chest-length, untrimmed beards, the boy’s meager, curly facial hair had barely begun to sprout. His Adam’s apple bobbed behind a sheet of skin in his long neck, and his eyes were wide with fear.
            The men’s chanting was suddenly disrupted by Deena’s screams. “No! No! No! I don’t want to!”
            I turned to see her mother and another ample-bosomed woman, each twice Deena’s size, propping the veiled bride on both sides like bookends, forcing her down the aisle.
            Her crying continued throughout the ceremony. The rabbi stopped twice and ordered someone to give the bride red wine to calm her nerves.
            Horrified, I ran to the bathroom and threw up.
           
            A year before, when I had entered high school, I chose to commute to a French school instead of walking two blocks to the local high school.
            On the first day, I was surprised to see Leah at the bus stop. Tall, blue-eyed, with pretty strawberry-blonde hair, Leah was the daughter of a wealthy family that owned Israel’s largest sweets-and-chocolate company. They were modern Orthodox; Leah’s father and younger brother dressed in European clothes and only wore skullcaps. Although she lived just a block away from me, on the same double tree-lined boulevard, we had never talked. Leah attended an all-girls religious school and never mixed with our neighborhood youth. Whenever she left the house, her mother watched her from their second-floor balcony. Leah seemed to be surrounded as much by her religious upbringing as by her family’s money.
            Now, hidden from her mother’s view by the trees, Leah gushed as if she’d known me for years. “Are you too going to Alliance Française? I’m so happy! It will be wonderful to have a friend so close!”
            She did not stop chattering throughout the forty-five minute ride, during recess, and on the drive back. She was giddy with excitement at having convinced her parents to let her attend a secular school and anxious to befriend my secular girlfriends. Could I invite them over as soon as we returned from school this afternoon? Hanging out in my room, she asked me to teach her how to tease her hair and listened ceaselessly to “forbidden music”—the Top Ten recorded on my suitcase-size Grundig reel-to-reel player.
            On our fourth day of school, when I came by her house in the morning, her mother stood on the balcony. “Leah will be transferred back to her school,” she announced.
            Leah stood behind her, silent, her eyes swollen and her nose red.
            The following Saturday morning, I saw her in the boulevard with a group of religious girls after synagogue services. Dressed in their Shabbat best, they sat on a bench and kissed their prayer books. Leah did not return my wave.
            She rarely acknowledged me in the ensuing years, even as I traded my Alliance Française uniform for a military uniform. On Friday nights, when I teetered on high heels in a pencil dress next to my boyfriend on our way to a party, I sometimes caught a glimpse of her watching me from the lonely darkness of her balcony, unlit throughout the Shabbat. Her longing to join me was palpable through the less than thirty feet separating us.
            However, eventually she must have won another battle with her parents: a religious girl who was not obligated to serve in the army, at age eighteen she left for the Hebrew University in Jerusalem to live away from home.
            The reason for their capitulation became apparent when I arrived at the university after serving two-year in Israel Defense Force. Beautiful Leah was beginning her third year. She had already dated the heir to the country’s largest hotel chain. When he broke the relationship, she dated another heir.
            Alas, by the end of her final year, she was not engaged to an heir. Then, within days of graduation, she married a particularly swarthy and hairy young man from a wealthy Jerusalemite Sepharadi family, a match I guessed her Ashkenazi family viewed as a compromise on the grandest scale. Still a student, I was dating a close friend of that Sepharadi family and attended a couple of their china-and-gold laden Shabbat dinners. Polite and demure, Leah never acknowledged our acquaintance. And when someone at the table made the connection, asking about our growing up on the same boulevard where both our parents still lived, she brushed it off. 
            Watching her, I recalled Deena at her wedding and wondered about the painful struggles Leah was covering behind her patrician demeanor. There was no sign of the animated girl who chattered on the bus to school, buoyant by the prospects of starting a new life. Her desire to break away from her parents’ control merely eight years before was still vivid in my mind, and I ached at the realization of how little freedom she had gained in the intervening years.
            Several years later, a mother of two boys, Leah walked into a hotel owned by her former boyfriend’s family. She paid for a room and locked the door.
            Her body was found the following day by the cleaning crew.

            These two friendships with religious girls pressed into a life with few choices framed my perception of my grandmother’s life ninety years ago. In her youth, the absence of electricity under the backward Ottoman rule meant that no news or outside influences reached the insular Jewish community, helping it to further isolate its girls. An elite society of scholars, the ultra-Orthodox community viewed the dancing and singing simpleton Hassids with derision. Instead, they prepared themselves for the messiah’s arrival through austerity, suffering and diligent studying, while assigning twelve- to fourteen-year-old girls the responsibility of supporting the Talmudic and biblical scholars through marriage. Teenage girls were thus burdened with the daunting task of saving the world’s Jewry.
            What if my feisty and artistically talented grandmother had bolted to follow her heart instead? What if Deena had run away, or Leah taken more time to find her way? While writing my grandmother’s fictional alternate life as a Jerusalem Maiden, I also commemorated later-day Deena and Leah who couldn’t or wouldn’t break away.            
                                                                            # # #
Author Talia Carner lives in New York. Her novel, JERUSALEM MAIDEN, about a young woman's struggle between her passion and faith, was published in June 2011 by HarperCollins. www.TaliaCarner.com

Saving Rivka

At the Western Wall, circa 1870

Rivka was fourteen. A Jerusalem maiden, she was already married, building a home in God's Holy City according to the mitzvah to hasten the messiah’s arrival.

Alas, Rivka's young husband died, leaving her no longer a virgin but neither a mother.

Thankfully, to her rescue came the ancient law that would ensure saving her womb from this fate, a law that would help her bear children in her husband’s name.

No frozen sperms in a bank. Familiar only with the old-fashion route, the law simply required that Rivka's husband’s brother would impregnate her on his dead brother’s behalf, thus ensuring the closest proxy of the dead man’s seed. Yibum, the rabbis called this brilliant scheme, as thus saved, Rivka would not be deprived of the privilege to contribute her share to hastening the messiah’s arrival

But wait! There were problems: Rivka's brother-in-law was merely a boy of eight, and he lived in Russia, Yishmor Hashem.

Poor Rivka was condemned to a lifelong widowhood, except that another Jewish law, a more modern one, came to her rescue. This law demonstrated the sages’ enlightenment by undoing the archaic law of Yibum. According to this more progressive law, called Halitza, the deceased man’s brother may relinquish his sacred obligation to his brother’s memory—but not without a great shame.

Disdained at her brother-in-law’s refusal to impregnate her, Rivka must humiliate him publicly by removing one of his shoes and spitting in his face.

Armed with this practical solution to her plight, at age fourteen Rivka set out alone on the road to Russia, on foot and on horseback, through snow-capped mountains crawling with bandits.

It took her two years to make the trip there, and two more years to return to Jerusalem, a free woman.

The messiah, who’s forever tarried, waited until at age eighteen, Rivka was finally permitted to remarry and fulfill her duty to hasten his arrival.

Rivka was my grandmother’s grandmother. I learned from her determination and courage. I also took another lesson: I stopped worrying about the messiah’s comings and goings. Then, no longer burdened with carrying the weight of the world’s fate on my shoulders, I’ve become my own messiah.

# # #

Talia Carner's next heart-wrenching suspense, JERUSALEM MAIDEN, will be published by HarperCollins in June 2011. It is the story of a woman’s struggle for individuality against her society’s religious dictates.