An Exaltation of Stars
Rory was about two and a half when we finally appeared at one of the back door entrances of Estelle’s daughter’s large Victorian. The house was set high up on a patch of land in the middle of Pennsylvania that was a stone’s throw from one of the loops of the Susquehanna. Rory’s sweaty hand was wrapped around my pinky, but in my other arm and under my armpit were a couple of bottles of expensive Lower East Side wine for the Seder. Estelle’s family welcomed me like some kind of biblical angel in disguise, and they accepted my darling child as one of their own.
It was a large, long Seder, with Anna’s husband at the helm. Estelle mainly kept track of the pages. She didn’t sing much. It seemed she was most interested in looking around at the near thirty people of all ages gathered around the series of tables unified by tablecloths, densely covered with silver, china and three Seder plates.
After the meal, when most of the other small children were lumps on the carpet, Rory was talking to everyone whose eyes were still open. I sat on the floor trying to keep him on my lap, with a book in my arms, reading and talking with Rhonda who was about my age, and who must have been assigned the task of entertaining me, as the others were cleaning up. So many cousins—I could barely keep them apart at that time. I thought of them as permutations of me, of my family. How proud they were of their Judaism, of the culture, and especially of their grandmother, her plays, her books, her New York Times subscription, which is where she saw my face, which is how she knew that Stone might really be Stonoffsky.
Later, her daughters—Anna and Miriam–each took an arm, escorting Estelle, with me following, into one of the smaller rooms, in the meticulously decorated house, full of pictures and flowered wallpaper and books on every wall. When we were alone and doors were closed, Estelle asked me: “What’s the name of the child’s father?”
I had Rory on my lap.
“Gabriel Storrow,” I said, sensing something other than judgment going on in her voice, on her face. We talked about him, and she told me I should marry him, if I loved him.
“If you’re thinking you can rid yourself, or spare your progeny from Judaism, Beatrice, forget it.” Estelle spoke haltingly, savoring her words, rolling her “r” in her throat, like old New York. She wore thick black-heeled tie-up shoes that reminded me of my grandmother’s, but she was more eloquent and piercing with her words than anyone in our strand.
Within the fringe of soft curls, more brown than gray, I saw the harsh contours of my father’s face as it was given to me, striking—rather than pretty, as she entreated my boy to come talk to her.
Her daughters came back in. I’d figured them to be in their mid-seventies, as my parents would have been.
As they helped her rise, Estelle promised that I would find her children and grandchildren generous and hospitable, and it would always be so.
I would see her the next day for breakfast, for matza brei.
When Rory had become another little sleeping mound littering the carpet, they started with stories, Anna and Miriam, about a family that had run the gamut, from Jews for Jesus to Hasidim, in addition to hair-raising tales about a German refugee who’d reunited with her mother in Israel; the daughter had run from Hitler, hidden in forests, was discovered and saved, and the mother had survived one of the camps. She had grandchildren in the Israeli philharmonic. These were descendants of Sammy and Jake’s siblings, those who did not get on that boat to America in the late 1800s. I was shown more photographs of my great, great grandparents. In sepia, their images bled, poised on chairs, with somber faces, every inch of their bodies covered, the look of dreary work on my great, great grandmother, and on her husband, the arrogance of scholarly aloofness, the sad brilliance.
Reading Estelle’s stories, I knew, of course, that Sammy and Jake were rebels. From my father, I’d remember that his grandfather Jacob was a notorious womanizer, whereas Sammy’s passion ran along the lines of social justice. Together they had joined a group of “freethinkers,” who talked of freeing fellow Jews from the bonds of their own separateness, for which the patriarch nearly disowned him.
“My grandmother is writing still,” Rhonda said. “She’s writing now, in her nineties.”
The two women in their armchairs, Anna sitting up, her eyes glistening, Miriam leaning back.
“The story about Frumkin,” said Anna. “That’s a great one.”
“You know what a freethinker is,” Miriam said. “They’d read books like War and Peace, some plays by Shakespeare. They’d hold gatherings at someone’s house to talk about literature, about the goings on of the day, the current events.”
“This they did instead of going to shul,” Anna said. “Their rebellion.”
“My great grandfather was really a rebel?” I said.
“Yes, but there was this fellow Frumkin,” Anna said.
Rhonda said, “I remember that part. Frumkin was the guy who started the business.”
“Frumkin or Franklyn?” Rhonda’s older sister, Ruth asked this. Rhonda was a banker, Ruth—a computer programmer.
“Listen,” Anna said. “This fellow Frumkin was in charge of all the gatherings. He had a business in the garment industry. They were all salesmen for him. Sammy, Jake, and a lot of their acquaintances.”
I told a story about my grandfather and his brothers gathering old cork, carrying large sacks of cork from Manhattan to Brooklyn, one time having missed the last train and having to walk the tracks over the river.
“Yes, they were—but before the cork, and before what Sammy got into, they were all into this. And then Frumkin changed his name to Franklyn. He wanted everyone to change their names, move to a suburb, put up Christmas trees, hang up wreaths, and hope no one would know they were Jews.”
“I have never heard this part of the family story,” I said. I remembered our four sets of dishes, lighting candles on Friday nights, then gradually the cleaning of the chumitz relaxed from nowhere in the house to a cabinet in the house to just one cabinet reserved for the matza.
Never a tree, never a wreath.
“Your great grandfather left the group, and they moved to Brooklyn, where he established this cork business, and he got all his sons into helping. But Sammy stuck with it.”
“Until he had a son,” Miriam said.
Anna said, “You remember that Dvira, our great grandmother—the one who brought wine to Jersey City, was very religious—frum is what it’s called.
“You remember Rifka was her only surviving daughter, as Dvira had lost a daughter to sickness on the boat ride across the Black Sea.”
I remembered that part of the play, Dvira’s monologue, her blaming herself, and how it had me crying, so vulnerable I was to the feelings of motherhood, so new and raw they were to me. The unthinkable horror of losing a child. I could barely read it, could never imagine writing about it!
“Well, Dvira was very possessive with Rifka. It was a source of tension, between Dvira and her husband, because Sammy wanted nothing to do with Judaism, and Dvira was religious. Estelle, our mother, was Rifka’s oldest daughter, and then there was Hannah.”
“Yes,” I said.
Anna’s lips curled, and a gleam came into her eyes just as I was thinking about my father, with his four girls, and his stories about the seven sisters. The Pleiades, he called them, as he pointed out the constellation.
“Yes,” I said. Something was beginning to sound familiar.
“After Hannah—there came a boy.”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes—and then five girls after that?”
“Yes, but—that’s another story. This time, when Rifka was in labor, Sammy was on the road. But it happened that Rifka had a boy. Everyone was excited, and Dvira was going to make a bris. Of course, they were inviting everyone—including Franklyn and all his salesmen. There would be a big party. As the winemaker, Dvira, was a great personality in the community. People came to her for many things, including borrowing money. Anyhow, Dvira was planning the celebration, the simcha. She was going to whip the works. Dvira was strong, you will remember. Without Sammy there, there was no way anyone would say ‘No,’ to Dvira.”
“Don’t forget to tell Beatrice the names of Franklyn’s sons,” Miriam said.
Oh yes,” Anna said. “Franklyn had four or five sons of his own—but of course there was no bris for any of them. Their names were William Shakespeare Franklyn, Victor Hugo Franklyn, Abraham Lincoln Franklyn, and—oh, I forget—do you remember?”
“Leo Tolstoy Franklyn,” Miriam said.
“Yes, let’s go back to that bris now,” Anna said. “Rifka and Dvira were planning, but Sammy was in Pennsylvania. He didn’t even know he was having a son until they wired him. A bris was the last thing he wanted to have! When he discovered that the women invited Franklyn, he was furious—and he was out of a job.”
Miriam took over. “It was tough. Rifka had my mother and Hannah and the little boy, whose name was Yosef. My grandfather was very depressed. He didn’t know how to support the growing family.”
I wondered why he couldn’t help with the wine business.
“You could only help with the wine if you were religious,” Miriam said. “He was not and had no interest.”
“Eventually,” Anna said. “It was actually Rifka’s creation. The shirtwaist—a blouse that was pulled in at the waist. Rifka herself started making shirtwaists, and Sammy began to sell them.”
“But,” Miriam said. “Rifka had miscarriage after miscarriage, and Sammy was depressed. The neighbors kids stopped playing with Estelle and Hannah. They thought there was a curse on the house.”
“Even Sammy thought there was a curse on the house,” Anna said.
“They made it, though,” Miriam said.
“That Sammy—he started hiring a few salesmen of his own,” Anna said. “And do you know, one day, he was in Grand Central Station when he saw one of Frumkin’s sons—much older than Sammy’s kids. He’d actually sold when Sammy was still part of the business.”
“Leo Tolstoy Franklyn,” Miriam said.
“Yes,” Anna said. “Leo Tolstoy Franklyn met my grandfather in Grand Central Station, and Sammy asked Leo Tolstoy Franklyn to go out for a drink. Leo Tolstoy Franklyn said that he couldn’t, and do you know why?”
I had no idea.
“Well,” Anna said. “He couldn’t go anywhere with my grandfather because he had to rush home to his son’s bris.Leo Tolstoy Franklyn had fallen in love with a religious girl. Now isn’t that some story!”
I was waiting to hear the story about the five girls that followed the one boy, the twin girls, even.
Miriam said, “Tell her what happened to Frumkin.”
Anna’s eyes were still bright. “What happened to Frumkin?” She looked around, waiting to catch everyone’s eyes. “Frumkin, Franklyn. Such a rich man, but he lost all of his sons. They stopped speaking to him. And he? He committed suicide.”
“And what happened next,” I said.
“The end,” she said. “That’s it.”
“That’s what happens,” Miriam said.
“What happens when you try to pretend you’re not Jewish,” Rhonda said quietly.
Not long afterward, I scooped up my son, his head on my shoulder, and threw my jacket over him. It was at the motel that I finally thought to look up.
I had to be careful and balance myself, but there they were, there in the silence of trees and insects breathing, still before the leaves would come out, a thousand million sparks. I could easily make out that tiny oval constellation, that fist of stars clinging to itself.
Was it true? Was it a story?
The stars so clear. It hurt to keep looking.
I kept looking.
Geri Lipschultz has published in The New York Times, The Toast, Black Warrior Review, College English, Terrain and Ms,among others. Her work appears in Pearson’s Literature: Introduction to Reading and Writing and in Spuyten Duyvil’s The Wreckage of Reason II. She teaches writing at Hunter College and Borough of Manhattan Community College. Her stories have received nominations for the Pushcart, and she was awarded a Creative Artists in Public Service grant from New York State. Her one-woman show Once Upon the Present Time was produced in NYC by Woodie King, Jr.
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