Free Sweet Like Sugar by Wayne Hoffman Page A

head to look into my eyes. I nodded, and he began.
    â€œI met her in 1951, when I was teaching at a yeshiva in Brooklyn. She was such a beauty—long brown hair and the most delicate hands, but eyes so sad and far away,” he said. “But after all they had seen . . .”
    Sophie had arrived in America only a few years before, the sole member of her extended family to survive the Holocaust. After all the indignities and offenses she had witnessed during the war, she had to suffer still more in peacetime: She couldn’t go home to her village in Poland and instead had to enjoy her so-called freedom in a displaced persons camp in Germany. It was there, in the camp, that she befriended an American soldier, a medic, a Jew who spoke to her in Yiddish. Although she was a beautiful young woman, almost twenty at the time, and the soldier was only seven or eight years older and as handsome as all kind, healthy American soldiers must have seemed, their connection was not romantic.
    â€œThey were like brother and sister,” Rabbi Zuckerman explained. “They would talk in Yiddish, but he also began to teach her English words. She would stay near him during the day, watching him work, and keeping up to date on the news of the world. New people arrived at the camp, and others left for Palestine or America, but Sophie had nowhere to go.”
    When it was time for the soldier to end his tour of duty and return stateside, he made arrangements with a Jewish aid agency to bring Sophie to America. The soldier’s family took her in as one of their own, essentially adopting her and giving her a whole new set of brothers and sisters and parents, and the soldier set her up to train as a nurse’s aide.
    â€œShe was working in the clinic at the girls’ school across the street from my yeshiva, when I first saw her,” the rabbi recalled. “I had spent years at that yeshiva, teaching boys prayers and Torah lessons, and studying with the other rabbis in the evenings. But once I saw Sophie, I couldn’t think about anything else. She was my bashert. ”
    â€œYour what?” I asked.
    â€œMy bashert, ” he repeated. “The one I was destined to meet, to share my life with.”
    â€œYou really believe that?” This came out sounding sharper than I’d intended, and the rabbi cocked his head at me, stung.
    â€œI do,” he said. “You’ll see. You’ll meet the right girl one day.”
    â€œI doubt it,” I said, leaving it at that.
    â€œWe are all destined to have someone special come into our lives, Benji,” he said gently but with conviction, like a teacher explaining something utterly simple to a particularly dim student. “Even you.”

CHAPTER 4
    T he rabbi’s words stayed with me for days. Was there really someone I was destined to meet?
    Obviously, I hadn’t met my bashert yet. Or maybe I had met him, but didn’t even know it. Maybe I’d already dated him but had cast him aside for some ridiculous reason: he bit his fingernails, he wore the wrong shoes, he didn’t like The Kids in the Hall. Maybe I’d blown my only chance.
    Would I know my bashert if I saw him? Would I recognize him?
    I sat at my desk on Saturday morning, scanning the photos of a dozen different models the photographer had suggested to be the devil in the Paradise ad. I wasn’t thrilled to be at my office on a weekend, but the bar manager seemed serious about deadlines, and I wanted to impress him—I needed the job. Besides, looking at photos of hot guys wasn’t such a bad way to spend a Saturday morning.
    As I flipped through the pictures, I searched for my bashert. Was this him—the curly-haired boy with the dimpled chin and perfect eyebrows? Or this one, a daddy type with a trim goatee and a shaved head? Or the blond one with the blue eyes? I’d always had a thing for blonds; was this because my bashert was blond, or because he