Free The Sisters Weiss by Naomi Ragen Page B

Catholic girls didn’t wear stockings, and she’d never seen one with a skirt less than three inches above her knees. She wondered for a moment if the girl was some kind of foreigner.
    “I would like to take out a library card,” Rose said with an accent that only a non–New Yorker would consider odd, putting the librarian’s doubts to rest.
    “Your name?”
    “Rose … Monroe,” she stammered, giving an address that she’d written down as she’d walked along.
    Having to choose only four books from among the stacks was an agonizing challenge. She finally made her choice, reminding herself she would soon be back to exchange them for four new ones. She hid them inside her school bag.
    “You’re late! I was worried! So, you cooked something?” her grandmother questioned her when she came in.
    “What?”
    “In your cooking class?”
    “Ah, right. Challah, Bubbee. We learned how to make challah.”
    Her grandmother sighed. “For this you need to come home after dark? This I can teach you, believe me. Go eat something.”
    “I’ll eat, but first I want to do my homework,” she said, anxious to hide her treasures in a safe place.
    “First, eat!” her bubbee commanded.
    She ate, tasting nothing, thinking about how only the first lie was hard. The rest came so naturally, it almost felt the same as telling the truth.
    *
    That night, and every night that followed during that period of her life, she lay under her bedcovers holding a dime-store flashlight that illuminated rows of words strung together with magical skill. Slowly, they dissolved the fetters on her spirit, which had felt like shoes bogged down with mud from tramping through the jungle. Dried, polished, repaired, she danced with them through the night, slowly at first, then kicking up with joy, roaming freely, transcending the rigid strictures of her life, the little apartment in Borough Park, her family in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York, America. She sat cross-legged on a magic carpet that floated over lands and lives so very different from her own.
    There, in secret midnight rendezvous, she met Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, and Anne of Green Gables, standing side by side with them, viewing the world through their eyes. What photos she would take, she thought, of the onion-spired churches of St. Petersburg, the French countryside, or Prince Edward Island as it burst into life each spring!
    And that was how one night she met David, the sensitive little boy aching with loneliness and fear in Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep. For the first time, David saw a coffin. He asks his mother about death, and she answers him: “They say there is a heaven and in heaven they waken. But I myself do not believe it.”
    Her mind lingered over these shocking words. “They say there is a heaven … But I myself do not believe it.”
    It was the first time in her life that she considered such a shocking idea. It was not so much the idea of dismissing heaven, but of disbelieving things that were taken for granted by everyone around you. That you had the right, the power, the freedom not to believe. It was a stunning revelation, both miraculous and terrifying.
    The next night, she sat in the kitchen watching her bubbee’s small, heavy figure bent over the old stove, stirring the contents of a steaming pot with her large wooden spoon. This is real, she thought. This you could know. But as for the rest … everyone was simply guessing, rabbis, parents, teachers … They believed what they wanted, what they had been taught, what their parents before them believed.
    And right then, surrounded by the odors of chicken soup and stewed apple compote and baking challah, her life changed forever.
    I do not believe I deserve to be punished for looking at beautiful photographs. I do not believe the Honored Rav is infallible or that his knowledge of the world comes from God. It that were true, then all of the Honored Ravs in Europe would have told their congregations to escape the Nazis