Free Leah's Journey by Gloria Goldreich Page B

Ferguson passed the crisp green check over and watched Leah’s face soften with pleasure and the lines of fatigue slowly ease.
    “That’s wonderful,” she gasped. “How pleased David will be. You have given us a wonderful Sabbath gift, Charles.”
    She took his hand and pressed it with surprising strength and swiftly left.
    At the window, moments later, he watched her emerge from the building and hurry down the deserted street. The mauve shadows of evening streaked the gray cobblestoned street. One small boy, his workman’s cap balanced jauntily on his head, ran by, clutching a brown paper sack. A single onion skidded out and rolled down the street, shedding its pale silken skin. The boy dashed after it and plucked it from the arms of a darkening shadow, and then Charles Ferguson could no longer see him because the darkness of night had overtaken the street before the lamps were lit. The art teacher thought of the wintry sunset that briefly bloodied the gray skies that stretched above his father’s striped and somnolent fields. Next spring, he promised himself, next spring he would set out across the prairies. Next spring.
    *
    David Goldfeder, walking home through the deserted, night-washed streets, did not hurry. Under one arm he carried a sewing machine shrouded in newspaper which he had borrowed from his shop for the use of his brother-in-law Shimon Hartstein. His other arm was laden with books from the public library, including a picture book for Rebecca and a volume of fairy tales for Aaron. The boy had started first grade only a few months ago but already he was reading with easy fluency. They had been right, after all, to send him to the public school rather than a yeshiva. One cannot enclose oneself in a ghetto in a country which offered the opportunity to be free of ghettos. Anything was possible in the United States. Look what he, David Goldfeder, had accomplished in only a few short years. He had earned a high school diploma and was taking university courses. Such things would never have been possible in Russia where only a minute percentage of Jews were admitted to the universities. Even under the new Communist regime in which poor Yaakov had placed such faith, the words of the law had simply been twisted so that a new ideology was attached to ancient discriminatory practices. The killers of Jews had simply become proletariats instead of Cossacks. On the North Campus of the City College one evening, a fellow student, a youth with wild hair and burning eyes, had asked David Goldfeder to sign a petition on behalf of Eugene Victor Debs, the Socialist. David had refused, gently but firmly.
    “I’m sure this Debs is a good man,” he had said, “but if you want to know about socialism—sit down and I’ll tell you about socialism.”
    The boy had moved uneasily on, looking nervously back at the thin man with the heavy accent who carried his notebooks in a brown paper bag and used the ten minutes between classes to sleep, sometimes snoring lightly through parted lips, to the controlled amusement of his classmates who also understood the bone-weary fatigue of the night school student.
    And now even wider horizons had opened for David Goldfeder. He trembled at the memory of Professor Thompson’s words and repeated them to himself again, as though they were a secret incantation whose repetition implied fulfillment.
    “Your paper on Freud’s theory of the subconscious was excellent, Goldfeder,” the tall dark-bearded professor had said. “You approach the subject with considerable depth. Remarkable for an undergraduate. Psychoanalysis interest you?”
    “Very much.” David’s heavily accented voice, as always, was soft, his words cautious. Psychoanalysis more than interested him. It absorbed him. Since his introduction to the work of Sigmund Freud he had thought of little else. It was as though he had searched in the darkness for much of his life and a great light had suddenly been thrust into his hand.