Free I Am Forbidden by Anouk Markovits

prayerwords, and then HaShem himself, pushed their way in, and it seemed to Atara that Hannah’s multicolored words had been a ploy to introduce God words about punishing the wicked and rewarding those who feared. The evening when Atara realized that the lively words would
always
vanish from Hannah’s stories, she stormed out of the room.
    In the forbidden books, the colored words sometimes continued inside her even after she had finished reading the story; then Atara wondered whether a secret passageway might link her to the outside world.
    Soon Atara was reading all the time. She read on the way to school and back from school; she read under her desk in class; at night, she read by flashlight under her eiderdown.
    In his study, Zalman swayed to the ancestral singsong of Talmudic disquisition; under her eiderdown, Atara read soundlessly, urgently. Only during Zalman’s midnight lament over the Temples destroyed did his moan shear the lines off Atara’s page. She raised her head, listened to his plea—waited for the shuffle of his slippers in the corridor. Silence? The words realigned themselves, once more drew her in.
    Zalman’s Talmud folios and Atara’s books were like neighbors who share a building without knowing each other, except that now and then Zalman searched the girls’ room for secular writings and tore them up. “I will not raise a Spinoza, not under my roof!”
    Always, Atara found a way. She slid the forbidden books between her belly and the waistband of her white underwear,she climbed on the wooden toilet seat and stashed the books on the outer sill of the high, narrow window.
    Hannah was too busy with the younger children, too tired by her latest pregnancy, to watch over Atara’s reading.
    Mila peered at the ghostlike hump of eiderdown in Atara’s bed. Just last year, the two girls still laughed with Leah Bloch at their poor grades in literature’s trivialities, but now the teacher of literature called on Atara. Mila tried to remind Atara, timidly, that the books were forbidden, but Atara shot back that free will was a right in Judaism too; Atara’s
free will
wanted to read books.
    Leah Bloch reassured Mila: Atara’s books were merely about pleasure, not serious matters. When you give in to forbidden desire, despair sets in, and emptiness; the secular world was full of mental illness. When Atara would be depressed and lonely, Mila would be there to save Atara.
    Next to the glowing hump of eiderdown, Mila prayed:
“Michael is to our right, Gabriel to our left, Raphael.…”
    At fourteen, Atara found her way to the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève as if she had always known that such a space must exist and that she must be let in. In the hushed, tall reading room where lamps of milk glass inside green shells cast bright ellipses of light on rustling pages, she read contemporary authors. She did not read them in any order: One day she came across
Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs
, the next day she found
L’Être et le néant
. When words or concepts escaped her, she did not put the book aside; the more enigmatic the formulation, the richer the promise of freedom. When she left the library, pearly threads linked roof to roof, dormer to dormer, a luminescent web under which everyone was equally chosen.
    She lingered in front of the Sorbonne, peeked into the cobbled yard. The bell of the chapel rang. She darted through the crowd on the boulevard Saint-Michel, across the Seine, faster, to get home before Zalman noticed her absence.

1955
    W HEN Mila began to mention classes that prepared for the baccalauréat, the diploma that opened the doors to university, Zalman withdrew the girls from the lycée. Mila and Atara were to help Hannah around the house until they were of age to marry. Mila was sixteen and Atara fifteen.
    Hannah, however, remembered Leah Bloch praising a highly reputed seminary for girls, in northern England. Leah Bloch had spent her happiest years there. Hannah was willing to forgo the help; a