Day After Night

As the rabbi moved to the front of the crowd, everyone grew still. The mood dimmed so quickly, Leonie looked up, expecting to see a thick cloud covering the sun. But the sky was clear except for a single thin band of purple stretched over the mountains.

The rabbi covered his head with a large white prayer shawl and stood silently for a long moment before he picked up a book and began to chant in a clear, reedy tenor voice.

With the first note, Shayndel began to weep, silent and almost motionless. The tears came not so much from her as through her, as every note and phrase called up random shards of memory.

“Blessed, blessed,” said the rabbi, and she saw her father’s signet ring.

“Hallelujah,” he chanted, and she thought of her mother’s favorite blue apron.

“Open my lips,” the rabbi recited, and she remembered the little scar on her brother’s forehead.

She was overcome by the weight of what she had lost: mother, father, brother, friends, neighbors, comrades, lovers, landscapes. Odd details surfaced, like flotsam rising from a sunken ship: her father would only eat the dark meat of a chicken; her mother loved Laurel and Hardy films and the Beethoven piano sonatas.

She remembered the last formal photograph of her family, taken a week before Noah left them, headed for Palestine. She had just turned sixteen. When her father brought the picture home, he couldn’t get over how much his children resembled each other. Her mother agreed. “Your noses, your chins!” she exclaimed, tracing her finger over the glass. “Just like my father.”

All gone.

Leonie and Tedi sat on either side of Shayndel, but she could not bear to look at them. She could do nothing but weep. The tears reached her lips, orphan tears; she found them strange

ly cold.

Leonie put her arm around Shayndel’s waist. Tedi rested her hand on Shayndel’s shoulder. They pressed their bodies against hers, holding her up, reminding her that she was not alone, that she was still loved.

Leonie and Tedi wept softly, too, less for their own losses than out of sympathy for Shayndel, whom they had never seen cry. She worked so hard, smiled so freely, and seemed to forgive the everyday pettiness of Atlit so easily. She had made them think she was different—undamaged and immune to grief. But of course she was as lost as everyone else, as lonely and haunted by ghosts that only she could see and hear. Her pain as bottomless. Together, the congregation of Atlit wept. As the sun dropped and the sky blazed and blushed and dimmed, for nearly an hour, they rose for some prayers and sat for others, reciting the sibilant Ashkenazic Hebrew liturgy of a thousand gutted sanctuaries.

Tedi, Shayndel, and Leonie kept their seats, silent, holding on to one another. Zorah watched them from a distance. She stood at the back of the crowd, a few paces removed from the Orthodox girls—the ones who kept their arms and legs covered even on the hottest days, the ones who never danced in the same circle as the boys.

Zorah kept her mouth closed throughout the prayers, pursing her lips and frowning during the communal confession of sins and the plea to the great Father, the formal outcry as the gates of judgment were closed, the somber wailing of God’s oneness, the triple repetition of His kingship. Then, “Adonai is God,” repeated seven times, each one louder than the last, sounding more and more like a demand for justice, until finally the words stopped and only the bleat of the ram’s horn answered.

Zorah used to hear the last shofar blast as a call to wake up and begin again, a clarion trumpet. But this was noise, a feral howl, signifying nothing. The final note drifted and hung in the air. The sun had set and the twilight was soft on their heads. No one spoke or moved until the sound faded and silence reigned.

But it was only a few moments before a loud sneeze broke the spell. Someone said, “Gesundheit,” and laughter followed. People stood and stretched. Men began to fold their prayer shawls and conversation began to percolate until the rabbi called out.

“My friends,” he announced. “A moment more. Let us end this Day of Atonement, this Sabbath of Sabbaths, together.” The crowd turned back, reluctant but obedient, on their feet as he lit a foot-long, blue-and-white braided candle and recited the blessings that separate time into sacred and profane.

The evening prayer service followed—a rushed affair, murmured by only a few men, until the rabbi announced the mourners’ prayer.

It was the slowest Kaddish Zorah had ever heard, every syllable weighted by groans and sighs. Pious women on either side of her covered their eyes with their fingers, soundlessly mouthing the words.

Glorified and celebrated, they recited. Acclaimed and honored, extolled and exalted beyond all tributes that man can utter.

Zorah knew that most of the people around her did not understand what they were saying. For them, the ancient prayer was a kind of lullaby, a balm for the afflicted. She wondered if they would be standing if they realized that they were praising the God who had decreed the murder of their families; that they were expressing gratitude and affection for the One who had annihilated everyone and everything they had loved.

We need a new Kaddish for 1945, she thought. An honest Kaddish that would begin, “Accused and convicted, heartless and cruel beyond anything the human mind can understand.”

They chanted, God who brings peace to His universe.

Silently, Zorah translated, “God who brings Nazis to His universe.”

Amen and amen, they assented.

“No more and no more,” said Zorah.

“Amen, already,” came a shout from the crowd, ready to be finished, ready to forget, ready to eat.

The last lines of the prayer took up the case for peace: God who brings peace to His universe, make peace for us all and all of Israel.

Zorah wondered where peace might be located in a world burned beyond recognition.