The Match and the Mikveh
Luria, Yaacov
THE MATCH AND THE MIKVEH YAACOV LURIA I am holding a photograph that already seemed old and fragile to me 50 years ago. It shows my mother as a girl of 17 or 18. She is dressed in the fashion of...
...And to have dated young men on her own initiative would have been unthinkable...
...Eventually my fathergot a job keeping the books for a textile wholesaler on the Lower East Side, but his salary was a pittance...
...Smoking to him was a shameful practice, almost in the same class as sex outside of marriage...
...I understood now: Without immersion in the mikveh after her last period, she was forbidden to have sex...
...Puzzled by my forwardness—was nothing sacred to her college-boy son?—my mother blushed...
...I want to know if he was passionate...
...After a while my father joined in the laughter too...
...I could almost feel within me the joy with which they sanctified the Sabbath with their love...
...I knew then that I was edging into space where my mother was entitled to privacy...
...His book of poems, Not a Piano Key, is now in its second printing...
...Her eyes fixed on the darkening river, my mother finally began to speak...
...And of my father too...
...She stressed the "20," as if the passage of time had imposed a statute of limitations on what was to come and had diminished its reality...
...His father, somewhat of a tyrant, had demanded that he become a shochet, but for him, slaughtering fowl in a live poultry market was a ghastly occupation...
...He was not a cold person...
...But how else could he calm his agitation...
...And just as surely I knew that my question arose from stirrings and perplexities of my own...
...From the fields there's a smell of fresh hay...
...I demanded...
...daughter...
...My mother would tell me only one thing more...
...Your father is not touching me, but I can feel his warmth—it's like electricity...
...The family ate, my father sang zemirot, he said a leisurely Grace after Meals...
...Everything he wore suddenly felt so tight that he imagined it would all explode and fly around the room...
...I was 18 years old at the time, living in the neighborhood of City College, where I was a second-year student...
...The trick was to find a wife who could see the fun in a prat fall...
...Her hardest task, before they could be married, was convincing my father that it wasn't such a tragedy to be a bit of a schlemiel and fall over your own feel...
...I haven't been to a mikveh even though my time is past...
...She hesitated again...
...No, something else troubled her...
...more accurately, we never knew we were...
...Shabbos...
...unmarried, she was a failure...
...her dress has a high neck and balloon sleeves and gives her an hourglass figure...
...Papa had warm feelings...
...She contrasted him with the brassy "all rightniks"—salesmen and buyers mainly—who drifted through the shop where she worked...
...Up to that moment he had avoided it...
...My mother never questioned her obligation to help support her family...
...My mother answered with another question, "What do you mean by romantic...
...My father sat on an overstuffed chair and fidgeted...
...Ay, he was with us for such a short time...
...It was more than 20 years ago...
...After her day's work over a sewing machine, she attended night school or went to Broadway plays with shopmates—women, of course...
...My father, whose Yiddish name, Velvel, had been anglicized to William, would not have been anyone's nominee for "young immigrant most likely to get ahead in the world...
...The Match and the Mikveh" is drawn from Luria's just-completed memoir...
...As my mother, not without envy, watched the other husbands and wives embracing, my pale and crumpled father unexpectedly stepped out of the car...
...Eager to get the ordeal of being introduced to a strange young woman over with as soon as possible, he arrived at my grandparents' apartment earlier than he was expected...
...He grew sick at the sight of blood, suffering with every bird he put to death...
...I have a son...
...You asked before if Papa was— what was the word...
...Papa is walking ahead of me so he will not be tempted, but he is trembling...
...My mother never tired of the cigarette-in-the-pocket story, splitting her stitches each time she told it...
...You understand what...
...My mother was right when she foresaw that she would rule in her household...
...Suddenly I understand...
...The sun had set by now...
...Castle Garden...
...I don't think there was any premeditation in the question that suddenly came from me...
...In a panic, my father hid his cigarette in the palm of his hand, then slipped his hand into his jacket pocket...
...And the air is full of the singing of birds...
...1 suspect she also liked his looks...
...The picture carries the name of a photographer on the Lower East Side of New York...
...In the world of my grandparents, marriage for a woman was the only real fulfillment...
...His boss needed him...
...One evening in May my mother and I were sitting on a bench on Riverside Drive and watching the sun descend beyond the Palisades across the Hudson...
...Suddenly he stops and whispers, 'Annie, listen!' Now that the birds have grown still, I hear the bubbling of water...
...It was arranged that my father would show up on a Saturday evening, just after the Sabbath had ended, at my mother's house...
...Her face bespeaks innocence, serenity and feminine modesty—modesty in the traditional Jewish sense of willing acquiescence to age-honored disciplines...
...Papa was a very devoted husband," she said at last...
...My mother thought, "Oh, isn't he a shy one...
...And, looking ahead, she thought how pleasant it would be to have a husband whose will would not be opposed to hers...
...I demanded...
...My mother seemed more embarrassed than ever and said nothing for a long while...
...Bazaar on the River East...
...My parents were married for 18 years...
...He undid his celluloid collar, loosened his suspenders and unbuttoned his shoes...
...Nu, my father washed, combed his beard, welcomed the Sabbath with his prayers, said Kiddush...
...She took in sewing and boarders, she did laundry for single men...
...The picture, alas, was unproductive...
...We are walking on the road and it's dark as a coal cellar...
...My mother's blush deepened...
...I could imagine my mother running through thorns and brush and plunging into the brook to purify herself in obedience to the Law...
...I wasn't sure whether my mother was still blushing or whether the afterglow of the sun had crimsoned her cheeks...
...for my mother it made my father interesting, charming, even fascinating...
...This shy, unworldly, gentle Talmud scholar she found far more attractive...
...As soon as the girls are in bed...
...She seemed miles removed from anything sensual...
...Papa stayed in New York...
...I asked her whether she was upset because there wouldn't be enough food for him...
...He says nothing, but I understand...
...There was no contest of wills...
...Far from it...
...Never before and never after this can I remember such nachas ruach, such a good feeling...
...There was a polio outbreak in New York that summer, so I took Leah and Rebecca to the country...
...Fifteen families in fifteen rooms...
...The incident of the hot jacket pocket just about destroyed my father's small store of self-confidence...
...Finally, becoming utterly incautious, he lit a cigarette...
...Work to her was as ordinary as bread and borscht...
...I knew she was a natural storyteller and would not— could not—leave a story hanging...
...My mother's voice again...
...Your brother Srolke was born after Pesach the following year...
...But what can I do...
...Yet my mother was far from unhappy...
...Suddenly my father leaped from the chair, his open shoes flapping like the wings of a frightened hen...
...Both my grandfathers attended the same synagogue...
...Their middle daughter, Annie, was turning into an old maid and was not even worried about her impending fate...
...Sensing his nervousness, my grandmother led him into the front room so that he could calm down in private...
...I think I often unwittingly inflicted an especially cruel punishment on her, the pain of happiness recollected in sadness...
...and averted her eyes compassionately...
...He was about to pull himself together again when my grandparents and my mother came into the front room...
...It had grown dark...
...Having spent most of his years as a cloistered yeshiva student, he was devout and scholarly...
...Again silence...
...It was inevitable that one day my paternal grandfather would say to my mother's father, "I have heard that you have a Yaacov Luria, recipient of a Saxton fellowship from Harper & Row, has written for The New Yorker and Harper's, as well as for moment...
...You see...
...With your own son you don't talk about such things...
...I remember once—never mind...
...This incident remains with me as the most beautiful memory of my mother...
...While one hand held up his trousers, the other tried to douse the smoldering cigarette eating a hole in his pocket...
...And yet her anxiety mounted moment by moment...
...A Jewisii wife who had made Shabbos wouldn't have enough to feed an extra person, her husband yet...
...Passionate...
...He was also shy, introverted and unworldly...
...My mother seemed so prudish, as if, being husbandless, she had locked away her womanliness and allowed it to wither...
...his full-face beard gave him a kind of storybook dash...
...But the evening that began the match between my parents was almost the end of it...
...But I would not let her escape...
...My grandparents sniffed the air, said they thought feathers might be burning close at hand, and left the room to poke around...
...Obviously my parents must have had sex to bring four children into the world...
...I asked why...
...In all matters of the workaday world, my mother was lord and lady...
...Immediately after their wedding she forbade my father ever to slaughter another fowl...
...Surely copies of the photograph were distributed to relatives, landsleit (Old Country neighbors), friends—to anyone who would help spread the word that this fine young woman was ready for a husband...
...She escaped spinsterhood, of course...
...People speak well of her...
...My father decided all questions of religious observance...
...He knew the Law: In a serious crisis, it was permitted to break it...
...I pitied my father and mother for their unquestioning obedience to their religious beliefs, yet how magnificent their faithfulness was...
...She could be infinitely talented and charming...
...For the first time that summer my mother felt the joy of the Sabbath suffusing her...
...My sisters, both of them older than 1, had had more time to get to know my father...
...A brook is not a mikveh, but it is flowing water that keeps changing...
...When my father died during the flu epidemic in March 1919, I was only four...
...She used the Yiddish word zeit, which I knew as a euphemism for menstrual period...
...She is dressed in the fashion of the time...
...It's forbidden...
...I grew up endlessly curious about him, questioning my mother, probing for incidents and details of his life with her...
...With some effort of imagination I saw...
...Was Papa romantic...
...Was Papa a good lover...
...It's a mitzvah for a husband and wife to be together in honor of Shabbos, but I hadn't expected your father for Shabbos," she said...
...I had enough sense to respect her silence...
...My bereavement was even more poignant than theirs because the void left by my father's absence held too few memories to comfort me...
...We were never poor...
...exclaimed my mother...
...If another woman even came close to him, he turned his face away...
...Since a visit to a photographer's studio in those days was not undertaken frivolously, I can guess the purpose of this one: It was a rite de passage signalling that my mother had reached marriageable age...
...One memory my mother yielded up to me with the utmost reluctance...
...To conceal his disheveled appearance, he sank as far as he could into his chair...
...Suddenly the deliberate pace of her words quickened...
...Late one Friday afternoon just before candle-lighting time, a car full of visiting husbands drove up to the kuchalein...
...It wasn't such a pleasure living in one room in Shaine's kuchalein and sharing a kitchen...
...My mother was torn between happiness and dismay...
...That's not what I'm asking," I persisted...
...Papa wants to go for a walk with me...
...There is a brook following the road...
...Without a word to my startled mother, he ran out of the apartment...
...I go, but I'm worried," my mother said...
...And this is Friday night...
...I grew tense within myself as I imagined my parents' predicament on that dark country road so long ago...
...She kept on working in the shop through her first pregnancy while my father studied bookkeeping...
...I don't remember her ever sitting idle...
...But that my mother and father had ever embraced and pleasured each other seemed incredible...
...By the time my mother was nearing her mid-20s, my grandparents were anxious and bewildered...
Vol. 7 • October 1982 • No. 9
