Frogs Don’t Swim in the Sea

Azariah Horowitz

Afternoon and the Olive Trees

Boris’s Russian Food and Gifts sits proud and washed out by the sun behind the bus stop on the corner, where Rechov Bialik meets Rechov Yehuda haLevi. In the empty lot next to Boris’s Makolet shop, stray cats stalk the dusty world between the dumpsters, and time is marked by the angle of the sun through the branches of the olive trees.

Every afternoon as the shade laps midway up the stucco wall of the Makolet, the Israeli kids stream out of the doors of Ashdod Ilanot Elementary School. They run the two blocks to the bus stop and congregate here. Older siblings pick younger siblings out from the crowd, grab onto the handles of their backpacks and don’t let go. If the bus is running late, they duck into Boris’s Makolet and blow their bus money on Bazooka bubble gum and bags of peanut butter Bamba. Then the bus pulls up and they rush the automatic doors at the back without paying.

Elya does not like this wild energy. She needs things to be steady, consistent. If she goes into the Makolet with the other kids, she will not be tempted by the chocolate, and she will not let herself buy sardines to feed the stray cats. Instead she always always must save for the bus the three silver shekel coins her Ima gives every morning. Then she will get on through the front doors, nod at the driver, and feed her handful of coins into the slot by the driver’s seat. Here, far from the chaos at the back of the bus, Elya joins the old Russian ladies at the front, the ones that remind her of her Savta, and she observes.

The old Russian ladies in Ashdod ride the bus back and forth, up and down Sderot Moshe Dayan all day long. The ones who came before sit in pairs, unravel balls of yarn slowly from their laps as they knit socks and scarves and whisper to each other in Yiddish, that language that is like folklore. The ones who came after and did not change their names greet the bus driver in Russian, clutch newspapers headlined in block Cyrillic.

As soon as she gets home from school on this Friday afternoon, Ima is already nagging Elya. Tomorrow is Saturday, Shabbat, and Elya will visit Savta bright and early. Because Savta has nothing to do, because there are no buses on Shabbat for the old ladies to ride up and down and back and forth, because the country is religious and it rests when G-d tells it to, nevermind what its people think and practice at home.

Elya finds her mother’s line of logic rather convoluted, but that does not stop her from marching up to Savta’s apartment complex in Ashdod by the sea at 10am every Shabbat morning. She is all braids, neat white ankle socks, polished shoes, and a little floral skirt, like Eastern Europe, like the Old Country. Ima dresses her up like a doll, then sends her daughter off to bring her own mother the comfort she cannot.

Elya has never particularly enjoyed this task, but also she has never complained.

Do good deeds still count if you are doing them out of guilt?

Saturday Morning in Ashdod

Some mornings, Savta Shayna wakes up delirious and the glare of the sun on the sand outside her window is almost like the sun on the snow back in her village outside Minsk, and then she is a little girl again and she is not in exile.

But Savta does not share these thoughts with Elya. Instead, she brews tea in a kettle on the stove. Savta is precise with her time and the kettle whistles every week just as Elya is untying her shoes by the door, and:

“Shabbat Shalom, Savta Shayna,” Elya says in her accent like water in a mountain stream.

“Gut Shabbos, Elyaley,” Savta responds in her accent like the earth that is soft after it rains.

They sit down at the kitchen table. The window is open to the sea and they sip their tea without speaking, like it is winter, like they need it for warmth. Elya scoops tablespoons of sugar into her mug, then swirls them around with her spoon, full of secret delight that Ima is not here to stop her. Savta puts a sugar cube between her teeth, then slurps the tea through this saccharine filter. The curtains are sunbleached and flutter in the breeze and the room smells briney, like salt.

This week, Elya is antsy. She kicks her feet against the iron legs of the table, watches their mugs reverberate on its glass top. Then, on an impulse, Elya decides she wants to take Savta on an adventure. She thinks about things she likes: feeding the cats in the empty lot with the olive trees; and she thinks about things she knows Savta likes: sitting on the bus, sitting in the bus stops, and all the other old Russian ladies who do these things with her. And Elya instantly knows what their destination will be.

Makolet One

The door of Boris’s Makolet chimes pleasantly as they step inside. Elya notices that there is no mezuzah on the doorpost, but there is a blaring red socialist flag tacked to the wall above the freezer that holds the pierogis.

“Shalom, Zdravstvuyte,” says Boris from behind the counter in the back of the store. He is chewing on a cigarette, reorganizing a rack of lottery tickets for sale.

Elya knows that Savta does not remember Russian. She left that place long ago, so long ago. Elya lingers by the door, examining a freezer with a slide-open top stocked full of Dadu ice cream bars imported from Eastern Europe. Savta drags her chunky white sneakers up to the counter where Boris chain smokes and presides over his little empire of black bread, vodka bottles, borscht mix.

“Privyet, dobroye utro,” Savta responds, to Elya’s surprise. Savta and Boris stumble into a conversation, they are talking Russian, but slowly so that Savta can pause to think, to untangle these words from the cobwebs that have grown around them in the back of her memory.

Then Savta makes her way around the store slowly. She picks up frozen herring cling- wrapped together in groups of six, their beady little eyes deep-frozen in place. She strolls over to a shelf of jam and honey that is made “with love from the Belovezhskaya Forest,” and pauses to take it all in in wonder.

“I am on a memory trip!” she laughs, switching into Hebrew for the sake of her granddaughter.

“How did you come to this country?” Boris asks Savta Shayna offhand, then comments that he came to Israel after the USSR broke up, and the Iron Curtain fell. Elya scoffs. She could have told you that from Boris’s Slavic clip of speech and the communist flag above the pierogis. But Boris knows that still waters run deep, and that people will talk to you if they trust that you will listen.

Savta Shayna smiles, nods thoughtfully, then opens up. “I came here from a village in the forest outside Minsk,” she begins.

Milk and Honey

Before, what was broken could be fixed. What was sick could be healed. Savta Shayna’s Mama knew this.

For a sore throat, a cough, or menstrual cramps: A spoonful of honey mixed into a cup of tea. Maybe, if this is a week of plenty, there will even be a little milk poured in. The tea cup’s ceramic sides will be warm between little Shayna’s hands and Mama’s palm on her forehead will be cold and that is good because if she has a fever, then this is serious, then Mama has time to give her love.

For a broken heart:

A cube of sugar between your front teeth. Hold it softly behind your lips and do not tense your jaw too hard when you drink or the sugar will shatter like snow. And your tea will be so sweet all at once and then it will be suddenly bitter. After all, it is only rose hips in hot water.

Shabbat Beresheet

In Minsk in the village in the forest, Shayna had a brother. A twin brother, actually. Yankle was his name.

When Shayna and Yankle wake up in their bed that is warm like the womb, there is frost creeping in through the cracks in the wood on the ceiling, and there is a shell of the thinnest ice over the top of the quilt where there are no bodies to melt it.

This morning is Friday morning, and so begins an all-day scramble to get everything done before sundown and those three stars in the sky that bring Shabbat and stillness and peace. Shayna kicks and Yankle elbows her hard in the ribs, his breath smells like sour bread. They peel back the quilt and venture out into the cold of the house. They tiptoe around other mattresses, other siblings sleeping. Mama and Papa have too many kids, it is not practical, there is not enough space, there is not enough food. But they do not think too much about this because G-d told them to be fruitful and multiply until they are numerous like the stars in the sky or the sand on the beach. The rebbe in the shul giving his Shabbat sermon does not mention that this advice was maybe not written for this family of Jews landlocked in a Russian forest, so far from G-d’s holy land on the sea.

In the cold in the morning, Yankle and Shayna wear two layers of socks, they need eggs to make challah this afternoon. The eggs are a warm and milky brown, they gather them from under the hens’ feathery bottoms in the chicken coop outside, and their breath hovers in the dawn air. Then Yankle gets to go to religious school, to Cheder to learn; and Shayna drags her feet back to the house to sweep the loose dirt off the floor and change diapers and clean spittle off round baby cheeks and help Mama sift the flour for the challah, but never braid it. She is still too little to be trusted with that. At home, playing the domestic daughter, Shayna daydreams.

On the bench in Cheder, Yankle is surrounded by boys with black curls who whisper what they are reading to themselves and rock back and forth as they work, their bodies flickering like flames. Yankle daydreams too, different dreams, Cheder dreams. They will tell each other what they thought about later, when Yankle gets home early for Shabbat.

On Friday afternoons before Shabbat comes in, Mama pours her little ones a bath in the tin tub so they will be clean and pure for the Shabbat Bride. Yankle and Shayna crunch up their legs behind them at either end of the tub, then push off the sides like frogs. Their legs are naked and their skin is smooth. They swim laps and imagine what the ocean might look like, where they say the water goes on and on and it looks like the beginning of the world when all G-d had done yet was separate out the water from the sky.

Soon the water in the tub is lukewarm and their fingers are pruned and Mama is mad that Shayna’s hair is not brushed for dinner. That means it is time to clean up and move on and maybe that is not so bad. Afterall, in the end, frogs do not get pruned toes, a fact that Yankle knows, and neither do they live in the ocean, a fact that Shayna does not know yet and Yankle never will.

Lively Ghosts

In Cheder, the rebbe told Yankle (who promptly told Shayna as soon as he got home), that the Talmud that Jewish boys must study isn’t just holy, it is magic! Because it is a book full of arguments between sages who lived hundreds of years apart, and yet here they are on this very page, talking to each other and talking over each other and agreeing and disagreeing. They are not dead!

“And we are so lucky to be Jews in Cheder!” the rebbe preaches to his captive audience, three benches worth of little boys, “We get to eavesdrop in on these holy men saying such holy things!” The rebbe wiggles a meaty finger and his scraggly black beard wiggles along in time.

The sages in the script argue about the sand between the tiles in a clay oven, and who is responsible for the damage of a goring ox, and lots of other mildly esoteric things that little Yankle, in all of his eight-yearold earnesty, cannot seem to muster the interest to focus on.

But yesterday, Yankle tells Shayna, he saw Rabban Gamaliel sit up on the page, shake out the dust from his beard that is even longer than the rebbe’s, and stare down Rabbi Eliezer ben Hurcanus, who dared suggest that such a clay oven is ritually pure. A page and a half later Rabbi Joshua weighs in on the debate. His eyes glimmer purpley-blue, the color of a lively ghost. Yankle boasts to Shayna that now that he has learned to spend his endless hours of Cheder in the company of Rabban Gamaliel, Rabbi Eliezer, and all the other lively ghosts, he is never bored and he is never alone.

Shayna wonders what kinds of happy ghosts live in the house with the chickens and their warm eggs, and her too many little siblings and their feathery upper lips and schmutzy baby cheeks.

Olah Chadasha // New Immigrant

When Shayna first stepped off the overcrowded ocean liner full of refugees, their silence and their sorrow, she touched down on the foreignness of a sandy soil where chaparral plants grow in solitary with their overextended root systems. And she found that she was alone. And it was strange how after so many years of praying towards this holy mythical place in the East, here it suddenly was. But that was many years ago now.

If Shayna were to go back to her village in the forest (which is already distant as a dream), she would be shocked to discover that the dampness of the earth has a distinct scent to it. A smell of ferns, and water, and life. But she will never know this because her village outside Minsk does not exist anymore now, and anyways when you grow up in a place you often tend not to notice its certain magic until you leave it behind.

A young woman now, Shayna has taken up the habit of waking up early Friday mornings to go to the open air market, the shuk, she has learned to call it in this new language. She takes the walk from her house up the lip of the coast to the market slowly. In this new town by the sea it does not rain. There is no water in the streets, there is no water in the sky. The clouds pass over like wandering Jews, like migrating caribou, they do not stop here. In this town it does not rain and the puddles in the road are heavier than water, iridescent, stagnant. Shayna pauses to wait to cross the road, then she stays put, she does not cross, she is stuck. She watches as a little bird’s feet smack down on the surface of a puddle of oil, it thinks it can come here for a bath, to primp its feathers. Its little talons distort the surface of the oil, its colors bend blue, green, red. Shayna thinks she sees a man in the puddle, his hair grows curly and wild, it is Yankle. He is a young man now, he doesn’t swim laps like a frog in the tin tub anymore. He is muscled and kissed by the sun, not like those soft Eastern European Jews who were pale and peaceful and spent time with their holy words and holy books and then got on trains off to camps, off to die. Shayna smiles at this Yankle in the puddle. She thinks of the concerned American social workers and the other broken neighbors from Marseille and Morocco who like to ask her how she is doing, if she is lonely? Now that Yankle and Mama and the babies with the dried flour caked around their lips are gone.

But Yankle is not gone, Shayna laughs. He is here. He is with her all the time. Sometimes he looks out at her from the knots on the wood of the kitchen table, the swirl of spent tea leaves at the bottom of her mug, the oil in the puddles on the street. Sometimes he talks to her, and she hears him in the wind off the sea, weighing in on her thoughts. And Shayna knows that Yankle learned these things from the happy ghosts with their black scraggly beards and purple-blue eyes. The ghosts who lived in the books in Cheder.

Makolet Two

Elya is silent now. She hangs in the quiet limbo of the makolet, a Russian paper doll in her tiny calico flowers, red against the sterile white of Boris’s tile floor.

She has never heard her Savta say these things before. Or maybe she has, but only vaguely, hinted at, but never laid fully out in the open. Really, Elya does not know so many things about her Savta Shayna. She thinks that neither does Ima, maybe. In her age, Savta Shayna is stoic and strong. She withholds. These are stories she has never offered, and no one taught Elya to ask.

Boris smiles, leans back against the countertop. He has done this before, coaxed out things kept inside for too long. He has figured out the things to say, the questions to ask. He knows how to listen.

Shayna fidgets with the bus card in her pocket. She decides that it is sudden, a rush and a scramble, and then it is peace, to tell these things. A memory of Shabbat in Minsk.