Strife

Listen, dear, you’ve been so sweet to me visiting with all the rules and tests you had to get because of Covid, and when the weather has been so wet and miserable. Maybe you thought you’d get a nice story about when your grandfather was courting me or about your father when he was a boy, but no, not today, dear. Today you get a story about hate, hate in the kishkes, hate in the very soul. You should learn from this how not to get on the bad side of someone who’s seen the very worst in people because nothing is beneath them. Their imagination for meanness is bigger than yours.

Every few months someone wants to do a Holocaust memorial thing, and they come asking for our two remaining survivors, Rivka Meyerwiscz and Sadie Baumgarten. We used to have more but they died. In the normal ways.

There’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day in January, that’s from the United Nations. Then there’s Yom HaShoah in the spring, that’s the Jewish one. Don’t forget Tisha Ba’av in the summertime, which is supposed to be about the Temple in Jerusalem but which always works its way to include Hitler, too. And then there’s Holocaust Education Week in November, which somebody thought would be a good idea, so we could spend a whole week wallowing in our pain and for everyone else to learn about how to hate the Jews. I’m telling you, if they hadn’t had a Holocaust already, they could come to town in November and learn all about how to get one started.

Here’s the thing, though. We’ve got Rivka and we’ve got Sadie, but they hate each other. They won’t talk to each other. They’re not even civil. When Sadie comes to the dining room for dinner, it’s always time for Rivka to go. If Rivka wants to play bingo, she has to wait until Sadie has cashed out. Some people think it goes back as far as the war, but I know better.

Way back before you were born, this place, the Rosen-Vogel, was called the Jewish Home for the Elderly and I was around here a lot. You know your zayda was a doctor, his speciality was bones, and he would come visit from time to time to see a patient who’d twisted an ankle or broken a wrist. It was always a nice place, so when your Uncle David and your father were old enough to go to school, I started to volunteer at the home, just to have something to do. My Aunt Pearl was there for a while and I’d visit with her, but sometimes she’d be asleep so I’d visit other people. I’d clear a tray away, maybe I’d help somebody who had shaky hands with their lunch. Eventually they took me on part-time as a nurse’s aide. That’s what they called them then.  This is how I know things from before I was living here. After your zayda died and my knees got so bad I couldn’t climb the stairs in our house, they made a space for me here.                       

But that’s not what I was telling you. In those days, there were lots of survivors from the war, and plenty of stories to go around. There was Margarete who had a tattoo on her arm and a scar on her neck from where they almost hung her. There was Jacob who fought for the partisans in Poland and thought everyone else was a weakling. He would challenge the staff to an arm wrestle. From Poland also was little Karl who had seen his father shot in front of him and who had never grown more than five feet tall. What a sweet fellow he was, though, and I don’t mind telling you that many years later Karl and I had a tryst or two on movie nights when the rest of the floor was in the social hall. Your grandfather should forgive me, but it’s not like he’d know any better. What does he want, he’s left me alone for years. Am I supposed to forget what it is to be a person?

Anyhow, Sadie was a big girl, zaftig we used to say, and she liked life and knew how to have a good time. She liked a drink when she could get it, and she had a laugh that you could hear from two towns over. That’s what they said, anyhow. I didn’t know her in the old country; as you know, I was born here. Sadie’s family ran a distillery in Hungary, and her father hobnobbed with all sorts of bigwigs. If you make good schnapps then everyone wants to know you, it doesn’t take a genius to learn that.

Honey, could you fetch me that glass? The one with the lemon in it. That’s the one, thank you. It’s my homemade lemonade: water, a slice of lemon, and half a packet of Sweet ‘N Low. I used to do that at United Bakery when lemonade seemed like a big expense. Now it’s because they don’t always have lemonade here, but they always have lemon and they always have Sweet ‘N Low. I have a taste for it, you could say. It reminds me of things. Did I tell you about the man who asked me to marry him before your grandfather? That was at United Bakery. His name was Bernie Ungar and he used to buy me a lemonade when he could. Eventually he made a big name for himself in real estate before he got put in prison. But that’s not what I was talking about, I was talking about Sadie and Rivka.

If Sadie was this, Rivka was that. Rivka was a skinny thing from a religious family in Warsaw. Her grandfather was a famous rabbi, the kind that people would visit at his house and ask him advice. For hours they would wait in the front room and little Rivka would collect the money and the sweets that they would bring, but she wouldn’t eat the sweets. Instead she would listen at the door so she could hear her grandfather’s wisdom and learning. You could say that this was her food because she didn’t eat much of anything else.

Rivka and Sadie were like oil and water, or like milk and meat. They weren’t inclined to like each other, like the way I get along with Trudy Mandelbaum since we grew up in the same neighborhood and half the time know what we’re talking about to each other without even having to say anything: a look is enough. Rivka and Sadie had a different life, those two, and that’s not so bad if you stay out of each other’s way, live and let live. If the war hadn’t happened, then Rivka could have married a nice yeshiva boy and been a good rabbi’s wife, and Sadie could have run the distillery and had lots of fun with kids and servants and all that, at least until the Soviets came.

But I keep saying that this wasn’t what made for the bad blood between them. Sadie got through the war at first because her family provided the army with spirits. This was in Budapest, and not all the Hungarians were so bad. For a while anyway, you could make deals. Sadie’s family bribed the right people at the right time. Sadie’s father must have been a wizard to last as long as they did. I think Sadie had a brother who went to Palestine around that time, so they weren’t complete idiots. But even their time ran out eventually and they went to the camps with the other Hungarians, who mostly went up in smoke in the last months of the war. But you could say that Sadie had a running start, and even though both her parents were murdered, she survived and even still had enough meat on her that one of the army boys that liberated her decided to make her his war bride. Did it right there in the DP camp, with her hair still growing back in and a bunch of skeletons and soldiers for a wedding party. So I was told, anyhow. That’s how she made her way to Montreal and then here. She had a big family that was always visiting, and if they weren’t as wealthy as they once were in Hungary, they were still plenty loud. When Holocaust remembrance groups would invite her to come to one gathering or another, she would make earthy jokes about when she was a girl, then weep over her parents’ deaths, finish up by naming all twelve of her grandchildren so they could see how she had survived, and say Am Yisroel chai, and they loved her.

Rivka, though. After they burned off her grandfather’s beard right in the middle of the street—these were the Poles mind you, not even the Nazis—and they shot her mother and sister when Rivka was out trying to find flour, she hid herself in an attic like a rat for three years and became so crooked that she could never stand up straight again. She was as twisted and tough as a tree branch. I don’t know the whole story of what Rivka did after the war, I think she lived in Sweden for a little while, and never married. But eventually she learned about a nephew who had survived, her oldest sister’s son, a boy named Yitzik who’d been shipped off to safety just as things were starting. Somehow, he’d ended up in Toronto and she set her mind to caring for him. She may have walked over the icebergs to get there for all I know, she’s that kind of person. When she got here, she watched over that boy night and day, even over the objections of his new parents. He was sickly, skinny, and had a limp, and the other boys would make fun of him, but not if Rivka was in the schoolyard. Then they’d leave him alone altogether. She protected him with the precision and ferocity of a spider. So he lived, he managed, and once, when Yitzik—now Isaac, or even Ike to the kids who would talk to him—was in high school, he asked Rivka to come tell everyone about the war. But the tales she told and the darkness she revealed to those kids made them never ask her again.

Sadie had warmth, girth, even a mothering spirit, but only if she was the boss. She wanted to be the centre of things. And she had a smart mouth. I liked being in the room when she was there, but I never liked being alone with her, if you know what I mean. She got bossy.

On the other hand, Rivka was a pinched, bitter, brilliant witch who could curdle milk with her mood. She could solve the cryptic crossword in a half-minute and could be relied on to translate from Polish, Yiddish, German, or French. She also made nurses cry with a remark about their earrings, and she could kill a festive meal with a suck on her teeth. You know, just because you’ve experienced terrible things, doesn’t mean you become a better person. Not everyone who suffers becomes a saint. In some ways it can be an education in cruelty. But Rivka was also pious. She knew the prayers and the rules about kosher food, so the kitchen staff would ask her advice if a milk spoon fell into the soup or what have you. That was how she’d kept herself sane in the attic, apparently. She knew the whole Tehillim by heart, and she would recite it to herself in the dark, during the war and after. Despite everything, she had kept her faith and, you could say, devoted herself even more. As far as she was concerned, that was why she was still here, to praise God. Not just to make everyone miserable.

Okay, so I don’t know their whole life stories. Rivka worked at one of the Orthodox synagogues and devoted her life to her nephew, who grew from a sickly child into a sickly genius scientist who was always either in a laboratory or in bed with a fever. Sadie had a secular life with a Canadian husband and a big family. They both came to the Rosen-Vogel around ten years ago. I wasn’t living here yet, but I was around a lot, I was on the board and came to meetings. We made a donation and they named that osteoporosis clinic after your zayda, which was very nice. But then he died, and I suppose I needed to have something to do with myself. I was still friends with some of the nurses and the staff who remembered me from when I was just a volunteer, so I still came around a lot, sometimes in the board room and sometimes in the dining room with the residents. You could say that the home was my second home in those first lonely years after he died, and your father and uncle were off making names for themselves. Fetch me that tissue, would you, sweetie?  

I’m getting to it, I’m getting to it. Like I said, Rivka and Sadie were destined not to get along, and from the beginning they rubbed each other the wrong way. Even before they moved in, there was a dispute about which room each one would get. Rivka wanted to face east toward Jerusalem, but Sadie said that was just because that room had newer carpeting. Sadie won that argument, but it meant that Rivka would sometimes do her morning prayers right outside Sadie’s room, shuckling and mumbling at sunrise in a way that made Sadie crazy.

One time Rivka made one of the girls upset, one of the personal service workers they call them now. She dropped something, maybe it was Rivka’s little book, and Rivka snapped at her, and the poor girl covered her pretty little face and ran to a storage closet to cry. This was a girl that Sadie had affection for, so she tramped over to Rivka and said, you’ll excuse my language: “You’re a mean son of a bitch sometimes, you know that?”

Rivka smirked and said that made no sense since she wasn’t the son of anyone, and her parents had been the blessed tzaddikim of the earth, holy people, unlike some peasants who would make friends with any nebuchwith a nose.

Anyway, this is how they were. There were spats and there were strategies, there were shifting allegiances among the residents and even some of the staff. Sometimes it simmered and they could be civil for a few weeks at a time: other times it flared up over a passing remark. This kind of hate can become a whole way of organizing your week if that’s what you want to do with it. Rivka would scheme and plan, and Sadie would throw a tantrum, or Sadie would push her bosom right into Rivka’s chin as she was walking by her chair, and Rivka would pinch and curse her so that she got shingles and had to stay in bed for a week.

So, about a year ago it comes out that Sadie is turning a hundred years old, and with one of her daughters’ help she’s going to throw a party to celebrate. They reserve the big social hall at the centre and order kosher catering like it’s a wedding, and Sadie invites everyone: her family, but also her friends and protégés who live outside, various important Hungarians from the city, and of course the staff of the Rosen-Vogel, the doctors who help her manage her diabetes, the nurses and PSWs, even the maintenance men who fix her toilet. It’s the biggest party for a single person that has ever been thrown at the centre, and boy you better believe Sadie made sure everybody knew that.

They were even bringing in bottles of Sadie’s pálinka. You see there is a special kind of Hungarian schnapps, pálinka they call it. They make it with apricots, so it’s sweet but also very strong. This was Sadie’s favourite. It was her father’s speciality, and she used to dream about it, her father’s pálinka. She would wax poetic about it any time she had a drink. “Oy, my father’s pálinka, you never tasted such sweetness!” You could get versions of it around here, and people were always bringing a bottle they found at the Duty Free, or from a new importer for Sadie to try, but she was never satisfied. You can’t compete with memory.

But finally, a few years ago, one of Sadie’s grandchildren went to Hungary. This was a boy who was studying to be a chef, has exquisite taste, and said he could imagine what his bubbe was describing, it was as if he were bred specifically for this task. He sampled pálinka all over the country and brought a dozen little taster bottles back with him rolled in his sweaters. Somewhere in the Mecsek Mountains there was a little distillery that had what she wanted. When Sadie tasted it, she gave that boy a hug that almost rearranged his spine. You’d never seen her so content. For all I know it was a recipe from her father’s own distillery that some lucky Magyar had found. In any case, her family sprang into action. For the party, arrangements were made, customs officials were consulted, and a case of this magic booze was shipped in with utmost care, arriving a week before the festivities.

Whispers started among us about whether Sadie might even put aside her bitterness and invite Rivka. It wasn’t a particularly hot time for their feud, but it wasn’t particularly cool either. Would Sadie invite her? Would Rivka come? Could we even imagine Rivka offering a blessing there, as she did when one of the nurses went on maternity leave? That would have been a lot to expect, of course. But who knows? It’s not every day that someone turns a hundred. There may have been wagers placed among those who do that sort of thing. This is what I’m saying: A feud like theirs can animate the whole life of a place and give a birthday party an extra sort of scratch to it that makes it more interesting to attend.

And lo and behold, maybe her daughter put her up to it, or maybe she was feeling good about her booze arriving, but she does, she does. One evening Sadie comes to dinner early, when Rivka eats, and despite the pain in her hips, like a queen she tromps over to the table and looks down, not friendly exactly but formal and polite, like a general reviewing a treaty with his long-time enemy. Rivka looks up from her cup of lentil soup and the whole dining room holds its breath. And Sadie says, in a low voice, very proper, “I would be very happy if you would come to my birthday party, next Sunday at 4 o’clock in the social hall.”

And Rivka, who knows exactly when the party is scheduled, she’s no fool, she’d been wondering just like the rest of us whether or not Sadie would invite her, and has been devising her response one way or the other for days. But to her credit, she doesn’t include any snide remark, and replies with no trace of bitterness or spite, despite the fact that her own one hundredth birthday is only a month away, and would probably pass by without acknowledgement from anyone except her beloved nephew. No, she merely nods her head and says, “I would be pleased to join you, if God preserves my health.”

It was like the Treaty of Versailles, Yalta, and the Camp David Accords all rolled into one. The whole dining room let out a big sigh of relief and took a bite—we didn’t realize that we’d been sitting there with our forks an inch away from our mouths like idiots. So, for five days there was peace and hope at the Rosen-Vogel, even though Roger Kane had a fall and had to get a hip operation.

Come the day of the party, the place is decorated like a cruise ship and is full of Sadie’s family. There are children sprinting down the corridors and more old Hungarians than you’d think could fit in a city this size. There are toasts, songs in six different languages, and food in mountains, with Sadie’s laugh soaring over everything like a good baking smell that lets you know you’re in a good place.

Then at last it’s time to bring out the pièce de résistance, the long-sought-after pálinka, the memory of Sadie’s father here to celebrate her special day. A cart with the bottles arrayed is wheeled from the kitchen, past where Rivka is sitting on a straight-backed chair and. . .  “Wait!” she says with that tight, sharp voice, so that the poor kitchen boy can’t help but stop.

Rivka pulls a bottle from the cart, Rivka, who everyone knows never touches alcohol except for a taste of ceremonial wine. She examines the bottle carefully, perhaps reading the Hungarian—we wouldn’t have put it past her to learn Hungarian just for the occasion. She turns the bottle carefully, thoroughly, twists her lip and clicks her tongue and says, “It’s not kosher. We can’t drink it here.”

She was right, of course. The rule of a kosher facility like ours is that you can keep what you want in your room, but only kosher food and drink is served in the communal spaces. And who could expect a little Hungarian distillery in the Mecsek mountains to have gone to the trouble to find a kosher authority to bless its products for export? If no one had noticed then no one would have cared—but once Rivka said so, it was the obligation of the kitchen staff to remove the offending bottles and stash them in Sadie’s room, where they sat through the whole party.

Sadie wouldn’t condescend to act upset in the moment. She tossed her hands in the air and pretended to listen to one of her granddaughters who was plunking out a little tune on the upright piano. But you could see that her day was tarnished. Her father’s spirit would not be present for her special day. Sadie’s son brought a bottle onto the patio for those who were interested but it was a bitterly cold January day, and even for Sadie it was too much trouble. Someone even snuck a dram into a paper cup so that Sadie could sip in secret, but it wasn’t the same, something of the joy of the event had evaporated. And even though the celebration, toasts, and deliciousness continued well into the evening, Sadie’s mind had turned to other things. She seethed. She burned with an unholy rage.

For weeks afterward, Sadie would have a pull on one of those bottles alone in her room, or maybe with one of her visiting conspirators, and she would curse Rivka and her concern for kashrut. Every three days she’d leave an empty bottle in front of Rivka’s door. That’s a lot for an old lady to drink, even with her guests, and I can’t imagine it was the best way for Sadie to enjoy it. But it was her way of letting Rivka know that she hadn’t forgotten, that this wasn’t going to just go away, not by a long shot.

I don’t know if she had some plan in development, or was thinking just of committing some unspeakable act of violence. Sadie wasn’t usually much of a schemer, she was more of a bully, though she did invite over blind Margot Bradbury, from room 211, who once worked for the police department, and they had a long chat. But before she had time to act on any of these plans, the virus started. Now we finally have some history that you can remember! You know how you couldn’t come to visit me for weeks on end, and even then you could only come to the window, and eventually they’d let you in, but you had to sign up for a special time slot when no one else was here, and you had to wear those awful masks? I don’t have to tell you how miserable it was. But around here, they were especially concerned. You know how bad that disease was for old people like us.

You’re a smart boy, you can see it coming. Once visitors were allowed, Sadie had plenty of visitors: at the window, in their masks, whatever the rules allowed. There were plenty of people coming to see Sadie. And I have to say that her spirit during that time gave a lift to everyone. She’d joke with the staff and reassure the rest of us. Someone bought her a new smartypants phone and she figured out how to use it. Then she taught the rest of us, so I could see your face when you called, and that was nice. And most of the time she stayed very upbeat, like her normal self, even when we all had to stay across the room from each other. But if she saw Rivka, you could see the flash in her eye and the set of her chin. Even the coronavirus wasn’t enough to cool her rage.

The only person who Rivka wanted to see was her nephew, Yitzik. She had called him on the phone during the lockdown when nobody was going anywhere, and he knew the science of the virus, and explained it all to her so that she knew what was happening. But Rivka didn’t get a smartphone so she couldn’t see his face. When we had the window visits, Yitzik never stayed long because it was still cold then in March, and often raining, and with his health he couldn’t just stand there. He’d just wave with his hat on and his nose running, and Rivka would put a hand to her mouth and say nothing.  

Eventually we got to the point that we could have a visitor if they signed up for a time slot and went through all the rigamarole, you remember. They wanted the room empty for a half hour between visitors to let the germs fall out of the air or something, and there were only two rooms we could use at that time, so the appointments filled up fast. I remember this very well because I had a nice visit with your Uncle David in the morning, and I was going back to my room with the sandwich he had brought me. It was the first smoked meat I could enjoy in a long while and I wanted to savour it. Rivka was next, she had finally managed to schedule a visit with Yitzik. Between his work and his own parents to look after, not to mention the difficulty finding an open slot, it had taken her some time to work it out. I could see her at the other end of the hall while I was making my way back. But Sadie’s door opens up, and out she comes, just stands there blocking Rivka’s way. From where I was, I could only see Sadie’s backside, which blocked the view of Rivka altogether. She must have used her big bosom to push Rivka into the broom closet there. This is the part she probably thought about ahead of time because she had a key to lock the closet with in the little pocket of her cardigan.

I couldn’t move. I just stared with my mouth open as Sadie put the key back in her pocket and stood looking at the door, watching it tremble from Rivka’s beating and throwing herself against it. I could hear her muffled cries, but when I saw Sadie’s face, I wasn’t going to put myself in between them. I went back the other way and ate my sandwich in the little alcove next to the elevator. As shaken as I was, it was still delicious.

When the coast was clear, I made my way back to my room and pulled the cord to call for help. But by the time someone came and I’d told them that Rivka was stuck in the closet—I didn’t tell them how that happened, you think I wanted any trouble with Sadie?—and by the time they found a janitor with the key—(they don’t usually lock that door), it took a little while. And by the time Rivka got out of the closet, Yitzik had gone and it was someone else’s turn. They couldn’t make everyone else suffer just because she had missed her appointment. So they rescheduled the visit for the next week, but what Sadie, Rivka, and all of us at the Rosen-Vogel couldn’t know was that by the next week Yitzik would be in the hospital himself and two weeks later he would be dead. He was always sickly. Even before the virus he could barely breathe, and sure enough he caught Covid from somewhere, maybe from his lab. Either way, it finished him, poor soul. Not so handsome, but a smart man, and devoted to his Aunt Rivka. Just eighty-two.

I’d rather not say how Rivka behaved after that. It was heartbreaking and terrifying all at once. Being stuck in that closet, cut off from her nephew, must have brought back memories. And we know it won’t be the end of the strife between them. No, of course not—are you kidding? The only question is how and when. This, my dear, is why I’m sorry, but you cannot have both Sadie and Rivka come to your school for the Holocaust program.