The interviewer from Vanity Fair could barely stay in his skin. The details of the story that was beginning now had never been told anywhere. This stage of her life (or lie?) had always felt to Shlomith if not shameful then at least too private for public consumption, but now the situation was different. Surely a lauded and controversial sixty-year-old artist could give her admirers (and haters) a slice of her failed kibbutz experience. It was part of the jagged picture of her life, and it was also the story of her name. Keeping silent wasn’t going to change it, so Shlomith decided: Let’s do it.
The story (one of them) begins: breaking up, love, infatuation
Dovid and Sheila began to prepare for their big move. By day Dovid slogged away in the Herald Square Macy’s men’s department and saved money for plane tickets. Sheila left the band with a joyous slamming of doors and began to study Hebrew under the tutelage of Rabbi Noam Aurbach at the temple on Eighth Avenue, where members of the Reform Congregation Beth Elohim worshipped. “You don’t need God, but you need Hebrew,” Dovid said, and so Sheila obediently began beating the language into her head. She already knew the basics, just like any Jewish girl who had celebrated her Bat Mitzvah, but otherwise she hadn’t used the language. In her family, as in many of the families they knew, Jewishness was more of a curiosity than a living religion. Her family was Jewish because the family’s ancestors had been Jews, and their ancestors had suffered because they had been Jews, and that was why they suffered too, because they were Jews. But no one ever said that out loud. It was “unexperienced trauma”, as Sheila later expressed it with Shlomith-Shkhina’s mouth. Tradition, and the wrongs experienced by their ancestors lived among them, even though little apparent attention was given to either, and because of this they began to take on increasingly strange forms, worming their way under their skins and running amok there; they were all its victims. All except her, Shlomith-Shkhina, who forty years later would shed her false flesh and force the world to see the truth, the suffering from which it was possible to be freed through catharsis. (But it isn’t time for these themes yet, not until Shlomith is sixty-one years old and deathly ill.)
Sheila and Dovid spent their evenings in the closet on Carroll Street. Dovid made Sheila delicious food and, leading her by the hand, taught her to eat and enjoy. He praised his beloved after each bite, and he also rewarded her with a kiss, because love was the same as food, and they had no lack of either. Dovid first placed a piece of puff pastry pie in his own mouth, between his lips, knelt before Sheila sitting at the table, and then kissed the piece of pie into her mouth. “My little bird,” Dovid cooed, and Sheila chewed and ground the piece with her teeth until the saliva did its job, making the pie soft and ready for swallowing, and then Sheila swallowed, and her strength grew day by day.
No more food appeared in the chest of drawers. Dovid had asked Miriam to keep herself in check. Dovid had said to Miriam, “Don’t you understand you’re part of the problem?” which offended Miriam to the depths of her soul, even though her psychoanalyst friend had said basically the same thing. (But in a different way! That’s critical. Over a glass of wine, reassuringly and with much encouragement, while that Polack came into her own home to accuse her and make her feel bad, backing her into a corner and making her force her daughter to choose between her and that urchin, and even as she shouted, “Choose him or me!” she knew the answer, that her daughter would choose the meddler; her daughter, whom she had brought into the world and fought tooth and nail to keep in the world, would laugh and turn her back, as if nothing that had happened up to that point meant anything. She would leave with that insane demagogue, and Miriam couldn’t do a thing about it.)
Sheila’s weight increased, and despite her indignation her mother had to admit, watching through the window as her daughter walked to her lessons with Noam Aurbach, that this apparent recovery delighted her even as it aroused painful questions with no answers, even though it also aroused fear: what was ultimately behind the improvement? She was still angry, hurt, and bewildered, and shaken to her core that some man had that kind of power over her daughter. But there was no getting around the fact that Sheila was filling out. Sheila alternated between horror and delight, delight and horror about her increasing weight, but even in her horror she continued chewing and grinding and swallowing, because Dovid was by her side. Dovid loved her exactly as she was, even her digestion and flatulence.
In the evenings, once they had eaten and regained their strength, they lounged on their bed they had made on the floor. Dovid told Sheila kibbutz stories that his father’s older brother Zachariasz had recounted in his letters. Zachariasz was, excuse our choice of words, completely shiftless. In the late 1920s, his bosom friend had moved to a kibbutz named Degania, which was located on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, near the Golan Heights, and was the best place in the world, a paradise Zachariasz had to get to as well. Then the war came, and the Germans occupied Łódź. Zachariasz did the only non-shiftless thing in his life: as the Litzmannstadt ghetto was being set up, he slipped away to Israel. His mother gave him money for the journey, because dear Zachariasz was the best of the boys, better than Izajasz, Dovid’s future father, who on the verge of this catastrophe was focused on his future wife, the picture-perfect beauty Agnieszka, and refused to
