“Miss Altschul is here to see you, ma’am,” the secretary said.
The headmistress sighed and dismissed the girl across from her: Harriet Loeb, a habitual offender, caught pilfering ribbons from the sewing room. Harriet slunk away, unchastened. “Send Kreindel in,” the headmistress said.
Kreindel stormed through the door in her usual full pique and stood to attention. “Headmistress, I request—I must strongly request—that I be removed from my Hebrew class.”
“Really?” The headmistress had been expecting this, but it was usually better to feign innocence. “I was under the impression that you were the head pupil.”
“I no longer wish to be,” Miss Altschul said stiffly.
“Does the new curriculum fail to meet your standards?”
Miss Altschul pressed her lips together, said nothing.
The headmistress shook her head. “Kreindel. You must learn to bend, a little. Or what will happen when you leave here? The world can be a disappointing place. It, too, will fail to meet your standards. Then where will you go?”
But Kreindel only stared ahead, the very picture of resolve. Sometimes the headmistress wondered how such a slip of a girl managed to sustain such constant ire. Was it the memory of her revered father that kept her fighting? The headmistress could only imagine him as the most stiff-necked man ever to walk the earth. She could refuse Kreindel’s request, of course—but that would only serve to punish the rest of the class.
“All right, Kreindel,” she said. “If you must have your way, then so be it. What do you propose to do instead?”
“An independent study,” Kreindel said. “For my Psalm translations.”
“An independent study! You know perfectly well that won’t do at all.”
“I’ll only need a table in the library, I won’t bother anyone!” But her protests were feebler now. Independent studies were reserved for prodigies, the college-bound; they were bestowed with great ceremony, and rarely upon girls. Kreindel had used up her teaspoon’s worth of liberty, and she knew it.
“Kreindel, when did you last take a domestic elective?”
The young woman’s face fell.
The headmistress went to her file cabinet, retrieved Altschul, Kreindel, paged through its innards. “Sewing, four years ago. Your only such elective to date.”
“But—I could double up on chore duty—”
“Out of the question.” The folder snapped shut. “It’s time you studied something other than Hebrew. I believe we can find space for you in Miss Levy’s third-period class.”
Kreindel gaped. “Cooking?”
“Miss Levy prefers the term Culinary Science, if I’m not mistaken. Oh, stop making that face, Kreindel—a little cooking won’t be the death of you. You might even enjoy it.”
The bell rang, announcing the beginning of chore duty. Still fuming, Kreindel joined the line at the supply closet, grabbed her rags and brush and shoe polish, and went down to the Marching Band room, to clean the uniform boots.
For an hour she worked silently amid the racks of uniforms. The boots stank of rotten cheese, thanks to the dozens of adolescent feet they’d housed over the years. From nearby came a steady plink, plink, plink of water dripping from the sacks of rock salt that hung from the ceiling, drawing moisture out of the air so the uniforms wouldn’t rot. It was filthy, dispiriting work—but at least it gave her time to herself, which in the Asylum was a precious commodity.
The worst of it, Kreindel reflected as she scrubbed and blacked, was that, against her own will, she’d actually started to enjoy the Ivrit b’Ivrit. She knew that this secularization of the language was a type of blasphemy, a willful destruction of the holy mystery that had sustained Hebrew through the generations, that she might as well use a silver Torah pointer to scratch her back—and yet, when her teachers had put the Gettysburg Address in front of her and asked her to translate it, her mind had leapt at the problem. Four score and seven years ago: Ought she to translate that directly, or simply write eighty-seven? Our forefathers was avotaynu—that was easy—but what about brought forth, which was merely a poetic way of saying created? Which verb for to create should she use? To make, to produce? To mold, like clay? And was it best to choose one’s words for precision, or to mimic the tone and rhythm of the piece? From these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion . . . She made a first attempt, hoping they’d let her return to her Psalm translations. Instead they’d praised it to the skies, and assigned her the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet—and her mind had leapt at that, too.
But Susie Baum’s bad brown cow meat had been the final straw. The girls had laughed together, untroubled, and it had tempted her; she’d wanted to join in, to share in the joke, to become one of them. A step on the road to decreased devotion, to forgetting her own honored dead. So instead she’d pictured Yossele in his alcove, and marshaled her resolve, and left Hebrew behind.
It simply wasn’t fair, though! Hebrew had been her daily source of happiness; it made the hours fly, made her heart sing like the Ziz-bird, with her feet in the oceans and her head in the heavens. And now the Asylum had managed to ruin Hebrew, too. She longed to leave—but for what? A factory job, perhaps. A husband, children, boarders in the living room. Sabbath mornings in the women’s balcony, listening to prayers she wasn’t meant to understand; Sabbath afternoons with her children on her lap, reading them the Tsene-rene’s lessons of resignation and forbearance. Yossele concealed in a tenement basement, crumbling away to dust. The most beloved parts of herself hidden out of sight.
He was just a few rooms away, watching her, with
