Speak the Truth, Laughing: Nine Stories and a Novella, House Arrest by Rose Zwi

Author:Rose Zwi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Apartheid, Immigration, South Africa, Australia, Jewish Studies
Publisher: SPINIFEX
Published: 2007-01-24T16:00:00+00:00

“How interesting, grandma, that you know exactly what Yossala read to Mierke.”

“It is the privilege of the storyteller to know everything. And what she doesn’t know, she invents. Which brings me to the time they read the Song of Songs for the first time … But don’t let me get distracted by the poetry which is even now running through my head. By this time, Yossala’s father, the Rabbi, was getting worried. He had taught his son everything he knew and it was time for him to study at a Yeshiva, to become a rabbi. Yossala said he wasn’t going anywhere and the Rabbi knew why. He did not want his son to marry into the family of an impecunious tailor; with his talent, he could marry into any of the famous rabbinic dynasties in the country. Yossala and Mierke met in the woods, put their arms around one another and wept. I’ll never leave you, he vowed, not even for two years. I can’t live without you …”

“Brilliant though he was,” Rachel murmurs, “Yossala couldn’t live without Mierke.”

“Nor I without you, Mierke told him. She had matured into a beautiful young woman, and a sensible one. Yossala, you must go to the Yeshiva. If you don’t become a rabbi, you will break your father’s heart, and he will always blame me for it. I will wait for you, forever if necessary.”

The grandmother laughs, a little bitterly. “Only youth can make such terrible pledges: forever. What did they think they were? Immortal? Yossala came to a compromise with his father: he would go to the Yeshiva for two years but when he returned, he would marry Mierke. His father agreed. In two years, he told his wife, many things can happen. Imagine the parting, Rochala. She was seventeen, he twenty …”

“I can imagine the parting.”

“They wrote to one another all the time,” says the grandmother, “quoting long passages from the Song of Songs. He wrote:

‘Thou are beautiful, O my love, as Tirzah,

Comely as Jerusalem,

Terrible as an army with banners.

Turn away thine eyes from me,

For they have overcome me.

Thy hair is as a flock of goats,

That lie along the side of Gilead …’

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