The House of Love and Prayer by Tova Reich

Author:Tova Reich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: kosher;Holocaust;short stories;Shtisl;literary fiction;Rabbi;Unorthodox;Orthodox;Judaism;Jewish;Jew;realistic fiction books;fiction;novels;jewish;fiction books;religious books;long story short;religion;literature;books fiction;short story collections;jewish fiction;jewish books;short story anthology;short stories collections;jewish novels;jewish fiction novels;essays;philosophy;music;family;writing;20th century;german;translation;spirituality;modern;love;novella;anthology;21st century;parenting
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2023-03-24T14:36:23+00:00

The Third Generation

This was not the first time that the father-and-son team Maurice and Norman Messer, respectively chairman of the board and president of Holocaust Connections, Inc., had traveled home from Poland, but it was definitely the saddest. In all their business dealings for clients they had always come through with flying colors, which was how they had built their enviable reputation and their legendary success. But this time, in a most painful personal matter involving an exceedingly close member of their immediate family, indeed, the very future of their line, they had failed completely. Nekhama only child of an only son, had absolutely refused to see her father or her grandfather, either one on one or in any constellation. In any case, as they were categorically informed, she had taken a vow of silence. This was communicated to the two men by a matronly nun in sunglasses, who came to meet them outside the gate of the Carmelite convent—the new convent, that is, a little farther back from the perimeter of the Auschwitz death camp, to which the nuns had moved after all that fuss. “Sister Consolatia asks that you respect her right to choose,” the nun told them with finality, in English, though Maurice of course knew Polish. Hearing the signature phrasing, the Messers, father and son, could not deceive themselves that this was anything other than a direct quotation from their apostate offspring, their lost Nekhama, now reborn as Sister Consolatia.

Nevertheless, despite their unquestionably genuine and heartbreaking disappointment, they made themselves comfortable, as usual, in their ample seats in the first-class compartment of the LOT airplane. They always flew Polish, as a matter of policy, to maintain healthy relations with the government with which they had so many dealings; and they always flew first class, because to do otherwise would be unseemly for men like themselves, steeped as they were in such nearly mythic tragic history, a history that set them apart from ordinary people and therefore required that they be seated apart. And from a practical, business point of view, to go economy would look bad, as if their enterprise were falling on hard times. Everything in their line of work, naturally, hung on image. “Look,” as Norman formulated it, with the pauses and swallows that usually heralded the delivery of one of his aphorisms, “we already did cattle cars. From now on it’s first class all the way.” Clients expected a premium operation from the Messers, and were billed accordingly. This trip, for example, had been paid for by an anti-fur organization that was eager to firm up its honorary Holocaust status, and Norman had managed, even in the midst of his private anguish, to do a little work for them, still in its early stages, admittedly, involving the creative use of the mountains of hair in the Auschwitz museum, shorn from the gassed victims—a ghoulish idea on the face of it, which he was now massaging and dignifying in order to establish the relevant

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