Stones Tell No Lies

Jake ran his hand through the scant strands of hair left on his head. “I don’t know my grandmother’s name. If I did, it would make both our lives easier.”

The Jewish records office clerk narrowed her eyes. “Without a name, how can you expect me to find information?”

“I know, I know.” Jake recognized these clerks were overworked, forced to deal with cramped working spaces and withering, yellowed papers and folders. Oh, what technology could do to help these people.

The clerk pleaded as if her life depended on it. “Can you give me anything, anything at all?”

“Let me think. She died in 1937. Her first name was Yetta. She and my grandfather had a bakery in the 18th arrondissement.” Maybe Bubbe used that name here in Paris? He didn’t know. He really didn’t know. He wanted to be more helpful. He prided himself on being a man of service, helping others in whatever way he could. He never forgot his grandmother’s mantra of tikkun olam, repair the world. And that was before the roundup at the Velodrome.

The clerk tried again. “A last name would be more helpful.”

“I’m certain it would, but I don’t know it. Maybe it began with an F. Feldman, Feldstein.”

“Let me try that.” She stepped away from the service counter and into some back room. While she was gone, Jake surveyed the room. Any number of secrets could be hidden here among the many doorways and file drawers. How could he tell the clerk it was still a secret to him how and why he was even in Paris looking for his grandmother’s gravesite? One night a sort of wave enveloped him as he lay in bed staring at the light fixture. An invisible voice whispered, “Go to Paris. Find me.” It was his bubbe’s voice.

The clerk returned, snapping him out of his thoughts. “I have a Bertha Finkelstein. She died in 1937. Could that be her?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know.” Nothing stirred in his heart. Bertha Finkelstein could not have been his grandmother. He remembered once seeing an envelope in her flat with a surname. He tried to bring it up in his mind’s eye like rolling back a movie film frame by frame. If this were his father’s mother, he’d know the name. It would be his own, artificial as it was: Beignet changed from Beninson. What a stupid name his grandparents used. What a stupid name they gave to Jake’s father. Artificiality was the game his father’s family played like insisting on plastic slipcovers for the living room furniture. Making only rustic French dishes like cassoulet or ratatouille. Nothing fancy. Nothing so-called “ethnic.” Nothing kosher, because you didn’t want to be seen patronizing a kosher butcher. No, definitely nothing Jewish. Don’t call attention to yourself. Don’t touch. Don’t feel. Don’t argue. Don’t complain. Go to school in uniform. Cut your hair the same way as everyone else. Have a bland, common French first name.

True enough, Jake had been named Jacques. He adopted the name Jake when he arrived in the United States. No one in his school could really deal with his French name. Even Beignet became Ben-Gay like the arthritis ointment. It stuck.

But his mother’s parents had been more inventive. They might have done a straight translation of the family name like Weissberg to Montblanc. Again he tried to bring that envelope into his memory. He could almost see the handwriting, the flourishes of the capital letters. A “B?” No. A “K?” That could have plenty of embellishments. It couldn’t be an H, because the Russian alphabet had no such letter; they use a G instead. An “F.” Yes, an “F.” But he had to figure out both the French version and the original version from some Russian shtetl. They were from White Russia, that he knew. That they’d come after World War I like so many others. Most of France’s Jewish population at that time, before the occupation, had not been born on French soil.

“Feldman, Feldstein. A field in French is champ. Man is homme. Champhomme?”

The clerk shook her head. “Ridiculous.”

Jake nodded in agreement. “What about Champion?”

“Champion? Yetta Champion?”

“Maybe?” Who knew?

The clerk disappeared into the back room again. She returned quickly with a tall, leatherbound ledger book in her gnarled hands. “Yetta Champion. Died April 1937.  Boulevard du Montparnasse. That’s in the fourteenth.”

Could this be her? Could this be his beloved Bubbe? The marrow in his bones stirred. “Any mention of a husband?”

“Solomon.”

Shloyma, Solomon, of course. Eureka! “That’s it. That’s him, that’s her! Yetta Champion.”

The clerk continued to read. “Solomon Champion died in 1932. They’re both buried in the Jewish section of the Montmartre Cemetery in the eighteenth.”

“Where exactly?”

She began to write on a piece of paper. She stopped. “But there’s more.”

“What do you mean?”

“I thought the name sounded familiar. Have you never heard of the Champions? They were actors in Paris’s Yiddish theater. That’s why they probably lived in Montparnasse.”

“My grandparents, actors? That can’t be possible.” How could Zayde be known for his tarts and be on stage at the same time? If this were true, and he wasn’t admitting this to himself just yet, there would be much more to research. He never really knew his grandparents at all.

Jake dipped down into the metro. He checked the map for his destination. He tried to pretend he was a Parisian again, although he never really felt like one even though he was born here. French was not the language spoken at home. His first day at school had been a nightmare because he only spoke Yiddish. That was the day he learned he was different, other. After that, his grandparents hammered it into his head. “Remember you come from a rich heritage,” they said. “Be proud of who you are.” Yet they changed their names. His parents told him to blend in yet remain Jewish.

After the Nazi invasion, his father said at the kitchen table, “Yankel, you are a Jew. Don’t ever forget that.”

“But Papa, if we weren’t Jewish we wouldn’t be facing arrests and being beaten,” Jake said, letting the bubbles of the seltzer hit his face. They made him sneeze.

“We don’t know what’s to come,” Papa said. “But we’ve survived many centuries. We’ll continue to survive.” He spritzed more seltzer into his glass and Jake’s. He gulped his. Jake sipped his.

How would Jake tell him? To be a Jew meant danger, even death. Denouncing his faith, although he was too young to use those words now, was his only solution.

“Yankel, we’re going to leave this place and somehow get to America. We’re going to go to Spain and then Portugal, to Lisbon and get a boat to New York. There we will practice the traditions. You will be bar mitzvahed in New York.” The sun was setting behind the city’s buildings behind his father. All orange and red, sinking and skulking behind the dark silhouettes.

“No, Papa,” Jake wanted to say. He wanted to pronounce, “I will not be a Jew. I hope I can still be your son, without stepping into a shul, without praying, without a yarmulke or prayer shawl, without a Bar Mitzvah.” But he said nothing.

Papa said nothing. Did nothing. He just stared at Jake. Papa finally stood and put the glasses in the sink to rinse. “You’ll see, everything will change for the better once we leave France.”

Jake sat back against the chair, nestling his shoulder blades. He was done with it, with Judaism, for good. He didn’t want to die for being born a Jew. If there were a way to get uncircumcised, he aimed to find it, in France or in America.

Now here he was forty years later in Paris, in a Jewish cemetery, trying to pay homage to his grandmother. Jake cried out to Bubbe in his head. He implored, “Help me find you!” But no response came except the drizzle of rain that was Paris. Here he was, a grown man, an elderly man if truth be told, and he felt five years old, spritzed in the face by a cousin and a seltzer bottle in Bubbe’s kitchen. No one came to his rescue then and no one came now. He glanced at his watch. He’d been walking around this vershtinkeneh cemetery for nearly three hours even with the clerk’s note with the cemetery address and grave locations. He would just have to face facts. He was inept. He was incapable. He could not find Bubbe’s grave. He had been stupid to come to Paris for a stupid reason. It’s not like finding her grave would bring her back to life. But no one could erase his memories, how he recalled her and Zayde in his mind’s eye.

He ambled out of the cemetery and soothed his nerves in a brandy at a nearby cafe. More than one brandy. More than one cafe. The streetlights turned on as he swaggered into the hotel lobby, a doorman offered assistance. “I’m fine, I’m fine,” Jake insisted, although he tripped over the clawfoot of an ottoman and the doorman steadied him. He staggered to the elevator and then to his darkened room. He did not turn on the lights but fell face first onto the bed. The pillowcase felt cool and soothing.

Jake closed his eyes. The room continued to swirl like a maelstrom around him, the same kind of chaos that surrounded him and his family when they fled France in 1940. Only the sound of rain against the double-paned windows reminded him he was in Paris. A small voice emerged from the spaces between raindrops. A voice that grew increasingly louder until it practically boomed in his ears. “Yankel,” it said in a Yiddish accent. “You gave up too early. Too early on yourself and too early on me.”

His eyelids flew open and his nostrils flared with the scent of…rose water. 

“Bubbe?” 

“Yankele, yes, it’s me. You get up early, listen to me boychik, you get up early and go back to the cemetery. You can find me. I will help you.”

“Yes, Bubbe.” Only now he remembered those pastries she made with rose water. She marinated apple slices in rose water, rolled them into puff pastry to create roses, and baked.  The sweet smell of roses always strangled him, but now its sweetness reminded him of happier times when the family gathered at home or in the bakery. When everyone was still alive.

Who was he to disobey his grandma? Jake returned to the cemetery. Once again, he read the paper from the records office with the location. Once again, he struggled. He walked around and around, stumbling over exposed tree roots and broken pathways. The silence of the cemetery pounded in Jake’s ears so hard, he put his hands up to them. But as he did this, time stopped. His hands moved slowly as if were a marionette and someone stood above manipulating his strings. He caught the scent of rose water.

“Bubbe?” he asked out loud to no one. A breeze whipped up and he turned his head to the right. There was Bubbe Yetta’s grave. And an apple rose in his hand.

Yetta and Shloyma. In Hebrew were the real surnames and their heritage: Yetta bat Avraham Hacohen and Solomon ben Arye Leib Feldman. He recited Kaddish. “A shaynem dank,” he said out loud to no one. He found her, found Grandpa. Mission accomplished, with a little help perhaps. We all needed a little help sometimes, he told himself. A sensation bubbled inside of him like a seltzer bottle shaken, ready to explode. Jake wanted to call home. But who would he call to tell he’d found his grandmother’s grave? His parents were long gone.

He stooped down to pick up stones he could place on the grave as a sign of his remembrance. One for each of his parents, one for himself. As he lifted himself up to place the three stones, his mouth opened wide. There were already stones on the grave. Who could have done that?

Jake checked the address the burial office had given him on a slip of paper. Whoever owned his home was paying for perpetual care of his grandparents’ graves. He placed his left hand over his right hand to quiet the tremors. He stared at the doorknob in front of him, an ornate one, perhaps from the early twentieth century. He pressed the doorbell. Even the sound of it sounded inherited and privileged. He stepped back from the threshold, not knowing what to expect. A servant opened the door and led Jake into the grand foyer of marbled floor and vaulted ceiling with an extravagant chandelier only gloved hands could clean.

“Monsieur, this way, please,” the servant said. He guided Jake into a wood-paneled room, a library with ample seating of tufted chairs and velvet sofas. “Madame will join you in a moment. I will bring some tea.” He backed out of the room as if Jake were royalty, but maybe that’s how this person had been trained. Jake himself came from peasant stock, this he knew.

An elderly woman wearing vintage Chanel glided into the room, her neck covered with strands of pearls. He knew that necklace or thought he did. It was his grandmother’s. “Monsieur Beignet.” she said, her words sliding off her tongue to her hand that awaited his enchanté. “Please sit.” Jake chose one of the tufted chairs separated from Madame by a marble cocktail table decorated with Limoges pieces.

“I believe you knew my grandparents,” he said.

“Indeed, I did.”

“So it was you who remembered them in the cemetery.”

“With the stones, yes.”

“May I ask?” Words fought with each other on Jake’s tongue. “How you knew my grandparents?”

“Mon Dieu, you don’t know?”

He shook his head.

“I am your aunt. Your mother’s youngest sister. Your grandparents were my mama and papa.”

Jake sat forward. “That cannot be. I’ve never heard of you.”

“Do you need to hear of something to make it true?”

He no longer needed to accomplish a mission. This woman, if she was really his aunt, already was doing it and with more panache than he could possibly muster. Plus, she was local.

“Do you have children?” he asked.

“You’re really asking whether someone will care for these graves when I’m gone, yes?”

“Well, yes.” She looked not at him, but through him as if he were a piece of plastic with all his innards hanging out.

“Why have I never heard of you?” he asked. The servant returned with a tray of tea and pastries.

“I didn’t get along well with the family. I decided to marry a diamond merchant originally from Antwerp, you see.”

“This was a bad thing?” He hadn’t even picked up his teacup yet.

“My sister, your mother, thought I had forgotten where I came from. Had gotten, how you say, hoity-toity.” By the look of her surroundings, that could very well be true. “But I fell in love, married Armand and started a family. But I never forgot. No, I never forgot.”

“It must have been difficult for you,” Jake said, finally bringing the delicate teacup to his mouth and grabbing a mini napoleon, “to be separated from family.”

Madame sighed. “Yes, but from my parents I learned how to hide my truth, how to wear a mask.”

“What do you mean?”

“They’d been actors, of course. Well known throughout Paris. As a child, I never knew what was real and what was a play.”

“I only recently learned about the acting,” Jake said.

“Yes, by the time you were born, they’d retired. It was hard on my children not to know their grandparents. Would you like to meet the rest of your family?”

Jake nodded, swallowing that last bit of custard while eyeing a perfectly footed orange macaron.

“Then please come to dinner Friday night, for Shabbos.”

With the macaron carefully wrapped in an elegant napkin, Jake promised to return the next evening. On his walk back to his hotel, memories swirled around him like cyclone winds. There was so much he should have asked, like what happened during the round-up? How did Madame, he hadn’t even asked for her first name, and her family survive?

The walls of the dining room had never known family arguments. Instead they were covered with framed photographs. “This is my family,” Madame said. But no one was there but the two of them. Still, Jake felt a presence. The servant pulled out a seat for him. He was reluctant to sit for fear he’d be sitting on top of a ghoul.

Madame said, “This portrait is my wedding portrait, Armand and I. We had a good life together, until the occupation.” There it was. The Holocaust. His family had not escaped it at all. Jake listened as Madame, who now instructed him to call her Aunt Delphine, went from portrait to portrait and introduced him to her son Alain, died in Drancy; her son Jacques, died in Auschwitz; her daughter, Annette, raped in one camp whose name she couldn’t remember, and died in Ravensbrück. Aunt Delphine’s sorrow cut into Jake’s marrow. While he and his family escaped through Spain and Portugal and made their way to the United States, Delphine’s family dealt with the realities of mutant antisemitism and intentional extermination.

“And you, Aunt?” Jake asked. “What happened to you?”

“Armand and I went into hiding. The children were hidden elsewhere and were betrayed by the people we trusted. I can never forgive myself for their suffering, for their deaths. After the war, Armand returned to the diamond business and we accumulated wealth again, as you see. But the diamonds no longer brought happiness, only sharp, sharp edges. Now I am all alone. Except for you.”

She pinned a piece of white lace to her hair and lit the Sabbath candles. For a moment, Jake thought she was Bubbe, their voices in prayer so similar. The servant brought them a challah, which Delphine cut while saying the prayer. Other courses that followed included eggs and onions made on shmalz, a concoction Jake hadn’t enjoyed since his Paris days. Then chicken soup with kneidlach, roast chicken and caramelized roasted potatoes. He wanted to unfasten his belt buckle. This was a meal, a real Sabbath meal. Thinking the meal over, he backed his chair and stood.

“Oh, no,” Delphine said. “We have one more course. Dessert!”

Jake knew before the dish was placed in front of him. The rose water gave it away. An apple rose.

“My mother taught me how to make these,” Delphine said. “Aren’t they divine?”

Jake couldn’t answer with his mouth full. He closed his eyes and felt once again he was a small boy at Bubbe’s table. Bubbe had brought him to Paris. Bubbe had brought him to Delphine.

“Let’s go to shul,” Delphine said, wiping her mouth at the corners with the linen napkin. “So we’ll both have a good week.” Jake nodded and helped her out of her chair. “It’s not far,” she said. “We can walk. We shouldn’t ride on the Sabbath.”

Jake studied Delphine now. Her high forehead. Her cheekbones. Her wide eyes and short pug nose. The spitting image of Bubbe. He had a choice: to either slump and go home like a young boy who’d been found with his grubby little hands in the cookie jar or he could embrace this new relationship with the aunt he’d never known. She had to be nearing one hundred and perhaps he could offer her some comfort. Not economically, she was well cared for that way. But emotionally and socially, he could accompany her. And there was something else. Maybe because she reminded him of Bubbe, he felt transported to a time when religious practice and family practice intertwined. One could not be separated from the other. A Shabbos dinner. When was the last time he’d done that? Said Amen to the blessing of bread? Watched the lighting of the Sabbath candles?

It felt right to be here. Delphine caught his stare. “Are you all right, my dear?” she asked.

“Yes, never better. I’m so glad I went to the cemetery and saw your stones. That I asked around and found out who you were. I’m glad I found family.”

She took his hand in hers. Her skin felt fragile and feathery. He caught a faint whiff of face powder. “I am, too.”

As he heard the ancient Hebrew words, chanted by his forefathers for millennia, memories flooded Jake in this space. The reading of the megillah during Purim. The kissing of the Torah paraded down the aisles of the sanctuary during Simchas Torah. The blowing of the shofar during the High Holy Days. The kids running around outside while the parents said Kaddish during the Yizkor service on Yom Kippur. The synagogue was a place of memories and community. He had come home, not just to Paris. That wasn’t home. This synagogue, among Jews, that was home. Maybe that’s what Bubbe had wanted all along. It hadn’t been about her grave at all.

The synagogue sanctuary welcomed him. Jake donned a yarmulke pulled from the community bin. In the lining a gold inscription told him of Barnett Goldstein’s bar mitzvah in 1975. Jake wished he had his grandfather’s tallis stored with his father’s in the attic back home. He felt naked here without a prayer shawl. He and Delphine entered the center aisle. The pews offered him a seat and a prayer book. He entered a pew and sat now facing the bima and the Torah ark. He’d never been to this shul before. Still, it felt familiar. It stirred something in him, as if all the members of the congregation whispered, “Welcome back, Yankel. We’re glad you’ve come home.” Delphine introduced him to old, bent-over men with prayer shawls so faded, the blue had gone past purple to pink. Survivors, they were all survivors who’d come back from the far reaches of the Third Reich back home to France somehow and back into their pews, into the familiar, ancient words of Hebrew prayer. Words said the same way all over the world. The rabbi stood on the bima, in tall black cap and robes, with black mustache and beard. The sanctuary had two stained glass windows on either side of the bima. Jake couldn’t make out what they depicted. Moses and the Ten Commandments? Yes, he could make out the Lo, Lo, Lo–No, No, No.

Delphine reached for his hand and squeezed it. It was like Bubbe approving his presence. Delphine whispered, “We’ll go to the Oneg Shabbat after for tea and cakes, yes?” Jake nodded in approval. An idea swirled around him and his tongue caught familiar words that flowed out of his mouth like they’d been there all along, eager to come out of hiding. He would return to New York, pack his belongings, and come back to France, to Delphine, to Bubbe’s memory. Although Delphine hadn’t exactly asked him to move into her palatial home, he knew it would be all right. He didn’t want her to be alone. He didn’t want to be alone. “When I come back to stay,” he said after services, I’ll show you how to make American apple pie.” Delphine blew him a kiss and the stones fell off his heart. He could breathe again. Yes, he was home.

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About the author
Barbara Krasner, MFA, PhD, is a Pushcart Prize-nominated author of short fiction and poetry. Her work has frequently appeared in Kelsey Review as well as Michigan Quarterly Review, Jewish Literary Journal, Consequence, and Jewishfiction.net. She serves as Director, Mercer County Holocaust, Genocide & Human Rights Education Center and teaches in the English and History departments of Mercer County Community College.