Yiddish for Pirates(23)

“So, my plan: sneak into the Catedral and walk out wearing two red capes. Return wearing only one. Repeat until we have all the capes we need. It’s perfect. Who would think twice about a priest walking in a church?”

“Another priest. Maybe you could put on all the capes at once and pretend to be a fat shnorrer of a priest,” I said.

Do?a Gracia laughed. “And then if you were stabbed, like Queen Isabella’s overdressed ladies-in-waiting, no knife could reach you,” she said.

“So, my idea needs work,” Moishe said.





Chapter Twelve



Midnight. The streets of Seville empty as the wind from either end of a shlemiel. The sky moonless but for a luminous blade disappearing behind cloud. We exit through a small sally port in the west wall of Do?a Gracia’s and into an alleyway. Moishe is Red Riding Hood, carrying a basket of food. Not for his Bubbie but for fairy-tale Christians, the secret Jews held prisoner by red-hooded wolves.

What drink goes best with dungeon food?

The Merlot of Human Kindness?

Molotov cocktails.

We’ll get to that.

Some of the larger homes had night watchmen but more often than not, their beat was the jurisdiction of Nod. Still we crept quietly and kept close to walls.

“Sarah. This sheyneh maideleh, this beautiful girl,” Moishe whispered. He could name her, but didn’t know what came next.

There were guards before the gates of the church, but a behindback such as ours necessitated an unorthodox approach.

Moishe slithered on his kishkas toward the barred windows at the back of the building. He pushed his face close, his shnozz between the bars, but he could see nothing, only smell the rat-ripe dankness of the dungeon.

The prisoners were in darkness. We dared not call them for fear of the shtarkeh guards. I slipped between the bars. It was the deep black of the jungle at night. I navigated by the give of air at doorways, the thicker air as I approached a wall. I went through a doorway and along a hallway lined with cells.

“So, nu,” I said. “Come here often?”

I heard breathing. They hesitated, disoriented in the dark.

“We have food for you. And wine,” I said. “From Do?a Gracia.”

“Strange that you didn’t knock, but yet do not intrude.” It was the rabbi.

“Gracias,” someone else said.

Moishe was at the window. They were in cells. How to get the food to their mouths? I’d be the mother bird, feeding her chicks. “Es, es, mayne feygelech.” Eat, eat, my little birds.

Moishe reached inside the window and dropped the food to the floor. I carried each piece of bread, each portion of cheese from window to cell.

“Aharon. Aharon.” A small voice called my name. A girl’s voice. “Tell him there’s a gap in the stone of my cell. I must speak.”

Moishe, a church mouse against the wall, crawled until he found a face-sized hole. “I’m here,” he whispered. “Moishe.”

A few minutes of breathing only.

Then: “My father’s books. Will you save them?” Sarah said. “In his memory. For mine.”

Torquemada, the Grand Inquisitor, had ordered the burning of Jewish and other heretical books.

“Libricide, lexicution, biblioclasm. To save our Catholic Spain,” he’d said, “we must first destroy heresy.”

“All Jewish books were condemned,” Sarah said. “So the community brought their books to my father.”

“As I’d taken one from mine,” Moishe said.

“They knew he would keep them safe. They knew he would preserve their history and their future.”

Sarah’s father’s hidden library. As he’d been a hidden Jew.

For years her family had lived in secret. They went to church. Received the wafer and the wine. Baptized their children.

But still, the hands over the eyes and the blessings over candles in the cupboards. The whispered words when walking through doorways.

And a library of Christian theology. Inside some books, in the compartment cut into the pages, smaller Jewish books.

As their Judaism was hidden inside each member of the family.

Like a devil or an angel child. Depending on which midwife you asked.

Each boy learned his true identity upon Bar Mitzvah. Each girl, usually when she married. But Sarah was an only child and her father taught her as if she was a son.

There was a priest. Padre Juan Lepe. A good man. A friend. He had known and had helped.

“He told me a story,” Sarah began. “A man told a rabbi he would convert if the rabbi could explain Judaism to him. There was a catch, though. The man would stand on one leg. The rabbi had to explain everything before the man fell over. The rabbi sent him away, chastising him for insulting God with trivial gymnastics. Later, the man came upon the great sage Hillel and presented him the same challenge. Explain all of Judaism while I stand on one leg.

“ ‘Left or right?’ Hillel asked.

“ ‘Either. Does it matter?’

“ ‘Tell you what, you jump in the air and while you’re there, closer to God, I’ll explain everything,’ the sage said. ‘Ready? Jump!’

“And what did Hillel say while the man left the ground?

“He said, ‘What is hateful to yourself, do not do to your neighbour.’