The Matchmaker's Gift(78)
She scanned the boxes on the floor, looking for the one her mother had mentioned, the one with Abby’s name written on the top. Abby found it, eventually, on the coffee table, next to the crystal dish of candies that had been wrapped to look like tiny strawberries. Abby took a candy, twisted off the wrapping, and popped the rock-hard sweet in her mouth. She bit through the shell to the viscous center—a dollop of cloying strawberry syrup. It was as if her grandmother were sitting beside her, holding her hand, whispering in her ear. We begin in dust and end in dust. In the middle, it’s good to have something sweet.
When the last bit of candy was finally gone, Abby opened the flaps of the cardboard box. It was largely empty—only two speckled composition notebooks were inside—the kind her teachers used to give her in high school. One was new, but the older, yellowed book seemed remarkably familiar. As Abby lifted it onto her lap, she suddenly remembered the last time she had seen it. It had been a cold and rainy day when she was fifteen or so. Grandma Sara had asked her to fetch an umbrella, and Abby had scoured the bottom of Sara’s front hall closet. Behind the winter boots and the pile of shopping bags, Abby had found the timeworn notebook. She had brought it to her grandmother, along with the umbrella, and asked what it was.
“It’s a book of memories,” her grandmother had replied, a smile playing on the edge of her lips. “You’re welcome to look through it if you want.” But Abby had been busy with her schoolwork, and the book seemed too old and shabby to be of any interest. She remembered that it had been filled with newspaper articles, but she’d had neither the patience nor the desire to read even one.
Now, of course, all that had changed. Carefully, she flipped back the cover of the notebook to see a myriad of wedding announcements from The New York Times, cut out and glued onto the pages. The first clipping, dated August of 1946, consisted of only a single paragraph.
YOUNG REFUGEE COUPLE WED YESTERDAY
Emma Buchbinder, 20 years old, and Benjamin Teplitz, 22, who survived two Nazi death camps, were married yesterday at the Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society, 425 Lafayette Street. A wedding reception followed the ceremony.
The second article was printed in November of 1947.
SURVIVORS OF NAZI DEATH CAMPS MARRIED
Two recently arrived displaced persons who lost their families in Nazi death camps were married yesterday at the Marseilles Hotel, the national reception center maintained by the United Service for New Americans.
The bride, Anna Weiss, 28, spent two years in the Buchenwald camp. She lost her mother and father, three sisters, two married brothers, and nine nephews and nieces.
The groom, Harry Kranz, 29, escaped with his brother from a sealed train taking them to Oswecim (Auschwitz). The brothers lost their mother, father, and two sisters.
Anna and Harry met in a camp for displaced persons shortly after liberation. Distant cousins of Anna’s father arranged for her to move to New York, but Harry and his brother were still overseas. When Rabbi Samuel Cohen of the Bronx relayed Anna’s story to Sara Auerbach of Manhattan, Mrs. Auerbach coordinated with United Jewish Appeal to relocate both Kranz brothers to the United States.
The third article was from 1948, about a wedding that took place on Coney Island. The outdoor wedding, it was printed, “is an old Jewish religious custom, the open sky symbolizing the roof of the traditional canopy.” According to the article, the bride and groom both fled Poland after the German invasion. The families of both had been “wiped out.” Over five hundred people, including fifty rabbis, were in attendance at the ceremony.
Abby’s hands shook as she turned the pages—more and more wedding stories from the late 1940s, all of them, presumably, her grandmother’s doing. When a fresh wave of European Jews began arriving in New York, Sara had been approached by a group of community leaders who encouraged her to use her prodigious gifts once more. The matches she made—and the children that resulted from them—would help to rebuild some of what her people had lost. While Abby knew a bit of what Sara had accomplished in those early post-war years, those were the stories her grandmother glossed over. Those were the names Abby didn’t know.
Abby wondered whether this was why Sara still read the wedding announcements with such devotion. Her grandmother had insisted that even if she didn’t know the couples, reading the love stories lifted her spirits. “Love is a light in the dark,” she would say, waving her newspaper in the air. “These stories are proof of love. And proof of love is proof of life.”
In the last few pages of the notebook, a different type of entry caught Abby’s eye. The first was dated 1955, with a woman’s name written and underlined on top: Marlene Fishman. Below the name came standard information:
Husband: Artie Fishman
Children: Annie, 7, Steven, 4
Address: 165 West 82nd Street
Phone number: Traflgr 4–0495
None of that, of course, was particularly unusual. What was strange, however, was what came after. Notes had been added on different days, some in pencil and some in ink. When read together, the tale they told was a far cry from Sara’s typical stories. It was clear that Marlene and Artie Fishman were not one of Sara’s love matches.
3/6/55: Met Marlene and Artie at Purim carnival
3/20/55: Saw Marlene at park
3/25/55: Marlene limping
4/8/55: Marlene’s arm in cast, bruises on face