Out of the Ashes Read online

  Maisie Mosco

  OUT OF THE ASHES

  Dedication

  In memory of my mother

  The evil that men do lives after them…

  Julius Caesar

  Acknowledgements

  My editor, Marjory Chapman.

  Stephen Mosco and Miranda Selby for assistance with research in Germany and Austria.

  The Institute of Jewish Affairs Library.

  The characters in this book are entirely imaginary and bear no relation to any real persons living or dead.

  Part One

  1982…

  Chapter 1

  Marianne was browsing through her family album, a sentimental pastime in which she rarely indulged, but not unfitting today.

  An early-morning telephone call had wakened her, and she had afterwards come downstairs to make some tea. Wrapped in the cosy old dressing-gown she could not bring herself to throw away, as if doing so would denude her of a comforting bit of the past, she was now curled up on the living-room sofa, only the hissing of the gas fire impinging upon the silence.

  She had known before picking up the receiver that the caller was her Uncle Nat, wanting to share with her his anxiety lest anything mar the family event due to take place this afternoon. The sole remaining elder of the clan, its one-time black sheep was incongruously proving himself capable of wearing the patriarchal mantle. But Marianne wished he would choose someone other than herself with whom to confer about family matters.

  “Supposing the out-of-towners who haven’t yet arrived don’t get to Manchester in time?” he had said on the phone. “They shouldn’t have left their travelling until today, and that includes your son and your brother, Marianne!”

  Outside Marianne’s window the back lawn stretched pristine white, the poplars at the far end ghostly figures against a leaden sky. Her uncle’s fear of a last minute hitch had materialized as an overnight snowfall, and she imagined him now pacing the floor in his big house, with nobody but the ageing Irishwoman who looked after him for company.

  Bridie, though, is like one of the family, Marianne’s thoughts meandered on while her fingers turned the pages of the album. She had been with Uncle Nat’s branch of it since her teens and Marianne’s childhood.

  A snapshot of herself in uniform reminded Marianne that she had left home, via the Women’s Services, at the age of eighteen, never to return. What a rebel I must have seemed! The more so, she reflected, when she had subsequently married out of the faith in the days when, for a Jewish family, there was no worse disgrace.

  The man for whom love had caused Marianne to do so had, a few years later, elected to convert. And, she thought poignantly, was now buried in the cemetery where the in-laws who had not wanted him lay, his death the last in a series of family bereavements in the first two years of the eighties.

  Marianne had still not accustomed herself to her grandmother no longer being there. To not being telephoned at least thrice daily by her mother. To Uncle David and Aunt Miriam too being gone.

  But those of whom she had just been thinking were old people. Hardest of all for her to accept was her husband’s being cut down in his prime.

  She returned her mind to the afternoon that lay ahead. Though it would be a pleasant change for the family to get together other than for a funeral, the occasion was in its way a solemn one.

  David’s will had instructed that a stained glass window honouring the founders of the Sandberg-Moritz clan be consecrated in a Manchester synagogue, in the presence of every branch of the family tree that had sprung from those roots.

  “Every twig and branch” was how David had put it, and it was, of course, his estate that had paid for the window. The carrying out of his instruction he had entrusted to his brother.

  Marianne turned back the pages of the album to look again at a faded photograph of the two couples whose meeting in Manchester’s old Strangeways ghetto in 1905 would, in 1982, impel their descendants to demonstrate the unity David’s wish required.

  Her grandmother, Sarah Sandberg, would say, “What’s with the honouring? It’s enough that we are now resting in peace.” But Sigmund Moritz, whose ego had matched his intellect, would consider it his due, Marianne thought with a smile.

  By noon, when she had dressed in her best for the occasion, and her son had not yet arrived from London, she found herself anxiously eyeing the weather, as Uncle Nat was probably doing. A flurry of snowflakes was scudding by the window, and a high wind hurtling around the cottage that in summer had roses around the door.

  A reminiscent smile fleetingly lit Marianne’s olive-skinned face, enhancing the gamine appearance lent by her short black hair, and her petite figure. It was summer when she and Ralph had moved in, and the picture of their new home, so idyllic was it, had seemed a portent for their ending their days as the proverbial Darby and Joan.

  Instead, Marianne, though she was a successful author with little time to brood, was having to come to terms with a personal loneliness she had never before experienced. She had gone from under her parents’ roof to the midst of a hut full of ATS girls. Marriage had followed. This was the first time Marianne had lived alone.

  “Is my outfit okay?” she would now be asking Ralph, if he were here to look her over. Oh, the simple little things one missed. Since there was only the mirror to tell her, she surveyed the middle-aged woman reflected there and decided that a scarf at the neck of her dark suit would not come amiss.

  She selected the blue silk square her son had bought for her at Saks, on one of his frequent trips to New York, and looking in her jewel box for a scarfpin picked up the gold filigree brooch, dented with age, that Sarah Sandberg had brought with her from Russia. Ought I to wear it for the ceremony? And Sarah’s antique ring?

  Marianne hesitated to do so. Her cousin Shirley, not she, was the eldest of Sarah’s three granddaughters, but Sarah had left to Marianne the pieces she had valued most.

  Marianne would not forget the day when Sarah’s treasure trove was opened. How Shirley, as materialistic as her father, David, had immediately put a monetary value on the pieces, scrutinizing each in turn as if she were a jeweller.

  “Don’t bother looking at the filigree brooch, or the garnet ring, Shirley,” David had said. “They’re for Marianne.”

  “What do you mean, they’re for Marianne?”

  The ensuing confrontation, for such it had felt, had taken place in Marianne’s mother’s flat, a week after Sarah was laid to rest. With my mum lying ill, in the next room, Marianne recalled.

  Uncle Nat, too, was present that afternoon, with his daughter Leona. But Leona had displayed no resentment about Marianne’s being left their grandmother’s most treasured jewellery. It was she who broke the silence that followed Shirley’s antagonistic words.

  “Marianne had a very special relationship with Grandma, and everyone in the family knows it.”

  “But I’ve never understood why,” Shirley had replied. “And while Grandma was growing old and frail, where was Marianne? Living it up in London. You and I, though, were right here, doing our grand daughterly duty, no matter how inconvenient it sometimes was for us.”

  “Marianne had to live where her husband’s business was,” Leona countered.

  “And if it hadn’t gone bust, she wouldn’t have returned to the bosom of the family,” Shirley retorted, “which my dad’s generosity made possible.”

  “My asking Ralph to run the art gallery I was thinking of opening in Manchester was a business proposition,” David interceded, and received a tight-lipped smile from his daughter.

  Another silence followed, and Marianne glanced at the armchair her grandmother had occupied until she became bedfast. It was there that Sarah had sat when the family came from wherever life ha
d scattered them, to celebrate with her on her ninety-ninth birthday.

  It was the last happy occasion for which the entire clan had gathered. All had brought Sarah gifts, and the old lady had received them with the graciousness of a queen seated on her throne. Later, while the party went on around her, she had sat pensively fingering her little Russian brooch, as always pinned at her throat, and Marianne had wondered what she was thinking. If she was perhaps re-living her long years; remembering the bitter along with the sweet, which she had always referred to as the almonds and raisins of life.

  Marianne’s marrying a gentile had contributed to the many almonds that Sarah had been obliged to chew and swallow. I’m surprised that Shirley didn’t throw that at me, too, she had thought on the day her cousin’s animosity towards her was made overtly plain. Though she and Shirley had never got on well, Marianne had not felt, until they stood with Sarah’s jewellery spilled on the table between them, that Shirley hated her.

  “Just because you look like Grandma, you’ve always been her favourite!” Shirley had finally flared.

  Marianne had let that pass. It was not just her looks that she had inherited from Sarah, but in some respects her character, also. Like Sarah, Marianne had found herself capable of bending with the wind of change. And she too was equipped by Nature with the strength to see a difficult situation through.

  These were Marianne’s thoughts and recollections as she tried to decide whether or not to wear Sarah’s ring and brooch for the window-consecration ceremony. The pieces themselves were not what the confrontation was about, and Marianne had felt sorry for Shirley, a wealthy woman who, time and again, had been made to realize that there are things that money can’t buy.

  Two more telephone calls, both from motorway service station call boxes, cut short Marianne’s rumination.

  The first, from her Tory MP brother, Arnold, resulted in one of their usual tiffs. “I’m on the M1, Marianne. Something I had to sort out for my constituency manager delayed me.”

  “And that’s more important than what you’re coming to Manchester for?”

  “Look – it’s snowing like hell, I’ve got a terrible cold, and I’m doing my best to get there in time! But I might not.”

  “The one you should be letting know is your wife.”

  “Lyn and I aren’t on speaking terms at present.”

  “What have you done to upset her now?” Marianne demanded. But her brother had rung off, and she visualized him stomping to his car, the picture of self-righteousness, his thinning hair sent awry by the wind.

  The second call, from her son, was to assure her that he would arrive in time. Were Martin’s wife and child with him? Marianne brushed that doubt aside and cast another glance at the still swirling snowflakes, thankful that Martin had got as far as the M6.

  Suddenly, it was as important to her as to Uncle Nat that every member of the family be present today. Nor would her grandmother have been surprised to know it.

  She slipped Sarah’s ring on her finger and pinned the meaningful little brooch to her scarf.

  Nathan Sandberg was blowing a speck of dust from the sideboard when Bridie entered the room.

  “An’ whut, Doctor surr, do ye think yere after doin’?” she inquired. “Fussin’ an’ wurryin’! An’ still gettin’ under me feet, like ye’ve bin after doin’ since ye rose from yere bed, is whut!”

  Bridie put down the tray of china she had brought in with her and began laying the table for the tea-party Nathan was giving after the consecration ceremony.

  “How many times am I after tellin’ ye, Doctor surr, that the family won’t be findin’ Bridie’s burnt the kuchen an’ the strudel, jus’ because the missus is still away.”

  The delicious aroma of baking cakes was drifting in from the kitchen, and Nathan surveyed Bridie with affection. She was loyalty personified. And who but she had held together the everyday warp and weft of his tempestuous marriage?

  Tempestuous until a few years ago, he corrected himself. But Bridie had behaved throughout as though nothing untoward was going on in the household, taking all in her stride. What would Nathan have done without her when post-natal depression caused his wife to reject her new-born child? Thankfully, Leona knew nothing of that traumatic episode, or she might have grown up believing her mother didn’t really love her; in addition to realizing, all too soon, that her parents didn’t love each other.

  Nathan glanced at the photograph of himself and Rebecca on their wedding day, the gleaming silver frame a testament to Bridie’s housekeeping, and reflected that their marriage hadn’t stood a chance. Nor had this house ever been a home. Just a battleground until eventually the fight had gone from both of them. After which an indifferent peace had reigned. He had not minded in the least when Rebecca went to spend the winter in Florida, with her sister who lived there.

  Nathan would not have been surprised had he known that Marianne thought of him as the one remaining elder. Little by little his wife had distanced herself from the family.

  Bridie, busy folding the starched napkins that matched the damask tablecloth, gave him a long-suffering look. “If yere after makin’ sure I do me job properly, Doctor surr, why don’t ye do it sittin’ down?”

  Rather than argue with her, Nathan did as he was bid, the vacant Queen Anne chair on the other side of the hearth serving to heighten the bitterness his present thoughts could not but evoke.

  So much for the arranged marriages of his youth, when a wealthy girl was offered by her parents to a lad whom money could help on his way. Nathan’s friend, who later became his partner, had thought Nathan fortunate to be offered a girl whose beauty was an unexpected bonus. Yet Lou’s arranged marriage, to a girl as plain as she was good-natured, could not have been more contented.

  Nathan’s, however, had begun with a built-in handicap; his love for the gentile nurse he had met while a medical student. And a lifetime wasn’t long enough for Nathan to forget how David had castigated him when he found out about Mary.

  He could still see himself sitting in David’s car, a puny youth, his brother already a married man, being told that if he wanted to kill his parents, marrying a shiksah was the way to do it.

  The introduction to Rebecca was afterwards hastily arranged. And how mortifying it had remained for Nathan that he had been too weak to defy his big brother. A man who had himself married for money.

  Raking up old coals will get you nowhere, Nathan told himself, absently watching Bridie take some cake dishes out of the sideboard and line them with paper doyleys. But how could the floodgates of remembrance not open for him today? And the memory that had just returned to him accounted for his lifelong hostility towards David…

  In his childhood, Nathan had idolized David. When the Sandbergs still lived in the Strangeways ghetto the possibility of one of her sons becoming a doctor could not have entered Sarah’s mind. How to make ends meet would have been her major preoccupation. But Nathan was then too young to have realized that. He alone of her four children had taken for granted that there would always be a meal for him on the table.

  Then a day came when Nathan’s childhood illusion that all was well with his world was shattered. He had called at the Moritzes’ house on his way home from school, to borrow a book from Sigmund’s library, and had found Sigmund parcelling some books in order to sell them.

  How incongruous it now seemed that so humble a home had housed that library. Goethe and Galsworthy, Dickens and Shakespeare, Robert Louis Stevenson, among the literary giants cheek by jowl with the works of the great philosophers, Nathan recalled, in a small room lined floor to ceiling with shelves built with Sigmund Moritz’s own hands.

  Incongruous too was the friendship between Nathan’s parents and the Moritzes, so different were the cultures from which the two immigrant couples had sprung. Sarah and Abraham Sandberg were products of the insular background that Tsarist oppression had imposed upon Russian Jews; Sigmund and Rachel Moritz, he, though a tailor by trade, an intellectual, and sh
e with the elegant refinement that had characterized the Viennese Jewesses no less when they settled in their new country.

  Half of Sigmund’s library was now in Nathan’s study. The other half, packed in boxes in the attic, was awaiting the building of extra bookshelves.

  Sigmund had bequeathed the library to Nathan – his godson – and David. But no mention of the books was made in David’s will. As if, thought Nathan now, David could not bring himself to make what would have been a conciliatory gesture to me. The books had come to Nathan only because David’s daughter did not want them, and his son could not accommodate them.

  It was Sigmund Moritz who had nurtured Nathan’s love of literature, encouraged him to partake of that literary feast, given him Silas Marner, the first book Nathan had ever owned. And still imprinted upon Nathan’s mind was Sigmund’s explanation, that long ago day, for selling some precious first editions: You can’t eat books.

  Decades later, amid the trappings of affluence of which the Sandbergs and Moritzes could not then have dreamed, Nathan’s journey backward in time caused his throat to ache as he saw again, like figures in a distant landscape, those who had peopled his childhood.

  David helping him with his homework. His father snoozing in the rocking chair beside the kitchen hearth. His sister Esther, ironing a blouse. His middle brother Sammy, patiently carving with a penknife the ornaments he had made from bits of wood. And Sigmund and Rachel Moritz arriving with their family for Sabbath tea, their daughter Miriam, who had loved David but had married Sammy, as beautiful then as she was in old age.

  As for Miriam and David dying together, in a car crash… What was it but another twist in the tangled history of a clan welded ever closer by time and events? Part of which was Nathan’s daughter marrying Sigmund’s grandson. And my granddaughter marrying David’s grandson.

  Bridie, whom Nathan had not noticed had left the room, returned to place a bowl of sugar on the table and surveyed his expression.