Rachel steered me along toward a school for young boys beginning to study the Torah.
Bits of trash lay in the roadway.
The air smelled warmish and foul.

A young man appeared out of a side alley and walked toward us with quick strides.
He wore a long double-breasted coat of a heavy material, dark trousers, and black boots with buckles.
His black hat with its wide brim, high crown, and fur trim rode high.
With his head erect, he approached, not glancing at us, and passed by with his clear eyes raised and fixed straight ahead.
He had a pinkish-white complexion, a small straight nose, a short black beard, and tightly curled paot.
I was suddenly conscious of my bare arms.
The girls in the market place wore long-sleeved dresses and covered their legs with cloth stockings.
I turned and watched him stride down the center of the road.
His hands were swinging at his sides, and he passed through the dingy market place with his back straight and, pivoting on his heel, he entered an old stone building.

Rachel had seen me watching the young man.
She smiled.
"When your mother was here he must have been a young boy.
Like the ones you will see now".

I swallowed hard and looked down at my feet plodding along beside Rachel.
She led me into a twisting side alley.
The dirty, discolored buildings looked boarded up, and their few windows stood high above our heads.
Rachel said that schools and synagogues occupied most of the buildings.
We entered one where the front door stood ajar and climbed a flight of steep steps to the main floor.
An old man with a white beard and dressed in a long shabby coat, baggy trousers, and a black skullcap greeted us.
Rachel talked to him.
He nodded, clasping and unclasping his hands over his paunch, and flicked glances at me.
I thought he would ask us to leave because Rachel and I were bare-armed, but he looked down into his beard and preceded us down the corridor.
His toes pointed out toward the walls.
He stopped in front of a door, placed a finger on his lips, and, still peering down into his beard, pushed open the door to a classroom.
We stepped inside.
He left us.

Little boys crowded together on long wooden benches, and in the center of the room sat the teacher.
His black beard dripped down over the front of his coat.
One white hand poised a stick above his desk.
He turned his surly, half-closed eyes toward us, stared for a second, then shouted in Yiddish, "One, two, three"!
Rapping the stick against the desk.
The little boys shrilled out a Yiddish translation or interpretation of the Five Books of Moses, which they had previously chanted in Hebrew.
They chanted a fixed tune in time to the report of the stick.
Each boy opened his small mouth wide and rocked back and forth on the bench in the way his grandfather and great-grandfather had studied and prayed in the ghettos of Europe.
The boys were tiny.
They had large bright eyes, the small upturned noses of all babies everywhere, and hair cropped short except for the long ringlets of paot framing their little white faces.
They bent over yellowed prayerbooks and looked up only to watch the teacher.
Since they did not glance curiously at us once, I guessed that there was a penalty for distraction.
The guttural language from the ghetto stopped.
The teacher plunged the children into a new portion, this time in Hebrew, rapping the stick incessantly.

One boy who rocked back and forth over his worn book had bright red hair and freckles.
His tightly curled paot hung down to his narrow shoulders.
In the center of his brilliant curls sat a small black skullcap.
His head barely rose above the table.
I stared at him for a long time.
He did not return my interest.
My eyes traveled over the bare walls and up to the one partially open window high above the little figures and back to the boys.
Some of them ignored the texts and had apparently memorized the words long ago.
They singsonged the portion at the teacher, who accompanied them in an off-key baritone and spurred them on with the stick.
The tapping defined the rhythm and kept the boys awake.
I could not keep my eyes away from the boy with the red hair.
His body pitched back and forth on the bench.
His front teeth were missing.

I shuddered and backed out of the room.
Rachel followed, looked at me, and clucked with her tongue.
We walked down the cool hall silently.
From behind us came the rapping of the stick and the high-pitched voices of the boys who would grow to devote their lives to rigid study and prayer.

I said, "How long do they keep that up"?

"All day", she said.
"Except for Shabbat, when they are praying all day".

I rubbed my hands together.
They had turned numb and prickly in the classroom.
The old man in the baggy clothes waited at the foot of the steps.
He glanced down into his beard and muttered something in Yiddish.

Rachel said, "He asks for money".

She passed by him.
I reached into the pocket of my skirt, fingered ten pruta, and dropped the coin.
Then I picked it up again and handed it to the old man.
He thanked me.
I didn't look at him.

I grinned at Rachel.
"Does this bother you"?
I said.

She smiled to herself.
"Most of our Sabras think it's horrible.
When we were fighting, a few of our orthodox people were lying down in the roads so we could not pass.
They said that we must not fight but wait for the Messiah".

I was amazed.
You had to have convictions to lie down in the road in all those clothes and appear as though you might wish to turn yourself out of your own home.
You had to be stupid or crazy or immortal.
And I wasn't.
I was American.
You had to know, also, that you were going to fail.
All of it might have been heroic, but they had done it in the wrong place.
I resented them.

Rachel faced me.
Her bright eyes were twinkling.
She said, "Sometimes I think they are keeping religion for us while we play around.
Your mother hated this way of life.
She wished to change much for the children here".

I said quietly, respectfully, "What did she do here?
In this section"?

Rachel clicked her tongue behind her teeth.
"Here, nothing.
But when she saw the children you have just visited, she wanted to take them away and put them out in the country, in the kibbutzim.
She loved the children.
She was a strange woman, your mother.
When she loved, it was with a passion that drove her along and carried along with her those things she loved.
Nothing was too impossible for her to do when she wanted.
She stayed here to work for Aliah.
For many immigrants, for many children, the first thing they knew of Israel and freedom was your mother.
Sometimes it was dangerous for her".
Rachel grinned slyly.
"But she loved danger.
She took it with her wherever she went;
she chose it.
And I think she sought out danger as much as she sought out helping other people.
She was most strange woman.
Ready to follow her impulse.
It was an impulse when she was here in Me'a She'arim -- I was with her -- that led her to stay in Israel.
Your mother wanted to bring children to Israel so that they could leave their ghettos.
Here they did not need to be in ghettos.
If she could not take the children out of this section, at least she could take other children out of their countries and put them on the farms.
She set out to make sure that no Jewish child anyplace in the world had to live in a place such as this".

I said quietly, gaining nerve, ready to ask any question at all, no matter how intimate, ready to be rebuffed, "Then why did she leave Israel?
I'd like to know that very much".

Rachel clasped her hands together and slowed her pace.
The soles of her sandals reported sharply on the cobblestones.
She pursed her lips, then clamped them together so tightly that I thought she was angry with me.
But she sighed and her face relaxed.
"Trouble came into her life.
She had good friends here, people who liked her.
Who loved her.
But she had to go out and hurt herself.
There was a man here in town.
He helped her meet people so she could go out and do the work she wanted.
She worked very hard.
There was a refugee who was able to come here because of her.
He came with his son.
At first I thought they were relatives of your mother, but it was not so.
This refugee was a middle-aged man, a big, handsome man with a strut to his walk as I have never before seen.
He had the black numerals on his arm, so he had been branded in a concentration camp.
Yet he walked like a young man.
Often he was terribly despondent and talked to no one.
Then he would walk off for a few days alone in the direction of Europe.
All his family was dead, except for his son.
Your mother would always retrieve him when he wandered off, and she would send him home to his son.
He loved the son and was always glad to be sent back to him.
Then his son did something" -- Rachel threw up her hands -- "I don't know what, but something, to an official here -- it was during the Mandate -- and the son was imprisoned.
A few hours after the son was arrested, your mother was informed.
She ran from a little group of us.
We were sitting together, talking.
She went to the father and found he had hanged himself".
Rachel paused.
It was silent in the stone alley.
Then she continued with energy, "I myself did not see her until a week after she had run off to find the father.
No one saw her except the man Reuveni".

"Yes", I said.
"I know him".

Rachel gave me a direct, bright-eyed look.
She said, "Reuveni wanted your mother to give up her deep interest in this refugee.
He said she would only hurt herself.
He complained to me once that I must talk to her.
When I did, she shrugged her shoulders and said that Reuveni wanted her to marry him.
I asked her if she would, and she said she would not.
He had known when he first helped her to meet the right people and work with them that she did not intend to marry him.
Anyway, I did not see her until two weeks after the refugee hanged himself.
She came to me one day.
She was pale and skinny;
she was terribly alone.
And she said that after this man had been dead for a week she had gone to Reuveni and accepted his proposal.
He shouted at her and told her he loved her and couldn't understand why she had upset herself.
But now he was happy she would let him straighten out her life and take care of her.
He would never let her harm herself again.
For one whole week he never let her stay alone.
She let him lead her around.
He took her to a doctor, for she was run down, nervous, did not care where she was.
Reuveni took her with him wherever he went.
He did not let her talk to people;
he did not let her choose her own food.
She was limp and beaten from her loss;
she did not care.