The Widow Mandelbaum Dreams

Eric Rozenman

The first time the late Moshe Mandelbaum appeared in a dream and gave his widow advice struck Goldie Mandelbaum (nee Finkelroot) as merely odd. Perhaps she had eaten too much the night before. However, the other times Moshe Mandelbaum disturbed her sleep would prove not just odd but life-changing. Also life-preserving.

A year after Moshe’s unfortunate demise at the wheels of a motor vehicle, Goldie had received a marriage proposal from a man she was not really interested in. There was nothing wrong with Hymie Perkofsky, you understand. He was one of the more respected kosher butchers in Khmelnytsky. To tell the truth, that status was not difficult to attain. Khmelnytsky, a small city of perhaps 20,000 people, including nearly 4,000 Jewish souls, supported only three full-time kosher butchers, and Hymie Perkofsky stood second to Mendel Bialovsky as the kind of man one preferred to do business with. Of butcher number three, Yankel Rozenstein, the less said the better.

Hymie proposed to the widow Goldie early one Friday afternoon as she was deciding which of his chickens deserved to grace her Shabbat dinner table and satisfy her son Jacob and daughter Rivka, the two of them growing teenagers and, it seemed to her, always hungry. Hymie knew he was going to propose to Goldie the moment he heard of Moshe Mandelbaum’s passing, an event he did not consider entirely unfortunate. Not that he had anything against the man, of course. But his wife, now widow—ah, what a woman. Her walk, like a captivating rhythm; her shape, zaftig without being overly so, no more need be said on that score; her voice,like honey, it was; and her uncanny ability to select the choicest chickens. Now there was a woman.

As for Hymie, he was honest enough to consider himself average. Average height, average weight, average appearance—brown hair, brown eyes, not handsome, to be sure, but in no way unpleasant. And maybe just a little more observant of his surroundings, of life, than average. More than one of his female customers had told him it was time he got married. And then, he thought, batted their eyes just a little at him. So, Hymie believed that maybe, just maybe, he had a chance with Goldie Mandelbaum.

As for Goldie, the butcher’s proposal came as a complete surprise. She had sensed no prior attraction from him for her, and certainly felt none for him. So, she delayed. “I’m flattered,” Goldie said. “But my dear Moshe has been gone for barely a year and my heart still feels like it has not quite gotten up from shiva yet.”

Hymie Perkofsky looked crestfallen.

Goldie Mandelbaum, never wishing to hurt another’s feelings—unless they really deserved it, like the blowhard Dovid Simonvitch, who would lecture one on all manner of things because he imaged his position as synagogue gabbai made him practically a Sage—stopped, looked squarely at the butcher, and said courteously, “I will think about it, Mr. Hymie Perkofsky.” Then, poised as usual, steps confident, she exited his shop, one lovingly plucked chicken in her basket.

“Say yes. Don’t be foolish!” Goldie Mandelbaum’s friend Yehudis Kranz urged her. “You’re nearly 40.”

Yehudis herself was only 34. But she was honest enough to see the tiny lines at the corners of her beautiful and uncommon blue eyes for what they were: an unmistakable warning that time was running out. Not for her primarily—married as she was to the vigorous if unimaginative Lemuel Kranz—and after three children still slender but not so much as to draw attention to her sharp nose. No, time was running out for others of her acquaintance, the never-marrieds and the widows. They were not as realistic as she was. Others like her dear friend Goldie. 

“37,” Goldie corrected her.

“37, 38, 50. You’re not getting any younger.”

About that, Yehudis Kranz was right, Goldie thought, as she tossed and turned in bed that night. It seemed to her, thinking about it in the morning—she finally had fallen asleep sometime after 1:00 a.m.—to have been a startlingly sharp vision. She had dreamed about Moshe often after the accident, but in fragments only, like images one saw from a broken mirror and that vanished if you looked too hard at them. But this time was almost like a little version of one of those Hollywood movies in Technicolor they showed sometimes at the one theater on the square in the center of Khmelnytsky.

“Goldie,” the voice in the dream called to her. “Goldie, it’s me, Moshe.” In the dream, Goldie was wide awake, sitting up, staring with big eyes at the face of her Moshe, floating a few feet in front of her, a few feet up in the air.

“I apologize, Goldie, for having been away so long. But after the accident—when that fool omnibus driver had a heart attack or stroke or whatever and ran me over—they took me to this sanitorium. I’m getting better, the tuberculosis is subsiding—that’s the word the doctors use, subsiding—and some day I’ll be able to come home. But not yet. Oh, and by the way, don’t marry that butcher, Hymie Perkofsky. You can do better, much better. Like me.”

And poof! The dream ended. Goldie, really wide awake now, found herself alone in her darkened bedroom, the children asleep in their rooms. The little, neat house, just about at the edge of the Jewish part of Khmelnytsky, and just about at the city limits, near the main road leading south toward the still dense, still expansive forest, lay quiet. The only sound Goldie heard was her pounding heart.

“Oh!” Yehudis Kranz said when Goldie related the dream. “Oh, this is not good. A dybbuk is after you!”

A dybbuk, as every Jew in Khmelnytsky, and even the sophisticates in Warsaw, 80 long miles to the west, knew, was the disembodied soul of a deceased person desperately trying to latch onto a living body to do harm to them and as many others as possible.

“Dybbuk?” Goldie replied. “Don’t be ridiculous. It’s 1935. We have radio, movies—movies in color sometimes—and flush toilets. Khmelnytsky is a small city, not some shtetl with mud roads and unpainted wooden houses. Here the streets are brick, sometimes concrete even, downtown at least. The buildings are mostly stone and cement and white-washed even. There are street lights around the square and some people have telephones. We don’t believe in dybbuks anymore.”

“We don’t? Just you wait. But in the meantime, do not marry Hymie Perkofsky!”

Goldie had already decided she was not going to accept the butcher’s proposal. Still, she took Yehudis’ words as confirmation of her decision. Too bad, in a way. It meant that in all decency she could not continue shopping at Perkofsky’s, not after rejecting him. Now she would have to patronize Mendel Bialovsky. His meats and poultry were first-rate, and he was polite enough, but he charged prices to match the quality of his offerings. 

Goldie Mandelbaum slept soundly for the next three months. As the time went by, her sleep grew deeper, more restful. More peaceful even than when Moshe had been there in bed next to her, his deep, even breathing a reassurance about everything, about life. She even grew used to the bed itself at last, which she had never liked. It was a big, heavy wooden piece of furniture with grape vines carved into the high, dark, and deeply polished headboard. Moshe could never sell it, so to get it out of the store he finally brought the thing home.

Then it happened again. Her late, beloved husband came to her a second time in a dream, sharp and sustained, just like the first time. This was two days after Reuven Sonenschien asked her to marry him. Sonenschien’s wife had died in childbirth—her ninth delivery—and all of Khmelnytsky knew he was searching for a replacement. Reuven Sonenschien, the local wine merchant, was handsome, tall, square-shouldered, healthy, prosperous, well-spoken, and not yet 50.

“You are so fortunate!” Yehudis Kranz enthused. “Reuven Sonenschien! What a catch! Every Jewish woman—and some of the gentile ones as well—have been after him. And he wants you! When are you going to tell him you accept?”

“I don’t know,” Goldie Mandelbaum said. The pair were sitting in Goldie’s kitchen, lingering over cups of Wissotzky’s raspberry tea and Yehudis’ sugar cookies, something they had been doing nearly once a week for the past, how many years now, nine, ten? “I mean, he is all those things you said, and he is quite friendly to me. But still, I just don’t know if he’s the right one.”

“What’s to know!?” Yehudis practically exploded. “You’re not getting any younger. What are you now, 42?”

“38!”

“Practically an old maid, like the spinster Goldblatt. Listen, Goldie,” Yehudis was suddenly whispering, “if you don’t take him, tell him I will!”

“You’re already married,” Goldie reminded her friend.

“Not to Reuven Sonenschien!” Yehudis Kranz declared.

“Goldie,” the late Moshe Mandelbaum said to her as she slept that night, clear as the tinkle of a crystal glass when you tap it with your spoon. Not that the Jews of Khmelnytsky tapped many crystal glasses, except some of the more well-to-do, and then only at Rosh Hashanah dinner and the Passover seder.

“What is it, Moshe?!” she heard herself ask breathlessly in the dream.

“I’m so sorry I’ve still stayed away from you. And that I didn’t tell you the whole truth. I’m not really in a sanitorium. The bus driver that ran me over had been paid by some gangsters to do it. They thought I ran off with their jewels, which I did not. I was going to pay them for the shipment but just hadn’t collected all the money yet. Anyway, I’m in jail. I will be out in three years. Oh, and by the way, whatever you do, don’t marry that Reuven Sonenschien.”

“Why not?” Goldie asked in the dream.

“He’s not what he appears to be. For one thing, he dilutes his wine.”

“They say that about every wine merchant,” Goldie responded.

“Well, do they also say that Mr. Reuven Sonenschien has fathered not nine children but 12, an even dozen—two others by their maid, and one with Masha Lipshitz?”

About the maid, a blonde, round, little Polish girl, that was no surprise. “But Masha the laundress?” Goldie asked, astonished. “She has the plainest face and thickest calves of any woman in town.”

“Yes, and the most well-shaped breasts and hips,” Moshe replied. “And, you’ll remember, not quite two years ago when she disappeared—‘went to visit relatives,’ the story was—for nearly six months? One learns quite a lot here in the sanitorium, I mean, jail.” And with that, Goldie’s late husband, or his apparition, vanished.

Though she appreciated her late husband’s concern—he always had been thoughtful, always trying to cheer her up when she was down, so why should things be different now?—Goldie was getting a little annoyed with Moshe, or his ghost, whichever was the case. And, having stared in horror at the tire tread marks across his chest after the mishap with the omnibus, Goldie was pretty certain it was the latter. Here she was, trying mightily to get on with her life, raise the children properly, and Moshe was playing tricks on her from she’ol or wherever.

Anyway, she did not need his further matrimonial advice. Goldie felt, with the assurance granted to the just, that when the right man spoke, Hashem would let her know.

It was just a few weeks later that Jacob and Rivka brought home the new melamed,  their teacher at the Jewish community school. In modern Khmelnytsky, the school was not a yeshiva. “We even learn geometry!” Rivka had told her gentile friend Sylvia Sopko a few weeks earlier when the latter made one of her increasingly rare visits. Throughout the city, Jewish children noticed their non-Jewish playmates slipping away. Usually there was no quarrel, no falling out. But the more the radio told of Jewish merchants cheating their gentile customers, the more local priests inveighed against the Jews’ stiff-necked refusal to accept Jesus Christ—“Yeshki” as the Jews of Khmelnytsky referred to him—as their savior, the more a chill settled onto the little city.

The melamed, Eli Wysbrodt, was a little taller than average, slender, with a thin red beard that, in color anyway, matched the thick red hair curling from under his kippah and covering his head. Goldie had heard good things about this Wysbrodt from her children—they said that, unlike his predecessor, the unsmiling Isaachar Itzkovitch, he made the subjects in class interesting, corrected their mistakes firmly but respectfully, and started and ended the school day on time.

“We asked Melamed Wysbrodt …” Jacob and Rivka started in unison.

“Eli, please,” the teacher interrupted. 

“We asked Eli,” they began again, Rivka giggling, “to come have some tea and cookies and read one or two of his poems to us.”

“I hope it is not an imposition,” Wysbrodt said, looking directly at Goldie. [He stood in the doorway, straight but not stiff, his expression midway between diffident and amused]. And those red curls, Goldie thought—this must have been what David HaMelech looked like, as it is written. Staring into the melamed’s deep brown-green eyes, Goldie Mandelbaum felt a rush of, well, ‘what exactly was it?’ she asked herself. Could it possibly be long-unfelt passion, out of the blue sky and into the teacher’s eyes, so to speak? she wondered excitedly. 

“No, no imposition at all,” Goldie managed to say, hoping she was not blushing. As a matter of fact, she thought he was, his face reddening toward the color of his beard. Listening with her children to Wysbrodt read several of his poems, she felt something like rapture. This is foolish, she told herself sternly. Stop mooning like an infatuated schoolgirl. After the teacher had taken his leave, Goldie Mandelbaum could not remember exactly what his poetry had been about, only that his voice sounded like a brook splashing over rocks as it descended merrily through a wood. It was a voice she had to hear more of.

Uncharacteristically, she had run to the Kranz home soon after the teacher had gone from her own house. “Yehudis! I am going to marry the new melamed!” Goldie exclaimed to her friend.

“Marry a melamed? Are you out of your mind? He’s much younger than you …”

“Only five years,” Goldie interrupted.

“Much younger, and poorer. Must I remind you that you are a widow with two children and, as you yourself have said, the money from your late husband Moshe’s furniture store is slowly running out,” Yehudis noted. “And melameds, while honored for their knowledge and help forming the next generation, are not so honored as to earn much money. Be sensible. If not Reuven Sononschien, then maybe Beryl Shimsoni …”

“Beryl Shimsoni?!” Now it was Goldie’s turn to ejaculate. “The undertaker? How dreadful!”

“His business is always steady.”

“Please,” Goldie said.

She had barely dropped off to sleep that night, a most pleasant, or perhaps pleased, smile on her face, when Moshe popped up. “Goldie. Goldie, listen to me.” She was now sitting up, staring at her late husband’s face floating a few feet in front of her and a few feet above her, just as before.

“I’m tired, Moshe, and I just fell asleep. What is it this time?”

“Don’t be angry with me, Goldie. I could never take it when you were angry with me. Anyway, I just came—this will be the last time—to tell you to marry that melamed, Eli Wysbrodt.”

“I intend to,” Goldie said. “This means you really are not coming back, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” Moshe confessed. “I only told you those stories about being in a sanitorium and in prison to ease your heart a little at the time. I really am dead. I always have been, ever since that damn fool omnibus driver hit me. He’s dead too, of course, and deserves it. But he’s somewhere else, not here with me, thank God. Otherwise, I’d kill him. Anyway, that’s not what’s important. Listen closely: Eli Wysbrodt is not just a melamed who writes poetry in his spare time. He also writes short stories, plays, and novels. He has a desk full of them, mostly drafts, but some nearly finished and quite good. You’ve seen him wandering around Khmelnytsky with his little notebook, occasionally stopping to write something?”“Yes, of course. The whole town has, wondering if he isn’t absent-minded,” Goldie said.

“He’s not absent-minded. He’s gathering real-life material for his writing. He will be well-known and almost as widely read—someday respected, and eventually fairly prosperous. A university professor whose books actually sell. But Goldie …”

“Yes?”

“For this to happen, you not only have to marry him but take him, and Jacob and Rivka of course, to America, to di goldene medineh. And soon, very soon!”

Goldie thought that Moshe, so indecisive when alive, sounded unusually insistent. “Why?” she wanted to know.

“Because everyone here agrees. The Angel of Death is coming for the Jews of Poland. It will come quickly. And though the warning signs will have been there …”

“They already are,” Goldie said. Formerly playful Sylvia Sopko’s growing aloofness toward Rivka was but one of the smaller ones.

“…few will have heeded them.” With that, Moshe disappeared from her dreams forever.

Goldie Mandelbaum and Eli Wysbrodt married as soon as the 1937 school year ended. A month later, the S.S. Breslau sailed from the port of Danzig on its way to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Immigration restrictions having complicated getting a visa to the United States, Goldie chose Canada. Anyway, Wysbrodt had a cousin in Montreal.

So it was that a family of four, a new family, stood at the rail watching the expanse of the gray North Sea grow behind them as Poland receded. They felt sadness, of course, leaving the only place they had ever known. But more than that, they felt relief, as if waking from a troubled dream.