Leah's Children by Gloria Goldreich

Description:

Spanning decades and the globe, the remarkable odysseys of Aaron, Michael, and Rebecca were as compelling as the journey of their renowned mother, Leah. From the courageous struggle of the Hungarian revolution, to the dramatic strife of the civil rights movement in Mississippi…from Israel’s heroic fight for freedom, to the eve of the Six-Day War…Leah’s children confronted their own convictions and desires in an ever-changing world fraught with danger, idealism, and betrayal. Their uncompromising search for love and fulfillment carried them into dangerous emotional territory—where only the strength, courage, and imagination inherited from their mother could lead them to their own triumphant destinies.

Excerpt:

Aaron spoke sadly but easily of Lydia’s first husband and her stepson now. He had assimilated his own grief and was no longer threatened by his wife’s past. If only Rebecca and I could do the same, Yehuda thought wearily. Sometimes it seemed to him that their marriage was frayed by too many separations; always it had been shadowed by their divergent pasts. He turned his attention back to Lydia, who was describing the work she had done in developing a new receiver.

“The ideal receiver must amplify and measure an extremely weak signal at an extremely high frequency,” she said. “Originally we assumed that such a receiver should be stable but my laboratory experiments have led me to conclude that a mobile amplifier might solve many of our problems.”

Deftly she produced charts and drawings, and the delegates leaned forward, taking rapid notes, following her pointer as it danced across the carefully marked oak-tag sheets, illustrating her explanations. She opened the floor to questions. The size of the wavelength band? Less than one centimeter. She agreed that they would have to employ a sophisticated microsound technology. They had already had some success using very small acoustic devices that substituted for electromagnetic counterparts.

The Bulgarian delegate, a short, goateed man who chewed gum incessantly, rose.

“I congratulate you, Dr. Goldfeder. Clearly, your amplifier is the most sophisticated approach we have discussed at this conference. It is exceedingly generous of your government to share this information with us. That generosity might even give rise to suspicion.” He smiled with wily insouciance and unwrapped a fresh piece of gum.

Lydia turned to him and smiled. A man would have frowned, Yehuda thought, but Lydia’s intuitive reactions were always exactly right. He himself would have responded angrily, but Lydia spoke in her soft, level voice.

“The government of my adopted country, the United States of America, is pleased to share unclassified information with the international scientific community. It is stated policy. We believe that scientific information should be shared and that all advances in our field should be directed toward peaceful purposes. Surely, there is nothing suspicious in this. Radar was developed for military purposes, but we are in a new decade now—a new decade and, we hope, a new era. Perhaps the sixties will see us harness radar and utilize it to make the world a better place to live in. My government is pleased to contribute any information that will help to control air traffic and prevent tragedy, any information that will help to detect weather patterns and monitor the health of unborn children. It is true that war coerced us into our discovery, but now we must work to confound the forces of darkness and use our knowledge for the good of man and for the survival of mankind.” Her voice rang with passion and conviction.

She sat down to a burst of applause, to the resonance of murmurs of approval, shouts of agreement.

Yehuda waited until the last of her colleagues had congratulated her before he joined her. He noticed that the Lebanese delegate and the Swiss physicist left the room together, although they did not speak.

“Your speech was worth my trip to Rhodes,” he told Lydia.

She smiled at him gratefully. “It was a successful conference.”

“I didn’t understand most of the technical material, of course,” he acknowledged ruefully. “But I did notice that there was no discussion of radar evasion techniques.”

“This was a conference on peacetime usage,” she pointed out.

“But is progress being made?”

“We are optimistic,” she said cautiously. “It may be as important for the United States in Southeast Asia as it is for Israel. It is not being ignored.”

“Work fast,” he said. “A day is a long time in the Middle East. The next time around, radar will decide the outcome of the war.” His voice was grim. The next time round, his son Noam would be a combatant—gentle Noam who loved to watch things grow, who drew diagrams of irrigation systems and experimented with hybrid melon vines.

Lydia touched his arm lightly, reassuringly.

“Enough serious talk, Yehuda. Let’s enjoy this afternoon together.”

She had a special fondness for her Israeli brother-in-law. This was not the first time they had met at an international conference; always such meetings became an occasion for catching up on family news, comparing their reactions, sharing their feelings. Always they felt the special intimacy peculiar to those who meet in a city not their own, who look out across unfamiliar landscapes and listen to strangers speak in mysterious foreign cadences. They recognized that they were linked by ties more complex than those of blood. Yehuda had married Leah’s daughter, and Lydia was wife to Leah’s son. They spoke with each other of the secrets and mysteries of the family that had become their own. They shared perceptions and insights as they struggled to understand those vanished distant years when Aaron and Rebecca had been strangers to them, children of America, safe and secure while Lydia confronted the perils of an embattled Europe and Yehuda experienced an endangered Palestine.

They offered each other pieces of the complicated puzzle that formed the Goldfeder past. It had been Lydia who told Yehuda that Joshua Ellenberg had once thought himself in love with Rebecca. And it had been Yehuda who told Lydia of the long and anguished silence that had stretched between Aaron and Leah for so many years.

Always, during the days of his boyhood, Leah had seemed at a remove from her son, studying him as though searching out a clue that might solve an elusive mystery for her. It was not until Aaron was a grown man, returned from the war, that she had shared the truth with him, had told him that she had been the victim of a rape in Russia and that for years she had tortured herself with uncertainty as to who had fathered redheaded Aaron—Yaakov, her first husband, or the copper-haired peasant who had forced her to submit to him. Leah had waited long years before confiding her secret to Aaron, and Aaron, in turn, had not shared it with Lydia, his wife.

Lydia had understood then Aaron’s constant need for reassurance, his sudden bouts of insomnia when he seized her in the darkness and whispered earnestly. “Do you love me? Do you really love me?” She had wondered how he could doubt her love, but Yehuda’s words had explained those doubts to her. Aaron had spent his childhood never certain that his mother loved him.