“My turn.”
“Is this too short?”
Rosh Hashanah had always been her favorite holiday. As the sun set and a new year began, the world seemed filled with promise. Her father would return home from the brief evening service smiling. He would compliment her mother’s soup and the meal passed pleasantly and ended in song. Her father had a beautiful voice.
But as the month wore on and one holiday followed another, his mood would sour. He complained about the stifling heat or the cold drafts in the prayer hall. He grumbled about her brother’s inability to keep up and the hypocrisy of the rich men, who had the best seats in the synagogue but talked business throughout the service. By the end of Sukkot, he was back to slapping Mama for overcooking the chicken.
Even so, when the sun began to set at the start of Rosh Hashanah the following year, Zorah would hope again.
She felt a light touch on her shoulder and turned to see Leonie standing beside her, holding out a white blouse with yellow buttons. “This should fit you,” she said softly as she placed it on the foot of the bed and hurried away before Zorah could say no.
She waited for a moment, sat up, and placed her hand on the soft, dotted swiss cotton. The buttons were made of heavy plastic in the shape of flowers, with five petals each.
She touched one of the buttons and wondered if Meyer would notice them. The idea shocked her and she drew her hand back as though she’d been bitten. She glanced over her shoulder to see if anyone had seen her nearly succumb to the nonsense around her, which she knew was nothing but sex madness. All she really wanted from Meyer, she told herself, was another cigarette.
The door banged open as Shayndel and Tedi rushed in. Shayndel stripped off her shirt as she strode through the room. “Wait until you see the boys,” she said. “It’s amazing what a shave and a comb can do.”
Tedi stopped at Zorah’s bunk.
“How is your hand?” she asked.
“It was nothing,” said Zorah.
“Come here,” Leonie said, waving to Tedi and Shayndel. “I have dresses for you. The dark red is for Shayndel and the blue is for Tedi.”
“You seem to be enjoying yourself,” Shayndel said, slipping on a cherry-colored shirtwaist.
Leonie picked up a brush and set to work on the tangles in Shayndel’s hair. “It’s nice to feel useful,” she said.
A strange, mournful sound filtered into the room. The conversation quieted and then stopped altogether as the half-musical, half-animal wail hovered for six, seven, eight seconds and then changed suddenly into a high-pitched staccato shriek.
“What on earth was that?” Leonie shuddered.
“A shofar,” Shayndel said. “It’s a sort of trumpet blown at Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. It’s made of a ram’s horn. You never heard a shofar?”
Leonie shook her head. “My uncle had no use for religion.”
“What about your parents?”
“I was a baby when I went to live with my uncle’s family. It’s a terrible noise, no? So primitive.”
“I always liked it,” Shayndel said. “In my summer camp, they would blow a shofar to wake us up in the morning. They must be using it to tell us that it’s time for Ma’ariv. They’re keeping the gates between the men’s and women’s sides open for evening prayers.”
“Will you go?” Leonie asked.
“I don’t think so.” She shrugged. “It’s a short service and given the state of my hair, they will be done by the time you’re finished with me.”
Shayndel thought about her last Rosh Hashanah at home, when she had refused to sit with her mother and stood in the back of the women’s section, whispering and laughing with the other Zionist girls.
Leonie slipped a pair of tortoise-shell combs into Shayndel’s hair and held out a mirror. “Look how pretty you are,” she said. “Let me find you some lipstick.”
“Don’t bother,” Shayndel said, staring at Zorah, who was fastening the last of her flower buttons. Eyebrows arched all over the barrack as Zorah twisted her hair into a loose knot at the nape of her neck. She stood up, faced her audience, and made a stiff curtsy before she walked outside and headed for the men’s side of the camp.
She approached the group that had gathered in a semicircle around Anschel, a wiry man of twenty-five or so, whose spectacles and wild black beard lent him an air of religious authority. Everyone agreed that Anschel was more than a little crazy. On his first night in Atlit, he had made a scene in the dining hall when they brought out a platter of chicken, pounding the table and screaming when no one could give him the name and credentials of the butcher who killed and salted the birds. He had also tried to break up one of Arik’s classes, shouting that Hebrew should be reserved for holy purposes only.
Anschel certainly prayed like a madman, his eyes squeezed tight, swaying back and forth so violently that he hit his head against the wall behind him. He had begun the evening prayers for Rosh Hashanah the moment he counted nine men around him and mumbled through the service so fast that no one could keep up.
“Who made him the rabbi?” someone demanded as Anschel began folding his prayer shawl. “We aren’t going to let him do that tomorrow, are we?”