Shlomzion

I.1

The joke in our family was that Salome was an Alsatian. My father used to find my repeated remonstrations that “she was nothing of the sort” too amusing to let me in on the gag. I used to insist—with all the emphatic conviction of a four-year-old—that Alsatians were dogs. And Salome was most definitely NOT a DOG!! She was a majestic woman who frequented our home in London for a number of years and to whom many of my fondest childhood memories are attached.

Salome’s father was an austere intellectual with the unlikely name of Leon Leon. As far as I could understand, he had been dishonorably discharged from the German army in 1916 when Salome was only one year old. He had been frequently reprimanded for what his superiors called “cowardice.” But the officers forgave his weakness, favoring his gentile manner and scholarly nature. Leon, who had lived his entire life in the border province of Alsace-Lorraine, simply could not bring himself to shoot his weapon at the French enemy. “He refused to hate anyone enough to do so,” his daughter explained. Instead he developed the eerie habit of wandering around the trenches muttering psalms. He used to huddle in corners and write lengthy letters in Hebrew to the infant Salome he had never met. He scribbled feverishly on scraps of paper that he stored in the pockets of his trench coat. The men in his company thought he was a liability. Some thought he was a spy. Comrades hissed as he passed and called him “Dreyfus.” They campaigned to have him discharged. He endured a public humiliation at his barracks, then was sent home to Metz, to the unwelcoming society of his fellow Jews and to the embrace of his wife, Rose, and their five daughters.

This story is almost all I ever knew of Leon Leon. Salome told us very little. She would often quote things she had learned from him or mention his name bashfully, as if he were an excuse for all the things she knew. “C’est Papa,” she would say with a little laugh after referring to a biblical passage or a talmudic concept in polite conversation. She used to cover her face with her beautiful hand as if she were giving confession to her fingers for a sin she had not meant to commit. My mother found the allusions and the confessions equally discomfiting. “She shouldn’t know so much. Nothing good will come of it.”

From the little that Salome did tell, it was clear that Leon Leon was a man of books and not of society. He was very devout but privately so. I once overheard Salome confide to my father that Leon used to speak in their synagogue only with the rabbi. He isolated himself, and also his daughters, from everyone else. When he was at home, Leon kept to a small study where, alone for hours at a time, he wrote letters that he never seemed to mail. He was a distant and inadequate husband to Rose, for whom his early return from war brought little comfort. But though he was a father to Salome, she sighed when she spoke of him. I always wanted to know more. Had all her family been killed? Were we family? My mother used to scold my curiosity. “Don’t be so nosy,” she would say. But my father, when she was not listening, said that one day he would explain.

Salome read books with me on the long Saturday afternoons of the summer months. She would read to me while my parents slept. She would kneel on the rug, an array of books open before her. “All at once,” she would say, “that’s how to read!” I had a picture book of Bible stories that I loved to look at. But I could not read it with Salome the way I read it with my mother. Salome never put me on her knee to tell me stories or read from the page. She would open the book at the story of Abraham, Moses, or Noah...