His Brother's Keeper

Tales of the Chelm First Ward

On the Sunday when 97-year-old Israel Lewensztajn woke up during sacrament meeting just before the meetinghouse telephone began ringing, no one was sure at first what to do. Was this a part of the choir’s performance? A vision from God that came to their ears? Or was someone actually trying to reach them on the telephone? It was several seconds before Gretele’s mother, Zelda Gottstein, walked over from her usual place in the foyer to confirm that a real telephone was ringing and answer it. She soon appeared in the chapel doorway—the closest she’d come for many years to entering—to summon Bishop Levy. Apparently, the stake president had been trying to reach Chelm’s humble shepherd for some time and was beginning to suspect that caller ID was standing between them. The president had concluded that a call during meetings, with the whole ward as witnesses, might help the bishop overcome his hesitations and return to their unfinished business. 

Feige Cohen, Mirele Schwartz, and a few other sharp-eared Saints sitting near the chapel exit could make out bits and pieces of the meetinghouse half of the conversation. Bishop Levy was discussing an event to take place in the spring. He mentioned the city of Kyiv, the chartering of a bus, and potential arrangements for some sort of overnight stay. He did not sound enthusiastic (except when raising objections). 

But all Bishop Levy’s efforts were fruitless. No excuse or evasion was enough. The stake president was insistent. After each interruption, he showed such a clear increase in love that Bishop Levy slowly realized he was being rebuked. When the bishop returned to the chapel, it was to announce that the Saints of Chelm were about to put their faith in God and the modern nation of Ukraine: the time had come to organize the ward’s first-ever group temple trip. 

Talk immediately turned to who planned to attend. Old Israel Lewensztajn surprised everyone twice: first, by still being awake, and second, by saying that he would not miss the trip for anything short of an urgent call from the other side of the veil. (In his capacity as ward executive secretary, Heshel put down Brother Lewensztajn as a “maybe.”) 

Oskar the Miser’s reaction to the sudden proposal, in contrast, was unsurprising enough to restore ward members’ sense of normalcy. “Why should I budget for a trip all the way to Kyiv now,” he asked, “when soon enough, someone else will be able to do my work by proxy for me?” (Beside Oscar’s name, Heshel wrote “next time.”) 

There were other nos. Zelda Gottstein said the trip to the phone had been quite enough. Lazar worried about carsickness. There were also other yeses. Mirele Schwartz, predictably, was willing to make any sacrifice to attend. The Cohens, shockingly, decided to go together. Menachem Menasche was excited both for the temple and for time together on the road with other ward members. The Fischers suggested games they could play along the way.  From there, vigorous discussion about bus-friendly entertainment picked up among the likely goers while the stayers fell quiet. 

Before long, Bishop Levy cut through all the chatter. Whoever decided to stay or go, he insisted, the trip would be for the whole ward. Over the next few months, they could all prepare family names to send. He challenged everyone to find five names for sealings, or else for the prayer roll. Heaven knew every family had need enough for both.

And so it was that the members of the Chelm ward went to work on their family histories. 

No one would plant a tree by tossing a leaf into the sky and waiting for it to grow a branch, and the branch a trunk. To Brother Cohen, it seemed equally absurd to start one’s genealogy in the fickle present. When talk turned to family history, he preferred to begin at that roots. During many a talk and many a lesson, he had opened up the good book to trace his way from Abraham to Levi, from Levi to Aaron, and then on down the generations through the many lines described in Leviticus and Chronicles and Ezra. 

But those ancestors had already served in one temple or another in Jerusalem and hardly needed an invitation to drop in on the one in Kyiv. And sometime before the temple was destroyed on a long-ago 9th of Av, the genealogies stopped. It simply wasn’t possible for the fathers to make it down in an orderly, linear fashion to the children. 

So Brother Cohen sighed and opened up a blank page in the back of his book. Perhaps it would have to be backward after all, with the children driving across the centuries in reverse for as long as the engine could hold out. “Aaron was the son of Eleazar,” he began, “who was the son of Amram, who was the son of Ezra, who was the son of Gotlib, who was the son of Chaim.” Writing scripture of one’s own, he realized, was remarkably simple if one stuck to the classic plot. 

Meanwhile, in the quiet that descended on her apartment in the evening, Clever Gretele was using a very different method to figure out which ancestors to begin with. It did not even occur to Gretele to move forwards or backward, since she had always thought of families as being more round. Relatives sort of circled around each other in her experience, waiting to pounce on the less alert. The person Gretele most desperately wanted to see in heaven was her mother, but Zelda might never die and, if she did, was probably too stubborn to leave the foyer even for the courts of God. Gretele decided that the best way to help herd the woman toward celestial glory would be by setting up some peer pressure in advance. To fulfill the bishop’s challenge, she set out researching her mother’s aunts, who had been pushy in this life and had hopefully retained that same virtue in the next.  

Oskar the Miser felt little need to search out his forebears in the Wiener family. Considering family legacy to be a kind of wealth, he counted his regularly. There was his uncle Nachum the cheapskate, who refused to pay for ice even in the hottest of summers because in a few months, everyone would get it free. He thought of his grandfather, Kopel the penny-pincher, who lived off a special soup made by filling old tea-bags with dried vegetables and letting the broth steep. There was a maternal cousin once removed, Libkind the extortioner, who narrowed the local wage gap by refusing to pay anybody for anything. And then there was the greatest of his great-aunts, Gryna the gold-digger, who had married seven brothers in succession and made it through a combined total of fourteen weddings and funerals in the same hand-me-down gown. 

It occurred to Oskar that Gryna had left him one last gift. He could send her first five marriages on this temple trip and still have two left for the next! That just went to show that it paid to plan ahead. 

In other homes, too, there was a great turning of the hearts. Leah Kantor started it with an old record player and a turning of the albums her relatives had loved. She thought it might coax their spirits closer and give them a head start preparing for the temple trip. Menachem Menasche faithfully chronicled the siblings and cousins in each generation leading up to his own, appreciating the crystalline shapes of stops and starts in his wide family tree. In the Levy house, Bluma and Bina put together a four-generation chart in which almost no one was dead and almost everyone needed blessings. Especially their father, whose worn nerves surely deserved a mention on the temple’s altar.  

If there were truly blessings coming, Bishop Levy wanted a divine advance. He had accepted that the trip would happen, but as he planned the particulars anxiety still twisted his stomach like a wrung-out rag. It was not that the bishop had anything against the temple. (It was true that his ancestors’ luck with such buildings had run out more than once, but so had his grandfather’s cow—and they’d chased her down each time to keep the milk up just the same.) No, the problem was Ukraine. 

Bishop Levy’s ancestors were not all from Chelm, and he knew a thing or two from old family stories. Growing up, he had heard wild tales about gangsters in Odesa. As for Kyiv, Bishop Levy’s mother’s cousin’s great-grandfather was a humble milkman from the nearby village of Boyberik and he had experienced nothing but scams and misfortune in the big city. The people of Chelm knew an offer too good to be true when they saw one—but they didn’t know how to turn it down. Naturally, he worried for them. 

Nor was Bishop Levy’s own family safe.  As the father of daughters, he was hardly eager to pass through Anatevka, where they might fall in love and break his heart. These days, a girl might choose a man who had a double life online as a Nigerian prince, or a live-in boyfriend who only wanted to make it as an influencer, or a perfectly likable wife. Yes, a father could never really know what would happen in Ukraine.  

The stake president had assured him it would be all right. After all, Ukrainians had recently elected a Jew as their head of state. What could go wrong, the stake president asked, in this day and age? Ah, but Bishop Levy had inherited an active imagination. He assured the stake president he could think of a few things.  

The only person who felt more conflicted about the trip than the bishop was Yossel the Fisherman. Ukraine didn’t worry him. The temple building looked perfectly nice, and he knew from a song his children sang that he was going there someday. But it would be with a little twinge of uncertainty, the nagging doubt that he was missing something. When the topic of family came up in the Church, as it so often did, Yossel always felt an extra burst of gratitude for the family that had taken him in as an infant after losing their own baby. But sometimes, he also felt curious about the anonymous parents who had given him birth. 

Thoughts of his birth parents could lead Yossel down a dangerous spiral. In church once, he had heard a story about an illiterate peasant who learned, after his death, that he was celebrated in heaven as his world’s greatest poet. For the angels, the speaker said, what truly mattered was not the man’s poverty, but what he could have written given the opportunity. That story was meant to be comforting, but it gave Yossel a sudden vertigo. He was a fisherman. He could hardly imagine himself as Yossel the Poet. Then again, his adopted father was a fisherman. If his birth father had raised him, would he be something else entirely? Perhaps, in a different life, he would have been Yossel the Trash Collector or Yossel the Car Salesman. Truth be told, he probably would not have been a Yossel at all. 

So what had happened to Not-Yossel the Not-Fisherman? Was he only in hiding, waiting to reveal himself in the eternities as the self who might have been? Or had an inheritance of fishing, through accident of the time just after his birth, sunk itself for the eons into the very shape of Yossel’s soul? 

At the same time he pondered his own post-mortal identity, Yossel found himself wondering about the brother he had never known. In his parents’ house, there was a thick silence about that lost son, the one who could have had Yossel’s life. Someday, perhaps, Yossel’s parents would develop an interest in the Church. Perhaps then he would bring up his missing brother—and his mother’s eyes would not grow misty and his father would not change the subject, because they would see that there was a way to be together with their son again. Their son, who could’ve been the fisherman. Their son, who might have filled the house with laughter. Who might’ve fallen in love with the girl next door, maybe even married Belka. All while, in the orphanage, not-Yossel the not-Fisherman might’ve been left without knowing any parents at all. 

In the next elders quorum meeting, President Gronam talked about family history. Family history, he said, was not simply a walk down memory lane, but a duty with a firm basis in doctrine. President Gronam liked duties because he hated indecision. Much better to go through life with the days resolving into neat sets of accomplishment and guilt than to wander through a sucking morass of possibilities. 

A man should know what to do. Projects, lists, even busywork, were some of the most gracious gifts God gave mankind. Even if it had nothing to do with family, genealogy would be useful because it was concrete, measurable, and all-but-inexhaustible. Until the Millennium, the dead were a renewable resource. The work for them was good as any wheel to put your shoulder to. And for all its challenges, it was hardly the most complicated part of belonging to a family. 

And so President Gronam reminded his quorum members what they were under obligation to do. He expected them to do this work, to do it right, and to do it right now. Like many kinds of paperwork, the urgency was no less than apocalyptic. According to Malachi’s prophecy, Elijah the prophet would come before the great and dreadful day of the Lord—to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children and the hearts of the children to their fathers. A Saint should do something about that. 

Brother Yossel Fischer raised his hand. He asked what it meant for the hearts to turn. He wondered, further, exactly which fathers were meant in the verse.  

President Gronam sighed. He liked the idea of family history as something to do better than he liked dwelling on the turn of phrase about Elijah turning hearts. Privately, President Gronam suspected that no other prophet had been given a more harrowing task. So many fathers’ hearts ran hard or hot—and who knew what would happen if you tried to wrench them aside from their accustomed courses? And children: their hearts were so hungry. It took years for most to accept the limits of what their fathers could offer and turn their expectations elsewhere. It was madness to turn those hearts back again. A kind of divine madness to expect that a collision of the hearts would go well. 

It was no wonder that Elijah slipped by so many houses each year for a sip of Passover wine. 

“Think of the temple like a factory,” President Gronam told Brother Fischer. “This factory packages relationships for transport—to a faraway country, or another world. And our duty is to feed in the raw materials. I don’t know what Elijah does with them.”     

As Yossel considered the raw materials of his own life, he thought of both families who had played roles in his creation. He was so much a product of the family he knew: good and loving parents who had always been there for him with noble ancestors who had lived pious and faithful lives. But, in some ways, he was also a product of the family he didn’t know: parents who, for whatever reason, had not wanted to raise a child. Had they loved him once? Had they loved each other? He didn’t know. He hadn’t ever looked for them because a part of him didn’t really want to know. 

But maybe President Gronam was right. A person’s duty was to find the names of his ancestors and offer them to God. Absent as they were, Yossel’s birth family were a kind of ancestors. Maybe not in the same sense as the parents who had given him a home and an identity, but he could claim them nonetheless. If he could find them, who knew what he might learn? 

On Wednesday, he decided to walk down toward the orphanage to see if they had any records about his origins. He wondered briefly if his birth parents still lived in Chelm. He considered the possibility that he had passed his birth father on a street or helped his birth mother reach a bottle off a high shelf while shopping. He wondered if they would want to meet him now, if they would be proud of the fisherman he had become. 

It was possible, of course, that his birth parents were dead and he would have to wait for the next life to find out. What if his birth father had died in an accident before he was born and his birth mother had died in childbirth? Maybe they’d been watching him all his life from the other side of the gauzy veil between the living and the dead. Or maybe they had been alive when he was young, but each died in the many years he wasn’t looking for them. He had growing children of his own: plenty of people old enough to be his parents were no longer among the living. 

But if they were alive. If they were alive, and he could find them, and he went to talk to them, what then? It was quite possible his absence had never troubled them. Maybe his birth mother had thought of him only in passing and with shame. Maybe his birth father had never known about him at all. What then if he found them and knocked on the door? 

Yossel walked past the orphanage. He walked past it without giving the building a second glance, but thoughts of his birth parents followed him down the block. He stopped in front of a small grocery store. If his birth parents were dead and in God’s hands, he didn’t need to understand in advance what God would do with their names. And if he didn’t need to understand what God would do if his parents were dead, maybe he didn’t need to know in advance what he would do if he discovered that his birth parents were alive. After all, hadn’t the prophets taught that Yossel was a god in embryo? If that was true, he was entitled to some mysterious ways. 

Yossel turned back toward the orphanage, not knowing beforehand what he was getting into. He walked past the corner store where Isaac Peretz used to buy his cigarettes. He picked up speed as he passed the front door of Fruma Selig and Hirsh the Atheist’s aging building. He ran past a cafe, where Leah Kantor and Menachem Menasche were having a heated discussion about the relative merits of Shostakovich’s fifth and tenth symphonies. Finally, he composed himself and walked up to the orphanage door, sure that the Lord would provide a way. 

Apparently, though, the Lord was not in a hurry. On Wednesdays, the front office told him, the place was short staffed and the records office was closed. 

Late that same evening, so late that she supposed it was night, Feige Cohen was thinking about her marriage. Aaron was not an easy man to know. She suited him well enough: she was not an easy woman. They were both so brittle; that was the trouble. Once either of their minds got set, it was stuck. After the barest hint of decision, both found it all but impossible to change course. And in any collision that followed, neither knew how to give, so the obvious alternative was to break. He could be so thoughtless and bull-headed, he would hurt her feelings without realizing it. Being more perceptive, she hurt his feelings on purpose. In a great leveling across their difference in emotional intelligence, the results were essentially the same. 

As the years passed and her heart calloused over, she found it easier and easier to forgive him in theory. But by then, her reflexes were too strong to forgive him in observable practice. Whether she thought he deserved her hard feelings was beyond the point; they were simply a matter of habit. She clung to each offense. She savored the bitter taste that came with licking her wounds. Yes: when she joined the Church, she’d found it surprisingly easy to give up coffee because she held on to her firm rituals of resentment. Having a chip on her shoulder energized her. A little spite gave her reason enough to get out of bed.  

She still loved her husband, and she wanted to be with him in time and eternity. Just not too close. Was there anything so wrong with that? 

Her children certainly thought so. They were of the opinion that there were better ways to grow up than on freezing glares and icy silences. Their parents’ way of relating left the children inside them feeling insecure and the adults they had become feeling embarrassed. A few years ago, the children had briefly hoped that Feige and Aaron’s conversion to Mormonism proved—against all previous evidence—that they were capable of change. There had been a brief window when her children had even been interested in the strange religion and its potential to transform. But after immersion failed to wash Feige’s personality away, their interest dried up. Except for the occasional visit from her granddaughter Zusa, Feige was left in the Church without branch. 

She would go to the temple on behalf of her ancestors. But she had no illusions. It was clear to her that she and Aaron were a weak link in their family’s long chain.   

Bishop Levy couldn’t sleep that night, either. As he lay in the bed, tossing, his thoughts turned to Benya Krik, the famous gangster they called the King. He imagined the King’s men stopping the bus and looking the Chelm ward members over. He felt so weak as he thought about how he must look to those tough old Odesa Jews and their modern successors. What an unflattering mirror the past could be. 

In the bed beside him, Sara Levy was also awake. She was tired, but every time she started to fall asleep, her husband would turn again. She wished for a moment he had a less sensitive heart. “I understand that you’re worried,” she finally told him, “but I still don’t understand what you’re so worried about.”

Her voice pulled him from his thoughts. Once he left the churn of them, the figures of the gangsters thinned but his embarrassment remained. He felt small. Silly. But since his wife was still up, he felt that he owed her the truth. “I was thinking about the ghetto where my great-grandmother grew up,” he said. “And wondering about this temple trip.” 

“That was a long time ago,” Sara said. “Why should those things keep you from sleep? The old ghettos and shtetls don’t even exist anymore.” 

She was right, he told himself. There were no more czars, no pale of settlement. No dance on the rooftops of an empire’s fringe. No Russian Empire. That world didn’t exist. Benya Krik was only a ghost. The village of Boyberik didn’t appear on any map. 

But maybe that was the problem. The most frightening thing about the past was the way it had of disappearing. He was afraid to go back and meet it, yes, but he was also afraid to go back and find it gone. 

The next day, the attendant at the orphanage records office received Yossel warmly. As soon as he had explained, to the best of his limited ability, who he was—and provided official documents to support his story—she was happy to retrieve his file. 

It was thin. The report did not list any names, descriptions, or contact information for his birth parents. Instead of mother and father, it offered the identity of the police officer who had retrieved an abandoned baby from beneath the sauerkraut in a nearby grocery store and the orphanage nurse who had recorded that lost baby’s length and weight. So far as the official paperwork was concerned, then, he was the descendant of two different departments of the state. Otherwise? His name: unknown. His birth date: unknown. The place: likewise unknown. And then, staring up at him from the midst of the vast unknown, Yossel noticed a strange thing. Even as an anonymous baby, his religion was listed as Jewish. 

After a moment’s puzzlement, he realized what this must mean. He had not been abandoned at birth. For at least eight days, someone outside the orphanage had cared for him.

That thought pierced his heart. And made the dead ends on the rest of the page feel so heavy. He was accustomed to thinking of his past as a nothing, but the fields on this form showed that his early life must have been made of missing somethings. For the first time, he wondered if he’d had a middle name. If he’d been named after someone. What the first blanket his mother had wrapped him in looked like. Now that he had one tiny glimmer of his past, he was more attuned than ever to the darkness. There were such specific things he did not know. 

Israel Lewensztajn was looking forward to the temple trip. He liked falling asleep in the chapel well enough, but he had never fallen asleep in an official house of the Lord! He only hoped he would not snore. 

He was especially looking forward to seeing family and friends there. Maybe, while sleeping in the temple, he would dream of his parents, his aunts and uncles, or his own great-grandfather. He could still remember the man’s forked white beard, and snatches of the melodies he used to sing around the table with his fellow Hasids. Maybe those friends of his great-grandfather would all come, too, still singing, and Israel would hear that old music again with the same wonder he had experienced as a small boy. It would be nice to be the young one at a party for a change.  

Over dinner, Israel thought to wonder about the food in heaven. He had spent long enough on earth to see tastes change, ingredients change, kitchens change, even dietary laws change. Speaking for himself, he wouldn’t mind having a little wine again in heaven. Then again, even if an angel brought it out on a platter, he’d feel suspicious of shrimp. He wondered whether most of the dead would prefer to eat and drink what they were used to. If you sat at a heavenly banquet with a medieval rabbi, for example, would he want a bite of potato latke? Or turn up his nose at the strange root? This struck Israel as an important question the prophets ought to spend more time praying over. What sort of feast would it take to coax the generations to the same table? For God’s work to progress, his people surely needed to know. 

It occurred to Israel that the scriptures suggested even angels enjoyed a little novelty. Hadn’t the three messengers who came to Sarah and Abraham rejoiced over her food? They could have packed their own to bring, in tiny heavenly boxes. But they didn’t. Mouths watered. Hearts turned. He resolved not to get out of touch after he died: he would come take a look at his descendants from time to time and see what was on their plates. Yes, he’d smell the sweet savor of whatever meats they decided to cook, in whatever strange future gravy or sauce. Earth surely had a surprise or two for eternity. Maybe that was part of the whole purpose of their partnership. 

Zelda Gottstein thought about eternity far less as she prepared not to go to the temple. As the ward planned for the trip, she thought instead, with a mix of longing and revulsion, about the bus ride. Everyone stuffed together for all those hours, with no more free air than from a window cracked a centimeter open. Yossel smelling, as he did, of fish. She wouldn’t miss that. 

But she would miss them. Fools that they were, bigger fool that she was, she would miss them while they were gone. She would miss the warmth of having them in a very next room. 

Zelda had never been one to fixate on sin, but separation? That was a problem she hoped this faith of hers really would solve. In time, and maybe after the darkness she expected when life reached its end. 

As Belka Fischer comforted her husband Yossel, it occurred to her that the way might not be so blocked as it seemed. So the orphanage didn’t know his birth date? The hospital must have records of any babies born there. He ought to check on the eight days or so before the policeman brought him to the orphanage. For that matter, a mohel might keep notes on the babies he had circumcised. So far as she knew, there was only the one who had been active in Chelm four decades ago: the old dentist, Moritz Froim. It seemed likely enough that her husband would have been abandoned in the same general geographic area as he was born. After all, a mother looking to be free had no reason to flee very far. A newborn baby couldn’t even crawl. With a little more looking, Yossel could surely find a few candidates, at least, for the person he might have once been.

And so it was that Yossel the Fisherman went out on another expedition. 

The hospital was less accommodating than the orphanage. Polish privacy laws simply weren’t designed for people with only a general approximation of their identity. They were happy to show a person a record regarding his or her own birth, but they expected you to know already with a great deal of  precision who you were. There was no provision for possible selves, let alone the proximate selves Yossel wanted to fish through. The records staff were sorry, of course, that he had lost both parents—in whatever senses of the word—but they needed him to understand that even as a baby, he had a right to privacy, which would last for his whole natural life. They couldn’t just let a stranger like him look at his birth records. If he could prove that he was dead, of course, that would change the story. Intruding on the living was a crime, but on the dead, it was research. 

Yossel thought and he thought. He was not in any hurry to die, but an opportunity was an opportunity and he felt he ought to take advantage of it somehow. After a few moments of consideration, he asked to see the records of any deceased babies from the time period in question, in the weeks before his arrival at the orphanage. That would at least give him a place to start, he pointed out, by showing which of Chelm’s children he was definitely not. The staff agreed to look, but the search led to another dead end. No babies matched that description, and Yossel had to leave without so much as a scrap of new knowledge about who he wasn’t.  

Given that disappointment, Yossel was low on hope by the time he reached the old mohel’s door. He had been assured that Dr. Froim was very likely still alive, though his hand was no longer steady enough to continue in his former lines of work. Sure enough, those hands rattled against the locks for several minutes before the retired mohel welcomed Yossel into his apartment. But when Yossel shared his story and asked his question, Dr. Froim readily agreed to take a look. He had not kept, he admitted, a direct list of the baby boys who had been brought to him. But families usually brought along a little money or a gift, which he had always listed in an account book alongside the parents’ names. It wasn’t much, he warned, but he could check and see about Yossel’s theoretical parents’ generosity. 

Yossel’s heart fluttered as the mohel’s hands flicked shakily through the pages in the year and then month of his mysterious birth. Sure enough, Dr. Froim announced at length, a couple had brought him a child at that time. Their names were Jakob and Rochla Fischer. 

The hope Yossel had felt rising in his chest was instantly deflated. Of all the possible names the mohel could have read, those two were the least helpful. The one documented baby was his brother. Truth be told, a part of Yossel felt jealous. It hardly seemed fair: why should Yossel’s brother, who needed no answers, have inherited this clue? He could hardly blame the child, but it was still frustrating. Why was it so often that those who had, received, while those who had not were left empty? 

But Yossel refused to give in to resentment. He would be his brother’s keeper. If he could look past his disappointment, Yossel realized, his trip had not left him entirely without insight. Given his parents’ silence on the subject, he had never known that his brother lived to be circumcised.  

On the night when Yossel found a clue, Menachem Menasche was reading in his scriptures about covenants. He’d made it past the promises of descendants like stars in the sky or sand in the sea, like fruitful branches growing over a wall, and was trudging through the stories of those descendants getting stuck like sand in uncomfortable places, when he happened upon a familiar story in an unfamiliar way.  In the book of Samuel, David and Jonathan made a covenant. Jonathan loved David as his own soul. He gave him his robe and his garments. 

Menachem stopped and looked up. He didn’t know just what sort of covenant those two had made. But he wondered what they would mean to each other in the time beyond all time. Yes, David had broken a whole tablet’s worth of commandments. According to the Doctrine and Covenants, he had forever broken relationships with his wives. But Nathan the prophet said God forgave David. The scriptures showed that God could sometimes equivocate, but they were quite clear that he could not lie. The Psalms said God would not leave David’s soul in Sheol. What kind of heaven would heaven be without some kind of relationship with people he had known and loved? 

Menachem loved his parents. Their very memory was a blessing to him, so he wanted more: to see them again, to be theirs and for them to be his. When that reunion came, he also wanted them to see how he had loved the world, to feel themselves extended through his relationships. He wanted them to feel what a good talk with Lazar or Leah meant to him, to see him studying with his students in Sunday School. To understand all the tiny ways he expressed life’s many loves. Of course, those were hardly the kinds of relationships a person took to the temple for transport across the veil. The truth was, and might well always be, that he had no new relationships to mark on a chart. Only the connections he carried in his heart. He supposed that he could, at least, bring that into God’s house. Lay it on the altar. Who knew what Elijah would do with it? 

President Gronam had never been particularly fond of thinking about his father, but that same night he decided it would be best if they were sealed. It was possible the shock of death and the vast expanse of the spirit world had opened his father to change. If that was the case, he might as well throw the man a rope, with the sealing’s weight acting as an anchor against the storms he was likely working through as he reflected on his life.   

Though he balked a little at the thought, President Gronam reassured himself that there was little enough danger in such an act of conditional charity. After all, if his father was still the same man he had once been (or at least seemed to be), then the sealing could work to his condemnation. The anchoring weight of family obligations would be no balm to a spirit still kicking against the pricks. And if it dragged him down instead, President Gronam felt no need to be sorry. Once mercy had claimed her own, justice and vengeance would be the same. Vengeance was not President Gronam’s, but it was quite emphatically the Lord’s. In life, kindness could easily slide into carelessness. There had to be boundaries. But when it came to questions of judgment and redemption, you didn’t have to be a fool to trust love. President Gronam was confident that God’s love would sound in the proper key. 

And on that same night, Feige Cohen dreamed of her mother. They had quarreled, sometimes, when Feige was young, but they often seemed to find their way back out of an argument without any lingering damage. After all these years, it finally occurred to Feige to wonder how. But she hesitated to ask. If her mother had a secret to resolving conflict that she had never shared, Feige would feel bitter. She’d say something curt, and her mother would say something back. Feige wouldn’t be able to stop herself, then, even though she wasn’t in the mood to fight over how their fights had ended. Not when her mother was sitting quietly, bent over some needlework. 

Since it wouldn’t do to disturb her, Feige leaned closer instead to see what her mother was working on. Her first impression was that it was beautiful. Delicate lacework in the shape of a tree. But the pattern was irregular, asymmetrical, and Feige felt a sudden itch to fix it. She found a needle and bent beside her mother to count the stitches on each row until she could see what had gone wrong. 

Looking closely, there were problems with more than the symmetry. As she scrutinized the stitching, it was clear the piece was filled with little mistakes. Sloppy. Slapdash. She was surprised her mother hadn’t given up. And yet: when Feige looked from any given stitch to the larger pattern, those quirks stopped looking so much like flaws. The longer she looked, the more they each seemed to be part of the design. There were odd twists worked into the leaves and fruit, almost-snarls made to conjure knots in the wood. The piece’s genius transcended planning: it was the product of inspired improvisation. 

Feige clutched her useless needle. She wanted to make things right, but she couldn’t tell what right was. It was so frustrating. A woman should know what to do. She wished, looking at the lacework, that she had her mother’s eyes, her mother’s gift. But that was hard to imagine. Feige had trouble letting anything go. Ah, she couldn’t stand it.  

And then her mother’s fingers were in her hair, stroking gently like she was a child again, drifting off to sleep. Those careful fingers. They were love, they were love, they were love.

The next time Bishop Levy saw the stake president’s number appear on the screen of his cell phone, he answered. But before he could report on his progress since their conversation on the meetinghouse phone, the stake president asked for his forgiveness. 

“It was wrong of me to push you,” the stake president said. “Sometimes I forget that eternity is a long time.” He cleared his voice. “The temple can wait for the people of Chelm. After all, waiting for us is most of what heaven does. If anyone has names they would like to send now, they can send them with another group. You should follow your judgment when it comes to your ward.” 

But Bishop Levy no longer felt quite such a strong desire to escape the journey. “Even if you were wrong, I think you were also right,” he admitted. “I don’t think that our ancestors would want some anonymous Christians poking across the veil and asking them to be baptized.” It would be better for them if their own family members came, inviting them to be sealed. Reaching across history was no small thing, but what better place to do it than in Ukraine? “We should be the ones to carry those names to the temple,” he said.  “We’ll be ready in the spring, God willing, for a trip to Kyiv and a wonderful time.” Sara was right. There was nothing to worry about. 

After reassuring the stake president one more time that this really was his choice, Bishop Levy brought the conversation to a close and turned his attention to searching for old family names. 

At that very moment, Yossel was making his way to his parents’ apartment. They would be happy to see him—they always were—but he wondered how they would react when they found out he’d been looking not only for himself, but also for the son they never talked about. Would they feel as though their children were conspiring against them? Since one of them was dead, the two Fischer boys had never done anything like this before. 

Yossel didn’t want them to feel bullied, but he wanted a question or two answered for a change. He wanted his brother to be remembered. For someone, finally, to say his name. 

Jakob Fischer threw his arms around Yossel right after he opened the door, and for a moment Yossel almost decided to let the sorrows of the past stay silent between them. But he had not visited an orphanage, a hospital, and the office of a retired dentist for nothing. He needed the truth. “I went to visit the old mohel,” Yossel began, “and he didn’t know anything about me.”

“Well, why would he?” Yossel’s father said. “Both your children are daughters.” 

“I mean about me before I was me, or when I was a different me. When I was a baby. But your names were written in his account book, because of my brother.” 

Yossel glanced over at the couch where his mother was sitting. Sure enough, a faraway look came over her and her eyes turned misty. 

For an instant, he could see a cloud pass over his father’s face, too, but then it was bright again. “How is Dr. Froim, then?” Jakob Fischer asked with a forced lightness. “I saw his nephew the other day, and he was telling me—”

But Yossel refused to let him change the subject. “I wish I knew more about my brother,” he said. 

His father met his gaze. “That was a long time ago,” he replied. “And there’s not much to tell. Why don’t you tell me about my granddaughters? I can make you some tea.” 

But Yossel pressed forward. “I want to know more about my brother. I believe he’s still there, in heaven. I believe I’ll see him again someday. But I don’t even know his name.” 

“It was Beniamin,” Yossel’s mother said suddenly. “Our little Beniaminek.”

Yossel’s father moved to sit beside her. He put an arm around her in a way that struck Yossel as half-comforting and half-protective. 

Yossel’s mother began to cry. “And he may not be in heaven—” she said, before her tears gave way to sobs.  

Yossel’s father stroked her hair. “Hush now, hush,” he said. He gave Yossel a reproving look. “You don’t have to talk about it.” 

Her shoulders continued to shake for a moment, but then they stilled. “He’s a grown man,” Rochel Fischer told her husband. “He deserves to know my shame.” 

Yossel did not know what to think. Shame? He could never have imagined his mother being unfaithful to his father, but then again—he knew her as a parent more than as a person. And that would’ve been long ago, years before his memories began. Like so many things. 

Yossel’s mother turned toward him. “Your father wasn’t even there,” she told him. “It was my fault we lost your brother,” she told him. “I lost him.”

“Even if you made a mistake, I don’t see how you would be to blame for his death,” Yossel said. That was old, magical thinking. God didn’t punish by taking away children. 

“His death?” his mother said. “God forbid.”

“She lost your brother,” Yossel’s father said. “We never could find him, but it’s possible that he’s still alive somewhere.” 

Then the words began to pour out of his mother in a torrent. “I was so tired. I could barely think. One day, I was coming back from some errands. It wasn’t until I stepped through our front door that I realized I had my bags, but his carrier was missing. I ran back to the stop, but it wasn’t there. I rode every bus I could find, but there was nothing. We contacted the transit authority, questioned the drivers, but none of it was any use. No one could remember anything. And how could I blame them—when I had forgotten my own suckling child?”

“For a week, she was inconsolable,” Yossel’s father said. “She wouldn’t go to work, would barely leave her bed. We had wanted a child so badly, and to lose him so soon . . . you’ve never seen a heart so broken. When a friend of mine, who worked at the orphanage, told me there was a baby there, I thought we should raise him. At first, she resisted—”

“I couldn’t bear to lose another child—” his mother said. 

“But I promised her I would keep you close to me, always. That’s why you never went to the yeshiva. Why I trained you to become a fisherman. I know it might not be the life you would have wanted, but you have to understand how frightened we were.” 

“Even after we adopted you, we spent the next two years looking for your brother,” his mother said. “But there was no sign of him. It was as if he had vanished into thin air.”

“We didn’t want you to grow up thinking that your brother was all that mattered to us, so eventually we gave up the search,” Yossel’s father said. “I only pray he’s happy somewhere.” 

Yossel turned to his mother. “What else do you remember about that day?” he asked her. 

“Besides the blind panic? The despair? The tearing my hair out searching?” 

“I need to know,” said Yossel, “exactly what was in the bags you were holding when you came home.” 

“Nothing of value!” Yossel’s mother cried. “Nothing worth losing a child! Some bread, some cheese, some potatoes. A jar of sauerkraut.” 

Yossel’s heart felt ready to burst. He had just lost a brother, but he had found himself. He was the product both of the parents he had known, and the parents he was just meeting, with their tragic secret and their hidden motives and their terrible self-doubt. “Oh mother,” he said. “How could I be angry at you for losing me in the sauerkraut aisle? I am only thankful for the policeman who left the note in his report at the orphanage that helped me find you again.” 

His mother looked at him in confusion. Then something dawned in her eyes. “Could it be?” his mother asked. “All this time?” 

“Our Beniaminek?” asked his father. 

“No,” Yossel said. “I am Yossel the Fisherman. The man I am is because of the child you raised. But yes,” he said. “You did give birth to me. And today, your lost son is found.”

James Goldberg is a poet, playwright, essayist, novelist, documentary filmmaker, scholar, and translator who specializes in Mormon literature.

Artwork by David Habben.

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Tales of the Chelm First Ward: Introduction