It was a beautiful spring day when the Silbers blessed their new baby. It was an extra special occasion for the whole ward: the tiny girl with such perfect tiny toes was Israel Lewensztajn’s first great-great grandchild. What a joy to bring together more relatives than fit on a four generation chart! Both Israel and his bright-eyed descendant slept like babies through the service, allowing their souls to soak in the blessing without any interference from the conscious mind. After blessing the baby, Brother Silber lifted her up for everyone to see the sweet, sleeping face.
In the pew just behind the chapel entrance, Tzipa felt tears running down her cheeks as the blessing came to a close. She was happy for Hannah Silber, who would be such a wonderful mother. Happy for all the Silbers and the other branches on the Lewensztajn tree. Yes, she was almost exhausted with joy. She knew she must be, because she loved the puff in their baby’s doughy legs so much it ached. The emptiness inside her was surely because she was so unreasonably happy for them, had somehow transmitted her own happiness to them in such abundance that she seemed to have none left inside for herself.
When she and Lemel had married, they had planned to wait a year or two before having children. He loved children, yes, but she’d been so busy building up her business and she hadn’t felt ready to have tiny feet running through their apartment yet. Had it been selfish of her to want to wait? The question was absurd, but Tzipa clung to absurd questions more and more as she searched for an explanation as to why, when she and Lemel had started trying, no child came. She needed an explanation for how all their love-making and cycle-tracking and doctor-discussing had left her womb empty as two years became three and three became four and four, as it will, stretched on to five.
Tzipa had always thought that not having children was what would take work. The women around her had always talked like getting pregnant was dangerously simple. You couldn’t let a boy touch you, because that led to pregnancy. You had to be careful with kissing, because that led to touching, and that led to pregnancy. Travel could lead to pregnancy: whether by parking together in a car, or going too far, or somehow managing both at once. Being out past midnight for any reason instead of at home and in bed often led to pregnancy (which was confusing, since bed was where most pregnancies began). And there seemed to be no limits to which drugs could lead to sex and pregnancy: even birth control pills were not beyond suspicion!
Train up a child in the way she should go and she’ll remain paranoid forever. After she was married, Tzipa worried obsessively about accidentally getting pregnant. She and Lemel, taking church counsel on emergency preparedness to heart, had purchased a year’s supply of contraceptives. They packed others in a 72-hour kit in the closet: during the stress a natural disaster would surely produce, that was the last thing she wanted to be without. In keeping with church counsel, they had made sure to rotate their storage often. They had been creative in the ways they used it. They had followed every piece of advice about preparation with vigor and zeal.
And? On Tzipa, all such caution had been wasted. The only contraceptive she and Lemel needed was their own physiology. Her mother and aunts might have saved their breath; she and Lemel might have saved their money. Why is it that so much of the advice in this world is taken most fervently to heart by exactly the wrong people?
Not that she’d ignored advice about fertility once she realized she might need it. She studied textbooks and collected old wives’ tales alike to determine how she and Lemel might try to persuade their bodies to produce a child. Tzipa had never needed a calendar to tell her that her womb might be ready to conceive, but she used one anyway to scientifically confirm what crescendos of desire suggested. On those same days, she made sure Lemel did not take showers that were too hot or wear pants that were too tight. His body, too, needed to be taken care of! She tried making love more frequently, rushing up the stairs from her bakery to their apartment whenever things slowed down. She tried making love less frequently, waiting longer than she liked in the hopes of giving his body more time to produce sperm.
Nothing worked. The doctor prescribed pills, but no babies came. The doctor gave injections, and still no babies came. Desperate, Tzipa and Lemel even drove to Warsaw to have her eggs fertilized and placed, but they failed to attach. It was almost as if they didn’t trust her enough to hold on.
Lemel insisted that wasn’t true, that it didn’t make sense—but nothing made sense. Tzipa couldn’t bear to try again. She couldn’t stand the thought of her own eggs continuing to reject her.
Tzipa knew it was probably for the best if she could forget about the whole thing and be content with her bakery and her Lemel and her God. Ah, but watching the Silbers bless their baby, she knew she still wanted to carry a child of her own. If only she could discover why God hadn’t sent her one!
Tzipa asked discreetly, indirectly, around the ward, to figure out how to trick God into granting a blessing. Not necessarily a child, but just any blessing a person happened to desire with a consuming, tidal force magnified over millennia of evolutionary history.
It was quite simple to get Gretele Gottstein-Kleiner started on the subject. She said that God showers blessings down on his children: on the just and the unjust, the miser and the glutton. Hard times come, she admitted, but eventually they get worn out. With a little luck and patience, everyone would find abundance sooner or later.
Tzipa made a mental note never to ask happy people for advice. Gretele seemed to sincerely believe this to be true, and perhaps it was. She seemed to sincerely expect it to be helpful, which it certainly was not. That was only natural; contentment rarely leads to genuine reflection. God must have realized that for the happy to think deeply would be a waste. Even if a satisfied person obtained some great wisdom, who would be able to hear it through the din of envy?
Recognizing the value of perennial dissatisfaction, Tzipa turned next to the ward’s leading overthinker. Menachem Menasche, surely, had spent enough time in his head to have some answer. Tzipa trusted, furthermore, that it would come tempered by his own disappointments and jealousies. (You could trust an intellectual to have a rich supply of those.)
Menachem, of course, couldn’t resist a question. He licked his fingers and opened up his scriptures. Flipping from verse to verse, he demonstrated that miracles come by the spirit of revelation. A hypothetical person must study the issue out in her mind, he insisted, employing ancient and modern methods to uncover nuances, apparent contradictions, and hidden layers of meaning. Next, she needed to ask of God, nothing wavering, and believing that she would receive, but at the same time guarding against false spirits and the lust for signs. Above all, she must keep in mind that God cannot lie—but will often equivocate for dramatic effect. Then, if her hands were clean and heart pure and she asked not amiss and God was willing, she could receive the answer or miracle she wanted or the one she needed or perhaps again some mix of the two, God condescending to meet her after the manner of her understanding.
Tzipa concluded that general happiness was not the only disqualifying characteristic in a good advisor. If a person wanted actionable advice, it was also best to steer clear of people who enjoyed ideas.
That standard also ruled out people who fixated on a single short motto, such as Brother Cohen, who said at least once a week that sacrifice brings forth the blessings of heaven, and Lazar the blind beggar, who was forever telling people to stop and smell the lilies of the field.
Who, then, to turn for blessing-getting advice? Oskar the miser was better at clinging to the blessings he had than at opening his hands to receive new ones. Dobra Peretz’s only advice was to wait until about 11 am, when things start to feel less cursed all on their own. And if you asked Bishop Levy how to get a blessing, he’d recommend reaching out to your ministering brothers or his executive secretary.
With all these options exhausted, Tzipa turned at last to Mirele Schwartz. Truth be told, there were reasons to believe that the woman was a good choice. Mirele was not temperamentally capable of being satisfied. She was far more a woman of action than ideas. And she intimately understood the nagging sense of wrongness and irrational guilt that Tzipa felt whenever she thought about her struggle to have a baby. Above all else, she had a child. Not an upsetting number of children, like the Levys. Just a single, quiet, precious child. Surely, she’d done something to convince God to trust her with Perla. All Tzipa had to do was swallow her pride and ask.
Mirele did not preach patience or load up counsel with endless qualifications. There is a law, she said, irrevocably decreed in heaven before the foundation of the world, which dictates the relationship between each act of obedience and its corresponding blessing. It may be, Mirele admitted, that this divine law was damaged and bent when it was dropped off on the earth. But sooner or later, God is bound to bless us—literally bound—if we discover the specific law upon which a blessing is predicated and cling to it with exacting obedience.
As Tzipa probed, Mirele was happy to offer examples. People who followed the Word of Wisdom would never get tired of running. Honoring father and mother was the best way to find a job in Poland. Just look at Dobra’s cousin Ronia. She quarreled with her mother and ended up in France. And if you wanted to feel closer to the dead, all you had to do was pay a precise and proper tithe and the windows of heaven had to open. Simple as the laws of physics.
And what law, Tzipa dared to ask, might open up the womb?
Ah yes, Mirele said. As far as fertility was concerned, she knew of no surer charm than absolute adherence to the roles laid out for women and men in a revelation known as The Family: A Proclamation to the World.
Tzipa was no Mirele Schwartz. But she felt as if, after years of treading water, she had finally been thrown a rope. How to be a mother need not remain a vague mystery. It was written. In words as solid and seizable as any iron rod. Tzipa went home from Mirele’s overjoyed with the hope that comes from fresh guilt. She had been lax, she had been careless, she deserved her suffering. It was so freeing to see it as more than ill fortune, so freeing to feel she deserved it—because then she could change, and stop deserving it, and regain control over her tiny corner of a vast and bewildering universe.
Tzipa’s enthusiasm cooled slightly when she got out the Family Proclamation and actually read it. There was an important problem: she wanted to be the perfect prospective mother, needed commandments to which she could be strictly obedient, but there was simply not a lot of strict there. Most of the Proclamation described a theology of longing for family and talked of children’s rights. Parents typically appeared as a unit, in gender-neutral terms. As far as defining the unique, God-given roles of women and men which Mirele Schwartz had alluded to, Tzipa could find only two sentences: “By divine design, fathers are to preside over their families in love and righteousness and are responsible to provide the necessities of life and protection for their families. Mothers are primarily responsible for the nurture of their children.”
Ah, well. Bare bones still make soup if you boil them long enough.
Lemel seemed well on his way to meeting God’s standards for a father. He was certainly loving and undeniably righteous. She was not sure what might count as presiding, but he was probably not so good at that. She was also not sure what it meant to provide the necessities of life. That seemed to be what the placenta did—which was, non-negotiably, a mother’s contribution. If it meant rent and groceries instead, her bakery paid for far more of those than his work repairing the town’s few pianos. But he had always been willing to provide the necessities of protection, rather than leaving her with the burden of contraception, as many men reputedly did for the women in their sexual lives.
The Proclamation’s list for mothers was much shorter. If she was to wrestle with God through these words, he’d played a dirty trick by making her whole sentence about children. However acutely she felt the absence at the core of her divine role, though, she refused to turn away. If you left the children out, what remained? Only “responsible” and “nurture.” She could work with that. She would wrestle a blessing out of those two words.
Tzipa was reasonably responsible. In her relationship with Lemel, she was not sure she would go as far as to say that she was primarily responsible for much. Money, yes. But he did more cleaning and most of the reading out loud. Though she was quite capable in a kitchen, all the baking she did in her shop meant she typically left it to him to cook at night in their home. But she kept track of where things were in the apartment and on the calendar, and she always paid their bills on time.
And nurture? She managed. She planned. She calculated. For her, though, taking care of things meant crossing them off a list. Not tending them. Tzipa did not think of herself as very tender.
She and Lemel had real work to do.
Tzipa tried to broach the subject casually the next Sunday after church at lunch.
“Have you ever wanted to preside more?” she asked Lemel.
His face puckered as if she’d snuck a lemon into his borscht. “Not really,” he said. “I know you don’t see it, but President Gronam already does that in elders quorum more than enough.”
“I meant at home,” she said.
“Oh, you know I wouldn’t do that to you,” he said. “Besides, I wouldn’t know how to be so gruff.”
Tzipa looked at him until he met her eyes. “Well, I’m not asking you to be like President Gronam. Only to call on someone to say the prayers or make some assignments or whatever a president in the home ought to do.”
“I suppose I could do better at helping us to remember our prayers,” Lemel said. “Are we so bad at that?” For a moment, he studied her face. “Is something bothering you? Am I bothering you?”
Tzipa thought of the baby they did not have. “It’s not that I have complaints about our relationship,” she said. “I’m just trying to impress God. And apparently he has strong opinions.”
“We could try buying him flowers,” Lemel suggested. “Lazar says God is very fond of flowers.”
“Or,” Tzipa countered, “we could change things around in our home so you preside and provide, while I find something to nurture.”
Lemel set his spoon down. “You want me to provide? For a place like this?”
Tzipa nodded slowly. “Is that too much to ask?”
He shrugged. “I thought we were happy.”
“We were!” Tzipa said. “I mean, we are. But of course, there is more to life than happiness.”
“Of course,” Lemel said, though he had no idea what she meant.
“I will call on you or myself to pray before each meal and I will have us sign a roll each day to make sure we are here and I will try to complain about how we are neglecting our duties.”“I would appreciate that very much,” Tzipa said. When he put it that way, she realized that if she did become a mother, she should very much like not to be the only one complaining when their child neglected his or her duties. Perhaps Lemel’s practice presiding would be useful after all.
“If you will show me how our finances work,” Lemel added, “I will find a way to provide.”
Tzipa promised to take him through her accounts. She knew Lemel disliked change, but he loved her, and she was glad to see him so willing to try something new.
Lemel stayed up late that night wrestling with some uncomfortable numbers. Math was never his strongest subject, but he could still see that his income fell far below the sum of expenses Tzipa tracked so carefully across her accounts. That only made sense: it wasn’t so hard for Tzipa to pay for a bakery when you took into account what she earned from the bakery. But if he tried to pay for the bakery just from the jobs he did, they would be selling a lot less rugalach and a lot more matzah.
He could try expanding from pianos into the repair of other instruments. An accordion was basically a piano with a bellows. What was a violin but a piano without any hammers or keys? And a harmonica was a kind of mouth organ, which made it something like a piano’s second cousin. Lemel typed up some estimates and sighed. It’s hard to earn much from harmonica repair. He supposed it could have been worse—at least he wasn’t a writer—but it could have been a great deal better. He could have been a baker like Tzipa.
Then again, why shouldn’t he be? Lemel had never cared much for early mornings or the stifling heat of Tzipa’s ovens, but the Family Proclamation praised Adam and Eve and the Bible said Adam had earned his bread by the sweat of his brow. Why not follow in the footsteps of humanity’s ancestor?
There was the small matter of starting a bakery. He briefly considered buying Tzipa’s, but he needed to save up for a down payment first. He decided to begin more humbly, doing his own baking in their apartment kitchen until he could afford to buy the big ovens downstairs, and selling his food door-to-door to save the rent he’d otherwise have to spend on a shop.
He wondered absently if customers would mind that he was terrible at baking.
Lemel’s first customer was Oskar the Miser, who bought a badly burned roll for a little less than the ingredients cost. His second customer was also Oskar the Miser, who bought a day-old, badly burned roll for quite a bit less than the ingredients cost. His third customer remained Oskar the Miser, who bought most of a batch of two-day-old, badly burned rolls at a temporary discount so steep that there was no price at all.
After that, though, business started to pick up. Lemel got just enough better at baking that he could use sticky glazes and sweet sauces to cover his mistakes. Since he sold mostly to his instrument repair clients, he also found himself with more and more work as a piano cleaner.
Slowly, he crept his way closer to being able to provide. It would not be too many years before he would be able to pay for himself and Tzipa. It would be longer of course, before he would be able to provide for Tzipa’s bakery, or the child she wished to have, let alone whatever their child wished to have: perhaps its own butcher shop? He tried not to think about it.
Meanwhile, Tzipa began her first experiment with nurturing. After reading that to nurture was to help a thing grow, she had made a long list of things that might need her help growing. A baby, of course, was what she hadn’t been able to have, and pets were a burden she did not want. She had already killed a long line of house plants over the course of her life and did not care to help others limp along to a slow death of thirst.
It finally occurred to her that a sourdough starter needed plenty of nurturing. She hadn’t had any sourdough breads on her menu, but that could change. Over the course of several days, she was able to capture some stray cells of bacteria from the air to produce a bubbling concoction with the potential to completely take over her life. What more could God want?
After a little experimenting, she got the bread right. Her customers, who heard her talk of little else, would buy up each loaf almost as soon as she made it and often ask for more. At first, Tzipa flushed at their praise, but then she realized she was neglecting her duties. Nurturing was not to be a secondary responsibility, something to do in the service of bread or customers, but her primary responsibility. She needed to act with exactness.
Tzipa was determined. Late at night, she would research the science of her tender bacteria until she understood exactly the conditions it needed. From one jar of starter she soon had two, and from two, four, and from four, eight, and so on—until her sourdough starter took up all the shop’s available storage space.
There was more to nurturing, though, than helping the starter grow. The starter deserved to thrive. If she left it too long, it grew crowded and could choke on its own waste. To stay healthy, a growing starter needed to be divided again or else baked into bread.
Once she ran out of room to divide it, baking was the only option. Her sourdough now took over more and more of the menu. In addition to the rye, she baked sourdough loaves of barley and wheat. She made sourdough bagels and sourdough blintzes and sourdough rugalach. She even tried to come up with a way to make the world’s first sourdough matzah.
Her customers struggled to keep up. The more sourdough took over the menu, the faster their early enthusiasm declined. Tzipa made sure to tell them what they were missing. She insisted they buy sourdough slices to go with anything else they wanted to purchase. But no amount of praising and persuading, haggling and threatening was enough.
People simply didn’t want enough of her sourdough, and when she forced it on them, more and more customers stopped coming altogether.
Lemel was miserable. For some reason, his business was booming, but the kitchen had only the one small oven. He was spending more and more of each night baking to keep up.
His efforts to preside were suffering. He was often out making deliveries already when it was time for morning prayers, and simply sent a text message to Tzipa reminding her to pray for the both of them. Lost in her obsession with her sourdough starter, she was neglecting scripture study. Though it was hypocritical of him to tell her so (as his own had been all but abandoned for baking) he did his best to speak up. If he happened to say something while she was busy with her starter, though, she often snapped at him.
Not that she was the only guilty one. At Mirele Schwartz’s suggestion, Tzipa had also insisted on taking over most of the cleaning. When he saw the simple things she was forgetting, things he never would have thought to neglect, he often snapped at her himself.
What was worse, Tzipa had also taken over the cooking at home. Normally, Lemel wouldn’t have minded her help. Now, though, Tzipa’s cooking mostly involved increasingly bizarre uses of sourdough. He’d eat sourdough granola bars for breakfast. For dinner, sourdough dumplings in sourdough-thickened soup. Week after week, the sour filled his belly until it soaked into his heart. And still, Tzipa piled more and more onto his plate.
One evening, facing a mound of unsold sourdough rolls on his dinner plate, Lemel couldn’t bring himself to eat. He couldn’t even bring himself to speak. He only sat, staring at the unyielding mountain of bread while Tzipa sat staring at him, no doubt waiting for him to call on someone to say the prayer. He tried to find the strength to do so, but it was she who finally broke the silence.
“My business is falling apart,” she said. Tears welled up in her eyes. “No one in the shop wants my bread anymore either.”
“It’s all right,” he said. “I can almost provide.”
But her tears didn’t stop. In fact, she began sobbing. “I didn’t mean for all this to happen,” she told him. “I just wanted us to be more obedient. I just wanted to prove we could live according to the Family Proclamation.”
Lemel looked at his plate again. “I know it’s an honor to live by the word of God,” he said. “But even scripture admits that a man cannot live by bread alone.”
Tzipa wiped her eyes. “I am so tired of sourdough,” she said, “that I would sleep better if I never saw a container of starter again.”
“Are you sure?” Lemel asked.
She nodded fiercely. “With all my heart.”
Lemel smiled. “Then let me preside just one more time,” he said. And he led her down the stairs, so they could smash jar after jar of the musty stuff together. Like Sampson bringing a building down.
After they had swept up all the broken glass, after Lemel had cleaned the apartment to his liking and Tzipa had replaced her sourdough menu with the names of all the things she’d sold before, after they had collapsed into bed together, their fingers intertwined, after they’d slept in and called Lemel’s customers to apologize for deliveries that would be delayed, and Tzipa had helped him bake all the orders in the large bakery ovens—after all that, Lemel dared to get out the Family Proclamation for the two of them to study together.
And Tzipa promised not to nurture any more sourdough. And Lemel asked her if it would be all right if he didn’t try quite so hard to preside. As to providing: since Lemel’s customers were mostly people who had left Tzipa when she forced them into sourdough, he promised to send them all back. And Tzipa said that from that day on, she and Lemel would be equal partners—just like the very next sentence of the Family Proclamation said that husbands and wives ought to be.
Tzipa did not miraculously find herself pregnant the next month, or the next, or the next, but she did feel at peace: with her home and her bakery and her Lemel and the happy family the two of them could, so often, be.
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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