The Golem Mother of the Catskills
Talya Jankovits
Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest 2024 (view all the winners)
Honorable Mention, Fiction
None of us will forget the sight of Elisheva Bornstein walking up the dirt path from the lake that day in 1984. Her hair was exposed, grey roots blending into the blonde it threatened to overtake. Her head scarf, the color of which some of us still argue over, pink with a green paisley design or green with a pink paisley design, was slipping backwards down the back of her scalp. Often, we get caught up with the small details. Easier to argue over the color of a headscarf than to try and unravel the many mysteries of that summer day.
She wasn't a particularly strong-looking woman, but she had child-bearing hips and thighs like the rest of us, wide and soft beneath her flowing skirt. But Elisheva carried her daughter in her arms, the small, round head limp-necked and dangling, her legs, barefoot and swaying. Five little toes on each foot. So small. So tiny she looked. But she must have been heavy. And they say a dead body is heavier than a living one despite no change in its mass.
Elisheva did not have it easy, which made it all the more difficult for us to witness her anguish that day. She was alone. Had been alone since just a few months after she gave birth to her daughter. A widow whose husband died without warning or explanation in his bed one night. She lived near most of us in Flatbush and that first summer after his death we were all surprised to see her and her young daughter arrive in the Catskills. Perhaps we all assumed grief didn't take summer vacations. It didn't. It went along with the vacationers to haunt them.
That first summer after her husband died, we were unsure how to talk to her in the bungalow colony. And all there ever was to do those long summer days was talk to each other, between drying wet bathing suits and preparing three meals a day and applying aloe to sunburns and Calamine lotion on bug bites. Because we all had young husbands that now could die without warning or explanation in the middle of the night. She frightened us. She was a reminder of death. Pain. Of singularity in a world where most of us were so bound up in each other's lives we knew the moment one of us was pregnant or bleeding.
We all came to the Catskills to escape the boredom and routine of life at home. Each of us renting or owning a bungalow often out of our financial means. But who were you if you didn't spend the muggy summer in the mountains! We might have even been resentful, that she would dare to bring her sadness when we were all escaping. But we sat on our porches drinking cold cans of cola and swatting at buzzing mosquitos as they nibbled our skin beneath our stockings or long skirts. We sat and threw her porch negative glances, not because we disliked her. But because we didn't want to be her. Touched by grief. Weighed down by it.
She was from Ukraine, but back then we all just said she was Russian. She arrived at our doorsteps as Sasha but before long she was correcting us, Elisheva. She spoke English fluently, but she had an accent that made her seem old to us, though she couldn't be much older or younger than any of us. The foreign accent amongst us born and bred Brooklynites made her seem like a character from a mystical fable. One of us used to do an Elisheva impression. It was quite good too. A mastered imitation of her accented English. Of course, we were sure never to do it in earshot and the impressions stopped as soon as her husband died. We knew better than that.
It's hard to remember who first discovered the body of six-year-old Baila Bornstein. Many of the children claim they spotted her first but us mothers are quick to shush them, no one wants their child to have been the one to find a dead child.
At first, rumors circulated up from the lake that there had been a drowning. The entire colony erupted into a fearful cry. Dozens of mothers, and fathers who were lucky enough to be there during the week, crying out. Let it not be mine! Let it not be my friend's! My neighbor's! Let this awful tragedy not touch me! No one heard Elisheva cry out during this frantic descent. No one knew where she was. Or why Baila was down by the lake alone to begin with. That most of the children, that nearly all the children were by the lake unsupervised did not seem relevant at the time of our outrage over a dead child. And our little ones had older siblings attending them. But poor little Baila had only her mother. No siblings. No father. In fact, Elisheva had nearly no relatives at all. Having come alone to the States and leaving most of her family behind, and her husband's family all secular and living back on the West Coast, she and Baila were truly alone.
But it was the children, we think. It most obviously was the children who must have discovered Baila. Their screams must have beckoned us from the comfort of air conditioning. The shouting and crying and snot-stained faces of terrified girls and boys must have been the confirmation that something dreadful had happened. That was how we all found out. But who told Elisheva? The rumor is that no one did. That everyone in the bungalow colony had come running down to the lake to assess the tragedy and/or claim it. And run we all did. Screen doors ripped open from force, slamming back hard on squeaky hinges. Mothers in robes, in scarves, in snoods, in slippers. Mothers with only one eye of mascara on. Mothers holding wooden spoons still stained red from a boiling tomato sauce. Mothers coming from every direction, kicking dirt up in their stampede towards the unknown. All converging at the bottom of the lake. The child lay lifeless at the water's edge and no mother dared touch her. No mother dared touch another mother's dead child. We waited for the flesh of the flesh to lay claim.
Elisheva was a near apparition. At some point in our stifled horror, our skirts burying the innocent faces of our children from such a calamity, she appeared. She was white as a ghost. Like the Nile, we split, making way for her to affirm her next tragedy. And to distance ourselves from whatever terrible evil eye she possessed. That a single person could be so blemished by so many tragic deaths was unseemly.
We kept our hands over our mouths, watching in horror as Elisheva approached her daughter. Some of us turned away unable to witness such an intimate moment of anguish. Elisheva moved slowly, as if in a dream. Did we remember it that way? Did we slow it down in memory to help process it all better or did she actually move with trepidation? Was she trying to elongate the brief moment where her daughter is alive before it morphs into the one where she isn't.
Baila was sandy. There was a bit of sand around the lake. It sat in patches and then dusted the blades of grass several feet from it so that all summer long no matter how we tried, our floors and mattresses always had a few pestering grains of sand sticking to feet, grinding against a cheek. No one knew where the sand came from or how it got there but some of the children played in it, insisting their mothers bring beach toys to the Catskills each summer so they could pat the moist sand into bright primary colored buckets whose cheap white plastic handles would snap under the weight of wet sand. Next to Baila was a red bucket. An old one. The handle broken, a giant chunk of the plastic missing, making a sharp and dangerous edge. It hadn't looked used recently. It was faded. There was no indication she was playing with it but we all noticed that ominous sharp red edge.
Her clothes were damp, but she did not look as if she had gone into the water. She had on a blue A-line dress with a quilt design, much too heavy for summer weather, but pretty, nonetheless. Her white knee-high socks with a small blue flower stitched into the top trim were later found in the grass by a pregnant mother who wept when she discovered them. This mother kept those socks inside a pink velvet pouch from some keepsake or another in her nightstand. An indiscernible need to remind herself of the vulnerabilities of motherhood. At least that's what we heard came of those socks once we got back to Brooklyn.
Elisheva moved fluidly. She did not pause over her daughter. She did not stare down in disbelief. She did not drop to her knees and pull her hair and tear her clothes and pound her chest. Like a rehearsed choreography, as if she had anticipated this dead child was what she would find when she got to the end of the crowded pathway, she simply bent down in one graceful motion and scooped her daughter up into her arms.
Without a word to any of us, without so much as a wayward glance, she walked back past the way she came, her scarf slowly slipping downwards, and with one foot in front of the other she made her way.
None of us knew what to do. Do we send the children back to play? Do we usher them all back into the bungalows despite the sun still high in the east and the sky cotton candy blue without a single threatening cloud as far as the eye could see? And what of ourselves? We had a whole day in front of us. Washing to do, dinners to cook, porches to visit. Does it all go on hold just because Elisheva Bornstein was once again a victim of unforeseen tragedy?
A low hum like hovering bees echoed along the lakeside. We were convening. Was she dead? Perhaps she was just unconscious. Did Elisheva even take a pulse? Why did she appear so calm? What kind of mother reacts in such a way. Did she drown? Did you see, Dovi? Did you see, Chana? Who spotted her first? Who called for an adult? What happened!
We were all so involved in our own reactions that no one seemed to notice where Elisheva was going. Because she had passed her own bungalow. And really, where was she planning on taking the child anyway? There was no infirmary, this wasn't an actual camp. Just a bungalow colony where a dermatologist who summered here with his wife and kids would occasionally stitch up a torn piece of flesh and examine endless bouts of eczema free of charge for his fellow bungalow members. There was no hospital, not for miles. One would need a car or a car service and come to think of it, Elisheva Bornstein didn't have a car. How did she even get up here? With Perela Hersch. Perela is Elisheva's next-door neighbor back home in Flatbush, and it is her annual chesed to bring Elisheva and Baila up to the Catskills each summer and return them late August. Elisheva was only allowed one suitcase for the whole summer, not because Perela was stingy, G-d forbid! But because there wasn't enough room in the station wagon for Perela's whole family's summer luggage and Elisheva and Baila's. And Elisheva was not given the front seat, not because she didn't deserve it as the only other accompanying adult on Perela's drive up, but because Perela's eldest son, Shlomie, who was fourteen that fateful summer, always got carsick and needed to sit up front. So Elisheva and Baila found themselves squished in the very back row between two screaming toddlers for the entire drive up from Flatbush with just one suitcase for the lot of them for the entire eight weeks of summer vacation.
So that's how Elisheva got to and from the Catskills each summer.
There on the banks of the lake, we all knew Perela was crying. What we didn't know was that she was crying because she thought she would have to drive the dead child back to Brooklyn alongside her living ones.
While the lot of us chatted over what to do or not to do in such a circumstance, the children grew restless, already forgetting the morning's trauma and without our even condoning it, they all slowly drifted into play. Some began splashing in the lake. One child started shoveling sand with his bare hands into the broken red sand bucket that just moments ago was inches from Baila's body. Other children continued to bounce a ball to one another. They resumed a game of tag. The mother with the red stained wooden spoon suddenly remembered her pot of boiling meatballs and clasped her snood as she ran back to her bungalow crying out, my dinner! And before we all knew it, we were on each other's porches drinking cold sodas and eating salami sandwiches discussing nothing else but Elisheva Bornstein.
What we hadn't seen was that Elisheva carried her daughter in her arms past her own bungalow, down the long wide and winding road, a half mile to the Rabbi's doorstep. Every bungalow colony had a Rabbi. Or several rabbis. But our colony was lucky enough to have the very Rav Shlita Shunem spend his summers learning and studying in our midst. He was so revered that he traveled always with his two gabayim. Both of them nearly six and a half feet tall with broad large imposing builds and a dozen or so children each, who occupied the bungalows next door to him in order to wait on him hand and foot. He was so admired that people from other bungalow colonies came to ours to pay him a visit and seek a blessing. Even people from the cities who weren't summering in the Catskills, which weren't many, came to our little colony to see Rav Shunem. He was known to travel to different major cities to dole out blessings, to grace a community with his holiness. He was, more or less, a spiritual celebrity.
His beard was long and white. His peyus, curled and framing his face. He was shrinking with age, hunched from studying Torah for twelve hours a day. His eyes were large in his sunken face always behind thick lenses, and he had a scar on his mouth that caused him to lisp. The rumor was he was jailed by the Cossacks and beaten, all for being a Jew in the USSR.
To say Rav Shunem was a holy man understated his knowledge and influence. How he chose our little nebby bungalow colony was beyond any of us. None of us were particularly pious, no more pious than anyone else at least. We weren't a bunch of Shunem followers, though we relished that he spent eight weeks in our proximity. Really, he came for his health. His doctor prescribed him fresh air, time away from the fumes and stresses of his home in Brooklyn. And it was to his bungalow that Elisheva carefully made her way.
What we heard is she kicked his door with the toe of her white sneaker. She could not knock as she held Baila in her arms, so her only option was to kick at the Rav Shunem Hashlita's door. We all shuddered in deep shame over this detail. The sheer chutzpah, to kick at the Rav's door. Yet, we didn't dare expect Elisheva to put the sacred body of her child on the dirty porch of a Catskill bungalow. How we expected her to knock without a single one of us assisting her or accompanying her at such a time was something none of us seemed to have consider as we all sat on our yenta porches.
It was the rabbi's wife who answered the door. She had just been getting up to make her husband a hot water with lemon and honey when she heard a pounding emanating low from her front door. She was a small woman herself and barely came to Elisheva's waist so that when she opened the door she was staring directly at the deceased child. She was so frightened by the sight that she dropped the glass mug she had been holding. Elisheva did not greet her, she only said, We are here to see the Rav. She said it not in her native tongue and not in her accented English one but in the tongue of ancestors, in the tongue of mystics. She said it in Aramaic.
We are here to see the Rav.
But who is we? It was only Elisheva. Baila was already stiffening in her arms.
The rebbetzin was flabbergasted. Stunned by the theatrics of it all. The dead child. The shattered glass. The Aramaic. She couldn't answer. She couldn't speak. Instead, she stepped aside. Though Elisheva had never once stepped foot in this house, she crunched the broken glass beneath her Keds sneakers and walked past the rabbi's wife and made her way to a back room where the air was so thick you could see it in tiny floating particles. No lights were on, but the windows were bare, and sunlight poured in relentless rivers of daylight.
When Elisheva walked through the open doorway, left ajar by the rabbi's wife who had come to collect his empty mug and refill it with the intentions to return shortly after, the two traveling gabays stepped forward in quick unison, blocking her way with their wide bellies and sweat-stained dress shirts. It's hard to know if Rav Shunem already caught a glimpse of Elisheva before his laymen blocked her way or if his eyes never lifted from the words of Torah before him and that it was divine prophecy that told him who was standing in his doorway.
Step aside, the Rav said in Yiddish. His two gabayim parted, allowing the gleaming sun to spotlight Elisheva and the deceased child still carried in her arms. When the light hit the child, it seemed to be radiating off her. As if the shechina itself was inhabiting the body of this innocent and pure girl.
He took my husband from me in the middle of the night. He will not take my child from me in the middle of the summer. I do not accept her death.
Elisheva spoke in Aramaic still. She spoke to the Rav without introduction. Without apologies or niceties. She was a mother with a mission. She moved forward and despite the rabbi's table laden with thick books of gemarah, she laid her dead child down before them, the tips of her bare feet still sandy, granules sprinkling the rabbi's desk.
The two gabays leaped forward in outrage but the Rav held his hands up, a palm each hovering to his sides, halting his zealous protectors. The men retreated into the shadows, their hands nervously stroking their thick beards.
Rav Shunem looked down at the lifeless child on his desk. Her mother had not pulled back the strands of hair that were caked to her face. She did not dry off her damp dress or shake off the granules of sand. There, in front of one of the most revered Torah scholars of our day, was a dirty, damp, dead child on the holy words of Torah that our great Rav was just moments ago studying.
The Rav began to weep.
It hadn't occurred to any of us that Elisheva had not yet shed any tears for her daughter. We speculated later that perhaps it was because she refused her daughter's death. Not just mentally, not just emotionally, but physically. She refused to accept the natural order. She had ascended and would not descend back to the mundane life of the Catskills until her daughter descended with her.
The Rav though, he was moved. He was shaken. To behold a dead child, to witness life taken far too early, in its prime, in its jubilant innocence, that is to witness the most tragic of worldly tragedies. There is no greater loss than that of a child.
The room was still but for the sobbing of the Rav. His head sunk, cradled between his bony drooping shoulders. His body heaved with his cries. The stale musty air vibrated and shook with the sound of his sorrow. Elisheva stood stark still. She didn't move. She didn't release a sigh of gratitude at having unburdened herself of her daughter's dead weight.
Minutes passed. Elisheva did not move or further inquire. The two gabays stood like statues in the shadows of bookshelves. Baila lay lifeless on the desk. The Rav wept. It felt like a trap. Circular. Endless. No one daring to break the lack of action until Rabbi Shunem himself did. And then he did.
He lifted his head and rolled back his shoulders. The chair he was seated on pushed out from beneath him and he very slowly rose. He was a man short in stature, and yet he loomed above them all. He made his way to the door of his study. He closed it, catching a glimpse of his wife on the floor collecting shards of glass. Her eyes darted upwards momentarily, catching the gaze of her husband as it gradually disappeared behind a closed door. He missed her nod. Her approval. Her understanding. Her complicity. She was a mother too.
Elisheva had not turned her head to follow the movements of the Rav. She kept them focused on her daughter. Perhaps she was scared if she took her eyes off her, it would solidify this early death. Perhaps she thought her daughter was scared, wherever she was, her soul hovering between worlds, this and the next, pulled by G-d towards one and her mother to another, and Elisheva didn't want to leave her alone by lifting her gaze.
The Rav shuffled back past her, his gabayim unsure what their role was there, their eyes steady on mother and child. The Rav went to a bookshelf and took two books down. He handed a prayer book each to his gabayim. It is time to pray, he said in Yiddish to them. The room buzzed with guttural sounds of Lashon HaKodesh. The gabayim did not pray quietly nor did they pray overtly, but they joined together in voice from across the room and sent words of ancient prayer up towards the heavens. Rav Shunem though, he prayed quietly in a whisper that seemed to wisp through the room, tickling the earlobes of Elisheva and quickening the nervous beats of her heart into a stampede.
This went on for quite some time and little pearls of sweat formed at the corners of Elisheva's head and we think this might be when she finally realized her scarf had slipped back down her neck. That she was standing before the great Shlita Shunem with her hair mostly exposed. We imagine she reached up, pulled the lip of it over her head and tightened it beneath the ball of her neck. Because by the time she left that bungalow her hair was securely covered.
When Rav Shunem finally stopped praying, the room felt fuller. The Adam's apples of the gabayim rolled up and down as they tried to moisten their mouths, the whole room stifling. Rabbi Shunem beckoned for his men, and they were by his side in an instant. He pointed to the child and then to the rug beneath his feet. The two men lifted Baila with ease and placed her gently on the ground before the rabbi's black loafers. Then he reached out an arm and one of the gabayim took it, held it securely in his own while the Rav slowly got down on his knees, the tips of Baila's toes grazing the edges of his kapatah. And then, Elisheva drew in air, an audible gasp as the Rav laid himself atop the child. A knee to a knee. A chest to a chest. Heart beating upon stilled heart. Palm atop palm. Forehead upon forehead. Eyes upon eyes and mouth upon mouth. The Rav was stretched out upon the child and the held breaths of his audience watched as minutes passed and soon a heat began to rise off the skin of the child. As a warm rosy color returned to the girl's skin.
The Rav reached a hand up, and again a sturdy one appeared, helping him up off the child, off the floor, back onto his two feet. Without a word, he walked. He walked out of the room. Passed his wife who stood in the kitchen, concealed yet alert. He walked out the front door. Down the porch steps and then he spun back around and went back the way he came. Passing the doorway and the now cleared floor of broken glass, down the narrow hallway, back into his study. Passed Elisheva and towards the two gabayim who stood over the warm body of the deceased child and once again they helped lower Rav Shunem down atop the girl.
It was stillness. It was quiet. It was held breaths. And stopped hearts. And hope hanging on the tail ends of a mother's madness. And then. A sneeze. Another and another. Seven exactly in a row. And to the disbelief of the gabayim, the eyes of the child shot open exposing a green hue that looked like the emerald moss of our summer lake. The Rav rose again, relieving the child of his arthritic weight, his own ailing heart, his scarred face. This we all know.
We know he laid atop her, limb for limb. We know he left and returned. We know she sneezed seven times before opening her eyes. We do not know what happened after that. What kind of warm embraces might have taken place. How did Elisheva react? Did she fall to her knees finally? Did she weep and praise and thank and hug and cry? Did she take her daughter's hand calmly, as if it were any day, and lead her out of the bungalow explaining what happened to her shoes and why they couldn't find her knee-high socks? Did the rabbi's wife suffer a stroke upon seeing the dead child that was at her doorstep now walk out on her own two feet? Did the two gabayim, the rabbi's most trusted confidants and assistants, mistake Rabbi Shunem for God himself? Did they hang his photo in their homes and pay homage to him as a resurrector of the dead? Was the child ever dead? Did someone mistake a quiet pulse for no pulse at all?
We spent the rest of the summer trying to unravel what happened that morning. All we know is we hardly had a chance to gossip at all about Baila's death before we were assaulted with the information of her resurrection. The way the news traveled differently through the bungalow colony than it had of her death. The way the mothers came gingerly to their screen doors, peeking, peering, looking to catch a glimpse of evidence. Did she truly walk? Was the child holding her mother's hands right this instant to return to play by the banks of the lake? Phones rang on their hooks on kitchen walls as we passed the rumor along, one bungalow to the next so that by the time Elisheva Bornstein was halfway back to her own bungalow, we were all crowding our front steps to witness the miracle. Suddenly, we all desired to be near her.
Elisheva radiated. As if she'd swallowed a lightbulb. We had to shade our eyes to protect our vulnerable pupils. She was holding Baila on her hip as if she were a young child and not a lanky six-year-old with a bit of baby fat still crowding her face. Baila had her arms around her mother, her face buried into her mother's slender neck. We couldn't quite glimpse her, just her long, knotted hair, her bare feet. Her dress was dry now, but we wanted to see her face that instant. We wanted to see what a child brought back from the dead looked like. We hadn't yet heard all the details at this point, of the sneezing and the praying, and later the story was embellished. By the time we got back to Brooklyn for the start of the school year, Baila Bornstein had levitated. Baila Bornstein was dipped several times in a mikvah. Baila Bornstein spoke the devilish tongue of a dybbuk. Baila Bornstein was a golem, made from the sand of the lake bank, formulated with the sweat and spit of Rabbi Shunem himself.
It became hard to decipher reality from fantasy. It was hard to decipher anything. We were all mothers. We were all fairly young, even if we weren't, because when a child dies, we instantly think of the mother. We are her, in whatever age she is and our child is the age of the dead child and we are so immersed in the neurotic grief because we almost believe if we can suffer along with them, we can be spared to actually be them. We kiss our children those nights with extra fervor as if a bout of explosive declaration of our maternal love can protect our own from illness and death. Protect us from enduring what far too many endure. Only for the kisses to dissipate with each passing evening as we numb and forget and complain to each other about our pestering exhausting living children.
As summer neared its end, Perela Hersch was sobbing again. She was frightened to have to drive all the way home with Elisheva and her golem child next to her own normal regular living children. What if it's contagious? she asked us. We pooh-poohed her, waving our hands, dismissing her erratic concerns while thanking our lucky stars none of us were obligated to return Elisheva back to Brooklyn. But Elisheva didn't go back with Perela Hersch. She opted to stay a little longer, despite knowing Baila would miss her first day of school. She was going to stay on longer with Rabbi Shunem and his wife and the gabayim and their families. The Rabbi had no need to rush back to Brooklyn. His children were grown, and the doctor suggested he stay until the cold came, or at least, until the Jewish New Year.
How it came to be that Elisheva stayed with them, we do not know. We assume she imposed. There was no way Rabbi Shunem would invite her to stay. Such a holy man, him and his tzedekes wife, what would they do with a woman whose husband died and child nearly did, or did, or didn't. Or did and then didn't. None of us had the faintest idea what she did there while we were all back home filling new backpacks with school supplies and shmearing peanut butter and jelly on matching slices of bread.
When Rosh Hashanah arrived we expected to see her return, as the Rabbi and his wife were due to come home for the high holidays but none of them ever came back. The two gabayim and their families came home and that's when all the details began to emerge, the sneezing and the limbs upon limbs. They returned to spread the stories of their rebbe. But what of Elisheva, we wanted to know. What of little Baila? Where are they all now?
We were only ever told they were with Rabbi Shunem, wherever it was that he went next, wherever it was he would go after that. He was still a revered scholar, a blessing giver and a leader to all Jews alike and anyone who sought him out, be it in the clean mountain air of the Catskills or the dry warm desert of Arizona in the winter time or the eventual landing place of a small apartment in the holy city of Jerusalem, all his visitors spoke of the young woman who guarded him, stood over him and assisted him in just the very same way his two gabayim once did. A little girl was always in the midst, playing at the feet of the Rav until she was older, growing and learning and sometimes found in a corner of the Rav's house wrapping her left arm in the long leather straps of tefillin, eliciting gasps and zealous gossip amongst the Rabbi's visitors.
But it was only ever us, the ones with them in the Catskills that summer, who knew who this mystery girl and woman were. Knew that it was little golem Baila who wrapped herself in tefillin like a daughter of Rashi. That it was Elisheva Bornstein, widower and mother of the golem daughter, who waited on the Rav day and night like a guardian, like a devoted child. She did not bring him hot water and lemon, no, his wife did those duties, but she stood in the shadows when visitors came. Blocked them when concern rose. Prayed alongside the Rabbi when he handed her a prayer book. Wrapped her pink and green, or green and pink head scarf over her head and shoulders like a tallit when joining in morning prayers. She came to be called the woman of Shunem. So that in time, the story of that summer morphed, ballooned, and stretched into all kinds of mystical fantasies. All anyone would ever share about Rabbi Shunem was a story of death and life. A story of miracle. A story in the Catskill Mountains of a mother and a child witnessed by only mothers and children. Because if not for us, then who else would tell her story? Who else would give life to a story where one was taken?
"The Golem Mother of the Catskills" previously received an Honorable Mention from Moment Magazine in their Karma Foundation Short Fiction Contest.
