Excerpt of The Avengers by Rich Cohen
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We turned onto a road that ran through open fields. Little cars would dart up behind us flashing their lights. You could see them in the rearview mirror. Rolling down his window, my father waved them on. And off they would drive, bounding ahead, trailed by dust. We were going to see Ruzka Korczak; we had been sent by my grandmother. In 1920, my grandmother emigrated to New York from a small town in Poland, where she had nine siblings and an infant niece, the daughter of her oldest brother. Though my grandmother was to be just the first of the children to make the trip, the family ran out of money. And the seasons changed. And the politicians fell. And the War started. Several years after Nazi Germany collapsed, my grandmother got a letter from a woman named Sara, who came from her town in Poland. Sara now lived in Israel, where she searched for survivors, trying to put them back together with lost family. She met ships, studied dockets, interviewed passengers. Early in our vacation, we had lunch with Sara. Even if she had something of interest to say, I missed it. Her husband was named Shlomo; I could not move much beyond that.
In her letter, Sara told my grandmother that almost every Jew in their town had been killed. And yet a member of my grandmother's family had survived -- the niece. For much of the War, this niece had fought as a partisan in the forest. She was now settled on a kibbutz north of Tel Aviv. "Do you remember your niece?" wrote Sara. "You are her only family. Her name is Ruzka."
The road climbed up a hill. Looking back, I could see the flat brown country below. It was blurry in the dust. We turned onto a bumpy trail. Fields rolled into the distance. The crops were so green they hurt my eyes. The air smelled like Illinois when the farmers sell their vegetables in town. We went around a bend, and there was Ruzka. I had heard stories about her, things she had done in the War. I had expectations. What I got instead was a slight, smiling, gray-haired Jewish woman not so different from my Grandma Esther, who was just then passing her golden years in a retirement complex in North Miami Beach.
When we stepped from the car, Ruzka gave each of us a hug, as if we had met many times before. She had the rugged face of a farm worker -- a dramatic backdrop for her eyes, which were warm and youthful. She asked us many questions and seemed to savor each answer, listening as fully as most people talk. As we followed her along the road, she pointed out buildings: "That is the dining hall," she said. "That is where the children live. That is where we keep the guns." In the distance, we could see children, cattle, goats. The kibbutz is a collective, a socialist settlement where you might work in the fields or pick fruit or milk cows. Spotting any cow, a local can say, "That is my cow." The few kibbutzim that still survive are hold-overs, relics from the pioneer days, when such one-for-all communities seemed the best way of coping with scorching summers and marauding neighbors. Looking to the eastern horizon, where the fields turned brown, Ruzka said, "Before we fought the Six Day War in '67, the other side of those fields was Jordan."
Ruzka led us to a white house with a red roof. The windows blazed with light. Inside, the walls were lined with paintings and books. Avi, whom Ruzka married after the War, a handsome, fair-skinned man with white hair and brilliant blue eyes, smiled and said hello. Since emigrating to Palestine in the thirties, Avi had spent much of his life trying to recapture the culture of his youth, the music and literature and food of Austria. "Avi, what are you doing?" asked Ruzka.
He was picking at the tray Ruzka had set out: fruit and vegetables.
"Darling, Ruzka, tell me, why no sausage?"
Ruzka smiled at Avi, and then fixed a plate for each of us.
There was a knock on the door. Then another. The floorboards creaked. The house filled with the smiles and guffaws of old Jews. "This is Abba Kovner," said Ruzka. I had been told Kovner was a poet, that he had won the biggest awards a writer in Israel can win, that soldiers carried his books to war. He looked like no one I had ever seen, a lost Old World prophet. His shoulders were hunched. His body was steely slender, a piece of modern sculpture, edges and angles. His eyes shone with a dark, secretive melancholy. In any picture, his face recedes, more still and somber than the surrounding hills. At his side, never beyond whispering distance, was his wife, Vitka. She was long-limbed, with dark hair and big eyes. Her face was plain until she smiled and her smile remade her face and then her smile was gone and her face fell again into the blank gaze she must have worn as a girl in Eastern Europe.
Excerpted from The Avengers by Rich Cohen Copyright© 2000 by Rich Cohen. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
