Vera Read Online Free

business. We can afford luxury.
    We are about to enter the High Holy Days. The Nazis, in their malice, have made sure, in the rest of Poland, that Jews everywhere will remember the High Holy Days of 1939 with sorrow enough to bow their heads to their chests. The Jews now pouring into Lvov bring tales of murder, torture and theft – stories that are kept from me, at least in their details, but the impact of which I can see on people’s faces.
    On our way to my grandparents’ house, I am thinking not of murder but of the thrill of the approaching season. We are not especially observant Jews but we maintain the traditions. The day after tomorrow is Rosh Hashanah, the first day of Tishrei. I know, because I have been told, that if we were to go back far enough, we would reach the Day of Creation of the universe, and that Rosh Hashanah commemorates this greatest of all events in the history of the cosmos. For my father and every other Jew in the world, Rosh Hashanah offers the promise of renewal: one’s fortunes may have become blemished, but repair is possible.
    Rosh Hashanah does not fall on Shabbat this year, so I will hear the shofar, and the Mussah will be especially long. I will hear my grandfather wish my father shana tova emetukah (‘a good and sweet new year’), however unlikely that is under the circumstances. I will witness the gravity in my father’s expression, and also the quiet pride.
    Then ten days later will come Yom Kippur. The more observant Jews will spend most of the day in one of the many synagogues of the city. They will fast for twenty-five hours straight, atoning for the sins of their life: sins against God, against fellow Jews, against everyone and anyone. Their sins – even my sins, my father’s sins, my mother’s, those of my grandparents – are known by God in their every detail, and on Rosh Hashanah the fate of each of us is inscribed in the Book of Life. The ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are the last chance we have to convince God that we have repented, to be granted forgiveness, to avoid an unwelcome fate being sealed in the Book of Life.
    The rituals of our faith delight me. How could they not? It is not their object to delight me, rather, to instruct me, console me, wrap me in the cloak of observant belief and veneration. But I am too young for any higher understanding of our faith, and am content with delight.

    Even at the age I am now, knowing all that I did not know in 1939, I still settle for delight. In truth, delight is the highest plane of experience I ever hope to reach. What am I to do in this hedonistic Arcadia by the sea, where I now live? Stalk the profound, the sublime? Grasp finally and forever the meaning of the Shoah? No. My revenge on Hitler is not a lifetime devoted to the study of his motives and means, but a lifetime in which delight has reached me from a hundred sources, and been welcomed.

    Only consider this: in 1939, on Rosh Hashanah, God inscribed in the Book of Life the fate of every living Jew. He inscribed the fate of the two hundred thousand Jews in Lvov, including those who had escaped to our city from Nazi-occupied Poland. In the ten days between Rosh Hashanah and the Day of Atonement, the two hundred thousand Jews of Lvov found ways to show their repentance for the sins of their life, and particularly for those of the past year. Their fates were sealed on Yom Kippur in that great book: sealed by God, by Adonai. And for all but very few of the Jews of Lvov, that fate was death at the hands of those who had sworn an oath of hatred against us, against all Jews. How many years would I have to labour in thought to grasp the wisdom of such a sentence?

    I am again in Lvov. I am again on the kitchen balcony. Yom Kippur is past. The Russian soldiers are still to be seen in the street. My hair is in plaits. Somewhere in the house, my mother is singing. The theme of this chapter has been all that I did not know in