The Sacrifice of Tamar Read Online Free PDF Page A

finger. G-d was always with her, day and night, a good friend whose hand she held all her waking hours. Her conversation with Him was constant and natural—a breath in, a breath out—needing no outer trappings of synagogue and prayer book.
    Curling up on the comfortable chair, she took her sister’s crochet needle and thread and worked on the blanket Rivkie was making for a friend. Even as she worked, she knew her sister would probably tear out all the stitches, which would no doubt fall below her high standards. She didn’t care. The lovely blue and green threads slipped easily over her fingers, dulling her restlessthoughts like a drug. Such pretty colors, she thought. I must make my own baby such a blanket. Someday, she thought drowsily.
    And then she heard the footsteps.
    Her first reaction was one of pleasure. Rivkie had seen her distress and had come back early to apologize. Or maybe the lesson had been canceled. She put down the crocheting and walked into the living room.
    “Rivkie?”
    He was a black man of medium height and average build, wearing a pair of unclean brown pants and a checked shirt. “What are you doing in here?” she said reasonably, almost politely, her body tense but controlled, believing in honest mistakes, in polite strangers stumbling inadvertently into lives meant to be detached forever from their own.
    Later, her calm, her doubt, would all seem so ludicrous, so much that she would deny it even to herself, ashamed that she had not instantly perceived the winding downward spiral into the stuff of nightmare.
    The flash of the knife would always be the beginning of the memory for her.
    “Shut your mouth and do exactly what I say. I’ll kill you and…” The knife slashed the air, pausing above the baby’s head.
    She froze, her heart, her mind, suspended, as if quick-frozen by some sudden snowy avalanche.
    His small, dark eyes looked her over appraisingly. “Now turn around.”
    She did exactly as he told her. The strange freezing horror radiated down her limbs, like the numbness of an anesthetic that slowly encroaches into more and more territory. It was a numbness of horror akin to calm, and she felt almost grateful as she looked at the wall, grateful for this tiny space of time, this one moment when she didn’t have to look at him or his knife, when she could concentrate. “ Shema Yisroel ,” she whispered, the proclamationof G-d’s oneness that is a Jew’s last rites. She heard the wooden slide of drawers, the rustle of materials, the tap of undefined metals.
    The moments stretched out and she was still not dead.
    “G-d,” she prayed, concentrating all her heart and soul and faith into what she was about to ask, understanding limits, choosing her request wisely: “Just don’t let him kill the baby. Just don’t let me die. Anything but that. Let us live. Please, dear G-d!”
    “Now go into the bedroom.”
    No!! G-d, no! She couldn’t move. And then she thought of the knife and the small baby, her sister’s child, the child whose fragile skin even the scrape of a fingernail could harm. She took a deep breath and walked into the bedroom.
    She found herself facing the dresser mirror. He was standing behind her. He had thin lips, strangely shaped, sunken cheeks pockmarked by bad acne, and thinning hair. He had put on tinted glasses with dark rims.
    He fingered her head covering. “You Jewish?” he asked. A simple, neutral question.
    Why did he have to ask me that? she thought with sudden rage. Why did he have to make this personal? She nodded.
    He ripped the tichel from her head.
    A deep well of humiliation and rage and hatred ripped through the soft center of her body as the carefully pinned hair tumbled down her back. And suddenly she felt she was no longer just a female, a chance stranger found home alone. And he was no longer just a marauding thief who had stumbled across her. She was a helpless Jewess. And he was a goy, a Roman centurion, a cossack, a Nazi. He was a