Leah's Journey by Gloria Goldreich

Shadowy corners of doubt and fear were illuminated with reason and explanation. There was, after all, an answer to the question that had hammered at him since he looked down at the body of Chana Rivka, the gentle violet-eyed girl who barely reached his shoulder and whom he was to have married in a few weeks’ time.
    Chana Rivka’s jaw had been broken. One arm had been jerked with such force that it had been dislodged from the socket and lay twisted against the tiny lifeless form like the ragged limb of a discarded doll. Chana Rivka had worn a ring, a tiny sapphire that had belonged to David’s mother. The ring finger had been chopped from the hand and David tried not to think of how the jeweled circlet, with which his father had betrothed his mother and which he had given to his beloved on a starlit summer evening, had been wrested from the bloody stump. The severed finger had been found a few meters from the body by the small boys who trailed after the burial society in the aftermath of the pogrom, scraping up blood and scattered limbs, gathering crushed eyeglasses and handfuls of hair jerked from beards and earlocks.
    Chana Rivka’s death had filled David with a grief that clung to him like an engraved shadow and the thought of her killers suffused him with a horror that made him despair of life. How could men kill like that? What forces drove them to such excesses of hate? Did they actually hover so close to the world of the jungle that if they took one uneasy step backward they would fall upon each other in a frenzy of violence, fear, and greed? The questions tormented him and he had wrestled with them for five years, until he found hints of a possible answer in the observations of the Viennese doctor who had wandered solitary through the wilderness of man’s anger and anguish. Psychoanalysis, the understanding of man in his most naked psychological being, gave David Goldfeder the courage to counter the desperation that had throttled him since the darkness of that terror-ridden Odessa night.
    “You must do more work in the field. Your grasp of the material is unusual, extraordinary. You are a second-year student now, Mr. Goldfeder?” the professor had asked.
    “Yes.”
    “You have had biological sciences?”
    “Only one semester. I go to classes at night and laboratories are difficult to schedule.”
    “And in the daytime?”
    “I am a pants presser.”
    “I see.” Professor Thompson compressed his lips in irritation. It was ridiculous that a man of Goldfeder’s unusual intellectual talents should spend his days pressing pants. Something would have to be done. Some sort of scholarship or loan arranged.
    “You must think of medical school, Goldfeder. You must think of studying psychoanalysis in depth.” Decisively the professor walked off to a faculty meeting as though a troubling situation had been settled.
    Medical school. The thought teased David Goldfeder as he struggled home, clutching the sewing machine which seemed to grow heavier at every step. Psychoanalysis in depth. It was ridiculous, impossible. Even with scholarships. But still, perhaps he could juggle time. Perhaps it could be arranged. He would talk to Leah about it tonight, after the children were asleep and the boarders had dispersed to their rooms.
    Slowly he mounted the steps to their apartment. The stairwell smelled of the ammonia and urine which drifted over the transom of the common bathroom and he pinched his nostrils against the acrid odor. The door to his own apartment was open and he heard the sound of excited talk and Rebecca’s lilting laughter as she scurried after Joshua Ellenberg. The aroma of vegetables simmering in rich golden chicken broth, the yeasty scent of the newly baked Sabbath loaves, and the smell of burning candles banished the foul hallway odors and he closed the door firmly behind him.
    “Good Shabbos,” he said cheerfully, looking at the welcoming burning tapers. He realized with a kind of terror that he had