The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem by Sarit Yishai-Levi Page A

far from her parents’ house. After her father’s death, when Raphael sold his father-in-law’s shop and bought a shop in the Mahane Yehuda market in the New City, outside the walls, they moved to the Ohel Moshe neighborhood, where houses were arranged in rows around a central yard with a cistern that provided water for residents.
    â€œTheir house in Ohel Moshe became a magnet for the Jews of their neighborhood and the surrounding ones too. Neighbors would come to Raphael for donations and to Mercada for treatment. The house was always spotless and the yard around it was enchanting, flooded with light and big clay pots of herbs and geraniums. And so life progressed smoothly. Senor Raphael Ermosa met success in business and traveled once in a while to bring fresh goods from Lebanon and Syria. When his son Gabriel turned ten, Raphael took him along, training him in commerce so he’d be ready to take over the business when the time came. When they weren’t traveling, Gabriel attended a Talmud Torah school in the morning and worked in the shop in the afternoon. He so excelled at the shop that it wasn’t long before Raphael put him in charge of running it, while he himself spent more and more of his time sitting idly on his wooden throne in the shop’s doorway.
    â€œDuring the First World War, the Turks started recruiting young men into their army, forcing them to join against their will. To save Gabriel from a fate faced by many Jewish boys, Raphael decided to smuggle him out to America. And so that he wouldn’t have to make the long journey alone, he decided that Moshe, the oldest son of his shop assistant Leon, would join Gabriel at Raphael’s expense. So the two boys sailed from Jaffa to the Port of New York and settled in Manhattan, where Gabriel found a job as a butcher’s apprentice and Moshe as a tailor’s apprentice. For almost two years there was no contact between Gabriel and his parents. Raphael almost lost his mind with worry, but Mercada kept her composure and strengthened him: ‘ Que no manqui, we should not lack anything, amen! Trust in Senor del mundo. He is watching over the boy, and when the accursed Turks go back to their own country, he will come back to us, sano que ’ste, well and in good health,’ she’d say.
    â€œTime went by and the Turks, may their name be erased, left Palestine and in their place came the English, may their name be erased too, and one day, without warning, Gabriel showed up at his parents’ door. Mercada, who had been watering the plants, almost dropped her watering can, and Raphael almost fainted with excitement, so before Mercada could fall into the arms of her beloved son who had returned from America, she had to quickly pour water over her husband and pick strong-smelling herbs to bring him around.
    â€œMercada could barely recognize her son. He had left Jerusalem a sixteen-year-old youth with a hint of stubble, short and as skinny as a beanpole, and had come back a handsome, tall, and well-built eighteen-year-old man. They gathered all the family and neighbors, and Mercada made cold lemonade with mint, brought up the watermelons from the cistern, and crumbled goat’s cheese over them. She sat Gabriel in the middle of the yard, and everybody around him urged, ‘Tell, tell us como es America, what America’s like.’
    â€œGabriel told them of a place with buildings that touched the sky and automobiles that drove like locos, and his work on the Lower East Side with the butcher Isaac who only spoke Yiddish and didn’t know a word of English, and about the first words he learned, and how today he could pull the wool over the eyes of any Ashkenazi in the market with his Yiddish. And about Moshe who decided to stay in New York and not come back to Jerusalem. When his father Leon heard this, he burst into tears, and Gabriel consoled him: ‘ No llores, don’t cry, Senor Leon. Moshe will be