The Things We Cherished by Pam Jenoff

somehow, like people were acting as they thought they should behave, mimicking what they had read in books or perhaps seen in a movie, if they had been fortunate enough to visit the
kino
, as Sol had managed twice over the years. In the warmer months, when the outdoor beer gardens drew even larger throngs, he avoided the square altogether.
    The synagogue, set at the edge of the Jewish quarter, was a large, opulent structure with stained-glass windows and a gold dome on top. As Sol entered, the other men looked up and nodded vaguely in his direction before turning back to their conversations. They were middle class, mostly, or had been in better times, merchants and tradesmen hailing from the surrounding eastern districts of the city, their work clothes pressed a bit more carefully or perhaps covered with a suit coat for the Sabbath.
    They thought him odd, he knew. A lone single man who came to shul every Friday night and Saturday was an anomaly among the younger Jews of their once-affluent section of Berlin. The Reform movement had caught on like wildfire, and most young people attended the more modern temple across town, if they went anywhere. Still others, like his brother Jake, went to the Jewish social club on Reisstrasse, where they did not worship at all, but instead had a meal and then debated politics over schnapps and cigarettes late into the night.
    Sol pictured his twin brother’s face as he made his way down the aisle. Jake, who had shaved his beard to a tiny goatee and trim mustache, was too busy for shul. He traveled in a wide circle of friends, many of whom were non-Jews, and spent long hours at his job at the ministry. Of course, he never explained his lack of observance that way. The Sabbath, Jake said, had traditionally been home-based—it was only in diaspora that Jews had felt the need tocome together at the synagogue each week. It was infuriating the way he did that, tried to find nuggets from the Talmud to support his modern views, while ignoring wholesale so much of what the holy text required. But Jake had always done what he wanted, and so each Friday he joined their mother for the Sabbath dinner, making conversation with the handful of guests she assembled, before disappearing to the social club or for drinks with God knows who.
    What, Sol wondered, fingering the edge of his tallis, would their father have thought of Jake’s lifestyle? But even if he was still alive, Sol likely would not have known. Max Rosenberg had seldom been home and, when he was, had kept his thoughts to himself. Born penniless in a shtetl in Bohemia, Max had spent every waking hour of his life working, building from a single tiny hardware store to a chain, third biggest in Berlin. He had gone to shul dutifully each week when he was in town, not out of a sense of religious obligation but in order to keep the goodwill and patronage of his Jewish customers. No, their father would not have approved of Sol’s own observant lifestyle, with its focus on books and study rather than earning money, any more than he would have agreed with Jake’s social high jinks.
    As the rabbi began to chant, a faint scuffling noise came from the rear of the sanctuary. Sol’s eyes darted to the back of the room where a group of men, recent immigrants from the east, shuffled in, clad in work clothes that were crude and worn despite their best efforts to wash the factory dirt from their collars and cuffs. The newcomers had arrived in greater numbers and frequency in recent years, owing to the violence that had worsened under the earlier czarist regime, the harsh economic conditions exacerbated by the war and its aftermath. Their faces still bore the scars of what they had seen, the permanently fixed haggard expressions more tellingthan anything they could say in their accented Yiddish. Sol doubted that their lives here, living in cramped apartments, often two families to a single room, and working long hours in the factories for little pay, could be