Rebecka grew up and became a beauty. Thick, dark hair and regular features, petite and cute. In the photos I have seen I seem to sense a sensuality and sadness. But they were taken later, much later. As a girl, she must have been charming and ready to laugh. Quite likely she could have married any young man she wanted from the Jewish society of Plzen or Prague. But when she returned from the boarding schools in Dresden and Lausanne, where wealthy daughters were sent to get Europe’s best education, she fell for exactly the kind of man her mother had wanted to protect her from, and Rebecka’s love for him plunged Hannah Rothstein into unending sorrow.
Rebecka met him at a ballIvan. Ivan the Terrible . . . Dark and slim with hard muscles and a waxed moustache. His eyes were as blue as his uniform jacket and he danced and rode like a god. An officer and a gentleman? An officer and a goy! A goy, Hannah said and cried, but Rebecka was in love and didn’t give in. She had always gotten everything she wanted, and it was the same thing now. Hannah had to give up her only daughter to a Christian soldier of dubious descent. Ivan’s father was what Karel would later call ‘a living typewriter’a copyist at the city hall in Ljubljana. His wife, an Italian woman, came from a nice and conscientious but relatively poor family, somewhere in the northern provinces. Together they had twelve children, six boys and six girls. All the girls became nuns and all the boys, soldiers. Not necessarily out of calling; more likely due to lack of cash.
Since cadet school Ivan had been full of the anti-Semitic ideas of that time, but Rebecka’s traditional Jewish upbringing had been worn away during the years in Lausanne, and he mainly saw in her a charming rich man’s daughter. Still, there was a problem. It was forbidden for an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army to marry a Jewish woman. With one exception: when the Jewish woman in question was rich. But even then, one had to ask for permission with an official letter, first to the regimental commander, then to the war ministry, and finally to the emperor himself. When the emperor had given his permission, the man was granted a stipend that was supposed to be appropriate to the Jewish woman’s wealth and had to be paid by her parents. Hannahwho hated Ivan from the startthus saw herself forced to give him three thousand imperial gulden every month. Three thousand gulden was twenty times more than Ivan’s salary as an officer and a sum on which an archduke could easily have lived. But even this was not the worst. The worst was the fact that Rebecka must be baptized and promise to baptize her children as well. Rebecka took it all with a shrug. What was some holy water compared to the great love, the soul was Jewish anyway. But Hannah took it hard. It was a sorrow she would never get over.
When the time came, Rebecka was given one day’s education in Christianity. The next day she was baptized, and the day after that her wedding took place. It was the only time in her life that she crossed the threshold of a church.
Apart from Ivan, Rebecka loved the two Russian greyhounds that had been her constant companions in the last few years. They guarded her and protected her from evil. They didn’t like Ivan getting close to her. On the wedding night, he shot them both.
How could Rebecka continue to love Ivan after he shot her dogs? It seems she did just that. Loved him. Despite everything. All through life.
Translated by Lena Karlström and Peter Stenberg.