Fertile Ground by Rochelle Krich Page B

said quickly. “When you were six weeks old, we took you to the mikvah, and three rabbis witnessed your immersion. You had a kosher conversion.”
    She was converted. How odd that she had no memory of such a momentous event, of being dipped in the rainwaters of the ritual bath, the same kind of ritual bath she would be going to on the night before her wedding.
    Had she cried? Had the water been cold? Hot? Had her mother cradled her against her chest and soothed her? Who was her birth mother? Who had fathered her? Why had they given her up?
    “The thing is—” Esther cleared her throat. “Since you were a child when you were converted, you were supposed to affirm when you became bat mitzvah that you wanted to be Jewish.” Again her mother studied her hands. “We should have told you then.”
    Lisa stared at her. “So if Aba hadn’t forced you, you would have let me go through with a sham wedding?”
    “It’s not a sham! In my eyes you’re Jewish! In God’s eyes you’re Jewish! I believe that with all my heart!”
    It wasn’t a big deal, her mother said. Aliza didn’t even have to go to the mikvah again. All she had to do was affirm her acceptance of Judaism by continuing to keep all the Torah laws. “And no one has to know.” She grabbed Lisa’s hands. “Your children will be one hundred percent Jewish, and their children, and their children.”
    “I have to tell Asher. He has a right to know.”
    Her mother looked stricken. “What difference would it make to him if you were born Jewish or became Jewish? Does it change your face? Your heart? Your soul? You’re Jewish, Aliza.”
    “It’s unethical not to tell him!”
    “Don’t be stupid! Don’t throw your life away for nothing! I’m begging you, Aliza!”
    Her father begged her, too.
    In the end, she decided to tell Asher. He listened quietly and told her it didn’t matter who her parents were. “You’re the one I love,” he said. “Nothing changes that.”
    “You see?” she told her parents, her voice ringing with triumphant vindication. “You were wrong.”
    Two days later Asher’s father called Aliza’s father. She picked up the extension in her room when she learned her future father-in-law was on the line and heard him talk about “misrepresentations” and “deceit” and “dishonor.”
    “We would never have allowed the match if we’d known,” Jacob Rossner said just before she hung up the phone, unwilling to hear more.
    Asher phoned her and told her not to worry. His parents were understandably upset—more shocked than upset, really—but they would come around. It was just a question of time.
    And Aliza had been hopeful.
    But the next morning a messenger returned the gold Ebel watch and the twenty-volume, gilt-edged set of the Talmud that Aliza’s father had given Asher as an engagement gift. And Aliza returned the one-and a-half carat, pear-shaped diamond ring Asher’s parents had bought her, along with the gold bracelet and two sterling silver Sabbath candlesticks.
    Within the year Asher was married. By then Aliza had moved out of her parents’ home into an apartment she shared with two other young women she’d met at Brooklyn College. She’d distanced herself from the close friends she’d known since her childhood—she never knew for certain how the Rossners had explained the broken engagement, but she’d sensed stares, imagined whispers. “Did you know … ?” And she’d changed her name to Lisa.
    She stopped keeping kosher and honoring the Sabbath out of bitterness and anger—at her parents for keeping
    the truth from her; at Asher and the Rossners for rejecting her so cruelly; at a community she decided was filled with others like them, others who would always regard her as second best; at a religion that condoned their behavior.
    She quickly forgave her parents, who had acted with the best of intentions, and she made her kitchen kosher so that they could eat in her home. Later she began to understand the