The Resurrection of Abraham Gold

A Secret Guardians short story

I come now to a record as precious at life itself, a scene I am so blessed to have been shown. It came, as these things usually do, in a restful moment. Despite my unusual gift of remembering, where I was at the time escapes me. Truly, there are some experiences that transcend time and place.

– Jian

Ann Arbor, Michigan
University of Michigan Campus
East Hall on Church Street
Akashic Record, September 1975

Behind his immaculately organized captain’s desk, Abraham Gold was absently playing with a droopy corner of his overgrown mustache. His face, lined over the decades, framed eyes that still twinkled brightly. He had just graciously welcomed his unscheduled guests, his graduate assistant, Sean Byrne, and one Jenna Poett, a young woman he had never met.

“Your office is simply magnificent, Dr. Gold!” Jenna began.

Jenna had been in her share of instructors’ offices. Most were squirrel warrens with books and papers scattered about like so many discarded acorn shells. She had never seen one like this. Builtin red oak bookcases took up three full walls, each shelf meticulously organized like a public library. A Tiffany-style lamp stood at attention in one corner. A Persian rug woven in azure blues with gold edgings warmed the floor.

The professor’s eyes brightened at her compliment.

“Young lady, order is the first law of the universe,” he said with an accent that betrayed his Slavic roots. “To think critically, I have always been required to surround myself with order. “

Now, if you will be so kind as to pardon an old man’s faulty hearing,” he continued, “I didn’t quite catch your name. Sean mumbles a bit, you know.”

Sean gave the professor a look of dismay.

“Jenna. My name is Jenna Poett, Dr. Gold.”

“A poet, how lovely! You must tell me who your favorites are! And please call me Abe—Abraham if you must be formal. ‘Dr. Gold’ sounds like character out of a novel. I am a character, true, but definitely not the fictional type.”

Jenna shot Sean a quizzical look, but he just shrugged and smiled, clearly enjoying his mentor’s odd wit.

“Well, even though it’s my last name, I’m not really a poet,” she answered. “But I do love poetry, especially put to music.” She got an encouraging nod from Sean. “As for my favorites, that’s difficult to say. I have so many. Longfellow and Emily Dickinson are two. Thomas More, the bard of Ireland, I absolutely surely love his laments: The Minstrel Boy, The Harp That Once Through Tara’s Halls. So sad, that one.”

Jenna stopped speaking, suddenly embarrassed that she’d started rambling. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’m carrying on as if I’m sitting at lunch with my girlfriends.”

Gold gave her his best avuncular smile. “No need to apologize, no need at all, my dear,” he said. “It’s quite refreshing to hear the opinions of a poet. Your patronymic, mind you, is no accident. And I do share your taste in bards.”

The old teacher paused, mirth lighting his eyes. “I do have one question, though, young Miss Poett. I know Webster’s adds hundreds of slang Americanisms every year. But are you absolutely sure that ‘absolutely surely’ is found in the dictionary?”

Jenna flushed, her ears turning a soft shade of rose. She managed a self-conscious laugh. Sean grinned. “Jenna makes up words, Abe. I think she’s a regular contributor to Webster’s.”

“Okay, that’s way enough about me, too much about me, in fact. Professor, what about you? What of your studies of—Sean, what’s that word you don’t like to use—enlightenment, that’s it. Please tell me how you research that. Sounds like a fascinating world to explore.” Despite Gold’s invitation to address him by his first name, Jenna couldn’t bring herself to be that familiar. “

Also, what do you think of his determination to learn what makes—what’s that term you use, Sean, ‘the consciously evil’—what makes them tick? Did you follow all that?”

“I did. And I’m beginning to see you have a reporter’s instinct. Sean mentioned in his call that you write for the Michigan Daily. Your questions are excellent.

“Now to address your first question, I attempt to observe through the lens of science what mystics have called the subtle world. I also study the most accomplished among us, though not necessarily accomplished by worldly standards, I should note.”

Rather than expound further, Gold let his comments dangle for a few ticks of his wall clock, before moving on.

“I’ve always struggled to find adequate language to explain my studies. God knows I have tried. But after a few sentences my students’ eyes lose focus and their heads begin to nod. I might even catch a muffled snore from somewhere in the back rows. Discourteous behavior, surely, but the discourtesy is more my own for boring them to sleep. So, over time I’ve learned to take a different tack. Instead, to illustrate the roots of my work, I tell a most personal story.

“As did Sean a generation later, I traveled from Europe to study here in the Americas. In the summer of 1938, I was sent by my Warsaw parents to live with the family of my aunt and uncle in Yonkers, New York. I was expected to matriculate at Columbia University. My father was a physician and he wished me to follow in his footsteps. I left him, my mother and my younger sisters behind.”

Gold paused, as if startled by how poignant the old memory still was.

“I’m sorry,” he said, returning to the present. “As I was explaining, I had sailed across the Atlantic on a steamer overflowing with Europeans fleeing the coming war. I was among the fortunate. Although rumblings of war had begun, little did we know how diabolical the Nazi plans were, especially toward us Juden. Truly satanic they were.”

There was a tremor in Gold’s voice. He stared down at his hands, steepled as if in prayer, then forged on.

“As I was expected to become a medical doctor, my field of study at Columbia encompassed chemistry, biology and physiology. In the spring of my freshman year, I began receiving worrying letters from my mother. Then a few weeks after I started my sophomore year, I received a rather large package from Warsaw.

“News that the Germans had invaded Poland had reached us. Earlier before the package arrived I had received a letter from my father, carefully handwritten. It was the first letter he had ever sent me. Most unusually, the letter was signed by my mother and my sisters, too: Liba, Malka, and even Maryam, the youngest. To this day, it is Maryam I can remember the most. I still see her scurrying into my mother’s skirts or laughing in pure joy as I swing her around. I remember her eyes, so sad and uncomprehending the day I boarded the train for Gdansk, from where I sailed to America.

“In the letter, which I still possess, my father speaks of how proud he is of me. He urges me to honor the family name by excelling at my studies. He ends the letter instructing me not to worry about our family. ‘We are in the hands of God,’ he tells me. Those words were the last I ever heard from him.”

“I’m touched and honored to hear your story,” Jenna said.

Gold, too, looked touched by Jenna’s comment. “Thank you,” he said.

“As well as the letter, I still have the box addressed to me in my father’s hand, postmarked from Warsaw, August 26, 1939. And I have most of the clothes, outworn though they are. I can’t bring myself to throw them out. Besides a single photograph, those are all the relics I have of them.

“In the box, among other clothes, was my old overcoat. Sewn carefully into its lining were two dozen 10-zloty gold coins, as well as my father’s gold wedding ring and my mother’s diamond ring. I cried when I saw those rings. Mind you, I was a hard young man. One had to be to walk the streets of Warsaw. But seeing those rings broke my spirit. It meant only one thing.”

Gold hesitated, his lower lip trembling slightly, his voice wavering with emotion.

“They didn’t believe they would survive the war. My dear aunt nursed me during the blackness I fell into, forcing me to keep going by her constant care.

“Two years later, when Pearl Harbor was attacked, America joined the war. I quit university and enlisted in the army. I was burning to go and kill Nazis. And to find out what had become of my family.

“I fought with the 82nd Airborne in Europe, in Sicily first. And then we dropped into St. Mere Eglise on D-Day, and into Holland later and fought on into Germany. But I found no trace of my mother, my father or any of my sisters, no word, nothing. The Russians had Warsaw and all of Poland in their grip. I couldn’t travel there, even after the war was over. I tried.

“It wasn’t until 1947 that I learned through a Jewish missing persons group what had happened to them. They had been brought from Warsaw to the Treblinka death camp in 1943. Arrivals to that camp were separated, men from women and children, and forced to strip off all clothing and possessions, rings, everything. They then were sent running down a tunnel disguised as an entrance to showers, running into the jaws of death, the chambers. Locked in, they were gassed to death.

His face cemented hard against the memory, the professor stopped again, struggling for control.

“That is how my sisters and my parents died.”

“After hearing that, I lost all interest in a noble path. The sadness in me turned to bitterness, even hate. My heart became a stone, encasing a buried anger I was only dimly aware of. I blamed the God they had put their trust in for not saving them.”

“After the war, I resumed my pre-medical studies, but only because it was my father’s wish for me. I believed I was honoring his name. It was only much later that I chose the academic path I now tread. But back then, along with losing my family I also had lost my way.”

The professor surveyed his tiny audience. Reassured they were still with him, he continued.

“I began drinking. Most evenings I could be found in the Dublin House, a short walk from my apartment near Columbia University. I also began patronizing an upstairs girl who worked in a Harlem club. She was my only comfort, my only friend, even though I paid for the privilege. Only much later did I realize what that young lady—her name was Evangeline—had given me in return.”

“Life had been brutal to her, a colored girl from the south all alone in New York. She was forced early on into the street walker life, which is about as hard a life as there is for a woman. She was tough enough to get off the streets eventually, but she never got free of the life. Like me, she had no family to speak of. We were bound together that way, you could say.

“I can hear her now: ‘Mr. Abe, why you so blue? I know you got nobody. I got nobody, too. Old news, baby, why you wasting time on that? You can’t change it. All we can change is us.

“’Come to me,’ she’d say. ‘Angline’ll warm you up and melt your ice cube heart.’ And melt it she did.”

Sean and Jenna exchanged looks. Gold wasn’t finished.

“There’s a survivor of the Nazi camps named Victor Frankl. He’s a writer now, a psychologist, has gained a following in the profession. He says he learned one priceless lesson in the camps, and that is this: every freedom can be taken from you but one, and that is the freedom to choose one's attitude, no matter what our lot in life is.

“Before I ever knew who Frankl was, Evangeline taught me that. She taught me by example.

“Frankl also found rare qualities of love in the camps, some who would give their last crust of bread to another even though they might themselves be only steps from death’s door.

“Evangeline had nothing much to give but her body. So, she did. Sometimes she gave a piece of her heart, too, her ‘last crust of bread.’ Very few of her men returned the favor. I was one. I took her in, took care of her after she got sick. I paid for her funeral, too. She was only forty-two when she passed, used up like a pack mule.

“My co-workers would ask why I cared for a no-name nigger whore, their words. They could never understand my answer, but I told them anyway. I cared because she did, though she had every reason not to.

“I was unashamed of my love for her. To me, she had a beautiful name. I called her ‘Angeline, angel mine.’ She loved to hear me say that. In the end, I was her only friend. But it was enough for her.

“From Evangeline I learned we have it in us to become saints. Ever since I laid her to rest, I’ve made it my life’s work to find other Evangelines among us and Evangelines in the making—and to study them.”

Sean’s mind flashed on hellish scenes from his time in Vietnam. But Abe Gold, his family slaughtered, had been through a hell he could not begin to imagine. Yet he speaks of saints.

From Evangeline I learned we have it in us to become saints.

– Patrick Rogers