On Division

by Goldie Goldbloom

Returning to the midwife after several circuits, Surie had said, “Why should I scream, why should I moan, when I am doing the exact thing I was made for? When I am fulfilling my part in creation? Thank God, I know my place in the world. The Torah speaks about many things, but always, always it talks about the children that come forth, the children that one is to sacrifice for. Every part of my life is turned towards children, the having of children, the raising of children. “The strollers standing in the synagogue on yontiff, they are the Jewish people. And the yellow school buses that clog the streets in the morning, that is the Jewish people. And all of the crying babies under their father’s white prayer shawls during the priestly blessing, that is the Jewish people. Their small hands, their feet, their shaven heads, their long curling payos, the singsong of their voices, at the end of the Holocaust when we thought no children were left, the sound of one child’s cry was enough to fill every heart to overflowing. Families that didn’t have money for blankets had money enough to bear children because that was the true and only wealth of the Jewish people. When the nations of the world say that we have stolen all the riches, there is no denying it, for aren’t our places of worship full of gems, and aren’t our schools full of diamonds, and aren’t all the beds in our homes filled with gold and silver and onyx? When they say we have the blood of Christian children in our matzos...