Chapter One

The Horror of It All

In which Salo Oppenheimer meets a rock in the road

Mom had a way of obfuscating when anyone asked how she and our father first met. Mainly she said it was at a wedding in Oak Bluffs, to which she’d been brought as a date by the closeted brother of the groom, and there was her future husband, an usher for one of his fraternity brothers. Both factoids were perfectly true, though the broader assertion was also utterly false. Our parents had met once before, under frankly terrible circumstances, and this is why we all, eventually, understood how impossible it was for her to be truthful. It’s supposed to be a happy question—Where did you two meet?—with a happy answer, opening out to a lifetime of companionship, consequence, and progeny (in our case, lots of progeny). But when that moment dovetails with the very worst event in a young person’s life? Who wouldn’t wish to spare him, and the person innocently asking the question, and, as it happened, our mother herself? The shock. The glare of disapproval. The horror of it all.

The bald fact was that our parents met in central New Jersey, in a conservative synagogue that looked like a brutalist government building somewhere in the Eastern Bloc. The synagogue was Beth Jacob of Hamilton Township, and the terrible occasion was the funeral of a nineteen-year-old girl named Mandy Bernstein, who had died four days earlier in a car driven by her boyfriend, our father, Salo Oppenheimer. Mandy was, by every account, a vibrant young person with a glowing white smile and long dark hair, the eldest child and pride of her family (the Bernsteins of Lawrenceville, New Jersey, and Newton, Massachusetts), a Cornell sophomore and likely psychology major, and (as far as she herself was concerned) the joyfully intended future life partner of Salo Oppenheimer. Mandy Bernstein was one of two Cornell students who’d perished in the accident, the other being Salo’s friend and fraternity brother, Daniel Abraham, a kind boy who was on a first or possibly second date with the other person in the back seat. That person was still hospitalized in Ithaca. Salo alone had walked away from the wreck.

Even then, nobody blamed him. Nobody! Even in those early days, in the grief and rage of the Abraham and Bernstein families and the many friends of the two young people who were suddenly, horribly, not there, it was somehow held by all present in the synagogue (and, the following week, at the E. Bernheim and Sons Funeral Chapel in Newark, New Jersey, where Daniel Abraham would be memorialized) that Salo Oppenheimer’s brand-new Laredo had been traveling at an eminently reasonable speed down a perfectly respectable road when it hit a loose rock and—abruptly, incomprehensibly—flipped, landing on its roof, half on and half off the road. It was, in other words, at least in those houses of God, as if the hand of God itself had picked up that vehicle and dropped it back to earth. Who could explain the mystery? Who could make comprehensible the loss?

Not Salo, that was certain. He sat in the second row at his girlfriend’s funeral service, four stitches in his scalp and an Ace bandage (not even a cast!) on his left wrist, out of his mind with shock and guilt, barely taking in the stream of Mandy’s cousins and high school friends and the contingent of Bernsteins who’d made aliyah a few years earlier but were now, appallingly, here in Hamilton Township, weeping and looking at him but still: not blaming him. At least to Salo’s face, everyone seemed to be blaming … the Jeep.

Why the Jeep? Why, why, the Jeep? He’d had his choice of cars, and in fact had been on the point of purchasing a sparkling gray 300-D from Mercedes-Benz of Manhattan when his grandmother phoned his mother to say that it was a disgrace for any Jew to drive a Mercedes, and was Salo so removed from his own Jewishness, from the fact and fate of his own martyred ancestor Joseph Oppenheimer (Goebbels’s own Jud Süss!) that he did not understand the company had used concentration camp labor to build armaments and airplane engines? In fact, the answer to that was: yes, as Salo’s Jewishness was not particularly acute, either in the religious or, at the age of nineteen, all that much in the historical sense. Certainly he was well aware of the mythic Jud Süss—“court Jew” to the Duke of Wurttemberg in the 1730s, convicted of a bouquet of fictional crimes when his boss died suddenly, and executed, his corpse hung in a gibbet for six years outside of Stuttgart—but that all felt so very eighteenth century, and Salo was a young man fresh out of the 1960s, when the entire culture had coalesced around his own generation’s youth and vigor and renunciation of the past. Besides, he’d really, really liked that Benz a lot, its sleek shape and leather seats, the vaguely European sophistication he’d felt sitting behind the wheel. After that phone call, though, it was a moot issue, and some instinct had sent him in the opposite direction: from the Nazi Mercedes-Benz company to that perfectly all-American anti-Semite Henry Ford.

Later, the instability of those 1970s Jeeps would become something of a cliché, but at that time the notion of a rugged, gritty 4x4 driving machine, suggestive of the Manifest Destiny frontier, was one of capability, not compromise. And if Salo Oppenheimer, in the market for his very first car, was willing to forgo the interior luxuries of, say, an uber-German automobile with a long company tradition of sophisticated design (alongside the slave labor), then surely it would only be for the enhanced ability to drive the wild roads surrounding Ithaca, his college town, even in its insane winter months. A Jeep for gorges and icy highways! A Jeep for the back roads of upstate New York! A Jeep for weekend jaunts with buddies and girlfriends, who didn’t even, that fateful Saturday morning, have a precise destination in mind.

In the aftermath, he had no recollection of the rock in the road, or the sickening arc through the air, bright winter sun streaming directly into his eyes. His only impressions would be the shriek of crushing metal—that absurd sardine-tin roof, crumpling on impact—and the open-mouthed surprise of Mandy Bernstein, whose sweet, freckle-dusted nose he had thought adorable, instantly, the first time he saw her at a reception for new Jewish freshmen. Mandy was made of joy, perpetually on the verge of laughter, close to her parents and younger sisters back in New Jersey (if she wasn’t in her room, she was likely in the phone booth down the corridor in Balch Hall, coaxing Lisa or Cynthia through some high school social maze or perceived parental injustice) and to her cousins in Newton, the mother ship of the Bernstein family. She liked to wear her hair in a high ponytail, sometimes with a red bandana wrapped around it (a fashion she’d picked up on a kibbutz she’d visited one summer during high school), and she rotated three pairs of well-loved bell bottoms that she was perpetually embroidering: butterflies, rainbows, a rendering of the family poodle, Poochkin, in lavender. By December of their freshman year they were “dating,” which basically meant that Salo took her out to football games and walked her home to her dorm when the library closed. They sampled the brand-new and exotic Moosewood restaurant downtown for something called “tofu” and went for numerous Hot Truck runs on the way back to their North Campus dorms. Mandy was fond of the pizza subs.

He’d brought her home only once, when she was visiting the city to interview for a summer internship with UJA (an internship she would indeed be offered, in a letter that arrived one week after the accident). That introduction had gone well, despite the Bernsteins’ obvious lack of Our Crowdliness (and despite the fact that Selda Oppenheimer plainly harbored hopes of a Sachs, a Schiff, or even a Warburg for her only son); Mandy was simply that delightful, that charming and powerfully kind, and that in love—pure, clear, and very obvious love—with Salo Oppenheimer. She loved his brain and his manners and his spindly body, tall and frail, devoid of musculature. She loved a goodness she saw in him, which Salo—quite honestly—had never pretended to see in himself. It was not precisely true that she made him wish to be a better man; it was more true that she made him wish he wished to be a better man. At the time, that felt like enough.

He hadn’t asked her to marry him. They weren’t engaged, though later he was deliberately vague on this issue, because he knew it would make a big difference to Mandy’s parents; the distance between “She was a wonderful girl, someone any guy would have been lucky to date” and “She was the love of my life, and I was on the point of proposing to her” felt vast, and our father opted (correctly) to let her parents believe whatever might help them bear the pain. That awful winter and spring, and for the next several years, he let the Bernsteins enfold him into their grief as Mandy’s intended: future fiancé, husband, and father of the children she would never have. Then he married Johanna Hirsch, their daughter’s Lawrence High schoolmate, and all contact abruptly ceased.

Mandy Bernstein had been Johanna’s Big Sister, not literally but within the local chapter of the B’nai B’rith Girls. This was a position she had taken seriously, leaving surprise gift baskets (bagels and cream cheese, chocolate-chip cookies) on the doorstep of the Hirsch home when she knew Johanna was studying for a test, and showing up to help out on Johanna’s service projects, like the roadside car wash to benefit the Hebrew nursing home recreation fund or the friendship letters to children in Israel. The “Sisters” had all been randomly assigned, but Johanna was ecstatic to find she’d been paired with the popular and pretty Mandy Bernstein. Mandy Bernstein! A person she would not have dared solicit for friendship in the halls of their teeming New Jersey high school, where a year’s difference in age meant everything, and perceived deficits in looks, wealth, and cool meant everything else.

Johanna was one of dozens of young women at the funeral that day, each and every one of them sincerely, personally in mourning. The identity of the young man with the bandaged wrist had been freely exchanged among them, and it would be fair to say that Salo Oppenheimer was the object of a certain romantic fascination. How must he feel? So young himself, and already responsible for the deaths of two others, just as young? How would he survive the loss of his own beloved Mandy, this glowing, clever (Ivy League!) girl, the jewel of her family, school, and town? Possibly, Johanna was not the only person in the jammed pews of Temple Beth Jacob wondering what kind of person it might ultimately take to draw this devastated Salo Oppenheimer from his eternal vortex of guilt and pain. Possibly she was not the only one imagining the great love and compassion necessary to bring Salo Oppenheimer back to life.

Copyright © 2022 by Jean Hanff Korelitz