Ibrahim & Reenie by David Llewellyn Page A

sighed. She had never seen him this way before, so defeated.
    â€˜I’m sorry, Reenie,’ he said. ‘I’m not angry with your father. None of us are. We’re worried, that’s all. We probably won’t speak to one another for a while. I’m sorry.’
    Reenie returned to the house shuddering with anger, and went straight to her bedroom. How ungrateful her father had been. How dare he speak to Mr Ostroff – kind, lovely Mr Ostroff – like that?
    Months later, while walking home from school, Reenie passed the Ostroff’s house, and Mrs Ostroff came running out and called her name. She invited Reenie in for tea and cake, and the three of them – Reenie and Mr and Mrs Ostroff – sat together in the front room, the room they only ever used for special guests.
    â€˜We’re going away,’ said Mrs Ostroff. ‘To Israel.’
    â€˜On holiday?’ said Reenie.
    Mr Ostroff shook his head. ‘No. Not a holiday. We’re going there to live. A new country. My brother, from New York? He’s there now, with his family. He says the sun shines every day. It hardly ever rains. And the figs… he says the figs are incredible. And Mrs Ostroff and I… we aren’t getting any younger. And London is so cold .’
    It was the last time she saw them, and the three of them wept as they said their goodbyes. A few weeks after they had left, Reenie received a postcard. Blue skies and blue sea. Cream-coloured houses around the harbour at Haifa, and a Magen David stamped on its back. A message in Mrs Ostroff’s ever-so-neat handwriting, the last exchange of words between them.
    It was hard, despite the drabness of the woman, for Reenie not to blame everything on Vera, to imagine that everything was part of some devious scheme of hers. Was it she who had suggested they might change their surname, make it more English? Less German. Less Jewish. Her father only broached the subject once, and Reenie’s expression was enough to see it never raised again, but he must have drawn the idea from somewhere, or someone. At times Vera Lieberman – and how silly, how wrong that name sounded – seemed to Reenie a gentile Jezebel, luring Jewish men into her strange, exotic church.
    The decisive, climactic insult was Vera’s suggestion, one Sunday morning, that Reenie join them. Until then there’d been some tacit agreement that Reenie would stay at home on Sundays. She was old enough by then to look after herself, and there was invariably last-minute homework to be done for Monday morning. With this invitation, it felt as if Vera was making a final move in her domestic game of chess.
    It was impossible, six decades distant, for Reenie to remember precisely how thoughts led to action that afternoon. If she sat there, stewing in her anger, she could no longer remember it. Condensed by time, she remembered everything happening at once. Her father and Vera, dressed in their Sunday Best. The sound of the front door closing, the knocker bouncing against its brass plate. Running upstairs, packing a bag, leaving the house. Did all that take minutes or hours?
    A tantrum, that’s what it was. Just a tantrum. But she couldn’t turn back on it, couldn’t back down or give up. She had to keep going. Stopping meant it would catch up with her. And there was nowhere else for her to go now the Ostroffs had gone.
    She had no idea, no real plan. While her father and Vera spent their afternoon in church – rising for the tiresome hymns, sitting or kneeling or whatever it was goyim did for their dreary prayers – Reenie went about packing her belongings into the small, paisley-patterned case that had been her only companion on the crossing to Harwich. She searched in desperation for her mother’s photograph, but still couldn’t find it.
    By mid-afternoon she was on the District Line, heading west, with only a young girl’s notion that something would