"Adam and Miriam" by Dina Rubina, summary Automatic translate

This book is a short and poignant story describing the narrator’s chance encounter with a strange elderly lady in rainy Jerusalem. The most striking detail of the text lies in the stark contrast between the cozy atmosphere of the Georgian restaurant where the action unfolds and the monstrous past events it describes.

An unexpected companion

The narrator, recently licensed and driving alone for the first time, is driving through rainy Jerusalem. Reveling in her newfound freedom, she decides to visit her friends Manana and Vaso at a Georgian restaurant. Along the way, she spots a drenched elderly lady with a broken umbrella and impulsively offers her a ride.

The woman introducing herself as Miriam turns out to be a woman with an unusual sense of style and astonishing driving skills. She easily parks the narrator’s car when she has trouble maneuvering it. During the conversation, it emerges that Miriam was supposed to go with her stepson, Gideon, to her husband’s grave, but the trip fell through. Miriam mentions that she’s never been to her husband’s grave, which leaves the narrator perplexed.

Visiting Manana and Vaso

Women take shelter from the rain in a semi-basement Georgian tavern. Miriam examines the premises with interest and recalls that it used to be the workshop of an old man, Pablo, who repaired musical instruments. She recounts that her husband, Adam, was an incredibly gifted musician and once played the viola da gamba here.

To the sounds of the Georgian chant "Shen Har Venakhi," which Miriam initially mistakes for Gregorian chant, the women order hot mushroom soup and khvanchkara. The narrator, intrigued by Miriam’s story about how musical talent once saved Adam in the ghetto, begins asking her about her past.

The Story of Adam

Miriam recounts her youth in the Grodno ghetto. Adam, not yet her husband but her first love, played in Commandant Menzel’s quartet. He played music during the day, and at night he dug a tunnel from an abandoned forge. The hardest part for him was cleaning the dirt from under his fingernails so as not to arouse suspicion during rehearsals.

Adam planned his escape and persuaded Miriam to flee with him, but her authoritarian mother forbade her daughter to leave with the young man without an official match. Miriam remained with her family, and Adam left. He became a partisan, fought in France with the Resistance, and then helped smuggle surviving Jews to Palestine as part of the Briha organization. In Israel, he participated in the War of Independence and the Six-Day War, and became a distinguished biologist and professor at the Weizmann Institute.

The horror of execution

After drinking wine, Miriam moves on to the most difficult part of her story, speaking in the third person to distance herself from the pain. She describes the day of the Grodno ghetto’s executions. People were driven to a clearing with pre-dug pits. Miriam saw her father digging the last grave and her little brother, Itzik, who couldn’t understand what was happening.

Amid the sounds of gunfire and screams, Miriam was shot in the shoulder and thrown into a pit on top of bodies. She awoke at night under the weight of earth and the sound of groaning people. With great difficulty, she climbed out of the grave and wandered toward the neighboring village.

Miraculous rescue

A patrol spotted her on the outskirts of the village. Fleeing pursuit, Miriam ran into a barn and hid in the straw. The soldiers rushed in after her, stabbing the straw with their bayonets. But then the unthinkable happened: a huge boar lying in the barn approached and covered the girl with its body, shielding her from the bayonets. Since then, Miriam has never eaten pork, calling this boar her personal Righteous Among the Nations.

The next night, she knocked on the door of the house on the far side. The owners, Semyon and his wife, risked their lives to let the wounded girl in. They had no way to hide her in the house, so Semyon dug a hole next to the stove, where Miriam spent the next two years.

Liberation and meeting in San Francisco

Two years later, the owners, exhausted and fearing discovery, took Miriam away in a cart and abandoned her at the camp gates. She was on the verge of starvation: bald, missing nails, with purulent eyes. At the camp, she was rescued by a captured American doctor, Basso. He fed her crushed eggshells to restore her calcium levels.

After his release, Basso took Miriam to the United States, where they married. The marriage broke up after five years, as Miriam didn’t love him. She continued to believe Adam was alive.

They met in 1971 in San Francisco at an international congress of biologists, where Miriam was working as a translator. Adam, who was reading a paper, saw her and recognized her. By then, his wife had died. Adam and Miriam married and lived together for twenty-one years, dividing their time between America and Israel.

Denouement

Adam died suddenly during a symposium in Berlin. Miriam did not attend his funeral in Israel. She explained to her stepson Gideon that she found it easier to think that Adam had simply left her for another woman, as she had believed for many years before they met.

The story ends with Miriam saying goodbye to the narrator outside a restaurant. She declines a ride home, promising in exchange to help the narrator out of the parking lot and assuring her that she’ll be a great driver.