Art of a Jewish Woman (12 page)

Elsewhere, Wilno had become in many ways a modern, compact northern European city with trolleys and cars and harmonious gray, five-story buildings along broad boulevards. They had tall windows and large stores on the ground floor, and cinemas featuring Garbo, Dietrich, Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Lillian Gish, and Mary Pickford. Book stores displayed
Gone With The Wind, Anna Karenina,
and the works of Jules Verne, Upton Sinclair, Thomas Mann and Joseph Conrad, in his adopted English as well as translated back into his native Polish.

Business and professional men wore suits and Homburg hats; workers baggy pants, jackets and caps. Women wore dresses to the knee and high heels. People rested, reading newspapers and magazines, on benches in little plazas bordered with flowers. In the market districts and the ghetto, older women were in long dresses, aprons, shawls, and had a kerchief over their heads.

From almost any point in the city, one could see golden domes, spires, and crosses atop ornate, Italianate baroque churches dating from the 17th and 18th centuries. The foremost Jewish place of worship—the Great Synagogue—had been built after a fire set during an anti-Semitic
pogrom
destroyed an earlier, smaller wooden one in 1635. Large enough for 3,000 worshippers, the Great Synagogue had a Parthenon-influenced façade that rose high, though by government edict it had to be lower than the spires of the tallest church in Wilno. Competing with the Catholic church for the distinction of loftiest sanctuary, the builders excavated below ground level so the height from floor of the sanctuary to the dome of the synagogue equaled the cathedral’s.

Felice’s school was in one of the new districts, on a broad boulevard in a narrow contemporary building. Inside, a distinctive marble central staircase with bronze balustrades and a mahogany railing wound steeply up several stories, the classrooms and offices opening off the landings. A half block away was a small park the students used for recreation. Sonia’s aunt’s home was a few blocks away. The school, named after Etta Djemkovsky, the philanthropist who endowed it, had a reputation for excellence throughout Poland and was one of three university preparatory schools in Wilno that accepted Jews. It was ninety percent Jewish because Jewish students were excluded from most other private or public schools at that level. Public school education was lower in educational quality. The faculty was ethnically mixed, and classes were in Polish. The school followed the traditional Polish calendar for vacations.

“It was the Mecca and Medina for me,” Felice recalled. “I was so excited. But I was terrified by the mathematics. My head couldn’t do the problems. I feared that I would flunk out of the school because of math, and then I was scared that my father would hit me because he sacrificed so much for me. I was so scared that I cheated on tests for the only time in my life. A girl caught me looking over her shoulder at her paper and asked me what I was doing. I explained that I couldn’t do math and asked if she would help and scoot over a little in her chair. She was outraged and threatened to tell the headmaster, but I begged her not to and promised to never do it again.” All Felice’s other grades were A’s, and she was so good in Latin and literature that the other students asked her to help them.

The headmaster was a tall, elegant middle-aged man. He called her into his office and asked, “What is the matter with you? How can a student who does so well, do so poorly in math?”

“I had no answer for him except that I had no head for math. I was sure he was going to send me home. My father read all my report cards and certificates and asked me the same question. He kept them in a little drawer in the buffet in the living room and took them out to tell me when I had to work harder.”

She didn’t like chemistry or physics but passed them nicely. Faltering in math, she traded tutoring others in their Latin for tutoring for herself in mathematics, and in Szczuczyn she had Abraham Nissenovicz to help her.

“My father was the best father a girl could have, but it was a misfortune to have one’s life dictated by a father who chose everything for me, even things I had no interest in, and I was utterly unsuited to like dentistry. He probably got the idea that dentistry was a suitable profession for a woman because Sonia’s aunt was a dentist. Somehow I got through.

“It was a serious school, and I worked very hard. I was a serious student and had very little free time, but I was pretty and had many dates. I could choose the boys I wanted. I loved to go to the movies and theater with them.”

Near where she lived was a great park that she adored, a large park with a little lake and café and so many little birds she liked to watch—pigeons, nightingales, woodpeckers, sparrows, and robins hunting worms in the spring. Felice and her friends loved to meet for ice cream and little cakes, but the boys she went with were not serious relationships because she was a diligent student first. For some of the girls it was different. Her roommate Sonia was a singer and dancer and had many boyfriends. She let her grades fall and didn’t return after the second year. And there was the rumor that Fania Kamionska had an affair with the headmaster her senior year. He was a handsome, distinguished looking man with an eye for the girls.

In her free time Stefan Batori University also beckoned Felice. She would walk down Pilies Street skirting the large gates and archways on her left which led into the Jewish ghetto and instead picked an archway farther down the street that opened into the university. The quarter was dense with the faculties of all the different scientific and humanistic disciplines; some of the buildings dated to the 17th century, and others were from the modern era. A few small quadrangles, with ivy covered arcaded walkways around the perimeter, gave the university open space.

Felice didn’t know the Jewish neighborhood. She never walked there. Her life was school and the university, and her room in Sonia’s aunt’s house was in the modern city. New movies, the theater, opera, and books were what occupied her. And the Café Literatu, where she would sip milk and coffee and try to read while she watched the professors and students, imagining herself like them some day.

Legend has it that Miloscz was himself indomitably reading the newspaper in the Literatu in 1941 when the Nazis burst in. They ignored him because he was not Jewish. Milosz left Wilno and spent the war under German rule in Warsaw working at the university library and secretly gathering with fellow intellectuals. He composed tragic poetry describing the oppression and murders he witnessed. In 1943, he wrote
A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto
about the guilt he was feeling over being a witness to genocide: “Ants build around white bone/Torn is paper, rubber, linen, leather, flax/The roof and the wall collapse in flame/…a guardian mole makes his way/…I am afraid, so afraid of the guardian mole/…he will count me among the helpers of death/The uncircumcised.”
¹²

After the war Milosz served as a cultural attaché for the Polish Communist government until those rulers became, in turn, oppressive dictators. He found political asylum in France in 1951.

As a teenager in Wilno, Felice understood that the city had a reputation for being an intellectual center but had no specific knowledge of its renowned Jewish scholarly past. It had been the home of the mythic Vilna Gaon (“the Wilno Genius”), the great theologian Elijah ben Shlomo Zalman, who lived and taught in the Jewish community through most of the 18th century. He stamped the culture of Jewish Wilno with his research into the comparative Greek and Hebrew texts of the Bible, Torah, and Talmud that went beyond the scope of anything done before, and with his intensely rational and orthodox commentaries on their meaning. His influence and emphasis on serious study and practice was the counterpoint to the mystical Hasidic movement spreading elsewhere, often in poorer communities in Eastern Europe, that emphasized excitement and sincerity in prayer as the path to encounter God.

Felice was a rationalist in her approach to learning and problem solving. Had she known of the Vilna Gaon, she might have been drawn to his scholarship. She was also an idealistic romantic and thinker about social conditions—traits she had shown as a child in her feeling of sadness that she had abandoned the peasant woman who had wet-nursed her, and in her concern that the feelings of her family’s two maids from poor families should be respected and not be ignored. Her empathy and analysis, as well as her father’s influence, led her to the progressive, internationalist European socialists in Wilno. They were in intense competition with many other parties for adherents and votes to place representatives in the parliament—the Syndicalists (unionists), the Bund (the Jewish workers party), Poalei Zion (left-wing Zionist socialists), Mizrachi (Zionist religious right), Bolsheviks (communist party), Polish Nationalists, and the Lithuanian Nationalists.

There were many marches, political demonstrations. One day she was marching down the Pilies toward the government buildings carrying a placard. “At first it was like a party. We were all laughing and singing. But when we got near the river we came upon an opposition group, and the men started fighting. I tried to escape into the university campus, but police were blocking the way in. Then they also got behind us. There was no way out. They pushed me into a large truck and took me to jail,” Felice recounted.

Word got through to Moses Ozerovicz, and he came by train the next day to get his daughter out of jail. Glaring at her, he said, “I didn’t send you to Wilno for this. This is not what I told your mother I was paying for.”

“I thought you believed in socialism. That’s what I was marching for.”

“Socialism yes. Not prison.” He slapped her across the face.

“It was the hardest blow I could have imagined. I was angry and ashamed and even a little scared, but I had my beliefs.”

Felice’s most serious conflicts with her father were over her relationships with boys and men, and occurred in Szczuczyn during vacations from Wilno. Jews and Poles had co-existed for centuries in Poland, but there was an internalized, emotionally ambivalent boundary between the two cultures. They were distinctive parallel worlds linked by commerce whose barriers were occasionally breached by true affection as well as violent outbreaks of ethnic hatred. Rationally, Felice rejected boundaries, preferring relationships to rise and fall on their own merits. However, as occurred in Palestine later, in Szczuczyn neighbors spied her walking hand-in-hand in the wheat fields beyond the church with a Polish teenage boy. There was also another Polish boy she was fond of.

“They were good students. They looked up to me because I was smart and educated. We would meet at the bridge on the Wissa or in the market square and sit on the benches and talk about the people. We also liked to talk about books we were reading. When my father heard that we had been walking holding hands, he gave me another slap.”

“You are never to do that again. I don’t want to hear any more stories about you and Polish boys.”

“Why?” Felice asked.

“Nobody will want to marry you.”

“What do I care about marriage? I am only sixteen,” she retorted. “We didn’t talk for two days.”

There was also Leon Golding in Szczuczyn, her boyfriend for two years of gymnasium when she was home. He was the most handsome young man she knew. She thought she loved him. He left school to work in his parents’ store. They were respected people.

“He was so smart and loved to read, but my father called him a ‘wind man’ because he loved to talk and joke. He had such intelligence and sensitivity and treated me like a princess.’

Papa asked me, ‘Are you in love with that fellow?’

‘He is a very fine person. I like him a lot,’ I answered.

‘I will talk with him’.”

He did, and then, calling her into his office, he said, “He’s not for you. I don’t want you to love him. He’ll marry you and want you to work in his business. You will marry an educated man. I want a doctor for you. A doctor is the most beautiful profession. There will be no marriage to Leon until hair grows in the palm of your hand.”

Her father was afraid that, like most girls, she wouldn’t finish her education. Leon was a very happy fellow. They’d sit on a bench in the square and watch the people take their 5 p.m. walks and exchange a few words. He emigrated to Mexico, to Cuernavaca and wrote letters back to her, hatching a plot for her to come to Mexico and marry him because he thought her father couldn’t stop them there. But her father intercepted the letters and hid them. Finally he apologized and showed them to her but still said there would be no marriage to Leon. Leon was also writing proposals to Dora Liebson, who never went to gymnasium, and she accepted and joined him in Mexico.

A boy named Rattner bicycled 30 miles from Lomza to see her on vacations. Felice’s mother had an aunt in Lomza, and they invited Felice for a visit. That’s how she met Rattner. They were both crazy for socialism. He became a lawyer, first studying in Warsaw then at the university in Bialystock. He was shortish with dark hair, fine brown eyes, well dressed. But he was a little short for her taste. She would never hear what happened to him. Probably the Nazis got him, she thought.

Her last home town boyfriend was Isaac Slutzki, a wonderful man to her. He finished medicine at the Sorbonne. Abraham Nissenovicz, Isaac Slutzki, Rattner, and Felice were the only four from Szczuczyn from her generation who went to university. Unfortunately, Isaac had two younger sisters who were disabled—one who was mentally retarded and another who was crippled. They worshipped him and hung onto him whenever he was at home. She couldn’t imagine marrying into such a situation. He fell in love with Zinna Guttman from Lomza. Zinna had a wealthy uncle who had emigrated to Aukland, New Zealand. She went there, developed a successful fur coat business, and made yearly trips to Paris to see the styles.

On one of those trips she came home looking for a husband. Isaac was also home on vacation from the medical school in Warsaw where he was trying to earn his Polish medical license. The state required him to do two years’ extra study in Warsaw after the Sorbonne, and even then it was not a sure thing that the government would give him a license because of the rules against Jews. He met Zinna and proposed to her, then asked Felice what he should do. She was like Isaac’s little sister in a way, and she told him he had to get away from his sick sisters, that they would destroy him.