Art of a Jewish Woman (18 page)

“They killed him too. They hung Berci,” my mother stopped.

I asked my mother to tell me about her mother, Bela. Her eyes narrowed. The lines in her face deepened into the tragic creases I remembered from my childhood. They froze between an expression of horror and anger. Then Felice described how some time after her father first told her about his experiences, she received a letter from abroad in a handwriting she didn’t recognize. She opened it. It was from Chaye Golding, whom she had known in Szczuczyn, but not well because she was older. She was the sister of Leon, the fine boy who had wanted to marry Felice and who had gone to Mexico after her father had said he didn’t have enough education.

“I knew the letter was something terrible. In it she wrote, ‘Dear Felizia, I have to tell you this so you will know. I was with your mother in Treblinka, and they took your mother and my mother together to the gas chamber. They knew exactly where they were going, what was going to happen to them. They gave me a kiss and said Shema Yisrael. Then they held hands and walked together. I am sorry to have to tell you this, but I think you would like to know. As you can see I survived’.” Shema Yisrael, the most important prayer in Judaism, begins
Shema Yisrael, Adonai Elohenu, Adonai Ehad
(Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One).

Felice said, “I don’t know how she got my address in St. Louis—maybe from my sisters in Palestine. She didn’t say anything about her husband. They probably got him too.”

For a year or so after Moshe arrived, it was peaceful in our modest rented house on Westminster Place. It was two blocks from our first apartment on Waterman Street, and I was busy exploring the neighborhoods on my first bicycle. I was also getting to know my grandmother, Rose, Edward’s mother. To me she was never the spiteful person my mother experienced her to be. She was calm, sober, organized, and on time like my father.

We had a regular Saturday date. My mother would walk me to Waterman to meet Nana arriving on the trolley from the Loop in University City. Then she and I boarded the next streetcar and rode for thirty or forty clanging, swaying minutes all the way downtown to the Mississippi River. After we stared at the big muddy flow, the boats and bridges, and the Old Dred Scott Courthouse, we walked the short distance to the big stores with children’s departments that occupied whole floors. Or we got off on Grand Avenue at midtown and went to a matinee at one of the great movie palaces where an organist rose up from the orchestra pit in front of the screen and played overtures on his mighty Wurlitzer. Saturdays with my grandmother were a respite from my mother’s emotionality and her will-o’-the-wisp nature, meaning she could get so engrossed in what she was doing or talking about with a friend that she would completely lose track of time.

My outings with Nana were also a respite for Felice from me, and gave her time to be alone with my brother and her father. Felice helped him enroll in English classes for newcomers at the International Institute and subscribe to a raft of Hebrew and Yiddish newspapers. They arrived from Palestine as well as from Jewish organizations and congregations in St. Louis that held on to the old languages and had immigrant members. Moshe had a room and bathroom of his own under the eaves on the third floor. He spent a lot of time alone upstairs reading the newspapers and went to a few social meetings. He was a heavy smoker, but since Edward didn’t smoke and frowned on it, he smoked mostly in his room or outside the house. My grandfather’s clothes always looked boxy to me, from another world, even though my mother took him shopping to replace the eastern European suit he’d worn when he arrived with Midwestern styles to make him look more American. At first he still kept his Old Country toothbrush mustache, which reminded me of the villain Adolph Hitler’s. In a few months he had enough English to read Barry simple children’s stories but couldn’t yet read books that entertained me.

Sometimes my grandfather had dinner with us, and other times he took a plate upstairs to eat alone. The only way to get to the third floor was by a narrow, dusty back stairway from the kitchen that wound around an old dumbwaiter that was no longer usable. For me it was a little child’s adventure to mount the stairs to meet with the quiet man who lived in the attic at the top, and to poke around in the other musty room that had been turned over to storage. He would pat my head in a kindly way, we’d sit quietly for a few minutes, look together at his books and papers with their strange script, and then I’d descend, carrying an empty teacup or plate to the kitchen.

Recalling that time, Felice said, “My father came to me in St. Louis because I was his product; he made me, he educated me. When Hanka’s name came up, he smiled and called her
‘Floch,’
which means somebody who runs all the time and doesn’t stop to think. He felt sorry for Miriam, who had missed so much when she was growing up because he had lost his means of earning money by then. In St. Louis my father liked to look at me, take little walks with me. He’d take my hand and I his as we walked, and occasionally he smiled at me with approval. We would talk politics because we both had political minds. I spoke my political opinions openly and he would get scared.

“He said, ‘You shouldn’t talk like that to just anybody; you shouldn’t talk too loud. They will think you are a communist’.”

Slowly, however, Felice and her father’s fractious relationship resurfaced over who was in charge. “He had a mind of his own. He kept asking me if I had tuberculosis because I was so slim, and he had seen so much starvation. I would suggest that he get out and meet people and socialize with students from his English class. We introduced him to Polish Jews living in St. Louis and to other refugees, but he would isolate himself. We didn’t think that was good for him. He was very stubborn.”

Sometimes I heard them arguing in Polish. It was a musical language to me, with unfamiliar melodies, and when they argued, the tempo, pitch, and volume went up, then dropped to a hush.

Moshe brought with him nightmares from Europe, and they scared him. He was afraid he wouldn’t be able to awake from them. He told my mother that in his dream his arm and hand were across his chest. He couldn’t raise his arm and felt that he would suffocate. Sometimes, he told my mother, he could stop the bad dreams by raising his hand. Sometimes he would cry out in terror until my mother or father climbed the stairs and raised his arm for him. This happened too in the displaced persons camp in Germany, where bunkmates raised his arm to quiet him. My mother and father explained to me that my grandfather’s dreams were about his fear of dying in the war. My mother added that her father was suffocating himself with his own feelings. He was stifling them by holding them in. He needed to spend time with other refugees so he could talk about his experiences.

As a six-year-old, I understood part of this explanation, but I couldn’t follow the part about holding feelings in. What feelings were there that he could share with other refugees? Why did he need to hold them in? I was shielded from a lot. But I felt a sense of my grandfather’s fear and dreaded his screams in the night.

After a while Moshe asked my parents to install an intercom system so if he was screaming in the middle of the night they would hear him downstairs and come up and raise his arm. Felice demurred. “How could I lie awake listening for his screaming on an intercom when I was raising two little boys and had to be awake for them, and Edward woke so early in the morning to go to the hospital that he needed his sleep at night protected? We resisted my father’s request, and he must have stopped the nightmares on his own.”

The 1948 war in Palestine was a turning point. I was seven, and this marked my own dawning awareness of politics and world conflict. Each evening my parents and grandfather gathered by the radio in the sitting room for the evening news and followed the reports of the fighting from whatever sources they could as the Jews tried to stake out their own little state of Israel in the ancient Biblical battleground. The United Nations had voted on Nov. 29, 1947 to end British control of Palestine and create two states. British troops departed, and war broke out between the Arabs and Jews. I knew by then that my mother’s sisters were there—Moshe’s daughters—and that they and their husbands were fighting, and that I had a pretty little cousin about my own age named Dafna who was in danger. Letters came regularly.

For several weeks we followed the siege of Jerusalem on the radio. Arab forces had blocked the road, and food could only get through by an armored convoy up a narrow, dangerous canyon with snipers shooting down on the relief columns from the steep hillsides. Outside on the Westminster Place sidewalks and postage stamp lawns and in the narrow passages between the houses, my neighborhood buddies and I re-created the battles I heard about on the radio in our living room. I was usually the director, because few in the neighborhood were Jewish. I was the one who had the firsthand news. They had no idea there was a war going on.

To make our battles more universal for my friends, I changed the conflict into cowboys versus Indians and Americans against the Nazis. I liked to win by subterfuge rather than full frontal assault. My forces would break through a hedge or jump from a porch that served as a canyon wall and attack the enemy that was shooting the convoy from behind. The coal bin in our basement served as a bunker hideout. We could escape into it by sliding down the chute on the side of the house. We emerged black, covered in soot. Our make-believe wars were all black and white. We arrayed forces for good against evil, without any awareness of ambiguity or gradations of justice. At seven, we demonized our enemy just as world leaders do.

On May 14, 1948, Israel declared itself an independent state, and President Truman gave a speech the following day recognizing Israel. The radio broadcasts of these events are still vivid in my mind. The grownups were completely still and silent in our sitting room to hear every word of the radio broadcasts. There was some crackling in the transmission. Finally they smiled with satisfaction. My mother called friends on the telephone and then began to write a letter to her sisters. My father returned to his study to write and read. A short time later, Moshe was packing his suitcase to settle in Israel. I didn’t see him again until 1958, when at age seventeen I traveled to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem to meet my cousins. Moshe was living in a studio apartment that Hanka’s family added above their little one-story stucco house on the edge of Tel Aviv, built with money my father sent from America. His light brown hair had thinned, and he had shaved his mustache. When he saw me, he patted my head as he had done in St. Louis and said in good English, “You were so small. I didn’t think you’d ever grow up.”

Not too long after that, he developed a cancer of the esophagus, and Felice went to Israel to be by his bed in the hospital during his final days. He said, “I want my doctor to meet you.”

When the doctor came over, Moshe said to him, “She is my best medicine. She is my oldest daughter.”

“That was how I knew how much he appreciated me in spite of everything,” Felice said.

The Memory Books

About 25 more years passed before I really did learn about the Holocaust. I had to. I couldn’t avoid it any longer if I was to write Felice’s story. And still I might not have faced it if my wife, Bridget Connelly, hadn’t been interested my mother’s story. In the spring of 1992, the Berlin Wall recently having come down and Eastern Europe opening to the West, we decided to travel to Poland and Szczuczyn. At the same time American forces were rumbling into Iraq in the First Gulf War and Iraqi scud missiles were raining down on Israel.

In Warsaw we walked the neighborhood where the Ghetto had been. A few rubble-strewn lots remained, but the area was now mostly rebuilt with drab post-war communist state-built high-rise apartments. I trod the pavement tentatively, not wanting to really feel the ground lest it trap me like quicksand in the terrible past before I was ready. A driver we located through the Jewish roots organization drove us two hours northeast of Warsaw to Kolno, where Felice’s grandparents had lived and she had gone to grammar school, and to Lomza, the railroad junction where Felice took the train to boarding school. Along the way, farmers, with horse-drawn carts, were bringing potatoes to the markets and railroad sidings. A little further, Szczuczyn remained a sleepy farming town.

My mother had given us the address of her home, and we found it easily. Now occupied by another family, it was just where she’d said it would be, on the corner of Church Street and Market Square. I didn’t talk with anybody on this trip, just looked and imagined how life had been before the war. I tried hard not to imagine how it was on the night and days after the Germans invaded, nor did I yet know the details of what happened. I was still protecting myself from the full truth and vision of it.

Our second trip was twelve years later in June 2004. There was an exhibition of photographs of Szczuczyn from the years 1895 to 1939 in Warsaw’s newly reconstituted Jewish Historical Society, the first stop on the exhibition’s tour, which would then go to Israel and across America. As with our first trip, I asked my mother to join us, but she said, “I can’t go. I would cry and cry. The tears would never stop flowing.”

The photos on display were the work of Zalman Kaplan, who had been the town photographer until the Nazis killed him. His grandson Mike Marvins, a photographer in Houston, Texas, and his granddaughter Laura Kaplan Silver had gathered the pictures from emigrants to the Americas, Palestine, Australia, and New Zealand who had left before the war. They had also obtained Zalman’s photographs from Polish families still living in Szczuczyn.

Relatives of perished villagers came from around the world, including one survivor from the village now living in Israel. The mayor of Szczuczyn and a few townspeople also came to the opening. There were Warsaw cultural and official representatives. It was a reflective evening. We and most of the people simply identified ourselves and our mutual connections to Szczuczyn to each other and marveled how tranquil and quotidian rural Polish life seemed in the photographs. Digitized and enlarged, the images were vivid, as if the people had stepped out of them, off the wall and into the crowded room; the faces in them mirrored the faces of their living descendants peering at them. My mother’s family stood in a fine, poster size enlargement of a masterfully lit and composed studio portrait taken when Felice was home on vacation from school in 1931. She had carried a small original copy with her in her suitcase when she came to America.