Category Archives: Personal Revelation

Wishing for the Nightmare to End

The trauma is passed to us in our DNA. It has been etched by myriad attempts to obliterate us, forged by centuries of Babylonians, Romans, Crusaders, Cossacks, Jihadists, ad infinitum. . . an endless list of haters. Wherever we go, wherever we settle, we are never free of it.

I felt it in the earliest fog of my dawning awareness. In the safety of postwar America, it resonated in sounds and furies I couldn’t understand.   The wailing, the anger, the despair that accompanied the opening of an envelope.  The reluctance to go to the door when a telegram arrived.  The startle and the groan when the telephone rang. I felt the pain, intuited the anguish, but I was a baby, and I didn’t have words.  The frenzy was terrifying. 

As I acquired language, words seeped into my consciousness and insinuated themselves into my vocabulary.  Nazis, camps, exile, death, torture, hiding, hate. . . .

The images swarmed into my nightmares.  Dark images I could not name usurped my dreams.  By the time I was 3, the nightmare was a cinematic horror that repeated itself over and over. My cousins and I hide in my grandmother’s attic, a house in Queens full of shadowy corners, where evil easily lurked.  And always – though I do not know how or where I ever heard them – the soundtrack comes from the whine of European sirens and the thump of jackboots on concrete. 

I inevitably wake just as a helmeted monster finds me and proclaims, “So. . . you thought you could escape us. But there is nowhere to hide, Jew. . . .”

I was eleven before the full impact of my family’s flight became clear.  When I asked my mother why she never talked to me about it, she said, “I lived.  It wasn’t so interesting.”  She had not suffered as the beloved relatives suffered in the camps or as the cousins did when they were ripped from their parents’ arms and sent on Kindertransports or the way others did who watched their parents murdered and had to find their orphaned way to Australia or South America or . . . .Mom had no words and no sympathy for her own trauma –  being cast into exile, leaving everything she valued in a world gone mad.  She could not have explained it to me.

When I was an adult, I recognized some of her coping techniques.  She married my father, an all-American boy, whose family had come to North America by choice in the 1600s, Dutch and English protestants, fleeing nothing. They came in search of a New Life that was richer than the rich one they left behind.  Dad was a towheaded blonde, whose sky-blue eyes glistened with tears when he heard his favorite hymns.  He was Safety.  Mom buried herself in his identity and denied her own so that her children would never have to fear the monsters who robbed her of so much. 

I did not share her assurance.  I grew ever more afraid of the knock on the door, the intrusion of the evil interloper intent on taking our joy, our lives.  But I trusted that thanks to Israel, we would never again be an endangered species.  If the Nazis returned, we would have a place to go. The uncles and aunts and cousins who were denied entrance to alternate countries or who were caught because they knew of no place to go might have been saved had there been an Israel.  We the people without a country had one whose birth was within a year of my own, and we would never be flagless orphans again.

People ask me, “Why do you need Israel? You are American!”  My mother’s older sister, whose wisdom I found nonpareil, loved to say that in America we were safe.  “Don’t worry!” She would laugh. “The US is too diverse a community to hate one people with the kind of vehemence that European hegemony empowered.  We will never be hated like that here.”

I have wanted to believe her.  I have wanted to be grateful for this country that nurtured me, a country I deeply love.  Knowing that the Plot Against America of the 1930s and 40s was thwarted, I wanted to trust the country I have always believed is mine. 

Yet, even now we are reminded that even here we are interlopers.

A synagogue in Pittsburgh is attacked. Neo-nazis march in droves shouting “Jews will not replace us.”  Undereducated youngsters with no sense of history celebrate the murder of Israeli children and blame us for wanting to save Israel. They scream for its extinction.  Modern Judenratners, betray us at every turn.  We are no safer here than we are in any other gentile-dominated country of the world. 

We require the presence of a resolute, strong Israel to safeguard our future.

Israel must survive.   Or we will not.

Am Yisroel Chai!

Shoe Fever

It was 2003, and my sweet baby cousin Adriana was getting married in San Francisco.

The wedding was a big deal. Though a small destination wedding, it was a momentous occasion. Our entire extended family – including our celebrity cousin – would converge, and friends of Adriana’s from all over the world would join us. I had to look good.

Which is why, in preparation for the upcoming nuptials, I was not thinking about Adriana.  I was thinking about my clothes.  I was consumed actually.  And contemplating shoplifting. 

I envisioned the kind of escapade one imagines as a teenager, not as the nearly senior citizen of 56 that I was at the time, possessed by a midlife crisis: I needed new shoes.

I had found the perfect pair. They were elegant: low-heeled, round-toed, and comfortable for dancing yet black velvet and impractical for winter walking in New Haven, where I lived and worked. They were exactly the kind of shoes my money-obsessed husband would never let me buy.  

I must interject that while we were never poor – he was a well-remunerated engineer, and I was a classroom teacher, who took on multiple extra-curricular activities that paid me nicely – he regarded money much as an anorexic regards food.  So long as he had complete control, so long as he treated our finances as though we were destitute, he could breathe.  The minute we began allowing ourselves luxury items like more than one pair of shoes or a color television – anything beyond the necessities – his anxiety flared, and he became angry, verbally abusive, impossible to be around.  These shoes were unthinkable.

Yet I saw them as my emancipation proclamation.  I had spent thirty-three years believing, like the naïf Nora in A Doll’s House, that if I acquiesced perfectly enough and long enough, eventually the “most wonderful thing” would happen, and I’d be rewarded by his performing an act of magnificent self-sacrifice. Then he, my benevolent beloved, and I would live happily ever after.  However, by the time of this particular crisis, I knew that my miracle was never going to happen. Stealing those shoes would be a way of saying to my husband, “Hey you get off-‘o’ my cloud,”  a way to affect my liberation from the oppression of hope as much as of him. 

I tried them on.  Pure podiatric bliss.  I furtively surveyed the store.  No one was near.  If I just walked out, who would see me?  I headed toward the exit. A sales clerk stopped rearranging the handbags on the periphery of the shoe department and stared at me.  I turned around, pretending I was merely giving the shoes a trial walk around the store.  She went back to her work, and I took off the shoes. I waited a few moments before opening my backpack and sliding them inside. I hadn’t seen a beeper tag.  Surely, I could pull this off.  Again, I headed toward the exit, but as I rounded the corner near the checkout line, I saw myself standing in handcuffs, an army of my students past and present staring at me in disbelief, looking betrayed but pointing and laughing at the same time.  I couldn’t do it. 

The shoes went back to the shelf, and I left the store dejected but resolved.  If I were going to be held captive in this life for the duration, I should at least maintain my integrity. 

Our Little King

When I was very young, my father was afflicted with a strange kind of wanderlust that impelled him to move his growing family often.  We lived in eleven homes before I was nine.  Fortunately for me, in those early postwar years, as they adjusted to their American lifestyle and learned to trust their safety, my mother and her sisters were virtually inseparable.  My grandparents bought a large faux Tudor house in Bayside, Queens, which had a revolving door for the three sisters and their children. My first first cousins and I were treated as near-siblings, and we lived in that house at various intervals, and for several years, we all but breathed in unison. Each of the sisters had married a man from a different culture, and we navigated a polyglot world, overseen by our Pater familias Henri Robinson, whom we all called Papa.

Papa was short and round.  In those days, over breakfast, we’d read the Sunday comics together, and I especially liked “The Little King,” a cartoon by Otto Soglow.

“He looks like Papa when Papa wears his long red bathrobe,” I told my mother.

“Oh, dear, please don’t say that to Papa.  You’ll hurt his feelings.”

I did tell him, but instead of being hurt, he was amused. He looked at me with a rare twinkle in his eye and laughed a deep, belly laugh that I don’t think I had ever heard from him before.  He hugged me, showing me an affection that was rare for the Old World man that he was.

Papa was a flawed man.  We all knew that, and instead of judging him, his wife and daughters laughed at behaviors that were anything but funny.  We admired him and understood that he meant well even when he did terrible things. I was, however, perplexed at times. It especially confused me that they all — including my mother — thought it was hilarious that he ran away from home when my mother, his third daughter, was born. 

It was one of the many stories Grandma loved to tell.

“He was so upset that I didn’t give him a son, he ran away, and I did not see him till six months later!”  She’d laugh until an emphysema-hacking fit interceded.  “I punished him, though.  I had the last word. He got Ruthi before he finally got our Johnny.”

Some of the stories were more understandably funny.  My favorite was what we called “The Accord Story,” another one that Grandma loved to tell.

“You know. We came in 1939, when we escaped from Europe. My brother Joe was our first sponsor. You’d think he was the one who saved us. He did get us our first place. A two-bedroom apartment like the one we had in Vienna. Only this one was in Wadley Heights, Harlem.

“Papa was in Cuba. His passport from Poland, where he was born, and the Polish quota was filled. So what else could he do? He traveled to Cuba.”

“That lovely Harlem flat was too small for all us.”

At the time, the family included my grandmother, my mother, age 16, her sister Ruth, age 13, John, age 10, and Herma, her oldest sister, who was in the second trimester of pregnancy.  Herma’s husband Borislav, a Serbian painter, was with Papa in Cuba; the two of them would join the others as soon as their visas were approved.

“You couldn’t argue with the facts. We had to move.” 

Papa’s brothers offered a rescue plan. 

“Those two — the scheisters! Your papa saw what was happening all around us. He had some money in American banks, and those two found out a way to swindle us. They got a quarry in Accord, NY. A quarry!! That they put in Papa’s name. They told us they got us a big new house, and we believed them. When Papa and Borislav arrived in the States, they had us settled in the quarry farmhouse.

“I knew that when Papa would see what they did, he would go . . . there’s no good word in English.  Zornig. Deadly. He could murder those two.  A quarry was the last thing my Henri would want. Furthermore, everyone hated the farmhouse.

It was a true country homestead.  No electricity, no indoor plumbing, no privacy.  Large and looming, the house had no bedroom doors and no place to take baths without open exposure. Not a suitable home in any way.

“I told them, ‘As soon as Henri gets here, you better make this right.'”

The brothers were never put to the test.  When Papa was back for less than a week, a fire broke out.

Grandma and the sisters were all in various parts of the first floor. Papa was upstairs in the room where he and Grandma slept.  John was outside. It was he who saw the flames shooting from the house and screamed at my grandmother, who screamed at the others.

“My china,” yelled Grandma.

“Henri!!  Get what you can from the bedroom.  And get outside!”

“The baby things,” screamed Herma. 

“MY cello,” wailed my mother.

“Oh, no, the cat!”  howled Ruth.

John joined the frenzy to get out as much of what mattered as possible. The kids carried linens, dishware, jewelry, clothing. Borislav saved his easel and canvases. But Papa was nowhere to be seen.

“Where’s your father?”  called my grandmother.

“Last I saw, he went back to get things from the bedroom.” 

“Get out, Herma,” scolded Grandma.  “The smoke is getting thick.  Protect your baby.”

“Mama,” cried John.  “I keep calling Papa, and he doesn’t answer.”

“Get out, John.  Your father will find his way.”

Having saved as much as they could, the members of the family converged on the front lawn.  

Ruth worried. “I still don’t know where Papa went,” she whined.

My mother, who had walked around the house to assess the extent of the fire, said, “I won’t miss this house, that’s for sure.”  Then she looked up. “Omigod, Mama, look, up on the roof.”

There was Papa. Standing on the sloped roof of the house.  Calmly looking for a place to slide down.

“Henri,” called my grandmother.  “What are you doing up there?”

“I went back to the bedroom,” he called, “And when I started down the stairs, I saw that there were flames in the center of the house, so I came up here.”

“What have you rescued, Henry?” asked my grandmother. 

At this point of her narration, Grandma always stopped and looked us in the eye. 

“There he stood,” she would say.  “My brilliant bald husband.  Holding his hairbrush and his hand mirror.”  If we failed to laugh, she was crestfallen.  We made it a point to laugh.

The house was damaged beyond repair.  The family moved to Kingston in time for my cousin to be born there. And the story remains a moment of levity for a family that was otherwise plagued by tragedy.

But that’s not what this story is about.

Pride

  In the third week of my second year of college, I decided I had to drop out. I told the registrar at the University of New Mexico I was pregnant so I could collect my tuition money and run away to New York with my boyfriend.  We were both gold-green and scared. I was 18, still living in books, and he was 20, just a kid from the rez near Santa Fe.  We’d heard that even in New York there were laws against illegal cohabitation, and we were worried we’d be arrested if we tried to shack up.  Where would we live?

Mid-flight, halfway across the country, I remembered that my grandmother had a cozy little apartment in her Queens home basement that we might rent if we were married.  So, soon after we landed, we wed.

Grandma’s and my relationship was historically fraught.  Her life had tortured her, and even I understood that that gave her license to torture me.  Before her whole family was forced out of Vienna, the city she loved, before the Nazis murdered her two most beloved brothers and a revered sister, before my grandfather’s illness took all that was left of her endurance, she had buried her favorite daughter, her much-adored first grandson, and even her long-awaited, highly prized son to freakish illnesses and accidents. She took solace in the Cutty Sark and beer she kept close to her in ample supply. As she drank, she descended into dark, evil moods that riveted her to her couch in an unlit corner of her living room. 

In those days, Grandma was a big woman, and her presence was terrifying. She would sit on her couch by herself, sullenly knitting or crocheting, a bloated, glowering Mme. Defarge, muttering her complaints mostly about me, her third surviving grandchild and a massive disappointment.  She smoked a pack of unfiltered camels a day, so her litany of my shortcomings – too fat, too lazy, too blonde, too stupid to be 6 or 7 or 8, 9, 10—was punctuated by the rasp of expectorating sputum. My only defense? I called her Grandma, which she hated, instead of Mamma, as my cousins did.

By the time I needed her apartment, however, she and I had forged a truce.  I was, after all, a married lady, and I worked hard to maintain my professional demeanor, never missed work, cared for my new husband with all the deference and respect expected of a proper 60s wife.

But not for long.  Mickey and I said “I do” in October.   He nearly died of hepatitis in December, and I finally understood why we hadn’t yet conjoined.   Turned out he’d been living la gay vida loca all over NYC.  Yes, I had had a clue.  I just didn’t know what I was supposed to do with the information.  Besides, I loved him, loved his company.  His friendship was the most precious relationship I had ever had, and I never wanted to lose it.  The illness forced him to leave.  He was miserable in New York and wanted to be near his mother. He moved to Santa Fe in January, and I remained in Bayside, terrified to share the explanation with my grandmother. I didn’t want her to stop loving him.  But mostly I feared her derision.

One night I got home late from work in Manhattan, and I was lounging in bed, watching the Million Dollar Movie, when I heard a knock at my door.  I opened it to find my grandmother bent over in the cold, holding a batch of cookies she had baked earlier.  I was surprised to see her and just as surprised by the cookies – she rarely baked, and she never allowed me to eat bread in her presence, let alone cookies.  But I smiled and thanked her.

She coughed for a full minute and a half before she collapsed into a chair at my kitchen table.  I brought her a glass of water, and she nodded. 

“My brother was a faygele,” she said apropos of nothing.

“Hunh?” I wasn’t sure I had heard what I thought I heard.

“Like your Mickey.  He liked boys.  That’s why they took him first.  The Nazis.  To the death camp.”

I sat next to her, and she told me about my great Uncle Ferdinand, a gifted musician, a small hump-backed man, who painted and made his living as a bookbinder.  The Nazis relocated him to the popup ghetto along with his professional musicians brother and sister-in-law with whom he boarded. Then, the three were sent to Mali Trosinac. 

“The Nazis hated the homosexuals.  And anyone who tried to protect them. The brightest and the best they took from me.  Ferdinand, Max, and Paula.” She sighed, and her head dropped to her chest.  I thought she would fall asleep.  Then her emphysema cough startled her upright. She lit a cigarette and talked on into the night. The more she talked, in German and in English, the more elegant her prose became. What a facility she had for narration.  I was spellbound.

“Listen,” she said as she neared the end of her story.  “I know what it was like for you with all your brothers and sisters. You the oldest, you in charge of so many personalities. For me, it was not so different. Everywhere we went when I was a child, we, too, stuck out like a seamstress’s thumbs swollen with pinpricks. “

“You, Mamma?”

“Well, you know. I was the youngest.  Of ten.  Whether you’re six or eight or ten, you’re too many.  You’re always special.  Like my Ferdinand. And your Mickey.”

Elegy

It’s an odd thing to be a sister whose little brother has died.

The sister is not the wife who tended to him for 42 years, who devoted her existence to making sure he lived longer than anyone could have predicted.  The sister is not responsible for orchestrating his diabetes care, his two kidney transplants, his quintuple by-pass, or for guarding his limbs with her life so that he would die with most of himself intact.

The sister is not the adopted son, the boy-now-man who needed a father and found in the brother a gently adamant hand that guided him through the tumult of adolescence and into an altruistic career.

Nor is the sister the granddaughter he took in at her birth, whom he nurtured, fed, coddled, and adored while his wife, her grandmother, worked to support them all when he had been forced into early retirement.  The granddaughter who ran to her Poppi whenever her feelings were hurt or her path confused her.

Or the 9-year-old niece who came to visit and stayed till she graduated from college, married a surgeon, attended law school, and settled in the heartland.

The sister is peripheral.  She has no rights to the mourning.  She knows that the wife, the son, the granddaughter, and the niece own the wailing rights.  And who is this sister to suffer from his loss?

After all, all this sister is is the grown-up child into whose hands her grandmother placed this brother when he arrived home from the hospital on his fourth day of life.  She is the person who hardly remembers life before there was this brother, whom she didn’t always like but never failed to love.

It was she who caught him when he fell off the neighbor’s garage roof pretending to be Davy Crockett on the trail of Big Bad Mike Fink. She is the one who ran to get Daddy when little brother climbed a telephone pole in the aftermath of a hurricane and tried to use his new tool kit to fix a live electric wire.  It was she who walked him to school on his first day of Kindergarten, when his hearing was still returning from near-deafness. She stood guard over him while he played with gusto, alone and jubilant, on the playground. When the principal called them in, and he didn’t hear, the principal grabbed his ear to pull him inside.  It was the sister who pushed the woman’s hand away.  “Don’t you dare touch my little brother,” she screamed.  “He didn’t hear you.”

No. She didn’t always like him.  At times she hated him. He could be a tyrant, barging in on her bathroom time, teasing her about her appearance, robbing her of time alone when she wanted to write. Then there was her abject jealousy. He was more popular.  He had a broader grin.  He was cute and funny.  Which she was not.  And he got sick.  A lot. Which meant people took care of him.  That’s why she crawled into bed with him and licked his breakfast fork when he had the Asian flu. It was her turn, and though she nearly died for her trouble, she was never sorry.  For once the brother tended to her and brought her soup and news from the schoolyard.  He found her shivering and brought a cover from his own bed. 

She coaxed him to read, to write, to expound his wisdom.  In his last year in high school, he spent a week with her in her New York apartment working on an essay and a speech he was to give in a competition.  He won the contest and got an A on the paper, and she was not the least bit surprised.  She always knew he was smarter than he thought he was.

The sister’s life did not depend on his, but then she always thought he’d be somewhere she could reach him. He could be a great comfort . . . and he could be a painful cyst. Either way, he was there. She always knew he might precede her into the void. She just never believed it.

So odd to be the sister whose little brother has died.