by Susan Taubes
I could have been two or three years old. I had a little charming brother whom I loved more than anything else. He got sick. At that time, we did not have any serum against diphtheria, whooping cough; no antibiotics. He was dying. He was put in the studio in a wooden crib. People gathered in the studio. They were reciting (as is customary) psalms. My mother and two sisters were standing by, close to each other. The life of Samuel (it means “the name of God”) was close to the end. An elderly Jew held a goose feather in hand to see when the breathing of Samuel did not move the feather any more. Suddenly he cried out the S’ma Yisrael (Harken Israel), which meant that my brother expired. And I was there, unnoticed, observing. I felt that life is utterly impossible, bitter, the dangers are tremendous; that these people should be able to do better and not to let my little, beloved brother die.
I spent my life with the other boys in the yard of the synagogue where our family lived. I went twice daily to service. In the synagogue there was burning the eternal light. The light flickered. I was told that the spirits of the dead are dwelling there and when the living come in for the service, the spirits of the dead have to be reminded that the living are coming in for the service and the spirits have to leave. One was supposed not to meet them. So I followed the shamesz, the man who had, among many other things, the duty to open the door of the synagogue. There was a thick and heavy door. The man had a big key. He knocked on the door with this heavy key, reminding, urging the spirits to leave. There was already a considerable hole due to previous knocking on the door. In the synagogue, there was a sort of chair on which the circumcision took place. The removed foreskins were collected in a box attached to the back part of the chair. With several boys we once raided this chair and dispersed the dried-up foreskins on the floor.
HOW OLD WOMEN URINATED IN GALANTA ON THE STREET
I often witnessed the following scene. (There wasn’t a possibility in Galanta to find a facility for urination, besides at home.) It was always with two women together; they met and chatted. When they left, I found a puddle at the place where they were standing. It was dry before. Later on as a medical student, I understood that in old women there is a possibility to accomplish this without (much) soiling themselves. (Women wore long dresses.)
FATHER’S WALK FROM THE HOUSE TO THE SYNAGOGUE
He started to pray the moment he left the house for the synagogue. And he did so until he reached his prominent place in the synagogue. Nobody would have disturbed him. Leaving the synagogue, he stopped for a few minutes to talk to a member. It was like when a king would do such a thing. (Today a rabbi of a reform congregation would stop and tell even a dirty joke to a member.)
GRANDFATHER, THE FAMED REB SIMON OF NYITRA
I did not know him; he died shortly after I was born.
He didn’t leave behind any writings, but the following hochmes (wise sayings) were often repeated in our house. When disciples came to ask him what a man needed in order to be happy he answered, “A yid soll man sein und appetit soll man haben.” (One should be a Jew and one should have a good appetite.) He used to say that he couldn’t understand how a goy can be happy: he does not eat kosher food and does not apply tefillin (phylacteries).
He didn’t understand birds. From his study window he would see a bird fly from one branch to the next, rest a while and fly on to another branch. Why couldn’t the bird stay where it was, why did it fly to another branch?
BACK TO PRIVATE CONVERSATION
Around the age of eight. A small group of boys talked about whether sexual intercourse exists between our parents or not. We decided that the parents of the boys present did not have sex in order to produce us, all the others’ parents did.
MY FIRST PENNIES
It was when I was four or five that his father let me work in the lumberyard to put in order shingles. I got three pennies. I bought with one penny a flute, painted red, made out of sugar, wrapped in fine thin paper, held together with a ring. I put away the paper, put the ring on my finger, played the flute, and consumed it. With the second penny I bought at the market a fist-size canteloupe, ate it secretly. The third penny I saved for the future.
WHY THEY PERSECUTED MY FATHER
The Galanta congregation resented my father’s vernacular learning. They were savages. They claimed that he was not a real rabbi because he read the newspaper. They held against him that on a visit to Vienna he had gone to the theater and seen a play by Schiller. Once I asked him how he liked the play, he answered with a shrug, “M’lacht...”
BUDAPEST
I was ten and a half when my father was invited to become the rabbi of one of the greatest congregations of Europe. We moved to Budapest and my life and outlook changed completely. I became a college boy and then a medical student. With all the enthusiasm of a young man, I got acquainted with the new discoveries of chemistry, physics, with the literary geniuses of that time, with sociological theories, with new trends in art and finally, with Sigmund Freud’s writings. When his Totem and Taboo was published I briefed my father about the main content; namely that, according to Freud, God is our projected conscience and not what religion says; that conscience is the introjected God. He was silent. When I urged him to make a comment he said: “You are meshuga” (crazy). This was the first and the last time that I talked to my father about psychoanalysis.
At the age of eighteen I left the home of my parents. I made myself independent. But I stayed a devoted son. As long as I lived in my parents’ home, I participated in the performance of several rituals. My father knew how I felt about them. Later on, as an analyst, I wrote several papers on Jewish rituals and have shown that every ritual was a tremendous step forward in harnessing antisocial drives; but that now we can know their meaning and have control by knowing what they are. I do not oppose those who observe them, who obey.
FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF THE HUNGARIAN CAPITAL
Glorious entry into Budapest. We were traveling in first-class coach (I had never been in before—with red beautiful cover) and a terrible thing happened. My sister Lea wet herself. A large wet spot on the red plush. Terrible embarrassment. A delegation received us with music. We were taken to our apartment in fiakkers (carriages with two horses). The first time I saw water coming from the wall, at my will, toilet with flush (in Galanta we had outdoor Abort), houses with many flats, streetcars. Very soon I walked to the Danube. Later on I walked up to Buda. I was fascinated by the Royal Palace. No way to get in. Only to the gates. But I could get in to a museum at the side of the palace with relics to honor the memory of Empress and Queen Elizabeth (a real and legendary beauty who was killed in Luzern by an anarchist). I never missed to stand on the line on the street when Emperor and King Franz Josef (Ferencz Jozsef) came for a few days or weeks to his palace in Buda. It happened that I was (pretty often and always alone) near the guard horse who, when the king or prince came, drew arms to honor them, and see myself standing there, again alone, nobody bothering to ask me what I am doing there. I felt—like Kafka—that I would never get in. But I did, I did. The Hapsburg Dynasty perished and the palace was taken over by the revolutionary government of the radical (not communist) party and also later by the Hapsburg communists too, and offices were set up. I walked in the beautiful corridors, saw the wonderful doors, wallpapers, all with great art, and I wasn’t sure who would take care of all these precious things. The palace was destroyed when in 1945 the Germans withdrew from Budapest. Now the palace is restored. I do not know what happened inside.
MY “PRIMAL SCENE”
(Observance of parental intercourse, directly or indirectly.)
Age twelve to thirteen. Father went very early to the synagogue. The moment he was out of the house, I went furtively (others should not notice it) in the bed of my father. His nightshirt was there. It had a special smell. My mother’s nightshirt smell was different. When I perceived that the two smells were mixed, I drew my conclusion. Since then my olfactory orientation enables me to “put
my nose into everything” when an explanation is missing. It helps me to discover the hidden.
MY FIRST INCOME FROM “PSYCHOTHERAPY”
I was about fifteen. It was in Budapest.
My father called me and my older brother Hermann into his studio. There was standing a short, thin man, showing on his face great distress. Father explained to us that this man made a vow that he cannot fulfill and that this man needs an absolution from his vow. According to Jewish tradition three Jews over the age of thirteen can create a court, a Beth Din, and absolve him from the obligation he committed himself to in innocence.
MY MOTHER’S DREAM A MONTH AFTER MY FATHER’S DEATH
She was at a ball and a man with a wooden leg asked her to dance. They danced for a long time and, she added, it felt so good.
Interpretation: To “dance” means to enjoy intercourse. She missed having intercourse with Father. The wooden leg signified her dead husband. She was dancing with her dead husband in the dream. It was the first and last time that my mother asked me about a psychoanalytic interpretation.
SHE WALKS up the porch steps of her father’s house. The front door is open; he is with a patient in his office upstairs. She is to wait for him downstairs. Nothing has changed since she left for college, except that the dining-room table where she used to do her homework is now entirely covered with his papers, piles of mail and medical journals. The black air-raid shades from the forties are still on all the windows behind the regular yellow shades; both drawn three-fourths down during the day. At night he pulls them all the way down, going from room to room, and in the morning hoists them one-fourth up, meticulously. When the house is dark during the day, he puts on the dim little wall lights.
Her father had furnished the house to suit his own needs: the living room was where he made his telephone calls; the dining room, where he answered his mail; a table with six chairs and a buffet, the set bought second-hand for a hundred and ten dollars, filled the space. A room needed furniture, but he hadn’t arranged his house for entertaining, or even casual sitting around. Women friends and his sister-in-law Olga were always offering to fix up the house for him, but he wouldn’t hear of it. “Busybodies!” he told his daughter. He knew he could afford finer materials, custom-made furniture, “But what for?” The chest of drawers he bought for eight dollars served perfectly well; and the curtains that were hanging on the windows when he bought the house didn’t bother him. That such things should bother his daughter when she lived with him was always a source of grief. “You’ll be leaving anyway in a few years,” he used to answer her complaints.
She hears the patient come down the carpeted stairs, the front door open and close, and soon after, her father’s heavy tread that makes the woodwork creak. He stands smiling, arms thrown apart, as he had done when she was a small child. It would be wonderful if she could run into his arms like then, run and be lifted in the air; but on her long legs she stands three paces from him, too near to run; she walks two steps and they embrace, the old bear hug.
“Well, at last! At last!” His raspy voice welcomes her, his voice like his grip on her arm, proprietary. To his child, who will always belong to him, he repeats with relish, “At last you’re here. It’s right. Come,” he says and she follows him into the kitchen. “We have many things to discuss. But we have time.” He shows her there’s everything in the icebox; a roast turkey, bread, butter, cake, eggs, salami, ham. “We will eat, but not yet. We will take our usual evening walk.” But first he must draw down the shades, put on the lights, wind the clocks, change his shoes. “No,” he says sternly when she offers to help. He doesn’t want her to touch the shades. They’re old and fragile, all the fixtures in his house, only he knows how to wind his clocks properly. She follows him up the stairs; there is a clock in every room, in the upstairs and downstairs halls and on the landing. She watches him tie his shoelaces, the way he learned as a boy. Forming two loops he makes a double knot with appropriate grunts.
“Come,” he says, “I want to show you...” She knows what: the envelopes with his will, with the cash, with the list of telephone numbers, instructions for his funeral. And then to the drawer with all the documents, and through all the closets, then up to the attic. On the third floor, showing her the boxes of reprints of his articles, copies of Imago, her childhood things, drawings, notebooks; a box where he put wedding presents for her from his friends in Garfield: Paul Revere pots and pans, and more of those meaningless pairs of silver candlesticks.
“What will you do with all this when I die?” he asks anxiously. “Do you want this? Shall I give it away? I don’t want you to be burdened with such details. Everything should be in order when I die.”
Ever since they had lived in the house he had spoken of his will, and periodically showed her where he kept the envelopes; then every time she left to play in summer stock and when she came home for vacation from college and when she visited after she was married; her father’s house in Garfield was always the house to which she would have to return one day to open envelopes, meet with lawyers, real estate men; the house she would have to dispose of; the house where her father had just died and where it was frightening to hear his footsteps at night; a house where it felt strange to sit in the kitchen with her father while he read the newspaper.
She watches him, an apron around his waist, scraping leftovers into the garbage can, then wiping his plate with a Kleenex, his and her plate, before he washes them. He has never allowed her to cook in this kitchen beyond boiling eggs or wieners and always preferred to clean everything himself. Till she went to college they ate from cans. Since then a Negro woman trained to prepare Hungarian dishes, to be silent and to wash up everything before he sits down to eat, comes daily, and he washes the plate he eats on after. He has taken her cup; she hasn’t finished her coffee, “Have you finished?” he asks, the cup already in his hand.
“Yes.” It’s all right, it doesn’t matter any more.
“How will it be when the children come for Christmas,” he worries; he wants to see them of course, but the disorder—“Will you cook? I won’t be able to live here! I’ll have to find a room in a hotel for the time...” he resolves mock seriously.
What will happen to them, he pursues; Joshua is almost fourteen, “When I was that age...The world has changed.” And he carries on with a troubled insistence, in a tone of bewilderment as he asks, “Will Joshua go to college? Will Toby get married and have children? Will Jonathan be drafted if there is a war in xx years?” And in a tone of impotent resignation, “Joshua will go to college. Toby will get married. Jonathan will be drafted if there is a war. This is how it must be.” But he is not reconciled. “How will it be?” he continues asking childishly. Everything should be under his control; everything should be known and settled.
“Why do you worry?” she asks.
“I don’t worry; I want to know; I want everything to be in order.”
He knows how alone he stands in his commitment to order; that men are irrational and violent, “You too,” he observes sadly. The fact that he has failed with his own child hurts anew. “Why?” he asks, and speaks about the intrinsic tendency for order in every living cell—why not the mind? He must have a reason for the disorder of the human mind. Is there a death instinct? Is it a by-product of language?
Wouldn’t it be better for him to be putting on tefillin and wailing in the synagogue, she wonders, instead of carrying on like this? If his father had remained in his village...then Sophie wouldn’t exist. For an instant the world lights up in the heavenly splendor of that possibility, true and eternal as pure possibility, a world unblemished by the marriage of Rudolf Landsmann to Kamilla Ripper, and their offspring; a world where those three people living together in embarrassment didn’t happen, nor the journey of the father with the daughter, terminating at this table; for a moment longer she covets that happier world in which her father would have lived the life of a provincial rabbi, and
she wouldn’t have been born, while he, her father, rambling on, concludes on a hopeful note, “Chemistry will provide the answer.” And as they start walking toward the grocery store, his arm around her, he tells how he loved her as a child, loved, cared, provided for her; “But sometimes I feel guilty that you were born,” he confesses, not for the first time; and asks her, “What do you think, am I wrong? Should I not feel guilty?”
Her silent smile, faintly amused, indifferent, secretive, answers him. The child to whom he keeps addressing his questions, his child, has refused to exist for him so long ago, she reflects, or rather has continued to exist only in this act of refusal.
Once again father and daughter walk arm in arm along Clinton Avenue, he speaking, she silent. It could be during the war years or when she returned from college, or after she was married; the same stories told, the same questions addressed to her, himself, to life. The same bleak parking lots and garish billboards rising over two- and three-story frame houses with cluttered shop fronts blinking their neon signs. “I saw my mother work from daybreak late into the night; working for nine children. And why? Was it worthwhile? Worthwhile to be born for this? For her? For me? I told her once when we were alone, ‘You could have skipped me.’ But then you wouldn’t exist. And so what?”
It could be ten years ago, or fifteen. It is not now. It is in a book. Her father’s conversations with himself always had the quality of some obscure rite in which she was incomprehensibly involved.
As she was walking along Clinton Avenue with her father in the evening during the war, “Can you imagine yourself,” he asked, “a young girl married to a man she had not exchanged a word with till after the wedding; and then children, one after another—what would you have done?” he asked strangely. “Can you imagine yourself—” he continued about his mother, then about Sophie and her mother. Part of a long monologue which she never interrupted, not in answer to her question, growing out of some troubled preoccupation of his own: concern for his family in Budapest, his daughter’s future, his fear of being forgotten by his daughter when she married; the conversation beginning or ending with Auschwitz.