“Mademoiselle Kohn, will you marry me?” When she said yes, he slid the engagement ring on her finger and held her hand in his.
Their hands were still clasped when Josefina returned. Seeing the ring on her daughter’s finger, she sighed, though Soleiman noticed it wasn’t a loud sound of exasperation but more a signal of disappointment.
“The world is not ending, Madame Josefina, because I love your daughter. In fact, her new life is really just beginning. Please give us your blessing and let us join together as a family.”
Josefina was silent.
Soleiman spoke again. “We have two lives here, coming together, as it should be,” he said. “I promise I will take care of your daughter and make her happy.”
Josefina turned to Suzanna. “Suzi, I do only want what is best for you.” She paused, looking out beyond the courtyard wall to the stars now settled in the night sky. “I will stay with you until the war is over,” Josefina said, “and I will assist in whatever ways I can. Mr. Cohen, I love my daughter.” With that she turned and went upstairs.
Two Worlds, One Love
APRIL 1943, TEHRAN
AN ENGAGEMENT BETWEEN SOLEIMAN COHEN and the young Polish woman named Suzanna Kohn had been announced just before Rosh Hashanah in the common-era year of 1942, much to the disappointment of every Persian Jewish family in Tehran who hoped a daughter might marry the charming and successful third son of Haji Rahim and Gohar Khanoum. The local rumor mill was incorrect—it was not the older Kohn woman who had been so blessed with the longtime bachelor’s affections, but her daughter.
Josefina did not heed gossip, and though she did not fully approve of Suzanna’s plan to marry, she felt a kind of pride in her daughter’s stubbornness. She is perhaps more like me than I give her credit for, she thought. Ultimately, it was Suzi’s choice to embark on this brand new life—who was Josefina to stop her? But she could not envision her youngest child blossoming in Tehran, first as a wife and mother, then as a role model for the numerous younger women who would come to seek her advice. All Josefina saw was the betrothal of two individuals from two completely different worlds: Suzanna was a young, sometimes naïve, assimilated Ashkenazi girl, who had been raised with servants in the home and came from a Habsburg enclave called Teschen, a place which, at this particular moment in history, no longer existed. Soleiman Cohen was an older, more tradition-bound Mizrahi Jew from Tehran, a modern and prosperous man, yes, but raised in poverty in the mahalleh. Josefina was not proud of why she was critical of their union, but she clung to her disapproval, which represented, she realized when she was much older and able to finally let it go, the last vestige of her life before the war.
Suzanna repeatedly asked for her mother’s blessing.
“Mama, please …,” she said as she dressed for her wedding, and Josefina knew such an entreaty was coming. “Please tell me you will be happy for us both.”
“I want to see you content and of course I want you to know joy,” Josefina said, “but I cannot see how you will be happy in this country with a man so much older than you are.”
“Everyone but you—Soli’s mother, his entire family—approves of our getting married,” Suzanna said.
Not only did Suzi sound more like an adult than she had ever sounded, Josefina thought, but they were both having a very frank and mature conversation.
Of course they approve, thought Josefina, my daughter is the perfect bride. She managed a brief smile. “Let me help you button this dress,” she said, with a tenderness she hadn’t summoned until this moment. “You should be proud to have made such a lovely wedding gown,” she added.
SUZANNA AND SOLEIMAN EXCHANGED VOWS beneath a huppah erected in the courtyard of the Avenue Pahlavi house. In spite of the war and its endless shortages and sadnesses, the wedding was a splendid affair, fragrant with flowers, generous with food, and joyous with hope. The celebration of their marriage was only the beginning of the ultimate gift of love Soleiman planned to give his bride. For everyone in attendance, the wedding provided a moment of welcome relief from the ever-calamitous news of tragedy caused by the war, which raged on in Europe, Africa, and Asia. Many of Suzanna’s family members, friends, and neighbors died or were interned in camps, but she wouldn’t know who or how or when or where for a very long time.
Her brother, Peter, wrote letters from the front. Suzanna wished he could have attended the wedding. His last furlough had been in November, and he had come to Tehran to see his mother and sister, and, less conspicuously in front of Mama, to celebrate Suzanna’s engagement. With Peter present, their mother had been a little less rigid, her focus diverted from dwelling on the choice her daughter had made. Peter liked Soleiman Cohen and was bluntly in favor of the marriage.
“At least she won’t object when you stand in front of a rabbi,” he had said to his sister as they sat in the garden together one evening.
He and Suzanna had both laughed, the kind of sibling laugh that shakes one free of the dramatic worry engendered by parents. Suzanna had never loved her brother more than at that instant. Although he had protected her throughout the darkness to which they had been subjected, his humor now tempered the divide between Mama and her, an emotional chasm which seemed to Suzanna almost more unforgiving than the duress of deportation or internment. Peter’s lightheartedness provided Suzanna with a way of seeing that the conflict between mother and daughter might end. They were all going to have lives that extended beyond the present, but what mattered most was enjoying this life, this time, this moment.
AFTER THE CEREMONY, THE NEWLYWEDS sat for their wedding portrait, and Suzanna contemplated the photos left behind when they fled Teschen. Her two aunts had likely managed to save some of the family pictures, but Suzanna couldn’t imagine a day when she’d be looking at them again. She thought about those fading-in-her-mind images, the majority of them made on family-centered occasions—visits at her grandparent’s farmhouse when her Aunt Elsa and Uncle Hans visited Teschen, skiing and hiking in the mountains with her cousins, and even a hunting excursion with Uncle Arnold and Aunt Milly. Those places in the photos were now part of the Third Reich. Although Suzanna didn’t know this as she adjusted her pose in the photo studio in Tehran, people were being shot or buried or were hiding in the forests and mountains where she, as a young girl, had gathered wildflowers, went swimming, and watched rabbits.
Suzanna had not appeared in any photos since the age of thirteen. Like so many who fled during and survived after the war, she brought to her place of refuge no pictures attesting to her childhood, no proof of ever having lived before now. If one did not capture an experience with words, how did one contain a memory without pictures? She wondered how important it really was to have such artifacts. What did people do in ancient times, when there were no means of keeping a likeness or preserving the written account of an event? Of course she knew they recorded only the collective stories—history and mythology, legends, most of these oral, some notable for having been written, such as her people’s Torah or the cuneiform-etched stone of the Code of Hammurabi. But how did they remember everything?
For the wedding portrait made that day, Suzanna sat with a bouquet of calla lilies in her arms, which rested on her lap. She wore a simple but elegant jewel-collared white dress with embellished shoulders and a long train. Her thick, dark hair framed perfectly proportioned features. Pearls graced her neck. The veil was decorated with flowers made of white silk. Soleiman stood by her left side, his right hand hidden, his left grasping a pair of white gloves. Dressed in a tuxedo and white bow tie, he had pinned to his lapel a fresh flower from the garden.
The photographer instructed the newlyweds to look at him, but one is eager to think of the couple looking toward the future. Neither knew what was coming next, but both possessed a vision about what it means to love, honor, and protect, and how important it is to create a mutual philosophy, one replete with hope.
As Suzanna sat in the photographer’s chair, she could not know that the image made on he
r wedding day would be prominently displayed—an enlarged and ever-present memory—on a wall in her last home, in a time she would welcome but was not yet able to imagine. She could not picture the many grandchildren and great-grandchildren looking at this image, each of them with their own special fondness for something she cooked or the way she pronounced a certain word or how she liked to hold them when they cried or slept. These progeny would all remember the wedding photograph in their own ways, some sighing, some whispering, some silently mesmerized, all of them in awe of the couple before them, depicted in life-size format, their ancestors who came from two different countries, two cultures, but who knew one love.
Her wedding day, was, until that point, the happiest moment of Suzanna’s life. Many more such times of joy were going to follow, her new husband promised her, so many in fact, he said laughing one evening, that she’d have to choose which ones to remember forever.
La Vie en Rose
1968, TWENTY-FIVE YEARS LATER, AT THE ALBORZ MOUNTAINS
SUZANNA WAS A GRANDMOTHER when she returned to a part of the Alborz Mountains she hadn’t been to since she rode on the bus from Bandar-e Pahlavi as a teenager. The year was 1942, three years into the war and three years from its end. Then she had been a Polish refugee come out of a forced-labor camp in the Soviet Union. Now she was an Iranian citizen with three children and three small grandchildren. The Soviet labor camps were finally gone, but the Cold War raged on. Turmoil coursed through the world, causing great suffering, and sometimes even eliciting outrage, but nothing compared to what Hitler and Stalin had wrought in Europe in those six years between 1939 and 1945. “The twentieth century ruined Europe,” an American poet said, but Suzanna always thought it was Europe that ruined the twentieth century. But no matter, she lived in the Middle East now. She enjoyed her life. Her family, the one she had built with a gentleman from Tehran, had become solid, like the mountains themselves. She had two sons—one who had completed a graduate program in England, the other who was about to attend college—and a daughter who had given her three grandchildren.
Of this visit to the Alborz Mountains, Suzanna later recalled one moment in particular. As she was looking out toward the valleys and peaks of the range, a wind picked up; the smell of it in her hair brought her back to the first crossing of those mountains. If she squinted, she could almost see that girl she had been, stretching her legs on the side of the road with the other refugees, beholding Mt. Damavand, the exhilaration and fear entwined in her gut almost inseparable. She could almost feel as that girl she had been had felt, so compelled to move forward into a new present, one that included something completely different from anything she had ever known. She could almost hear what that girl she had been heard when the shells and bits of rock in her pocket made their muffled clicking. She could almost recall what that girl she had been remembered: they were on a bus going through the mountains, those fragments of beachcombed things nestled in a pocket; her mother was asleep; her brother traveled with his regiment. And she, Suzanna, though she didn’t know it, was coming home.
WHAT BECAME OF THEM: AN EPILOGUE
AFTER THE WAR, JOSEFINA [EISNER] KOHN remarried and settled in London. No one knows how she was informed, if at all, about the murder of her husband, Julius. She died in 1977 at the age of seventy-seven. All three of Josefina’s siblings—Elsa [Eisner] Uberti, Arnold Eisner, and Hans Eisner—survived the war. Elsa remained a widow, residing in Argentina near her children and grandchildren, who married and had their own families, settling outside Buenos Aires and in Uruguay. She died in 1975 at the age of eighty. Arnold, who spent most of the war as a civilian refugee in Hungary, was deported in 1944 to a Nazi concentration camp. At the war’s end in 1945, he was liberated by the Red Army and returned to his wife and daughter in Teschen (which became Cieszyn), and lived on the Czech side of the river. He died in 1973 at the age of seventy-five. Hans married in 1940, and with his wife emigrated first to Canada then to southern California, where his two sons were born. In the late 1940s, he changed his name to John Emerson. He died in 1969 at the age of sixty-three.
As of 2018, there were over one hundred living descendants of the four Eisner children. Peter and Suzanna were the only descendants of the Kohn side of the family who not only survived the war, but who had children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.
Peter Kohn remained in the Polish Army throughout the war, serving first as a sapper and then as part of the engineering corps. He fought at the famous Battle of Monte Cassino in Italy and was decorated for his service. Before being discharged from the army, he was promoted to second lieutenant. After the war, he demobilized in England but later settled in Jujuy, in the northwestern part of Argentina. He married twice and had three sons, eight grandchildren, and, as of 2018, two great-grandchildren.
Suzanna and Soleiman Cohen had two sons and a daughter. They lived happily in Tehran and then Shemiran for thirty-six years. With the advent of the Iranian Revolution, they were forced to leave Iran in 1978, and for the second time in her life, Suzanna was exiled from her home country. They settled in Santa Monica, California. Soleiman died in 1986 at the age of eighty-one; Suzanna died in 2016 at the age of ninety. They had eight grandchildren and, as of 2018, fifteen great-grandchildren. Suzanna’s motto, which she repeated to callers and visitors, family and friends, was, “Enjoy your life.”
AFTERWORD
by Rabbi Zvi Dershowitz
MY LAST TRIP TO TESCHEN, where this narrative begins, was in 1939, but I clearly remember it took only about twenty minutes to walk from the railroad station to my grandparents’ apartment on the town’s main street at 19 Saska Kupa. At age ten, I was somewhat aware that things were not the same as they had been during the many other trips we made to Teschen from my birth city of Brno, Czechoslovakia, to visit my mother’s parents, Rosa and Isaac Schleuderer. However, nothing stopped my grandfather from taking me to the local store to buy some of my favorite herring, stacked in a huge wooden barrel.
But I was scared! We had crossed the Czech-Polish border in an altogether new place. The change was not only because it was close to midnight on 31 December 1938, just a few moments before the new year. It was because my parents had decided to leave behind not only the old year, but everything else.
Now, looking back, I can’t imagine how my parents, Aaron and Aurelia, left behind such a comfortable life in Brno: maids in the house, outings to the opera, a deep involvement in synagogue life. They were ardent Zionists who belonged to a Maccabee sports organization and enjoyed Sundays at the Jewish country club. But they closed those doors behind them and, with only a few suitcases, sought a new world.
Teschen was my mother’s hometown. Her parents lived on the western, Czech side of the river. Her sister Regina—along with husband, Jakob, and children Danek, Nelly, and Moniu—lived in the eastern, Polish half of the city. I crossed the border bridge over the Olza River so often that the guards knew me. No passports, no visas were needed. Just a smile and a greeting. But on that last trip in 1939, both halves of Teschen belonged to Poland.
They told me to be careful when I went on walks. Seeing graffiti—Jews to Palestine—scrawled on buildings, made anti-Semitism clear to me. I can’t count how many times I was called a Christ-killer. At times, walking with my father, as we approached a church, it was safer to cross the street. But for me at that time, I was more affected by my mother’s stories about growing up in Teschen: that she had, as a teenager, played volleyball on the town’s Maccabee team; how deeply Jewish traditions were observed in her home; and that, while the language in schools was German, the languages spoken at home were Yiddish, Czech, and Polish.
Whichever language they articulated, much of it was spoken around the warm, pleasant setting of the table. Meals—good, kosher, Jewish meals—were the center around which my mother’s Teschen family gathered. And, of course, bread was part of the food served at these meals. I hardly ever thought about the bread on my grandparents’ table until I had to gather informat
ion to officiate at the funeral of one Suzanna Cohen on 13 April 2016. Interviewing her loving family, I discovered not only that Suzanna came from Teschen, but that her maternal grandfather owned and operated a flour mill and bakery and, uniquely, stamped his initials—HE, for Hermann Eisner—on every loaf of bread he and Arnold, his son and partner, sold.
That almost insignificant detail became a magical link which, in a flash, made me realize that my Teschen grandparents purchased their bread from Suzanna’s close relatives. Suddenly the connection between the two families was real and, therefore, deeply meaningful. In a small community such as Teschen, one knew personally and, most likely, intimately, the people from whom, almost daily, one purchased an item over which they offered the ha-motzi prayer. Likely the two families knew one another. Likely they applauded at theatrical performances, cried at weddings and funerals, and prayed at synagogue at the same time.
My mother went from Teschen to Brno, then Brooklyn to Jerusalem. Suzanna Cohen went from Teschen to Lwów, to a Soviet labor camp, then to Tehran, and finally to Santa Monica. Teschen was the starting point for both families. Optimism, faith, love of kin and community, and the pursuit of a joyous life was the destination each achieved.
—Rabbi Zvi Dershowitz
Los Angeles, California
AUTHOR NOTE
The tragedy of her life was caused by her identity, but it was her identity that proved to be her salvation.
—RICHARD COHEN, speaking of his grandmother Suzanna (née Kohn) Cohen
THIS BOOK TELLS A TRUE STORY as a work of historical fiction. I have tried to render real people, most of them lost now, by imagining them in particular historical and social landscapes. Specifically, I have focused on how the women and men in this story might have thought about and responded to the urgencies that unfolded in real time during their lives. Of course it is impossible to accurately depict the emotions and reactions of others, especially when few recorded memories exist of a particular story set during a particular historical period. The plot of this book—that is to say, what happens to the people in the story—is a reconstruction, one I have tried to make with as much historical accuracy as possible. Thus, I have relied on facts from historical accounts and analyses, personal, autobiographical, and fictional narratives (told in print, graphic, and film media), the genealogical records pertaining to the Kohn, Eisner, and Cohen families, and recordings and interviews of family members.
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