My stepson, who has grown up with my family’s story and recently discovered more about his own Jewish roots, teases her about her enthusiastic embrace of her Jewishness. He thinks of Jewishness as a religion not an ethnicity, but recently cooked Chris and me our first ever Passover Seder dinner.
Around the time I heard my father had died, my English course at university included Bernard Malamud’s The Assistant, about a Jewish immigrant shopkeeper in post-war Brooklyn, and The Fixer, about anti-Semitism in Tsarist Russia. The books stirred old memories, and once after a class I tried to talk to the lecturer, mentioning my family history. He looked at me as though I were mad. Perhaps I was. There were no trigger warnings in those days. Every once in a while, I would be ambushed by suppressed grief. My hand would shoot up: “My father’s family were murdered by the Nazis.” It never went well. I learned to shut up.
CHAPTER 10
Visitors from New York
Mr Wichtel has been very independent and is hurt and confused by the rejection of both his wife and his brother.
Miss Crawford, Brockville, May 8, 1968
IN THE WINTER OF 1987 Sy’s widow Auntie Mollie and my cousin Linda fly back into our lives. Chris and I are now living in Devonport with my son Ben, who is ten. Chris’s Ben, aged six, is with us every second weekend and during holidays. We are what our therapist likes to call a “reconstituted family undergoing a process of recalibration”. We are a family with three different surnames and two children called Ben. Mum and Stew, back from Japan, are living close by. After Mollie tracks down Mum, she and Linda are on the next plane. The door to our other life across the world is about to open. Realities prepare to collide. I assume the brace position.
EARLIER THAT YEAR CHRIS AND I had taken the boys on a trip to Vancouver. It was the first time I’d been back since we left in 1964. We had visited Stanley Park, scene of our happiest family outings, where the sight of a squirrel had triggered a wave of nostalgia. A moment later the grass was seething with them, like something from a Hitchcock movie. The return to Vancouver felt like that: too many squirrels, too many ghosts.
I ran up and down Pender Street like a lunatic searching for English Textiles, even though I knew the old tenements had been torn down not long before. We met Auntie Rose and Uncle Harry, who were still in the same house, and had dinner at a restaurant with them and Rose’s sisters Ida and Ethel.
Dread set in as we drove back to their house for coffee. Christmas decorations were everywhere. My father hadn’t let us have lights on the outside of our place, declaring them vulgar, although in the last year or two he had relented and put up a single string.
“Of course he didn’t have Christmas lights,” Rose said. “He was Jewish.”
I didn’t say there was never any mention of Hanukkah, or that, when I insist on Christmas lights on our house every year, it’s as a kind of tribute to my father.
He had no objection to decorations inside. We always had the most impressive Christmas tree in the street strategically placed in the front window of the living room. The oil inside the lights on the tree bubbled when the lights heated up, intensifying the piney smell. There was always the Sputnik ornament, because we children were going to fly to the moon.
On that trip to Vancouver, I found I remembered Rose and Harry’s little house by heart. There was the spare room with the piano, where we used to play increasingly elaborate versions of “Heart and Soul”, and the small garden where we sat on hot afternoons having iced tea and watermelon. There was the magic cupboard full of gifts so no visitor ever left empty-handed. We ate the chocolate cake, thawed from the freezer, that we had never really liked because it wasn’t iced. And then there was the kitsch collection of salt and pepper shakers, most of which would now be considered culturally inappropriate. There was the chair where my father would sit, arguing about politics, the Studebaker parked outside. I excused myself, went to the bathroom and took a Valium.
Rose changed the subject every time I tried to talk about my father. Harry, who used to make us laugh by singing “Donald Where’s Your Troosers?”, who wanted to teach us Hebrew, took me aside. “Your father was very sick,” he said. “We tried to help him but he wouldn’t let us. Everyone tried to help.” He didn’t judge my mother for leaving. He knew how hard she’d tried.
Did he know whether my father was ever really meant to follow us to New Zealand? “I don’t know what happened to him after he moved east,” he said. I could see he was worried I might think they should have done more, might blame them for what had happened. I hugged him and told him I knew he was a good friend to my father. I knew he had done his best.
As we headed for the airport before dawn I made the taxi driver go to 3389 West 43rd Street, Kerrisdale, the house where we had been happy. I jumped out and tried to get some photos in the pitch dark. When the photos were developed they were blank.
MUM HAS PICKED UP MOLLIE AND LINDA from the Regent Hotel. Mollie likes to go in style, although she’s no longer as well off as she once was. She’s in her seventies, a few years older than Mum, and looks good—maybe she’s had a little work done. She’s smaller than I remember and no longer scary. Linda is warm, pretty and has a way with children, talking to them as equals. Our boys fall instantly in love with her.
Mollie is quick to say that they tried to help my father. Like Harry she seems worried we might blame them. I know how much Sy did, I tell her.
I’m worried how this invasion of the past into the present will go. Stew is drinking a lot and things can get out of hand. As it turns out, Mollie still likes a drink, Stew is funny and charming, and Linda and I talk a little about our dead fathers. Mollie tells my mother she did the right thing by leaving. She says she herself should have left Sy much earlier than she did.
After Mollie and Linda go back to New York, we keep in touch by letter. I beg Mollie to tell me anything she knows about the Wichtel family. She lists the family traits she saw in my father and Sy: “impetuous, impulsive, stubborn and extremely sensitive.”
“You and Jerry are the tallest Wichtels,” she writes. “He’s six feet two and I understand you had a tall grandfather.” I guess that would be Dad’s father. Some of his mother’s family, the Joniszes, were very small. By the age of twelve I was taller than my father.
There was a lot of collateral damage in their family as well as ours. Jerry had some tough years: estrangement from Sy, who was alcoholic and abusive, then drug and drinking problems of his own. “Difficult to watch? Yes,” Mollie writes, “but he picked himself up—the Wichtel genes are strong—and applied himself to the business of living.”
Like Mum, Mollie had to go out to work when times got tough. She got a job in a department store. Sy outlived my father by only seven years. One day he fell down in the street. He had a brain tumour. There was not much that could be done. Mollie visited him in hospital, as did a former girlfriend and his current girlfriend—all his women except Lillian, his first wife. “I no longer walk in Abraham’s world,” she said when told he was sick.
Sy had his family with him in 1977 as he was dying. Linda tells me he said to Mollie, “Thank you for the children.” Mollie said, “Thank you for the best years of my life.”
My mother would always say, “When you children were small, those were the happiest years of my life.”
Wedding portrait of Sy Wichtel and his second wife Mollie.
I ASK MOLLIE IF SHE KNOWS ANYTHING about Dad, what happened to his papers, where he ended up. She doesn’t. She and Sy were falling apart at the time. She does provide one unbearable detail. One day after we left for New Zealand my father turned up unannounced at their home in New Jersey. He ran through the house calling out our names.
I’m grateful Mollie and Linda got on a plane to New Zealand. I’m grateful, too, that I got to see Rose and Harry one last time in Vancouver. I’ve been back there three times now. I know what’s what. Yet each time I’m gripped with the same crazy thinking, the sort Joan Didion scrupulously recorded in her
memoir The Year of Magical Thinking about her brain’s inability to absorb the sudden death of her husband. “We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe their husband is about to return and need his shoes,” she wrote. I never expect to find myself roaming Pender Street, sure that if I just look hard enough what’s gone will still be there somewhere, hiding in a crack in time. But it’s always the same. There I am, Dad, half-believing I will come across you outside English Textiles, just standing there smoking a cigarette and watching the world go by.
CHAPTER 11
“Er iz a krank mentsch”
Patient served with the “Underground” in Warsaw, Poland from 1939 until 1945. ... He stated that he was always very close to his family, but recalls many hardships and heartbreaking experiences during the War years.
Clinical record, Brockville Psychiatric Hospital, May 26, 1967
KEEN TO KEEP UP CONTACT with our newly rediscovered family, Chris and I see Mollie and Linda again in New York in 1990, at the tail end of a writing trip for the Listener. This is in the days when a journalist and photographer are put up in a hotel in London’s Marble Arch to interview stars of British television shows: big hair, bigger shoulder pads, and an expense account.
We meet Linda after work and go to her local bar, the sort of place where everybody knows your name, and then to her studio apartment. Over vodka we make another assault on that inexhaustible topic, our fathers. We’re beginning to talk more freely but the excavation of this particular archaeological site is slow and careful, layer by fragile layer.
Uncle Sy adored his daughter. She was exempt from his violent rages. “He’d have a fight with my brother, throw him out of the house. Have a fight with my mother, she’d go running to a hotel. He’d come into my room and say, ‘My life is in the palm of your hand.’“ Linda thinks she reminded him of the mother he loved so much and couldn’t save. It’s a common experience: children born after the Shoah standing in for the dead.
It’s on this trip that we reconnect with Jerry. The tall handsome cousin who showed me his bar mitzvah gifts has become a successful Wall Street trader. We meet at Harry’s, a bar in the financial district. He tells us of his days of single malt whisky and closing bars. Before that he did drugs. Now he doesn’t drink.
Chris and I order a couple of stiff ones. Jerry says, “I have to tell you, I don’t do family.” We will find out he has his reasons, and that sometimes he is willing to make an exception. Now he says, “A lot of people went through hell. It doesn’t mean you have to be an asshole.” I value his honesty, startling at first. After so rocky a road it seems Jerry is lucky to have survived.
He takes us on to the floor of the stock exchange and shows us around, and then we meet up with Mollie, Linda, and Jerry’s partner Jill, a social worker who instantly offers friendship and good advice about staring down the guilt: “You were just a child. You didn’t get a vote.” We go to dinner at Windows on the World, the famous restaurant in the north tower of the World Trade Centre. It’s a long way up. It’s the middle of summer and there are problems with the air conditioning. The stern rule about men wearing a jacket is relaxed. When the air finally cools, a waiter issues an oblique command: “The gentlemen are putting on their jackets now.”
Auntie Mollie orders poularde. God knows what we order. Being here with the Wichtel family, who have become like fictional characters in a story that could surely never have happened, combines with the dizzy view to cause an existential vertigo. Ten years later we will watch like the rest of the world as the towers and the people in them are wiped out by a different set of lunatics from the ones our family encountered. A chance change of schedule will mean Jerry is not in the building.
IN JUNE 2006 CHRIS AND I ARE BACK IN NEW YORK again for a few days. On this trip we bring our daughter Monika, who is now fourteen and has never met any of her New York family. We visit the ruined site of the twin towers and read the heartbreaking notes still on the fences. Our travel itineraries will become increasingly prone to include mass graves. Jerry and Jill come over from their place in New Jersey and take us to the Museum of Modern Art for lunch. Just as Uncle Sy once made me try caviar, his son makes Monika try foie gras. After lunch we prowl the gallery, half an eye on the art but mostly we talk about our families. Since we were here last Auntie Mollie has died. Linda has adopted a baby girl and named her Mollie. When we meet Mollie she is a beautiful, funny, clever eleven-year-old. Linda and Mollie now live in an apartment in a nice part of town. It’s also home to a cat and a bouncy tangerine-coloured dog called Peanut.
It’s on the last day of the visit that Linda tells me about Joe. “You know, we have another cousin,” she says. Joe Lubell turns out to be my father’s first cousin, the younger son of his Aunt Sabina. Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1930, Joe was about seventeen when the family’s survivors began to arrive in America from Europe. He met my father. Why didn’t I know about Joe before? Why didn’t he know about us? “There is only looking,” Daniel Mendelsohn writes in The Lost, “and finally seeing what was always there.”
I might have put two and two together earlier if I hadn’t come from a family with so many painful mysteries that the only response to them was a sort of self-protective paralysis. I knew my father had a cousin called Estelle. She was the pretty young woman who stayed with us when I was four years old, with her toddler Babette who spoke with a Brooklyn accent. I never heard my father refer to Estelle again. I never thought to ask where she had materialised from and disappeared to.
Sabina Lubell, sister of Rozalia and mother of Joe, with her daughter Estelle.
Sabina, the sister of my grandmother Rozalia, had come to America via France with her husband, Albert Lubell, in the 1920s. She had died in Far Rockaway Queens, in February 1982. She had outlived her two nephews Ben and Sy. Why hadn’t I known about her either?
I learn that Sabina had a lot of tragedy in her life. Her first son Solomon, one of Joe’s two brothers, had died at the age of five, struck by a car while chasing a ball. Her daughter Estelle, once a beauty queen, Miss Brooklyn, had married a wealthy Canadian, Hy Singer of the sewing machine family, but the marriage had collapsed. Perhaps Estelle had just separated from her husband when she visited us in Vancouver. In 1991 she had died in a house fire.
When I learn about Joe, he is living in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Linda is the only one of the Wichtel family in touch with him. I rush back to the hotel. Forget packing: I have Joe’s phone number.
Hearing his voice is like being dragged backwards through a tunnel in time. “Your father and I were first cousins,” he says. “We carry the same DNA.”
He tells me his mother Sabina and his cousin Sy were close for a long time. Sy would visit Sabina on weekends, bring her presents. They would talk together in Yiddish. They were in cahoots. Joe knew him as Uncle Eddy, and later as Abe. “When I was a child he sat with me on the living-room floor of our modest apartment in Brooklyn playing chess,” he says. “When he left he gave me five dollars, which was a fortune in those Great Depression days. You could see the Brooklyn Dodgers at Ebbets Field for fifty cents. An ice-cream cone or a hot dog was five cents.”
Joe, with his Brooklyn accent, doesn’t sound like my father but he talks in the heightened way my father did, with a little extra humour, a little extra drama. Bluntly, with a trace of Yiddish. “You know Yiddish was my first language,” he says. He was held back when he first went to school because he couldn’t speak English. “My mother spoke Yiddish to me. It drove me crazy.”
Joe worked for Sy at his luggage factory for a while. His older brother, Jack, worked there for longer and got a good wage on the proviso fifteen dollars a week went to his mother.
Sy met and married his first wife, Lillian, in America. After Sy divorced her and married Mollie, relations with Joe’s side of the family seem to have become strained. Sy and Mollie went to Joe’s wedding—there’s a photo of them with the handsome young couple, smiling—but sometime after that the families drifted
apart. Sy was becoming a wealthy man and moving in different circles. Linda tells me that before Sy died she took him for a final visit to Sabina at Far Rockaway. “Such a young man,” Sabina said.
Joe says that when my father arrived in New York he visited Sabina. She was his only remaining aunt. Contact seems to have continued for a while: Joe has photos that Dad may have sent to Sabina, or perhaps to Sy who passed them on. But it seems he didn’t stay in touch. Why not? Such a small family left but the centre could not hold.
Wedding portrait of Sy Wichtel and his first wife Lillian.
I HAVE SO MANY QUESTIONS FOR JOE, so little time. In his seventies when we first make contact, he is a force of nature, a difficult man to interrupt. He begins immediately to write to me about our family and send photographs. There is one of my great-grandmother Brandla Jonisz, another of my great-grandfather Chaim Jakob Jonisz, known as Yankel, who died before the war. There is a picture of Estelle at twenty-one, stylish in a fur coat from her father’s business.
I beg Joe for a photograph of his mother, my Great-aunt Sabina. Joe and his wife Barbara tell me a little of her story. Sabina had been the last unmarried daughter in the family, unable to land a husband, schlepping sacks of potatoes for her father’s business. Albert, dragooned into the Russian counter-revolutionary army, had deserted. In Warsaw he met and proposed to Sabina. The couple married in Germany, lived in France, and emigrated to the US in the 1920s.
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