Have Mother, Will Travel: A Mother and Daughter Discover Themselves, Each Other, and the World

by Claire Fontaine

  She nods and I follow her as we get up and walk toward the street. Thirty minutes later, we’re standing in front of a simple, elegant nineteenth-century apartment building several stories high with white stone detailing and ornate wrought-iron railings. It’s pale yellow, and a square courtyard inside the building allows you to see the stairs and walkways on each floor. It’s the building my grandmother hid in during World War II.

  It was an eventful building; while in hiding there, she overheard deals being made between Adolf Eichmann, the S.S. commander who exterminated Hungary’s Jewish population en masse, and Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who tried to save them. It was largely the wealthy Jews who were saved—most couldn’t afford to have someone like Wallenberg buy their freedom from Eichmann—and it’s chilling to think that human lives were bought and sold not twenty feet from where I’m standing. Especially because the numbers of those saved were minuscule compared to those deported.

  When Germany invaded Hungary in 1944, they knew they were losing the war. Exterminating Hungary’s Jews was a race against the clock for Eichmann, who sent them to Auschwitz with dizzying speed. More Hungarian Jews were killed in Auschwitz, the closest death camp to Hungary, than Jews from any other country—somewhere between four hundred and six hundred thousand.

  Bubbie survived because, first, she was living and working in Budapest when the Nazis rounded up everyone in her village and, second, she had some serious chutzpah. Without any false papers to replace the gold star she removed, Bubbie relied on her blue eyes, blond hair, and perfect German to bluff being a gentile.

  “Bub always said the Hungarian Nazis were worse than the German Nazis,” my mom finally says, staring intently into the courtyard. “I think her exact words were, ‘German Nazis were quite civilized when they weren’t killing you.’ ”

  I smile at my grandma’s dry humor.

  “At some point in the war she did slave labor and there was a soldier, a teenager, who used to slip her bread. Near the end of the war, German soldiers weren’t all willing; by then they were drafting even fifteen-year-olds. I know some of the time she worked at a distribution place where they sorted through the things taken away from Jews that were deported.”

  “That must have been awful.”

  “Not as awful as Auschwitz.”

  A small shop of some kind has been built right into the courtyard of the building, and as my mother and I talk quietly, a tall man in his forties with salt-and-pepper hair and big, dark eyes leaves the shop to walk toward us.

  “I can help you?” he asks in broken English, clearly wondering why two foreigners have been staring into the courtyard for so long.

  “Good afternoon, sir. My mother used to live here, in the forties, during the war.”

  He brightens. “This was an important building,” he tells us. “Kastner (a well-known Hungarian Jew later indicted in Israel for also dealing with Eichmann) lived here. Also during war, a writer live here in hiding. Nagy Lajos. He write book about it.”

  “Really?” my mom asks, excited. “He was in hiding here? My mother hid in this building, too. Do you know if this man survived? Or if he’s still in Budapest?”

  She’s over the moon at the thought of meeting someone Bubbie was in hiding with and she looks crestfallen when the man calmly shakes his head no.

  “After war, Communists come, they execute him. I don’t know why.”

  “Do you know if any of the other people who lived in the building then still live here?” she presses on.

  He shrugs his shoulders and shakes his head no again, but with a kindly look in his eyes. You can tell he senses my mom’s looking for something important to her. We thank him for his help and walk away, my mom chattering about how she can’t wait to find out if Bubbie remembers the writer, and how exciting to meet a man who knew some of the building’s history, and wouldn’t it have been amazing if the writer had lived and we could have met him!

  My mom’s always been so hungry for information. Junior high marked the beginning of what she dubbed her Hitler years, when she began reading whatever she could find at the city library about the Holocaust, which wasn’t taught in school curriculums much then. When I was growing up, I remember looking at the cartoons in Maus, not really understanding them until I was old enough to read and comprehend the other books on her shelf, Hitler’s Third Reich, Children of the Holocaust, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

  “It must have been so surreal for Bubbie when she first came to America,” I think out loud. “It’s not like she could relate to other housewives on her block.”

  “Sure she could. Our neighborhood in Cleveland had lots of survivors, and there were people like her friend Renate, who was German but not a Nazi. Now, when we moved to Anaheim, that was another story. Aside from one or two other families I think we were the only Jews in a twenty-mile radius. My mom was so thrilled when she found a pediatrician who wasn’t only Jewish and spoke Yiddish, but another survivor. I loved when Dr. Abrams came over. He was this short, roly-poly man, and they would drink coffee and eat my mom’s poppy-seed pastry and laugh for hours. He once said that you can’t not be funny speaking Yiddish—humor’s just built into the language.”

  “Was there a lot of anti-Semitism then?”

  “Not really, no. One girl used to call me an Italian booger for some reason but I only had two experiences of anti-Semitism, both in fourth grade. First was this kid named David, who probably went on to become a serial killer. Boy, was he one miserable kid. He was always more dressed up than everyone else, buttoned-up shirts, cardigans, and rock-hard leather buckle shoes instead of sneakers like the rest of us. I stayed late one day after school to help a teacher, and all the other kids had left, so I was walking home alone. He came up behind me, calling me a dirty kike, and kicked the back of my legs black-and-blue for an entire block.”

  “What? Why didn’t you just run?”

  “I was so scared I froze, and he was much bigger than I was. I’d never experienced anything like that before. I think I figured if I ran he’d catch me and really beat me up. My legs were bruised for weeks. I never told my mom, though. I thought it would really upset her, you know? But then a few months after that, Stuart, who lived on my block and was normally only a mild jerk, rode by on his bike, called me a fucking Jew, and threw a rock at me. It hit me square between the eyes.” She pauses to point to the small scar between her eyes.

  “That’s how you got that?” I ask, wondering why I’d never asked about it before.

  “Yeah. Anyway, I saw a trend developing that I didn’t like so this time I ran home crying, blood running down my face, and told my mom. Well, she took one look at me and without saying a word, she put on her shoes, grabbed my hand, and marched over to his house.

  “Now, you have to remember, my mother was extremely shy then. But when Stuart’s father opened the door—and we had never seen his dad; they were from Germany and always kept completely to themselves—my mother gave him a talking-to in flawless German. My eyes just about fell out of my head. Bubbie spoke six languages but I’d never heard her speak German. I’m sure he was just as surprised. I had no idea what she was saying, but the father just kept nodding politely and speaking very softly. And whatever she said worked, because right after the door shut, you could hear the hollering and little Stuart squealing.”

  It’s funny hearing her describe Bubbie as shy and quiet. I guess raising five kids and a lifetime of experience knocks any timidity out of you, because one of my earliest memories of Bubbie is crossing the street with her, and hearing her tell a honking driver to “Go toot up your ass—this is a crosswalk!”

  “His dad must have beat the living daylights out of him,” my mom continues, “because the next day his face was all puffy and he could hardly sit in class. He was super-polite to me the rest of the year. I actually felt bad for him. But I remember being so proud of my mom. I felt so good that she did that.”

  She smiles as she says that last sentence and I li
ke hearing the warmth in her voice talking about how good Bubbie made her feel that day. It balances the sadness and frustration she usually feels when thinking or talking about her mom. It’s a great image to walk away from this building with, my mom’s little schoolgirl self, Coke-bottle glasses and braided hair, skipping behind her mom, feeling happy and safe and proud.

  No matter how old we get or what the relationship is like, we never stop wanting our mothers. I think that’s why women often say that the moment they felt fully grown-up was after they’d lost her. For most of us, no one makes you feel safe in the world like your mom, at any age. Mortally injured soldiers cry out for their mothers on the battlefield. Even women who you would think would hate their mothers, such as those who write to tell us that when they were growing up their mothers turned a blind eye while their fathers were molesting them. Twenty years later, they go to family dinners and keep silent, knowing that’s what everyone wants.

  I wonder if they fear that if they shun their mother, move on, it means their mother doesn’t matter to them anymore, and we need our mothers to matter. I’ve observed that women whose mothers were cruelly abusive, or who looked the other way, will often go through hell in their own minds, willed ignorance and denial of epic proportion, to allow themselves to be with her—living a kind of reverse Persephone myth, the daughter coming up from hell in search of a mother who has taken away her own daughter’s spring and summers. (If you’re a mother who looked the other way, I beg you to put this book down now and pick up the phone. Acknowledge what you did, apologize, and ask how you can make amends. And then listen. Don’t try to justify or make excuses. There are none. Just listen. And then do whatever she asks of you. Whatever pain or shame you feel is nothing next to what you caused. You will give life again to your daughter, and to your relationship.)

  For many women, however, it’s not an abusive background, a shattered, or even strained, relationship that haunts them or causes sadness, there’s just a vague disharmony, a distance. It seems to me particularly true for boomers, I believe because most of us bought into the culture of the times.

  We were the first generation who not only wanted different lives than our mothers in almost every possible way, but were able to do it. The majority of us were largely contemptuous of their Donna Reed lives, with the culture’s encouragement, certainly with Madison Avenue’s and Hollywood’s. Most folks don’t know that The Gap started out in the sixties as The Generation Gap. It was when we were teens that it became cool to reject our moms.

  Then, as adults, with the therapeutic community’s blessing, we discovered we had inner children. The thing about inner children is that they see the world through a child’s eyes, but with a grown-up’s ability to inflict harm. Children don’t have a well-developed understanding of cause and effect. Not to mention they’re immature, usually selfish, and know Mom forgives everything. Which made us perfect victims, and Mom a perfect target.

  First we made our moms and their way of life irrelevant, not worthy of influencing us, then our inner tykes made them über-relevant by saying they had too much influence. We blamed them for everything wrong with us, for our “issues.” We took our cues to denigrate our mothers for not having coddled us enough from the very same therapeutic community that told them in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s not to coddle us, not to be too loving. During the twentieth century, even the government bashed moms; Judith Warner points out in her excellent book A Perfect Madness that during World War II the military blamed the fact that one in five young men flunked the draft on “smothering” mothers.

  Freud set the tone in America early last century: Femininity, the necessary turning away from the mother, is accompanied by hostility; the attachment to the mother ends in hate. Do we really believe that anymore? If it were true, why is it only in the United States that healthy psychological development depends on separation from the mother, emotionally and physically? Why is it only in our country that letting your daughter go is synonymous with letting her be who she is? Women in first-, second-, and third-world countries become successful, professional, emotionally healthy adults while living at home till marriage.

  How could an entire generation of American mothers all be wrong, and an entire generation of kids all be right? They washed our diapers before they had disposables, made clothes from scratch, washed floors, and devoted their lives to us. Then society changed all the rules; it took away alimony but wouldn’t allow them to get credit in their own names once their husbands began to dump them, while we were off watching Pink Floyd, changing the world, and too busy to care. By the time any of us had an inkling of what many of our moms’ lives were like, if we ever did, decades had passed.

  They didn’t nurture enough or criticized too much? Oh, now that we’re older and wiser, most of us will say, “They did the best they could.” How big of us.

  What if the best they could was pretty damn good? Our moms must have done something right, because by and large they raised and shaped what is arguably one of the most successful, creative, influential generations of all time. We went off into the world with a sense of self-esteem, life skills, independence, and confidence that evades a lot of our own kids. And they did it without the guilt of today’s moms; they didn’t second-guess their every maternal move, do our homework for us, or worry much about our self-esteem.

  I’ve lamented that the culture is the biggest parent of all for our children. But parents are just as much a product of our culture and era, for better or worse. I’ve read about twentysomething malaise, but only in observing and listening to Mia on this trip am I beginning to grasp what it’s like for them, and see the impact of the changes in motherhood that we’ve adopted since the sixties.

  I spent years complaining about my mom, yet when I look back at some of the smartest things I did as a parent, I see that I learned them from my old-world mother. Like putting Mia to nap wherever I was, so she’d train herself to sleep through anything, instead of putting her down in a quiet room so she’d train us all to drop dead while she napped. Like not to worry if Mia didn’t eat all day (relax, no little kid ever starved themselves to death), and to use a playpen so I could take a shower or cook unimpeded (lots of moms would label that abusive today, but Mia loved her little “housela,” and I loved being able to go number two uninterrupted). My mom taught me not to feel guilty for holding her as much as I wanted (“You’re supposed to baby them when they’re babies!”) or for letting her cry when it wasn’t important (“She’ll never learn to comfort herself, she’ll cry over everything.”).

  My mom taught me to be a relaxed mother, which, until the caca hit the fan when Mia was a teen, I was. I certainly had, and have, my flaws as a mom, and I did join the Kumon math bandwagon (against my mom’s counsel) with a daughter that couldn’t care less about math, but I never questioned that I’d know what to do with a baby or that I’d be a good enough mom. I read only two books on mothering, beat-up copies of Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care and Selma Fraiberg’s The Magic Years. From my mom I learned that mothering can be as natural to a woman as breathing.

  It certainly was for her, which is remarkable, given her history. She lost her own mother at twelve, went to live and work in a strange city, all alone, at thirteen, survived a war and the murder of her family before she was eighteen, lived for three years in a displaced persons camp in occupied Germany from the age of nineteen, endured an unhappy marriage to my dad (definitely no picnic), and raised five kids in a foreign culture.

  She never once complained about any of it to us, not once. It used to bother me that she rarely talked about her wartime experience. How selfish and foolish of me! I was too busy thinking of my own curiosity and “right” to know to think about how it might pain her, or how wise she was to know that it would probably have been more damaging to her children to talk about it. What six-year-old needs the horror of the Holocaust in her brain? And adults’ and children’s worlds were more separate then; parents then didn’t want or need to be their child’s
friend.

  I also see now that in the sixties, in Orange County, California, sewing dresses and baton uniforms and making tuna casseroles for a big, healthy family, laughing with the neighborhood moms at their kaffeeklatsches, knitting on the sofa and watching her crush, Elliot Ness, my mother was happy. She always said that all she ever wanted to do was be a mother and housewife. And she succeeded, she made a happy home; other than the two bullying incidents, my elementary school memories are of sunshine, Kool-Aid, Simplicity patterns, playing freeze tag till dark, my mom’s beautiful soprano filling the house all day, and homemade fried chicken at the beach.

  Then the seventies hit and we became teens. Raising American daughters who suddenly acted like they no longer wanted or needed her, in a culture of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, with almost nothing from her own childhood as a guide—my God, she must have felt as if she woke up on Mars. A few of her kids gave her major heartache. My older sister and brother were pretty even-keeled and respectful. I was a studious girl who never got into any trouble, but I went through a long phase of being pretty bitchy to my mom; one of my younger sisters was sweet to my mom but, if they had programs like Mia’s back then, she was a candidate; Vivian was a good daughter but at sixteen, after ignoring a sore throat for two weeks, she got scarlet fever, followed by encephalitis, and went into a coma for weeks.

  The doctor told my mom in a hospital hallway, bluntly, with no one there to support her, that if Vivian did live, which they didn’t expect, she’d be a vegetable. He used that word. When I flew home from college and got to the hospital that night, I walked right by my own mother. She’d aged so much overnight that I didn’t recognize her. Her face never looked the same. Miraculously, on Thanksgiving Vivian came out of the coma, stared at my mom, then chastised her for having a third eye. She couldn’t add two and two for a year, but we’re a tough bunch—she eventually went on to get a master’s degree. I went back to college the following semester and since then have never lived in the same city as my mother.