I finally told her that I always knew, and that her silence about it was worse; I assumed whatever was going on was too terrible to even speak of. The intensity of her sadness terrified me, living in our home like a silent sibling, consuming as much of her time and energy as I did. I remember coming home from school those years and hearing Michael Nyman’s sound track to the film The Piano. It’s beautiful music, but it’s very dark, and even after it was turned off, the chords and melodies lingered in our home like smoke. I didn’t understand the term “clinical depression” then, but I knew my mother saw the world through a dark veil, and I didn’t know what I could do to push it aside.
She eventually got help and normal life resumed, but childhood has a way of magnifying events in your mind’s eye and I’ve always been very sensitive to any sign of sadness in her. I remember reading what my mother had written: “I knew a hole has opened up in the terrain. And that if I wasn’t careful, I could fall in.” She didn’t realize that I knew that hole was there, too. And that I was afraid that if she fell in I’d be pulled down with her.
It wasn’t until my sophomore year of college that I finally saw The Piano. Stumbling across it in my campus library felt like finding an invitation into my mother’s world, to that missing piece of the puzzle.
I took the film back to my dorm room, turned off my phone, and watched it. Afterward I sat motionless and silent for a long time. In my mind’s eye was an aerial view of our old apartment, a pale woman curled in the fetal position on a yellow bedspread, a listless expression on a tearstained face. I felt the heavy tiredness, the indifferent acceptance of death, the dread of having to hide what she was feeling from the ones she loved. It was the first time I fully saw my mother.
When we are children, seeing our mothers upset is as frightening as it is confusing. When we become adults, while we may understand what’s going on, it’s no less disturbing. I think back to a few weeks ago, when my mom sat down in the middle of an alley and started crying about lost children and other big regrets of hers. I’ve very rarely seen her that raw and unraveled, and when the person who’s always been your rock drifts out to sea, life suddenly feels unstable and uncertain.
Like a lot of daughters, I imagine, I have a complex relationship to my mom’s emotional state, particularly to her level of happiness. On the plane here I read A Woman’s Story, by French writer Annie Ernaux, about her relationship with her mother, and I was struck when she wrote: “I was both certain of her love for me and aware of one blatant injustice: she spent all day selling milk and potatoes so that I could sit in a lecture hall and learn about Plato.”
That sentence helped me see that it’s hard for me to separate how much my mother loves me from how much she’s sacrificed for me. Now, when I picture my mom lying listless and depressed on her bed, I can’t help but think about the bed itself. At that point we were living in a one-bedroom apartment. My mom wanted me to have the bedroom, and she and Paul turned the living room into their bedroom. The sacrifices my parents made for me, how much of themselves, both emotionally and financially, they invested in me. It makes me feel like they deserve a return on their investment, that they know all those sacrifices weren’t in vain.
I think kids often feel that their parents’ happiness hinges on their own, and that they judge themselves based on how you’re doing. Our failings are their failings, our successes their triumphs. Knowing that someone determines whether they were a success or failure as a human being based on how you turned out can be really stressful.
My mom and I have talked to hundreds of women about their moms in the last few years and one thing we all seem to have in common, no matter what age we are, is a genuine and unselfish desire to see our moms happy. I have to wonder, though, if some of our wanting them to be happy is needing to see them happy, for selfish reasons—the happier and more fulfilled our mothers are in their own lives, the less likely they are to be impacted by—or scrutinize—ours.
Menjen már onnan, illetlen külföldi! Ha még egyet megfogdos, lecsapom a mocskos kezét! Honnan jön, Amerikából? Miért nyomogatja meg egyenként mindegyiket! Állatok ezek!”
(Get away from there, you rude foreigner! If she touches one more, I’ll slap her filthy hands! Where did she come from, America? Why is she pushing each one individually! Animals, they are!)
It’s always produce.
First in Provence, where I was publicly scolded for picking out my own tomatoes (the merchant picks your produce for you), and now a six-foot-tall peasant woman in Ma Clampett getup wants to smack me upside the head for touching her enormous, gorgeous, homegrown tomatoes. I was just feeling, very gently, for ripeness when she blew a gasketbekek.
She and her amazing tomatoes aren’t the only giants in Nagycsarnok, the soaring, Eiffel-style, glass-and-metal-covered market in Budapest. Everything here is bigger. The people, the produce, the volume. There are squash bigger than my thighs, cherries the size of apricots, apricots the size of apples, and poppy-seed strudel as big and heavy as shot puts. All of it so delicious, we’re going to be bigger by the time we leave.
Architecturally, Budapest is an elegant city largely patterned after Paris, but where France is neoclassically delicate, Hungary is voluptuous; a sort of baroqueified Eiffel, by way of the Ottoman, the Byzantine, and an embarrassment of fabulous Art Nouveau. The occasional blocky Soviet hulk actually serves to throw the beauty of everything else into sharper relief.
A highlight of our trip thus far is the Hungarian National Museum. Because the artifacts and artwork are displayed not by type (paintings, sculpture, costume) but chronologically, Mia and I have just moved era by era from the dawn of the Magyar culture to the current day.
My favorite space is on the grounds of the museum, in a serene, shady patch of the gardens. Actually, it’s my favorite place in the entire city, because it’s where my mother used to while away her free hours as a young teen, before the Nazis invaded Hungary in 1944.
While Mia wanders about shooting photos, I’m sitting on the same wood-and–wrought-iron bench my mom sat on as she knitted the striped sweater she wears in a beautiful photo of her at sixteen. She’s smiling and happy, with her thick, wavy blond hair styled into the big swoop of bangs popularized by Betty Grable. It makes me smile to think of my mom as a typical teen, a girl who loved movies, singing along with the Andrews Sisters and mooning over Gary Cooper (who, of course, spoke fluent Hungarian; movies have always been dubbed here).
The feeling of sitting exactly where she sat before the bombs fell, where she laughed with friends and clacked needles, is so big in me that I hardly know what to do with it. Sadness, delight, fascination, but mostly longing, a deep, knotted ache. For my mother.
The sad or clouded look I was anticipating on my mom’s face is notably absent when I approach her. If anything, she’s in a pleasant mood, reaching for my hand as I sit on the bench beside her.
“Being here isn’t strange for you?” I ask. “Or hard?”
“It’s comforting,” she answers softly. “In a way, it’s the closest I’ve been to my mom in three years. I wish I’d brought some yarn with me; it’d be nice to sit and knit here, or teach you to.”
“I know how to knit. Or maybe it’s crochet . . . what’s the one where you only use one needle?”
“Crocheting—but since when do you crochet?”
“I don’t, but I know how—a girl from the psych ward taught me [I had a two week stint there during my wayward years]. They didn’t allow knitting, but I don’t exactly have warm and fuzzy associations with either one!”
We both start laughing and my mom shakes her head. “Yeah, I don’t suppose they’d give you two pointy objects there.”
“No. Good grief, that place was abysmal. To this day if I hear that Paula Cole song about cowboys I want to run screaming—it played on the radio all the time then. And remember how beige everything was?”
“I more remem
ber that you were a total snot to me and Paul, and couldn’t fathom why it wasn’t okay for you to live on the streets with Cloud,” she says, rolling her eyes.
“Yeah, that wasn’t my finest hour.”
“Are you looking forward to visiting Morava?” my mom asks after a moment’s pause.
After our conversation at the Sénanque Abbey, my mom and I talked about my going back to see Morava, which is a few hours from Budapest, as a way of gaining further closure.
“I am. I’m a little nervous, maybe even sad, but it’s more that excited-nervous feeling, you know?”
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 sque
aling.”
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 like 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.)
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