I used to dream about being in the concentration camps with my grandmother. Always I awoke knowing with certainty that I had died, or was about to die, and that this was somehow proof that I still wasn’t strong enough, or special enough, to survive what my grandmother had endured. Compared with her, I was a whiny weakling.
I would stand in front of the gilded, oxidized mirror in my grandmother’s bedroom when she was away and stare at myself for hours, trying to imagine what I would have looked like on the brink of death, my skin clinging to my bones, my eyes sunken into my skull. What was different about her that she was able to emerge from the pit of human despair that surely would have swallowed me whole? Did she believe in her inalienable right to life in a way I could never hope to?
III
inheritance
Sometimes, when the house was empty and quiet, I would root through my grandmother’s drawers, looking for clues. It was difficult to learn anything about her otherwise. I asked many questions, but my grandmother was almost never in the mood to talk. Therefore I gathered frayed documents and sepia photographs obsessively, sneaking into my grandfather’s office to use the color copy machine before putting the found treasures back in their original hiding places. I kept a folder under my mattress stuffed with facsimiles of postcards, letters, and documents. I also kept detailed notes, jotting down names every time I heard them, documenting anecdotes whenever I was lucky enough to be in earshot. I was trying, surreptitiously, to put together a family tree of my ancestors, one as detailed as possible. I did not know why I felt so driven to color in the vague outlines of my past at the time, but I remember that the folder was one of the few items I took with me when I eventually left my community. I abandoned years of diaries and journals and personal photographs, but for some reason I rescued that folder from the musty basement where it had lain untouched for years. Those documents were my only connection to my roots, not the shallow ones that had been planted in New York, but roots that went far back into the earth on the other side of the ocean. They were roots I could never really shake off, nor did I want to.
Was it the incessant secrecy, the silence that shrouded our household, that incited my insatiable curiosity to know more about my family’s past? The more my questions were met with dead air, the hungrier I became to fill up those spaces with images and words. Even though no one told me the story behind the photographs or explained the letters written in incomprehensible languages, I savored those mementos under my bed for years, feeling that my imagination told the best story anyway.
Once, I found an old brown envelope, tattered at the edges, reinforced with brown tape, tucked between the Hungarian down comforters my grandmother stacked in the old wooden crib that still sat in the corner of her bedroom, despite the fact that her youngest child was in his thirties. There was an old passport, with a photo of her as a young girl, thick, dark hair waving as if there were a breeze, pinned by a clip on the side where it was thickest. She had a tired smile on her face, like someone who had just completed a Herculean task, a long hike or swim. The date said 1947, so that task would have been an arduous recovery from typhus. She would have had to gain the weight lost in the concentration camp, grow back the hair, come to terms with the loss of everything.
My grandmother’s passport did not have a shiny leather cover like mine does now. It was a simple folded sheet of card stock. It was temporary. It said STATELESS in bold black letters. It was the passport issued to her after the war, when Hungary didn’t want to recognize her as its citizen anymore, and no country wanted to step up in its place. Until her American naturalization, my grandmother used that declaration of categorical homelessness as her ticket across borders and oceans. She was, for many years, a displaced person who relied on the sporadic generosity of host countries and international relief organizations.
In the story of the Jews, we are technically all displaced persons. The last time we had a home was before the Second Temple was destroyed in AD 70. Then God punished us by sending us into exile, or galus, as we call it, and the diaspora happened. We were cursed with wandering; we moved from region to region, from country to country. Every time we settled into a comfortable routine, something would come along and shake the earth from beneath us. Crusades, Cossacks, Tatars, Nazis. The earth shook in 1944, and a few years later my grandmother came to America with her stateless passport.
Enclosed in the brown envelope was all the correspondence between her and the bureaucratic government agency in charge of her naturalization. She was addressed as DP3159057. At the time, she told me, she was working as a secretary in Williamsburg. She didn’t mention the company she worked for, or what she did exactly, as a secretary, but she did mention that she shared an apartment with roommates on Hooper Street and that at night she was awakened by the cries they emitted in their terrible dreams. Everybody around her was haunted in the same way. So she gave her information to a matchmaker.
“I’m ready to start a new life,” she had said. She wanted to have many children. She had just gotten her period for the first time at twenty-four years old, and she was relieved. She had lost ten siblings in the war. She would ultimately give birth to eleven children.
She did not raise her kids with the same traditions with which her parents had raised her. It was a postwar generation, and if you hadn’t given up on God completely, you were well on your way to the other end of the spectrum. She had married an avid follower of what was beginning to be an extremist movement. My grandfather, while educated and successful at a young age, was the only man she had met who insisted on keeping his traditional beard in the New World. Later, their sons and daughters would grow up in a self-imposed ghetto led by rabbis who were trying to make sense of the Holocaust and appease the angry God that had razed the European Jewish population.
Over the years, my grandmother paid little notice to the winds of fanaticism blowing around her home. At times when the community was in its grips and my grandfather brought news of tightening restrictions into his home, my grandmother waved it away and sang a little tune as she carefully frosted a hazelnut torte. I remember that the little things made her very happy. She prepared such beautiful and tasty food, food the likes of which I found only when I traveled to Europe or ate in very old-style establishments. It was regal and classic in the way people rarely cook anymore in the United States.
To my grandmother I attached ineffable elegance. There was no elegance in Hasidic life, but there was elegance in her, in her origins, in her story, and in her inimitable cooking. My grandmother was European, and though I could not fully grasp what that meant, I imagined that it was something wonderful and otherworldly. I cherished the photos taken of her as a young woman in gorgeous hand-sewn dresses with rows of tiny cloth buttons. I loved the way her slim ankles looked in delicate T-strap shoes. There was something spectacular about her loveliness and poise, which stood in sharp contrast to a photograph I had found in her drawer, one of her being carried out from Bergen-Belsen on a stretcher by the British Red Cross. To embody beauty after you had endured the ugliest of assaults, that was magic to me. I surmised that there was something very powerful at the core of my grandmother’s spirit.
My grandmother’s passport gave her name as Irenka, Hungarian for Irene. It was not a name I ever heard her called, but then no one called me by the name on my birth certificate either. It was custom to have a secular name, to make it easier for the outsiders to relate to us. Better that than they should resent us for having to break their teeth over our Hebrew names. My grandmother’s religious name was Pearl, a beautiful name that I thought I might give my daughter someday, except that, I reasoned, I would have a daughter too early for that. We didn’t name our children after the living, like Sephardic Jews do. It would have to be my granddaughter’s name.
Of all the passive and submissive women in the Bible I could have been named after, somehow Deborah ended up on my birth certificate. No one in my family had ever been named tha
t, and Ashkenazi Jews never give their children random names. The custom is always to name a child after a dead relative.
Indeed, I was given two names at my Kiddish, the Jewish equivalent of a christening for girls: Sarah and Deborah. I was called Sarah growing up. There were plenty of dead Sarahs in my family. Deborah was an afterthought, rarely mentioned. I never heard any tales told about an ancestor with that name. When I scoured the family tree I had managed to assemble through careful sleuthing, no one by that name showed up, even when I went back seven generations. Why Deborah?
In the book of Judges, Deborah is introduced with the words “eshes lapidus.” It’s common in the Bible for people to be tagged in such a way, with descriptions following their names. Wife of, son of—that’s how they were identified in those days. The weird thing is, if the words eshes lapidus, or “woman of Lapidus,” are to mean that Deborah is a wife, why is Lapidus never identified separately in the scripture? Why isn’t he given a patronym? In the Bible, all male figures are identified by the names of their fathers, sometimes even their grandfathers and great-grandfathers, too.
Lapidus is a Hebrew word for torch, or fire. It is not the mundane term, but a literary word, a term with elevated connotations. It is an unlikely name for a person. Educated people infer that the description of Deborah therefore translates to “woman of the torch,” or “fiery woman,” as opposed to wife of anyone.
Woman of fire.
Nothing was beyond the scope of Deborah’s achievement. She is undoubtedly the most empowered woman in Jewish history. She was a judge, a leader, a military strategist and commander, a prophetess, and an icon. The Greeks later put her effigy on a coin. She was revered for her beauty, her wisdom, and most of all, her strength. Men tried to marry her, rabbis surmise, but she refused. So she was given the ambiguous affixation—eshes lapidus.
When I first applied to college, needing a legal name for documents, I discovered that my birth certificate said only Deborah, and from then on, the Sarah was dropped. To me, Sarah was my old name, a name for a passive girl. Deborah would be my future.
Deborah, woman of fire.
Centuries after Deborah’s rule, Jews were still talking about her, but not necessarily politely. The group of rabbis who sat around a table in a synagogue and argued with one another about every word in the Bible, and who had the minutes of their meetings transcribed into a collection of work that would become the Talmud, made a point of belittling, with a pernicious determination, the few women who had made it into biblical history. They focused on Deborah with unreserved vitriol, for of the paltry group of women who received positive mentions in scripture, she is truly the only threat. Not just a holy woman, neither a mother nor a wife, Deborah broke every rule in the book by occupying a position that had only ever been held by men and would never again be held by a woman. She died untamed, although surely there were those who wanted her retired into a convenient marriage to sink behind the name of her husband into obscurity.
There is a particularly memorable passage in the Talmud that records a conversation in which rabbis compete with one another to mock the names of the female prophets. By happenstance, some of the women were named after animals, names designed to denote industriousness, a cherished quality in a Jewish woman. Deborah is the Hebrew term for bee, a hardworking creature. The rabbis poke fun at Deborah by attacking her name as vulgar and unsophisticated.
But Hebrew, as a language, works in a particularly interesting way. Words are composed of three-letter roots, which have altered meanings based on suffixes, prefixes, and vowels stuck in between. The root of Deborah consists of the Hebrew equivalents for D, B, and R. This is the root word for speech. The Hebrew version of H, tacked on to the end of an action word, usually denotes feminine gender. Therefore, DeBoRaH would literally deconstruct as “she speaks.”
These sorts of language gymnastics are a beloved sport of Talmudic rabbis. They spend countless pages indulging in a game called gematria, in which they use a code that assigns numerical values to Hebrew letters to draw connections between different words by showing their sums to be equal. The acrobatics involved to draw these complex conclusions are necessary because too frequently they are cited as the only evidence to support a rabbi’s claim. Hasidic Jews still donate to charity in multiples of eighteen because that is the numerical value for the word chai, or life. In this way, they feel that their generosity will buy them life, because it is in the right numerical form.
Hebrew is certainly a language that invites the obsessive code-cracker. It is very layered, packing meaning upon meaning. Words often have dual or triple uses. The poetic nature of Hebrew scripture has allowed for centuries of conjecture and deconstruction not unlike that which I experienced in a poetry class in college. The difference is that all of us in that class knew that no matter how many assumptions we made about the meaning, and how cogently we supported our theses, we were never granted any certainty about the true intent of the poet, or the message behind his or her words. Ultimately, the poem remained unsolved.
My grandfather understood this concept. He often warned me that, although we were living our lives according to a strict rabbinical interpretation of the Torah, there was a distinct possibility that we had a lot of it wrong. He was the first person to explain the concept of a metaphor to me. That’s the thing about the Hebrew language, he said. You never know if you’ve picked the right meaning. It could be literal or figurative. The language could be deliberately obscure, designed to cloak a meaning that only someone with the right code could access. And codes can go wrong. You could be using the wrong key to crack it and get an entirely mixed-up result.
Deborah = Bee.
Deborah = She who speaks.
Deborah = Woman of fire.
My grandfather was confident in his rabbi nonetheless. He reminded me that faith in the righteous was our insurance against error. If we had the right intentions in hand, it was ensured that God would modify his wishes to align with those of the saints leading us. Such reverence was there in heaven for our holy rabbis. The same holy rabbis who had mocked Deborah, who had been chosen by God to lead the Jewish nation to extraordinary victory, who had been blessed with a reign of unparalleled peace and prosperity, and most important, who had been beloved by her subjects and fondly remembered by them.
The author of the book of Deborah was clearly of a very different mind than the fastidious group who chronicled their highly subjective opinions in the Talmud.
“And Deborah rose, a mother in Israel, and spoke.”
This is how Deborah is introduced. Why a mother if she was childless? Could there be a more loving description of her? She was a mother to a nation. She rose to power not as a woman who abandoned her femininity but as one who harnessed its most glorious qualities to lead her people to triumph. Reading this reminds me that, unlike what was taught to me, there is room for rule breaking in the Jewish tradition. God approves of a little feminism once in a while.
In the story of Deborah came my first opportunity to find a positive reflection in the Judaic mirror. In those early years after leaving, everywhere I went, someone or something wanted to show me an acquired perception of Jewish culture. A stereotype, a joke, a Woody Allen reference, countless such instances of a projected identity I had never been aware of, at least not as aware as I was of my existence within the framework of Jewishness I had grown up in.
No one had ever mentioned Deborah to me, except in passing. The stories of Moses, David, and Solomon were told and retold gloriously, but somehow the women slipped from collective memory, and only their shadows remained.
The anesthesiologist who had put me to sleep before my hernia surgery was Hungarian.
“When did you come over to America?” I asked as he hooked up my IV bag.
“In 1988.”
“A year before communism fell!” I said.
He laughed. “How was I supposed to know that then?�
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“I want to go there someday,” I said, slurring a little as the drugs kicked in.
“Why?” he asked.
“Because my grandparents are Hungarian.”
“Which part of Hungary are they from?” he asked.
“Nyíregyháza,” I answered, pronouncing it correctly (Nyir-ed-huza).
“That’s crazy,” he said. “That’s where I’m from. If you go, let me know. I’ll introduce you to some of my friends.”
“That’d be nice,” I said as I drifted off.
It’s hard to explain why I started to feel closer to my grandmother in the years after we last saw each other than at any moment during the time we spent together in my childhood. I had once stood alongside her in the kitchen and mixed bowls of cake batter and meringue, and perhaps we had talked of this and that, but even then I was yearning to know the person she had once been.
By the time I came along, my grandmother’s life had been greatly diminished. I never knew her in her heyday, when she was raising a family of eleven with aplomb, sewing her children’s clothes by hand according to the latest fashions she spied at Saks. She could look at a dress and instantly know how to make it; she didn’t even need a pattern. Neighbors whispered that her rich husband gave her free rein, but they didn’t know that the opposite was true. Despite his financial success, my grandfather didn’t believe in spending money on material things. So she slaved away instead, and they kept up appearances. But this was only something I’d heard, you see—from an aunt or an older cousin who had heard it from somewhere else. The stories were all gone by the time I lived in that house—only their echoes remained.
My grandmother was almost a ghost to me then. Perhaps for that reason, her spirit seemed to accompany me on my way out. I did not feel the separation so keenly because I had always been attached to the memory of her, and that would never fade, no matter how far I traveled. Instead, by freeing myself from the bounds imposed on relationships by the Hasidic community, I was finally able to explore the person my grandmother had been. I opened that folder stuffed full of photographs and documents and started to piece together as much as I could, assembling a chronology of dates, places, and people. Yet there were so many missing elements, and I knew I had to start at the beginning if I was ever going to get the full story.
Exodus: A memoir Page 5