At the newborn fundamentals class, where I took a dozen pages of notes—with diagrams—on how to treat cradle cap, I chuckled when my attempt to swaddle a doll ended in my accidentally breaking off her head. At the Infant CPR class that I took with a pregnant acquaintance from Harvard (I suggested we bond over brunch and prenatal massage; she thought perhaps a first-aid class might be more useful), I was blown away by all the anti-SIDS recommendations. “You have to sleep in the same room as your baby for a year?” Then Jon took the dads’ class while I went shopping at the Upper Breast Side and found out I was imposing horrors on my ducts with my underwire bra.
And now here I was again, panting my way into Breast-feeding 101. I took a seat in the circle, noticing the equipment spread on the table: those easy-to-decapitate dolls, a variety of crescent-shaped pillows and an extra-large plush nipple. “Today’s special guest will be an actual breast-feeding woman,” the lactation nurse proudly declared while setting up a giant flip chart. “She’ll show you how to get a latch.” A what? And, did I really want to see that live? “But before that, let’s go around the room and everyone can say for how long they plan to breast-feed.”
Wait. This was supposed to be an intro to nursing. Since I didn’t know anything about it yet, how was I supposed to know how long I wanted to do it?
“One year,” every single woman declared and the nurse nodded vigorously as she scribbled numbers next to their names like they were scores.
I thought of Tina Fey’s line: Breast-feeding was amazing; the most gratifying seventy-two hours of my life. “I don’t know,” I mumbled when it came my turn. “Maybe three months.”
“I’ll write down six plus,” nursie said with a saccharine smile. “My goal is for everyone to be feeding for at least twelve.”
Your goal? Argh! I was so tired of everyone else’s opinions. My splicing abs, the tiramisu toxins. I’d recently been chastised at a party—where everyone was downing delicious-looking margaritas—for ordering a special-treat Fresca. “Starting her on the aspartame early . . .” Just the other day a waitress at a hummus bar insisted I was having a boy. “Actually it’s a girl,” I said. “But your belly is round.” “But the sonogram shows female genitalia.” “No!” Um, yes.
I’d been biting my swollen tongue, but now I was starting to wonder whether—with my last chance for hormones to take the behavioral blame—I should let my larynx loose like my ligaments. I fantasized replying, “No, I will not be giving birth in an organic sink in the Park Slope Food Co-op followed by a placenta barbecue! The prehistoric water-loving women you are emulating in your back-to-nature water births were fourteen, not forty-two! And many of them died! Your insistence that your entire household—including your doula and her rescue dogs—all sleep together in a single futon bed is more dogged than any doctor’s prescriptions! You are insane for naming your child Timothée! Lethem! Bon Jovi! And doubly insane for doing baby-led weaning with your endive ragouts and single-origin garlic cloves marinated in bone marrow jus!”
The nurse rambled about terms I didn’t know, and plugged the almighty boob. “Around the globe, the average length of time that women breast-feed is four years.”
In cultures where women work? I didn’t ask. I wanted to breast-feed—that’s why I was there—but I inwardly rolled my eyes. Enough with the “breastapo” tone.
“The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends exclusive breast-feeding for six months minimum, but note: one year is preferable.” Huh? The AAP said that too? I sat up in my seat. She read their statement: “Human milk protects against infant disease . . . diabetes . . . bacteremia . . . leukemia.”
Cancer?! It was one thing to be contrarian, another to disregard serious medical recommendations.
What is wrong with me? I grabbed my water bottle, feeling faint. The cat panic, my inability to diaper a doll, my ridiculous sartorial choices. Why didn’t I care about my child? Why didn’t I want that fuzzy, nurturing experience that everyone else craved?
What if I just couldn’t love her?
I got up and dashed out of the room. Shaky, I wobbled through a maze of anonymous hallways. I was now one of the giant women from that yoga class who I imagined held sacred knowledge, only I had none of it. I looked around: I was going to be poked and prodded, cut open again, and then, one of these post-natal beds would be for me. And her.
My overworked heart raced.
Then, as I turned a corner I saw a gurney parked outside a room. A woman lay on it, smiling, a man’s fingers laced around her own. I smelled a familiar alcohol-like scent and clenched my puffy fists as something hit me—a memory of my colitis surgery I hadn’t recalled in decades.
• • •
IT WAS MY mother’s hand I felt when I awoke into a cloud of noise and pain, the most excruciating, bone-busting, all-body aching I’d ever experienced. I’d never before felt such a surge of desperation, of wanting to escape my physical being, crawl out of my organs. But just then, my mom’s smooth palm, young like a twelve-year-old’s, younger than mine, flowed up and down my cheek. In that moment of torture, she was at my bed, stroking me. “Squeeze my hand whenever it hurts,” she whispered into my ear. “As if you’re passing the pain to me.”
VERITY ON THE VISTULA
Poland, 2008
“I think you should go a little faster,” I chided Jon, as my childhood friend Nadia’s eyes bugged out of her head. It was dark by the time the four of us, including Eli, approached the German-Polish border in our rented German minivan. We were the only car on the autobahn, which Jon took as a license to drive at light speed.
Days after our engagement party at the Freud Museum, I was schlepping Jon to—of all places—Poland. Despite all my travel, I’d never been to the land where all four of my grandparents were born, raised and married, where after the war, my mother spent her formative years. I thought of Bubbie’s stories about being the only female tutor in Puławy and how she took her younger sisters swimming in the Vistula, the river that brought sparkles to her eyes. I recalled the photo of her with her mysterious beau on the banks of that river, the largest in Poland, running right through it like an arrow in a heart, imagining Bubbie falling in love here, more than once.
Now that I was in love, legally linking my heritage to another—and one who came from generations of knighted barristers—I wanted to connect to my roots. My background always felt so hazy, the stuff of myths. All I knew was that I came from Polish peasants and joked that if it wasn’t for the Holocaust, I’d be a farmer in the Warsaw–Lublin corridor. I wanted to know that Jon understood my origins, the dark skies and warped-wood shtetl huts that were part of my maternal narrative.
We approached the border. I was genetically programmed to feel nervous at the prospect of showing “my papers” at Eastern European checkpoints. I pretended not to notice that Jon was having fun weaving between lanes. My stomach tensed as we drove up, only to find no border patrol. It was completely open. “I guess the problem never was getting into the country,” I said, as Jon sailed past the empty booth. Or, as much as he could until we hit Polish soil, which was literally soil. The autobahn became a crumbly country road. Even with Jon’s carefree driving, it took hours more to reach Wrocław, the place—the very real place—of Mom’s first home.
• • •
IN THE MORNING, we walked into the brightly colored medieval town square that I recognized from photos, though the black-and-white images had concealed the magnificent pastel shades of the buildings. I touched the side of a structure, my fingers grazing over its dusty paint: this place existed, for real. How strange it must be for Mom, I thought, that the site of her earliest memories and formative experiences had been off-limits, even dangerous, for so very long, becoming an image in the mind rather than in the world. I rubbed my fingers together, like an archaeologist investigating clues in the granules of pigment—how long had it been here? What had it witnessed? Covered up? The bui
ldings, colorful like sidewalk chalk, like the squares in Candy Land, felt confusing, more surreal than real. Later, later this will make sense, I told myself, hoping, wishing I had more stories to draw on, more collective memories to trace.
We found a bakery and Eli, Nadia, and I cackled at the similarities—challahs, blintzes, cheesecake! This is where it was from. This shop could have been located in my neighborhood in Montreal. “Cool,” Jon said, stuffing himself with meat pie. Then he took a photo. He’s having fun, I told myself, sensing that we were not quite in sync.
That afternoon, we visited parks, museums, and shops, wandering through cobbled streets. Mom did not know her old address, so I could only imagine which building had hosted Bubbie’s cooking and Zaidy’s furs, Mom’s nanny, her one doll. Mom had been so young here, remembered so little, and despite all of Bubbie’s stories, I’d missed so many details. As I shielded my eyes from the bright sunshine—even the weather didn’t match my image of the country—I chided myself for not having asked the right questions. Now, I kept asking myself if I felt a connection, a sense that this was my past, my ancestral home, possibly for dozens of generations. My motherland. But illiterate in the language, I felt more like an anonymous tourist in a land that didn’t even know it held my secrets.
• • •
UNTIL I CHECKED my e-mail. The week before, I’d contacted friends of friends, hoping one or two might have time to meet. I had not expected to find an in-box inundated with messages from Polish curators, professors, and tour guides, all eager to rendezvous.
The very next day a Polish scholar met us for breakfast at our Krakow hotel, welcoming us as if we were a UN committee. We wound through the medieval streets in and around the former Jewish quarter, looking at old synagogues but mainly this new, hip neighborhood of Jewish-themed bars and contemporary art galleries, of molecular borscht foam and digital photography. Very little reminded me of Bubbie or Mom.
That night we went to a “Jewish restaurant.” The Klezmer band belted out Fiddler on the Roof classics as my cholent was followed by a dessert of hamantaschen—not Bubbie’s brisket and Kit Kats, that was for sure. The crowd laughed and clapped along. While this might have been a standard scene at my elementary school’s annual Purim carnival (in a particularly good year), it was less expected on a Tuesday night in November in Krakow. Especially when the energized throng consisted of a busload of retired Germans. I gestured at Jon to get some video of this troubling sight, not sure whether I had a rational reason to be disturbed by German tourists enjoying an evening of ersatz Jewish culture. Jon, on the other hand, seemed pleasantly amused and clapped along. That disturbed me even more.
Amid the strains of “Tradition,” notes which all of a sudden tingled with foreignness, all sorts of things about Jon that I’d repressed came flooding back. The way his bubbie’s name was Gwendolyn, how she skied, went to finishing school in Switzerland, talked about sports cars, and served roast lamb topped with mint sauce (my bubbie had never even heard of mint). How Jon had attended a fancy Christian school, how his mamahloshen was Latin, and his founding myths, Greek. It wasn’t just our demeanors and jobs that differed, but our heritages, our family’s defining incidents. Generationally, I was just minutes removed from terror.
That night, I was woken after midnight by a text: the senior advisor to the mayor of Lodz, saying he’d be delighted to see me. Me? “Cool,” Jon muttered, between snores. How could he not see how crazy this was? The next day, at an über-trendy café, the advisor told us of his overwhelming interest in Lodz’s Jewish history. “I’m just a fucking goy,” he repeated, as we all sipped macchiatos. A twentysomething tour guide then showed us the town, and explained that, like many youths, he’d decided to become Jewish, certain he had hidden Jewish roots. He told us about dozens of youth organizations, a whole Jew-cool movement. Jon thought the city looked like Liverpool and asked him questions about the local film industry. I nearly fainted. Was he not listening to this guy? If I’d once thought it cosmic that both of us had been raised by hoarders, it now began to seem like Jon and I had absolutely nothing in common.
I tried to tune in as we wandered around, stopping to see a nightclub with see-through bathroom stalls as the guide told us about how a third of the city’s population was Jewish before the war. I rinsed my hands in the fluorescent sink, staring at clubbers right through the walls, convoluting all my expectations. I’d thought I was going to Poland to find a missing link, but it seemed that Poland was missing me too.
• • •
THEN I INTRODUCED Jon to my actual family: we dined with distant cousins—the communist branch of my clan—who’d stayed in Poland after the war for political reasons and whom I’d never met. Their tiny apartment with a makeshift kitchen and cramped living room filled with trinkets and mismatched glassware but also magazines, newspapers, passion, finally fit my mental image of Eastern bloc existence. I stared at their ornaments, wondering if Bubbie and Zaidy’s home had been similar, back in the 1940s, but figured that they hadn’t had the time to amass such a stash. Yet.
In Yiddish, I told my cousins about the amazing stories of a Jewish cultural renaissance. “Are you crazy?” my otherwise soft-spoken cousin’s husband suddenly barked. “Bullshit.” He insisted the Poles only pretended to like Jews for American money. “They are anti-Semites to the core.”
Jon sat quietly, eating cold potato salad, taking random footage of the flags on their credenza. When I translated, he shrugged. But do you not see how bizarre, how troubling, this all is? I said with my eyes. He ate coleslaw. I felt so empty that it made me nauseous. I had no idea what to believe.
The next night at a hotel in Lublin where, apparently, Nazis used to stay (in my bed?), Jon complained to the front desk about the pillows. I tucked myself in, my head spinning. Jew love, Jew hate, home, Holocaust.
I dozed off, thinking of Mom’s doll, which she clutched fiercely with two hands in the black-and-white photo. Even though it was her most prized possession, the object of all her adoration, she ended up giving it away to a neighbor. She’d wanted so badly to make friends, to be liked, that she handed it to a brusque girl who’d asked to hold it. I’d heard the story before but now pictured the handoff, one arm lifted, the other lingering, fingers wrapped around the doll’s elbow, not wanting to let go, to lose contact with what she loved. While Bubbie and Zaidy had been searching for their parents, siblings, cousins—finding out one by one that they were dead—Mom was giving up her imagined friend, the warm fabric baby she rocked to sleep, who kept her company day and night. Good-bye, I pictured her saying, wide-eyed, holding back tears as her fingers slowly unfurled, the rough girl pulling, pulling, as if pulling Mom’s soft skin right off her body, until the transaction was complete. Do widzenia. Mom watched as the Polish girl hugged her doll, her doll, knowing at that instant she’d never touch it again. She’d made someone else happy, but she herself had been turned inside out. The beginning of her black hole.
• • •
IN THE MORNING we met our local guide, Lukasz, an intellectual with a man bag. He hopped in our minivan and Jon drove us all east. That’s when we saw the road sign: CHELM. Eli, Nadia, and I burst into applause. The legendary city of Jewish humor folklore—the town of fools—featured in half our high school literature. We couldn’t believe it actually existed as a real place, with a train station and drugstores. “What’s Chelm?” Jon asked. He didn’t even know!
The town’s synagogue was now a bar; a swastika was spray-painted on one wall. But the Jewish cemetery displayed a sign indicating that an organization of people who’d “come out” as Jews were dedicated to preserving it. I was totally confused. Did Poland like Jews or hate Jews? I stared at Jon as he fiddled with the GPS and wondered if I was marrying someone who didn’t understand where I came from or how much had been taken.
Freezing, we got into the car. Lukasz told us that his grandfather was from Kraśnik, the same town mine had come f
rom. Lukasz was thirty-four, an academic. He’d grown up across the street from Majdanek death camp, and became obsessed with the Holocaust. Was it he and I who were beshert, soul mates?
I stared into the back of his calm head, while out of the corner of my eye I watched my fiancé violently meander across lanes, insensitive to the situation, to the passengers, to everything. He didn’t get it, didn’t get me. Who the hell was I marrying?
• • •
THAT EVENING, WE drove to Puławy. On the small roads in the Lublin–Warsaw corridor, we passed tall thin trees, forests just as I imagined them from stories about Partisans. In town, we saw the small wooden houses that were implanted in my mind from every Sholem Aleichem folktale. “Drive around this block again!” I commanded Jon, desperate to see every abode, trying hard to imagine which one might have belonged to my bubbie and her tales. Her family had made paper bags. They’d been robbed, once. Something about a roof? The details didn’t add up to a story.
After our third trip around the residential streets, Jon was annoyed: “Enough already. Where to?”
“The Vistula!” I ordered, angry at him for not knowing. Though it was below zero, I wanted to walk the paths near the river, Bubbie’s river. The banks of the Vistula were where I was sure I would finally feel the sense of connection that I so craved.
Jon parked in the lot, near the riverside park. No one else wanted to get out of the warm car. I was relieved. I threw open the door and ran, right for the paths I wanted to recognize from Bubbie’s photo. It was arctic, and I wrapped my zipless coat around me, hugging myself as I leapt through the trees, trying to get close to the water, which I could now make out was down a slope, in a ravine. I wasn’t sure how I’d get to the shore, but with the water in view, I continued to speed along, feeling my feet step in spots that her shoes might have touched, repeating to myself: this is the place. Her stories. Her soul. My fingers lost feeling. My nose was running. I came to a dead end and became teary. Not because I felt so much, but because I didn’t. Here I was, in Bubbie’s footsteps, and it felt like nothing. Like a random park, in a random town, on a road trip in Eastern Europe. I felt thoroughly frozen.
White Walls Page 24