Only in New York

by Lily Brett

  Jews make up just over two percent of the American population. But people seem to think we are everywhere. And up to no good.

  I was even more shocked when, after thirteen years of documentation, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum announced last year that they had catalogued 42 500 Nazi ghettos, slave-labour camps and concentration camps in the German-controlled areas of Europe.

  I have been reading about the Holocaust for decades. My library contains hundreds of books on the subject. But these numbers really stunned me. I don’t come across anti-Semitism in my daily life. And I rarely have. I have, though, seen evidence of it, in my travels.

  It seems that so much can change in the world, but anti-Semitism remains a constant. And not the sort of constant that is comforting or desirable.

  Anton Chekhov’s disquieting sentiment that ‘Love, respect, friendship, do not unite people as much as a common hatred for something’ is possibly always going to be true.

  The West Village is one of my favourite areas in New York. Its small streets, small stores, small parks and small restaurants and cafes give the area an almost magical dimension. Outside a store in the West Village, I once saw a sign that said, ‘Think happy thoughts and you can fly. Peter Pan.’ You would be hard-pressed to find a quote by Peter Pan in Midtown.

  Bleecker Street, in the West Village, has some of my favourite stores. Li-Lac Chocolates, Murray’s Cheeses and Amy’s Bread. Amy’s makes a chocolate bread twist that could be my undoing. It is a white bread roll twisted and intertwined with chunks of very good, dark chocolate. I try to buy only one at a time.

  Most of New York is on a grid. The streets and avenues are numbered and run up and down and across the grid. The grid was created by the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811. Unfortunately, the streets in the West Village were designed in the eighteenth century before that very clever Commissioners’ Plan. There was a plan for the streets of the West Village that took into account the relationship of the individual streets to the Hudson River. It is not an easy plan to detect.

  Unlike most of the streets in New York, which can reliably not throw you off course, the streets in the West Village can suddenly change course and take off in another direction. More than once, soon after walking confidently in the right direction, I have had no idea where I was.

  Some of the streets in the West Village are also numbered. This numbering was done in the nineteenth century. Haphazardly, it seems to me. West 4th Street crosses West 10th, 11th and 12th streets and ends at an intersection with West 13th Street. West 12th Street is three blocks away from Little West 12th Street, which is one block from West 13th Street. That sort of numbering is enough to give a lot of people headaches or nightmares.

  I do, in fact, have recurring nightmares about walking in streets that do not lead to where I am expecting them to lead. Nightmares in which I can never get to my destination. And never get home. In these nightmares, the streets usually lead to deserted areas with an air of menace, which I can’t get away from.

  I have had nightmares for almost all of my life. Sometimes I have them night after night for weeks and, sometimes, months. I have rarely had a pleasant dream. I think this may not be unusual for children of survivors of catastrophes.

  Hundreds of papers have been published on the transmission of trauma from Holocaust survivor parents to their children. Nightmares, anxiety and expectations of catastrophe are some of the common symptoms children of survivors have inherited.

  Because I was born so soon after the war and was a first-born child of two survivor parents who had lost most of their families, and because I ‘replaced’ a son who had died in the ghetto, I fall into the category of children who can be assumed to have been more affected by the effects of their parents’ traumatisation. I fulfil six of the seven characteristics required to fit into this group.

  It often takes me an hour or so, in the morning, to shake off the nightmares. I exercise, I potter around, I sometimes go for a walk. I do everything I can to extricate myself from the night.

  I avoid the West Village on these early-morning walks. Luckily most of the rest of the streets of New York are easy to navigate. However, I can get lost anywhere. I always get lost in hotels and have seen more than my share of hotel supplies rooms. I can even get lost on a plane, a feat that most people find unbelievable, and not in a positive way. I have stood, in various planes, staring down a long line of seats and been unable to recognise where I had been sitting.

  This lack of a sense of direction is inherited. My father has often called me from a street corner, minutes from where he lives. He is calling to tell me that he is lost. I am the last person in the world you should call if you are lost. It generally takes me a few minutes to recognise that my father is almost outside his front door. He has arrived there from a different direction from the direction he usually takes. And that has caused the confusion.

  My younger daughter rang me one night to ask me if it was Greenwich Avenue or Greenwich Street that was off Sixth Avenue. She was running late for a meeting. I have walked along Greenwich Street and Greenwich Avenue, both very interesting streets, hundreds of times. But forced to think about the answer, my brain froze.

  I consciously set out to learn which street was which. Greenwich Avenue runs off Sixth Avenue. Greenwich Street begins at Ninth Avenue and, with a few interruptions, goes all the way to Battery Park City.

  The lack of a direction gene has spread through the family. My father, my son, my younger daughter and my cousin Adam. None of us can find our way anywhere. Or find our way back.

  At least they can read maps. I was looking for India on a map of the world. India is not a small country. I couldn’t find it. My daughter’s son found it. He was four.

  In one of New York University’s medical buildings, it took me thirty minutes to find my way back to the elevator after I had inadvertently got off at the wrong floor. If I wasn’t always early for everything I would have been late for my appointment with the dermatologist.

  I had been distracted by a conversation in the elevator. You can go up and down, hundreds of times, in a New York elevator, without anyone speaking to anyone else. When a woman in the elevator asked me a question, I was startled. I was also startled by the question.

  ‘What hair colour do you use?’ she said to me. I have never been asked that question. Outside a hairdressing salon, anyway. And even then, because I have had the same New York hair colourist, Bryan from Brisbane, who is at the Marie Robinson Salon on Fifth Avenue, for fifteen years, I am not frequently asked that question.

  It seemed a very personal question, although I guess it is not any more personal than ‘How are you?’.

  ‘It’s light brown, I think,’ I said.

  ‘No one has just light brown,’ she said. ‘You have to have the hair-colour number and the name of the brand.’

  ‘I think it is a mixture of Coldwell G7 and N7,’ I said.

  ‘What proportions?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘You must know,’ she said.

  ‘I think it is half and half,’ I said.

  By now I felt as though I was being interrogated by the FBI. In front of about ten witnesses who were very quiet. Although I don’t think they were heavily invested in the details of my hair colour.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘I really like the colour.’

  I think that was the point at which I missed my floor. I suddenly remembered that Bryan had recently changed the colour of my hair. ‘I just remembered that my colourist switched to Wella,’ I said. ‘Wella 7/0 and Wella 7/3,’ I said. ‘Half and half,’ I called out as I got off the elevator. On the wrong floor.

  I have a history of getting lost. I have been lost in an apartment with hundreds of millions of dollars of art on the walls. I have wandered around Van Gogh paintings, a Cézanne still life, a set of Matisse paintings, some Jasper Johns paintings and a room with a large group of highly polished, bronze Brancusi sculptures and all I have wanted t
o do was find my way back to the dinner table.

  I have been lost more than once at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. I haven’t been lost walking around the complex of buildings, I have been lost getting from the bathroom to my seat at several of the theatres. The last time was when I was at the Metropolitan Opera House.

  I wasn’t watching an opera at the Metropolitan Opera House. I was at the ballet. I was at the ballet because my son’s daughter is crazy about ballet. She has been crazy about ballet since she was four. She is now six.

  Before this, I had thought of ballet as a series of dance steps by very thin young women wearing way too much pink. Because of this small girl’s insistence on explaining the storyline of every ballet we saw together, I started to understand ballet. I am now almost a ballet fan. But I still get lost trying to find my way back to my seat.

  I have been getting lost for decades. Not long after we arrived in New York, I was in the rooms of a referring psychoanalyst. She didn’t treat patients, she just matched them with a suitable psychoanalyst. My Melbourne psychoanalyst had recommended her.

  For fifty minutes I ran through a history of my symptoms and what I had learned from my previous psychoanalysts. Twenty-five years ago, there had already been two analysts. At the end of the fifty minutes, I left the room feeling flushed and breathless. I looked for my coat, which I had hung in a closet in the waiting room. It wasn’t there. The closet was, instead, full of women’s clothing.

  I was in the referring psychoanalyst’s bedroom. To this day, I have no idea how I got there. And how I got back out. My husband laughed for two days after I told him the story. ‘You were never meant to be a taxi driver or a tour guide,’ he said.

  For years I have been mesmerised by a cemetery. This cemetery is enormous. It seems to stretch for miles. Except for the lack of movement, it looks like a metropolis.

  I have been looking at this cemetery from a bus on the Long Island Expressway, about ten minutes from Midtown Manhattan, for twenty years. My husband and I are usually on our way to Shelter Island, a very quiet place where I do a lot of my writing.

  Not one of the other passengers on the bus strains to see as much as they can of this densely populated burial ground. I can’t look away.

  From the expressway, the cemetery looks packed. Packed with plot after plot of buried people. Tombstones that almost seem to touch each other. And graves as far as the eye can see.

  The cemetery fascinates me and terrifies me. ‘I don’t ever want to be buried there,’ I regularly say to my husband. ‘I would feel claustrophobic if I was buried there,’ I add. He is kind enough never to point out that I would be dead and not able to feel claustrophobic or agoraphobic or any other sort of phobic.

  I needn’t have panicked about being buried there. What I didn’t know was that I couldn’t be buried there. It is a Roman Catholic cemetery. I am Jewish. And not even married to a Roman Catholic.

  ‘I want to go to that cemetery,’ I said to my husband one morning. My husband is used to me saying strange things straight out of my sleep. Nothing fazes him. ‘It’s called Calvary Cemetery and it’s in Queens,’ I said.

  ‘I know it’s in Queens.’ he said. Of course he knows it is in Queens. Most passengers who travel regularly on the Long Island Expressway know when they are in Queens. I don’t. A lack of any sense of geography or direction can really be an impediment.

  I was thrilled at the thought of going to the Calvary Cemetery. It is one of the largest cemeteries in America and one of the oldest. The cemetery, which was established in 1848, covers 365 acres.

  I wondered if we should stay in Queens overnight. Three hundred and sixty-five acres is a lot of ground to cover. I could only find one reasonably priced hotel anywhere near the area. It was called the Boulevard Motor Inn.

  I called the Boulevard Motor Inn. I asked how much was a room with a queen-size bed for one night. ‘Ninety-nine dollars,’ the man on the phone said. That was a perfect price. I was about to make a reservation when he said, ‘What sort of room do you want and for how long?’ He clearly hadn’t understood me. I thought it must be my Australian accent.

  ‘I want a room with a queen-size bed for one night,’ I said, slowly and carefully.

  ‘You want it for the whole night?’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘How much are the weekend nights?’

  ‘That’s not a good idea, he said.

  ‘Are the weekend nights noisy?’ I said.

  ‘Sometimes,’ he said, sounding irritated. By now I was starting to reconsider the Boulevard Motor Inn. ‘I’ll call you back,’ I said.

  I looked at the ad for the Boulevard Motor Inn again. It said, ‘Couples Orientated.’ I thought that meant they weren’t crazy about having kids running around. That was fine with me. They also advertised ‘Round Beds’. That seemed like a smart way of getting an edge on their competition, I thought. They offered ‘Mirrored Rooms’ and ‘Facilities for the Most Pleasant Experience Possible’. I was a bit bothered by the mirrored rooms, but then I prefer a hotel room with a good mirror. I had failed to notice the ‘Special Day and Evening Rates’.

  I was still excited about going to the cemetery for the day. You can get to the Calvary Cemetery by going to Sunnyside, Queens. That was enticing in itself. I love the name Sunnyside. I wondered if my temperament would improve if I lived in Sunnyside.

  It is not hard to get to Sunnyside. Take the Number 7 train, get off at 40th Street, and you will be in Sunnyside, Queens.

  Sunnyside is a cheerful place. I felt almost chirpy from the moment I arrived. It is like a village, only bigger. And more ethnically diverse than any village I’ve ever seen. It is clean and calm. Nothing seems to be broken, bruised or vandalised. There is no razzle-dazzle. Just the modesty of working people getting on with their lives.

  There is nothing trendy. No pretention. There is no feeling of transience. Sunnyside feels very solid. There are few franchises and chain stores. Just small businesses. You don’t have to get dressed up or check your ensemble before leaving the house.

  Sunnyside is also a good place to be if you are hungry. You can dine on the cuisine of twenty-seven countries within a seven-block stretch of Queens Boulevard. You can have, among many other options, Romanian, Indian, Hungarian, Italian, Mexican, Turkish, Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Colombian, American, Irish, Himalayan, Lebanese and Nepalese food.

  There are two Irish bring-your-own-food pubs. That fact made me laugh. It made me think that we should have Jewish, don’t-bother-with-the-drinks restaurants. We Jews, on the whole, don’t drink a lot. We eat.

  I ate too much in Sunnyside. All that sunniness made it feel okay to eat too much. My downfall was caused by the sugared guava buns at El Buen Sabor, a Colombian bakery. My husband got hooked on the sausage rolls at the Butcher’s Block, a large Irish food store. After a couple of hours of strolling and eating we finally made our way to the cemetery.

  Up close, the Calvary Cemetery, which still feels huge, doesn’t feel crowded. It feels more peaceful. I had imagined neighbours, buried in plots and too squashed together, squabbling with each other. I imagined there was no privacy. That every one of the interned was able to see what all the other internees were doing.

  Cemeteries always look lifelike to me. Like towns and villages and any other grouping of people. Cemeteries loosen my grip on my firm lack of belief in an afterlife.

  The Calvary Cemetery has a list of ‘Notable burials’. The ‘Notables’ are divided into categories. There are Notable Athletes, Notable Entertainers, Notable Military Figures, Notable Law Enforcement Professionals and Notable Organised Crime Figures.

  There are only two Notable Law Enforcement Professionals but twenty-one Notable Organised Crime Figures. The Notable Organised Crime Figures have fabulous names. There is Ignatius ‘Lupo the Wolf’ Lupo and Peter ‘Giuseppe’ Morello, the first head of the Morello crime family, who was also known as the Clutch Hand. There is Natale ‘Joe Diamond’ Evola. Many of the crime figures als
o have their occupation listed. Joseph Lanza is called a racketeer and mobster, whereas Michael ‘Mickey’ Spillane is simply called a mobster.

  I am not sure why the cemetery points out its organised crime figures or its lack of law-enforcement officers. Anyway, it all looks pretty orderly now.

  It also looks much more homely than it does from the bus. And it looks less crowded, even though there are three million people buried there. The atmosphere is peaceful. It looks as though neighbours are no longer arguing with each other and relatives who were feuding seem subdued.

  There is an air of maturity and serenity. None of the buried residents are drinking too much or swallowing too many prescription pills. No one is worrying about money. Or their hair. Or children. No one is planning to diet. There is no tension.

  I have to remind myself that there is also no life.

  When Chelsea Clinton’s pregnancy was announced, it seemed that there was no time for even a small moment of celebration. The political ramifications began about two seconds after the announcement. Although Chelsea Clinton isn’t running for political office. And neither is her baby.

  The furore was all about Chelsea’s mother, who is possibly running for the office of President of the United States in 2016. Minutes after Chelsea said how happy she and her husband were to be expecting their first child, things changed for her mother, Hillary Clinton.

  There were now new issues, new titles, new questions, new suspicions. Did Hillary plan this pregnancy in order to look more sympathetic for the 2016 campaign, several commentators asked. Did Hillary plan this pregnancy? Did someone envisage Hillary Clinton standing over Chelsea with an ovulation detection kit and then monitoring the rest of the activities needed to achieve a pregnancy?

  Few mothers have the power to plan their daughter’s pregnancy. Despite the fact that Hillary, a lawyer, has been a First Lady, a senator, and a Secretary of State, I doubt that she would have been able to orchestrate Chelsea’s pregnancy. Besides which, pregnancies can prove to be remarkably hard to orchestrate even for the mother- and father-to-be.