by Oliver Sacks
I loved the songs and recitations of the seder, the feeling of a remembering, a ritual, which had been performed for millennia – the story of the bondage in Egypt, the infant Moses in the bulrushes being rescued by the pharaoh’s daughter, the Promised Land flowing with milk and honey. I would be transported, we all would, into a mythic realm.
The seder service would go on past midnight, sometimes to one or two in the morning, and as a five-or six-year-old, I would be nodding off. Then, when it finally broke up, another cup of wine – the fifth cup – would be left for ‘Elijah’ (he would come in the night, I was told, and drink the wine left for him). Since my own Hebrew name was Eliahu, Elijah, I decided that I was entitled to drink the wine, and in one of the last seders before the war, I slipped down at night and drank the whole cup. I was never questioned, and never admitted what I had done, but my hangover the next morning, and the empty cup, made any confession unnecessary.
I enjoyed all the Jewish festivals in different ways, but Succoth, the harvest festival, especially, for here we would build a house of leaves and branches, a succah, in the garden, its roof hung with vegetables and fruit, and if weather permitted, I could sleep in the succah, and look through the fruit-hung roof at the constellations above me.
But the more serious festivals, and the fasts, took me back to the oppressive atmosphere of the synagogue, an atmosphere that reached a sort of horror on the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, when all of us (we understood) were being weighed in the balance. One had ten days between New Year and the Day of Atonement to repent and make restitution for one’s misdemeanors and sins, and this repentance reached its climax, communally, on Yom Kippur. During this time, of course, we had all been fasting, no food or drink being allowed to pass our lips for twenty-five hours. We would beat our breasts and wail: ‘We have done this, we have done that’ – all possible sins were mentioned (including many I had never thought of), sins of commission and omission, sins deliberate and inadvertent. The terrifying thing was that one did not know whether one’s breast-beating was convincing to God, or whether one’s sins were even, in fact, forgivable. One did not know whether He would reinscribe one in the Book of Life, as the liturgy had it, or whether one would die and be cast into outer darkness. The intense, tumultuous emotions of the congregation were expressed by the astonishing voice of our old chazzan, Schechter – Schechter, as a young man, had wanted to sing in opera, but never in fact sang outside the synagogue. At the very end of the service, Schechter would blow the shofar, and with this the atonement was over.
When I was fourteen or fifteen – I am not sure of the year – the Yom Kippur service ended in an unforgettable way, for Schechter, who always put great effort into the blowing of the shofar – he would go red in the face with exertion – produced a long, seemingly endless note of unearthly beauty, and then dropped dead before us on the bema, the raised platform where he would sing. I had the feeling that God had killed Schechter, sent a thunderbolt, stricken him. The shock of this for everyone was tempered by the reflection that if there was ever a moment in which a soul was pure, forgiven, relieved of all sin, it was at this moment, when the shofar was blown in conclusion of the fast; and that Schechter’s soul, almost certainly, had fled its body at this moment and gone straight to God. It was a holy dying, everyone said: please God, when their time came, they might die like this too.
Strangely, both my grandfathers had, in fact, died on Yom Kippur (though not in circumstances quite as dramatic as these), and at the start of every Yom Kippur, my parents would light squat mourning candles for them, which would burn slowly throughout the fast.
In 1939 an older sister of my mother’s, Auntie Violet, had come from Hamburg with her family. Her husband, Moritz, was a chemistry teacher and much-decorated veteran of the First World War, who had been wounded by shell fragments and walked with a heavy limp. He thought of himself as a patriotic German and could not believe that he would ever be forced to flee his native country, but Kristallnacht had finally brought home to him the fate that awaited him and his family if they did not escape, and in the spring of 1939 they made it to England – just (all their property had been seized by the Nazis). They stayed with Uncle Dave, and briefly with us, before going to Manchester, where they opened a school and hostel for evacuees.
Occupied, preoccupied, with my own state, I was largely ignorant of much that was going on in the world at large. I knew little, for example, about the evacuation of Dunkirk in 1940, after the fall of France, the frantic crowding of boats with the last refugees to escape the Continent. But in December of 1940, home from Braefield for the holidays, I found that a Flemish couple, the Huberfelds, were now living in one of the spare rooms at 37. They had escaped in a small boat, hours before the German forces had arrived, and had then almost been lost at sea. They did not know what had befallen their own parents, and it was from them that I first gained some idea of the chaos and the horror in Europe.
During the war the congregation was largely broken up – as the young men volunteered or were called up for the military, and hundreds of the children, like Michael and myself, were evacuated from London – and it was never really reconstituted after the war. A number of the congregants were killed, either fighting in Europe or through the bombing in London; others moved away from what had been, before the war, an almost exclusively Jewish, middle-class suburb. Before the war my parents (I, too) had known almost every shop and shopkeeper in Cricklewood: Mr. Silver in his chemist’s shop, the grocer Mr. Bramson, the greengrocer Mr. Ginsberg, the baker Mr. Grodzinski, the kosher butcher Mr. Waterman – and I would see them all in their places in shul. But all this was shattered with the impact of the war, and then with the rapid postwar social changes in our corner of London. I myself, traumatized at Braefield, had lost touch with, lost interest in, the religion of my childhood. I regret that I was to lose it as early and as abruptly as I did, and this feeling of sadness or nostalgia was strangely admixed with a raging atheism, a sort of fury with God for not existing, not taking care, not preventing the war, but allowing it, and all its horrors, to occur.
Her Hebrew name was Zipporah (‘bird’), but to us, to the family, she was always Auntie Birdie. It was never quite clear to me (or perhaps anyone) what had happened to Birdie in early life. There was talk of a head injury in infancy, but also of a congenital disorder, a defective thyroid gland, and she had to take large doses of thyroid extract throughout her life. Birdie had somewhat creased and folded skin, even as a young woman; she was of small stature and modest intelligence, the only one so handicapped among the otherwise gifted and robust children of my grandfather. But I am not sure that I regarded her as ‘handicapped’; to me she was just Auntie Birdie, who lived with us, was an essential part of the house, always there. She had her own room, next to my parents’ room, filled with photos, postcards, tubes of colored sand, and knickknacks from family holidays going back to the beginning of the century. Her room had a clean, almost puppylike smell and was an oasis of calm for me, sometimes, when the house was in an uproar. She had a fat yellow Parker pen (my mother had an orange one), and wrote slowly in an unformed, childlike hand. I knew, of course, that there was ‘something wrong’ with Birdie, something medically the matter, that her health was fragile and her powers of mind limited, but none of this really mattered, or was relevant to us. We knew only that she was there, a constant presence, unwaveringly devoted, and that she seemed to love us without ambivalence or reservation.
When I became interested in chemistry and mineralogy, she would go out and get small mineral specimens for me; I never knew where or how she got these (nor how, after asking Michael what book I might like for my bar mitzvah, she got me a copy of Froissart’s Chronicles ). As a young woman, Birdie had been employed by the firm of Raphael Tuck, which published calendars and postcards, as one of an army of young women who painted and colored the cards – these delicately colored cards were very popular, and often collected, for decades, and seemed a permanent part of life until t
he 1930s, when color photography and color printing started to displace them, and to render Tuck’s small army of women superfluous. In 1936, after almost thirty years of working for them, Birdie was dismissed one day, with no warning and scarcely a ‘thank you,’ let alone a pension or severance pay. When she came back that evening (Michael told me years later) her face was ‘stricken,’ and she never quite got over this.
Birdie was at once so quiet, so unassuming, so ubiquitous, that we all tended to take her for granted and to overlook the crucial role she played in our lives. When, in 1951, I got a scholarship to Oxford, it was Birdie who gave me the telegram, and hugged and congratulated me – shedding some tears, too, because she knew this meant that I would be leaving home.
Birdie had frequent attacks of ‘cardiac asthma,’ or acute heart failure, in the night, when she would get short of breath, and very anxious, and need to sit up. This sufficed at first for her milder attacks, but as they grew more severe, my parents asked her to keep a little brass bell by her bedside and to ring it as soon as she felt any distress. I would hear the little bell ring at increasingly frequent intervals, and it started to dawn on me that this was a serious condition. My parents would get up at once to treat Birdie – she needed oxygen now, and morphine, to get her through her attacks – and I would lie in bed, listening fearfully until all was calm again and I could return to sleep. One night, in 1951, the little bell rang, and my parents rushed into the room. Her attack, this time, was extremely severe: pink froth was coming out of her mouth – she was drowning in the fluid that had welled into her lungs – and she did not respond to the oxygen and morphine. As a final, desperate measure to save her life, my mother performed a venesection with a scalpel on Birdie’s arm, in an attempt to relieve the pressure on the heart. But it did not work with Birdie, and she died in my mother’s arms. When I entered the room, I saw blood everywhere – blood all over her nightdress and arms, blood all over my mother, who was holding her. I thought for a moment that my mother had killed her, before I deciphered the fearful scene before me.
It was the first death of a close relative, of someone who had been an essential part of my life, and it affected me much more deeply than I had expected.
As a child, it seemed to me that the house was full of music. There were two Bechsteins, an upright and a grand, and sometimes both were being played simultaneously, to say nothing of David’s flute and Marcus’s clarinet. At such times the house was a veritable aquarium of sound, and I would become aware of one instrument and then another as I walked about (the different instruments did not seem to clash, curiously; my ear, my attention, would always select one or another).
My mother was not as musical as the rest of us, but very fond, nonetheless, of Brahms and Schubert lieder; she would sing these, sometimes, with my father accompanying her at the piano. She was especially fond of Schubert’s ‘Nachtgesang,’ his Song of the Night, which she would sing in a soft, slightly off-key voice. This is one of my earliest memories (I never knew what the words meant, but the song affected me strangely). I cannot hear this now without recalling with almost unbearable vividness our drawing room as it was before the war, and my mother’s figure and voice as she leaned over the piano and sang.
My father was very musical, and would come back from concerts and play much of the program by ear, transposing fragments into different keys, playing with them in different ways. He had an omnivorous love of music, and enjoyed music halls as much as chamber concerts, Gilbert and Sullivan as much as Monteverdi. He was particularly fond of songs from the Great War, and would sing these in a resounding bass. He had a large library of miniature scores, and always seemed to have one or two of these in his pockets (and indeed he usually went to bed with one of them, or the dictionary of musical themes that I gave him later for one of his birthdays).
Though he had studied with a noted pianist, and was always darting to the keyboard of one or the other of the pianos, my father’s fingers were so broad and stubby that they could never fit quite comfortably on the keys, so he usually contented himself with impressionistic fragments. But he was eager for the rest of us to be at home on the piano, and engaged a brilliant piano teacher, Francesco Ticciati, for us all. Ticciati drilled Marcus and David in Bach and Scarlatti with passionate, demanding intensity (Michael and I, younger, would play Diabelli duets), and at times I would hear him bang the piano with frustration, shouting, ‘No! No! No!’ when they failed to get things right. Then he would sit down sometimes and play himself, and suddenly I knew what mastery meant. He instilled in us an intense feeling for Bach especially, and all the hidden structure of a fugue. When I was five, I am told, and asked what my favorite things in the world were, I answered, ‘smoked salmon and Bach.’ (Now, sixty years later, my answer would be the same.)
I found the house somewhat stark, musicless, when I returned to London in 1943. Marcus and David, pre-med students now, were themselves evacuated – Marcus to Leeds, David to Lancaster; my father was busy, when not seeing patients, with his duties as an air-raid warden; my mother equally so, doing emergency surgery late into the night at a hospital in St. Albans. I would wait up, sometimes, to hear the sound of her bicycle bell, as she cycled back, close to midnight, from the Cricklewood station.
A great treat at this time was to hear Myra Hess, the famous pianist who almost single-handed, it seemed, reminded Londoners in the midst of war of the timeless, transcendent beauties of music. We would often gather around the wireless in the lounge to hear the broadcasts of her lunchtime recitals.
When Marcus and David came back, after the war, to continue as medical students in London, the flute and the clarinet had long been abandoned, but David, it was evident, had exceptional musical gifts, was the one who really took after our father. David discovered blues and jazz, fell in love with Gershwin, and brought a new sort of music to our previously ‘classical’ house. David was already a very good improviser and pianist, with a special flair for playing Liszt, but now suddenly the house was full of new names, names unlike any I had ever heard before: ‘Duke’ Ellington, ‘Count’
Basie, ‘Jelly Roll’ Morton, ‘Fats’ Waller – and from the horn of the new wind-up Decca gramophone he kept in his room I first heard the voices of Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday. Sometimes when David sat down at the piano, I was not sure whether he was playing one of the jazz pianists or improvising something of his own – I think he wondered, half seriously, whether he might become a composer himself.
Both David and Marcus, I came to realize, though they seemed happy enough, and looked forward to being doctors, had a certain sadness, a sense of loss and renunciation, about other interests they had given up. For David this was music, while Marcus’s passion, from an early age, had been for languages. He had an extraordinary aptitude for learning them, and was fascinated by their structure; at sixteen he was already fluent not only in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, but in Arabic, which he had taught himself. He might have gone on, like his cousin Aubrey, to do oriental languages at university, but then the war came. Both he and David would have reached call-up age in 1941-42, and both became medical students, in part, to defer their call-up. But with this, I think, they deferred their other aspirations, a deferment that seemed permanent and irreversible by the time they returned to London.
Mr. Ticciati, our piano teacher, died in the war, and when I came back to London in 1943 my parents found another teacher for me, Mrs. Silver, a red-haired woman with a ten-year-old son, Kenneth, who was born deaf. After I had studied with her for a couple of years, she became pregnant once again. I had seen my mother’s pregnant patients almost daily, as they came to her consulting room in the house, but this was the first time I saw someone so close to me go through an entire pregnancy. There were some problems toward the end – I heard talk of ‘toxemia’ and I believe my mother had to do a ‘version’ of the baby, so that it would come out head first. Finally Mrs. Silver went into labor and was admitted to hospital (my mother usually delivered babies at home,
but here it seemed there might be complications and a caesarian section might be necessary). It did not occur to me that anything serious might happen, but when I got home from school that day, Michael told me that Mrs. Silver had died in childbirth, ‘on the table.’
I was shocked, and outraged. How could a healthy woman die like this? How could my mother have let such a catastrophe occur? I never learned any details of what had happened, but the very fact that my mother had been present throughout evoked the fantasy that she had killed Mrs. Silver – even though everything I knew convinced me of my mother’s expertise and concern, and that she must have encountered something beyond her power, beyond human power, to control.
I feared for Kenneth, Mrs. Silver’s deaf son, whose main communication had been in a homemade sign language he shared only with his mother. And I lost the impulse to play the piano – I did not touch one at all for a year – and never allowed another piano teacher thereafter.
I never thought I really knew or understood my brother Michael, even though he was the closest to me in age, and the one who came to Braefield with me. There is, of course, a great difference between six and eleven (our respective ages when we went to Braefield), but there seemed, in addition, something special about him which I (and perhaps others) were conscious of, though we would have found it difficult to characterize, much less to understand. He was dreamy, abstracted, deeply introspective; he seemed (more than any of us) to live in a world of his own, though he read deeply and constantly, and had the most amazing memory for his reading. He developed, when we were at Braefield, a particular preference for Nicholas Nickleby and David Copperfield, and knew the entire, immense books by heart, though he never explicitly compared Braefield to Dotheboys, or Mr. B. to the monstrous Dr. Creakle. But the comparisons were surely there, implicit, perhaps even unconscious, in his mind.