13 Stradomska Street

by Andrew Potok

  Copyright © 2017 by Andrew Potok

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, including electronic storage and retrieval systems, except by explicit prior written permission of the publisher. Brief passages may be excerpted for review and critical purposes.

  This book is typeset in Monotype Dante. The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997).

  Designed by Barbara Werden

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Potok, Andrew, author.

  Title: 13 Stradomska Street: a memoir of exile and return / Andrew Potok.

  Other titles: Thirteen Stradomska Street: a memoir of exile and return

  Description: Simsbury, Connecticut: Mandel Vilar Press, 2017. Identifiers: LCCN 2016046177 | ISBN 9781942134299 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Potok, Andrew—Travel—Poland. | Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)—Poland—Personal narratives. | Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)—Psychological aspects. | Blind painters—United States—Biography. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs. | HISTORY / Jewish. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Jewish Studies. | HISTORY / Modern / 20th Century.

  Classification: LCC ND237.P814 A2 2017 | DDC 759.9438—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016046177

  16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 / 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Mandel Vilar Press

  19 Oxford Court, Simsbury, Connecticut 06070

  www.americasforconservation.org | www.mvpress.org

  For Mark and For Sarah

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE

  1. SIGNS FROM ABOVE

  2. THE FREDERIC CHOPIN AIRPORT

  3. HOTEL HELENA RUBINSTEIN

  4. A NOTE FROM MARTIN LUTHER

  5. 13 STRADOMSKA STREET

  6. PATRIMONY

  7. THE AMBIGUITY OF BETRAYALS

  8. TESTIMONY

  PART TWO

  9. BACK HOME

  10. NATURE AND NURTURE

  11. REPARATIONS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PROLOGUE

  During the war, German thugs turned my family’s elegant showrooms on Marszalkowska, the Champs-Elysees of Warsaw, into a brothel. I had once played on those silver couches, reflected in the mirrors hung on every wall. I ran my little fingers along the Alaskan seals and Persian lambs, slid mink coats back and forth with my uncle on the long mahogany tables.

  In the mid-1950s, based on the testimony of a witness who watched Goering and Himmler send trucks full of Apfelbaum fur coats from Warsaw to Berlin, my mother and my uncle received reparations money from the Germans. This witness, a former cutter in the Apfelbaum factory, now sat on a luxurious couch in the Maximilian Furs showroom on Fifty-Seventh Street in New York and told us astonishing wartime stories.

  An SS Hauptsturmfuehrer named Fassbender marched into the fur salon and “Aryanized it.” Fassbender began an affair with Slawa, one of Apfelbaum’s beautiful models, and they moved into my parents’ apartment at Moniuszki Four, possibly into my blue bedroom and nursery. Slawa was half Russian, married to a Polish officer. She became Fassbender’s accomplice as well as his lover. He impregnated her—in my bed?—and arranged for her husband to be arrested and shot by the Gestapo.

  In the Germany of the 1950s, resistance to paying restitution to Jews was huge. According to several public opinion polls recorded after the war had ended, only five percent of West Germans felt guilty about the devastation they had inflicted, and only twenty-nine percent believed that Jews were owed restitution. The rest were divided between those who thought that only those Germans who committed inhuman crimes were responsible and should pay, and those who thought that the Jews themselves were partly responsible for what happened to them during the German occupation. Anyone who suggested a societal responsibility for the Holocaust was branded as a foolish victim of Jewish propaganda.

  The German payment to Maximilian Furs helped my uncle Max buy top of the line sable pelts from Leningrad and Canada, helped redecorate their already-plush showrooms, and helped finance my graduate school and my years of painting in Paris.

  Now, more than fifty years later, a Polish lawyer calls me in Vermont, urging me to claim an apartment house once owned by my grandmother. I was eight years old when, as we were about to flee, my grandmother Paulina held me in her arms on the pavement in front of our Warsaw apartment, a vague distant memory.

  The Polish lawyer speaks decent English. “You must come,” he says, “to claim a property which is rightfully yours.” My heart is beating hard but I don’t know if I can bear going back to revisit awful memories, traumas, hatreds, and betrayals.

  PART ONE

  1

  SIGNS FROM ABOVE

  1.

  Among the five houses on my street are two signs put up by the city. One declares that we are a DEAD END STREET with no easy turnaround. A couple of houses down, another warns that there is NO PARKING on Richardson Street; it’s not a drive-through, a heartwarming thought. The street ends abruptly one house up from ours in a cluster of trees and bushes that mark the border of Hubbard Park, which overlooks Montpelier, the tiny capital of Vermont.

  Each year for the past few years, usually toward the end of May, a woodpecker selects the dead end sign instead of a tree intended for his delectation, inside whose trunk and limbs he would find a reward for his evolution-given skills, a worm or a bug.

  The woodpecker’s pitiful pecking on a steel sign touches my heartstrings. I am awash in anthropomorphic sympathy. But wherever the bird chooses to perform his nervous pecking, I do understand that it is his love song, his attempt at broadcasting his presence to lady woodpeckers in the hope of getting laid. Though the tapping reverberates like a jackhammer in my ears, I feel sorry for the damn bird, fool that I am about animal pain or stupidity. When I read about a beached whale or hear a cat screeching in the middle of the night, it makes my body shake and shudder. But I could be out there perched on the dead end sign with the woodpecker, banging away at my love song, and it would do me about as much good as it does for this crazy bird. “That bird is sending you a message,” says my wife, Loie, who is sitting on the porch chair opposite me.

  “You’re saying that this is a sign from above? He’s talking to me?”

  “You should pay some attention. He is definitely pointing out the dead end sign.”

  “Maybe you’ve spent too many years in California,” I jab. She swats my knee. But ever since an old friend accosted me in front of the post office to say that he had found God in the roar of a nor’easter, I’ve become wary of nutcases reading signs. I reach across the little wicker table between us and take Loie’s hand in mine. “Actually, looking into the dead ends of my life might be kind of interesting.”

  “See what I mean? That bird is telling you what your next book should be about,” Loie says. “On the other hand,” she adds, “Richardson Street is not really a dead end. Once you push your way through brambles and branches and roots, you’re in another landscape. Not only that, but dead ends often lead to new ways of seeing things.”

  “The damn woods are a dead end for me,” I grumble. My guide dog, Gabriel, might notice a branch hanging low, about to poke me in the eye, and then again he might not. Loie is all eyes. I’m all ears.

  I follow her into the house. “I don’t know if I have another book in me,” I complain as Gabriel, off harness, follows us in. “Maybe I’m too damn old,” I kvetch.

  “You’re not so old,” she says.

  “No?” I lift my chin a little to check for wattles. Vanity will follow me to my grave.

  At the dining room table, I pour each of us a glass o
f red wine. Loie rearranges the white lilies she has brought in from the garden, then gets up to draw the curtains. “Your last book was worth it,” she says. “You dealt with very important issues. You found a new way to look back at your father. You couldn’t have gotten better therapy.” Loie is a psychotherapist, and psychological considerations have taken on a new and not always welcome importance in my life.

  “Jesus, Loie, it wasn’t therapy. It was . . . a book.”

  “It wasn’t therapy?” she asks, getting perturbed now. “Your own father was the bane of your existence and you transformed him in your book into a father you wanted and needed. That’s not therapy?”

  “Art is not therapy and art therapy is not art.” I have never been clear about the art-life distinction, the need of biography in the understanding of art. My wife’s interest is in relationships rather than the ineffability of the art object.

  “Anyway,” Loie says, dismissing my little retort, “all I’m saying is that you seem unhappy just sitting home and reading. What are you reading anyway?”

  “About the war.”

  “That’s what I mean. You always read depressing books.” She reaches back to the credenza for her knitting.

  “Philip Roth stopped writing and he’s a year younger than me.”

  “Two years,” she corrects.

  “One and a half.”

  “He wrote more than thirty books,” she taunts. “You wrote four.”

  I pour myself more wine. Now I’m really getting depressed. “The only thing I know how to write about is me. I’m sick of writing about me.”

  She puts her knitting down, gets up, and heads for the kitchen. “I have to start marinating the meat for tomorrow,” she says. I follow her in. She leafs through her Italian cookbook. I lean against one of the new cabinets, open and close a drawer that’s supposed to close itself. I walk away and a corner of the butcher-block island smacks my hip, making my jaws clench. The dentist calls my attention to this every time I see him. Yes, yes, I clench and grind and my bite is too strong. My rotting teeth are my fault, not yours. I punish the hard wood island with my fist. Loie doesn’t notice. She is humming some singer-songwriter tune and, as she crashes her way through all the pots looking for the right one, she says, “Excuse me a minute. I’m going to make some noise,” and she turns on the mixer.

  I find the living room couch, lean my head back, and my brain begins to whir with poignant memories of grabbing at life, choosing from column A, then column B. I could have chosen anything: history, philosophy, art, music. A wife, then two, three, maybe more. I remember feeling full, every breath a gulp, screaming, crying, drunk with laughter. Not so much any more. But things aren’t so bad. It has been a full life, already a long life, fifteen years more than my father’s, five to go until ninety when my mother died; but thinking of death is not a good way to avoid depression, so I remember the exquisite feel of horse chestnuts in the Saski Gardens in Warsaw, blobs of cadmium red and ivory black on my palette, the sight of the giant black ships in the Baltic Sea, hearing the key of G minor for the first time, skipping down flights of stairs, my feet hardly touching, the sweet scent of roses in a Zopot garden where a little girl let me watch her pee. The smell of chicken wafts in from the kitchen and I take a long, satisfied breath, then travel back to the Spanish hills where I lie down under the spreading gnarled oaks, then look up at the marble mountains of Carrara, at the fishing boats in Greek island village harbors. I jump onto the moving Paris bus—Number Sixty-Eight? Eighty-Seven?—from the rue de Passy to Saint-Germain-des-Pres.

  “Where have you been?” Loie asks, squatting beside me. “You should get some fresh air.”

  I shake off nostalgia and saddle up the great Gabriel and, his harness on and tail wagging, we begin the descent of Richardson Street, hoping that movement and the last of this day’s sunlight will get me back to the present. I allow Gabriel three pee stops on the way to town. When he is unable to squeeze out another drop, we pass the gate of the State House grounds, then sit on the lawn in front of the capitol building near the marigolds and geraniums. After sniffing around for evidence of his species, Gabriel lies down at my side.

  When enough rods and cones of my retina were buried under a build-up of gunk, I stopped painting and began to write fiction and non-fiction: running for a cure for my blindness, non-fiction; a kid coming of age as an artist, sold as fiction, only partly non-fiction; a book of interviews with people working in various aspects of disability, strictly non-fiction; then a fiction-non-fiction mix in which I transformed my miserable father into a vigorous, loving one. What now? Advice to the aging? Tales of love and boredom? A compilation of life’s dead ends? Many come to mind, foremost among them blindness, not to speak of life itself. For some of my friends, even death is not a dead end, but their way to heaven or reincarnation or some damn thing.

  With Gabriel snoring gently now, I concentrate on my breath. “Breathe into it,” I hear my friend Robert’s voice. Into what? I keep wondering. So I begin breathing deeply, then exhale fully, “the Ujjayi breath” he calls it, but it isn’t working. A private plane practices cutting its engine above me and I get goose bumps, having distrusted low-flying airplanes since childhood.

  Back home, Gabriel goes straight to the downstairs toilet for a long drink of water, after which I take the harness off him.

  At noon the next day, the telephone rings. An unfamiliar voice on the other end, accented in a most familiar way. The man identifies himself as a Polish lawyer. He labors with his English. There is, he tells me, stuttering a little, a property in Poland, once my grandmother’s and wrongly inherited by someone whose identity I don’t quite catch.

  “I am confident,” he says, “that we will re-re-recover and sell this property which is rightfully yours.”

  I’m supposed to believe this?

  “I p-p-propose to bring you and your wife, at my expense, to Krakow,” the voice continues. “You must testify in a Polish court.” He pauses. “I pay for everything,” he assures me, “the f-f-flight to Krakow, your hotel here, all your expenses.”

  “I don’t understand,” I say. “Tell me again. I’m to recover what and what is it worth?”

  “It is a small apartment house and, I am sure, worth a substantial amount. It depends on the currency exchange at the time we settle this. It could be much more than two hundred thousand.”

  “Dollars?”

  “D-d-dollars.”

  Loie and I are self-employed, she a psychotherapist, I, once a painter and now a writer, so no retirement pensions in our old age. The state of our finances has always been precarious. I lost quite a lot of invested money in the late 1980s because of very bad advice. Most of the remainder disappeared in a guilt-ridden divorce settlement in the late 1990s. The money from writing is sporadic. If the recovery money from this Polish lawyer’s proposal were to come through, it would be a welcome relief. But who is this guy? Things like this don’t happen except in Greek plays. Then I remember the phone calls when my third book was being considered for publication and the editor at Random House offered my agent a puny advance.

  “Seven and a half thousand,” my agent reported to me on the phone.

  “After all these years of work,” I said, feeling totally deflated, “let’s ask for ten at the very least.”

  Later that day, my agent called and said, “Andy, you’d better sit down.” I did, expecting the worst. “Seven and a half meant seventy-five and when I insisted on at least ten, they agreed to a hundred thousand dollar advance.” Remembering this, an impossible turn of events that every writer must dream about, I wonder what the chances are of lightning striking twice.

  The Polish lawyer has been talking all this time. “So what’s in it for you?” I ask.

  “In it?”

  “I mean that surely you intend to make money from this.”

  “When it is f-f-finished,” he says, “I will take thirty percent. But f-f-first we need many documents, power of attorney, contracts, you
r parents’ death certificates, your birth certificate, many things.”

  “I don’t have a birth certificate,” I tell him and wonder what documents my parents brought with us, what they had time to collect, what documents were necessary to enter Lithuania, Latvia, Sweden, and the United States.

  This doesn’t seem to bother him. He says, “You s-s-simply have to show up for two court hearings where you will t-t-testify regarding the former existence and death of certain members of your f-f-family and establish the reason for your claim.”

  When Loie comes home after work, I am still sitting by the phone. “I can’t believe it,” Loie says. She is excited, undoubtedly already imagining the movie that will be made of the Polish experience in the same way she dreams of who will play whom every time some Hollywood producer becomes even vaguely interested in making a movie of one of my books. “Even if no money comes from all this,” Loie says, “a dead end it won’t be. You can always write about it.” I swivel my chair to face her, lay my hands on her hips. “We’ll have an adventure,” she says.

  When Loie was in her early twenties and I in my mid-thirties, she knocked on the door of my studio. In jeans and an untucked man’s shirt, she was a lithe startling pony with a gap between her two front teeth. Even that costume couldn’t hide her large breasts and hips. I was immersed in a big sloppy semi-abstract interior, afire with slashed and dripping reds and yellows.

  “Am I disturbing you?” she asked, closing the door behind her. “I heard that there was an artist working a couple of houses down from where I’m staying.” She looked like she should be dancing, not walking, as it happened, on bare feet. She came over and stood behind me. “Oh my,” she said, “It’s so full of life. Those colors,” she went on, her hands now on her temples, “they’re so . . . I don’t know . . . passionate. They make my body tingle.”

  What could I do except lay down the brush, still heavy with pigment and pay full attention to this marvelous apparition? Life does not offer many such moments, such life-enhancing opportunities, a beautiful woman presenting herself and asking to know me. I wiped off a stool. “Please sit,” I said, smiling, the courtly artist, the European gentleman.