by Nadia Gould
Soon after, the social worker registered me in the local public school. She and the Principal decided that I would do best in the fifth grade because I didn’t know the language and I was short. The pupils were tall but I could tell they were much younger than me. The entire morning I was in school that day I had to answer my name to every one who asked, “And what is your name?” I had to say over and over, “My name is Nadia and what is your name?” And they told me their names.
During a break, as soon as no one was watching, I ran out into the street and pushed by an instinctive urge I went to see my redheaded German friend from the boat. I ran through the streets. I didn’t know where my friend lived. I wanted to hear her say the French words I had taught her. Miraculously, I found her. No one mentioned my going back to school after that. I stayed home with the lady who was religious and swayed as she prayed every morning, facing the same direction.
One day to be helpful I washed a dirty dish. I was handling it and she grabbed it from my hands, rushed into the back garden and buried it in the ground. I thought she was crazy. I didn’t know about kosher laws and not mixing meat and dairy dishes.
Her son was her other big concern. He was nineteen and worked nights in a war plant. He was a good son but she complained that he kept company with a girl of dubious background and a non-Jew on top of everything! She couldn’t do anything about it. As I went to bed early in the evening, I never saw him except one night when I heard him shout at his mother. I was surprised he could get away with being so disrespectful to her.
Once when the lady was out I dialed the telephone operator and in my broken English explained to her that I wanted to locate my parents’ friends in Norfolk, Virginia; although I didn’t know the names of the relatives with whom they were staying nor the address.
After a few days, I received a call from my father’s friend, Sasha. He had been stunned to learn I was in America. He didn’t know we had escaped from France. I could hardly believe I was speaking French to him, a person who knew me and my parents. I felt I was me again. Often since, I have wondered about the faceless telephone operator who had been so smart and had understood my despair on the phone. And most of all, I wondered how she did the detective work to find my parents’ friends.
Chapter 10
Without My Mother (Concord, NH/Reading, PA) 1943
Sasha promised me he would do all that was necessary to have me move in with them. They were now living in Concord, New Hampshire. It took a long time to get the paperwork done before I was given permission to move into their house. Several agencies had to investigate my new home and my new foster parents.
Since I was going to leave their house anyway, the lady decided that she would go to work in a war plant also. The social worker said I could not be left alone in the house without her and decided I had to move temporarily until I could go legally to Concord. Again a separation and a crisis festered the day the social worker came to take me to a new home. I lost my sanity and I rolled on the floor, crying and begging not to be moved until I went to my friends. Even though I was out of control, the social worker dragged me out. This time I was placed in a home with many children—American children. The lady in charge of the foster home was a widow whose husband had jumped out a window during the depression. He had owned a shoe factory and had lost his money in the crash of 1929. Her grown-up daughter helped her run the home. They didn’t interfere with the children. I had to share a room with a girl my age named Margaret who told me she was in a foster home because her father had killed her mother. Her brother was in another foster home across town. I liked Margaret. Every day I went to pick her up from school at three to go to the movies together. We used my money—the money people had given me when they saw me cry.
I think the movies helped me a lot with my English and with getting adjusted to the American Way of Life! After the movies we had ice cream. In France, we rarely ate ice cream, but French ice cream didn’t compare with this American delicacy.
In the mornings, I was alone in the house. I took bubble baths while I listened to the radio. I used Jergen’s lotion on my hands. I loved the almond scent. I was losing my sadness and enjoying the luxuries of my new life.
One day, Margaret and I went to visit her brother. I thought he was good-looking, and I daydreamed that he would like me too. I was feeling things again, and I loved Margaret. I felt sad to leave her when it was time for me to go to Concord, New Hampshire.
Sasha, Luba and Gaby were living in Concord when I came to join them. I imagine Gaby was as unhappy as I had been when Lilo came to live with my parents and me. I was an intruder She had to accept me as her “sister” as I had had to tolerate Lilo. I knew she would have preferred Lilo as her sister. Lilo had been her friend in Marseille. I was a year older, which meant she couldn’t be my superior. There was nothing I could do to change her feelings under these circumstances, so I tried to stay out of her way.
Gaby was charming and attractive even if her mother wished she had a prettier face. As a friend she was loyal, fun and bright. She had many friends and she was popular. I felt embarrassed and guilty to be in her company at first until I had friends of my own. Even so, I hoped my troubles were over now that I lived with these friends and that they were trying to get a visa for my mother. I could speak French, and most of all I could speak about my parents. But then Luba said to me, “What enormous breasts you have, just like your mother’s, and look at your legs, a train could go through them. Why didn’t your parents do anything about that? There are operations and treatments for that. Gaby’s nose is horrible, but at least she has a good figure and that’s all men care about in a woman: a good figure!”
I didn’t know how to answer her and at that moment didn’t know how to convince myself she was evil. All I wanted to do was to cover my body. From then on I refused to take off my coat even in the summer. I felt like a freak with huge pendulous breasts and crooked legs. I kept thinking about these parts of my body all the time. I was obsessed with them, and if I had to cross a room I hugged the walls instead of walking in a straight line. I wanted to be shadow.
Luba belittled my mother to me, she called her a rotten housekeeper, without discipline, unfeminine, too naive, too kind to every one. I didn’t know what to say, how to defend my mother when Luba tore her apart. I wished I could have told her off. I hated her for saying the nasty things she said about her.
Luba loved my father. I suspected that they had had an affair. This suspicion irked me, as I had to listen to her as she called him so intelligent and how she couldn’t imagine what he saw in my mother. The more she praised my father the more it distressed me because she was always doing it at my mother’s expense. Then I realized why I had said I didn’t want to go live with them when Mr. Johnson had asked if we had friends with whom I could stay if I went to America.
Meanwhile Luba was pleased with herself. She was a disciplined, meticulous housekeeper. Her favorite gesture was to show off with her index finger:
“See no dust!” She checked for dust in other people’s homes when their backs were turned and she smiled if she found some. I hoped that something would happen to her and that she would change and be nice, but she stayed the way she was. She spent money wisely. She knew good quality—where the real bargains were. She was well built and could wear anything. She was so lucky with herself. Her husband was kind, but she spoke of him as if he too were stupid like the rest of us. Her acquaintances thought she was an excellent housekeeper. In 1944 it was important for a woman to be a good housekeeper. Her friends and acquaintances came to play cards and have tea in her clean house, but they didn’t come to empty their hearts and seek comfort.
Concord was a typical New England town with a Main Street and ubiquitous white churches with steeples and small white salt-boxes houses surrounded by stately trees, drugstores with comfortable leather booths where they served at any time of the day hamburgers, ice cream sundaes, banana splits, and double or triple deck Dagwood sandwiches with toothp
icks to hold them together—odd foods for me, then. But the most peculiar thing for me to accept was that these restaurants sold medicines.
Gaby and her friends from Junior High School spent time in the drugstores the way grownups in France did in the cafes. I was startled to see young people have a public life.
With the help of my English teacher, I wrote the story of my escape from France for the school newspaper. It helped me find friends. There were so many activities to do at school, and there were so many things I didn’t understand about American Life. For instance, in the assemblies they had contests and the contenders were asked to identify a saying like “Good to the last drop.” I was awed when the contestant knew the answer “Maxwell House Coffee.” I couldn’t imagine how people knew such things, and I feared I would never be able to learn and catch up.
Otherwise, the schoolwork seemed simple. I liked the way the teachers explained the work beforehand. It was very different from the system in France where you were told only afterwards what a subject was about and what you had to know to do the homework exercises.
Even though I was happier in Concord than I had been in those beginning days in Philadelphia when I had wanted to kill myself, I was still very sad, and I missed my mother. There was no one with whom I could share those feelings.
I discovered that reading the Bible was a distraction. It was a pornographic entertainment with the begats and begots, and I found sexual arousal speculating about love making in the beginning when the world needed to be populated. But mainly I worried about what would become of me. My life felt suspended with no future in sight. I didn’t get any news of my parents. The mail from Europe to the United States was not working. Until Sasha had come for me I had been sure my parents were dead. Talking French with Luba, Sasha and Gaby helped me regain hope that it might be possible for me to see my parents again someday.
I envied the students in school who had an easy time speaking English and accepting the luxuries of their lives. They spoke very fast and were saying (I assumed) important things. At that time I was also bewildered by the disposable objects that people used: table napkins, sanitary napkins, jars, boxes everything to be thrown out—such overabundance made me uneasy. It went against the grain of everything I had been taught in France. And Luba too was good at throwing things out. It bothered me to see bottles or jars used only once trashed out. And everybody in America had a telephone—even children. People also had cars and every house had a garage. The newspaper boy throwing the paper on the porches was a surprise: young people in France didn’t have regular paying jobs. Porches were new to me—the houses I knew in Chatenay didn’t have porches.
I kept discovering different things about life in America. Everybody had a bathroom. I was astonished to see that my friends took a bath any time they wanted and washed their hair and brushed it one hundred times a day. The movie magazines told them that the stars in Hollywood did that.
Parties and kissing games were strange to me. I was too proud to kiss anybody and I thought there was something odd about those games. I felt too inadequate anyway. My reluctance made me unpopular with the boys I would have wanted to kiss me.
Because of his job, Sasha had to move to Reading, Pennsylvania, and I went along with his family. Reading was a much bigger town than Concord and where Concord was white, Reading was red with stately Victorian brick houses. Sasha had rented one of these with a wraparound porch and a dark interior of paneled walls. The built-in furniture was sculpted with elaborate decorations. Two rocking chairs faced a fireplace. It was the first time I was seeing a rocking chair.
Neighbors came to introduce themselves and give presents. That was the tradition. Gaby and I were immediately invited to join the social activities in our new school. I made a few friends and I led a typical American child’s life playing Monopoly, jacks and pick-up sticks. In France, we didn’t play any of those games. I also learned to write cards and letters to the movie stars to get their autographed pictures. I learned the songs from the Hit Parade, but I didn’t dare sing in English.
After seven months, which seemed an extremely long time, my mother received her visa and arrived in Reading, blond and chic. I had forgotten how pretty she was. Even Luba agreed she looked good. My mother told us about her boat trip to America. They were in the middle of the Atlantic when they were stopped by the Germans who wanted to search the Portuguese ship and had the passengers disembark in lifeboats. This turned into a nightmare. As the people were going down the ropes to the lifeboats, a woman tried to throw her baby to a person in the boat, but she missed and the baby went into the ocean. My mother said that the chaos and horror of it were the worst thing she had ever experienced. After the inspection, the Germans let them continue their trip to America. But they were traumatized, and no one was the same, unable to shake the image and sounds of the baby striking the ocean and his mother’s screams as she watched him go down.
Once I was with my mother I felt normal, and it took me no time to become insufferable. I didn’t give her time to adjust. She had exactly twenty-six dollars to her name, and I was impatient for us to settle into our own place and leave Luba’s house. She took the first job she could find in Reading, sewing piecework men’s shirts in a small factory. The pay was too low, and she decided we would move to New York where the wages were better. I was thrilled to go to New York, the biggest city in America.
Chapter 11
New York City/High School 1944-46
In New York we moved into the Hias, a shelter for Jewish immigrants, and I was mortified. I had expected better surroundings. The Hias was in the building on Lafayette Street where later Joseph Papp’s theater was located. Then, it smelled of Clorox and its floors were shining and smooth. We had a cubicle with partitioned walls open on the top. The sound of our voices reverberated and made us feel self-conscious even though we were the sole occupants in the shelter. Living in this perfectly adequate setup, room and board gratis, didn’t please me as much as it did my mother. I was continually carping, always irritable. We were alone in the dormitory, but we were joined in the dining hall by Bowery bums. If they were presentable and sober, they would be allowed in for meals. Their cheerful presence didn’t help me feel better about my situation. I was humiliated to have to sit next to these smelly men.
These derelicts were happy to eat whatever was served to them, even the herring with sour cream and boiled potatoes, which at the time seemed to me a strange combination that I had never seen served in France. The sight of it made me feel sick. I knew I should be more appreciative, but I couldn’t help myself. My low status was unbearable. I dreamed of being rich. My mother, worried that I didn’t eat enough, took me once in a while to one of the fancy cafeterias on Fourteenth Street.
The cafeterias may have been standard and plain for most Americans, but to me they were the height of lavishness. You went through a turnstile and automatically received a ticket, for which you had to pay a penalty if you didn’t present it on the way out, so you kept the ticket with great care whether or not you used it. Once inside, you chose anything you wanted. The possibilities were mind-boggling. But I found that the food didn’t taste as good as it looked. Most of the time it was flavorless. My favorite treat was plain toast. To me, toast was the most delicious of all American foods. I had never seen a toaster or white sliced bread in France.
We also used to go to the Automat, the closest thing to a French cafe because one could stay hours undisturbed with friends, and no one expected you to buy more than a cup of coffee.
In the same neighborhood, was the famous Luchow Restaurant, which attracted many celebrities. Our favorite pastime was going to the movie house on Irving Place where we saw French or Russian movies. They played two films at each show, and there was a new offering every day. These movies made us feel less homesick while we were waiting to know what our future would be once the war would be over and we would be reunited with my father.
On Fourteenth Street, we accidentally met our prison fri
ends from Spain and Portugal, Annette and her family. Her parents had started a small manufacturing business making leather belts. She was going to Washington Irving High School, and she suggested I go there, too.
My mother found a job wrapping vitamin chocolate bars for soldiers. It was piecework again, and she was anxious to be as fast as she could be to make the most money. She had to be careful not to get involved in her co-workers’ gossip lest she lose time. An acquaintance on the job found us a cheap apartment, which was unheard of in those wartime days.
It was on Fifty-fifth Street between First and Second Avenue, on the top floor of a walk-up building. The halls were dark, and the stairs were hard to climb, but we had a tub with a metal cover in the kitchen and the toilet was inside the flat. The people on the other floors had to share a fire escape that we could use as a balcony. I was satisfied at last and I didn’t regret leaving the Hias.
We put down new linoleum on all the floors, and my mother took the furniture that people gave us. The generosity of our new acquaintances surprised us. It was part of the feelings of abundance and space we had felt in the United States.
House cleaning became my chosen responsibility. The shine on the floor and the smell of wax after buffing gave me great pleasure. I couldn’t tolerate anyone walking on my perfect floors, and I was endlessly dusting. I did the housework listening to soap operas on the radio, most of which I didn’t understand. One show was about a famous actor and his wife, another about a family in which a girl got pregnant out of wedlock. I also loved cowboy songs. Some stations played them all day long, and I tried learning the words: “I’ve given you a red bouquet of roses...One for every time you broke my heart…”