by Roger Cohen
The word order suggests Adler’s attempt to balance loyalties: first king, then Britain, then Israel, then empire. Jewish loyalty to the Crown had been questioned: thousands of Yiddish-speaking East European Jews in the East End of London were not yet naturalized and so could not serve. In November 1915 The Jewish Chronicle reported examples of recruiting officers saying, “Lord Kitchener does not want any more Jews in the Army.” But Jews clamored to prove their loyalty.
Writing the previous year, Adler stressed the Jewish commitment to the Crown:
We have reason to be especially stimulated by the knowledge of the manner in which our Jewish men have proved their readiness to offer their lives upon the altar of duty. Some, like Lieutenant Ronald Henriques, have already sealed their devotion with their blood. Gallantly and eagerly they have stepped forward. From my official statistics I can declare that quite nine-tenths of the eligible youth of the community from all parts of the country have enlisted; they have left parents and homes in order to prepare to show themselves men. We, fathers and mothers who have given our children to this cause, are proud of our boys in the King’s service. May God guard them all! If we were proud of being Englishmen two months ago, we are ten times as proud of that title today. The secret of this wondrous enthusiasm that has filled the soul of Anglo-Jewry is apparent to all.
By the end of the war, however, having toured the front several times and seen the carnage, Adler had begun to question his Dulce et Decorum Est pro Patria Mori. On July 6, 1918, he wrote: “All this colossal upheaval will have been in vain unless civilized mankind resolves once and for all that every effort should be made … that War shall cease henceforth.” Quoting the British journalist Philip Gibbs, he continued:
The conscience of Europe must not be lulled to sleep again by the narcotics of the old phrases about “the ennobling influence of war” and “its purging fires.” It must be shocked by the stark reality of this crime of war in which all Humanity is involved, so that from all the peoples of the civilized world there will be a great cry of rage and horror if the spirit of militarism, either in this country or elsewhere, raises its head again and demands new sacrifices of blood and life’s beauty.
My mother’s great-uncle Michael Adler, a rabbi to Jewish servicemen in World War I
Adler went on to review the contribution of British Jews to the 1914–18 war effort:
History will ask, and will have a right to ask, “Did those British citizens of the House of Israel to whom equality of rights and equality of opportunity were granted by the State some sixty years ago, did these men and women do their duty in the ordeal of battle; did that race, which yet remains faithful to the religion of its father and forms but a small community of a quarter of a million souls in the United Kingdom, did its representatives embrace the opportunity presented to them to demonstrate, beyond the shadow of a doubt, their complete sympathy and fellowship with their brother Englishmen, their loyalty to the Empire, both for life and for death, both in the hour of defeat and in the hour of victory?” …These are vital questions and our answer is a clear and unmistakable YES! English Jews have every reason to be satisfied with the degree of their participation both at home and on the battlefronts in the struggle for victory. Let the memory of our sacred dead—who number over 2,300—testify to this.
By the time June met with her great-uncle in 1937, less than two decades later, Adler’s words already seemed poignant and forlorn. Militarism had risen in Germany. Hitler was about to plunge Europe into another devastating war. Except in Britain, the loyalty to their nations of newly emancipated Jews, demonstrated by service during World War I, was to count for nothing as Hitler set out to annihilate them. An Iron Cross for valor at the Somme did nothing to keep a German Jew from the gas.
In Adler’s emphasis on the loyalty of English Jews, an old disquiet lurks: Do we belong? Are we completely accepted, have all our efforts at integration and assimilation made us citizens on a par with any others? While his brother Sidney had sailed for Africa in 1878, prospected for diamonds at Kimberley, worked in a coal mine, and run a saloon as Johannesburg rose, Michael Adler had stayed on in London and made good. He was an Englishman through and through, or so he wanted passionately to believe. He was a rabbi identified as a “chaplain” and a “reverend” in the armed forces, offering prayers and solace and ways to reconcile their loyalties to Jews serving the Crown at Passchendaele. Later in life my mother would speak proudly of him.
It must have been bewildering for her then, not yet eight, placed in a boarding school, to zigzag between worlds. There was one link she could not have known. On my father’s family tree, drawn up in a desperate moment, Michael Adler’s three children—Winkle, Ros, and Lilian—all have the black dots of mental instability beside their names.
CHAPTER 4
In the Barrel
My mother is being wheeled into a stark room in a sprawling, redbrick Victorian Gothic asylum. She is not yet thirty in an England strange to her. She has two infants and is suffering from postpartum depression (or puerperal psychosis, as it was then known) that has afflicted her ever since the birth of my sister, Jenny, in May 1957. Nobody knows now and nobody knew then how exactly electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) works: whether it somehow causes brain cells to be renewed, or changes the levels of chemicals in the brain, or alters the body’s system so that stress hormones are kept in balance.
The treatment in the 1950s was often administered without anesthetic or muscle relaxants. The body might jolt so violently as to cause broken bones. I see my slight, fragrant young mother with metal plates being affixed to either side of her head, flattening her dark curls, her heart racing as a doctor straps the plates to her swabbed temples, enclosing her skull in its high-voltage carapace. I can almost taste the material wedged in her oversalivating mouth for her to bite on when the current passes. I can see her imploring eyes and feel her fingers clench.
It is only a year since her emigration to London. The South African safety net has gone. There is no string on the toe of the sleepwalker. She is an emigrant in a cold place with a cool and brilliant man.
Sylvia Plath had the same treatment five years earlier in Boston. She described it in The Bell Jar, her semiautobiographical novel: “I shut my eyes. There was a brief silence, like an indrawn breath. Then something bent down and took hold of me and shook me like the end of the world. Whee-ee-ee-ee-ee, it shrilled, through an air cracking with blue light, and with each flash a great jolt drubbed me till I thought my bones would break and the sap fly out of me like a split plant. I wondered what terrible thing it was that I had done.”
This was the question June asked herself. It was compounded by guilt. She left us with the same question, although she would never have wanted to: What terrible thing have I done for my mother to disappear and suffer so?
For a long time she pretended it had not happened. When, in 1983, my first wife and I were about to move from Brussels to Rome with our infant children, we had dinner with my parents in London. My wife expressed some anxiety about the move to a new place with young children. “Oh,” June replied testily, “what are you talking about? When I moved to London from Johannesburg with small children, we quickly adjusted and were just fine!”
When I was in Žagarė, I read the letter of a Jewish Holocaust survivor, George Gordimer. In it he said, “I have had and have many health problems. However, the one health problem that has been with me all my life is depression.” My mother was spared the Nazi terror Gordimer endured as a small child. She was not, however, spared the strain of upheaval, displacement, and fear. She, too, faced the puzzle of the “genetic” and the “environmental” in her “cyclical” states, alternately manic and inert. She, too, faced the things not talked about.
I tracked down George Gordimer in Cranford, New Jersey. He is a compact, angular man. His large gray-blue eyes are the most prominent feature in a gaunt face. He talks in a gravelly voice, pursuing his point with a methodical insistence. The voice slows and slurs a
little when he is particularly down. For a long time now, he has been taking a small dose of Valium, a habit he has tried but failed to break. He still endures episodes of hyperactivity. When things don’t go his way, he can also get very depressed, even if the trigger is a trivial thing. He has a tendency to obsess about small things and slights. His mind will race like some infernal machine or freeze as if caught in a paralyzing beam.
Gordimer always looks trim. There is not an ounce of fat on him. His shave is close. He favors gray pants and light blue shirts. Every morning he reads the New York Times “A” section from cover to cover. If he needs to go online, he visits the library; he does not have a computer. He reviews his investments in municipal bonds. He and his wife, Dorothy, go out every Saturday night for dinner, but most of the restaurants they liked have closed. If you were looking for someone to fade into a crowd, someone hovering always at the brink of invisibility, Gordimer would be that man.
His life changed, not for the first time, in the fall of 1971. On the way home from his laboratory at Air Products and Chemicals, Inc., in Middlesex, New Jersey, Gordimer had a panic attack. He was on the Garden State Parkway in bumper-to-bumper traffic. A graduate of MIT with a doctorate from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, he was working on polymeric coatings for a variety of applications, including latex paints and adhesives. Some of the pressure-sensitive adhesives were for Band-Aids. Gordimer’s throat dried up as he contemplated the rear lights of the cars backed up on the parkway. His heart thumped; his breathing was irregular. He had no idea what was going on. At the first exit, he found a phone booth from which he called his older brother, Seymour, who came to pick him up. A doctor at the local hospital wanted to give George a shot to calm him down, but Gordimer was not having a shot unless there was something specific wrong with him. He was very insistent about that. Later, after his first heart surgery in 1982, a double bypass, he would get into the habit of saying to doctors, “If it makes any difference, I am actually two years older than my official age.” But that was only when he started to open up about the past.
When he arrived home that night, Gordimer was still agitated. His wife, also a chemist by training, had never seen him in such a state. She tried to calm him with a back rub. The next day his panic had eased, but Gordimer felt depressed to the point of being unable to move. When he eventually returned to work, he used local streets rather than the highway to get there, adding twenty minutes to his driving time. If alone, he always avoided the tunnels into Manhattan. They spooked him. Exhaustion and unfamiliar places were not good for Gordimer. He would get jumpy. Haircuts were also an issue. He would panic in the barber’s chair when the apron was fastened around his neck.
Not telling people things was a habit he had slipped into early. When asked where he was born, Gordimer would always respond that he was “raised” in Elizabeth, New Jersey, a subtle evasion that he found passed unnoticed. When asked what kind of name “Gordimer” was, he would answer: “You got me! I have no idea.”
He did not want to get into what had happened, and how, anyway, was he to explain? He had two ages, two names, and two places of birth—in short, he was a doppelgänger. These were not facts readily broached with anyone—Oh, by the way, I’m not who you think I am. Even with Dorothy it was difficult.
Gordimer’s parents had changed his date of birth to October 10, 1940, from the real date of October 10, 1938, in order to qualify him for additional milk rations as a hungry child in a displaced persons’ camp in Germany in 1946. The camp was in a converted monastery. Every morning Gordimer would comb the lice out of his hair, until his hair was shaved. That was the hot summer before they sailed away on a transport ship from the port of Bremerhaven, Germany. The vessel was called the Ernie Pyle, named after a great U.S. newspaper correspondent killed in combat at the end of World War II. When they reached Elizabeth, New Jersey, on January 16, 1947, the Gordimers submitted the later birth date to U.S. authorities. In the belief that it was easier to get into the United States as Germans than as Lithuanians, they also changed Gordimer’s place of birth from Šiauliai to Memel, which was German in 1940, having been annexed by Hitler the previous year. (Memel is now the Lithuanian port of Klaipėda.) Finally, they changed his name from Jona to George.
Thus did Jona Gordimer, born in 1938 in Šiauliai, Lithuania, birthplace of my grandfather and great-grandfather, become George Gordimer, born in 1940 in Memel, Germany, by the time he reached the United States. The family took up residence in the Port section of Elizabeth, a hardscrabble neighborhood inhabited mainly by eastern Europeans, including many Lithuanians and Poles. New Jersey’s backdrop of derricks and factory stacks and storage tanks took the place of the Lithuanian woods. His father, Ira (born Icikas), had always been a hustler, one reason for the family’s survival. In Lithuania, before the war, he’d travel to Minsk and haul back lumber to sell in his hardware store in Papilė, near Šiauliai. Now, at the age of forty-four, his street smarts were useful in starting over.
Ira Gordimer went to work for an uncle, Morris Lipton, who had left Lithuania in the 1920s and had a successful furniture store. Ira would move furniture, mount furniture, and deliver furniture. Later he went into the dry-cleaning business. People always need clean clothes, he said, just like they need to eat. Then it was property, basic rooming houses. George had to work as a young boy. He and his brother, Seymour (born Šolomas), would sell shopping bags at the local open-air market on Saturdays for five cents each. They used to offload five hundred bags and make twenty-five dollars, good money. Gordimer also worked in the rooming houses, making beds, changing linen, mowing lawns. He picked up English fast. He was an American boy. Nobody knew he came from Europe. Wasn’t America one continent-sized exercise in amnesia? The future mattered; the past was dangerous, fraught with shame.
Seymour had a best friend in grade school who was Lithuanian. The neighbors were Poles. Once Gordimer’s ball went over the fence, and he jumped after it to be confronted by a dog and an older Polish kid who yelled: “Get the hell out of here, you dirty Jew!” Seymour nearly choked an Italian boy who’d called him a kike. He had him down on the ground with his hands on his throat. George had to pull his frenzied brother off.
Still, Gordimer never talked about being a Jew. He did not want to be stereotyped—“Oh, that’s the Holocaust kid” or “That’s the Holocaust Jew kid.” Jew or gentile, what did it matter? That was what the Nazis had done: peg people. At least that was how he rationalized it. So he was “raised” in Elizabeth, born nowhere, and had a family name he couldn’t for the life of him figure out, he said. His bar mitzvah was a complete joke, a recitation of words he could pronounce but whose meaning was a mystery: “I did not want people to stereotype me as this or that. If you say you are a Holocaust survivor, they know everything about you.”
He never went out with Jewish girls. His father asked why. George replied: “I go out with the girls I meet. There are more gentile than Jewish girls in the United States.”
When he attended the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn in the mid-1960s, he roomed with an exchange student from Tashkent who thought Soviet communism was an excellent thing. They argued a lot. Gordimer told the Soviet student what he thought of Stalin’s deportations, killing, and tyranny in the Baltic states. But he never mentioned his family’s Lithuanian origins or his own suffering at the hands of Nazis and Soviets during World War II.
After the panic attacks began, Gordimer consulted psychiatrists. They told him he was still in hiding because he was afraid to expose himself. He shot back that he did not want to be tagged as Jewish: that was not what defined him as a human being. Besides, he thought the whole religion thing was nonsense. At MIT he took courses in Eastern and Western religion just to find out how full of baloney it all was. In every essay, Gordimer attacked religion with a vehemence that shocked his professor. George, face it, you are hiding something, the psychiatrists insisted.
Gordimer, at the age of five, had been hidden in a barrel in the Šiauliai g
hetto when, on November 5, 1943, the Nazis conducted a Kinderaktion, going house to house to grab 725 Jewish children. They were taken away, stacked in the back of trucks, and then loaded onto freight cars for extermination. After that there were no children in the ghetto. As birds go silent before a storm, children’s voices vanished. The Gordimer boys spent three days in a lightless cellar with a trapdoor.
The psychiatrists said he has to get in touch with those emotions. Pull them out, George, express them. You’re still stuck in the barrel.
In Žagarė, Gordimer is remembered. Zofija Kalendraitė still lives in the house three hundred yards from the village market square where she was at the time of the massacre on October 2, 1941. Aged twelve, she made her way to school that day, but class had been canceled because people were being killed. Zofija tried to find a way back. “I heard a lot of shots being fired and saw Jews running from the square,” she tells me. All the streets were bloody.
As we talk, snow lies deep around her home, heated by a single woodstove set against a stone slab in the wall of her living room. Staleness is in the air: cabbage and dampness. In a barn at the back of the house, goats huddle. Their breath is thick in the cold. An overfed cat, Bicas, sleeps on a couch, a ball of ginger fluff. Zofija, her lank gray hair tied back, sits at a table piled with mementos: letters and sepia photographs. She serves fruit tea, the fruit of my grandmother’s Žagarė woods. Not a car passes. Her blue eyes are calm and piercing, but her hands are agitated as they sift through papers. Of the Nazi and Soviet forces whose presence punctuated her life, she says: “They came. They burned. They killed. They left.”
I have come to Zofija’s home with her granddaughter, Dovilė Levinkaitė, who devoted her senior year project in high school to the absence she felt in Žagarė. Her family, because they had saved Jews, talked about Jews. That was unusual. In the introduction to her inquiry, Dovilė writes: “The most interesting thing to me is what the Jews did, how they lived because they were a great influence on the town’s architecture and culture, but here at the beginning of the 21st century they are history and I think it’s very important to gather and write down this information while there are still people who can recount it.” She knows through her research about the iron shop of Zeleman and the slaughterhouse owned by the Skliutauskas family. She can peel away the layers of the Žagarė palimpsest.