After the War, she entered Israel—Palestine, then—with the Israelis with whom she’d been throughout the War, and became involved with smuggling in Holocaust survivors.
I am not yet comfortable with that term, Holocaust survivor.
Raja’s work meant she had to return to Europe—her command of languages made her especially valuable there. Everywhere, she saw devastation, former cities become rubble-strewn plains. There were few Jews to be found in Germany, where she was sent first, and so she quickly and gratefully moved on to Austria, only to find few Jews left there as well.
The camp survivors seemed to fall into two distinct groups, Raja wrote: those who wished to live, and those who wished to die. The latter stared with vacant eyes, eyes turned inward to view again and again unimaginable horrors from which they had for some reason emerged with their lives. The former, on the other hand, had seemed to close a door on what they had seen and now looked resolutely forward.
Which type was I? Raja asked.
She could not help but believe that since my new address was in America, that I had decided to move forward, which, she added, was exactly what Anton would have wanted me to do. Was it not interesting, she wrote, that we both were somehow stronger in our resolve than our husbands, they should rest in peace, had been? She did not mean to disparage their memories, she hastened to add, but it was clear that we were more capable of adjusting to adverse circumstances, indeed, to any new circumstances. This, she went on, led her to believe that women were genetically stronger than men, a private opinion she dared share with no one but me.
But how did I find New Mexico? She had located it on a map of the United States, and found pictures which led her to believe that it physically resembled Eretz Yisroael. She had seen on the list that Alice Hermannova was here as well—did I see her? Was I playing? Had I remarried? She had not, though she enjoyed a longstanding relationship with a man who had been the commander of her underground group and was now an officer in the Israeli army. Perhaps someday they would marry, though she, for one, was in no hurry to ruin a good relationship.
I had heard, no doubt, that Mama, Papa and Irena never got out of Austria, and were among the first to die at Auschwitz? Horrible, horrible. There are no words to describe it. In Israel, all rise for the daily Mourners’ Kaddish; all have committed its ancient words of comfort to memory: Yisgadol v’yiskadosh sh’may rabah.
But even as we mourn, Raja concluded, we must strive to ensure that their deaths will not go unremembered. Did I belong to Hadassah, whose remarkable hospital on Mount Scopus, a place now sadly in Arab hands, reminded all Israelis of what was possible? Did I support the activities of Youth Aliyah and its efforts for orphaned Jewish children the world over? Did I read the American edition of the Jerusalem POST, and see how the desert was being reclaimed for agriculture, how Eretz Yisroael was rising from both its own ashes and the ashes of European Jewry to become a nation of strong and unafraid women and men?
And was I well? Please write to me, Raja wrote, my truest sister among my many sisters. I love you. Je t’aime.
23 March 1951
Dearest Raja,
Such a joy to hear from you, to hear that you are alive, to hear that you are in Israel, our own country, to hear that you are still so much the Raja I remember.
I am very well. I am the principal pianist with the New Mexico Symphony Orchestra, and in addition individually tutor graduate students of piano at the University of New Mexico. I live alone in a lovely adobe house on a tree-lined street only a half-mile from the University, and Alice (along with her American husband Herbie Stone and their son David) lives nearby.
It was Alice who arranged for me to come here. She is with the Economics Department, just as she was at Charles University (remember how she and Anton used to argue while you and I laughed about how little what they were arguing about mattered?), and Herbie sells real estate—homes, land, and ranches—and is very successful. They may soon be moving to a new area called Four Hills. It is miles out from the edge of the city, near the place where the Sandia and Manzano mountains drop to meet in Tijeras Canyon.
It pleases me to think that New Mexico, where I live, resembles Israel, where you live, and yet they are so far apart I wonder how we will ever see each other again. Hadassah, of course, offers tours of Israel, but while my little salaries are more than enough to support me here, they do not allow the luxury of overseas travel.
No, I have not remarried. I feel I am still married to Anton.
Yes, I know about Mama, Papa, and Irena.
I do not agree with you that women are genetically stronger than men, but your vehemence makes me smile: You have not, it seems, changed at all.
Perhaps I have not changed either, though I feel as if I am quite another person, not an older Hana but an entirely different one, separate from the woman who had a husband and children in that lovely old stone house in Praha. I cannot pinpoint where the one Hana ceases and the new one begins, but can only note that there is nothing that connects them except their name.
And other names: Pavel. Heidi. Anton.
I do not mean to begrudge you your new love, but for me that does not seem possible. It would seem to profane Anton’s memory, or rather, the Anton who is still alive only because I keep him so. Do you remember Anton before the War? How serious he was! And how we loved to tease him! Were we cruel?
This haunts me.
This haunts me, too: The night, just before it all began, when Heidi had the chicken pox. I sat up all night with her, and then Anton came at dawn and insisted I come to bed. I see this night with a vividness that is stronger than mere memory, as if I am living it over and over again. Heidi whimpering in her sleep. Anton tiptoeing into the room. Anton drawing me into his arms.
Enough. My darling Raja. At least we still have each other.
As a composer whose voice is remarkably distinctive, Beethoven stands nearly without peer, and this is due in no small part to the range of emotion his work conveys, a range that encompasses not just the above adjectives but many others as well. And yet, whenever Beethoven premiered new work, many of his early nineteenth century listeners found it bizarre.
While humans are decidedly reluctant to accept change, artists must both divine and implement it. It is all too easy to remain in the status quo, to read the same plot over and over again, to paint the same picture, hum the same tune. There is a certain comfort in the familiar, in nothing ever changing, in knowing what comes next.
But to seek such comfort is to fool ourselves, and to avoid living our lives to their fullest. To create is to take a risk, to open a door without knowing what lies on its other side. Our problem with our politicians is that they are not risk-takers, but rather risk-weighers who always err on the side of stasis.
Until the mid-1960s, Americans were happily unfamiliar with the politics of complacency. It was the rude awakenings of that decade that led to our now habitual distrust of our leaders. Both Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were masters of a deceit that would cut so deeply their example entered not just the mainstream but the national psyche.
Revisionist historians attempt to ascribe this deceit to events that predate its existence, to the war-time decisions of FDR and Harry Truman, for example. For Truman, the decisions to drop bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were clearly the most difficult of his life, decisions he nonetheless made as a risk-taker who has no political equivalent today.
For my father, however, those decisions were not agonizing at all. But my father was first and foremost a soldier, after all, and his business was war. My father found the second-guessing of revisionist historians bizarre; he was not a man who looked back.
Paul was unable to attend my premiere performance with the Agua Fria Chamber Players, but I wasn’t surprised and didn’t even—which did surprise me—really care. Carl Mayer came, mingling easily with the other members of my group during the after-concert cocktail party. Louis Sanchez he knew professionally, Paula Thoms he knew from th
e gay rights alliance, and both Emily and John he knew by reputation.
I worried that Emily’s flaky effervescence would put Carl off, so it startled me to find Carl and Emily laughing together exactly where I’d left them fifteen minutes before, though perhaps it was not so much surprise as a touch of jealousy.
“Too bad about Mr. Anna,” Carl said as I rejoined them. He turned back to Emily. “Mr. Anna’s a very busy man,” he explained.
Emily giggled. “Is there really a Mr. Anna?’ she asked me.
“That’s Carl’s name for my husband Paul,” I said.
“One mustn’t expect Anna to know she’s being kidded unless she’s forewarned,” Carl said to Emily. I felt my cheeks warm. “And I can only assume that Mr. Anna—who I am quite certain exists—shares her propensity for seriousness.”
“Paul’s very dedicated to his work,” I said, whether in defense of him or myself I couldn’t be certain.
“Thank God,” said Carl in the exaggerated fag-voice I found particularly annoying. “We wouldn’t want our nuclear physicists proceeding half-assed. Imagine the consequences.”
“They still do that up there?” Emily asked, wide-eyed. Could such incredulity be put on?
“It’s one of the finest scientific research labs in the world,” I told her. “They study an enormous variety of things there.”
“Including continued nuclear research,” Carl said.
“And how did you feel when you heard about the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki?” I asked him. While this was what my father had always retorted to his cocktail party critics, I was shocked to hear his words from my lips.
But Carl merely laughed. “I felt the same as everyone—enormously relieved. Ecstatic, even. It had been a particularly dirty little war, after all.”
“If those bombs hadn’t been dropped, we might not be standing here now,” I said, more of my father’s words.
“Perhaps we should call you Leon Junior,” Carl said, lightly touching my arm.
I drew away from his touch. “Call me what you like,” I snapped. “It’s not my business.” As I walked away, I heard Carl tell Emily Corbett, “Anna’s very sensitive. I must remember not to pick on her so.”
“But that was such a long time ago,” Emily said. “Too long to still be so sensitive about it.” The little twerp. I was only 46, after all.
Unlike my own, my father’s stance had never been defensive. My father believed that the Japanese were an enemy who would fight not just to the last man, but to the last person, and that the only way to stop that fight was to either destroy them or to terrify them.
But how does one terrify a people for whom death holds no terror? Japanese tradition views martyrdom, and particularly suicidal martyrdom, as the most honorable death, with death at the hands of an enemy an equally noble end.
Perhaps this might be better explained to our Western sensibilities from another angle: Those who survived the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts, called hibakusha, were considered outcasts by the rest of Japanese society. Already ostracized by their physical stigmata, they were separated socially as well: they had not died well. In fact, they had done far worse: They had lived.
There is no greater terror for a Japanese than social ostracism, than the dishonor of surviving what should have been an honorable death. Hence the death figures at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not the numbers that ultimately stopped the Japanese; the casualty figures were.
Did the net result—the end of World War II—justify nuclear attack? Hindsight has given us photos and statistics that heighten our horror by individualizing it. Hindsight tells us that, because of that horror, an atomic bomb has not been used as a weapon in the fifty years since. Hindsight suggests that the war was close to an end in any event, and hindsight replays Emperor Hirohito saying that, had it not been for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, the Japanese would not have surrendered.
We of the postwar generation deplore the do-or-die patriotism of our parents, denounce their cheering of Japanese deaths, but we deplore and denounce out of context. How easy for me to be horrified by my father’s personal role in those events, to feel tainted, guilty, ashamed. How easy for me to know a cold man, and to decide that his decision to bomb two Japanese cities was cold as well.
Logic, however, does not consider hindsight or horror. Logic tells us that if A = B, and B = C, then A = C. Here is my father’s decision, according to that formula: The Japanese will fight until they are stopped. An atomic bomb will stop the Japanese. We will use an atomic bomb.
It does not stop the horrible pictures. But it does help us to understand. And it helps me to see my father in a new light, though I still cannot forgive his coldness.
A volume, or perhaps more than one, of Hana Weissova’s diaries was missing, a blank space from 1959 to 1965 that left me once again imagining her life. This time, though, there were new possibilities to insert into my daydreams, and, more specifically, new faces: Carl Mayer’s, and my mother’s.
Once I knew that my mother and Hana Weissova had known each other, my imagination knew no bounds. I could picture them sitting behind matched pianos, playing the two parts from Bartok’s Concerto for Two Pianos, or Brahms’s Sonata in F Minor. I could seat them on blankets for mountain picnics, strands of dark hair blown about by a light wind, both voices talking at once.
With no real memories to guide me, I had remade Hana Weissova into the physical twin of my mother, and then I’d remade my mother’s weaknesses using Hana’s strengths. Now I was going further, and creating imaginings that I could wish had actually occurred; there was, after all, no diary to tell me I was wrong.
After favorable reviews of our first performance, the Agua Fria players were anxious to rehearse a new program, one which might showcase some lesser-known works created for groups like our own. Louis suggested a Villa-Lobos concerto; Paula was anxious to include a work by Josephine Smelker. John diplomatically pointed out that we were a chamber group, not a political organization, which led the other three to burst out all at once, the room quickly filled with the cacophony of their opinions.
“I have a thought,” I said into the din. “Excuse me?” One by one, they stopped speaking and looked at me expectantly.
I took the CD out of my purse. Music of Terezín, it was called. “Could you put this on?” I asked Emily. She complied, and Gideon Klein’s String Trio filled the room.
“I know that melody,” John said after a few minutes. “My mother sang it to me. She was Czech,” he added.
“What is this?” Paula asked quietly.
I stood and retrieved the CD box and passed it around as I spoke. “It’s music that was written in a concentration camp during World War II,” I said.
“Written there?” Louis asked.
“Yes,” I answered. We all listened some more. Fritz Krasa’s Theme and Variations for String Quartet began.
“This is amazing,” said John.
“Fucking amazing,” said Emily dreamily. We all laughed, breaking the spell.
“How did you happen to come across this?” Paula asked. I told them briefly about inheriting Hana Weissova’s papers and manuscripts, and how my curiosity had led me to the CD
“Her work has never been performed, so far as I know,” I added. “But I inherited the rights along with the transcriptions.”
“Are there transcriptions available for these other pieces?” John asked.
“This chamber group found a great many of them, and others they wrote out themselves. If we actually want to do this, one of us should call them. There’s a phone number on the CD”
“I’ll call,” Paula said, surprising us. Paula was not one for social niceties, and made no secret of it. “I’m Jewish,” she said. “Thomashevsky. Don’t look so surprised. Dykes can be Jews too, you know.” We all laughed again, though perhaps a bit more uncomfortably.
“This is so cool,” Emily said. “And you don’t know why you inherited her stuff?”
“I didn’t know initiall
y,” I said. “But it seems…” I hesitated, then went on in a rush. “It seems she knew my mother.”
“Ooh,” said Emily. “Karma. Cool.”
Something flashed in and out of my memory, so quickly I wasn’t sure it really had, and I was less sure of what it might have been. Cool, the flash said. Cool. But there was no image to accompany the word.
August 1958
I shall drive myself mad with this damned symphony.
Although symphonies are usually written in four movements, mine insists on being five. While most begin with an allegro, center on an adagio and then a minuet, and end with, well, a bang, mine abandons all of these conventions and veers instead in one (or more precisely, many) all its own.
In addition, it is written for a much smaller group than the usual symphony orchestra: a string quartet, plus a piano, clarinet, and oboe.
It may be presumptuous of me to call this a symphony, but its length precludes any other definition. Perhaps it is operatic in its scope; there is a plot, after all, though there is no libretto to lend it words. The story is told by the music—no, by the instruments—and it is a story that is of necessity fragmented and disjointed, although occasionally two themes intertwine.
It is presumptuous of me to believe that I am capable of accomplishing this. I am trained, after all, as a pianist, not as a composer (though in fairness to myself I must add that I did receive excellent grades in the four sections of composition I was required to study). I have no background in translating a music in my head onto paper without first hearing it played aloud, which is precisely what composition entails. And why a clarinet, and an oboe? Why, for that matter, a string quartet? What do I know of strings, except their particular sound?
And yet I must do this. Yes, I am compelled. Who else will write this symphony? Who else survived? It is one thing for the historians to say: This happened, and then this happened; for the psychologists to create a new nomenclature for the new psychoses. The journalists write of the horrors and the photographers illustrate the grisly toll, but who hears them? Who will sing this dirge?
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