by Sonia Pilcer
“Just a moment,” I grabbed the microphone with a white-knuckled grasp, my binder of poems in the other hand. “Please! I have some poems I’ve written—” I began.
People stopped in the center aisle. All eyes on the madwoman. The spotlight fixed me in its yellow star.
“I am the first-born daughter of Heniek and Genia Palovsky,” I said, voice twig-thin. “Both Holocaust survivors. My father was in Auschwitz. ‘A Tattooed Dreamer—’ ” I began to read slowly, halting at the end of each line.
We dream we are there.
We hear the Gestapo shout, “Raus!”
We stand on line
Waiting to be selected
Left side or right.
We dream we suffer
Real things.
I paused. The audience shifted impatiently. Those near the door headed out. The scholars never returned. A few others, curious, waited to see what would happen. I could see Dean Morton pacing in the back nervously.
Would you sell my hand
as an ashtray
tapered fingers
perfectly formed
for cigarettes.
Would you sell my ears
as paperweights
matching conches
expertly carved
to contain clips.
More people walked out. It was an exodus! The doors slammed noisily. I would not stop. Words had power. I declaimed over the din.
Would you sell my skin
hair shaven
softer than chamois
to reupholster
chairs.
Well, I had managed to empty the house. But I didn’t care. Raising my voice, I went right on. “This is the first poem I ever wrote. ‘Child of the Holocaust.’ ”
Six million Jews died
the figure was commanded
to where normal children keep
1492, 1776, the Alamo.
I wanted to forget
every digit of the six million
the numerals etched into your arm
like a phone number.
As I sucked your milk, I counted
gassed men, women, infants—
Zyklon B came up again
and again as phlegm.
Six million Jews died
and I was born
a child of the universe
always, a child of the Holocaust.
Afterward, there was silence. Dank, acidic silence, as if I had performed an obscene act in public. Maybe I had. Stripping in the presence of the Holiest of Holies, the Big H. They despised me. My heart revved. Shame. My ego, which had ballooned to fill the stage, deflated to a mite. What was I trying to prove?
I thought of my mother’s words: “Don’t stick out like a sore thumb. Just be normal! Not worse, but average. It’s better that people don’t know too much. Nobody likes a show-off. Stand out of the line and someone shoots you. Just be normal.”
That’s when Christine rushed up and embraced me. “You did it!” she cried. “God, you really do have balls!”
All I could feel was my own skinless vulnerability. “But everyone walked out.”
“Some people stayed.”
I still didn’t stir. Christine shook me. “Zosha, you were very good.”
I wanted to sob as I held onto her, squeezing my eyes shut. A miserable choke-back-tears shame. I took a deep breath. “Thanks,” I whispered in her ear.
When I opened my eyes, I could see a young woman striding determinedly down the aisle to speak to me.
“I understand,” she said, touching my arm softly. “I am a child of the Holocaust too.”
Her eyes burned with a crazy intensity I recognized. “My mother went through the camps . . . ” she told me.
I nodded.
“Do you go to any Second Generation groups?” she asked.
“No,” I answered.
“Maryse Ehrlich,” she introduced herself.
Her hair was long and dark like mine, but she wore too much makeup. Lips painted bright red, her eyelids smudged kohl. It made her look clownish. Was this my doppelgänger, I wondered. The double we fear in a fun-house mirror, never funny though. My sister.
I looked at Christine, then back at the woman. Her dark brown eyes blazed as she spoke, but her tone was flat. “My mother was in Belsen with her sister, who didn’t survive the war. My mother did, but she never got over it.”
“I understand,” I said to shut her up. This came with the territory too. Listening to other people’s Holocaust stories.
“Do you?” She paused. “Wherever she was, she always worried. She was convinced she left the gas jets on in the stove.”
I shifted uncomfortably.
“My mother died three years ago,” she went on, her voice matter-of-fact. “It might as well have been a suicide. There were photographs of the camps taped to the wall next to her bed. She had constructed shrines. Little stacks of eyeglasses, teeth—”
“Enough, please,” I said finally. “I have to go.”
“Of course,” she said, slowly moving away. “I won’t keep you. But I wanted to give you something.”
She passed me a folded sheet of paper. A flyer for her reading with the date and name of a performance space downtown. “I’ll leave two tickets for you at the door,” she said. “How do you spell your name?”
She scared the hell out of me, but I told her.
“Good. I’ll see you soon,” she said, jotting my name down on a small pad. Then she took my hand in hers. “We have much to share.” She looked intently into my eyes. “I feel we could be friends.”
I tried to disengage myself, but her grip was strong.
Afterward, I watched as she strode up the center aisle of the church. She wore black tights with a hole at the heel. Her dancer’s wraparound skirt slowly unraveled, the hem trailing behind her in a train. Though she held her body erect, it was fleshy, letting out the secrets of our coven.
“No, we don’t,” I said when she was out of earshot. “We don’t share anything. What is it about New York City?” I demanded. “You do something and your only audience gives you a paper about what she’s doing.”
“Even if you’re one in a million, there’s still nine of you in the city,” Christine reminded me. “Can I see her flyer?”
I took the sheet from my pocket, reading aloud: “Exorcisms: Rituals of Remembrance and Revenge.” I rolled my eyes.
“What?” Christine asked.
“Why the hell did I put myself out there?” I demanded. “I could’ve just sat quietly in my seat.”
“You?” Christine laughed. “I don’t think so.”
As we walked up the center aisle of the cathedral, devotional shards of colored glass flashed in the rose window. I crumpled Maryse’s flyer into a smaller and smaller ball, then stuck it into my pocketbook. Looking down, I noticed a gold disk with a crucifix on the marble floor. Raised gold letters encircled the gold cross: WHOSOEVER DRINKETH OF THE WATER THAT I SHALL GIVE THEM SHALL NEVER THIRST.
SHOAH CASANOVA
Uly Oppenheim, Ph.D., actually looked like the photograph on the back of Our Bodies, Not Our Souls. He was a darkly arrogant man with Byronic hair, beak nose. Tough wrestler’s stance at the podium like a young Norman Mailer. This was Jewish macho: aggressive, assaulting intelligence.
As he stepped down from the stage of the Postgraduate Center, he was met by a crush of admirers, colleagues, and Shoah professionals.
“Of course, I’m saying Jews are meshuggeh,” he declared. “Consider our collective trauma over the millennia, ending in the ultimate paranoid fantasy . . . ”
I had strutted my smart stuff toward the stage, hoping the professor might notice a young woman in a short leather skirt, clingy red sweater. The effect was intellectual, I imagined. Ayn Rand, née Alice Rosenbaum. A Jewess greenhorn like me, born in Russia.
Not that I wanted to sleep with Uly Oppenheim. I wasn’t a groupie. But without my piquing his sexual interest, he would never talk to me. I was tw
enty-seven years old and how else was I ever going to learn anything? Professor Oppenheim could teach me volumes.
An older woman with dyed red hair and dangling Mexican turquoise earrings whispered something in his ear that made him laugh. For several minutes, they exchanged gossip about The Holocaust as Metaphor seminar in Frankfurt.
I walked over to a nearby table and picked up his book. The cover, lipstick red, displayed a black garter with a swastika. Leafing through the pages of Our Bodies, Not Our Souls, I discovered that each chapter began with a different name. “Gertrud F.” “Eva Z.” “Alicia W.” All were women. All had spent time in Nazi brothels.
“Would you like me to sign it?” he asked.
“You must be kidding!” I faced him. “This is pornography. Interviewing women Holocaust survivors—” I put the book down angrily.
“The war was pornography,” he answered. “I’m just a historian.”
“But why tell this story?” I insisted. “It’s awful.”
“Are you a therapist?” he asked.
“Me?” I gasped. “Do I look like one?”
At that moment, he appraised me. Like a chicken in plastic wrap. Shaking his head, he said, “No. It’s just that’s who comes to my lectures. And the survivors, of course. Why’d you come?”
“I’m a writer,” I declared. “Like you.”
“What are you working on?”
“I don’t like to talk about it. I don’t mean to sound mysterious,” I said. “It’s just that every time you open the oven, it gets—”
“Let’s go outside,” he said, taking my arm firmly. “I just have to find my briefcase.”
I felt the prick of eyes upon us. The red-haired woman whispered something to a brunette in a tight French braid. Both were dressed in black like Greek widows. Their eyes followed us as we walked out together.
He could have had any woman in that room, but he had selected me. It was a warm March evening.
“Let me understand this,” he said. “You make up stories about movie stars?” We walked up Sixth Avenue.
“That’s what fan magazines are about,” I explained. “You take the biggest stars. Actually they’re not all stars. Like Jackie and Ari Onassis. But Liz Taylor always sells. And Elvis.”
He appeared confused.
“My latest masterpiece is ‘Elvis’s Secret Words from the Grave.’ In the June issue of Movie Screen.’”
“How do you write these?” he asked.
“I read Earl Wilson, Liz Smith, Marilyn Beck,” I answered matter-of-factly. “Like right now I have to write a piece: ‘Cher’s Secret Hours in the Dark with Robert Redford.’”
“But isn’t she still with Sonny?”
“You see.” I grinned. “Everyone’s contemptuous, but even you know about the stars. Anyway, I’ll describe Cher’s deep inner thoughts and feelings as she watched Redford’s newest film.”
“Do you have fantasies about the stars?”
I looked at him. “Of course not. But I have to pay my bills.” “I guess you could call me a literary slut.” I shrugged.
“Where’d you get that mouth?”
I didn’t answer him. We continued to walk uptown until we stood in front of my brownstone building on West Seventy-third Street.
“This is where I live.” I took out my keys.
“Would you have a beer upstairs?” he asked.
I studied Uly for a moment. Suppose he was a multiple murderer. But he taught at the Postgraduate Center.
The Holocaust Studies professor followed me up the four flights to my studio. Thankfully, I had folded up the bed that morning, and covered it with an Indian spread.
“You can sit anywhere,” I said, walking into the closet-sized kitchen.
Uly Oppenheim remained standing, rifling through my bookshelves. He pulled out Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, turning the pages as if searching for something. He began to read aloud.
“No human experience is without meaning or unworthy of analysis, and fundamental values, even if they are not positive, can be deduced from this particular world. The Lager was pre-eminently a gigantic biological and social experiment.”
“Is that supposed to be justification for your book?” I asked, carrying out two St. Pauli Girls, which I carefully placed on my desk, a wooden door set on two file cabinets.
“Aren’t you being a little moralistic?”
“The Holocaust is very personal to me.”
“Probably to the six million too, not to mention the survivors. To Kraut beer,” he toasted me.
“No!” I said, shaking my head as I read the bottle label. “I always assumed this was from Minnesota.”
“Hey, I’d drive a Mercedes if I could afford one. What I’ve got is an old Germy Bug.”
I sat down in a wooden chair across from him.
Though older, maybe fifty, he was attractive. I liked his long thick hair with its unruly strands of gray. Eyebrows climbing up his forehead made him look feral, and several hairs brushed the corners of his eyes, which were darkly opaque. But what attracted me was his mind.
“So you were born in Germany?” he asked.
“Yes, a cozy little displaced persons camp near Munich.”
“When did you come to the States?” Uly crossed his legs.
That’s when I noticed the boots. Tall, black boots that went up his legs, reaching his knees. I found myself staring at them.
“I was, uh, one and a half years old.”
“So young.” He smiled indulgently at me. “Have you ever been back?”
“No thanks,” I said. “That’s about the last place I’d ever want to go.” Staring at his boots, I thought: I have a Nazi in my house.
“It’s fascinating, actually. Seeing the place where it all happened.”
“I think I’ll pass.”
“The Poles have turned Auschwitz into a museum. Looks like an Ivy League college. And would you believe they charge fifteen dollars? I refused to pay. Told them my relatives got in for free.” He smirked at his own cleverness.
“I don’t joke about concentration camps,” I said, looking down at his boots again.
“Hey, it’s just a fucking factory,” he said. “Birkenau is where the actual extermination took place. Did you know it’s not even on any of the maps? It’s not part of the tourist program. You have to hike across a bridge with no signs. Enormous, too. I climbed one of the watchtowers, looking out in every direction. But there was nothing. No evidence. Just row after row of these horse sheds used as sleeping barracks.”
“I don’t think I have to hear any more.”
He didn’t hear me, enthralled with his own story. “It was just these empty fields. It was spring and there were red poppies everywhere—like drops of blood. Nothing like the movies. Then I went back to Auschwitz and stayed at a little hotel that was cheap and clean.”
As he took a sip of his beer, I asked, “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because you should know,” he answered. “Birkenau has this monument made of stones dedicated to all Nazi victims, including the Jews.” He emphasized the word. “But especially the poor unfortunate Poles. I tore a page from my notebook and scribbled: ‘Look, you fuckers, here I am. I made it. And I’m going to have lots of goddamn Jewish babies.’”
Jewish babies.
“Then I scrolled the paper and stuck it between the stones,” he continued.
“Isn’t that what Jews do at the Wailing Wall? Leave slips of paper with their prayers.”
“You got it.”
I stood up. “I haven’t any desire to go to Auschwitz.”
“We go through our lives thinking of it as a bogeyman. Poland is just a place now—”
“Not for me. It’s too real for me. And now it’s commercial too. All these Jews going on Heritage Tours to Poland.” I shook my head.
“No business like Shoah business,” he observed.
“I’m in it too,” I told him. “Not by choice. But I can’t seem to stop colle
cting.”
I walked over to my black file cabinet. “You see these,” I said, pulling out a precariously balanced stack of manila folders. “I have lots more in storage in the basement. My own Holocaust archives.”
I opened the top folder, flipping through clipped newspaper articles. “A review of the latest maudlin Holocaust play, From the Smoking Ashes, in Greenwich Village,” I explained. “An article about an old Nazi living in Queens. Another one in Toronto. A psychological study of the Second Generation sponsored by the National Jewish Mental Health Service.”
I picked up the study, beginning to read. “The children of survivors show symptoms that would be expected if they actually lived through the Holocaust. They present a picture of impaired object relations, low self-esteem, narcissistic vulnerability . . . ”
“Good, you’re working with it,” he said, pushing a strand of hair from my face. “That’s what we have to do. The only way we can master our demons.”
I shook my head. “I wish I could burn the files.”
“Do you know what the word Holocaust means?”
“Tell me.”
“Derives from the Greek holokaustos, third century, meaning burnt sacrifice dedicated to God. Holos means whole, kaustos to burn. Like caustic.”
“Burn, baby, burn.”
“Burnt whole,” he said. “The problem is the word makes it sound like a mystical fire. A sacrifice, instead of the systematic, technocratic murder—”
“I call it the Big H,”
“I prefer Shoah.”
“Enough.” I drew my hands to my ears. “I really can’t listen to this.”
“I understand.” His Jewish eyes stared into mine.
“Do you?”
“Tell me,” he urged.
“My mother’s family stayed together in the Czestochowa ghetto for most of the war. On Yom Kippur, they were lined up for Selection. Her mother had tied a white scarf around her head, insisting she wear it. My mother was sent to the death line with her family. Suddenly, a Polish soldier ran along the line, calling, ‘Where’s the girl with the white scarf?’ My mother was dragged to the other line and her life was saved.”
“She was lucky.”
“But was it the white scarf that saved her life?” I asked him. “My mother thought so. I figured the soldier thought she was too cute to gas.”