The Holocaust Kid

by Sonia Pilcer

  I recoiled in disgust, pushing him away.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Why’d you do that?”

  “Do you know what the Shema is?” he asked, standing up.

  “That’s what people said when they were dying in the gas chambers.”

  “It’s more than that, Zosha. ‘Listen, God is all,’” he translated, “ ‘and all is one.’ ” He stared at me. “Yes, it’s the last thing we say before we die.” He paused. “But it will be our child’s first prayer.”

  That’s when I lost it, tears stinging my eyes.

  “I’ll probably have to drive more hours,” Avi said practically.

  Several weeks later, it was Passover. I brought Avi home.

  “Come, sit,” my mother urged us, pulling his arm. Avi and I sat down on the couch, white crushed velvet with olive green tentacles. It had been covered in clear plastic for a decade, until my mother’s cousin, Helah, came to visit in the summer. Her buttocks got stuck and made an awful sound when she tried to stand up. And so the couch was finally exposed.

  My mother had cleaned several hundred slivers of glass in the chandelier, polishing them until they shone like mirrors. The table was covered with a white damask tablecloth, a ceremonial holiday plate in the center, hag-gadahs from Maxwell House and Manischewitz at the side of each plate.

  Batya, my mother’s distant cousin, who went to Cuba after the war, was invited with Anya, a fifty-year-old nurse’s aide from Warsaw. “In our home, my mother set such a beautiful table,” Batya recalled as she sat down at the table. “We were twenty, twenty-two people at our seder.” Then looking around herself, she asked, “Is Esther coming?”

  “Who’s Esther?” my father demanded.

  “Her sister,” my mother whispered.

  “Where’s Esther?” Batya repeated.

  My father growled in frustration. “She’s not here,” he said loudly. “She died.”

  Avi grinned at me. He enjoyed my parents because they reminded him of his own.

  Batya eyed me suspiciously. “You’re not Esther.”

  “Of course not,” Anya told her. “That’s Zosha. Genia’s daughter.”

  “Who’s Genia?” she asked.

  “Veys mir,” my father groaned. “Let’s get started. Genia!” he shouted. “Where’s the wine?”

  My father raised an engraved silver goblet from his parents’ home in Lodz. After the war, he had found it with a pair of carved silver candlesticks, which his father had buried behind their apartment building. The goblet glittered in the chandelier lights as he began reciting the Hebrew prayer for the fruit of the vine, as his father had done before the war. “Baruch atah . . . ”

  At thirty-nine, I was still the youngest in the group. So I had to read the four questions in Hebrew. “Why is this night different from all other nights?”

  After I finished, my mother rose immediately. “Come, Zosha. The gefilte fish.”

  “One minute, please.” Avi stood up, turning to my father. “I’d like to ask a fifth question.” He paused.

  “Nu,” my father said impatiently.

  “May I have your daughter’s hand in marriage?”

  My parents, rarely surprised, never speechless, suddenly were both.

  My mother placed my hand hastily in Avi’s as if she were afraid he might change his mind.

  “There is other news too,” Avi said. I watched their expressions.

  “What kind of news?” My father sounded suspicious.

  “Good news,” I added.

  “Mr. Palovsky,” Avi said. “You’re going to be a grandfather. And you, Mrs. Palovsky—” He turned to my mother. “You will be a grandmother. We’re expecting a child.” Avi beamed.

  “Boje, boje,” Heniek exclaimed in Polish. God, God.

  “So much news,” Genia murmured to herself. “So little news for so many years.” She shook her head. “Too much news at one time.”

  “Are you happy?” I asked her.

  “Oh, yes!” she cried. “You know, at my temple, people were always asking me. Why aren’t you married? Such a good-looking girl. I prayed every Shabbos. And it worked!”

  I had my amnio on a Wednesday. The TV monitor showed a nearly transparent filament swimming, its heartbeats exploding in tiny stars. Sunday was our wedding day.

  Sunshine flooded Central Park on a May afternoon after a week of rain, and New Yorkers seemed happy to be alive.

  Avi wore a black tuxedo, purchased from my cousin in the business. My dress was an off-white silk chemise with an overlay of lace covering my waist, which had expanded considerably.

  An out-of-work actor, Jason, picked us up in a freshly painted blue rowboat. He popped open a bottle of champagne, then rowed us across the lake to the Boathouse, where our guests waited.

  The Boathouse in Central Park was a secret artists and lunatics hangout. You could spend hours with a notebook and a cup of hot chocolate, the sun beaming on your face. That’s how a famous poet with leonine gray hair always had a Florida tan. A real restaurant was about to open and expel us, so it seemed like the perfect place to cater our wedding.

  My father gave me his arm, and I walked down the aisle supported by him. He looked puffed up with pleasure, peacock-proud in his navy brocade jacket and white ruffled shirt, courtesy of the same cousin. My mother stood nearby, movie-star beautiful, draped in aquamarine silk matched to the color of her eyes, sparkling with tears.

  Christine clutched one aluminum post of the canopy, weeping into a blue handkerchief. Next to her, two of Avi’s painter friends grasped the other ends. Maryse held hers, staring in wonder. Who had ever thought I would stand under a chuppah with a loving husband and a full heart and womb?

  “We crush this glass, actually a light bulb—they’re easier to break,” said Rabbi Neal Finkle, a young Reconstructionist, who wore a tie-dyed tallit. “To symbolize the destruction of the Temple, the ways in which our world is broken.”

  The rabbi turned to Avi. “You, Avi Ben-Tzion . . . ” Then he looked at me. “And you, Zosha Palovsky, are breaking with the past because you’ve come together to start something new, to begin a family. To mend our world, nearly destroyed by hatred . . . ”

  The rabbi wrapped the light bulb in a white napkin and placed it on the floor. He gave a signal by lifting his eyebrows. I held my breath. Avi raised his left foot and crushed the glass.

  BLUE PARADISE

  The setting sun casts shadows on the white walls of a small bungalow in Blue Paradise. An old man sits with a dark-haired boy at the kitchen table. He wears a beige cardigan sweater, a plaid woolen scarf around his throat. It is a cool evening in July.

  He opens a brown manila envelope. Hundreds of stamps spill out.

  “Wow!” the eight-year-old cries out. “Where’d you get all these?”

  “I used to collect when I was your age,” my father says. “Look at this one from Germany.” He points to a blue stamp with a red locomotive.

  “Are these from when you were a kid?”

  He shakes his head. “We lost everything during the war. These I got in America.”

  “Deutsch-land Bundes-post,” his grandson sounds out the words. “Have you been to Germany?”

  “Of course. We lived there after the war. Your mother was born in Germany.”

  “Are you a German?” he asks, looking at me curiously.

  “No, Jesse,” I break in. “I came here when I was a baby. Then I became an American citizen. Remember, I told you all about that.”

  “Am I an American citizen?” he asks.

  “Through and through,” I answer.

  “You’re a first-generation American citizen,” my father declares, then asks, “Where was I born?”

  “Auschwitz?” he asks unsurely.

  “Jesse!” I say. God, I hope my father doesn’t start yelling at him.

  “No. Auschwitz was a concentration camp,” he answers patiently. “I was there during the war, but we’re from Lodz, Poland. You must know these t
hings.”

  “He knows, Dad.”

  That we were despised, that we were murdered. Jesse knows the magic number too. Six million. How could he not? But he also knows his grandparents, as I never knew mine.

  “I’ll remember, Papa.” He beams at his grandfather. “I promise.”

  “Jesse, you know what you are?” He ruffles his hair. “A mensch.”

  I never knew this man, who takes such pleasure in a child. Maybe that’s the gift of age. The gift of being able to grow old, as no other member of his family could, old enough to love a grandchild.

  “Papa, I don’t want to look at stamps anymore,” says Jesse, standing up. “Is that all right?”

  “Sure.” My father stands up too and totters shakily over to the TV set. He turns on CNN and sits down in his La-Z Boy. My father, who slaved his whole life, swings back, his slippered feet flying in the air like blackbirds.

  “Ah,” he sighs. “It’s good.”

  I’ve returned to the summers of my childhood, to Blue Paradise in the Catskills, where my parents own one of a dozen white bungalows with green trim arranged in a square. You can still see the letters B UE PAR D SE painted on a whitewashed handball court where no one has played since the children grew up.

  Blue Paradise is a shtetl, where Polish and Yiddish are spoken, except when there’s an American around like me. Then the people parade their formal, strongly accented, strenuously articulate English.

  “So you’re a writer,” Tusha Rosenberg, a widow with a vividly dyed black hairdo, confronts me. “Tell me something. Why do you writers have to write so much about sex? Sometimes I feel that I have to take a shower after I read.”

  Their days are charmed. They bake the crumb cakes and almond crescent cookies of their childhood, sharing recipe secrets with each other. Cholent, a heavy beef, onion, bean, and potato stew simmers for over twenty-four hours on my mother’s stove in the middle of the summer. They make galler, that most disgusting of Eastern European delicacies—boiled beef hooves, which turn into a white jelly. Blue Paradise is heaven on earth.

  When I was little, a chorus of Lola, Stella, Minka, Ruzha, Fela, Blanca, Lusia, Manusha, who all knew each other in Germany after the war, sat outside our bungalow, playing cards. Shrieking with laughter, they tweezed each other’s brows and gave each other Toni permanents, wrapping pieces of hair in toilet paper. Ruzha gossiped while Manusha and my mother sat with their faces covered in Crisco shortening.

  The husbands traveled on Route 17, arriving on Friday evenings, smelling of hard work and the humid city, bodies aching to submerge in the swimming pool. My father drove up on Saturdays, having worked the night shift. He tied the white string of his ancient maroon trunks. Easing his tired, pale body into the water with a loud, mournful sigh, he disappeared. Now the swimming pool is empty. “Zimny,” my father shivers. Cold.

  Later, when we are about to start eating, my father screams at my mother. “Genia, you don’t know what you’re doing. That’s wrong! Let me!” He grabs the electric knife from her hands, clasped as in prayer, over the roast beef.

  My mother is about to shout at him. She would have in earlier years, but now her expression turns tender. “Heniek, don’t exert yourself,” she chides him. “And please, be careful with the knife.”

  It is the evening of our relationships. These tough, ghetto-fighting camp survivors are moving slowly toward the end of their lives. The family drama, or the family opera, in our case, has diminished to a poem, to a prayer, to the day when we will say Kaddish.

  Afterward, I find my mother in the kitchen, her fiefdom since biblical times. “That was a good roast, no? Moist,” she says. “Soft like butter. Here.”

  This is my mother, I muse, as I sponge the counter. She has lived through my exploits, public and private. She’s known them intuitively. And I have lived through her to reach back to ancestral soil.

  I remember the time she was called to my school, P. S. 28. I stood like a hostage in the principal’s office.

  “Your daughter was caught cheating on a math test,” said Mrs. Washington, my fifth-grade teacher.

  “No, I wasn’t.”

  She raised the sleeve of my blouse to reveal numbers, drawn with blue ink on my forearm. “Look.”

  My mother’s eyes met mine. I could see her shock.

  “Thank you for telling me,” Genia said stiffly. “I’ll take care of it.”

  When we were outside, she screamed, “You’re not normal!”

  Spitting on her handkerchief, she tried to rub out the numbers. The blue ink resisted. She continued, spitting and rubbing, wiping the tears that flowed from her eyes on her sleeve. Slowly, the numbers began to unwrite themselves.

  “How could you do such a disgusting thing?” she cried.

  “I wanted to be like you!” I answered.

  Just as I marched in her high heels, donned her black pillbox hat with the veil, imitated how she opened her mouth when she applied her red lipstick.

  “What are you talking about?” she demanded.

  “Will I have a tattoo when I get older?” I asked.

  At that moment, my mother unbuttoned the sleeve of her shirtwaist dress. “Look, idiot! Your father has numbers, not me.”

  Genia turns off the water faucet. “So did you bring something nice to wear for tonight?” my mother asks me.

  “What’s tonight?”

  “Nu. It’s Saturday night. There’s entertainment at the casino.”

  “Oh.”

  Always, it’s been a casino, not a social hall. Casino, with all that Las Vegas razzle-dazzle. Actually, it’s a wood-paneled room that resembles a finished basement except it’s above ground.

  “Arnie Keller,” my mother continues. “An excellent zinger. He sang with Eddie Fisher. There’s bagels and lox from the Fish Man. I paid for you already so you can take it home if you like. And what about Jesse?” she asks. “Does he have something?”

  “I didn’t even think of it.”

  She shakes her head. “What a person wears is important. Put on something decent, please.”

  Then she disappears in a ritual I remember from childhood. When she returns, she will look different, as if a fairy godmother came to her bedroom and turned her shmattes into golden finery. Several minutes later, she appears in a blue jumpsuit ensemble she’s sewn from a Vogue pattern. Her hair is poufed and sprayed, her earrings, faux-sapphire, match the blue of the jumpsuit as does her sparkling eye shadow. She wears pantyhose and black patent leather heels.

  We walk the several yards to the casino. Chagall reproductions taped to the walls, photographs of Barbra Streisand in Yentl, Jackie Mason, Ben Gurion, and Golda Meir, Schindler’s List and Holocaust remembrance posters.

  During the week, they play rummy-Q, pinochle, and poker, but tonight, an elderly man in a reddish toupee and flashy green jacket sits at an electric keyboard. He’s singing, “Raindrops keep falling on my head” as we enter the casino.

  Immediately, people rush up to us. “Oh, Zosha!” cries Mala, who shaves her eyebrows, penciling new moons. “You haven’t changed one bit!”

  “Such a beauty!” says Stella, touching my face. “Do you color your hair?” She used to work at the cosmetic counter at Stern’s.

  They still treat me like a miracle. My son is a normal miracle, an American miracle, like their own prosperity. But I was their Landsberg miracle, a child born in Europe after the war, before the survivors were relocated.

  “And what about your husband?” asks Minka.

  “Avi’s working in the city,” I answer, just as my mother had all those years.

  Yes, I married, a fellow 2G—with a different pedigree, though. His parents emigrated to Israel after the war.

  “And is that the young man?” Pola asks, smiling seductively. She is the first and only divorcée in their group. Jesse knows enough to lean back to avoid cheek-pinching. “Will you sing for us again?”

  He grins at her. “Maybe.”

  “Come, Jesse,” says his g
randfather. “Have a bagel.”

  “I don’t want a bagel,” he answers.

  “You hardly ate anything at supper. Come,” he insists.

  “Such a bad eater,” my mother tsks.

  Jesse rolls his eyes at me as he follows behind my father.

  My mother takes me by the hand to visit her friends sitting at card tables around the dance floor. This is a proud, well-dressed group, like a giant cousin club whose members moved far away after the war, to Australia, South Africa, Israel. Now they spend their summers together again.

  “You remember, Moshe,” my mother says politely.

  “Ach, Zosha!” His eyes are bloodshot, this lascivious flirt who has been pawing me since I was a teenager. He’s grown heavy, his face red and meaty. “You look good enough to—” he says, smirking.

  “How’s Marlene?” I ask about his daughter, whom I used to know.

  “Don’t ask.” He shakes his head. “This is a miserable life.”

  My mother nudges me to keep walking. “She lives with another woman. You know,” she whispers. “Poor man.”

  Each year, one member doesn’t make it back to the colony. Another unveiling in a distant Long Island cemetery follows. More bungalows stand empty in Blue Paradise. A white candle burns in a darkening glass.

  We approach Edek and Bronia, who live near my mother in Florida. Bronia, whose son is an anesthesiologist, asks me, “You heard of Art Spiegelman?”

  “Of course, Maus won the Pulitzer.”

  “A comic book about the Holocaust. In bad taste,” my mother says. “But what do I know? I’m not a writer like you are.”

  “Mice and cats,” my father’s voice rises. “It was nothing. A piece of garbage.”

  I look over at Jesse. He is talking to the musician, who is letting him play random notes on his keyboard.

  “I knew Wolf Blitzer’s parents,” says Shoshana, whose boyfriend is a professor of literature at Queens College. “You know, the one on the news on CNN. They lived near us in Washington Heights.”

  “Zosha, it’s a good thing you come to visit your Mommy. Our children have grown up, left home. They rarely visit.”