Odessa, Odessa

by Barbara Artson

  Later, Saul’s youngest daughter encounters Inganamort’s son, Bruce, at Longfellow Elementary School, when he explains he did not invite her to his second grade birthday party because she’s a “filthy Jew and a Christ killer.” Roberta asks Dora if the Jews killed anyone, and, she perseveres, she’s not filthy because she takes a bath every night. And years later, when Roberta approaches Bruce at her thirty-fifth high school reunion, trying to be friendly, she tells him that her family lived in one of his father’s housing developments. He says, “Nice,” and quickly walks to the group who had been in the “rah-rah” crowd to describe, in great detail, the skyscraper he built in New York City.

  Although there are no signs displayed on the borders of Berge-neck proclaiming, as there are in Miami Beach and environs, that “Jews and colored” are not welcome, one has only to tote up the number of churches that serve a population of 25,275 to get the covert message.

  Presbyterian Church, St. Anastasia, Christ Episcopal, Bergen Methodist, Baha’i, Community Church of Christ, St. Mark’s Episcopal, and St. Paul’s Luti. A Jewish house of worship is nowhere to be found. The statistics say it all. Jews! You are not welcome. Go back to where you came from: to the old country.

  The Sussmans move into their six-room suburban tract home in September 1939, a date coinciding with Germany’s ground invasion of Poland and the start of World War II. Dora and Saul are thirty-five; their girls, Hannah and Roberta, eleven and six.

  In April 1940, Adolf Hitler invades Denmark and Norway with his now familiar military tactic of “lightning war,” or blitzkrieg—a word that promptly infiltrates the American vocabulary. The Germans bomb Paris in June, and Benito Mussolini, Il Duce, enters the war on the side of the Nazis and coins the term axis to represent the strength of their Fascist alliance. The Battle of Britain begins in July and culminates with another strike of German lightning—and with the first German Luftwaffe air raids on Central London. The onslaught of German bombs wreaking mayhem on the English citizenry corresponds with passage in the United States of the military conscription bill.

  Saul listens to the nightly news on the radio and, without telling Dora, makes the decision to join the fight. Churchill informing his citizens “we will fight them on the beaches, we will fight them on the landing grounds, we shall fight them in the fields and in the streets” moves him almost to tears. He is similarly moved when he hears his president, Roosevelt, warning his countrymen that they have “nothing to fear but fear itself.” And Saul admits to no fear.

  The drumbeat of Hitler’s marching army reverberates in America. Americans’ awareness of the growing menace is heightened when they view the Pathe’s weekly film clips of Hitler’s SS troopers and Mussolini’s Fascist Blackshirts strutting their staged ferocity for all the world to tremble. And tremble they did, including Saul and Dora.

  In American homes across the country, radios are tuned into Gabriel Heatter and Walter Winchell. Families eat their evening meals in stony silence as they listen to Winchell’s mesmerizing words of greeting: “Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea.”

  They find little solace in Heatter’s words of reassurance that “there’s good news tonight, folks.” They learn that German Jews over the age of ten are now required to wear a yellow Star of David with the word Jude on their clothing, identifying them as Jews, although that edict had previously been put into practice in Poland following Kristallnacht in 1938. There are reports of Jews being deported from Vienna, Germany, Alsace-Lorraine, and Poland to newly constructed concentration camps in Hitler’s determination to detoxify German blood of its non-Aryan contaminants. And between 1939 and 1940, Hitler invades Poland, then Romania, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and France, quickly followed by Belgium, Norway, Denmark, and Greece. In 1941, the Axis troops invade the Soviet Union in the largest military operation in human history, with over four and a half million troops, labeled Operation Barbarossa. The loss of life, some three million Russians, is staggering.

  Der Stürmer, a Nazi newspaper, editorializes that “. . . judgment has begun and it will reach its conclusion only when knowledge of the Jews has been erased from the earth.” In October 1941, Saul keeps the news from Dora that thirty-five thousand Jews from Odessa have been summarily shot. Most likely, her grandparents are part of that horrifying sum.

  Indeed, there is no good news tonight or any night. Rather, anti-Semitism is on the rise both at home and abroad, with a striking lack of compassion for the plight of the thousands of European Jews being forced, yet again, to leave their possessions and their homes and being loaded into cattle cars for unknown destinations. But some know.

  Ships carrying hundreds of Jewish émigrés are turned away from foreign ports. Jews are reduced to ashes in German crematoriums along with gypsies, socialists, homosexuals, Poles, mental and emotionally disabled people, and the few brave German citizens who dare to defy Hitler’s 1935 Nuremberg Laws—laws defining Jews as anyone having three or four Jewish grandparents, regardless of whether the individual identifies himself as a Jew. A courageous Protestant minister named Bonheoffer will be hanged weeks before the German surrender for refusing to submit to the Nazi ideology.

  Only four years past, Jesse Owens’s Olympic victory in Berlin was a refutation of Hitler’s notion of “Aryan racial superiority.” And in the same year, Margaret Bergmann Lambert, the Jewish world-class high jumper who matched the world record of five feet three inches, was disqualified from jumping because of her religion. Two years later, in 1938, Joseph Louis Barrow, aka Joe Louis, the Brown Bomber, struck an additional blow to the chancellor’s theory of supremacy when, on June 22, before a crowd of over seventy thousand, Louis pummeled Max Schmeling, the German heavyweight champion of the world, with a series of body blows that ended the rematch in two minutes and four seconds.

  Years later, Jews will be blamed for going to their deaths like sheep to slaughter, without so much as a fight. The world will eventually learn of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising, in which 1,200 Jews, armed only with smuggled pistols, rifles, grenades, and Molotov cocktails, held off the bombardment of two thousand Waffen-SS soldiers, with their heavy tanks, artillery, and flamethrowers, for twenty-eight days, until they could no longer resist. The ghetto, along with the hopes and lives of the valiant fighters, went up in smoke and flames. No one could accuse them of cowardice.

  The strange guttural-sounding names of these destinations will all too soon become unwelcome additions to the English vocabulary:

  Dachau!

  Buchenwald!

  Sobibór!

  Mauthausen!

  Ravensbrück!

  Auschwitz!

  Nineteen-forty ends with another massive German air raid on London and with Saul’s clandestine visit to the Hackensack Draft Board to enlist. Because his job as a production manager at the Hudson Valley Laundry keeps the fighting troops supplied with clean linen and is, therefore, deemed essential to the war effort, Saul is rejected.

  Several weeks following his humiliating rebuff, with the children tucked into their beds, he confesses to Dora while sitting at the yellow Formica kitchen table the reason for his lousy mood and why he has withdrawn from her and the children into a dark cocoon.

  “You don’t care about us,” Dora erupts in tears of confusion and anger, unable to support, no less understand, Saul’s action and feelings.

  “You enlist without giving us a thought? Did you even think of me? You’d walk out on me with two small kids? First you move me to this God-forsaken swamp—away from my family—and then, like a big gantze macher, off to war you go. Without telling or asking me!”

  “Your family? Your family? I’m your family,” Saul counters. “You’re not a Kolopsky, you’re a Sussman. Do you ever think beyond the nose on your face? For once, can you think about what it means for me not to be able to go to war—especially after my kid brother was drafted? You were saved by this country and cry whenever you hear that schmaltzy song ‘God Bless America,’” he snaps, “but
you want me to sit home on my duff and not fight?”

  “Do you see Jack Coddington volunteering? Or Arthur Ziegler? He’s a cop, and yet he didn’t go marching off to fight for his country,” Dora responds with mounting fury.

  “That’s because he’s flat-footed. And 4-F,” Saul’s voice increases in intensity to match Dora’s. “I don’t have a so-called physical disability. It’s the goddamned job and because I’m married with children that they rejected me. I volunteered, so don’t compare me to that dumb cop or to that fascist coward bigot of a Republican across the street.”

  “Why do you always have to do the ‘right’ thing, Saul?” she pleads, her tone softening, her voice cracking. “Why is it you who has to make a stink because some colored man you don’t even know doesn’t get a raise at the laundry? Why do you have to risk our lives when you punch the guy because he calls you a dirty Jew? He could have killed us all. No, not you. Always fighting for the underdog. Telling Jack to go to hell because he doesn’t vote for Roosevelt?” She starts trembling, “What if the army took you and then you died? The kids would be without a father. Did you think of that?”

  “It’s the navy! And you’d get a pension for life if it’s money you’re worried about. And I’d be dead and I wouldn’t have to listen to your bellyaching.”

  Saul says that she never understands him and never will, and he walks out, slamming the front door behind him, shouting, “You should have married Freddy.” One of Dora’s blue-and-white porcelain figurines with ruffles on its skirt falls off the curio shelf in the living room and breaks. She picks up the pieces and places them on the kitchen counter for Saul to repair. When Saul doesn’t return by ten, she gets into bed but lies awake in the dark, awaiting the sound of the car and the projected headlights dancing upon the bedroom ceiling. Hours later, he returns from the neighborhood bar with Jack Coddington—drunk, remorseful, and singing the only song he knows as he fumbles, unlocking the front door.

  “Show me the way to go home. I’m tired and I wanna go to bed. I had a little drink about an hour ago . . .”

  He has tied a handkerchief over one eye to keep from seeing double. Dora rushes downstairs when she hears him stumble over the umbrella stand in the hallway. She places her hand over his mouth to keep him from waking the children and uses all her strength to help him climb the stairs to their bedroom. Lying on the bed, he grins as Dora labors to remove his shoes and socks, his pants and shirt. Still singing, he pulls her down to him—“I’m tired and I wanna go to bed,” she protests—and holds her tightly for several moments before turning her over to make love. Dora succumbs to her husband’s boyish charms and tells him that it’s a good thing he’s so adorable. Lovemaking, not words or apologies, dissolves some of the bitterness of their many arguments.

  Sixty million deaths occur as a result of World War II, including Saul’s favorite brother, Seymour. At thirty-eight, in March of 1945, he is killed off the remote and formerly unheard of island of Okinawa by a Japanese kamikaze attack. Young Japanese soldiers leave their wives and children to obey Emperor Hirohito’s declaration of war to fight their American counterparts in a forced marriage of suicide and death. Younger than Saul by three years, Seymour leaves his wife, Betty, and their six-month-old infant, Susan. He also leaves a hole in Saul’s already aching heart.

  The brothers had plans to go into business together after the war. Saul was to quit his job as production manager so they could open a small laundry in the working-class neighborhood of Guttenberg, New Jersey. They were to employ and train the unemployable—mostly colored men returning from the war—and bring economic vitality to the foursquare block community. No one would have to force them to pay a decent wage and bring dignity to the lives of their employees.

  For the second time in his life, Saul weeps unabashedly. With his brother’s death, unlike his mother’s, there is no grave site, no black void in which to heave himself. Nor will there be a marker to signify that a brave young man died on this very spot. Only the cold, dark, hostile waters of the Pacific Ocean will receive the severed body parts that fall freely from the conning station lodged above the pilot house of the LST—a Landing Ship Tank—which are known to his navy brethren as “large slow targets.”

  Unlike Icarus’s fall into the Icarian Sea after he disregards his father’s warning not to fly too close to the sun, there is no Bruegel to memorialize Seymour’s plunge into the watery sepulcher along with his fellow patriots. There are no survivors.

  Typically, when Saul returned home every evening punctually at seven sharp, he rushed in to listen to his nightly news program on the radio. Tonight, he turns the car into the driveway at five and sits motionless for well over an hour, seemingly a statue with his arms over his head, resting on the steering wheel of his gray-and-black Buick that he recently purchased secondhand.

  Dora views Saul walking trancelike across the green lawn, looking as though he might have been drinking, perhaps to celebrate the war’s end—something he would never do and never allowed the children to do. He thumps on the front door.

  Oh, he must have forgotten his keys, she thinks, not grasping that he had to possess them to drive the car. He looks at her, says nothing, and walks into the kitchen and sits at the kitchen table where his daughters are doing their homework. “What is it, Saul?” Dora asks, “What’s the matter? Isn’t it wonderful that the war is over?”

  His daughters sit stricken, helplessly watching their daddy—their all-powerful and silent protector—as he sits at the kitchen table with a crumpled Western Union telegram, taken from his pocket, and makes strange noises. They can’t tell if he’s laughing or crying. Hannah and Roberta exchange wary glances as curiosity transforms itself into fear and then into a paroxysm of giggles. Dora finds their behavior bewildering, not comprehending that their laughter helps to mitigate the panic they feel seeing their father’s collapse. Frightened herself, she scoots them to the living room, leaving Saul to fend for himself.

  “I’m sorry to tell you this, but the telegram Daddy received informed him that Uncle Sy is dead.” Dora struggles valiantly to continue, holding back her own tears. “You know Uncle Sy was in the navy and was fighting our enemies in Japan. He was very, very brave, but while he was on his ship, a Jap flew his airplane into his ship, and he and all the men on the ship were killed. He has gone to be with God.”

  “Is he really dead?” asks an unbelieving sixteen-year-old Hannah. “It can’t be; I just got a V-mail from him. He said he was coming home soon.”

  “Is he in Heaven?” Roberta wonders.

  “Well, maybe,” Dora says. “I don’t know if there is such a place. Maybe.”

  “Mrs. Strong, my teacher, told me that when we die we go to Heaven,” Roberta persists. “She said that we either go to Heaven if we’ve been good or Hell if we’ve sinned, and there’s a place called Purgatory where God decides which place we’ll go.”

  “Jews don’t believe in Heaven. And certainly not Hell,” sighs Dora, feeling that she has reached the end of her ability, or patience, to explain. “And I’ve never heard of that other place.”

  “I don’t want to die,” cries Roberta, “I’m scared, Mommy.”

  “You won’t die for a very, very long time,” Dora responds, feeling short of breath, the result of her own death anxiety. She hates to think about dying and, at times, suffers painful attacks when breathing becomes difficult, when her palms sweat, when she suffers from diarrhea or nausea.

  “I don’t believe you; I know he’s not dead,” insists Roberta. “Hannah got the V-mail, and I just got the Peter Cottontail bunny he sent.” With a growing weakening of her conviction, her lip begins to quiver.

  Hannah has been sitting quietly during this exchange between Roberta and Dora. She looks at Dora and then at Roberta and blurts out, “But what about Daddy? He’s all by himself in the kitchen crying. And poor Uncle Sy. He was only thirty-eight, and Aunt Betty . . . and their baby. Oh, jeez, this is terrible.”

  “You’re right.” A
s Dora returns to the kitchen, she hears the muted sobs from the living room grow louder. “Oh, God,” she thinks, “what do I do now?”

  Dora has always dreaded the fact that someday she too would die and does whatever she can to avoid thinking about it. Her oft-stated belief is that once you’re dead, you’re dead. To face the reality of death without the comfort of a belief in a hereafter means to confront the deepest, darkest void of despair and nonexistence. She cannot bear to think of a world without her or her children or Saul, and when she does, her mental state becomes intolerable.

  Her Judaism is of no solace. It consists of blindly following the rituals she once observed in her parents’ home without any comprehension of their philosophical, historical, or even moral underpinnings. Girls and women were exempt from the obligations to learn Torah and Talmud, and from the performance of mitzvoth. Rather, they were relegated to sacred tasks in the realm of home and hearth. Dora recalls her mother’s routinely avowed beliefs: “What could be more blessed than caring for your child or lighting the Shabbos candles or preparing food for those you love?”

  Without fail, with her hands circling and then covering her eyes, Dora lights the Friday night Shabbos candles and, by rote, repeats the prayers that accompany it. She refuses to write or turn on the oven’s flame and demands similar compliance from her children. She maintains a strictly kosher kitchen and never mixes meat, fleishig, with milk, milchig. She keeps the children home from school on the High Holy Days and even observes tashlik, the ritual casting away of one’s sins into a body of water on Rosh Hashanah. On Hanukkah, she grates the onions and potatoes to make latkes and gifts the children with their annual supply of flannel pajamas for winter and cotton for summer. All this she does without reflection or curiosity as to its significance. The comfort it provides, however, does not extend to death.