Odessa, Odessa

by Barbara Artson

  “Hmmm. That’s so interesting. I get the feeling—and always have—that Aunt Bessie didn’t like Daddy. Maybe she was right, that had Mommy waited and finished school, she wouldn’t have been so afraid of her own shadow. But it’s unfair to judge by today’s standards. That’s what most of the women did then. I mean, who in that generation went to school? Bessie was the exception, and yet she was older than Mommy.”

  “Yeah, I guess we forget,” Hannah adds, “Mommy came to this country without language, without education, humiliated when she’s put in a classroom with little kids half her age, and not understanding a word of English. She had to absorb a different culture, and then with only a few years of education, she quits school to work in a factory to support herself and her parents. Now that I say that, I don’t think I gave her enough credit. Makes me sad, you know? And Daddy didn’t help. Aunt Bessie’s right. He was so critical of her.”

  Hannah, from the beginning, felt closer to her mother. Unlike her father, she had a sense of humor; she was always interested in hearing about what they did. And she thought she was beautiful, a Dorothy Lamour lookalike, without sarong; while Roberta, in her anti-Semitic phase in her teens, thought, erroneously, her mother’s nose was too big for her face. She seemed to focus on what wasn’t there, what she couldn’t do well, rather than the way she survived in this hostile and strange environment in which her father dumped her.

  As a child, Hannah hung on to her mother’s side. Whenever possible, she clutched her hemline, as if to reassure herself of the permanence of their connection, and patiently waited for Dora to finish a conversation with a neighbor, or an activity, or whatever she was doing. No separation for her.

  Roberta, on the other hand, unconsciously determined who and what she would be or do in repudiation of her mother. Only later in life would she concede that some of the very qualities she possessed and enjoyed—her love of dancing, of music, of knowing and singing the words to all the musicals and songs of her mother’s era, reflected her mother’s fancies. She so wanted not to be like her, she so wanted not to be Jewish, she so wanted not be confined to Judaism’s “nonsensical” restrictions that she turned a blind eye to her father’s flaws while idealizing his strengths and identifying with his atheism. She looked to him for protection but ignored his lack of warmth and silence and criticism, and she even turned to him for help with her various “girl” projects, including sewing and knitting.

  When she needed to be fitted for a dress she was making, she solicited his help. Only his extended arms were big enough to hold the skein of yarn she would wind into a ball for the sweater she was knitting. Or for the argyle socks she was making for her current boyfriend. And when a tennis match was scheduled for her high school tennis team, he was the one to check the strings of her racket and, when needed, restring it. She based her conduct on what she believed would garner his approving nod and always sided with him when a squabble erupted between her parents. The sides were clearly delineated: Roberta, her father’s not-quite-good-enough surrogate son, aligned with him, and Hannah with Dora. She never won in her attempt to be the son he never had, the biggest disappointment of his life.

  Later, in her several unsuccessful attempts at psychotherapy and finally a full-blown Freudian psychoanalysis—couch and all—her analyst suggested that her inability to understand her mother’s struggle, coupled with her life-long battle to win the affection and approval of her father, most likely played a major role in her choice of husbands and her failed marriages.

  “Well, I guess,” Roberta reflects, “she had reasons, but in her passivity, she warded off lots of anger and aggression. And when it came out, it came out passively. She never made it easy for Daddy to do anything, to take the risks he wanted to take. Remember how she carried on when he wanted to quit that laundry chain so he could start his own laundry? My God, you’d have thought we were about to live on the street. Scheesh!”

  “You know, Roberta, sometimes it gets tedious hearing nothing but gripes about Mommy,” Hannah sighs, “never understanding how she may have felt. It’s always about Daddy and you. Get a life! Weren’t you supposed to get over all that after your five years of analysis? When do you stop blaming your parents and start taking responsibility for the life you are living? Not everything that happened is Mommy’s fault. She grew up in poverty; she had no education, for God’s sake, and did the best she could. We didn’t turn out so badly, you know. How do you account for that?”

  “And she never let him forget that he moved her to New Jersey, away from Bubbe,” Roberta continues, her face blanching. “Imagine wanting to stay in that rotten ghetto? I think he’d have been a very different man if he had married a different woman. Someone more adventurous, someone who would have encouraged, or even challenged him to do more, rather than fight his every move to advance.”

  Moaning, Hannah argues that her mother stood up when it counted to her, though “maybe not when it was important to you. Can you possibly empathize with her? In reality, the rocker wasn’t the only thing she stood up to him for. She was determined to keep a kosher home in spite of his outright hostility to it. There, you must admit, she put her foot down. He not only rejected but also denigrated anything smacking of religion, yet she continued to light Shabbos candles every Friday night of her life, with him always scoffing in the background.”

  “Okay, okay. She had her tough side,” admits Roberta. “I guess you’re right. I need to get over this, as my shrink said. But as a kid, I just hated that we weren’t allowed to write or draw or sew on Shabbos. All the things I loved to do. That turned me so against being Jewish. And living in that anti-Semitic atmosphere. Do you ever wonder what it was that drew them together in the first place?” After a long silence, she continues, “But what about the rocker. Should we give it to Aunt Bessie?”

  “But still, don’t you think,” Hannah persists, “that some of what you call her passivity had to do with her background? You always say how environment determines character. Well, look at her childhood. So getting on a plane or doing anything new or going on a vacation and spending money—all that has links to that frightened little kid. From that kid’s perspective, Grandpa abandoned her when he went to America and took her older siblings with him. She comes to this country and can’t speak or understand the language. And after two or three years of school, she quits and works in a factory. It’s like she used up every bit of strength and courage to assimilate, with nothing left over for anything else. I call that resiliency.”

  “But remember,” Roberta interrupts, “when she’d return from a vacation—and this really got to me—carrying on like she was going to her death beforehand, she’d return and rave about it, insisting that she always felt that way. I think we both suffered as a result, me in my way, my stubbornness, you in yours. Who we have become has been shaped by both of them, for good and bad.”

  In high school, Hannah was an academic star: honor roll, straight A’s, Merit scholar, and conforming. “Goody two-shoes,” Roberta called her, in part to diminish her own lack of academic accomplishment. At twenty-one, four years after high school graduation, having worked in Manhattan as a secretary, Hannah married her high school sweetheart, Bert, and moved to a neat suburban tract home with a backyard and swings, seesaw, sliding pond, and barbecue—a mere ten miles from Dora and Saul. Hannah and Bert raised two children, and in 1977, following her father’s death, she published her first poem in a little-known poetry journal:

  Tall

  Towering

  Redwood

  Ever mighty, a giant to the small child,

  Climbing skyward,

  No more

  Battling winds, tornadoes, hurricanes,

  A Force of Nature. Cancer.

  He was only a fragile limb. A defenseless man

  The giant redwood topples

  Leaving a Memory, a Myth, a child’s shattered Fantasy

  Forever

  Silent

  Roberta excelled in two endeavors: athletics and
troublemaking, though the trouble she made was mostly for herself. Once, caught smoking a cigarette in the girls’ bathroom at school, she sheepishly departed the toilet stall, with telltale smoke streaming from her nostrils, to find the principal, Miss Hill, glaring at her. Busted! She loves recounting these adventures to her friends and kids.

  On another occasion, she and her steady boyfriend declared a personal holiday to hear Sarah Vaughn sing at the Paramount in New York City, and naively, Roberta returned to the campus to rehearse a play in which she had a minor role. Once again, Miss Hill was there to greet Roberta as she opened the door to the auditorium. Her parents were advised and she was suspended for a day. Busted once more!

  She was a cheerleader, not an honor student. A champion tennis player, no straight A’s for her. Rebellious rather than submissive, she forged her identity in opposition to Hannah’s, and her mother’s, and in the process made decisions she would regret in the future. In actuality, she didn’t think she could compete with her sister’s intelligence and beauty and sterling reputation.

  “Oh, you’re Hannah’s baby sister” was the enthusiastic refrain from teachers at the beginning of each school year, typically followed by their cutting comments as the girls’ differences were discovered. “Well, Roberta, it’s hard to believe you and Hannah are woven from the same cloth. You should try more to emulate her.”

  “You’re right. I’m not like her. I’m me, and I’m glad of it,” Roberta responded with a clenched jaw that held back tears of fury from the rebuff she unknowingly produced.

  At twenty, on her own, she moved from the East Coast to Los Angeles, in part a reaction to a painful breakup with her boyfriend and first lover. Several years later, after working at a series of low-paying administrative jobs, she enrolled in college and graduated summa cum laude, surprising everyone, most of all herself. She entered law school, then married and divorced her constitutional law professor, some sixteen years her senior—with whom she had had an affair—but not before giving birth to two children: a boy and then a girl—a girl child who was wanted, not the disappointment she was to her father. She specialized in immigration law.

  Several years passed before Hannah and Bert and their two children tired of the eastern winters and joined Roberta in the sun-drenched, palm-treed, rose-colored tropical setting of Southern California, with its miles and miles of beaches, bistros, and freeways.

  Saul and Dora followed two years later, but Saul hated the congestion and smog, the noise, the freeways, and the materialism. He fell in love with Hawaii following a cruise that he and Dora took and insisted on moving to Honolulu, where he swam, snorkeled, gathered seaweed for the marinated salad he learned to make from the Japanese fishermen he befriended on the beach, and, as he said to anyone who would listen, “was a beach bum.” He started a little business doing small repairs for the neighbors in their condo. The money, he said, paid for his two-pack-a-day cigarette habit.

  Saul found his element in the laidback existence in Hawaii; he was happy and carefree for the first time in his life. He worked a little, fished a little, swam a little, listened to radio talk shows, and even called in to vent his rage at “the dirty old men who make the wars,” while Dora, lonely for her daughters and grandchildren and going blind from her neglected glaucoma, grumbled until the day that Saul died from throat cancer seven years later. She purchased a Los Angeles condo within a week of his death, leaving the arrangements for shipping his body to her sons-in-law.

  “Oh, Hawaii was such a beautiful place. Paradise. You’ve never seen anything like it. Friendly people. Palm trees. Beaches. Sand. I loved living there, but after Saul died, he should rest in peace, what could I do but move back here to be near my daughters?”

  “I can’t believe my ears,” Roberta whispered to Hannah as they overheard their mother talking to one of her new neighbors after returning from Saul’s memorial service, held, at Dora’s insistence, at the local synagogue.

  “Did you hear her? All the while she was there, she made Daddy’s life miserable with her complaining. She is such a phony.”

  “Was,” Hannah counters, “she was a phony. Whatever. He dragged her there against her will. She didn’t want to go. She didn’t know a soul there. He didn’t either, but the difference was that he never needed anyone, the loner that he was. And she was going blind too. He never took her needs into consideration; it was always what he wanted to do. Period. End of report. His way or the highway.”

  “I guess. But she got her revenge,” retorts Roberta, “when it came to following his explicit wish to be cremated and to have his ashes thrown in the Pacific in Hawaii! That time she did it her way. Buried him in the ground.”

  “You know that Jews don’t cremate their dead. He was dead, and she was the one that had to live with it. One shouldn’t rule from the grave.”

  “She always seemed to divide people. Look at us, even now it’s happening. Talk about ruling from the grave. Have you noticed that every time we talk about our parents, we end up repeating their dynamics? I take Daddy’s side, you take hers. We both get so damned defensive and stubborn. It’s contagious. That’s the pattern. So what do you say we both try not to do that anymore? Let’s bury it along with Mommy. How about a hug, and let’s give the rocker to Aunt Bessie. After all these years of loyal devotion to all of us, especially to Mommy, and even to Bubbe when she was alive, she deserves it. Right?”

  III. BACK TO THE BEGINNING

  Chapter 13

  THE MISSING PIECE

  1995

  The gaps of knowledge Roberta perceives concerning her ancestry at times leave her with a baffling sense of solitude. She feels alone, despite the home she shares with her boyfriend of two years, Dick, and despite the regular visits of her adored grandchildren and children. When there’s a break in her busy routine, she searches online for clues in the assorted Internet sites: The Mormon Genealogy Library, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, The American Jewish Historical Society, Yiddish Scientific Institute. These endeavors reveal nothing of consequence. No Kolopskys, or any ending in i, are to be found anywhere.

  When her attempts fail to materialize a promising clan member, she has the sense that she is plummeting into a black hole that, upon entry, closes tightly, leaving her feeling trapped—endlessly tumbling, head over heels into the timeless pitch-blackness of depression. Not exactly depression but adriftness. She insists there has to be a sign somewhere, a name, a reference. Something. There has to have been a seed that began it all. Some Adam and Eve. Or Erda and Wotan. Something cannot come from nothing. Now who said that? she wonders. Democritus, she recalls. Didn’t he write that nothing can come from nothing? I think so. Or am I thinking of King Lear, when he tells Cordelia that nothing can come from nothing? Gotta look that one up, she tells herself. Anyway, the point is that I had to have come from someone or somebody.

  Her obsession with her family’s history began when, in 1976, she read Alex Haley’s novel Roots: The Saga of an American Family. The following year she sat transfixed in front of her newly purchased Magnavox console with its enormous twenty-five-inch screen, watching, along with her two teenage children and 130 million other viewers, ABC’s television miniseries. For eight consecutive evenings, she and the world were mesmerized by the images on their television screens.

  She wondered, who was her Kunta Kinte? Who was that first forebear that launched her family tree? She longed to know and to be known, to discover and be discovered through the lives of those bearing her DNA, as if that knowledge would somehow lend significance and structure to her own life—would fill the mysterious void that popped in and out of her consciousness.

  Roberta’s obsession was further motivated when she read an article in the New Yorker that went on at length, as only New Yorker profiles can, about the recent spate of twin births. Yes, it held, it had to do with the new “assisted reproductive technologies” and treatments that zealously implanted an excess of fertilized eggs in the uterus as a way of ensuring
the survival of at least one viable embryo, which often resulted in the birth of two—or three or four—newborns. That made sense to her, but she was taken aback when they offered an alternative hypothesis.

  The article described, in passing, the latest research on the phenomenon of the “vanishing twin syndrome.” The authors claimed that there had been many more multiple pregnancies than previously recognized that ended in early miscarriages—at times, so early that no one realized the existence of multiple fetuses. Now, with the advent of sonographic techniques, it was easy to document such events. She was fascinated by the description of the not-so-rare occurrence—one in eight births—of what was labeled “vestigial twinning” or “parasitic twinning” or “the vanishing twin” phenomenon. Intrigued by this notion, she felt the need to dig further into the subject.

  As she continued her search, she stumbled upon a piece written by a woman professing to be a “womb twin,” who held that all her life she had experienced an absence of something that she could neither explain nor verify, but with the recent research on “missing twins,” she was now persuaded that her fantasy of having shared a womb with a sibling was not as delusional as she had been led to believe by the several psychiatrists she had consulted over the years.

  Riveted, Roberta went on to read about medical anomalies that came under the rubric of doppelganger. There were Siamese twins, where the splitting of an ovum produced two whole people joined, tragically, by a piece of skin. There were individuals carrying within them embedded body parts—an arm, a foot, or a leg. She chanced upon an exposé describing a fetus in fetu: a fetus encapsulated in a cyst containing bone fragments of teeth and, at times, hair. Was she, she wondered with fascinated horror, perverse in this pursuit, or was she trying to understand something important that she had somehow intuited about herself?