by Sonia Taitz
“I could be in the wrong place,” I muttered, deflated by the creepy dreariness.
“Well, why are you looking for that bloke?” said Paul, finally
“Because I think he is the best actor ever. Did you see him in—”
“Oh, yeh?” he interrupted, and yanked me into the room.
A few days later, he talked to me again. After supper, I saw him mount his bicycle, about to run off. He saw me and stopped.
“Hey! Care to come with me?”
“Where are you going?”
“Oh, I do this Suicide Center volunteering bit. Trying to keep the world going ’round, you know.”
“I do know,” I say, thrilled that he is open to the world of pain and sorrow.
“Would you like to have a look at the place? It’s usually quite empty. Come along then, you can keep me company.”
Not long after, at the Hotline, we are drinking hot cocoa and he is reciting poetry that he has written, odd William Blakean lines that mesmerize me. And I am telling him my stories, too.
I tell him about the Holocaust, which, strangely enough, I have almost never talked about before. I tell him everything, because, after all, I am at the Suicide Hotline, the very crossroads of the word pain. And the signs—includ- ing a big one on the entry door—say “We Can Carry Your Load With You.”
“That is so sad,” Paul says, his eyes welling.
I stare into his wet blue eyes with my own wet browny-green eyes.
“Would you like to sit on my lap?” he adds helpfully.
I am stunned; this seems unprofessional, but ...
Oh, yes.
Then a kiss. I’m surprised at how shaky he is. After all, he is an Englishman, and a Wasp. I really never understood that Wasps could be so nervous, and I never knew they could feel so ...
More, please.
And that is how it begins.
When his next part is cast, I attend his performances not as a guest but as an insider. It is The Tempest, and he is Caliban.
Paul chooses to play this role in green, even painting his face and limbs the color of moss. The production takes place at night. He appears with a swoosh—Caliban, the primal man, leaping from a tree and into the river, then onto the stage. He shakes himself off like a dog and humps the ground as he roars:
“I shall people all the world with Calibans!”
Can I come too?
After the play, we kiss and hug, and his green body paint comes off on me. I think of Billy, the kid I loved at four, and his primordial mud. I feel connected to Shakespeare, to art, to passion, and to the pulse of the earth.
Master of English Letters
DURING THIS TIME, with me in England, and my brother in Los Angeles, my father loses his store in what is now Lincoln Center. “Taitz Jewelers” has been condemned by the greed of a landlord, who raises the rent higher than my parents—or any other small business—can ever afford.
My father has my mother write a special letter to me. He is uncomfortable with writing in English.
Darling Sonia’le!
Please do not worry. We are in big trouble, only you can help. Daddy wants you to write a letter to the important people, maybe newspapers, the Times, so everyone knows that we are being chased out of our store, no one does nothing we are worried. Please you are so smart help us find a way so we can earn our living we have worked so hard all our lives we don’t deserve this.
Your Loving Parents (Gita and Simon)
I call them immediately, seeking more information. My father can only repeat an idée fixe: if they can save vanishing species (his example is the crocodile), why not the old watchmakers, the skilled craftsmen and their handmade world? Inside his request is the familiar paradigm—I am about to be annihilated. I am not your father, but your child and your responsibility. It is your duty to save me. And only you, Sonia Judith Taitz (carrier of at least three dead people, and now two live ones) can do it.
So I use my words and write a letter about the Holocaust, about watchmakers and other dwindling craftsmen, and about vanishing species. I send it to various newspapers, but there is no response at all from anyone.
“They never stopped the trains to Dachau,” my father tells me, over the phone lines from New York to Europe. “They never came. The world never cared. The British turned even Jews back to Poland,” he reminds me, as I stand in Britain and talk to him. “You have to keep going. You have to care. Write something more.”
I do care, but it is hard to have my words used, over and over, for someone else’s purpose, and not my own. (This was also a problem at law school.) I want, for example, to write a letter to someone, anyone, seeking peace from the chore of being my parents’ alarm system and conduit to an impossible, unconquerable world. I cannot defy my father, however, and continue to send the perpetual SOS. Finally, one Spanish magazine does a feature on Simon Taitz, “orologico” and the vanishing “crocodilios.”
Only then does Simon rest, for he had been shown the respect he had deserved from a time so long past it had preceded my existence.
I remember once being chased through the house and slapped for not greeting him at the door when he came home late at night. And then apologizing, weeping, until he forgave me, usually after a silence of several days.
I remember the last time I had tried to defy him. I had come home from camp happy, tanned, proud of myself. The word camp had transformed itself from my parents’ connotation (“when I almost died in the camp”) or from the oddball Camp Betar, to a communal joy-pot of adolescent fun amid the green smells of nature, so foreign to me in my urban veal box. I had worn some boy’s “ID bracelet,” a heavy chain-link encircling my slender wrist, the engraved name of my suitor falling casually down my hand. These IDs were status symbols among us girls, and wearing one had made me feel proud and female.
Whenever I arrived back from eight weeks of summer to our small apartment in the gray bleak Heights, I’d be sad for about a week, missing the freedoms and smells of youth and pleasure, reacclimatizing myself to the claustrophobia, the incessant demands, and the suppressed rage.
And sometimes, not suppressed.
Looking back, it was foolish to say what I said. But I never stopped trying to communicate with both my parents, bring them along on my developmental trips, share my growing acculturation. And the ID bracelet, a sign of my being a real American teenager now, had given me new courage.
“Daddy,” I said, “when I was at camp I learned something new. I learned that I’m really too old for you to hit me now.”
There was, perhaps, a second of silence, and then—WHAM!
He thumped me a good one. As with all other episodes of his literally heavy-handed rage, I fell to the floor, thwack, like a bug shot dead by a spray of Raid.
My father continued hitting me as I stayed there, half crumpled, guarding my face, with which I’d done much sweet kissing over the summer. He never stopped, even when I got the lesson. Actually, I could never fully get his lessons in ultimate submission. He stopped only when his wrath had fully abated, his forty days of torrents to drown out the world. Finally, I lay on the floor and he was finished. I could hear my mother’s ineffectual weeping, noticing that, unlike the times when my brother was hit, she had not screamed out for my father to stop. But although she was not crying hard, she was crying more than I was.
I was not crying this time. This time, I realized, I would write about my experience.
I went to my room, ripped a piece of paper out of a small, spine-coiled notebook, and wrote the words:
“I hate you, you fascist piece of chara.” Chara was a daring curse word, all things considered. It was the Arab word for “shit.”
I took the paper in my hand and slowly walked to our bathroom. Piece by piece, I ripped my midget-opus, ceremoniously freeing my passions to the acceptance of the sea, its conduit our toilet. Like openmouthed communion, the oval of water accepted my offering. My body, my blood, my passions.
And though the words rea
ched no living heart then, they do now, and I can add to them: “But at the same time, Daddy, I love you. If only words could take your pain away, as sometimes they do mine.”
In the end, of course, my father lost his store in Lincoln Center. The big, neon script banner, “Taitz” in pink, “Jewelers” in turquoise, was extinguished, the cooling wires lowered to the ground. But, just as inevitably, he didn’t give up. After a short time, Simon and my mother found and rented a jeweler’s “booth” in the National Jewelry Exchange on Forty-seventh Street, commonly known as the Diamond District. These booths consisted of little counters, scarcely separated, behind which diamond cutters, setters, and polishers, wholesale gemologists, gold engravers, and other jewelry specialists noisily plied their trade. My father was one of the few master watchmakers; he was nearly lost in that bustling exchange.
Simon brought his workbench and tools; Gita brought her velveteen trays of pearls and engagement solitaires. He nailed his precious OMEGA sign to the wall behind him, as well as a functional black laminate square with white letters spelling out “Taitz Jewelers,” and they started up again.
The Jewelry Exchange was really a block-long avenue of old-world Jews, many of them Hasidic survivors of the Holocaust. While immigrants themselves, and traditional in their religious practice, my parents were not Hasidim, most of whom had come from Poland and Hungary. The Lithuanian strand of Jewry had always been more geared toward learning and rationality; there was no special costume of black frock coat and trousers, no earlocks, no beards, no rebbe to whom one came to ask all questions of life. There was intellectual independence and more than a touch of practical modernity. Furthermore, the Yiddish voices that surrounded my parents at the Jewelry Exchange were accented differently from their own classic version. It was like listening to English spoken in a thick Southern accent.
Unlike my father’s little store, moreover, this open arcade was vast and cacophonous. Thousands of showcases glittered as you entered the building, a dizzying kaleidoscope. Fluorescent lights from both under and over the counters highlighted the diamonds, magnifying them into a glacial, dazzling world of snow-white. At the same time, the sound of thousands of voices, selling, buying, questioning, and bargaining, was an assault on the ears. Hands gestured, and hands were shaken; golden necklaces were draped on an endless chain of customers, reflected in hundreds of gleaming mirrors.
My parents’ booth was all the way in the back, on the right-hand wall. Tucked in there, I felt they were safe from the sensual assault of this crazy crystal palace. But at first, my father hated everything about the exchange, even his place in it.
“It’s a madhouse here; I can’t make myself think!”
“But at least you have your spot here in the back, where it’s a little quieter,” I’d say on my visits to New York, trying to console him.
“But no one can find me here! They come in for a big ruby, or maybe a pin, or maybe just to have a good time and haggle and waste someone’s time. But they’re not coming in here for pocket watches. They look me over and pass by—there are so many choices, so much to catch their eyes.”
After a while, however, my father again began to reestablish his name as a master watchmaker. Not only did his customers from the old neighborhood find him, but soon, more and more clients began to visit from all over the world. Word-of-mouth among collectors of rare timepieces began to make Simon a central stop again. He bought, sold, and fixed, growing more and more happy and prosperous. In the evening, he stored his treasures in the impenetrable vault downstairs, behind remarkably thick leaden bank doors.
My mother was happy, too. Right above that corner spot in the exchange was a little diner. Every day, she ran up and down the stairs, grabbing a danish for herself, a hot coffee for her husband. Apart from our long-abandoned trips to the delicatessen after movies, Gita had rarely had the chance to “go out to a restaurant.” The Diamond Dairy Kosher Lunchnet was a small escape for her. It overlooked the floor of the exchange, so that even when you sat there, sharing a cheese or cherry blintz with your daughter, Sonia, who was visiting all the way from England, you could see all your friends and coworkers below. And they could see you. You could wave to each other and not feel alone.
The Jewess at Last
IT IS PRE-CHRISTMAS DINNERTIME in the great, drafty, wood-paneled College Hall, held a week before the holiday. At the long oak refectory table, I sit next to Mr. Simopoulos, a brilliantly eccentric philosophy don. Leaning over me, he intones into my ear:
“The world is made up of three kinds of people: Jews, honorary Jews, and SHITS!”
Paul is sitting across the table from us. He is one of Simo-poulos’s favorite students. We both burst out laughing, and Simop joins us.
“So, which are you?” I ask him.
“Jew and Honorary Jew, of course, you imbecile!”
Well, both seem to be in the minority here in England. Over the term, Jewish students have slowly begun gathering in my dorm room. Their names are Anglicized: Fenton for Feinstein, Wayne for Weinberg. (They have the reverse problem to what I suffered with kashering the name Brendan O’Neill.) They seem frightened even to “admit” that their name was once Cohen (the name of the priestly caste) and is now Cowan. It is only when they know that I, too, am Jewish-and more surprisingly, open about it, proud of it, even—that they come in, relax, and talk about their names, their beliefs, their wariness.
So this is the country that forms the spine of “European culture,” the country of manners and containment. The people who like me tend to be the outsiders, the artists and actors, the weirdos and the rebellious aristocrats, out for a bit of real life. The Irish, the Scots, the Jews, and the Welsh; the black and the Arab—we bond. Benazir Bhutto is there, super cool in her purple kid-skin boots. People like her are called “Pakis” at Oxford. Most students feel no shame in their intolerance. After all, as the saying goes, “The wogs start at Calais.”
On the contrary, it is expected that I be ashamed to be Jewish.
When I ask, innocently, if someone is Jewish, a non-Jewish student responds, “I don’t know—I wouldn’t dream of asking him.” But why not? I am asking if that person is a descendant of Abraham, Moses, and David—not if they have a communicable sexual disease.
Paul’s own parents can hardly look at me, so horrified that this dark-haired, sultry foreigner has got her claws into their firstborn son. He has taken me to his home in Stoke Poges, a small, prosperous town near Windsor Castle. The house, like the Queen’s, or nearby Eton College, is built of stone. It being Sunday, we have roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, along with minted peas. Dessert is trifle and “blackberry fool.”
Perhaps they just need to get to know me better. They need to know what a good, nice, smart girl I am, how hard I work, how much I try. I try to impress them. Stupidly, I don’t realize that showing off is wrong in this culture—so I brag nonstop about all my accomplishments, the ones that make my father proud. I am actually hoping that they will like me for being a good student.
“And—what else? I—I was a valedictorian in high school. The Hebrew valedictorian. I actually gave my speech in modern Hebrew.”
They are numb with disdain. Who talks of Hebrew, of all the—? Who brags of language skills? What is she getting at?
“My parents are Holocaust survivors,” I tell them, falling fully into the shite pile. “They lost everything they owned, but did everything they could to give me a good education. Which no one could take from me. I’m actually on leave from Yale Law School.”
I’m giving them the old one-two. First, the Holocaust—look how much we have suffered, how noble we are, how innocent and brave. And then, despite all that, Yale! Can you beat the Jews? Their phoenix-like rebirthing abilities? Their Helen Keller gumption? But they do not applaud, and I cannot feel their love with my feet, my ears, or any other part of me.
Their expression tells me that I have badly overestimated my accomplishments. They seem to be saying, to themselves (I am not worth tell
ing):
“Our ancestors, toothless and on a farm holding a pitchfork of hay, would be better than yours with a golden mortarboard discovering the cure for cancer. We are English, born on English land. We don’t need to wander about annoying people. We worship God in the Church of England, founded by an English King. Our prayers are all in good, proper English, the language of God, a civilized gentleman with more manners than your clan of sweaty parvenus have ever had.”
“Better a Negress than a Jewess,” his mother confides tearfully to Paul. When he tells me this, the words give me a complex frisson. Are such words and concepts really still in use?
Isabelle wears a fine golden cross on her neck. In her childhood village church, they told her that Jews are damned, that they killed Christ—a man who didn’t brag and wasn’t pushy about his Phi Beta Kappa key—and that we will therefore be cursed forever, not just on earth, where we must wander (and will again, if they can just get rid of Israel), but also in the afterlife. All she’s done is take in what she was told, which is what most people do—including, to some extent, my own parents.
Paul feels his mum has fallen for easy propaganda and dated hocus-pocus. While believing in God, he cannot believe in the Christ story anymore (other than the good man’s existence). He tells me that he has “envious aspirations” toward the simpler monotheism held by the Jews. He cites the Bible, particularly one passage in Genesis:
“‘Numerous as the stars,’ eh? I’d actually say ‘brilliant as the stars.’ He did make you that. And if you’re an example, I’m hungry for more.”
On the other hand, a good friend of his (who belongs to the Christian Union) comments as I pass: “Oh, here’s Brother Abraham!” He gestures around his nose to indicate its prominence. With the other hand, he mimes holding a coin and rubbing it. He’s not alone. On the TV in the college common room, the sitcoms joke about the Jews and their aversion to pork. We’re not the only target. They make fun of all accents: the Spanish, the Italian, the Chinese. When I hear someone “do” an Eastern European accent, I want to say, That’s my mother and my father and their friends! That’s a bunch of refugees you’re mocking, with accents born of exile. That accent will vanish with them. Why are you laughing? Do you even speak another language, the way they do?