by Sonia Taitz
And yet, I rarely go home to see my parents. I rarely hear their accents on the phone. Instead, we mostly correspond by mail. I write long, dreamy letters about the rain and the swans. I am sure I baffle them. Our lives together have never been about dreams, rain, and swans. I am sure I wrong them by being so far away. All my life they have been like my children, and now I am living my own life, a life that they would find somewhat mad. Why chase arguments, feuds, and old shadows?
Still, though I do not fly home often, they are on my mind daily. When I write to them, I address them, as always, as my kindees—an invented word, a nickname, based on kinderlach. I have been using this word more and more. These people are my children, my dependents, yet all I seem to do is willfully try to relive the worst parts of their lives, a would-be Jew in Europe. The “Brother Abraham” comments actually please me. They make a reality out of the nightmares I had heard all my life. I can confront them now.
Paul’s father, Rikki (an old Boy Scout/Kipling nickname he favors), goads me now and then. He loves how angry and pointed I get about these little slights, how I get wound up like a desperate, talking doll. He is proud of being a white Anglo Saxon Protestant, better than anyone no matter what I say about his cultural myopia. Eventually, I come up with a parallel that nags at him. It’s kind of an SAT analogy.
“England is to America as Judaism is to Christianity.”
“So, you’d equate England and—and Judaism?”
“Yes,” I say. “England is the root of the English-speaking empire which, you would agree, has popularized and cheapened its original quality. Look at American culture,” I bait him.
“That’s true. It’s god-awful.”
“So that’s how you could see Judaism vis-à-vis Christianity. One is small and old-fashioned and riddled with rules and customs, and the other far more popular, with a simpler message and more universal appeal.”
“Well,” he says, “doesn’t ‘universal appeal’ tell you something? There must be something to it if everyone believes in it. That’s why, despite the occasional whisper of doubt, I’m a Christian—sheer numbers can’t be wrong.”
“Well, according to your logic, McDonald’s is better than a three-star Michelin restaurant. More people eat at McDonald’s.”
“Oh, be quiet,” he says grumpily, ruffling my hair. Rikki actually likes me far more than his wife does. He has traveled the world as a computer executive, but she has never knowingly met a Jew before.
Within a year, after I’ve received my MPhil in English literature, Paul cuts me off. He ceases all contact and exiles me from his world. His parents, who live not far away from Oxford, have told him that I have seduced him, body and mind, that I have hypnotized him. They have repeatedly motored up to Oxford to insist that he stop this crazy romance of his. Paul is only twenty-two years old now, and he must have been listening to them for months. When he does act he acts quickly, as though afraid of me and my tenacity. He is right to be afraid. I am not good at taking no for an answer. They are all right about me. I am a tenacious Jewess, a Scheherazade who will never run out of stories.
“Don’t do this,” I plead. More than anything, I never thought this particular story would end in fierce rejection. He was supposed to choose me, to cross over the divide that separated us. He was supposed to love me even (or especially) when his parents didn’t.
“She is sucking the life out of you” is the phrase they used, menace in their words matching the menace they see in me. I am a witch and a sorceress. He is the blond child whose blood is being taken by a succubus.
“She is toying with you. You’re not the first, and you won’t be the last.” I am three years older than he, and I have had more experience, romantic and academic. Why should he rest his vulnerable heart on my loyalty? One could easily see their point of view. I have left my parents behind; I’ve left every trace of my life behind me. What kind of person could I be to do that?
Back home at 100 Overlook Terrace, I am now twenty-five years old and beaten. I didn’t belong in law school and I didn’t belong in England. In time, a battered green trunk, emblematic of my failure, arrives from Oxford. Packed by Paul, it is full of everything that we have shared together—fond notes, programs from plays I’d written there (one in which he’d starred), a letter from Lord Bullock awarding me a prize for short stories, one suede boot with a broken-off heel, an old Hebrew prayer book, my Wordsworth and my Dickens.
The nightmare has come true—I have been kicked out of Europe. And here in New York, I have few prospects. Now that I’ve gotten a graduate degree in English, I am considered overqualified for most entry-level jobs, including one at a publishing house, which involves fast and accurate typing. So I decide to go back to law school to finish my degree. I am afraid to “just sit home and write.” My parents are dubious about the arts, and the real possibility of failure would bring me back to where I started—a nothing, a flotsam, the refugees’ kid. At least Yale Law is special. And at least my father is proud again.
Dan Greenleaf, Esquire
IN THAT SECOND YEAR of law school, the year of my return, I meet Dan Greenleaf, who is in his third and final year. Dan is the perfect rebound man for me, and ideal for my parents as well. After Jacob, they have waited more than five years for a Jewish man to ask for my hand in marriage. Dan is not only Jewish—his father is an oral surgeon in Brookline, Massachusetts. Prosperous and stylish, Dan rents a rambling beach house off campus, to which he drives in an ancient, lumpy Volvo. His clothes are like costumes—baggy pants and suspenders. Prematurely salt-and-peppered, Dan looks like Richard Gere in American Gigolo if, instead of a paid escort, Gere were playing a bookish Yale Law student in horn-rimmed glasses. His mother was an opera singer. His aunt produces documentaries. Not only is my Mr. Greenleaf at Yale Law, but he also graduated summa from Harvard College.
Dan shares his big funky house with actors and directors from the drama school. Chez Greenleaf, jazz plays through the sound system, actors roller-skate around, and clumps of interesting graduate students prepare African dishes requiring orange-colored spices, which we eat on vintage, mismatched dishes. Dinner conversation is witty, erudite, literary, political, pop-cultural.
As Dan would put it, “What’s not to like?”
And he is right. This guy is not just a lawyer. He is a very nice Jewish boy, the sort my heart needs to rest on, like a parakeet on a perch or index finger. Though of a far more biting intellect than Jake’s, Dan strokes my ruffled feathers, tells me to relax, fixes me a mean cocktail (he knows them all). One day, when it is cold outside and the New England wind is blowing, Dan buttons up my overcoat, just like in a’40s song. Another day he whispers into my ear the phrase I most need to hear:
“Baby, now you’re safe.”
It was a short trajectory. Before Dan, I wanted to risk myself, try my powers. I wanted to be unsafe so I could prove myself a peer to my parents’ heroism and survival skills. But England has thrown me upside down and on my fragile head. I have indeed inhabited the sense of being the wandering and unwanted Jew. I crave the warmth and security that Dan Greenleaf offers. I like that he makes good challah French toast, delivered on a tray with Kenyan coffee. I like that he calls me bubbeleh, like an old Jewish man from the Borscht Belt.
“Bubbeleh—you’re O-kay!”
Because of this “okay” feeling (which Jacob had offered me years ago, and I had arrogantly rejected), I quickly agree to marry Dan. Once the big rock is on my finger, the wedding caravan takes off with even more surprising velocity. We get a hall, a dress, a tux, pick a smorgasbord and plan a flower-bedecked chuppah. It seems no time at all before I am surrounded by hundreds of guests and two rabbis who tell me to walk around Dan seven times, as is the Jewish custom. I suddenly refuse. It is my only sign of rebellion, stemming not only from my sense of feminine pride but the fear that I should not be getting married at all.
People with broken hearts and bruised heads from being tossed upside down should probably not get mar
ried.
A few weeks before the wedding, I had told my father that I felt I was making a big mistake. I wasn’t sure if it was Dan, specifically, that I wanted, or simply the healing sense of rescue he gave me. My father offered the following strange advice:
“Don’t go backward. Always go forward.”
This might well have been the secret of the brave, productive, and heroic life of Simon Taitz. And functional clocks do not go counterclockwise. But this is not good advice if you are heading for a cliff. (I realize this years later, with characteristic esprit de l’escalier.)
So we marry. In no time, Dan and I are surrounded by hundreds of gifts (espresso makers, enormous vases) and comfortably living in a floor-through in a townhouse in Greenwich Village. As Dan said, “What’s not to like?” I am comfortable, and, true to his word, I am safe. As my father always dreamed, I am financially and socially sound: Dan and I are elite Manhattanites in the yuppie heyday of the 1980s. During the day, I work in litigation on the thirty-ninth floor of a law firm so prestigious that jaws drop when I mention it. The clients are all multinational corporations who pay hundred of dollars for each billable hour. We swat our opponents with yellow pads full of legalese (which I help write each and every day, often past midnight). We go to court in phalanxes, dozens of associates to each litigating warrior-partner.
Dan clerks for a federal judge. Along with the challah French toast, he sustains me with fresh baguettes and frothy cappuccini, and there are weekly flower arrangements that appear at the townhouse door. Still, I find my mind wandering to Paul. Maybe I don’t like the feeling of being thrown away. Maybe I want to win another shot at the proverbial Ahasuerus beauty contest. Maybe I remember more passion in my past. Like most husbands, Dan becomes consumed by his work over time, and his attention to me begins to drift. Over the next few years, Dan’s career rises meteorically. He leaves the house before I wake up and returns when I am asleep. Our bond wanes even as our possessions and bank accounts grow. I slowly regret joining my life to this man, whom I barely know.
What joined us was law school. Perhaps I could have resisted my wedding plans more forcefully had the date not been just weeks after graduation. It was all forward-moving continuum, like the mechanized walkways at a large airport. The question was never where are you going, but how fast can you get there. I was twenty-seven now, no “spring chicken.” My parents were tired of waiting for me to do them proud. I was getting the Jewish husband (which made Gita happy) and the Juris Doctor degree (thrilling Simon), with them and for them.
My parents stand, small and modest, in the faux-medieval courtyard outside my dorm. It is only a short time before their daughter’s name will be read by a stentorious voice, declaring her among the chosen few graduating Yale Law School. SONIA (named for his dead mother). JUDITH (a double-naming, for her brothers Jacob and Israel). TAITZ. Mr. and Mrs. Taitz, survivors, will now have a child who will speak for them, petition for them, write the letter to avert the next pogrom.
Resplendent in my cap and gown, puffed full of great job offers and the general air of privilege that is Yale, I notice how old and fragile they look. How did this happen? My father always looked a bit gray, but even my mother seems less rosy, and her shoes look clunky, almost orthopedic. Did they age while I was away from them at Oxford? Did my being so far away hurt them? Had I come home enough during the last years of law school? How had I let my kindees down like this?
Robert Sargent Shriver III is there, a warm and witty Kennedy scion known to all as Bobby, with whom I have developed a sweet friendship. He calls me “champ,” and I love his boyish kindness. His sister Maria, not yet a TV correspondent, holds a movie camera, filming her brother and the surrounding scene of graduates and their parents. I can hear her narrating, her voice bright, amused and energetic. Bobby’s parents are there, President Kennedy’s remarkable sister Eunice, and Robert Sargent Shriver Jr., founder of the Peace Corps. All the other parents, not just the Shrivers, seem to have smooth hair. The women seem blonde, with hairbands, the men, white-haired and tall.
“Sonialeh!”
The word is trilled in three high notes. I turn to see my mother approaching, offering me a battered brown banana in crinkly, used tinfoil. She sweetly waves her linen hanky, which is embroidered with pansies. This is the sort of handkerchief she would wet with her own spit, holding my chin to wipe dirt off me during my childhood.
“Sonialeh! Do you want a good nice banana? Take a piece!”
She actually says this in Yiddish:
“Vilst du a gute shayne banan? Nem a shtick!”
“Not right now,” I say, wondering if Maria Shriver is filming this. Hopefully, she will think that my mother is saying something intellectual and appropriate to the occasion. What does she know from Yiddish? Words like nem a shtick could never have emerged from the mouths of Sarge and Eunice.
My father wears his gray straw hat with the feather, the kind he always wore to visit me up at camp. He is so proud of me today; his carriage is straight as a soldier’s.
“Smile, Sonialeh,” says my mother, and she snaps a picture of me.
The photo, which I see later, reveals my feelings: though of course smiling, I am constricted, ashamed of my own parents. I also feel guilty at being annoyed with the good people who gave me all my opportunities. Whose own schooling was cut short. Who slaved for me. I am not merely ambivalent. I am multivalent.
At least I have done right by them and graduated. They are proud of their daughter, wearing not only the law school mortarboard and gown (embellished with royal purple), but a sapphire and diamond engagement ring. They are thrilled that she is finally going to marry a Jewish guy, a law graduate, too, from a good family. Dan’s parents do not find mine odd, or different. They know other Holocaust survivors; their own parents came over from Poland and Russia. They have heard the accents before.
Even the graduation speaker is a Holocaust survivor—it is Elie Wiesel, who survived the war as a teenager and wrote about it in unforgettable prose in books like Night and The Gates of the Forest. This man will ultimately win a Nobel Peace Prize, but that day I hear someone mocking his name on the program, pronouncing it “Weasel.”
“Elly Weasel? Is that like Elly Clampett married Pop Goes the Weasel?”
He actually laughs, this graduate who happens to be a Jew from a prominent, though assimilated, Washingtonian family. I want to hit him on the head with my mortarboard, and I want Maria to get it on tape.
It is in this crappy, defeated, and pugnacious mood that I marry Dan Greenleaf.
Reparations and Repairs
THERE HAD BEEN ONE MORE defeat before the wedding. Several months before, I had written to Paul, telling him of my engagement. I confessed to him that I was not really certain about the marriage—that I didn’t love Dan the way I loved him, that (despite the stew recipes from Mali) Dan did not have the passion, the wildness, the freedom in him that Paul had. This letter was, to mix Catholic metaphors with a Protestant paramour and a Jewish fiancé, a Hail Mary pass. I’d wanted Paul to stop the wedding. I’d wanted him to step forth, as though on the stage, and bellow: No! You can’t! Think of our love! You can’t marry this man, albeit Jewish and a Harvard/Yale grad, just to please your parents!
My letter to Paul is the tapping of a convict in a cell. Here under duress. Please come and rescue. Paul does not write back. I try to remember only the good of him, the part that loved me, not the one that threw my things out of the window of Staircase 7. What had his parents actually said to him? “What is she doing with you? A Jew? From New York? What is she playing at?”
My mother had asked me the same questions. “A goy? From England? Don’t you know he will one day get very drunk and maybe beat you?”
In the summer between my two years at Oxford, I had come to see my parents in Jerusalem, where they were vacationing. We sat on a balcony in the evening, enjoying hot tea and cool breezes. Beyond us lay a vista of white stones and evergreens, palm trees and golden domes. It wa
s paradise; it felt like love and peace and reconciliation. And in that spirit, I tried to tell them about my new friend Paul, whose connection to me seemed to negate that rigid “vow” of only a few years ago.
“I have met someone totally wonderful.”
“Oh?” My mother perks up, excited. Having not married my normal college boyfriend, the adorable and Jewish Jacob, I am rarely the source of nachas for her. She has nothing to say to her friends, whose own daughters are not only marrying but having children. When they ask about me, she is silent. Yale Law and Oxford mean nothing to her. If she had built me up from scratch, she would have had a daughter who taught school for a few years (lower grades), then had a few children for Bubbe (now it would be her, Gita) to feed and kiss and squeeze. But this daughter of hers went her own way, like a real crazy.
“I think this man is one of the special people on the earth,” I say, more to my father than her. “Special” is one of his words, not hers.
“The ones who make the earth a better place, who sustain its goodness, who tip the balance.” There is a Jewish legend about the Lamed-Vavniks—the Thirty-Six—meaning that at any given time, there are thirty-six saintly people alive and among us, in recognition of whom God refrains from destroying the world, even at its worst moments.