Hold on to the Sun

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

OTHER BOOKS IN THE REUBEN/RIFKIN SERIES

edited by Rhea Tregbov

by Judith Katzir

by Joyce Zonana

by Esther David

by Jennifer Rosner

 

 

 

The Reuben/Rifkin Jewish Women Writers Series, established in 2006 by Elaine Reuben, honors her parents, Albert G. and Sara I. Reuben. It remembers her grandparents, Susie Green and Harry Reuben, Bessie Goldberg and David Rifkin, known to their parents by Yiddish names, and recalls family on several continents, many of whose names and particular stories are now lost. Literary works in this series, embodying and connecting varieties of Jewish experiences, will speak for them, as well, in the years to come.

 

Founded in 1997, the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute (HBI), whose generous grants also sponsor this series, develops fresh ways of thinking about Jews and gender worldwide by producing and promoting scholarly research and artistic projects. Brandeis professors Shulamit Reinharz and Sylvia Barack Fishman are the founding director and codirector, respectively, of HBI.

The book before us, which gathers together fiction, poetry, and essays, is a work of art of the highest quality.The theme ranging across the entire volume is the indelible mark left by the Second World War and the Holocaust.

Michal Govrin was born in Israel, but her mother’s family, including her first husband and their son, were murdered in the Holocaust. Surviving, she transmitted to her daughter not only the horror of the times, but also the strength and courage needed in saving lives during the war, and in its aftermath.

This work joins the few serious books that try through artistic means to face the unspeakable.

—Aharon Appelfeld

WON’T YOU SEE

Won’t you see that I am carried to you on a sea of death
Not on the Styx—that noble river in a marble inferno
No Charon poles the raft
On my cheeks still lie the curls of the brother
In whose death I live
His breath is the wind in my hair

 

Won’t you hear, in our throats’ echoes, the silence
The cry that does not relent, does not release—
Of the heads
From whose number a hand was left
To knead our lives

 

Won’t you see
Lining up behind our faces
The trains that have carried us
On a journey ordained from then and there
Their whistle is our canopy
A pillar of smoke leading us
To the far ends of the wind

THE JOURNEY TO POLAND

(ESSAY)

In late October 1975, when I was in my early twenties and completing my doctorate in Paris, I went to Poland. An almost impossible journey then for a young woman, alone, with an Israeli passport, at the time when there were no diplomatic relations between the Eastern Bloc and Israel. It was only because of a French-Jewish friend, who turned me into a “representative of France” at the International Theater Festival in Wroclaw [Breslau], that I received a special visa for a week.

The night before the trip, when everything was ready, I called my parents in Tel Aviv and told them. I asked my shocked mother for the exact address of her family home in Krakow. Only later that winter, when I visited Israel, did I understand what profound emotion took hold of my mother’s few surviving friends and relatives from Krakow when they heard of the trip.

A week later I returned to Paris. For twenty-four hours, I closed myself in my student apartment in the Latin Quarter, far from the Parisian street scenes, and feverishly wrote to my parents. A letter of more than twenty pages. First thoughts, a summary of the rapid notes taken on the trip.The words groped for another language, for a different level of discourse.

That year, as every year, a commemoration for the Jewish community of Krakow was held in the auditorium of my high school in Tel Aviv. News of my trip and of my letter reached the members of the community, and they wanted to read it aloud at the commemoration. I agreed, and after it was commandeered from the family circle, I submitted it for publication to the literary supplement of the newspaper,
Davar
, with the title, “Letter from The Regions of Delusion,” the expression “Regions of Delusion” borrowed from the title of a parable attributed to the Ba’al Shem Tov.
¹
Aside from some peripheral changes of style, that text appears in the following pages.

 

Traveling to Poland in 75 was not part of the social phenomenon it is today. The group definition of “second-generation Holocaust survivors” hadn’t yet been coined. You had to find out everything by yourself: how to plan the trip, how to feel, and how to talk about it. The letter to my parents
began a long process of formulation. Even the choice of parents as the addressees of an intimate discourse was not the norm then.

Today, that trip seems like a geological rift that changed my emotional and intellectual landscape, and placed its seal on my writing. Yet the “journey to Poland” didn’t begin in 75, but in early childhood, in Tel Aviv in the 1950s. Distant shocks preceded the rift.

 

The “journey to Poland” began in that journey “to there”—the journey every child makes to the regions before she was born, to the unknown past of her parents, to the secret of her birth. My journey to Mother’s world began long before I “understood” who my mother, Regina-Rina Poser-Laub-Govrin, was, before I “knew” that she survived the “Holocaust,” that she once had another husband, that I had a half-brother. But there was the other “knowledge,” that knowledge of pre-knowledge and of pre-language, transmitted in the thousand languages that connect a child and her parents without words. A knowledge that lay like a dark cloud on the horizon. Terrifying and seductive.

For years the journey proceeded on a double track. One outside the home and one inside it. And there was an almost complete separation between the two. As if everything that was said outside had nothing to do with Mother. Outside, incomprehensible, violent stories about the “Holocaust” were forged upon the little girl’s consciousness. In school
assemblies, in lessons for Holocaust Memorial Day, and later on in lessons of “Annals of the Jewish People,” which were taught separately from “history” classes, and described events that happened in “another, Jewish time and place,” where King David and small-town Jews strolled among the goats and railroad cars of the ghetto. Even the Eichmann trial, on the radio in school and at home, was an event you had to listen to, but it had no real relation to Mother. (And even if things were said about it then at home, I succeeded in repressing them from consciousness.)

At home, there were bright stories about Krakow, the boulevards, the Hebrew high school, the cook, the maids, about skiing and summer holidays in the mountains, in Zakopane, and sometimes on Friday evening, Mother and I would dance a Krakowiak
²
on the big rug in the living room. And there was Mother’s compulsive forced-labor house cleaning, and her periods of rage and despair when I didn’t straighten up my room (what I called “prophecies of rage” with self-defensive cunning), there was the everlasting, frightened struggle to make me eat, and there was the disconnected silence that enveloped her when she didn’t get out of bed on Yom Kippur. And there was the photo album “from there” at the bottom of Mother’s lingerie drawer, with unfamiliar images, and also pictures of a boy, Marek. And stories about him, joyful, a baby in a cradle on the balcony,
a beautiful child on the boulevard. And a tender memory of the
goggle-moggle
³
with sugar he loved so much (and only years later did I understand the terrifying circumstances of that). And there were the weekly get-togethers at Aunt Tonka’s house (who was never introduced as the widow of Mother’s older brother who was murdered), get-togethers so different from the humorous, confident gatherings of Father’s family, who immigrated as pioneers in the 1920s and held leadership positions in the establishment of the state. At night, in Aunt Tonka’s modest apartment, I was the only little girl—“a blonde, she looks like a shiksa”—in the middle of the Polish conversation of “friends from there.” And every year there were also the visits of Schindler, when you could go all dressed up with Mother’s cousin to greet him at the Dan Hotel. And once, when Mother and I were coming back from downtown on bus number 22, Mother stopped next to the driver and blurted a short sentence at him for no reason.The driver, a gray-haired man in a jacket, was silent and turned his head away. “He was a
ka-po
,”
⁴
she said when we got off, pronouncing the pair of incomprehensible syllables gravely. All of that was part of the cloud that darkened the horizon, yes, but had nothing to do with what was mentioned at school or on the radio.

Poland and Krakow weren’t “real” places either, no more than King Solomon’s Temple, for instance. I remember how stunned I was when I went with Mother to the film
King Matthew the First
, based on the children’s story by Janusz Korszak which I had read in Hebrew. In the film, the children spoke Polish! And it didn’t sound like the language of the friends at Aunt Tonka’s house. “Nice Polish,” Mother explained, “of Poles.” Poles?They apparently do exist somewhere.

Yet, a few events did form a first bridge between the outside and inside. One day, in a used bookstore in south Tel Aviv, Mother bought an album of black and white photos of Krakow; “Because the photos are beautiful,” she emphasized, “they have artistic value.” And indeed, the sights of the renaissance city in four seasons flowed before my eyes. A beautiful, tranquil city, full of green trees and towers. Jews? No, there were no Jews in that album, maybe only a few alleys “on the way to Kazimierz.”