Hold on to the Sun (2 page)

At the age of ten, my parents sent me for private lessons in English, because “it’s important to know languages.” And thus I came to Mrs. Spiro, a gentle woman from London, married to Doctor Spiro, Mother’s classmate from the Hebrew high school in Krakow. One day, when the lesson was over, Mrs. Spiro accompanied me to the edge of the yard of their house on King Solomon Street. I recall the sidewalk with big paving stones as she talked with me. Maybe I
had complained before about Mother’s strict demands, or maybe she started talking on her own.

“Of course, you know what your mother went through, she was in the Holocaust. You have to understand her, the tensions she has sometimes,” she said to me directly.

That was an earthquake. A double one.The understanding that Mother was in “the Holocaust,” that awful thing they talk about in school assemblies, with the “six million.” And that I, a ten-year-old girl, had to or even could “understand Mother.” That is, to leave the symbiosis of mother and daughter constituting one expanded body, to cut myself off from my child’s view, and see Mother as a separate person, with her own fate and reasons for moods that didn’t depend only on me, or on my certain guilt. I remember how, at that moment, facing the spotted paving stones, I understood both those things all at once. Like a blinding blow.

Then came high school in Tel Aviv. Since both the principal and the assistant principal were graduates of the Hebrew High School in Krakow, their former classmates in that high school, including my mother, sent their children to study there. At that school, influenced by the principal and his assistant, both of them historians, there was an intense awareness of the Jewish past and life in the Diaspora—a rare dimension in the Zionist-Israeli landscape of Diaspora denial—and Gideon Hausner, the prosecutor in the Eichmann trial, initiated a “club to immortalize the Jewish community of Krakow.” A group of students met with members
of the Krakow community, who taught them the history of the city and the Jewish community before the destruction. The club also heard testimony from the Holocaust, with a special (exclusive?) emphasis on the activities of the Jewish underground. The women’s revolt in the Gestapo prison, led by “Justina,”
⁵
was also dramatized and performed for the community members on the annual memorial day. (“Holocaust celebrations,” as the memorials were ironically called by members of the drama club.)

I was a member of the “club to immortalize,” and I also played a Polish cook in the performance of the history of the uprising. But in fact, a partition still remained between me and the others, a zone of silence so dense that, to this day, I don’t know which of the children of the Krakow community members were children of Holocaust survivors and which were children of parents who emigrated to Palestine before the war. If there were any children of survivors, no bond was formed between us. We didn’t talk about it. We remained isolated, caged in the sealed biographies of our parents.

There were other bridges too, almost subterranean ones, which, as far as I recall, were not formulated explicitly. The bond with the literature teacher, the poet, Itamar Yaoz-Kest, who survived as a child with his mother in Bergen-Belsen. In high school, there was only his influence on
my literary development and a sense of closeness, a sort of secret look between “others.” Only later did I read his poems of “the double root” about his split childhood “there” and in Israel, and his story describing, as he put it, a little girl who looked like me, the daughter of survivors. And there was the love affair with the boy in my class, whose delicate smile on his drooping lower lip looked like the “different” smile of the literature teacher. His father, the lawyer, submitted reparations claims to Germany in those days—close enough to the seductive-dangerous realm. My complicated relations with that boy paralleled the shock of discovery of Kafka; and along with the tempest of feelings of fifteen-year-olds, that forbidden, denied, inflamed relation had a pungent mixture of eros and sadism, a tenderness and an attraction to death, and above all, metaphysical dimensions that pierced the abyss of dark feelings which somehow was also part of “there.”

 

In my childhood, when Mother was an omnipotent entity within the house, I couldn’t “understand” her. Later, when she became the authority to rebel against, the enzyme necessary to cut the fruit off from the branch erected a dam of alienation and enmity between us; I couldn’t identify with her, with her humanity. There had to be a real separation. I had to live by myself. To go through the trials alone. To listen slowly to what was concealed.

(An amazing example of the layers of memory and forgetting was revealed to me as I wrote
The Name
. The only detail I borrowed in the novel from things I had heard from Mother was a story of the heroism of a woman who succeeded in escaping from Auschwitz-Birkenau, and when she was caught and taken to the Appelplatz, the roll call area, she managed to commit suicide. I also borrowed the admiring tone in which Mother spoke of the event—only later did I discover how it had served her as a model. I created a biographical-fictional character, a virtuoso pianist, and invented a name for her, Mala, which I turned into Amalia, the name of the heroine.Years later, as I was finishing the book, I came across a written description of the event in Birkenau and discovered that the name of the woman was the same as the name I had “invented,” Mala—Mala Zimetbaum.)

Then came the move to Europe, to Paris. To study for the doctorate and to write literature intensively. I went to the Paris of culture, of Rilke, of Proust, of Edith Piaf. But in 1972, soon after I arrived, the film
The Sorrow and the Pity
⁶
by Marcel Ophuls was released. When the screening ended in the cinema on the Champs-Elysées, I emerged into a different Paris, into a place where that mythical war had gone on. I understood that here, on Rue de Rivoli, beneath my garret room, German tanks had passed (ever since then
they began to inhabit my dreams); I understood that the description of the French as a nation of bold underground fighters and rescuers of Jews—a notion I had grown up with in the years of the military pact between Israel and De Gaulle’s France—was very far from reality. The clear, comforting borders between good and bad were shattered for me, and so were the simple moral judgments mobilized for ideologies. Here, far from a post-Six-Day-War-Israel, secure in her power, far from the official versions of Holocaust and heroism, a different time was in the streets, a time not completely cut off from the war years. Here, for the first time I experienced the sense of “the other.” As a Jew, as an Israeli.Wary of revealing my identity at the university that served as a center of Fatah
⁷
activities, trembling in the Metro once as I read the Israeli newspaper,
Ma’ariv
, when someone called it to my attention: “Mademoiselle, somebody spat on your jacket.”

Distance also allowed a different discourse with my parents, especially with Mother. In the weekly letters, without the daily tension of life at home, a new bond was formed, between people who were close, who were beginning to speak more openly with one another. Even my clothes in the European winter, in the “retro” style, began to look like the clothes in Mother’s old pictures from Poland, like her hairdo
in the photo next to the jeep from Hanover, when she served after the war as a commander in Aliyah B,
⁸
the Brikha,
⁹
camouflaged in a United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration uniform. Poland, Hanover, suddenly turned into places that were much closer, more present than the little state on the shores of the Mediterranean.

On the first Holocaust Memorial Day in Paris, I decided to stay in my apartment all day and to cut myself off from the street that lived by its own dates, for example, Armistice Day of World War I, the “Great War” that took place at the same time of year. I spent the day reading works on the sources of Nazism, on the roots of anti-Semitism, on the German nationalism of Wagner, rehearsals of whose
Parsifal
I had attended at the Paris Opera.

That summer, on a tour of Europe, an accident forced me to stay unexpectedly in Munich for three weeks. And then the blank spot that filled the heart of the European map for me—Germany—the blank, untouchable spot that sucked up all the evil, also fell. Here, next to the beer hall of “the Nazi buds,” where some Israelis had taken me, in what was obviously a sick gesture, there was also an opera, where Mozart was performed, and there were wonderful museums, and parks.

The forced stay in Germany and the Yom Kippur War the following autumn, which I spent in Paris facing the brightly lit Champs-Elysées while my dear ones were in mortal danger, proved to me that there is no refuge in the soothing distinctions between “then” and “now,” between “there” and “here.” And I also understood that there is no racial difference, imprinted at birth between “them” and “us,” nor can we Jews hide behind the fences of the Chosen People. And that, in every person, the murderer and the victim potentially exist, blended into one another, constantly demanding separation, every single day, with full awareness. I understood that I could no longer hide behind the collective, ready-made definitions of memory. That there would be no choice but to embark on the journey that is obstinate, lonely, and full of contradictions.

 

Germany, France, Europe: What is in that culture, in its roots, mixed with the gold of the baroque and the flickering brasses of symphonies; what is in the squares, in the churches, in the ideologies that allowed what happened? Prepared it? Didn’t prevent it? What inflamed the hatred? What repressed it under pious words of morality? What fostered it in the heart of religious belief? What prepared it in the tales of God that man told himself to justify the outbursts of his evil instincts under the disguise of
imitatio dei
?
¹⁰

And what still exists right before my eyes? Keeps on happening?

How to draw the borders between good and bad with a thin scalpel under a microscope? How to distinguish anew, here and now? All the time?

And what is the terrorizing persuasive force of tales and of their metamorphoses into theologies, ideologies? How to struggle with forgetting, with denial, without whitewashing, but also without reiterating the same stories, without inflaming the same evil instincts? How to tell responsibly?

Jarring questions that filled me, that nourished my research, my theatrical productions, my literary writing, but did not yet touch Mother’s hidden place.

 

I spent the summer of 75 between Princeton and NewYork, collecting material for my doctorate, reading the works of Rebbe Nahman of Bratzlav in the old Jewish Theological Seminary library, and in the evenings, swallowing the plethora of fringe theater, jazz, and transvestite clubs in the international bohemian life of Manhattan. And thus I met that young violinist who had fled Poland, and was working as a cabdriver. A handsome young man from Krakow. Krakow? A place where people live?! The summer romance was a way to confront the profound seduction of the past stamped in me, as well as the depths of my femininity.

One day that summer, my aunt, Mother’s sister-in-law, came to my apartment in midtown Manhattan. I knew her
vaguely from a visit she had made to Israel years before: After the death of Aunt Tonka in Tel Aviv, this aunt from Queens, the widow of Mother’s second brother who perished in the camps, was her last living close relative. She had survived Auschwitz and her young son was hidden with a Christian woman. After the war, my aunt and her son emigrated to NewYork.

That day, on the balcony on the thirtieth floor, facing the roofs of midtown Manhattan, my aunt spoke in broken English only about “then” and “there,” a here and now didn’t exist, as if we had never left there. She and the Polish pop music at night melted the last wall of resistance. Now I had no excuse not to translate my preoccupation with the subject into action, no excuse not to go to Poland.

 

In late October, after the administrative alibi was concocted in Paris, I left. Ready. And not ready at all.

I was not ready for what I would find or for what I wouldn’t find. I was not ready for the fear. The fear of returning to the strange hotel room at night, the primal fear that I would starve to death, which impelled me to eat nonstop, completely violating the rules of kashrut which I had observed ever since I came to Paris to study, eating nonkosher with the dispensation “allowed during an emergency,” that I granted myself (insolently?). Not ready for the fear that rushed me in a panic straight from the visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau to meetings with Polish artists
and bohemian parties. I was especially not ready for the complexity of my responses, for their force. For what was revealed to me in “the living laboratory” I had poured by myself. The contradictory burst of fascination and revulsion, alienation and belonging, shame and vengeance, of helplessness, of complete denial . . .

When I returned, the letter to my parents was a first attempt to look at what was revealed, to talk.The restrained language of the letter reflects the difficulty of going beyond the taboo, hoping they would understand through the silence. That different, new discourse with my parents accompanied us throughout the years until their death. A discourse of closeness, of belonging, of acceptance beyond the generational differences.

The sense of belonging—along with my parents—to the “other, Jewish story” revealed in the depths of the journey only intensified in the following years, as the doors to the centers of European culture opened to me, as I devoted myself to writing. But at the same time, the understanding that it is impossible to go on telling as if nothing had happened also grew. Understanding that, after Auschwitz, there are no more stories that do not betray, there are no more innocent stories.

 

And what about Mother’s shrouded “story”? Details continued to join together in fragments. For years, here and there, she mentioned events, some in conversations with
me, some in conversations with others, which I chanced upon. I listened when she spoke, and she spoke little. Never did I “interview” her; never did I ask. I respected her way of speaking, as well as her way of being silent. Even after I returned from Auschwitz, I didn’t think she had to report or that I had to, or could, “know.” I learned from her the lesson of telling in silence.