The Watchmaker's Daughter: A Memoir
Read The Watchmaker's Daughter: A Memoir Online
Authors: Sonia Taitz
Table of Contents
Prologue: The Man Who Fixed Time
Praise for
The Watchmaker’s Daughter
“A heartbreaking memoir of healing power and redeeming devotion, Sonia Taitz’s
The Watchmaker’s Daughter
has the dovish beauty and levitating spirit of a psalm.
The suffering and endurance of Taitz’s parents—Holocaust “death camp graduates” who met at the Lithuanian Jewish Survivors’ Ball in a New York hotel (imagine Steven Spielberg photographing that dance-floor tableau)—form the shadow-hung backdrop of a childhood in a high-octane, postwar America where history seems weightless and tragedy a foreign import, a Hollywood paradise of perky blondes, Pepsodent smiles, and innocent high-school hijinks where our author and heroine longs to fit in. Although the wonder years that
Taitz scrupulously, tenderly, beautifully, often comically renders
aren’t that far removed from us, they and the Washington Heights she grew up in,
the shop where her father repaired watches like a physician tending to the sick tick of time itself,
the grand movie houses where the image of Doris Day sunshined the giant screen, have acquired the ache and poignance of a lost, Kodachrome age.
A past is here reborn and tenderly restored with the love and absorption of a daughter with a final duty to perform a last act of fidelity. ”
—James Wolcott,
vanity Fair
columnist and author of
Lucking Out
“Sonia Taitz’s memoir of growing up the daughter of a master watch repairman who survived the Holocaust is also a
haunting meditation on time itself.
Taitz writes with
a painter’s eye and a poet’s voice.”
—Mark Whitaker, author of
My Long Trip Home
“Sonia Taitz’s memoir of coming of age in postwar America is
unusually gentle, loving, and insightful.
This book’s understanding of family dynamics and the realities of the American Dream will resonate with us all.”
—Joshua Halberstam, author of
A Seat at the Table
“Sonia Taitz captures time in this deeply moving memoir
of a woman’s journey back to herself.
The Watchmaker’s Daughter
is written with a wise eye and a generous heart. Unforgettable!” —Christina Haag, author of
Come to the Edge
Praise for
In the King’s Arms
“Beguiling ... Taitz zigzags among her culturally disparate characters, zooming in on their foibles with elegance and astringency.”
—
The New York Times Book Review
“In the province of gifted poets, playwrights and novelists.”
—
ForeWord Reviews
“I thought often of Evelyn Waugh—the smart talk, the fey Brits, country houses, good clothes, lineage for centuries . . . Even the heavy moments have verve and wit.”
—Jesse Kornbluth,
vanity Fair
essayist and editor of
HeadButler.com
“In her gloriously rendered novel,
In the King’s Arms,
Sonia Taitz writes passionately and wisely about outsiders, and what happens when worlds apart slam into each other.”
—Betsy Carter, author of
The Puzzle King
and
Nothing to Fall Back On
Also by Sonia Taitz
FICTION
In the King’s Arms
NONFICTION
Mothering Heights
PLAYS
Whispered Results
Couch Tandem
The Limbo Limbo
Darkroom
Domestics
Cut Paste Delete Restore
Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost, to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
EMMA LAZARUS
Inscription at base of the Statue of Liberty,
New York Harbor
To the tempest-tossed,
and
to their children
Prologue: The Man Who Fixed Time
Y
OU COULD SAY THAT my father was a watchmaker by trade, but that would be like saying that Nijinsky liked to dance. Fixing watches was not only his livelihood but his life. This skill had saved him when he had been imprisoned at the death camp of Dachau, during the Second World War, and he continued to fix watches until the day he died. Simon Taitz was nothing less than a restorer of time. And I was his daughter, born to continue in his lifework—restoration and repair.
The minutes in my childhood home went by slowly and deliberately. They were accounted for by an endless series of clocks. Like the burghers of some old village, they sat around me as I listened to their secrets. Some kept the true hour; others were broken, chiming irregularly with dings and false, elaborate windups that led to weird silence. A few bombastically tolled the hours with notes that spread and reverberated. I was mesmerized by the whirly rotations within glass bell jars. I loved and feared the old cuckoos, with pendulums like overgrown Bavarian acorns. Clang and tick, pickaxe and wheel, a real hurly-burly.
My favorite was the one that sat on the breakfront in our apartment. Despite its size, this small mantel piece boomed throughout the house like an eight-foot grandfather clock. “Westminster chimes,” my father proudly explained as he wound it, a beautiful British diapason of notes, sometimes long, sometimes short, and ending with a hearty, chest-full
boom-boom-boom.
My father’s chest was large and round, his voice deep and resonant. I often thought that clock spoke for him and the dignified truth inside him. Time was company; it never left you. A look at a pleasant, numbered face, and you’d practically hear it say: “Yes, I’m here. See? I’m still marking the minutes. You can count on me.”
When I think of my father’s face, I see the loupe, the watchmaker’s special magnifying glass. It was a small tube of black-painted metal worn on one eye, a mini-telescope that fit into the optical orbit as though it were part of the skull. Through the glass, my father surveyed a microcosmic ward of ailing tickers. His domain opened up with the tiny click of a pocket-watch door, releasing a magical world in which minute gears spun clockwise, counterclockwise, and back and forth, each with its own rhythm. Daily, he sat at his wooden workbench, presiding over the internal secrets of clocks, each revealing its tiny pulse as he restored it to the natural, universal order.
I thought of my father as a magical man and was in awe of him.
“See what’s inside? Still alive,” he’d say, opening the back of a pocket watch. My father could reverse time; my father could reverse fate. He could fix a broken face, a cracked and faded lens, and make it clear and true again. He could make a dead heart beat.
Though the phrase
Arbeit macht frei
was the notorious banner welcoming doomed souls to slavery in Auschwitz, my father did, in fact, feel freed by his work. It relaxed him into a state of patient grace. By the time I was born, he had been fixing clocks and watches for nearly three decades. Simon had learned his trade back in Lithuania, apprenticing to a master as a boy of fourteen. His father had died when he was three, when Cossacks, rampaging through his village, shot the young miller, leaving behind a young widow and three helpless children. This story was my first narrative.
“Poor Bubbe Sonia!” I would say about my paternal grandmother, after whom I was named.
“‘Poor’ nothing,” my father would answer. “She was a special woman, strong and brave.”
This Sonia Taitz, the original one, buried her husband on their land, sold the millstones, and fled their riverside home, escaping into what my father called “deep Russia.” I always imagined a dark, Slavic forest, and a young, Snow White—like woman, surrounded by menacing branches. Bright eyes in the night, sadists and murderers watching her and her three little children, my father, as in a fairy tale, the youngest. Her favorite.
The eldest, a bookish, lanky boy called Aaron, was sent away to wealthy relatives. They were not kind to him, and ultimately he ran away to Palestine and did manual labor with other raw immigrants. The middle child, Paula, was blue-eyed, dimpled, and flirtatious. After marrying hot and young, she and her husband were sent to Siberia by the Communists.
Simon was left alone to support his mother. A gifted athlete, he enjoyed the Lithuanian winters, skating around Kovno (as the Jews called Kaunas), racing through woods and villages, flying forward into his manhood. Though he would rather have studied and become a doctor, he considered himself lucky to find that he loved his trade, and by his early twenties was a master himself, with a workshop and trained apprentices of his own. When inducted into the Lithuanian army, he enlisted with enthusiasm and loved the physicality of it, the discipline. On his return, flush with confidence, he opened a watch store, then another; he bought himself a Harley Davidson, top of the line. But when the Communists invaded, he was forced to “nationalize” his business, as well as the Harley. Still, he survived, he thrived; he supported his widowed mother. In the evenings, he danced at parties.
When, however, the Nazis invaded Lithuania, Simon began planning ways of escape. Good Christian friends had offered him documents, and he had considered booking passage to Australia with his mother. She, however, was frightened of starting her life again so far away. So he stayed behind with her.
“That’s why she died, right?” I was trying to figure out causes and avoidable, fixable mistakes. He had almost died as well; he was one of the very few Jews from his part of the world who had not.
“Who knows why she died?”
“No, Daddy, she had to keep moving. She got stuck!”
“I, too, my little Sonia. We all got stuck somewhere. But by a miracle, God heard my prayers, and I survived.”
My father considered himself lucky to have become a watchmaker. Lawyers, businessmen, and even doctors went to the gas chambers, but his humble, practical skill was needed. This portable trade saved his life. Simon had been assigned to fix the time for the Nazis, who prized punctuality. As he explained to me, Germans respected his ability, eventually giving him his own workshop within the camp. A part of him reveled in this odd esteem, even (or especially) coming from his enemies and captors.