The Watchmaker's Daughter: A Memoir (10 page)

I loved running in the yard with the athletic Bunny Milcher, whose American-born parents weren’t religious at all, who went to Miami Beach every winter and dove from the high board, and whose main wish in life, unlike mine, was to be “average and happy.” I loved her strong legs and arms and thick straight dirty-blonde hair, so unlike the frail and curly haired Esther Plaut.

Most of all, I loved the rabbis, who (like my father) beamed with true joy, a warmth that glowed like pure love, when I (or any other student) grasped some bit of knowledge. We were part of something, together. School was
shul
to me, a synagogue, a temple of magnificence. And the import of it all! Yeshiva was about survival—exiled from country to country, unable for centuries to own land, unsure of loss everywhere, all we had was what we could carry in our heads and hearts. We knew that the verses must be passed on, the traditions kept, the candles lit. The light of knowledge could, without diminishing, illuminate the world, as God had done with his very first words.

Each school day was a Sabbath to me, a paradise (both Hebrew words). Here was a place not only of intellectual illumination, but spiritual rest. My first teacher, Rabbi Lichtiger, used to hug his students. Each morning we went to him, shyly, as we entered the room, for this embrace. His very name, Lichtiger, meant
full of light,
and he held us as though each was a delicate sunbeam banishing darkness, our very beings miracles of survival.

The Holocaust was often on Rabbi Lichtiger’s mind. One hushed, snowy day in winter, he told us about his hero, Janusz Korczak, a Jewish teacher in Poland who had been so close to his little students that he had entered the gas chambers with them, despite connections that would have enabled him to be spared. Janusz had refused this help, saying that he could not bear to let his kinderlach, his children, experience any more fear than they had to. He, at least, would not abandon them, and the little that he could do to comfort them, he would.

If Janusz Korczak had raised me, we would have talked about flowers and butterflies, even during the Holocaust. He would not have taken it upon himself to fill my mind with horror, as my parents did, when the Holocaust was actually over. He would not have asked me questions but given me answers. He would have taught me that love is stronger than fear. But just hearing about him gave that concept entry into my mind.

Rabbi Lichtiger was a “Janusz” to me, a safe core within a harsh world. He realized, as my parents sometimes did not, that we were just children, and that nothing was required of us other than to exist, survive, and even enjoy life. Sometimes he gave us candies when we learned an especially hard verse in Hebrew. In the past, we learned, fathers and rebbes used to put honey on their children’s fingers as they learned the biblical letters, so that they would forever associate learning with sweetness.

I was also comforted by Rashi, the biblical interpreter. An eleventh century medieval scholar who had lived in France and Germany, Rashi’s life had been devoted to a simple yet profound interpretation of the Torah, verse by verse. Without him, many of the passages made no sense. Rashi would explain the meaning beneath these surface mysteries. He was my first literary critic and guide, and I deeply appreciated the role he had taken in life, that of “explainer.”

Still, even with his help, the Torah often seemed rigid. Boundaries and opposites seemed to be key themes in traditional Biblical Judaism. When the Sabbath is over, for example, the Havdalah prayer is sung. The word means separation.

Hamavdil bain Kodesh Lechol

(He who separates between the sacred and the profane)

Bain Or Lechoshech

(Between light and darkness)

Bain Yisroel La’amim

(Between Israel and other nations)

Bain Yom Hashvi’i L’Shesheth Yemai Hama’aseh

(Between the Seventh Day and the six days of Creation) ...

That same binary system—those who follow and those who don’t, those who are holy and those who are profane—showed up again in a magazine I used to pick up in the yeshiva’s library,
Highlights for Children.
I found it fairly biblical in its judgments of two imaginary boys called Goofus and Gallant. (You could easily call them Cain and Abel, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau.)

While Goofus would not say “please” or “thank you,” Gallant would be very polite. Goofus, like Esau wolfing his mess of pottage, would reach across the table and grab. Gallant would say, “Would you please pass the sugar?”

I made up some of my own:

Goofus eats shrimp cocktail. Gallant says, “No, thank you, that’s not exactly kosher.”

Goofus worships idols (he bows to little plaster saints in his room). Gallant is faithful to a God who is everywhere, who has no form and requires the leap of imagination.

Goofus goes shopping on the Sabbath day. Gallant goes to services, then eats
cholent
(a heavy bean stew), naps, and later enjoys a leisurely
shaptzier
with his parents, greeting all the neighbors and sharing his accomplishments with them. He says “hello” politely to Mrs. Friedman.

Goofus likes to shoot birds with BB guns. Gallant is kind to the mother bird, and if he needs the eggs, he sends her away so she will not feel anguish. He will never eat a hunted animal—they must all be ritually slaughtered, with a blessing. Their blood, which is the soul, must not be tasted.

Goofus fails school and can never conjugate the Hebrew verbs. Gallant becomes a doctor—no, a specialist. In his spare time he reads the Talmud in the original Aramaic.

Goofus lives in Riverdale and doesn’t know even which day is Sukkot. Gallant knows, and eats challah in the sukkah with his parents.

When I ask Rabbi Lichtiger about all these rigid judgments and separations I see in Judaism, he thinks about it for a minute, adjusts his black, silky yarmulka, and says.

“How wonderful that you ask,
maydeleh.
The meaning of the word
Israel
is
wrestles with God.
Do you remember how we read about Jacob wrestling with the angel?”

“Yes.”

“That is what the greatest rabbis did. God loves questions.”

Rabbi Lichtiger was a big door-opener in my life. All I had were questions. Some of them were my parents’, but increasingly, more of them were mine.

Beauty Queen

T
O ME, the most important holiday of all was the postbiblical one called Purim. There was once a king in Persia called Ahasuerus. He’s kind of stupid, and kind of a drunk, but he’s very powerful, and his kingdom is enormous. When his own wife does not obey him, he sends for all the beautiful women in the land, looking for a new bride. Amongst these women is Esther, who just happens to be secretly Jewish. Ahasuerus picks her to be his new queen.

Imagine that. I did.

“No, not the blonde. Not the redhead. That one with the light-blue eyes, nah. Wait, wait—I see someone I like! Look at that black hair! Those big dark eyes. And she seems to be quite intelligent, too!”

“Yes! I’ll be very helpful to you! I get a lot of stars! Pick me!”

“I do—I pick
you
!”

Meanwhile, the king’s advisor, Haman, decides that the Jews are bad and dangerous, and must be annihilated. They draw lots (
purim
), and choose the date for this genocide.

Esther, learning about this plan, bravely runs to the king. Esther knows that it is dangerous to enter the royal chambers unless Ahasuerus has allowed it by showing his golden staff, but she enters anyway.

She finds him in a loving mood.

“Why, Esther, my beauty, what is wrong?”

“What is wrong is that Jewish people are going to all be killed soon! And no one is going to stop it! God might be busy, you never know! Maybe
you
should do something!”

And he says, “But Esther, my love, why do
you
care?”

And she tells him, “I care because these are my people. I, the woman you love, am actually a Jew myself,” she says, “a Jew like my mother’s father, the one with the blonde moustache and cornflower-blue eyes.”

The king does not dip her head in the trough over and over, nor send her or her relatives to their deaths in Dachau. Instead, he immediately saves the Jews and sends their enemy Haman to his death. Because of Esther, all the Jews in Persia are saved. Purim is celebrated on the day that the Jews were meant to be destroyed. It is a happy day of mischief and masquerade. Jews are even allowed, no, urged, to get drunk on that day.

At Yeshiva Soloveitchik, every girl dressed up as Esther on Purim. Since we were all fairly poor, we’d portray our beauty queen in our mother’s lipstick. Bunny Milcher wore a hot magenta, like Jayne Mansfield. I wore Revlon’s Cherries in the Snow, and was sure that I was transformed into an irresistible future queen when I rubbed it over my lips (perhaps a bit of tooth as well). Then we girls would add a bobbly beaded necklace (in the Wilma Flintstone vein) and a golden paper crown with square, plastic gems in it. Some preferred a woolen, paisley scarf slug over their hair like babushkas, tied under the chin. Bunny added sparkling white cat-eye sunglasses without the lenses, broken shades her mother had once worn in Miami. Glamorous.

The boys wore paper eye-masks, which, with their gold and purple swirls surrounding the eyeholes, were meant to evoke the exoticism of the famous king of Persia. Most also wore their clothes backward, a witty fillip to the art of masquerade. Buttons down the back of a boy’s shirt or cardigan! Like a girl! You can just imagine the merriment.

One day, I mused, tar-head crushed under my cardboard crown, I too would capture the heart of a savior, my own potentate. I would make him love me and my people—and that is how our suffering would end. All I had to do was grow up and become beautiful. Which was not easy, because I was developing into quite a scrawny and pale girl, with thick glasses and buck teeth. When I’d keep asking my father if I was beautiful, he’d still answer, annoyingly, “There are more important things than beauty.”

What, in heaven’s name, what?

A Lament for Esau

M
y BROTHER’S BIRTH was a grand consolation to my mother and grandmother. Gita had lost not only a father but two teenage brothers, who had been shot by the Nazis while still in the Kovno ghetto. So this little boy, Manny, who bore her father’s name (embodied in the first initial “M”) and carried his faded memory in a boy’s healthy body—what joy!

On the other hand, Manny tended to irritate my touchy, proud father. He was a spirited boy, full of humor, sass, and challenge. Nowadays, he might have been labeled “hyperactive” before he finished a single zigzagged lap around the block, but at that time, he was simply a typical, mischievous boy. My father, however, saw him through God’s judgmental eyes. He had bought into Judaism’s dualities—day and night, Jacob and Esau, right and wrong, us and them. My brother, to him, was “them.”

Having known no father himself, he saw his boy as Esau: threatening, wild, and primitive. Dr. Benjamin Spock was on most night tables in those days, but not on my parents’. Thus, unlike the indulgent and stage-sensitive developmental pediatrician, my father saw unique defiance in his son’s every age-appropriate kick and raspberry. What was he to make of a little boy who seemed to learn about life from Dennis the Menace (a true paradigm of hyperactivity), Huck Finn, or Howdy Doody—who knew, and relished knowing, that he was “just a kid”?

“Hey! You’re hurting me!” my brother would say. “And I’m just a kid!”

What did the phrase
just a kid
mean to someone like my father? He had never been “just a kid.” After his father had been shot by the Cossacks, my father had had to be unwaveringly strong for his mother. There was no part of his life that had not witnessed tragedy and demanded sacrifice and resolve. So he had little experience with children, other than assuming that they obeyed their revered parents without question, as he had done.

My father could not afford books for school. An athletic, resourceful boy who ice-skated everywhere in his frozen Baltic village, he was often forced to lend his skates in order to borrow a book and try to catch up. Even with his two older siblings becoming independent, he saw that he was a drain on his mother. So by age thirteen, instead of preparing for a Bar Mitzvah, he settled down to the discipline and promise of hard work. Later, he enrolled in the Lithuanian army and thrived under the rigors that, he felt, made him equal to all other men, rich or poor, Jewish or not. He believed in sacrifice, in unwavering routines. He had loved the army, where, he often told me, the officers complimented him on his being a good soldier “for a Jew.”

How equipped was he to deal with American children, nourished and spoiled and played with and idolized? From the start, when my brother began to shout “No!”—sometimes punctuating his resistance by jumping up and down—my father took his little boy’s bravado as another mortal threat.

“WHAT did I hear?”

“You heared me say NO, Daddy!”

“YOU—DARE—say ‘NO’—to ME???”

“Yes, Daddy,” said my poor, normal, American brother, a kid with whom any other less exhausted dad would have loved to play catch.

“Yes Daddy what?”

“YES I Say NO to YOU!!”

A beating followed, and would follow for years (for neither would stand down), ceasing only when my father’s arms were tired. This was a process called
shmitz
in Yiddish, a cognate for the word
smite
(which the biblical God was often wont to do). It was methodical, brutal, and sad.

Yiddish has several words for hitting. There is the
frask
—a sort of slap (I received
frasks
from my mother for being “fresh,” but never on the face). There is a
klahp—
more of a one-time blow. And then there is the far more serious
shmitz
—implying a more sustained beating, perhaps with a belt (the dreaded
rimmen
). My father had no need for the weaponry of buckles. His own massive hands drove the fierce message home.