The Watchmaker's Daughter: A Memoir (2 page)

“The Germans admired a well-functioning machine. They loved order and discipline and I gave them that. Their watches and clocks came in broken and came out ‘ticktock’ perfect. So in some way we understood one another.”

The watchmaker’s trade was all that my father carried with him when he came to America in 1949, but again it was enough. After a few years of working in-house at Omega, the prestigious watch company, he began renting a little shop on the West Side of Manhattan, on Broadway and Sixty-third Street. Eventually, Lincoln Center would be built next door to this modest location, and he would befriend (and fix the watches of) great artists and impresarios; for now, he sat in his little jewelry shop in the middle of a tough neighborhood.

Hooting groups of teenagers ran by the store, hitting the windows with baseball bats. On a few occasions they smashed in the glass, shattering his storefront and grabbing watches by the trayful. My father chased them down the street, tackling the stragglers, grabbing back his treasures from their loosening fists. Carefully, he laid them back in their usual places in the trays, unafraid of anything but more degradation, more loss. He would truly rather die, now, than be bested by bullies and criminals. And he was not about to die. He installed heavy iron gates that at the beginning and the end of his long workday he slid over the windows with a long, loud set of clangs and a final bang. Then he installed a sensitive alarm system, so sensitive that any rattle of the gates would lead to an emergency call to the police, and another to our home. There was always a sense of potential disaster in that little West Side store, and the gates themselves, fastened by an enormous lock, seemed more a shock than a comfort to me.

Interspersed with the drama of thugs and thieves came the peacefulness of my father’s labor. Simon was, I suppose, used to functioning around crises, always able to restore himself to calm productivity as maelstroms faded. A laminated wooden OMEGA, written in large gold letters, hung over his head as he sat quietly at his workbench, attesting to his ranking as a master. Omega was my father’s Yale and his Harvard. Around him lay a little store lined with glass showcases and mirrors that my mother endlessly polished. Within the showcase lay velveteen trays holding jewelry; my mother wiped these treasures daily with a chamois cloth to make them sparkle.

And work soothed his soul as nothing else could. With the loupe in his eye, my father seemed to see everything. Even when a customer came into the store, he might not look up, so immersed was he in the intricate mysteries of his timepieces. My mother, his assistant in the shop, would dash up to them and eagerly say, “Can I help you?” Sometimes they were there to look at a ring, or try bracelets on their arms, and she would get busy and pull out some velveteen trays. Most often, however, they had heard of my father, and wanted a bit of his time.

“I’m waiting for the watchmaker,” they would say.

A glass separated him from his customers, the way a curtain might separate the holy from the Holy of Holies. Only when it was time, only when an issue was settled in his mind, would my father lay down his work, pop out his loupe, and look up. Then he would say, with utter seriousness, each word seeming to take on its fullest meaning:

“How may I be of service to you?”

From deep within pockets, purses, bags, and briefcases would emerge a beloved old wristwatch, an antique pocket watch, or a large, priceless antique clock. Unwrapping, exposing, handing treasures over to my father’s side of the glass, they would part with their heirlooms. He would look at the timepiece, first without the loupe, and then with it—opening the back with tiny tools as the customer stood back, scarcely breathing. Sometimes he would admire the secret paintings within secret doors (pastorals, portraits) or a clever repeater, a special toll, or ticking capability.

“Yes, I think I can make this repair,” he would finally say. “When you come back, your treasure will be beating.”

Naming Ceremony

I
TOOK MY FIRST BREATH less than a decade after the flames of the Holocaust had ended. Embers glittered in the ashes, and the last plumes of smoke still hung in the air. Notwithstanding the busy, ticking timepieces, the atmosphere at home was thick with the past. I cannot remember being born into my own world, my own time frame. I was born into my parents’ world, the world of refugees, immigrants, survivors.

It was dark in my apartment in Washington Heights, a leafy uptown enclave of immigrants perched on the Hudson. We lived in tenements with fire escapes, railroad flats where only the front rooms caught a breeze. Still, we were happy to come inside, climb the staircases, lock the heavy front doors to our apartments, and be safe and unbothered.

When we peeped out the front windows, the world outside was lively with screaming children playing stickball, hopscotching, or simply bouncing their balls against the sooty courtyard walls. Segregated by mere streets, we lived among hearty Irish handymen, ponytailed Puerto Rican girls who attended the Mother Cabrini convent school up the block, and the contained, devout German Jews who had lived in the neighborhood for decades. My parents were part of the most recent arrivals—Yiddish-speaking Polish and Lithuanian Jews who’d been spat out of Europe by a blast from Hades.

The fact that my older brother and I were alive, new Jews born after Hitler had promised to annihilate all the undesirables on the planet, was to my parents a sign and a miracle. My father and mother were both concentration camp survivors. Not victims—survivors, people who had looked death in the face and rebutted it. They had been slaves, with razor-nicked heads and skeletal bodies; they had scrounged for rotten potato peels and woken up alongside corpses; they had pleaded for their lives and run from guns and gasses, pits and ovens. They had prayed and promised and sensed, in my father’s case particularly, the answering voice of God. Their belief, they felt, had saved them, and so, unlike many others, they kept on believing. I never thought of them as weak, but as God-like warriors themselves, however wounded.

At the time of my birth, an unruffled state of mind was, theoretically, available to most Americans. Here was a world of conspiratorially bland, amusing entertainment, a corny embrace of normalcy. Still, the healing banality, the soothing crackle of black-and-white television, gray flannel suits, and blank-faced furniture was not peace to my folks, but hypocrisy. They felt a certain contempt for those vapid, idle Americans who didn’t appreciate the true magnitude, the nightmarish depth, of existence, who persisted in focusing on what my parents called
narishkeit
(foolishness)—with their golf and their martinis, their beehive or Brylcreem hairdos and hulking two-car garages.

Me, at first I loved
narishkeit.
Until I started school, my best friend was the television. I ruthlessly daydreamed about a “Dad” who smoked a pipe while sitting in a lounger, offering bemused yet well-considered advice. I wanted a slim-hipped “Mom” who wore heels in the house, a ruffle-edged apron tied about her trim waistline. My father sported thin, white, sleeveless undershirts, with fringed prayer garments above, the latter in observance of the biblical law to wear just such a garment. The outfit was completed by the bottom half of a suit, neatly creased and belted. He had no concept of leisure except for the Sabbath day, on which he prayed and tried to rest. Hence, no baseball caps, no sneakers, no tennis sweaters—it was either the whole suit, with a tie, and tie pin—or this undershirt-based ensemble.

With the upper body of a circus strongman and a bald head, my father looked like Yul Brynner as the despot of Siam in
The King and I.
He had a similar dangerous accent and charismatic aura. His posture was military; his carriage, aristocratic. Even his vocal timbre was the same, Slavic and deep. When I called him “Dad,” he’d mimic darkly.

“Dad?
Dad?”

In his voice, it sounded like “Ded?
Ded?”

He would roar, “You want me to be DEAD?” He seemed ready to deal with that threat, as he had too many times before.

So “Daddy” would do just fine.

My mother, estrogen to his androgen, wore busily floral “housedresses,” which closed with snaps, or one long zipper from neck to knees. In the kitchen, she and her mother, who had also survived, stirred pots together. On her small feet she wore pink calfskin slippers called
shlurkes.
While my grandmother sat, emitting a sense of sepulchral gloom, her daughter scurried around, mopping, dusting, spraying polish on the heavy mahogany furniture, shining away with assorted rags. As she cleaned, she wore a permanent, almost ecstatic sheen of perspiration and would sometimes stand by an open window and let breezes blow on her face, eyes closed as gauzy white curtains danced in the air.

“Oy, a mechayeh!” she would say. Oh, this makes me live.

In our home, the language was Yiddish. I did not then know that this German/Hebrew blend I spoke, my first language and mother tongue, was dying, spoken as it was primarily by survivors of the Holocaust in Europe. It was only when the dark wooden doors of our television set were opened like an ark, the set clicked on to slowly reveal another world, that I realized our family spoke one language, but the rest of America spoke another. English was cleaner and clackier; it was more sensible and far less tender. People who spoke English were lucky and immune. They really knew what they were doing.

Every morning, I ran into the living room and swung open the TV doors to search for paradise. I turned on the set to watch a show called
Romper Room,
then waited as the TV’s inner light began to glow, expanding. There she was: a calm, smiling lady, holding up a magic glass to her face. The goddess of children. Through it, she could see every kid in America. The lady would say:

“I see Bobby and Nancy and Anne-Marie. I see Richie and Stevie and Mary-Lou. I see Jeffrey and Billy and Susie and Chris. I see . . .”

“YOU
SEE ME!
I’M RIGHT
HERE!”

I stood before her, jumping up and down on our frayed green carpet. This was how I watched television: standing on my spot, swaying, praying, desperate to contact the world outside my world. (The area where I stood was growing threadbare; I could see the beginnings of a dun mesh below the crushed nap.) I hopped on one foot for Captain Kangaroo. I showed my frilly panties to suave Sandy Becker. I twirled in tribute to the flickering cathode ray image of Ricky Ricardo, Lucy’s Latino, an accented immigrant like my parents.

I was besotted by the fact that Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz had married each other, so in love that their show began and ended with a gleaming satin pillow on which was scripted their blended name—“Desilu.” They had crossed a great divide and met in the middle, like a fairy-tale kiss that broke all curses born of cultural distance.

“I see Kevin and Linda . . .”

“Call my name, lady! Call ‘Sonia’!”

For that, of course, was my name. In Yiddish it was Shayna.

Sonia, much less Shayna, wasn’t on the list of possibilities, unless the magic mirror lady could take a U-turn into a vat of savory schmaltz and say, with a thick, Semitic catch in her throat:

“Oy! Wait a minute! Now I see Ruchel and Dvora and Selma and Yizkhak and Menny‘shu. Gevalt! I see Maxie, Irving, Irwin, Perel’le and Yacccchhhhim!!!”

Romper Room lady couldn’t take that U-turn. It was I who had to.

“Hey, I know what you can call me in American!” I exclaimed to my parents with can-do optimism, as though I were teaching them to do the peppermint twist (which I myself was then learning from a show called
American Bandstand).
Often, they asked me how to say something in English, which they never completely mastered.

They were especially shocked by colloquialisms like “Get out of here!”

“This is polite to say?” my father would ask wonderingly. (He was also puzzled by the violent expression “son of a gun.”)

“Sure, you say it when you don’t believe someone. Like, someone tells you that they are gonna be on a TV show. And you can’t believe it, so you say, ‘No! Get out of here!’”

“Get out of here,” said my father.

“Get out of there,” said my mother.

My grandmother was silent. Finally, she muttered, in Yiddish:

“We already got out. What they want from us??”

“So what do you tell us about your name, now, Sonialeh?” asked my mother, lightly dipping a Swee-Touch-Nee teabag into a handled glass of boiling water. We were sitting down to breakfast in the kitchen. Pigeons flapped on the windowsill, and on our round, oilcloth-covered table sat butter, sour cream, rye and black breads, hunks of farmer cheese, and cut-glass dishes of preserves.

“You can call me ‘Susie’ now!” I blared. The sound of my high, ridiculous voice hung in the air.

“Huh, that’s dumb,” said my brother, who often sensed that his little sister was off.

My father stared at me for a moment, biding his time. He spread a thin layer of blueberry jam on his toast. It rasped like the weekend bristles on his chin, which, when in a good mood, he let me scratch with my fingertips. And then, he intoned, in his basso profundo, with dignity, slowly:

“Sonia, be proud of your name. My mother, she should rest in peace, who you are named for, died by the hands of those Nazis, murderers, may their names be erased from the world.”

The Susies and Nancies were not named for the victims of psychopaths whom one was never allowed to forget. They skipped down the street, pigtails bouncing. They giggled, teased, and wrinkled their noses. Their parents found them adorable, “spoiled them rotten”; they braided their hair and put satin ribbons in it.

To my father’s last comment my mother would not fail to respond.

“At least she lived her life, your mother. She grew up, she married, she had children. My poor little brothers died young, teenagers! Shot like animals! They had no life at all! What did they do to deserve it? Why did they have to die?”

Three years older, my brother tended to escape these inquisitions, and now, grabbing half a rye bread, cucumber, and butter sandwich, ran off to his room. Auburn-haired, freckle-faced, Manny was a whirlwind of activity with a pocketful of bottle caps and marbles. Sitting him down was a challenge, much less posing to him the Greatest Hits of Moral Philosophy. But me, I was a brooder. From the time I had begun asking “Why?” they had begun to respond, “Yes, why? What do you think?” And I had attempted to answer.