The Watchmaker's Daughter: A Memoir (20 page)

“But no one can find me here! They come in for a big ruby, or maybe a pin, or maybe just to have a good time and haggle and waste someone’s time. But they’re not coming in here for pocket watches. They look me over and pass by—there are so many choices, so much to catch their eyes.”

After a while, however, my father again began to reestablish his name as a master watchmaker. Not only did his customers from the old neighborhood find him, but soon, more and more clients began to visit from all over the world. Word-of-mouth among collectors of rare timepieces began to make Simon a central stop again. He bought, sold, and fixed, growing more and more happy and prosperous. In the evening, he stored his treasures in the impenetrable vault downstairs, behind remarkably thick leaden bank doors.

My mother was happy, too. Right above that corner spot in the exchange was a little diner. Every day, she ran up and down the stairs, grabbing a danish for herself, a hot coffee for her husband. Apart from our long-abandoned trips to the delicatessen after movies, Gita had rarely had the chance to “go out to a restaurant.” The Diamond Dairy Kosher Lunchnet was a small escape for her. It overlooked the floor of the exchange, so that even when you sat there, sharing a cheese or cherry blintz with your daughter, Sonia, who was visiting all the way from England, you could see all your friends and coworkers below. And they could see you. You could wave to each other and not feel alone.

The Jewess at Last

I
T IS PRE-CHRISTMAS DINNERTIME in the great, drafty, wood-paneled College Hall, held a week before the holiday. At the long oak refectory table, I sit next to Mr. Simopoulos, a brilliantly eccentric philosophy don. Leaning over me, he intones into my ear:

“The world is made up of three kinds of people: Jews, honorary Jews, and SHITS!”

Paul is sitting across the table from us. He is one of Simo-poulos’s favorite students. We both burst out laughing, and Simop joins us.

“So, which are you?” I ask him.

“Jew and Honorary Jew, of course, you imbecile!”

Well, both seem to be in the minority here in England. Over the term, Jewish students have slowly begun gathering in my dorm room. Their names are Anglicized: Fenton for Feinstein, Wayne for Weinberg. (They have the reverse problem to what I suffered with
kashering
the name Brendan O’Neill.) They seem frightened even to “admit” that their name was once Cohen (the name of the priestly caste) and is now Cowan. It is only when they know that I, too, am Jewish-and more surprisingly, open about it, proud of it, even—that they come in, relax, and talk about their names, their beliefs, their wariness.

So this is the country that forms the spine of “European culture,” the country of manners and containment. The people who like me tend to be the outsiders, the artists and actors, the weirdos and the rebellious aristocrats, out for a bit of real life. The Irish, the Scots, the Jews, and the Welsh; the black and the Arab—we bond. Benazir Bhutto is there, super cool in her purple kid-skin boots. People like her are called “Pakis” at Oxford. Most students feel no shame in their intolerance. After all, as the saying goes, “The wogs start at Calais.”

On the contrary, it is expected that I be ashamed to be Jewish.

When I ask, innocently, if someone is Jewish, a non-Jewish student responds, “I don’t know—I wouldn’t
dream
of asking him.” But why not? I am asking if that person is a descendant of Abraham, Moses, and David—not if they have a communicable sexual disease.

Paul’s own parents can hardly look at me, so horrified that this dark-haired, sultry foreigner has got her claws into their firstborn son. He has taken me to his home in Stoke Poges, a small, prosperous town near Windsor Castle. The house, like the Queen’s, or nearby Eton College, is built of stone. It being Sunday, we have roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, along with minted peas. Dessert is trifle and “blackberry fool.”

Perhaps they just need to get to know me better. They need to know what a good, nice, smart girl I am, how hard I work, how much I try. I try to impress them. Stupidly, I don’t realize that showing off is wrong in this culture—so I brag nonstop about all my accomplishments, the ones that make my father proud. I am actually hoping that they will like me for being a good student.

“And—what else? I—I was a valedictorian in high school. The Hebrew valedictorian. I actually gave my speech in modern Hebrew.”

They are numb with disdain. Who talks of Hebrew, of all the—? Who brags of language skills? What is she getting at?

“My parents are Holocaust survivors,” I tell them, falling fully into the shite pile. “They lost everything they owned, but did everything they could to give me a good education. Which no one could take from me. I’m actually on leave from Yale Law School.”

I’m giving them the old one-two. First, the Holocaust—look how much we have suffered, how noble we are, how innocent and brave. And then, despite all that, Yale! Can you beat the Jews? Their phoenix-like rebirthing abilities? Their Helen Keller gumption? But they do not applaud, and I cannot feel their love with my feet, my ears, or any other part of me.

Their expression tells me that I have badly overestimated my accomplishments. They seem to be saying, to themselves (I am not worth telling):

“Our ancestors, toothless and on a farm holding a pitchfork of hay, would be better than yours with a golden mortarboard discovering the cure for cancer. We are English, born on English land. We don’t
need
to wander about annoying people. We worship God in the Church of England, founded by an English King. Our prayers are all in good, proper English, the language of God, a civilized gentleman with more manners than your clan of sweaty parvenus have ever had.”

“Better a Negress than a Jewess,” his mother confides tearfully to Paul. When he tells me this, the words give me a complex frisson. Are such words and concepts really still in use?

Isabelle wears a fine golden cross on her neck. In her childhood village church, they told her that Jews are damned, that they killed Christ—a man who didn’t brag and wasn’t pushy about his Phi Beta Kappa key—and that we will therefore be cursed forever, not just on earth, where we must wander (and will again, if they can just get rid of Israel), but also in the afterlife. All she’s done is take in what she was told, which is what most people do—including, to some extent, my own parents.

Paul feels his mum has fallen for easy propaganda and dated hocus-pocus. While believing in God, he cannot believe in the Christ story anymore (other than the good man’s existence). He tells me that he has “envious aspirations” toward the simpler monotheism held by the Jews. He cites the Bible, particularly one passage in Genesis:

“‘Numerous as the stars,’ eh? I’d actually say ‘brilliant as the stars.’ He did make you that. And if you’re an example, I’m hungry for more.”

On the other hand, a good friend of his (who belongs to the Christian Union) comments as I pass: “Oh, here’s Brother Abraham!” He gestures around his nose to indicate its prominence. With the other hand, he mimes holding a coin and rubbing it. He’s not alone. On the TV in the college common room, the sitcoms joke about the Jews and their aversion to pork. We’re not the only target. They make fun of all accents: the Spanish, the Italian, the Chinese. When I hear someone “do” an Eastern European accent, I want to say, That’s my mother and my father and their friends! That’s a bunch of refugees you’re mocking, with accents born of exile. That accent will vanish with them. Why are you laughing? Do you even
speak
another language, the way they do?

And yet, I rarely go home to see my parents. I rarely hear their accents on the phone. Instead, we mostly correspond by mail. I write long, dreamy letters about the rain and the swans. I am sure I baffle them. Our lives together have never been about dreams, rain, and swans. I am sure I wrong them by being so far away. All my life they have been like my children, and now I am living my own life, a life that they would find somewhat mad. Why chase arguments, feuds, and old shadows?

Still, though I do not fly home often, they are on my mind daily. When I write to them, I address them, as always, as my
kindees
—an invented word, a nickname, based on
kinderlach.
I have been using this word more and more. These people are my children, my dependents, yet all I seem to do is willfully try to relive the worst parts of their lives, a would-be Jew in Europe. The “Brother Abraham” comments actually please me. They make a reality out of the nightmares I had heard all my life. I can confront them now.

Paul’s father, Rikki (an old Boy Scout/Kipling nickname he favors), goads me now and then. He loves how angry and pointed I get about these little slights, how I get wound up like a desperate, talking doll. He is proud of being a white Anglo Saxon Protestant, better than anyone no matter what I say about his cultural myopia. Eventually, I come up with a parallel that nags at him. It’s kind of an SAT analogy.

“England is to America as Judaism is to Christianity.”

“So, you’d equate England and—and Judaism?”

“Yes,” I say. “England is the root of the English-speaking empire which, you would agree, has popularized and cheapened its original quality. Look at American culture,” I bait him.

“That’s true. It’s god-awful.”

“So that’s how you could see Judaism vis-à-vis Christianity. One is small and old-fashioned and riddled with rules and customs, and the other far more popular, with a simpler message and more universal appeal.”

“Well,” he says, “doesn’t ‘universal appeal’ tell you something? There must be something to it if everyone believes in it. That’s why, despite the occasional whisper of doubt, I’m a Christian—sheer numbers can’t be wrong.”

“Well, according to your logic, McDonald’s is better than a three-star Michelin restaurant. More people eat at McDonald’s.”

“Oh, be quiet,” he says grumpily, ruffling my hair. Rikki actually likes me far more than his wife does. He has traveled the world as a computer executive, but she has never knowingly met a Jew before.

Within a year, after I’ve received my MPhil in English literature, Paul cuts me off. He ceases all contact and exiles me from his world. His parents, who live not far away from Oxford, have told him that I have seduced him, body and mind, that I have hypnotized him. They have repeatedly motored up to Oxford to insist that he stop this crazy romance of his. Paul is only twenty-two years old now, and he must have been listening to them for months. When he does act he acts quickly, as though afraid of me and my tenacity. He is right to be afraid. I am not good at taking no for an answer. They are
all
right about me. I am a tenacious Jewess, a Scheherazade who will never run out of stories.

“Don’t do this,” I plead. More than anything, I never thought this particular story would end in fierce rejection. He was supposed to choose me, to cross over the divide that separated us. He was supposed to love me even (or especially) when his parents didn’t.

“She is sucking the life out of you” is the phrase they used, menace in their words matching the menace they see in me. I am a witch and a sorceress. He is the blond child whose blood is being taken by a succubus.

“She is toying with you. You’re not the first, and you won’t be the last.” I am three years older than he, and I have had more experience, romantic and academic. Why should he rest his vulnerable heart on my loyalty? One could easily see their point of view. I have left my parents behind; I’ve left every trace of my life behind me. What kind of person could I be to do that?

Back home at 100 Overlook Terrace, I am now twenty-five years old and beaten. I didn’t belong in law school and I didn’t belong in England. In time, a battered green trunk, emblematic of my failure, arrives from Oxford. Packed by Paul, it is full of everything that we have shared together—fond notes, programs from plays I’d written there (one in which he’d starred), a letter from Lord Bullock awarding me a prize for short stories, one suede boot with a broken-off heel, an old Hebrew prayer book, my Wordsworth and my Dickens.

The nightmare has come true—I have been kicked out of Europe. And here in New York, I have few prospects. Now that I’ve gotten a graduate degree in English, I am considered overqualified for most entry-level jobs, including one at a publishing house, which involves fast and accurate typing. So I decide to go back to law school to finish my degree. I am afraid to “just sit home and write.” My parents are dubious about the arts, and the real possibility of failure would bring me back to where I started—a nothing, a flotsam, the refugees’ kid. At least Yale Law is special. And at least my father is proud again.

Dan Greenleaf, Esquire

I
N THAT SECOND YEAR of law school, the year of my return, I meet Dan Greenleaf, who is in his third and final year. Dan is the perfect rebound man for me, and ideal for my parents as well. After Jacob, they have waited more than five years for a Jewish man to ask for my hand in marriage. Dan is not only Jewish—his father is an oral surgeon in Brookline, Massachusetts. Prosperous and stylish, Dan rents a rambling beach house off campus, to which he drives in an ancient, lumpy Volvo. His clothes are like costumes—baggy pants and suspenders. Prematurely salt-and-peppered, Dan looks like Richard Gere in
American Gigolo
if, instead of a paid escort, Gere were playing a bookish Yale Law student in horn-rimmed glasses. His mother was an opera singer. His aunt produces documentaries. Not only is my Mr. Greenleaf at Yale Law, but he also graduated summa from Harvard College.

Dan shares his big funky house with actors and directors from the drama school. Chez Greenleaf, jazz plays through the sound system, actors roller-skate around, and clumps of interesting graduate students prepare African dishes requiring orange-colored spices, which we eat on vintage, mismatched dishes. Dinner conversation is witty, erudite, literary, political, pop-cultural.