The Watchmaker's Daughter: A Memoir (21 page)

As Dan would put it, “What’s not to like?”

And he is right. This guy is not just a lawyer. He is a very nice Jewish boy, the sort my heart needs to rest on, like a parakeet on a perch or index finger. Though of a far more biting intellect than Jake’s, Dan strokes my ruffled feathers, tells me to relax, fixes me a mean cocktail (he knows them all). One day, when it is cold outside and the New England wind is blowing, Dan buttons up my overcoat, just like in a’40s song. Another day he whispers into my ear the phrase I most need to hear:

“Baby, now you’re safe.”

It was a short trajectory. Before Dan, I wanted to risk myself, try my powers. I wanted to be unsafe so I could prove myself a peer to my parents’ heroism and survival skills. But England has thrown me upside down and on my fragile head. I have indeed inhabited the sense of being the wandering and unwanted Jew. I crave the warmth and security that Dan Greenleaf offers. I like that he makes good challah French toast, delivered on a tray with Kenyan coffee. I like that he calls me
bubbeleh,
like an old Jewish man from the Borscht Belt.

“Bubbeleh
—you’re O-kay!”

Because of this “okay” feeling (which Jacob had offered me years ago, and I had arrogantly rejected), I quickly agree to marry Dan. Once the big rock is on my finger, the wedding caravan takes off with even more surprising velocity. We get a hall, a dress, a tux, pick a smorgasbord and plan a flower-bedecked chuppah. It seems no time at all before I am surrounded by hundreds of guests and two rabbis who tell me to walk around Dan seven times, as is the Jewish custom. I suddenly refuse. It is my only sign of rebellion, stemming not only from my sense of feminine pride but the fear that I should not be getting married at all.

People with broken hearts and bruised heads from being tossed upside down should probably not get married.

A few weeks before the wedding, I had told my father that I felt I was making a big mistake. I wasn’t sure if it was Dan, specifically, that I wanted, or simply the healing sense of rescue he gave me. My father offered the following strange advice:

“Don’t go backward. Always go forward.”

This might well have been the secret of the brave, productive, and heroic life of Simon Taitz. And functional clocks do not go counterclockwise. But this is not good advice if you are heading for a cliff. (I realize this years later, with characteristic esprit de l’escalier.)

So we marry. In no time, Dan and I are surrounded by hundreds of gifts (espresso makers, enormous vases) and comfortably living in a floor-through in a townhouse in Greenwich Village. As Dan said, “What’s not to like?” I am comfortable, and, true to his word, I am safe. As my father always dreamed, I am financially and socially sound: Dan and I are elite Manhattanites in the yuppie heyday of the 1980s. During the day, I work in litigation on the thirty-ninth floor of a law firm so prestigious that jaws drop when I mention it. The clients are all multinational corporations who pay hundred of dollars for each billable hour. We swat our opponents with yellow pads full of legalese (which I help write each and every day, often past midnight). We go to court in phalanxes, dozens of associates to each litigating warrior-partner.

Dan clerks for a federal judge. Along with the challah French toast, he sustains me with fresh baguettes and frothy cappuccini, and there are weekly flower arrangements that appear at the townhouse door. Still, I find my mind wandering to Paul. Maybe I don’t like the feeling of being thrown away. Maybe I want to win another shot at the proverbial Ahasuerus beauty contest. Maybe I remember more passion in my past. Like most husbands, Dan becomes consumed by his work over time, and his attention to me begins to drift. Over the next few years, Dan’s career rises meteorically. He leaves the house before I wake up and returns when I am asleep. Our bond wanes even as our possessions and bank accounts grow. I slowly regret joining my life to this man, whom I barely know.

What joined us was law school. Perhaps I could have resisted my wedding plans more forcefully had the date not been just weeks after graduation. It was all forward-moving continuum, like the mechanized walkways at a large airport. The question was never where are you going, but how fast can you get there. I was twenty-seven now, no “spring chicken.” My parents were tired of waiting for me to do them proud. I was getting the Jewish husband (which made Gita happy) and the Juris Doctor degree (thrilling Simon), with them and for them.

My parents stand, small and modest, in the faux-medieval courtyard outside my dorm. It is only a short time before their daughter’s name will be read by a stentorious voice, declaring her among the chosen few graduating Yale Law School. SONIA (named for his dead mother). JUDITH (a double-naming, for her brothers Jacob and Israel). TAITZ. Mr. and Mrs. Taitz, survivors, will now have a child who will speak for them, petition for them, write the letter to avert the next pogrom.

Resplendent in my cap and gown, puffed full of great job offers and the general air of privilege that is Yale, I notice how old and fragile they look. How did this happen? My father always looked a bit gray, but even my mother seems less rosy, and her shoes look clunky, almost orthopedic. Did they age while I was away from them at Oxford? Did my being so far away hurt them? Had I come home enough during the last years of law school? How had I let my
kindees
down like this?

Robert Sargent Shriver III is there, a warm and witty Kennedy scion known to all as Bobby, with whom I have developed a sweet friendship. He calls me “champ,” and I love his boyish kindness. His sister Maria, not yet a TV correspondent, holds a movie camera, filming her brother and the surrounding scene of graduates and their parents. I can hear her narrating, her voice bright, amused and energetic. Bobby’s parents are there, President Kennedy’s remarkable sister Eunice, and Robert Sargent Shriver Jr., founder of the Peace Corps. All the other parents, not just the Shrivers, seem to have smooth hair. The women seem blonde, with hairbands, the men, white-haired and tall.

“Sonialeh!”

The word is trilled in three high notes. I turn to see my mother approaching, offering me a battered brown banana in crinkly, used tinfoil. She sweetly waves her linen hanky, which is embroidered with pansies. This is the sort of handkerchief she would wet with her own spit, holding my chin to wipe dirt off me during my childhood.

“Sonialeh! Do you want a good nice banana? Take a piece!”

She actually says this in Yiddish:

“Vilst du a gute shayne banan? Nem a shtick!”

“Not right now,” I say, wondering if Maria Shriver is filming this. Hopefully, she will think that my mother is saying something intellectual and appropriate to the occasion. What does she know from Yiddish? Words like
nem a shtick
could never have emerged from the mouths of Sarge and Eunice.

My father wears his gray straw hat with the feather, the kind he always wore to visit me up at camp. He is so proud of me today; his carriage is straight as a soldier’s.

“Smile, Sonialeh,” says my mother, and she snaps a picture of me.

The photo, which I see later, reveals my feelings: though of course smiling, I am constricted, ashamed of my own parents. I also feel guilty at being annoyed with the good people who gave me all my opportunities. Whose own schooling was cut short. Who slaved for me. I am not merely ambivalent. I am multivalent.

At least I have done right by them and graduated. They are proud of their daughter, wearing not only the law school mortarboard and gown (embellished with royal purple), but a sapphire and diamond engagement ring. They are thrilled that she is finally going to marry a Jewish guy, a law graduate, too, from a good family. Dan’s parents do not find mine odd, or different. They know other Holocaust survivors; their own parents came over from Poland and Russia. They have heard the accents before.

Even the graduation speaker is a Holocaust survivor—it is Elie Wiesel, who survived the war as a teenager and wrote about it in unforgettable prose in books like
Night
and
The Gates of the Forest.
This man will ultimately win a Nobel Peace Prize, but that day I hear someone mocking his name on the program, pronouncing it “Weasel.”

“Elly Weasel? Is that like Elly Clampett married Pop Goes the Weasel?”

He actually laughs, this graduate who happens to be a Jew from a prominent, though assimilated, Washingtonian family. I want to hit him on the head with my mortarboard, and I want Maria to get it on tape.

It is in this crappy, defeated, and pugnacious mood that I marry Dan Greenleaf.

Reparations and Repairs

T
HERE HAD BEEN ONE MORE defeat before the wedding. Several months before, I had written to Paul, telling him of my engagement. I confessed to him that I was not really certain about the marriage—that I didn’t love Dan the way I loved him, that (despite the stew recipes from Mali) Dan did not have the passion, the wildness, the freedom in him that Paul had. This letter was, to mix Catholic metaphors with a Protestant paramour and a Jewish fiancé, a Hail Mary pass. I’d wanted Paul to stop the wedding. I’d wanted him to step forth, as though on the stage, and bellow: No! You can’t! Think of our love! You can’t marry this man, albeit Jewish and a Harvard/Yale grad, just to please your parents!

My letter to Paul is the tapping of a convict in a cell.
Here under duress. Please come and rescue.
Paul does not write back. I try to remember only the good of him, the part that loved me, not the one that threw my things out of the window of Staircase 7. What had his parents actually said to him? “What is she doing with you? A Jew? From New York? What is she playing at?”

My mother had asked me the same questions. “A goy? From England? Don’t you know he will one day get very drunk and maybe beat you?”

In the summer between my two years at Oxford, I had come to see my parents in Jerusalem, where they were vacationing. We sat on a balcony in the evening, enjoying hot tea and cool breezes. Beyond us lay a vista of white stones and evergreens, palm trees and golden domes. It was paradise; it felt like love and peace and reconciliation. And in that spirit, I tried to tell them about my new friend Paul, whose connection to me seemed to negate that rigid “vow” of only a few years ago.

“I have met someone totally wonderful.”

“Oh?” My mother perks up, excited. Having not married my normal college boyfriend, the adorable and Jewish Jacob, I am rarely the source of
nachas
for her. She has nothing to say to her friends, whose own daughters are not only marrying but having children. When they ask about me, she is silent. Yale Law and Oxford mean nothing to her. If she had built me up from scratch, she would have had a daughter who taught school for a few years (lower grades), then had a few children for Bubbe (now it would be her, Gita) to feed and kiss and squeeze. But this daughter of hers went her own way, like a real crazy.

“I think this man is one of the special people on the earth,” I say, more to my father than her. “Special” is one of his words, not hers.

“The ones who make the earth a better place, who sustain its goodness, who tip the balance.” There is a Jewish legend about the Lamed-Vavniks—the Thirty-Six—meaning that at any given time, there are thirty-six saintly people alive and among us, in recognition of whom God refrains from destroying the world, even at its worst moments.

You don’t have to be Jewish to be a Lamed-Vavnik. In fact, the legend is that none of them are. These are the people who saved the Jews. These are the people who can feel other people’s pain, their hearts are that big.

My mother, astute, smiles thinly. For all her usual cuddliness, she can be harsh and dry when the boundaries of her familiarity are crossed. She is like God in the garden: You have so many good fruits, why do you need this apple? Just to make trouble?

“So you met what, a
shaygetz?”
she spits out, decoding expertly. This word, unlike
goy,
is deadly pejorative. She pushes her glass of tea away and looks angrily over the hills of this enchanted city. Her eyes are narrow, hurt. From
shkutzim
(the plural) comes only pain. From
shkutzim
she has had only grief—a dead father, dead brothers, neighbors rounding them up in the middle of the night. Many wearing crosses and feeling good about the Christ-killers in a forced march out of town. She will never, ever go back to Lithuania. For her, at bitter times, all people and places can transform into Lithuania. Even I, her daughter, can be Lithuania. She would not be surprised.

“Well, he’s not exactly Jewish right now, but he is good, and kind, and—”

“Yeh. Sure. So good and kind. Romantic, like Clark Gable.”

I’m surprised by the movie-magazine reference. Not that it is fanciful and out of place. No, the opposite. For me, those people and their stories have always been real. Ricky is real, and Lucy is real, and Elizabeth’s magical eyes? Nothing truer. Surely, Doris Day was real to my mother. Doesn’t she realize that most of these people were—are—goyim,
shkutzim?
Has she really never taken our folk legends seriously? I have. The legends taught me that anyone is accessible. Even an English actor, handsome as Henry Fonda, dressed as Don Juan, can descend from the stage and see you one day.

I turn to my father, who has always had his poetic side.

“Didn’t you ever meet someone who was surprisingly wonderful—so much so that you questioned everything?”

“I know what you are talking about,” he says, kindly not bringing up the vow I made to stay close to Judaism, and not in this new, contrived way of the special goy who loves me and my people.

“Here, in Jerusalem,” he continues, “I sometimes talk to the priests and ministers. I see them everywhere. They have great souls, many of them. I tell them of my life in the camps, and how I believed in God, and they understand me. And I understand them, too. I think of them as my friends here.