The Watchmaker's Daughter: A Memoir (3 page)

At night, after everyone fell asleep, I would get up, run to my brother’s room next door, and grab the flashlight out of his bedside drawer. Back in bed, lemur eyes and flashlight to the page (so I would not wake my grandmother, with whom I shared a room), I’d open my picture book of Genesis, worrying myself. The sacrifice of Isaac was a special concern.

Why does Abraham try to hurt his own child? I’d creep out again, fretting to myself, running in the dark corridor past Manny’s room, the bathroom, the kitchen, the living room, and then, at last, bursting though the French doors, into the sanctuary of my parents’ bedroom.

“What do you mean, Sonia? He was obeying God,” my father might say, stirring, turning to face me. My father’s side of the bed was the one near the window. In the night, it would be lit by the passing cars, and he would wake up to my voice with kind concern, eyes coming alive in the flickering light. Being called in the middle of the night to discuss the sacrifice of Isaac was an actual pleasure for the man. He’d pat my head affectionately.

“What a smart little girlie,” he’d murmur. “With her good questions.”

“Do you think it was easy for Abraham?” my mother would add, still lying down. “He suffered, too.” She, too, could talk about suffering in her sleep.

“Yes, but—don’t you think maybe Abraham should have talked with God a little? For his kid’s sake?”

“You think talking to God is enough?” said my mother, raising her head to look at me. “If only ...”

“Yes, it can be enough sometimes,” my father demurred. He was sure his prayers had saved him in the war.

“Maybe someone could find the right exact sentences!” I’d persist. I didn’t think my father’s prayers had done that much good. He and my mother still seemed so upset. God had let bad people hurt them.

“Maybe you can find them, then, the words we are all looking for,” my father added. “But now, go back to sleep so you have the strength to look for them.”

And now, at the breakfast table, my mother was asking me her own stumper of the day. She turned to me and pleaded: “Why did my brothers have to die? Why? They were fine, good boys!”

My grandmother glared at me. As well as I knew the English language, and good as I was at school, I did not have the answers to all questions, theirs or mine.

My middle name, Judith, was in honor of these two brothers, my grandmother’s lost children. I wished it were Jane.

“All right, fine, so this one you don’t know, I don’t know, no one knows,” said my mother, sweeping up the table crumbs with one cuffed hand. “But remember them,
mein kind,”
she added, her hand now full of collected scraps. After a minute, she stepped on the garbage can lid and tossed them away with a
tsk
.

In telling me their stories, my parents felt that they were nourishing my character as a Jewish daughter. The last thing either of them wanted me to be was flighty, or free of history. To them, telling me about the Holocaust was like telling me about the secrets of the cosmos. I just wasn’t clear about what it all meant—that the universe, God included, was a big bully? I could never agree to that. Inwardly, I fought that. Their little soldier was a double agent, half in love with hope.

“OK, Mommy,” I said, wriggling away from the folding wooden stepstool that served as my kitchen chair. “I’ll remember your brothers.”

But first I want to see another commercial for Patty Playpal.

“Do you want more to eat something, Sonialeh?”

“Zie hat gantz nit gegessen,” muttered my grandmother. “Gornisht.”

“I did eat! I want to go watch TV.”

Life was not monstrous in that box, nor, I suspected, in the America it portrayed. In America, God was a big ray of sunshine on a neatly mown lawn. He was the smile on happy parents’ faces, beaming joy on their children.

The living room was adjacent to the kitchen. I was about to turn on the TV again when I heard my father’s raised voice.

“Wait, Gita. Did you say
shot?
Your brothers, they were shot? On my mother, they didn’t want to waste a bullet. They shoved them all, naked, into the showers. And what sprays out? Not water, gas. Suffocated. A horrible death. It makes me sick to talk about it.”

There was a moment of silence. And then my mother, rebounding:

“But at least she had a life!”

That was part of the competition—my life was worse than yours. It was part of the great theme. The Jews suffered more. You don’t know from suffering. You didn’t have a potato peel? I didn’t have teeth. You didn’t have teeth? You were lucky—from me, they pulled out all my teeth, one by one . . .

“All right, Gita, my mother Sonia, she should rest in peace, had a life, once. And I am glad of it.”

I wanted a life, too, I thought, turning on the television that made happy faces come glowingly to life. And there she was, the Romper Room lady. The show was not over, and soon she would take up her mirror.

One day, I knew, she would see me. My mother would see me; my father would take out his loupe and really see me. The Sonia who was not
her
dead brothers or
his
dead mother, but a real live girl.

Arpeggios and Arpège

M
Y MOTHER, Gita, was seven years younger than Simon in age, and lighter, more pastel in temperament. Most people, including myself, found her fragrant, pretty, cuddly, cute. She possessed a certain ineradicable joie de vivre that fate had not taken from her. She was stubborn in her happiness; she could hum through her frustrations, and a good apple or orange could change her day entirely.

“Oy,” she would say, the
oy
in this case meaning something positive: “Oy, is this good!” And she would be talking about a bite of McIntosh apple (her favorite), or the simple act of coming home into a warm house in the winter, or a cool house in the summer. The windows open, no air conditioning (a little stuffy), and still she would say, “Oy, a mechayeh!”

Gita’s childhood and early teen years had been brought to an abrupt halt by politics; from the time of the Nazis she had stayed hip-close to her mother. Thus, she remained something of a child, a good girl who causes no trouble and asks no questions. As a condition of marriage, her only request was that her mother, Liba, who had survived the concentration camps with her, be allowed to live with them. My father, in turn, requested that his wife be a helpmate, working in his store. (Liba would take care of the children.) Gita had agreed—and spent the rest of her life catering tirelessly to him until the day he died.

A piano virtuoso, her conservatory career had been ruined by the war. She had had to leave her piano behind to go to the ghetto (and later, the concentration camp); she had even lost her music books and practice notebooks. Gita was not used to mopping floors, cooking endless meals, or helping out in a watchmaker’s store. Nor had she anticipated the suddenness and severity of her new husband’s wild temper. Since becoming his wife, she had learned about a merciless demon deep inside him. It was a kind of cuckoo, I sometimes thought, something that popped out of the works and then popped back.

“GITA!!” he’d roar. “Are you really bad or just plain stupid?” If an argument occurred during a meal—which it often did, as meals forced closeness—he’d slam his plate, food and all, to the floor as she wept, as much over the wasted food as the shards of broken china.

This cuckoo-man had no pity for a child-bride who cried easily and who wanted nothing more than to be romanced, as in a dream that had been interrupted when the Nazis had stomped in. Debussy, Czerny, and especially Chopin, she said, had led her to great visions of love. Now, she raced about him urgently, like a child trying to please but fearing she wouldn’t, rising early each morning to cook and pack her husband’s lunch (fried flounder in a buttered roll, a tomato, an apple) and fill a tartan-patterned thermos full of coffee (Nescafe, instant). Simon would leave early, descending into the subway when it was still dark outside. In his late thirties, it was up to him to climb out of poverty once again, with no family but a twittering wife and her sullen, traumatized mother.

When Gita came to work, she would be sent on errands to find gears and springs and watch straps, or told to straighten the showcases and arrange the jewelry neatly. Regardless of how much polishing she did, the place always seemed to smell of dusty smother to me—a feeling of gray in the air, a rime of whiteness on the black velveteen trays. The steel light fixtures seemed dull, too, the fluorescent rods within them colorless and dead. Cold chrome was everywhere—on the lamps, on the edges of the glass, in the heavy-based mirrors that stood on every table so that customers could see themselves.

I loved smoothing the honey-colored wood panels in the back of the showcases. They seemed warmer and more alive. With the twist of a tiny key they opened, sliding apart as I’d help my mother reach a tray to bring up to the counter. My father’s workbench, too, was of a worn, tawny wood. My parents were selling jewelry as well as watches, so Gita busied herself with wrapping boxes for paramours buying modest rings and bracelets (these young men made her smile), or dowagers buying large “cocktail rings” with semiprecious stones. Her equipment was a roll of silver paper, a monumental, weighted tape dispenser, and cherry-red velveteen bows, which she tied with meticulous care. My mother hummed as she worked; she was born happy; she had had almost eighteen happy years; and now she would always revert to joy by nature.

Yet there was a precarious quality to her happiness; when, unpredictably, its vague borders were touched, she would weep, or close down in disdainful rejection. She never told her mother how her husband’s shouting and insults hurt her, but she did, very early, tell me, in her own special locution:

“He is trying to make from me a Nothing.” Even the Nazis had not done that, she would bitterly observe. He was as strong and strict as any German, and proud of it.

He, in turn, would confide to me that he was baffled to have married such a silly woman. He found her “moods” ridiculous. His mother had never shown moods, not even when she had had to bury her husband and run with her three children into “deep Russia.” My mother would respond, under her breath but in my earshot, that his mother sounded like she literally did wear army boots.

“Oy,” she’d say, smiling mischievously, “I would run from such a sourpot!

“And that is why he’s such a strict officer,” she would conclude, dousing herself before bedtime with Arpege, her pastel nightgowns silky and cool to the touch. “And now he orders me.”

The hierarchy was not always clear. She would stop at nothing to bait him, incessantly nagging, chattering, kissing his neck or hand, asking the same question over and over, like Tevye to his wife:

“Do you love me?”

And he would say, “Gita. You know that words are meaningless to me. ‘I love you, I love you, I love you’—pah! So cheap and stupid!”

When he raised his voice and got annoyed, she’d smile a little. His raised voice told her she’d made contact. Impact.

“Sourpot,” she’d whisper to me, and wink.

I was torn between their points of view. No matter how cruel the arguments, my mother seemed, on some level, to enjoy herself even as my father’s face turned so red I was worried he’d die on the spot. It exhausted me, having to choose between his passionate, patriarchal sense of being wronged, and her easygoing, but slightly sadistic, resistance and feigned bafflement.

Yet every Sabbath, for all the arguments, they would sit at the head of a candlelit table like a royal couple. After lunch each Saturday, they would eventually take a long stroll together through the neighborhood, hand in hand in the late afternoon. They loved this walk, always ending it in the leafy groves of Fort Tryon Park, strolling by the flower beds. Other leisurely walkers tipped their hats and greeted them, standing in the dancing shade of plane trees to chat about their children or grandchildren.

It would take my parents nearly their entire lives to realize how well suited they were. Both were industrious, innocent, generous, and honest; both had seen the same world disappear. Both had left everything behind, and would never—could never—return. There was nothing to return to; their culture, what was left of it, was simply transported, bruised as it was, to America and Israel. On these strange New York City streets, stumbling with the language, scraping to reinvent themselves, they were each other’s only harbor.

Running Like a Crazy

U
NLIKE HER HUSBAND, my mother had not lost everything in the war; she had saved her own mother, whom she worshipped. In the ghetto, she had hidden Liba in the “eggbox,” she told me, sitting on it as the guards tromped around looking for helpless old people to kill. Later, during “selection,” the entire Jewish populace had had to line up and have Nazis decide which ones were to live and which to die. Her mother had been sent to the bad line (meaning incapable of labor, marked for immediate death); my mother, to the good. She had, however, in a panic, run from her line to join her mother.

“I wanted only to be with my Mamaleh,” she said, sometimes with a meaningful, slightly resentful glance in my direction. Already, she could see (rightly) that I would not carry on the symbiosis of mother-daughter to the death. For a start, I was always restless by her side, especially in the kitchen. Not a good eater. Not interested in pots and pans and bubbling stews. My father’s daughter, intense and always cogitating.

“So I ran like a crazy, not thinking; they could have shot me! And then, in a minute, I was with my mother. And then I did her work, and I kept her warm, and I begged her to keep trying to live. And together, thanks God, we survived.”

Her mother, Liba, had welcomed death. She had watched her sons leaving the ghetto, ostensibly on a work detail, only to find out that they had been shot along with dozens of other hale young men. She had seen her husband sent away to be gassed in the Dachau concentration camp. Her daughter was all that was left to her, and this child would not abandon her—even if it meant her own death. They lived through the liberation together, and through the Displaced Persons camps, and they came together to America. Gita was just out of her teens when these events had begun to unfold.