The Watchmaker's Daughter: A Memoir (4 page)

Now, like her husband, she tried to master English. It would be their sixth language. They already knew Yiddish, Hebrew, Lithuanian, Russian, and—due to four postwar years in Deutschland—German. Before the war, her family had had cooks and laundresses and cleaning ladies. Now, Gita did her best, learning to cook and clean the apartment—both in a generous, copious, and imperfect fashion. She learned to hurtle downtown on the subway to run a business with her driven, ultra-serious husband.

Although he frightened her, she respected him. “At least he is not a runner, a liar, a drinker, a gambler—he is a good, honest, Jewish man.” She sometimes added, “and he has a beautiful soul—like a poet.” His violent outbursts of rage only confirmed this image. There was something prophetic and passionate in him—something almost inexpressible. Like most people, she found him fascinating, charismatic. He had a real aura, haunting and deep.

Once, when I was about eleven and accompanying my parents on the subway to Radio City Music Hall, my mother, happy to be on a jaunt, wiggled her feet near the edge of the subway platform. It was warm outside. I remember that she wore a flowery summer dress with delicate shoes, like ballet slippers. In the center of these shoes, on top of her toes, was a little straw bouquet of fruit, complete with two small, shiny wooden cherries. I was staring at the pretty cherries as one of my mother’s shoes fell off and landed in the tracks. These tracks were deep, dark, and dangerous.

Not hesitating, my father leaped down into the darkness. In a second, he held the shoe in his hand. I can still see him look up at us, smiling; I can see the cherries, shining like new hope. From far away, I began to hear the rumble of an oncoming train. My father, trying to climb back onto the platform, struggled through a few efforts, then, with a powerful leap, at last joined us. As I caught my breath, he placed the shoe on my mother’s small foot. No question, her husband was a hero, a leader, someone to reckon with. You could be safe with him.

Each day together, she ran “like a crazy” to make his life easier—running to the store to work, home to cook, to the hospital when he was dying. From the day he met her, he was never alone; she was his constant helpmate.

In his heart of hearts, my father did love her. She had a beauty and lovability that he saw immediately, and he continued to see it until his dying day. This held their lives together, and bound her to him.

Eine Kleine Schwarzkopf

M
y BIG BROTHER and I were left at home in the care of my elderly grandmother Liba. This figure, so beloved to my own mother, so precious that she would risk her own life to save her, was a puzzle to me. “Bubbe” was proud by nature, and scarcely resembled the woman in a picture that sat on the wall in my parents’ bedroom. There, she was elegant, her hands inside a luxurious, dark fur muff, surrounded by three lovely children (my mother in long braids, her younger brothers in shining buttoned shoes) and a distinguished husband with a gentleman’s neatly groomed moustache. Liba had had cooks and maids; she had loved singing; she had gloriously driven her own horse and carriage around town—all this I was told by my mother, who idolized her. But the Bubbe I met was exhausted, extinguished, and favored sitting in the darkest corner, by a window where pigeons flapped dustily in the airshaft. Knees apart under a heavy dark dress, she emitted an aura of bitter knowledge, which she did not wish to share. She spoke to me in brief, short bursts of Yiddish: “Zetz.” “Ess.” “Herr opp.” “Schweig.” (Sit. Eat. Stop it. Be quiet.)

Thick-haired, long-limbed, busy, and mischievous, Manny loved to tease me. I was pleased that he paid any attention to me at all; I existed mostly in a dense fog of boredom. Sometimes he’d pick up a mirror and, catching the sunlight in it, tell me to “chase the spot.” I amused myself by obeying him, darting like a kitten after circles of light on the wall. He’d display my hilarious stupidity to his friends, and I’d willingly repeat the kitten-chase. It pleased me to humor him. Sometimes, as a special treat, he’d take me up and down the black-painted stairs of our small apartment building, looking for “treasure” in the garbage cans. I fully believed in his abilities as loot-finder when we found a fully intact roulette wheel, impressive in its weight and heft. It gave my brother pleasure to see me spin and spin it, not caring that the chips were gone, not to mention the all-important ball that determined one’s luck.

He nicknamed me “José”—a reference to my blue-black hair, a rarity among European Jews. It was meant as an obliterating (if witty) put-down, and it made my brother giggle until tears fell from his eyes: the Puerto Ricans who lived on the other side of Upper Broadway were even poorer than we—and he had dubbed me a Puerto Rican
boy.
I couldn’t even imagine myself to be one of the girls who attended Mother Cabrini, the convent school across the street from my house that seemed a holy bastion of white knee socks, plaid skirts, and general dark sexiness. My own dampened appeal was my mother’s doing; she chopped my hair herself, uneven bangs and all, and kept it short for convenience. I looked not so much like a José but like a good Chinese child (of indistinct gender), glum in the rice fields.

My brother’s presence, even his teasing, represented a life force to me, and I looked up to him. When he started school, I took comfort in the blessed television set, missing and envying others his company. I believe my brother was sent to school a year early because he was active and rambunctious. With him away for several hours a day, my grandmother could settle into a less eventful life with just one child. It was thought that as a girl I would be easier to take care of.

Neither my mother nor grandmother fully trusted my coal-tar mop of hair, which hinted, at the same time, of wildness and vulnerability. It came from my father’s side of the family, the poorer side, the side that apprenticed fatherless boys to be watchmakers, and was therefore déclassé. It was, furthermore, dangerous to look as ... as “exotic” as I did. There was a word for me (did the Nazis invent this?)—I was a Schwarzkopf—a black-head. From the beginning, my mother and Bubbe hinted that my inky hair was excessive. It was too intense, like a tambourine-shaking gypsy running barefoot down the street. (They didn’t actually use those exact words—but they did call me a “tzigane.”) The little girls they openly admired had infantile, softly curled blonde hair—ironically, the Christian ideal of a cherub. “Oh, how beautiful,” they’d say, looking at a child with flaxen ringlets. “Oy, vi shein.”

It did not help that hair-color commercials kept blaring on the television:

IS IT TRUE BLONDES HAVE MORE FUN???

WHY NOT BE A BLONDE AND SEE?

And, more hauntingly:

IF I’VE ONLY ONE LIFE, LET ME LIVE IT AS A BLONDE!!!

These insistent pieces of advice made me anxious—what was I to do about this problem? For a few years, I would take the flax out of our boxes of
etrogs
—lemony citrons, imported from Israel, which we bought each year at Sukkot, the autumn harvest holiday. I’d wear this beige-yellow packing material on my head.

“Do I look like a beautiful blondie now?” I’d ask hopefully.

“Not exactly,” my mother would answer, laughing and plopping some flax on her head as well.

On the television set, blonde girls seemed to be the true darlings. They played with their toys and dolls in a perfect world of loveliness. Their mothers knew how to be pretty, too, and used Clairol, after which they would run across fields in such a lovely way, to a beautiful embrace. Whenever I mentioned these important American, transformative purchases to my parents—this wondrous doll, that versatile Silly Putty, a bottle of dye—they would ignore me. Both had to work all day, with little to show for it. Our carpet was increasingly threadbare, the sofa lumpy and worn (my mother had taken to throwing fringed covers on it). They had other things to think about. I however, tended to focus on one thing at a time, about which I would fixate with great dedication and readiness to act.

IS IT TRUE BLONDES HAVE MORE FUN?

If it was, where did that leave me? The un-fun black-haired child who faced me in the mirror, I had been told, would have immediately been spotted as a
Jude
and killed by the Nazis. “A blonde you could sometimes hide,” went the brutally honest kitchen-table wisdom in my home. (So, I thought, blondes
did
have more fun—they could live to see another day!) They’d be peeling potatoes together, my mother and grandmother, comfortable with their expertise in the race-logic of maniacs.

“But you could not save
such
a black-hair.”

“Nothing could be done.”

“And the big, dark eyes.”

“Gornisht vilt ihr helfen.” Nothing will help her.

Potatoes boiling in bubbling water; peels tossed into the garbage can with a guillotine’s thunk of the lid. The matriarchs had spoken.

I’d run from their words. All the rooms in the apartment followed a narrow corridor. All but one faced a dark and sooty alleyway, gray-pocked as a moonscape. I’d gravitate to any source of optical novelty, staring with fascination at the linoleum flooring in my and Manny’s bedrooms: pixilated and sparkly, pink with
tromp l’oeil
ice cubes in mine, beige with sparkling red, blue, and green pick-up sticks in his. All the walls were mute with beige, even in the children’s rooms—no paintings, no drawings, not even a calendar. There was an Indian headdress in my brother’s room, with long, multicolored feathers, and a cap gun that smelled marvelous when shot, which he treasured; he also had a splendid velvet bag full of marbles. These were, to me, the gardens of Giverny and the Taj Mahal, and I stared into these orbs and the twirly helix-suspensions inside them as often as I could. I looked for stars, fairies, and sparkles everywhere.

My parents’ front windows faced the street, bringing in the sky, ringing sounds of children’s laughter, and the comforting adult burble of people who sat in lawn chairs, below, in the warm weather. Here is where my mother would stand, window open, to remind herself that she was young and alive and not a “Nothing.” Those wonderful front windows let light—sunshine—into my parents’ bedroom, illuminating their large wooden bed. Here, the sun caught motes of dust in a beam—a floating epiphany of shining, sunlit matter, which seemed to carry messages of hope. My brother told me they were “atoms” and I embraced his vision. I asked him if the pavements near our house, which had something shiny embedded in them, contained diamonds. He told me: “Of course they do!” These diamonds and magical atoms enlivened hundreds of my earliest hours.

My Shtetl, Washington Heights

I
N THE SUMMERS, I would hear the celestial music of the Mr. Softee truck, which played its tune right outside my parents’ window.
Outside
—what a glorious, windswept concept. I wanted to go down there; I wanted ice cream from the ice cream man; I wanted to follow that truck as one follows the circus. I wanted to dance, peel off my clothes, run!

Just above us lived a little girl about my age, Esther Plaut. Her parents, like most people in our building, were also Holocaust survivors. Mrs. Plaut, who worked from her home, was a stately seamstress with strong, wide hips and a gray-black bun like a bagel at the top of her head. Unlike my parents, she had a blue tattoo on her forearm, with a long sequence of numbers on it. The Plaut’s front bedroom had been turned into a workroom where clients visited. In it stood several tailor’s dummies—faceless torsos on which she pinned her dresses. Mrs. Plaut had a tremor, which I thought at the time was brought on by her Singer sewing machine, the pulsing engine of her workroom. Even when it was off, though, her arms would rattle, the numbers shaking and blurring into a light blue line like a touch of horizon.

Esther’s mother was stoical but kind. Though they were poor, her parents indulged her with great toys: not only Barbies but Kens and Skippers and clothing and accessories and See ’n Says (clocklike toys with pull-strings that made barn sounds) and sixty-four crayons and white boards and blackboards and Parcheesi and Shari Lewis singing about Lamb Chop on a long-playing record. Every day, Mrs. Plaut stopped work to make us tuna with onions and celery and chocolate milk made with three pumps of U-bet syrup, and we sat in the kitchen and ate and drank (she even gave us straws), and it was heavenly. While we ate, she would lie on the couch and watch her soap opera. From the kitchen I could hear dramatic cries (“But I love you!”) and the intermittent warning of organ music. We’d be quiet and listen. Later, our Barbies and Kens would kiss passionately, their plastic heads mashing and circling as we held their rigid bodies in the air.

Sometimes, Esther and I would go to the playground across the street and play hopscotch and potsy—a game that featured a metal apple juice lid (donated by Esther’s mother), which we threw with concentration onto the correct bit of chalked concrete. In the distance, I might see my brother with his friends playing Nok Hockey with cool authority. Manny would wink at me, and I’d feel proud to have not only a brother, but an older brother, someone who knew his way around a Nok-Hockey board, the pool table of the underage set.

In the evening, Esther’s unassuming father, a slim, long-faced man who looked like Stan Laurel, would come home from work and run into Esther’s arms, sweeping her up. Then, perhaps, we’d hear the Mr. Softee truck play its tinkling tune below. Mr. Plaut would run downstairs and get us each a cone, vanilla custard swirling in peaks, coated with chocolate sprinkles. He was a real “Poppa” sort of father—a softy himself, good and kind.

Esther and I would watch him through her front-facing window as he bought our ice creams. In front of the house, which featured a recessed and narrow courtyard, many of our other neighbors sat on light folding chairs, enjoying the breezy end of a hot day. The Yiddish that floated up to our window was soothing and familiar.

Upstairs, there was also a woman whose name I remember as Mrs. Schroodel, to whom, weekly, my mother would deliver vats of dill-scented chicken soup, afloat with carrots and thick with egg noodles (lockshen). She was an invalid, and I remember her apartment was full of breezes, floral cotton curtains dancing slowly by open windows. Mrs. Schroodel sat still in the center, weighty in her wheelchair. I remember that she seemed genuinely to like children, for she would exclaim, on seeing me in the doorway: