The Watchmaker's Daughter: A Memoir (6 page)

My mother may have “tsk’d” and tutted over Elizabeth Taylor, but, like everyone else, she could not get enough of this irresistible vixen with drives of her own. It is here, during the Reynolds-Taylor standoff, that my mother began to buy up all the magazines on the stand; together, we hungrily devoured them. Did I ever ask my mother to explicate the hair-color valences of this story? Did I ever say, “Could
this
raven-haired temptress have been saved? Would the Nazis have hated her, too?” To my mother, this was just a game. To me, it was a growing obsession, if not a strategy. One day, I would venture out and save the Jews.

I did not discuss these plans with my mother, since she considered all non-Jewish males to be not only forbidden but beneath desiring.

“But you love Jimmy Stewart!” I’d protest, noticing how her little feet wiggled around on the bed as we watched his old movies, sometimes appearing to nod, “Yes, Jimmeleh, yes.” I think she liked his gentleness, his hemming and hawing—so unlike my father’s strong and dictatorial machismo.

“Feh! That is not real! I could never love a goy who drinks and calls me a dirty Jew!”

“But Jimmy Stewart would never—”

“Feh. He would. This person I see on the television is just a character. A fantasy.”

Not to me. Retreating back to my Archie books, I developed my own romantic theories. Archie obviously preferred Veronica to Betty. The names themselves would tell you that. Elizabeth would survive, she would shine on like the stars in heaven. Yes, she would have her tracheotomy, her pneumonia; her beloved Mike Todd would perish in a fiery plane crash, husbands would bore her (and in later years, I learned, she’d even bloat), but she would live, live, live! I could be Sonia, then, not Susie, after all.

Sonia, Sonia, Sonia . . . Exotic temptress-to-be of Washington Heights.

I was also mesmerized when Elizabeth
dropped
Debbie’s husband, moving on to the primal, Welsh Celt Richard Burton. Wearing a glossy, ropy black wig, she played Cleopatra, who seduces Caesar, then Antony. Entire empires would be vanquished as she yawned and stretched. When the married Burton would refuse to divorce his wife, Elizabeth/Cleopatra would checkmate with a suicide attempt. She could not live without him—and he would relent, helpless in the force of her passion. The Vatican screamed. The world exploded. Amazing sex was doubtless had. Or, as I saw it at the time, a long, long, long kiss.

Moral: Blondes did
not
necessarily have more fun! As I grew older, I swore, I would fully investigate this thesis.

La Vie en Rose

J
EWS COULD HAVE FUN, too, even death camp graduates. There could even be mad sexual sparks. Simon had fallen in love with my mother in the course of one lovely winter’s evening. He was handsome, with an athletic body and a refined face. There they were, fellow survivors, not only both from Lithuania, but from the Kovno area. He had survived Dachau, where my mother’s father had lost his life. And she had survived Stutthof, where his mother had lost hers.

They met at a Lithuanian Jewish Survivors’ Ball in New York, shortly after they had both arrived, he alone, she, with her widowed mother, Liba. Gita Davidow Wery-Bey was elegant and pretty, fragrant and soft-spoken; Simon was poetic, intense, virile. In that old-world ballroom at a once-elegant hotel, they danced as though nothing could vanquish their private music. Now they were in the land of promises and freedom. Arms surrounding each other, palms clasped, they were a miracle of motion. Their song was Edith Piaf’s bittersweet, knowing “La Vie en Rose.” Despite all that had happened to them, a life in pink—all of it soft and sweet and fragrant—could be wished for. They shared this dream as they glided across the floor, dancing sweeping Viennese waltzes and nimble fox trots. When a polka was played, she flew in his arms, in circles and circles of hope.

While noting that Simon was “merely” a craftsman, and though some who knew him said he had a terrible temper, my grandmother liked her daughter’s suitor. Simon was gallant and respectful to Liba, promising that she could live with him and her daughter forever. After a few more dates, during which he was charming, and she shy and receptive, Gita agreed to marry Simon. Until the end of their lives they loved “La Vie en Rose,” and always danced together beautifully, as though—in some fairy tale in which nothing else impinges—they had been made for each other. Sometimes, on a wintry New York Sunday, they even ice-skated together in Central Park, he guiding her through routines both forward and backward. Still, much was to detract from their harmony. The dark and Heathcliffian man she married bore no relation to her kind, gentle father.

Menachem Mendel Wery-Bey, my maternal grandfather, was a prosperous gentleman with “a neat blonde moustache and cornflower-blue eyes,” my mother would say, with an odd touch of pride. “No one could ever tell he was Jewish.” She often retold a story about his encounter with a German SS officer. Wearing the yellow cloth star all Jews had been forced, by Third Reich law, to wear, he’d been stopped while walking in the street, or rather, the gutter, as Jews had been pushed off the pavement.

“You! Dirty Jew!”

He had turned around and swept off his homburg. Seeing my grandfather’s pale blonde hair, parted neatly in the middle, and staring into his pale eyes, the SS officer had softened and said:

“Here! Really! Are you truly a Jew?”

And my mother told me that her father had answered without hesitation: “Yes. I am a Jew.”

In the hierarchy of heaven, this was the highest form of nobility. He had acted
al kiddush Hashem
—to sanctity God’s name. While of course it was permissible for those who could to hide their Jewishness—all rabbis agreeing that nearly anything was permissible in order to save a life—this avowal was the heroic approach. Simply to stand in the gutter, wearing a yellow star, and affirm—given a chance to deny it—that one was a Jew, faithfully following the commandments, was a mitzvah, and showed a man’s sense of principle.

“A filthy rodent Jew?” shouted the Nazi, grabbing his lapel, smiling, a gleeful hound finally grabbing his little fox. He wrapped his free arm around my grandfather’s neck, and, bending him in half, dragged him over to a nearby trough (“for horses,” my mother explained, “so they should drink”). The Nazi forced Menachem Mendel’s head into the water, pushing it down as far as he could. My grandfather nearly drowned. Finally, he let him up for air, and asked him:

“And now. Did the water clean you? Or are you still a dirty Jew?”

Barely able to breathe, my grandfather nodded his head, yes.

“What ‘Yes’? You’re clean? Or you’re a dirty Jew?”

“I am ...” he gasped, “... Jewish.”
Yiddish
was the word he used, a word full of tenderness when spoken by Jews.

Jude
was the word the Germans used, the word emblazoned on the yellow star.
Yoo-deh.
Didn’t they know the word was based on the people and land of Judah? The insignia of the tribe of Judah was a lion, rampant! Our word for Jew was
Yehudi,
and my middle name, Judith, or
Yehudit,
in its original Hebrew, was not an insult, but a badge. It meant Jewess, a woman from the tribe of Judah. A lioness. A warrior. Maybe, I wondered, everyone couldn’t deal with this kind of history. We had lived in what was known as the Holy Land. Our name was Israel, Judah, Judea. We once had a kingdom; Jerusalem was our center. These were powerful things. The Bible itself—and most everyone seemed to believe in it—said we were chosen by God. Were our enemies jealous that we were teacher’s pet? Did everyone want to be the “special one”? Was this why Snow White’s stepmother, that usurper, wanted her step-daughter’s heart cut out in the woods—so she, the Queen, could for once be “the fairest”? The Nazis liked to consider themselves a “Master Race.” Was this simply sibling rivalry, like madman Cain killing gentle Abel, like Joseph’s big brothers throwing him down into the pit? And did we have to keep playing this game?

OK—you win!
You’re
chosen! Or as we used to say in the playground—“You’re It!” That meant that everyone would now chase
you.
Good luck with that! As for us, could we say “Not It”—and be safe?

What a relief that would be—to be treated as normal, neither predator nor prey. My grandfather was a middle-aged bourgeois with a well-groomed mustache. He just wanted to get back to his family. He wasn’t hurting anyone. He had never hurt anyone. He wasn’t even that religious—and whom would it have hurt if he had been?

But the Jews were “it” that day, and so his head was shoved back underwater, a sick baptism of hatred. My father told me that Europe’s Christians had blamed the Jews for everything from poisoning their wells, to causing the Black Plague, to drinking the blood of Christian children (Jews were thought to “need” this blood for their Passover matzohs). Didn’t anyone know that Jews are forbidden to taste blood at all, that this clear injunction can easily be found in our mutually beloved Bible? Did they really think Jesus had eaten unleavened
child-blood
bread at his Last Supper—a Passover meal called a seder? Why, if they worshipped him so much, did they attack the religion he’d followed?

As a child, my father would avoid the churches as they let out on Easter Sunday. After hearing about the death of their Lord, mobs of screaming boys would chase him, screaming, “Blood Drinker! Christ Killer! Child Murderer!” Their parents, the women wearing crosses, would watch and do nothing. But it was Simon’s father, who had a grain mill, a wife, and three small children, who had been murdered, and these very mobs, screaming boys later grown to dangerous men, would jeer and shove as he and his widowed mother were carted off on their via dolorosa to the death camps.

“My Papa came home that night,” my mother continued. “He was nearly dead from being so much in that water. He couldn’t speak. Later, he told us, with a voice that was breaking:

“‘They asked me if I was a Jew. I told them. I will tell them this even if they kill me.’”

“And he did,” she said, “and they did.”

My grandfather’s younger brother David took another route. Apparently, he looked even more like an “Aryan” than my grandfather did. Granduncle David had a long, handsome and strong-boned face, flaxen hair, and pale blue eyes. His nerves may well have been as steely as those of an SS officer. Passing as a Christian, he hid in plain sight, walking boldly on the pavements of Kovno, no yellow star to mark him. He married a Catholic woman and had children of his own, baptized—for their own safety—into his wife’s religion. David eventually died of pneumonia in a hospital, in a bed with clean white sheets, under a cross nailed to the wall over his head, nursed by compassionate sisters. He was buried in a Christian graveyard. My mother never talked about him, or his wife and children—her aunt and first cousins. I found out about them only when I was grown, with children of my own.

“Saving your life like that, I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t judge him. But his family—no one knows they were Jews. Thousands of years of history, lost.” Not for the first time, I thought: Ignorance
can
be bliss.

Then she said: “Sonialeh. Do you think I know all the answers? Maybe he did the right thing. But my father was a proud Jew—and now we talk about him. We honor him. Right? I lived, I had you and your brother, and you will remember who we are and what we stood for. Your children will have a soul full of precious history. Knowing who you are, where you come from, that’s a reason to live. About my uncle David, what can we say? Did that person even exist?”

His family lives in Las Vegas now, most of them croupiers. It thrills me to think of them sometimes, my kin safe amidst that anonymous dazzle of a timeless (clockless) world. And then again, without the known history, without the weight of time—are they really my true kin?

The Almost Blind Watchmaker

I
T WAS GROWING HARDER for my father to put life into his timepieces. He’d wind them regularly, keys held by his dexterous but increasingly thick fingers. He had acquired a rare brain disorder in America—acromegaly, a pituitary tumor that gradually, almost imperceptibly, caused his face to change, coarsening his features until he was nearly unrecognizable. Slowly, his feet widened and his fingers broadened. As his jaw grew, his perfect, white teeth began to splay and his straight nose became bulbous. From a handsome man, he became a giant trapped in a too-small frame.

When I played with my skinny, angular Barbie doll, I began to use another doll—not Ken, but a baby doll, all rolls and sausage-like extremities—to play the man, the husband. Both this doll and my father were bald, which added to the feeling that he was a circus strongman, a sideshow, perhaps, but formidable and forbidding. Had a doctor not diagnosed his illness, my father would have eventually gone blind. When he told me this, I dreamed repeatedly of his poor right eye, the one that held the loupe, sightless. And the poor loupe, with no eye to see into the truth of a ticking world. And the poor clocks, forever to be broken, heartbroken. And the world unfixed. A quick operation removed the tumor, however, and my father’s sight was saved.

On the other hand, the damage to my father’s appearance was permanent.

I realized, as his face grew, that my hopes of having a normal, conventional life
in any sense
were close to nil. His voice deepened, becoming darker and more sepulchral. When he answered the doorbell or the phone, he sounded like Lurch, the Frankensteinian butler from the
Addams Family
TV show.

“WHO IS DIS?” he would rumble, like a giant saying “Fee, Fie, Fo, Fum.”

Sabbath brought a change to everything. Simon never worked on that day, and the importunate ticking of clocks (like the ravages of illness) was ignored. Instead, the synagogue became my father’s sanctuary. He would arrive as soon as the doors opened and take his seat on the corner of a long wooden bench, a silken, white prayer shawl draping his shoulders, its case lying next to him to save my brother’s seat. An hour or so after the services started, my mother would appear with Manny and me. She and I would take our seats in the women’s section, high above the men’s. My brother would slide in near his father, who would show him the place in the prayer book, then sink back into his own devotions.