The Watchmaker's Daughter: A Memoir (9 page)

“Yeh, sure,” she said. “Have a playpal.”

“A Betsy Wetsy?” I knew all the great dolls, Chatty Cathy included. There was even one called Tearie Dearie, whose accompanying jingle went like this:

Tearie Dearie, as tiny as can be
.

But oh, how she cries—

Cause she needs me
.

I wipe my Tearie Dearie’s great big eyes,

Cause she’s my teary teary teary Tearie Dearie!!!

Disturbing. I had enough “tearie dearies” in my home at the moment. But a big Playpal would be a great friend for me.

And I was bottomless-pit greedy for crayons. I knew that in the world of colors one could go far beyond my little row and have twenty-four, thirty-six, and even—the nirvana of Crayola—the iconic “64 Color” box
with a built-in sharpener
.

“Can I also have a big box of crayons?”

“Sure, yeh, why not.”

“I mean the BIG one—the one with
sixty four
colors, and the sharpener? Can I even have that one?”

Inside that box were colors like blue-violet and violet-blue, red-orange and orange-red—and they were subtly dif- ferent. There were turquoise and apricot, lilac and magenta; forest green and sea green and olive green; burnt umber and burnt sienna. There was silver and there was gold and there was even copper, which was the subtlest. It spoke of deep-sea treasure, coinage from a lovely mythical realm.

I knew this from my neighbor-friend Esther Plaut’s box of sixty-four colors (plus sharpener); at her house, I had juxtaposed all the greens, all the reds, all the yellows, then drawn a flower with each of them, filling the page. If my mother bought me a box, I would make a million flowers for her, who loved them so much.

“Yes, Sonia, you will have all the colors.” There was a trace of weariness to her voice. “You will have all the pretty colors you always want.”

At this point we started walking into a grand building, bigger than any I had ever seen before. I thought this was the Palace of Toys, a temple for children, perhaps. My mother raced me through revolving doors and into a vast, echoey, and slightly spooky hall. I looked around to see the dolls and teddy bears, the giant Playpals and crying babies, bottles of milk that never ran dry. All I could see were people with grim, set expressions walking quickly in and out. Some were in wheelchairs. Some children were in wheelchairs. The ceilings were high and unfriendly, and emitted a vague, blue, almost underwatery light. Here and there I heard an odd, reverberating shout, and yes, maybe a crying child. A real child, crying in pain. I began to get frightened.

“Okay, now let’s go to the crayon part,” I said, taking her hand and pulling.

“I’m taking you there,” she replied, pulling me the other way.

“Just around the corner? Close by?”

She gripped my hand more tightly and nodded. Her face was grim, and I wondered why she looked so worried.

“Are you okay, Mommy?”

My mother had two sides to her—90 percent of the time she was sweet, cuddly, approachable, easygoing. The other 10 percent was pinched and tight-lipped, rejecting and refusing. I would see this face more and more when I grew up and broke out of my veal box. And I saw it now.

I remember next waking up in a children’s ward, with a throat that felt slashed and bloodied. My eyes were dripping wet. To my left was a wall with a high window. On the sill, unreachable, was a teddy bear that had fallen over on its side. If this was a toy store, it was the toy store from a nightmare. A nurse was trying to shovel melted, yellowish vanilla ice cream into me. I was retching. And my mother was nowhere.

There must have been a moment of sheer horror when she handed me over to the nurses, and later, when they put the gas mask over my face. To this day, I avoid even the haze of steam showers; they remind me of being smothered, as I was that day, with ether. They remind me of my namesake, Sonia, who, like so many women, was led to her death with a lie—that they were going to the showers, and instead were murdered with gas.

Years later, my mother told me that after being discharged from the hospital, I would not eat or speak for the next few days. She told me that she was even more frightened than she had been before the operation to which she had led me. It was bad enough to have had a physically sick child, whom she loved desperately, be taken away for an operation. But my “acting like a crazy” was even more horrifying. My mute hunger strike stopped only when she threatened to take me back to the hospital.

I opened my mouth, finally, and she put some melted ice cream into it.

“Good?” she asked.

“Yes, Mommy,” I said, and she smiled, and stroked my hair.

She was the only mother I had, and I continued to need her love, her food, and her good graces. And when I snuggled into her, she felt warm and soft and safe.

I am sorry that I was the daughter whom she had to take to the hospital. The one with the dark hair like Veronica, Elizabeth, and Cleopatra. The one who was so persistently, perversely sick she needed to go to a medical center and have an operation that must have worried her mother to death. The one who, from an early age, craved learning, and what was then the man’s world of knowledge and vertical advancement. The one who loved the gold stars and wanted to be special. The one who wanted only to read, and not cook.

I would not sit in the kitchen with her. I would not take the long Shabbat
shpatziers
(walks) with her. All that ever happened on those walks, when I joined her, was that she would introduce me to her friends, trying to show me off—if I would but cooperate.

“Say hello to Mrs. Friedman,” she’d say, pushing me forward.

“Hello, Mrs. Friedman,” I’d mumble, as my mother adjusted my collar, or tried to tame my messy hair.

I wanted to be different from the world of mothers and daughters, to grow away from what seemed like her female conventionality and subservience and saying hello to Mrs. Friedman on a dull walk in the park. I even hated the fresh air and longed to return to my own world of books and brooding, envisioning a world as good as the one in the television set. Maybe better.

My father’s praise seduced me further and further away. The implication of his attentions was that I would be president, Miss America, and a Nobel Prize winner, while my mother toiled in the kitchen, feeding us all with sustaining vats of chicken soup. It was only much later that I understood how important her role was, even later when she herself understood it.

Modern/Orthodox

I
NEARLY DIDN’T GO TO YESHIVA, where Torah, myopia, and rounded shoulders became central elements of my childhood. I might have learned more from going to a public school and mixing with all the lucky, scabby children in the neighborhood, like Loretta, Charlotte, and Billy. My father, in fact, had wanted me to become fully a part of American life, to be a typical kid and, at least scholastically, to fit into the melting pot. I attribute this to a sort of idealism that he always had, the sense that all people really did belong together—the same sense that had drawn him happily into the Lithuanian army to march and scale walls like any other young fellow. He was always boasting of how well he could deal with the “outside” world.

For instance, he had no problems befriending all kinds of customers. Watch and clock collectors began coming to see him from every corner of the world, and I’d never seen him happier as his business grew. I’d watch him step away from his workbench to lean over the counter, talking and listening avidly, engrossed. I saw him laughing with a Japanese man; I saw him shaking hands, eyes locking, with a Catholic priest. He found this country, in its very variety, illuminating and liberating, and often said, with a sense of wonder, “Everything and everyone is interesting to me.”

I felt the same way. Especially about the goyim.

One time, our superintendent came into the apartment to fix a leak. This is my first recollection of seeing a non-Jew inside. Inside our little chicken-
geshtunken
Jewish home where even the walls were sighing.

I gaped at this hearty Irish immigrant man; I inhaled his essence as though he brought tidings (and a rare curative elixir) from a new planet. Eve herself might have had as big a fascination with the proverbial ripe fruit. Johnny’s hair was yellow-orange; his face red, and his button nose large-pored. I stood next to him, as close as I could without tripping him. Watching him lie under the sink (his fawn colored, ankle-high work shoes were scuffed, rubber-soled), then upright and talking (blunt, honest teeth), I agreed with my father’s observation that “everything and everyone is interesting.”

Actually, my father seemed to find non-Jews even more interesting than Jews. Was it the anthropology? Not entirely. The praise of a non-Jew, or even the feeling he himself felt, of kinship with those outside his beleaguered tribe, made my father feel, finally, chosen. They were the ones who decided most of the fateful events of the world. They were the ones who had allowed him to live. They were the ones whose selection had really counted. To them, he was the chosen of the chosen. And I was the chosen of the chosen of the chosen.

My mother and grandmother, on the other hand, largely closed their minds to the goyish world, which they decided (based on the considerable evidence of their own lives) was wild and shallow in bad and dangerous ways. They felt that as Jews, my brother and I should be educated to be religiously and culturally literate. After all, how many of us were left after the mass murders in Europe? And how many of those were growing up in ignorance, here in America where only the new and modern was revered?

This, too, made sense to my father. Part of him felt that we could never understand history fully, or even the beauty of America, until we appreciated our own heritage. Nothing was sadder to him than Jews by name only, who had no idea why they suffered or sacrificed—no higher ideals to keep them alive spiritually. He regretted having had to leave school so young. His education had been scant, and for the rest of his life he tried to augment it, putting as much energy into the holy books as he did his beloved
Reader’s Digest,
with its rousing sense of an improving modernity and of touching human nature.

So I entered first grade at a place called Yeshiva Rabbi Moses Soloveitchik. No, the name alone did not deter my parents from sending both me and my brother to this institution. Indeed, it was not as insular as it sounded: the namesake of the school was a great Lithuanian rabbi who had, not long before, helped usher Modern Orthodoxy into the Jewish world. At first, most yeshivas limited themselves to Jewish studies; they were seminaries that cultivated the scholarly, religious mind and pious practices. Rabbi Soloveitchik, instead, argued that Torah was incomplete without
madah
(science, in the broadest sense). He urged schools to teach all of the world’s best knowledge under the same roof. A graduate of such an academy could read both Leviticus and LaFontaine in the original. Such binocular vision could only add to a person’s depth perception.

Jewish studies, nonetheless, were paramount at my first school, and children were expected, within months, to speak, read, and write not only in English but in Hebrew. And not just Hebrew, but Biblical Hebrew, and not just Biblical Hebrew, but the semi-cursive notes of the seminal scholar Rashi that annotated each page of the holy texts.

Amidst the rigors of deciphering ancient scripts, I became, like most everyone else in yeshiva, severely nearsighted. It is not as though my scope had ever tended toward the way of the soaring eagles; I had always, anyway, been looking down at my patent-leather Mary Janes, or at the “diamonds” glittering in the pavement they trod. I had closely followed the dust atoms in my parents’ bedroom, and had also stared at every floral motif in my bedclothes and pajamas until they revealed pansy-like faces, smiling. As much as I looked at things microscopically, I mulled them as well—the sounds of words, the meaning of slogans on TV, the Desilu heart. I loved the microcosmic, and the intimacy of subtle symbols. As learning Torah often involved decoding each word, phrase, and sentence in multiple ways, I seemed born for it.

I was very happy at Yeshiva Rabbi Moses Soloveitchik. If I was full of questions, this place seemed full of answers, intricate and mystical, as deep as can be. Hebrew sounded delicious to my ears, and oddly familiar. (Indeed, the parts of the Yiddish language that were not based on German came from Hebrew.) This ancient language was rich; it was dark, dense, and chocolaty, and, with just a few words, said everything. For example, a sentence like “I have loved you,” with the “you” even being specified as female (as God says to Israel in a tender moment of reassurance), is, in Hebrew, a single word:
Ahavtich.
Its powerful concision was impressive to me even at five, when we began reading the hauntingly beautiful first words of Genesis, or Beraisheet, in its original tongue. The language threw sparks; it did, indeed, feel holy, and a hole was blasted out of the top of my head when I began to learn to read it. Light came in, more light than I had ever experienced before.

The word for light in Hebrew is
or.
It was the main noun in God’s first sentence:

“Yehi or.” Let there be light.

“Vayehi or.” And there was light.

I found every second in school an illuminating alternative to my former life. I loved the piles of prayer books that stood there on the teacher’s desk at the beginning of the year—blue-green or magenta, like the Crayola colors—and were passed out to us to keep forever. I loved the brightly colored metallic reward star stickers on the wall, and adding one each day for “effort.” I even loved the two-toned walls (beige and forest green) of the hallways and classrooms. The paint was so shiny and clean; the foil stars, which we were allowed to put up ourselves when we earned them, magical. I loved the blackboards, the erasers and sponges that cleaned them, and the teacher’s wooden, rubber-tipped pointers (which were used to wake the many drowsy scholars). I loved our school elevator operator, an old gray-haired black gentleman who pulled the iron gates of the Otis closed as we went in—“Single file, shake a leg”—on our way out to recess in a dusty, square yard ringed by chain-link.