You Saved Me, Too: What a Holocaust Survivor Taught Me about Living, Dying, Fighting, Loving, and Swearing in Yiddish (3 page)

“Y’all come back anytime,” the social worker said. Not really, but that’s what it felt like—warm and welcoming.

Time passed. I needed them because you were talking about guns. The Lady at the Party, dear friend of a dear friend, rich but so seemingly compassionate, convinced me I was right to expect them to roll out the red carpet for you.

What I got, after a whole lot of pleading, was Jerry Maguire.
Show us the money
.

I’d thought they were good and powerful, but it turned out they were only Great and Powerful, like Oz, who also turned out to be a disappointment.

Strange that we live in a
shtetl
, too. All these towns that I drive through on my way to your bed are home to just a tiny percentage of Jews, a reflection of much of America. But our town is an upscale, contemporary version of the little Jewish villages that were like freckles on the face of Europe before the Holocaust. More than 50 percent of our town’s 18,000 souls are Jews. People used to say it was 70 percent, but that was before they built the mosque. On twenty-four square miles sit seven synagogues: two Reform, two Conservative, one modern Orthodox, and two ultra-Orthodox. I call members of the last category The Fanatics. I’m sorry; I’m just not fond of people who ban secular literature, don’t recognize women’s rights, and refuse to acknowledge people like me when we pass each other on the street because they don’t think I’m a “real” Jew.

On weekends, our roads are crowded with people who could be ghosts from your lost world. Men with wildly long beards, black fedoras, and long cloaks tied at their waists like bathrobes float in clusters down streets on their way to pray. On Shabbat, their families join them: boys with hair coiled in
payot
, fringe from their prayer shawls dripping from under their white dress shirts; little girls in oversized hand-me-down dresses and teenaged ones forced to hide their sexuality with boxy denim jumpers and dark tights; and women under broad hats and shellacked wigs who push strollers no matter how hot, wet, or icy the ground.

We live in harmony with Christians and Muslims and Hindus, which would not have happened in Zychlin, but we also weather waves of anti-Semitism. Once a white supremacist group dropped hate literature on people’s lawns. Swastikas have been painted on the outside of synagogues and the inside of high school bathrooms. Every year there seems to be some kind of Jew baiting from an opposing sports team:
Fucking Jew
, hissed through a field hockey player’s mouth guard;
Come on, kike
barked from the lacrosse sidelines. Really nothing, compared to what you grew up with.

I kind of wanted to sleep with you.

When a person is depressed, she doesn’t feel anything. Then, as the medicine kicks in, she feels everything. The crush I developed on you was one of the first signs of life I’d had in a long time.

You must have felt something, too.

“Good thing I’m not thirty years younger,” you’d say again. “David would be real jealous.”

You would repeat a version of this threat often during the first half of our years together. Every time, we’d laugh at the line. But it wasn’t really a joke, was it?

In my fantasies, set fifty years before we met, I am a strong American girl who holds you when you wake from your nightmares of being chased by dogs. I am the love of your life, the one who understands you as your real wife never would.

Or the affair would happen in the present, a
Harold and Maude
type thing, with our damaged, vulnerable souls melding. The forty-four-year age difference wouldn’t matter because we could talk about anything, like when people of all ages fall in love and feel as if they’ve known the beloved forever. I would imagine running my hands up your weathered chest and it wouldn’t even disgust me, though having those thoughts made me feel ashamed. You were an old man! I was a mother! What did sexual tension have to do with it?

You drove past my house several times a week just to see if my car was in the driveway, like a preteen pedaling his bike past his crush’s house. And I made sure my makeup looked right before pressing your doorbell.

All this came before I saw that picture of you, which you accurately predicted would turn me on.

“You’re gonna see me altogether different in the picture,” you said. “You’re gonna fall in love wit’ the picture instead of me.”

“I’m already in love with you,” I flirted back.

It was taken when you were twenty-six, shortly after the war ended, probably by someone from the Red Cross. It looks like a
passport photo, but the handsomest one I’ve ever seen. You had a strong jaw and sad, soulful eyes. Your combed-back hair was already receding, but it had a little wave to it. I didn’t even know you’d been considered “dark blond” until I read it on your Dachau intake form, but then it was too late to ask you about it. Your mouth, wide and perfectly symmetrical in the photo, would someday smile again.

The attraction and fantasies sank as you aged, but they’d occasionally bob to the surface. Once when I was driving you to see a doctor, I felt as tingly as when a hunky high school boy had filled my passenger’s seat years before. Another time, during one of our many talks about death, you said you were ready to die. I said I’d miss you.

“Maybe you’ll come see me on the other side,” you said. “We’ll be born again.”

“We could be married this time.”

“We dream of things like these,” you said with a smile.

Back in your day, everyone hit the kids. Hell, back in my days as a kid, everyone did, too. But your household sounded like a super whackfest.

Your older brother, Mendel, would whack you and you’d pass that whack on to Bill. Your father whacked all three of you.

“It was a tradition—you know what I mean—when my father slapped me. Why did he slap me? Because his father hit him. Deserve, not deserve, he hit me.”

You fought often with your sister Helen, who was the next youngest to you. I don’t know if you ever hit her, but I doubt it, because hitting females wasn’t part of the pattern.

“One time the father comes across to hit me. And the mother steps in front and says, ‘Don’t hit him, hit me instead.’ And he never raise a hand to her, so I was okay.”

Of course, that didn’t mean your mother couldn’t lay one on you. She went to hit you once but got blocked by your knobby elbow. She collided with bones instead of flesh, hurting her hand.

“Then I didn’t come home for a whole two days. I was at my aunt’s. I was afraid to come home to a beating from the father.”

I asked what you did to make your mother so angry.

“Maybe I did something wrong,” you said. “Who the hell knows?”

“Maybe?” I said. “I’m sure you did a lot wrong. You must have been a troublemaker.”

“That’s the way you talk to me?” you said, sounding a little hurt. “You’re supposed to be my baby.”

But despite all that whacking, you came from a good family. At least, that’s what a lady who lives in Brooklyn, New York, told me. Her father was a poultry man who knew your father, a cattle man.

“They were nice people,” she told me.

Then she needed to get off the phone.

“It’s too much,” she said. “My husband is sick. I can’t talk of these sad memories anymore.”

She was the last one to see Helen.

While the slow drivers continue to fuck with me at the final stop sign, I worry. You’re not alone, are you? They’ve done a lot of disappointing things in that place, but they wouldn’t leave you alone while you were dying … would they? Someone has to be sitting with you if you’re in as bad a shape as the doctor implied. You were unconscious, he’d said. They weren’t sure why.

Because if this is your last day and you are alone, I will be pissed.

All I’ve ever wanted from the people who run this place is royal treatment for you. You’ve had a bad life. You are entitled to a good death. Everyone who meets you should work toward that goal.

They haven’t always, as we well know. But I’m trying. That’s why I got into so much trouble before you moved here. And that’s why I’m such a good girl now. I worry that if I’m too irritating, they’ll take it out on you.

I feel completely responsible, though when we met, you were just my novelty. I guess I was yours, too. You used to rave to strangers about me.

“Isn’t she a cutie? She’s my sweetheart. I’ve adopted her!”

As we grew closer, our relationship became less defined. I didn’t know what you were to me or why you were in my life, though I spent a lot of energy trying to figure it out. Then the people who should have known better than to screw with a Holocaust survivor had to obey the rules that prolonged your suffering. I stopped ruminating about the meaning of our relationship and started putting my mental resources toward getting you the finale you’ve earned. In my eyes, you are the king. And the king does not deserve to die alone.

Theirs was your favorite love story.

“My mother had a face like a picture,” you said, voice reverent. “Round. So beautiful. Not one spot on it. She must have been the nicest-looking woman in the whole city.”

Your father certainly thought so.

His name was Leybish and he lived in Zychlin, Poland. Hers was Zelda. She lived in Plock, a big city with hospitals, factories, and about 30,000 residents that sat twenty-three miles from Zychlin, population 7,000. She was about twenty-two when they met.

“My mother, when she was young, she had an aunt lived in Zychlin. She come for, what you call it, a visit. And he saw her walking in the street. And he fell in love.”

You giggled when you told me that story.

“He was so happy. She was two years older than the father, but he loved it. She had other fellas, too, what liked her. And anybody what wanted her, he beat them up.”

Really? Come on—beat them up? I’m not sure I believe that, but I don’t doubt the real obstacle he faced in marrying lovely Zelda: his mother’s snobbery.

Your grandmother, named Leah, was educated. Though she was the daughter of a butcher, she had learned to read Hebrew, something most girls didn’t do back then. She practiced it as she sat in the balcony
of the synagogue surrounded by all the other women—women who could cook and sew and barter for a hen, but could not read a word of their holy books. Leah followed the prayers along with the men below her, her eyes trained on the black threads of Hebrew letters.

Or were they trained on the cattle broker in the third row?

Your grandfather learned to heal horses while serving in the Russian army in 1890 and spent his working life traveling the Polish countryside and tending to the livestock of wealthy farmers. The landowners paid the young Jew well to keep their equine families free of disease and steady after injury. He was important to these important men who called him “doctor” even though he was not technically a vet. He began buying cows from farmers and selling them at cattle auctions to kosher butchers. He was one of few in Zychlin not impoverished. Maybe that’s why Leah married him.

How does the song go?

For Mama, make him a scholar.
For Papa, make him rich as a king?

She and the doctor brought five girls and two boys into the world and raised them in comfort. They lived in a three-room flat in a building they owned. Leybish, the eldest, had followed his father into the profitable cattle business. But this beautiful girl he’d seen on the street was from a different class.

“What was the thing? See, my mother was from poor. My father was rich at that time. My grandmother says, ‘I don’t want you to marry her. She’s too poor.’ But my grandfather liked my mother. All the time my father wants to go see her. The grandmother looks like she’s gonna faint. But he goes, takes the train to see her. And the old lady couldn’t do nothing.”

Leybish wooed Zelda to Zychlin with a promise and a bed. She lived with his family until the wedding.

“He almost didn’t marry her,” you said. “You see, I tell you. One day the grandfather, he gives my father five hundred rubles to go to
the farms. He bought the cows, the calves, to sell at the market later. Before he gets to the farm, he sees a card game. He can make more money if he wins. So he stops and plays and loses all the money.”

Your father stewed in town for a while, then went home and stood by Zelda’s bed. She woke up and he explained the situation. He told her he couldn’t marry her because she wasn’t lucky: What else would explain his gambling misfortune? Zelda sat up in bed and yelled for her future father-in-law, who made his son track down the card players and get his money back.

They married in 1917. Leybish, who clearly lacked his father’s business sense, continued to make financial goofs. By the time you arrived two years later, they were poor—Zelda as poor in adulthood as she was in childhood. But in your eyes at least, still beautiful.

My favorite movie and book share the same theme.

In
Same Time, Next Year
, a film based on a play, two married people, played by Alan Alda and Ellen Burstyn, meet at an inn when they’re quite young and have an affair. Instead of breaking up or getting together permanently, they decide to meet in the same room on the same weekend every year. They remain constants in each other’s lives and grow up together. She goes from a meek housewife to a strong feminist to a wise businesswoman. He goes from flakey to conservative to liberal to somewhat less flakey. Every time they meet, they laugh, fight, make love, and tell one good and one bad story about their spouses. Every time I watch it, I cry.

I used to tell people they must see this film, but now I don’t because I worry they’ll think I’m a fan of adultery, which I’m not. But that’s not what the movie is really about. It’s about knowing that there’s one special person in the world who gets you, and still keeps showing up.