Art of a Jewish Woman (16 page)

He knew a doctor at the hospital who lived at the Park Plaza and was to be away on a sabbatical for six months. He would probably sublet his apartment for a reasonable rent, which Edward would pay. The Park Plaza’s art deco portico beckoned around the corner. But this was not a marriage proposal, not even a clear offer that they live together, for Edward said nothing about moving out of his mother’s apartment. He was still living with his mother in University City, out past the Central West End, where she had moved with her sons as the immigrant Jewish community relocated beyond the inner city.

It was January 1940, and Felice’s dilemma was not just about work and where to live, but also about Edward. She knew even more certainly by then, after six months of dating, that he was the type of man she wanted to marry. He was smart, reasonable, and thoughtful. She could ask him about everything, and always he knew what to do, but he hadn’t asked her to marry him. She had left Palestine to escape the marriage proposals, and now that she was ready to marry, he wouldn’t propose. Meanwhile there were many other young men asking her out on dates. For her, marriage was not a form of existence but a way to have children, and she knew she was ready. Whenever she walked in the park and saw a mother with a baby carriage, she couldn’t resist peering in and smiling at the little ones and seeing them smile back at her.

So she proposed to Edward, who would become my father. She said she couldn’t accept his offer of the Park Plaza unless they were going to get married. If she didn’t want to have children, they could live together without marriage, but she was ready to have her children.

He smiled and said, “Then we will get married.”

Felice said, “I need a rabbi to perform the ceremony, even though I have never lived a religious life. I won’t have confidence in the wedding otherwise. I need to feel the marriage is sanctified, that there is some spiritual element present in my wedding, because I will have no mother, father, sister, or brother there. If I were marrying a gentile, I would want a priest.”

The wedding was on July 7, 1940 in a rabbi’s study in University City. Esther Kreiger was there to give Felice away. Also present were Edward’s mother Rose, his brother Joel, and his best friends from high school, Toby Lewin, Ted Marcus, and Ben Senturia. Ted and Ben had also gone to medical school with Edward, and Ted was soon to join the army. He would be severely wounded in the invasion of Normandy in June 1944, after which he couldn’t continue his career as a surgeon because his right hand was mangled; he switched to dermatology when his wounds healed.

After the ceremony, Edward asked Felice what she wanted to do to celebrate, and she said, “I’m hungry. Let’s go to a good restaurant.” Then they left on their honeymoon by car across Missouri and Kansas to a cabin in Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado.

When they came back, there was a letter from her father that said Miriam had made it safely to Palestine. She told Edward, “Now we have to get Berci out of Poland at once.” She said Berci was the most beautiful human being she knew—kind, humane, with a precocious view of humanity. They had to help him.

“Of course,” he said.

They managed to get a telephone call through to her parents, who were happy when she told them she had married a young cardiologist. They said they had known she would do well, and Felice told them she would send them money. Somehow they had found a place for Berci at an engineering high school in Bialystock, 100 miles south and west of Szczuczyn. It was a modern city, half Jewish, where the train from Wilno arrived. She could imagine him there, smiling, going to classes.

They told Felice that life in Szczuczyn had deteriorated even more since her visit two years earlier because the Germans had invaded briefly the year before. In 1939, in a prelude to the Holocaust, they had burned the synagogue and killed several hundred Jews. The Germans departed several weeks later when the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939 took effect, stabilizing the border and leaving Russian forces to occupy eastern Poland, including Szczuczyn. But as a peace treaty it was a hypocrisy, giving Germany time to build up its war machine and Russia time to prepare its defense of the homeland. Meanwhile, in Szczuczyn and towns like it up and down the frontier, the Russians began deporting “bourgeois elements”—so-called threats to the Communist Revolution—to Siberia and elsewhere in Russia for their own uses.

Shortly after the phone call to Poland, Edward gave Felice another wedding present, a portrait he commissioned the noted St. Louis artist Cotelle Birman to paint. In the portrait, which would hang over her bed for the rest of her life, my mother wore a loosely draped robe of many colored stripes. Her fine neck and shoulders were bare. She was angled slightly away from the viewer, looking serenely yet firmly into the middle distance. Her long dark hair was piled on her head in a topknot, and her dark suntanned skin made her look like a Gypsy. But her wandering days were over, even though America never stopped feeling strange to her.

She asked Edward, “Why do you want a painting of me?”

He said, “In case I lose you. And I also want our children to know how you look to me now.”

June 28, 1941: St. Louis/Poland

The day the Nazis marched into my mother’s little village of Szczuczyn was the day I was born. During the delivery my father, Edward, was pacing outside the delivery room. In Poland, half a world away, German detachments were marching down the country roads toward the village, manning roadblocks, pinching off the town from reoccupation by Russian forces, and preventing its residents from escaping. My mother knew about it. On the day she went into labor, the boldface front-page headlines of the
St. Louis Post Dispatch
read:

Reds Fall Back in Poland

Germans Threaten Minsk

Decision Is Won, Nazis Say

Russians Take Up New Positions Against Thrusts Toward Moscow

Under the headlines a map showed the Soviet-German warfront running through Felice’s own part of Poland. The agonizing story of what happened in Szczuczyn—and in Kolno, where she lived with her mother’s family during middle school, in Lomza, Grajewo, and Suvalky where several of her high school friends lived, and in towns like them—has been told many times. A few survived the Holocaust by finding refuge with Polish farmers and villagers, by foraging in the woods and ruins, or by enduring deportations to labor camps and death camps. When the war was finally over, they would create the Yizkor Books, the Holocaust Memory Books. In 1945, when she was safe in Holland, Chaye Golding, one of Felice’s neighbors in Szczuczyn wrote for the town’s Memory Book:

Friday night when the entire city slept quietly, the slaughter began. They had organized it very well: one gang in the new section, a second in the marketplace, a third on Lomzher Street and a fourth on the Pavelkes. They murdered the tailor’s family, Ester Kriger with her youngest daughter … [T]he head of the
yeshivah
—all in their own houses … they killed Slutsky’s family … the mobs murdered Gabriel Farbarovitch with his family. Leyzer Sosnovitch was led to the slaughter house and there was told to put his head on the stump … It is difficult for me to write all this. I am reliving the horror. It hurts me, my heart is bleeding … that night I was to be led away, but as you can see I managed to escape.
¹⁶

The families mentioned are those of Felice’s friends Leon Golding and Sosnovitch and her father’s competitor Farberovitch. The Jewish community of 3,000 ceased to exist. Her mother Bela’s friend Ruven Finkelstein wrote in the Szczuczyn Memory Book:

For 28 years I ate your bread and drank your water, until the air began to choke me, the bread and water turned bitter, lost their taste. I left your land to travel across the sea.
¹⁷

My mother was of course one of the fortunate ones who traveled across the sea and finally found her destiny in America, where she married, had children, and lived a complex life of the intellect and of beauty. She had bits and pieces of knowledge about what was happening in her homeland when she went into labor. It is not surprising that my birth did not go well and in the end I arrived by caesarian section.

In those days it took time to recover from a C-section. As if in ironic denial of the Frankenstein monster Germany had created at that very moment, my parents hired a German nurse who was prized by bourgeois St. Louis families to assist with my care for a few weeks until my mother got her strength back. Her name was Mrs. Richter. In English her name translates loosely into
Mrs. Right.
She instructed young mothers how everything had to be done by the letter and on schedule, the
right
way.

Three years later when my brother Barry (named after Felice’s brother, Berci) was born, she came to work for us again for a time, and some of the first things I remember in my life come from that period—memories of Mrs. Richter wagging her finger angrily in my face, locking me in my room for not minding, and threatening to use her hair-brush on my backside. She did it once. I told my parents, and they let her go.

Nonetheless, Felice was her father’s daughter, imperious, and another one of my first memories is of my mother chasing me around the bedroom with the hairbrush because I was talking back to her. Not terribly scared, I pirouetted away, ran into my parent’s bedroom, jumped on the big mahogany bed, tripped, fell against the sharp edge of the wooden frame and lacerated my head. Holding a towel against my bleeding head, my mother called a taxi—she hadn’t learned to drive yet— and rushed me to the emergency room, where my father met us and found a surgeon to sew up my scalp.

Some of my other early memories parallel my mother’s first recollections from the same age. For each of us at that age, there was a war going on outside. Felice was about four years old, watching soldiers during World War I march through Kolno, where she was living with her wet nurse. I too was about four years old at the denouement of World War II. Soldiers on furlough in uniform walked in the streets. Tense voices on the radio spoke of killing and dying. There were pictures of war planes, bodies, and tanks on the front page of the newspaper that landed on our porch every afternoon. In both my mother’s and my memories, there was danger and movement, and for me excitement also.

For both of us there was also a personal emotional struggle going on. My mother, a toddler when she saw her first soldiers, was about to be taken from her wet nurse, whom she loved, and transported home to her parents’ village to join her newborn sister and her real mother, a stranger. I was in the throes of rivalry with my baby brother for my mother’s attention.

My other earliest recollection, also from about the same age, is simpler, purer. We lived on Westminster Place, the part that was a staid Central West End neighborhood of three-story red brick homes built very close together in the 1890s as part of St. Louis’s westward expansion. It was not T.S. Eliot’s midtown stretch of Westminster with elegant, spacious houses set back from the street behind full lawns, nor Tennessee Williams’ downtown Westminster with rows of homes decaying into chopped up rooming houses.

Ours was a quiet and not prepossessing neighborhood. My mother and I often met my father for a picnic lunch in the park across from the hospital. To get there we walked a half block to Kingshighway, turned right and continued along the big boulevard for nine blocks. Halfway along our route was Portland Place, with its gilded gates and huge mansions, each one sitting on what seemed like a park of its own. At a certain point a big blackberry bush spilled over a high stone wall guarding the private street. Felice would put me on her shoulders, and together we would pick the blackberries, eat them, and fill a small sack for my father.

She knew how to have fun, how to laugh, and how to get angry when crossed, all very transparently. More mysterious were her tears. I couldn’t understand why she often cried. I had no grasp that she was crying for her family in Poland, and she didn’t speak about it to me because she didn’t want to upset me. I couldn’t understand how she could go from laughing one moment, telling stories about her life with great relish, to tears the next moment. How she could go from romping with Barry and me in Forest Park on the swings and teeter-totters, and encouraging me to climb the highest slide, to quailing in fear as I swooped down, or worse, disappearing behind her bedroom door the next day because she was too unhappy to come out? Sometimes I wondered if it was something I had done that made her unhappy. I studied her face carefully, trying to figure out what was going on inside her head that made her moods so chameleon-like, trying to understand the triggers that caused her to shift from gaiety to sadness and back. I wondered what was real, who was my real mother—the laughing, fun-loving Felice or the one with the tragic face that flashed with anger when I crossed her.

If Felice and Edward talked much about the war, I should have begun to remember it by about the time I was three years old in 1944, but my prevailing sense of that time was my brother Barry’s birth that year. He became my playmate and rival. Early on, my mother insists, she saved his life from me because she left us alone for an instant and came back to find me putting a pillow over his face. Another time she found him choking because I was trying to feed him some of my food before he could swallow. His disposition was sunnier than mine, which made me envious; life seemed easier for him.

My brother himself tells the story that when he was about five and I was eight he fell and bruised his knee. He recalls how he came up to me to get some sympathy. Maybe he was crying. At the time polio was epidemic. Swimming pools were quarantined, there were newspaper headlines and piteous photographs of hospital wards with rows of children in respirators, and polio was on the lips of parents, including mine. Using my burgeoning diagnostic skills to imitate my father, I palpated my brother’s head and his bruised knee and informed him that he had early signs of polio. I terrorized him, and almost to this day he says he doesn’t fully trust my medical diagnoses.