Art of a Jewish Woman (9 page)

Her father looked her straight in the eyes and said, “Did you ever imagine such misery in our family?” She had no answer, but she had a lot of tears. Her father didn’t cry. Her mother cried and Miriam cried. While she was there, Miriam made a gesture as if to kill herself. On a crisp night she went to the outside toilet and sat there without a wrap. She said she was going to wait until she froze to death. But Felice had to go to the toilet later and found Miriam chilled and stiffly bent as if freezing. She asked Felice to allow her to die. She was so angry and envious that there was no chance for her, no education, just poverty.

Felice brought Miriam back to the narrow bed they were sharing and kept her in an embrace until she warmed up. During her short time there her family wanted to touch her, to see that she was real in their time of misery. She felt that she was being sent on a mission to save her family.

Her mother was also very disagreeable. She reminded Felice that she had said she would get married when she had finished her education because it had cost so much, and now her mother called her a liar because she had turned down marriage offers. She felt like slapping her mother. There was something missing in their relationship. Her father spent a lot of time talking about the political situation and a lot of time pacing back and forth. He kept saying that maybe the colonels who had taken control after Pilsudsky’s death in 1935 would go away. Maybe the racial laws would be lifted. He kept hoping that a progressive government more favorable to Poland’s Jewish citizens, like Jozef Pilsudsky’s democratic one after the world war, might return. Her brother Berci would sit beside her and listen to her stories about all the places she had been. He loved her, and she loved him.

The plan was for Felice to send home as much money as she could spare as soon as she found work in America so Miriam and Berci could go to Palestine on student visas. Bela’s brother in New Haven would help with money too. Moses and Bela would stay on until all the children had left.

At the parting, Berci said, “Don’t forget me, big sister.”

Moses, his arms around Felice and his eyes filling, said, “Be healthy and may God find a place for you.” Then his face brightened. “You are going to have a great future.”

Stifling her resentments, Bela hugged and kissed her daughter, saying, “Don’t worry, Fela, you will be a great success in America.”

Felice thought,
why is she saying this? I don’t even know how to wash a pair of panties.
“How do you think I will be a great success?”

“Don’t worry. You will tell me later.”

Felice stood on the dock in Gydynia. The
M.S. Pilsudsky
loomed above. As she craned her neck to see the ship that was to sail her off to America, she thought it must be what a New York skyscraper looked like. It was taller than any building she had ever seen—in Nancy, Warsaw, Paris, or Tel Aviv. The ship was a modern marvel, almost a mirage after the penury and desolation she had seen in Sczuczyn. The
Pilsudsky
was the face Poland wanted to show the world, its illusion of progress—mechanical progress in the face of political dehumanization and starvation.

Felice read the Gydynia-American Line’s brochure: Three years old, a twin-screw, double-stacked, diesel-powered liner launched on Dec. 19, 1934. It was 498 feet long, cruised at 17 knots and carried 49 first-class, 370 tourist-class, and 400 third-class passengers. Its crew of 303 included one priest and five bartenders. Built in the Trieste, Italy shipyard, its décor, fittings and furnishings were distinctly modernist, enhanced by the work of scores of Polish artists and craftsmen. “The Pride of the New Poland,” trumpeted the brochure.

She thought bitterly—the new Poland for which my father had felt so much pride, so much hope. After The Great War, the Allied powers had re-created Poland, which for more than a century had been dismembered and partitioned by Austria, Prussia and Russia. Now Poland was trying to become a maritime presence and had financed the construction of the boat and its home port by agreeing to provide coal to Italy for years to come. Not long before, the port had been a sleepy Baltic coastal village. Poland’s only other sea access was Gdansk, but Germany was constantly menacing that port to throttle Polish trade, Moses had explained to her. So Gydynia was to be her escape from the dispossession the government had thrust upon her family.

Waiting for the signal to board, she continued reading the Gydynia-American Line brochure. It proclaimed
,
“Freedom of the Ship.” Tourist passengers would find no doors marked “no admittance” and could use all the accommodations, including the dance floors, beauty parlors, swimming pool, and recreational decks—progress and equality that extended no further inland than the dock.

Felice’s third-class ticket gave her a cramped but comfortable shared cabin with a sink with hot and cold running water. There were communal bath and shower rooms and a dining room with a choice of plentiful Polish and American food. A Kosher menu was available. There was no hunger here, and she had her friend Nissenovicz for companionship, her somewhat older math tutor who had given up trying to court her.

Felice had $10, which felt like a lot of money. One day a woman stood beside her at the deck railing and asked, “How much capital are you bringing with you to America?”

“How much capital? I didn’t know how to answer her because I was never a materialist or afraid. I just thought about what I was going to do on any particular day. I had a great curiosity about what would happen on that day. I felt like I was being crushed on the boat because people went to America to make money, while all I had wanted was to live in France and be happy with Samy. But I couldn’t stay in France, and there was no Samy. America was a land of moneymakers.”

Nonetheless, everywhere she went, she made friends. On the boat to America was a boy, two or three years younger than her, traveling alone. He seemed frightened and she felt like his mother. He told her he had relatives in America and was going to be the greatest doctor there. She caressed his head and said he didn’t have to be the greatest. He just had to be a good doctor.

She could barely eat or keep food down on the ship. She wondered if it was because of seasickness or was it sight of all the food in the dining room. She thought of her family growing thinner. If she stayed in her cabin way down in the water, she threw up, so she spent most of the time on the stern deck. She had her own chair, with a blanket if she needed it, and a good French novel. Most of the time the weather was good, and she sunbathed looking at the foam. She thought of the irony, the famous
freedom of the ship
, when she knew how her family and village were losing all their rights and livelihood as if they had been put in prison.

She liked to look at the wake of the ship. It was like a trail back to where she was born. She had a romantic feeling for her hometown, her little village nestled amongst trees and rolling fields, with their little river ambling by.

Felice’s nostalgic vision was just that: a childhood romance, not reality. The new reality would be persecution and catastrophe for her family and their neighbors. Flotsam and jetsam floated in the boat’s wake like pieces of wreckage from her disappearing past.

Kolno and Sczuczyn

Felice felt her life really began when she was 12. Her parents sent her to Kolno, a few miles away, for middle school, something unheard-of for a girl to go away for middle school. “My father made me who I was, giving me an education. He told me that he wanted a son and that since I was not a son, he would raise me like one, meaning that he gave me the education that fortunate boys usually got.”

“I was the only girl from my village of Sczuczyn to go to university. Ours was a little village of 6,000 souls, maybe 3,000 of them Jews, and my father was the mayor. He decided that the middle school in Kolno was better than the one in their town, and I would have a better chance to go on.”

Growing up, she never experienced anti-Semitism, and even though she and a boy named Sossnovitch were the only Jews in the Polish public school, she never felt any trouble because everybody always seemed to like her. Every day she would walk to school in her gray raincoat, a great big capuchin over her head and a bag of books over her shoulder. She loved walking. The school had a long, green, narrow, tree-shaded lane leading to the entrance. Her classmates always called her fondly by her little names—Fela, Fegele, Felizia, Felinka, Felontec, Felushka. Every Polish girl seemed to want to give her another little nickname, play with her, and do homework with her. The boys who were still in school were mostly planning to be priests, and when they had trouble with their Latin lessons they came to her.

She never knew whether it was because her father was important or whether it was she herself, but from the first she felt a sense of self and dignity. If she didn’t like somebody and they didn’t like her, she couldn’t be touched and wouldn’t let anybody call her any names. She took a stand as a little girl. Maybe it came from her father, a proud, ambitious man. In their town almost all the Jewish children went to Hebrew schools. There were many little Yeshiva schools in the villages. One day at public school in Kolno, Sossnovitch came up to her and said he couldn’t take it anymore. He had joined the Hechalutz youth movement, and they were preparing him to be a
chalutzim,
a pioneer in Palestine. Felice didn’t understand why.

In Kolno she lived at first with her mother’s parents, the Grezemkovskys. They were nice people and they loved her. They ran a little general store just off the market square where they sold all kinds of supplies—vinegar, soap, naptha, lamps, tools, cloth, anything people need to make repairs or sew clothes. All day long her grandfather was at the counter, and when there weren’t customers he placed the Talmud and the Bible on the counter, brought up a stool, and read them devoutly. He lived in the two books. When he had a question or was uncertain what to do, he consulted the Bible. He told her it had rules for everything.

Her grandparents had two sons, her mother’s brothers, who had gone to America several years earlier. Herman settled in New Haven, and Solomon lived in Mexico City.

When she lived with her grandparents in Kolno, it was a new experience for her because they were very religious, so observant, even the ones who settled in America and Mexico. All the food was kosher, and they observed the Sabbath strictly, so on Saturdays she went home to Szczuczyn to study because it was forbidden to work on the Sabbath. They told her it was bad that her parents spoke Polish at home rather than Yiddish. They were angry because they felt that her parents were raising her to be too assimilated and argued that she wouldn’t be able to carry on the traditions. All Felice could think of was, What traditions? Her parents only set foot in a synagogue on the High Holy Days and maybe only then because it was one of her father’s civic duties.

Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, was a day of fasting, and her friends in Szczuczyn knew that if they got hungry they could come to her house and eat while her parents were at religious services. When her parents got home, the icebox would be empty. They didn’t have an electric refrigerator, of course. The first electricity came when she was a teenager, and it was only used for lighting. Food was kept cold by cutting large blocks of ice from the frozen rivers and ponds in winter, hauling it on sleds pulled by huge horses panting big clouds of steam from their nostrils to cellars in town and storing it below ground covered in hay. That way it stayed frozen all the way through the summer months until the next winter, although as a girl she couldn’t understand how it could be.

There must have been one or two cars in the villages, though later she could not recall any. The only cars she remembered from her early childhood were when she went to Warsaw by train on a school trip with her class from Kolno. It was her only time in Warsaw, and while they were walking a large rat ran in front of them. Her scream was the loudest of the group.

The only trouble living with her mother’s parents was that her grandfather had asthma and snored loudly so she couldn’t sleep. She was a little princess. After a few weeks she moved next door, where two spinster sisters lived, and in the evening she ate dinner with her grandparents. She spent a lot of time with Rahella, her mother’s sister, and often ate at her house too. Rahella and her husband couldn’t have children for a long time, but finally they conceived a little daughter when Felice was away at boarding school in Wilno. They named her Fela after her, even though in Jewish custom it was supposed to be bad luck to name a child after someone who was still living. She was told they got a special dispensation from the rabbi because they must have liked her very much.

What did Felice mean that her life began when she left home for Kolno for middle school, because of course her life had really begun with her birth? She must have understood at 12 that she had been singled out to be a student vagabond. She first consciously perceived then that she was special in some way. Her life was taking shape like a version of the Joseph myth in which a youth was sent away in adversity and later, by virtue of fortune, spirit, intelligence, and psychological acuity, became a source of fullness for others. In fact, when she was twenty-nine years old an artist painted her in a robe of many colored rainbow stripes, like Joseph’s, loosely draped over her shoulders, fine collar bones bare, skin deeply suntanned, her head regal and slightly in profile, gaze calm and penetrating, long jet black hair bound in a chignon.

In actuality—though she couldn’t have an explicit memory of it—her vagabond life started when she was born in 1910. It was a difficult birth. She was a troublemaker from the first day for her mother. She came to believe that her mother hated her for it.

One day when she was a student in Kolno, she went to the water pump in the square for a pitcher of water. Men usually brought big buckets of water to the house, but that day they needed more. Suddenly a short little woman with huge breasts grabbed her and started kissing her which scared her. Then the woman started saying, “Fegele, my little Fegele,” over and over again. The woman said, “Don’t you remember me?” And that’s how Felice began to learn the circumstances of her birth.