Hitler Made Me a Jew (6 page)

Chapter 10

Without My Mother (Concord, NH/Reading, PA) 1943

Sasha promised me he would do all that was necessary to have me move in with them. They were now living in Concord, New Hampshire. It took a long time to get the paperwork done before I was given permission to move into their house. Several agencies had to investigate my new home and my new foster parents.

Since I was going to leave their house anyway, the lady decided that she would go to work in a war plant also. The social worker said I could not be left alone in the house without her and decided I had to move temporarily until I could go legally to Concord. Again a separation and a crisis festered the day the social worker came to take me to a new home. I lost my sanity and I rolled on the floor, crying and begging not to be moved until I went to my friends. Even though I was out of control, the social worker dragged me out. This time I was placed in a home with many children—American children. The lady in charge of the foster home was a widow whose husband had jumped out a window during the depression. He had owned a shoe factory and had lost his money in the crash of 1929. Her grown-up daughter helped her run the home. They didn't interfere with the children. I had to share a room with a girl my age named Margaret who told me she was in a foster home because her father had killed her mother. Her brother was in another foster home across town. I liked Margaret. Every day I went to pick her up from school at three to go to the movies together. We used my money—the money people had given me when they saw me cry.

I think the movies helped me a lot with my English and with getting adjusted to the American Way of Life! After the movies we had ice cream. In France, we rarely ate ice cream, but French ice cream didn't compare with this American delicacy.

In the mornings, I was alone in the house. I took bubble baths while I listened to the radio. I used Jergen's lotion on my hands. I loved the almond scent. I was losing my sadness and enjoying the luxuries of my new life.

One day, Margaret and I went to visit her brother. I thought he was good-looking, and I daydreamed that he would like me too. I was feeling things again, and I loved Margaret. I felt sad to leave her when it was time for me to go to Concord, New Hampshire.

Sasha, Luba and Gaby were living in Concord when I came to join them. I imagine Gaby was as unhappy as I had been when Lilo came to live with my parents and me. I was an intruder She had to accept me as her “sister” as I had had to tolerate Lilo. I knew she would have preferred Lilo as her sister. Lilo had been her friend in Marseille. I was a year older, which meant she couldn't be my superior. There was nothing I could do to change her feelings under these circumstances, so I tried to stay out of her way.

Gaby was charming and attractive even if her mother wished she had a prettier face. As a friend she was loyal, fun and bright. She had many friends and she was popular. I felt embarrassed and guilty to be in her company at first until I had friends of my own. Even so, I hoped my troubles were over now that I lived with these friends and that they were trying to get a visa for my mother. I could speak French, and most of all I could speak about my parents. But then Luba said to me, “What enormous breasts you have, just like your mother's, and look at your legs, a train could go through them. Why didn't your parents do anything about that? There are operations and treatments for that. Gaby's nose is horrible, but at least she has a good figure and that's all men care about in a woman: a good figure!”

I didn't know how to answer her and at that moment didn't know how to convince myself she was evil. All I wanted to do was to cover my body. From then on I refused to take off my coat even in the summer. I felt like a freak with huge pendulous breasts and crooked legs. I kept thinking about these parts of my body all the time. I was obsessed with them, and if I had to cross a room I hugged the walls instead of walking in a straight line. I wanted to be shadow.

Luba belittled my mother to me, she called her a rotten housekeeper, without discipline, unfeminine, too naive, too kind to every one. I didn't know what to say, how to defend my mother when Luba tore her apart. I wished I could have told her off. I hated her for saying the nasty things she said about her.

Luba loved my father. I suspected that they had had an affair. This suspicion irked me, as I had to listen to her as she called him so intelligent and how she couldn't imagine what he saw in my mother. The more she praised my father the more it distressed me because she was always doing it at my mother's expense. Then I realized why I had said I didn't want to go live with them when Mr. Johnson had asked if we had friends with whom I could stay if I went to America.

Meanwhile Luba was pleased with herself. She was a disciplined, meticulous housekeeper. Her favorite gesture was to show off with her index finger:

“See no dust!” She checked for dust in other people's homes when their backs were turned and she smiled if she found some. I hoped that something would happen to her and that she would change and be nice, but she stayed the way she was. She spent money wisely. She knew good quality—where the real bargains were. She was well built and could wear anything. She was so lucky with herself. Her husband was kind, but she spoke of him as if he too were stupid like the rest of us. Her acquaintances thought she was an excellent housekeeper. In 1944 it was important for a woman to be a good housekeeper. Her friends and acquaintances came to play cards and have tea in her clean house, but they didn't come to empty their hearts and seek comfort.

Concord was a typical New England town with a Main Street and ubiquitous white churches with steeples and small white salt-boxes houses surrounded by stately trees, drugstores with comfortable leather booths where they served at any time of the day hamburgers, ice cream sundaes, banana splits, and double or triple deck Dagwood sandwiches with toothpicks to hold them together—odd foods for me, then. But the most peculiar thing for me to accept was that these restaurants sold medicines.

Gaby and her friends from Junior High School spent time in the drugstores the way grownups in France did in the cafes. I was startled to see young people have a public life.

With the help of my English teacher, I wrote the story of my escape from France for the school newspaper. It helped me find friends. There were so many activities to do at school, and there were so many things I didn't understand about American Life. For instance, in the assemblies they had contests and the contenders were asked to identify a saying like “Good to the last drop.” I was awed when the contestant knew the answer “Maxwell House Coffee.” I couldn't imagine how people knew such things, and I feared I would never be able to learn and catch up.

Otherwise, the schoolwork seemed simple. I liked the way the teachers explained the work beforehand. It was very different from the system in France where you were told only afterwards what a subject was about and what you had to know to do the homework exercises.

Even though I was happier in Concord than I had been in those beginning days in Philadelphia when I had wanted to kill myself, I was still very sad, and I missed my mother. There was no one with whom I could share those feelings.

I discovered that reading the Bible was a distraction. It was a pornographic entertainment with the begats and begots, and I found sexual arousal speculating about love making in the beginning when the world needed to be populated. But mainly I worried about what would become of me. My life felt suspended with no future in sight. I didn't get any news of my parents. The mail from Europe to the United States was not working. Until Sasha had come for me I had been sure my parents were dead. Talking French with Luba, Sasha and Gaby helped me regain hope that it might be possible for me to see my parents again someday.

I envied the students in school who had an easy time speaking English and accepting the luxuries of their lives. They spoke very fast and were saying (I assumed) important things. At that time I was also bewildered by the disposable objects that people used: table napkins, sanitary napkins, jars, boxes everything to be thrown out—such overabundance made me uneasy. It went against the grain of everything I had been taught in France. And Luba too was good at throwing things out. It bothered me to see bottles or jars used only once trashed out. And everybody in America had a telephone—even children. People also had cars and every house had a garage. The newspaper boy throwing the paper on the porches was a surprise: young people in France didn't have regular paying jobs. Porches were new to me—the houses I knew in Chatenay didn't have porches.

I kept discovering different things about life in America. Everybody had a bathroom. I was astonished to see that my friends took a bath any time they wanted and washed their hair and brushed it one hundred times a day. The movie magazines told them that the stars in Hollywood did that.

Parties and kissing games were strange to me. I was too proud to kiss anybody and I thought there was something odd about those games. I felt too inadequate anyway. My reluctance made me unpopular with the boys I would have wanted to kiss me.

Because of his job, Sasha had to move to Reading, Pennsylvania, and I went along with his family. Reading was a much bigger town than Concord and where Concord was white, Reading was red with stately Victorian brick houses. Sasha had rented one of these with a wraparound porch and a dark interior of paneled walls. The built-in furniture was sculpted with elaborate decorations. Two rocking chairs faced a fireplace. It was the first time I was seeing a rocking chair.

Neighbors came to introduce themselves and give presents. That was the tradition. Gaby and I were immediately invited to join the social activities in our new school. I made a few friends and I led a typical American child's life playing Monopoly, jacks and pick-up sticks. In France, we didn't play any of those games. I also learned to write cards and letters to the movie stars to get their autographed pictures. I learned the songs from the Hit Parade, but I didn't dare sing in English.

After seven months, which seemed an extremely long time, my mother received her visa and arrived in Reading, blond and chic. I had forgotten how pretty she was. Even Luba agreed she looked good. My mother told us about her boat trip to America. They were in the middle of the Atlantic when they were stopped by the Germans who wanted to search the Portuguese ship and had the passengers disembark in lifeboats. This turned into a nightmare. As the people were going down the ropes to the lifeboats, a woman tried to throw her baby to a person in the boat, but she missed and the baby went into the ocean. My mother said that the chaos and horror of it were the worst thing she had ever experienced. After the inspection, the Germans let them continue their trip to America. But they were traumatized, and no one was the same, unable to shake the image and sounds of the baby striking the ocean and his mother's screams as she watched him go down.

Once I was with my mother I felt normal, and it took me no time to become insufferable. I didn't give her time to adjust. She had exactly twenty-six dollars to her name, and I was impatient for us to settle into our own place and leave Luba's house. She took the first job she could find in Reading, sewing piecework men's shirts in a small factory. The pay was too low, and she decided we would move to New York where the wages were better. I was thrilled to go to New York, the biggest city in America.

Chapter 11

New York City/High School 1944-46

In New York we moved into the Hias, a shelter for Jewish immigrants, and I was mortified. I had expected better surroundings. The Hias was in the building on Lafayette Street where later Joseph Papp's theater was located. Then, it smelled of Clorox and its floors were shining and smooth. We had a cubicle with partitioned walls open on the top. The sound of our voices reverberated and made us feel self-conscious even though we were the sole occupants in the shelter. Living in this perfectly adequate setup, room and board gratis, didn't please me as much as it did my mother. I was continually carping, always irritable. We were alone in the dormitory, but we were joined in the dining hall by Bowery bums. If they were presentable and sober, they would be allowed in for meals. Their cheerful presence didn't help me feel better about my situation. I was humiliated to have to sit next to these smelly men.

These derelicts were happy to eat whatever was served to them, even the herring with sour cream and boiled potatoes, which at the time seemed to me a strange combination that I had never seen served in France. The sight of it made me feel sick. I knew I should be more appreciative, but I couldn't help myself. My low status was unbearable. I dreamed of being rich. My mother, worried that I didn't eat enough, took me once in a while to one of the fancy cafeterias on Fourteenth Street.

The cafeterias may have been standard and plain for most Americans, but to me they were the height of lavishness. You went through a turnstile and automatically received a ticket, for which you had to pay a penalty if you didn't present it on the way out, so you kept the ticket with great care whether or not you used it. Once inside, you chose anything you wanted. The possibilities were mind-boggling. But I found that the food didn't taste as good as it looked. Most of the time it was flavorless. My favorite treat was plain toast. To me, toast was the most delicious of all American foods. I had never seen a toaster or white sliced bread in France.

We also used to go to the Automat, the closest thing to a French cafe because one could stay hours undisturbed with friends, and no one expected you to buy more than a cup of coffee.

In the same neighborhood, was the famous Luchow Restaurant, which attracted many celebrities. Our favorite pastime was going to the movie house on Irving Place where we saw French or Russian movies. They played two films at each show, and there was a new offering every day. These movies made us feel less homesick while we were waiting to know what our future would be once the war would be over and we would be reunited with my father.

On Fourteenth Street, we accidentally met our prison friends from Spain and Portugal, Annette and her family. Her parents had started a small manufacturing business making leather belts. She was going to Washington Irving High School, and she suggested I go there, too.

My mother found a job wrapping vitamin chocolate bars for soldiers. It was piecework again, and she was anxious to be as fast as she could be to make the most money. She had to be careful not to get involved in her co-workers' gossip lest she lose time. An acquaintance on the job found us a cheap apartment, which was unheard of in those wartime days.

It was on Fifty-fifth Street between First and Second Avenue, on the top floor of a walk-up building. The halls were dark, and the stairs were hard to climb, but we had a tub with a metal cover in the kitchen and the toilet was inside the flat. The people on the other floors had to share a fire escape that we could use as a balcony. I was satisfied at last and I didn't regret leaving the Hias.

We put down new linoleum on all the floors, and my mother took the furniture that people gave us. The generosity of our new acquaintances surprised us. It was part of the feelings of abundance and space we had felt in the United States.

House cleaning became my chosen responsibility. The shine on the floor and the smell of wax after buffing gave me great pleasure. I couldn't tolerate anyone walking on my perfect floors, and I was endlessly dusting. I did the housework listening to soap operas on the radio, most of which I didn't understand. One show was about a famous actor and his wife, another about a family in which a girl got pregnant out of wedlock. I also loved cowboy songs. Some stations played them all day long, and I tried learning the words: “I've given you a red bouquet of roses...One for every time you broke my heart…”

The super of our building was a French Canadian, Madame Nunez. She was married to a Spaniard. She loved my mother. She was also the only person in the house with a telephone. She took messages for us and called us from the back yard so that the whole house knew our business even if she spoke French because her Canadian French had so many English words in it. But her partiality towards us didn't make us popular with our neighbors. She would reassure us by telling us we had nothing to lose because these people were no good anyway.

The family in the apartment just below us was often the focus of attention in the back yard. The man drank and beat his wife, who was frail and toothless. They had five children, all under five, whom they never took out. One day the neighbors gathered to watch the man shouting that he was going to drop his wife to the ground. He was holding her by the legs out of the window. Aghast, no one dared to move. Mrs. Nunez called the police on her telephone. As soon as they arrived, the man hauled his wife inside. The neighbors rushed upstairs hoping to see him arrested. But all they saw was the woman back on her feet, standing between the police and her husband, imploring the police, “Leave us alone. There is nothing wrong.” With her children hanging at her skirts, she begged, “Let him be.” Everybody snickered, greatly disappointed as she shut her door.

I forgot about them until months later I met her in the street. I was not even sure it was her, she had gained weight, her hair was stylishly cut, her new teeth sparkled. She said they were living down the street where she was the super of the building. I didn't dare ask about her husband, but later Mrs. Nunez told me he had drowned in the East River.

To go to school, I took the Third Avenue elevated train. It was fun to look into people's homes. At every stop I had my favorite apartment to peek into. I studied curtains or the gas ranges, the tables near the window, a cat, a dog, a man drinking in his undershirt, or a woman looking in a mirror. There was always something to look at and imagine even if no one was in. Some houses with fire escapes on the street had people lounging on the stairs, and in the hot weather I saw people sleeping out. There was an old-fashioned nineteenth century look to Third Avenue with its many junk and antique stores. I liked collecting old grammar books and I spent long hours browsing in used bookstores.

I decided to attend Washington Irving High School as Annette had suggested. At that point I didn't know it was a school well known for its art department. Annette had her own circle of friends, so I had to find my own friends. In Biology class I sat next to Joan. We were looking at an amoeba under a microscope. I had never heard of an amoeba before, and I didn't know what we were expected to do with it. Joan offered to help me. She saw to it that I understood everything that was going on. She was fascinated that I was a foreigner.

Joan had a Joan of Arc haircut and wore glasses. Her haircut made her stand out; in those days girls were not supposed to look like boys. Joan was bold and independent. She was not afraid to talk back to teachers and correct them. Because she was so smart, the teachers didn't mind being corrected by her. They were even grateful to her. Joan was a “woman of the world.” She knew about men. They were all bad. (Her father had abandoned her mother for another woman.) She knew the workers were abused and that Negroes were unjustly treated. She also knew that there had been a Holocaust. She overwhelmed me by all she knew, and I looked up to her. I was enormously pleased to be her friend.

She invited me to her house in Greenwich Village. It was my first visit to the Village. She met me near the subway, and on our way, we stopped at the Lafayette Bakery to buy French pastries. The atmosphere of the shop and the small streets of the neighborhood reminded me of Chatenay-Malabry. I told her how much I missed France and how strange it felt to have all these odd yearnings brought up in my throat at the sight of the quaint streets and the French pastries. Joan loved my stories of my life in France. I had at last found a true friend.

Joan's mother was an activist, before the word became popular, and a divorcee. She was on the side of the oppressed. She reminded me of the people in the Cité.

Joan, her mother and brother lived in a three-story Tudor-style apartment house. As soon as I entered their apartment, I felt at home: books were scattered about; paintings hung on the walls: bright colored Mexican and Indian blankets were thrown casually on the Swedish style furniture; tall plants turned to face the sun through the windows. It was the sort of interior I would have chosen for my house if I had known about those things. Joan's mother and brother treated me well, and for the first time since I had come to America I felt good about myself.

When girls wore A-line skirts, baggy crew neck sweaters, pearl necklaces, white and brown Oxford shoes and bobby socks, Joan wore pants and tennis shoes. One Easter day Joan said to me, “Let's go to the Easter Parade in dungarees!” I couldn't think of anything more courageous to do. And so on Easter Sunday we walked down Fifth Avenue with our rolled-up dungarees. We were scorned because the Easter Parade was sacrosanct in 1944. People prepared for it months in advance. Joan and I knew that it was a big holiday only for commercial reasons—that it was Madison Avenue pressuring everyone to buy a new outfit. Madison Avenue making sure you felt there was something morally wrong with you if you didn't have a new hat or outfit. Joan and I were ahead of our time in knowing these things when there was no alternative media to tell you the truth. We were the only ones who dared do something about it. Joan began a crusade so that girls could wear pants in our high school. In our senior year she single-handedly won us the right to wear pants. Joan was raising our consciousness before we knew there was a consciousness to be raised. At her house I met fascinating grownups: journalists, writers, poets, friends of her mother who wanted to change our society.

My other girl friend in high school was Ingrid. She was very different from Joan. She could have been a cover girl for Vogue she was so willowy, small-chested and clean-cut. She wore the latest styles because her mother made all her clothes. She also wore a lot of makeup even though her complexion was perfect. I didn't know then that wearing a lot of make up was a sign of insecurity. Her reticent, slow manners gave me the initiative when we were together. I thought I could protect her. We told one another secrets and that's how I found out she liked an older man. She was not interested in boys the way I was or rather would have been if I had had a chance! Ingrid didn't think I looked so bad. She told me she wished she could have thick hair like mine, her thin hair troubled her. I didn't think hair was that important. But she disagreed, and told me other important things about looking good.

Ingrid lived at Sixty-first Street at the corner of Third Avenue. Every time the elevated train passed by, her house trembled. She would say, “We're used to it.” Her parents doted on her because she was, like me, an only child. They had come from Germany a long time ago, and she was born when they were already old. They were a devoted couple who kept to themselves and lived a conventional life. Her mother ironed on an electric ironing press that overwhelmed their cramped quarters. It was the first time I ever saw such an appliance, which I later saw only in cleaning establishments. She ironed everything: sheets, pillowcases, even kitchen towels, and their house smelled of fresh linen and lemons.

Ingrid brought snacks to school prepared by her mother: sandwiches made of thin dark pumpernickel bread with a smelly German cheese that tasted like an overripe Camembert. Ingrid was embarrassed to eat her sandwiches because they smelled so strong. But that didn't bother me, so she gave them to me. I was often thrown out of class, with everyone laughing, because of the smell of those sandwiches. At that time, Americans didn't get any cheeses from France, so they knew nothing about cheese smells.

When I was in Washington Irving High School I daydreamed a lot of having a vanity table (even though we had no space for it in our two-room apartment) with a flowered-print skirt and covered with a glass top that held many bottles of perfume. I dreamed of meeting someone who would love me, someone who would not think my looks were a handicap. In these wartime years, desirable young men were in uniform. I longed for them, but I was in no hurry because I was not ready for it. Real love was going to mean marriage and at sixteen I certainly didn't want that.

I discovered a group of French Girl Scouts in a notice on the bulletin board of the French Consulate. Janine was the scout leader. She was a few years older than me. She wore no makeup, had an earnest way about her, and was extremely attractive. I joined her group of six girls. The best part of being a regular member was that we could speak French during the meetings, and we could pretend we were in France. Her apartment house was near the statue of Joan of Arc on Riverside Drive. Usually we met at the statue and sang French folk songs. I never missed a meeting, and because of my perfect attendance Janine proposed me to represent the Girl Scouts at Camp Northway Lodge in Ontario, Canada.

I was invited to spend two months at the camp in the wilderness of Algonquin Park. Miss Case, the director, lived in a small New England town. She was elderly and didn't stay at the camp except for short visits. I remember her well! English-looking, proper, her silver hair held in a bun. She wore thin glasses and long khaki skirts pleated at the bottom. She also had definite ideas about life. My presence in her camp was an illustration of her belief that people should mix with people from other lands and learn about different cultures. Even though her camp was exclusive and catered to rich girls, she believed that her girls should live simple lives close to nature. The girls stayed in tents on the border of a lake. There were two solid and primitive log cabins, one for the cooking and the other for dining and recreation when it rained. Algonquin Park was in a reserved forest area where new construction was prohibited, and Miss Case's camp was famous among the wealthy all over the United States. The grandmothers of the girl campers had attended the camp when Miss Case was a young director. But in spite of Miss Case's ideals, it was a snooty place.