Jewels and Ashes (29 page)

A delegation is sent to the Minister responsible for immigration. He promises to think it over. Mother's hopes leap. ‘It is good to dream', she writes, ‘but woe unto the dreamer.' At the same time, she never allows herself to stray too far from the practical. She rebukes Meier for sending letters express: ‘An unnecessary expense. Every groshen is valuable. Write on thinner paper. But your letters are a great encouragement', she adds, ‘and I await them anxiously, every Monday, my “sacred” day of the week.'

The Minister rejects the appeal, but allows her four months in which to earn the fare home. A new possibility emerges. Rabbi Brody of Melbourne writes to rabbi Katz in New Zealand. Rabbi Katz approaches immigration officials on mother's behalf. She requires sponsors, they reply, and only then can she apply for a permit. A young Bialystoker in Melbourne has relatives in Wellington, a Mr and Mrs Morris. He asks them to act as guarantors. They agree, and an application is lodged. If this attempt fails, mother reasons, she will return to Paris rather than Poland. She can see what is coming. Any alternative, anywhere on this globe, would be preferable to her former homeland.

Yet with each rejection Bialystok seems more alluring. ‘Come home', writes Chane Esther. ‘There will be a great simche when you arrive.' ‘Life is not so bad here', writes Meier, ‘Your many friends would love to see you again.'

Their entreaties are tempting; a day of waiting is an eternity. Each night takes its own time before giving way to the dawn. Mother wakes at 3 a.m. in a fever. She stares at photos of Meier. The ticking of the clock is a creeping insanity. Each minute is fraught with panic; each successive tick resounds louder. Letters float across oceans, bearing images of loved ones. Mother gazes at photos of her sister Sheindl, her cousin Freidele, her nephew Chaimke. ‘He looks so alive, as if he were actually here', she writes. ‘And Freidele is growing up to be pretty. But my sister Sheindl's sad smile gives me no joy. She seems very upset. Chilek no longer writes to her from Palestine. I feel insulted by it.' This is always the possibility which skitters beneath the surface, the spectre of abandonment, the fate of Mrs Abrahams.

Mother lodges one last appeal with the logic of desperation. Or is there a touch of irony, uncharacteristic of her? ‘The centenary of Victoria's settlement is to take place next October', writes Moishke on her behalf. ‘The newspapers say that over fifty thousand guests are coming from England alone. So why not allow me to stay on? At least until then? What difference will one person make?'

March 4, 1934: the final rebuff from the Minister. Melbourne has just emerged from a heat wave, over forty degrees for nine days in succession. Factory work is almost intolerable. ‘The papers say it was the hottest spell in many years', writes mother. ‘It had to be now, of course, just for me. It seems as though I am a true shlemiel. Well, let it be the last trial.'

Mother's moods fluctuate with increasing rapidity. She receives a visa for New Zealand, but only for six months. Her Yiddish script takes on greater urgency. The characters are more elongated, stretched taut almost beyond recognition. ‘I have become a mere straw tossed around on wild seas, from earth to the skies, from the skies back to earth.' And she hastens to add: ‘This is not just pretty prose, but the way it is. Which way do I go? Wellington? Paris? Bialystok? Buenos Aires?' She changes her mind from one letter to the next. ‘Why spend my hard-earned money on a fare to New Zealand, where my future is uncertain, where I am without family or community?' Bialystok appears frequently in her dreams as an enticing mirage. She sees herself sitting in the city gardens on summer evenings, strolling in Sienkiewicza Avenue on Sunday afternoons. ‘It will be exciting to see everyone again', she writes. Mother appears to have made up her mind. ‘There is much to talk about, Meierke', she concludes, ‘but it can now wait for when we are reunited in our beloved Bialystok.'

April 11, 1934: mother's last letter from Melbourne. ‘It is early afternoon. At four o'clock I will be going to the station. At 5.30 the train leaves for Sydney. From there I will catch the ferry for New Zealand. My situation you can well imagine. I try to reassure myself, but I have fantasies of arriving in a strange and desolate land. I'd be much happier returning to Bialystok. But I know, within me, I must seize this last chance, so that in years to come I will be certain I exhausted every possibility. Otherwise it will always weigh on my conscience.'

On the train to Sydney mother chats with the woman sitting next to her. She is of German descent. When she learns of mother's predicament she offers to look after her in Sydney until the ferry departs. ‘Only seven million people in such a vast continent?', the woman muses. ‘Surely there is room for just one more!'

The
Wanganui
steams into Wellington Harbour through heavy rain. When the ferry docks customs police check documents. Mother and a group of Chinese are detained. ‘We were treated like criminals' she writes. After lengthy questioning, Mr and Mrs Morris are allowed on board. They identify Hoddes as the woman they have been expecting, and assure the police they are her guarantors.

On April 30 mother writes her first letter from New Zealand. She is at her lowest ebb. During the first week she had walked the factory district looking for a job. Within a week she had found work. ‘Mr and Mrs Morris are fine people', she observes. ‘I sleep on a sofa in their dining room. They treat me as a welcome guest.' Yet this cannot lift her spirits. ‘To tell the truth', she confides, ‘I would rather be back in Bialystok eating bread and salt, than here, with all the riches in the world. I cannot see either of us fitting into this way of life. You have to look with a lamp to find just one Bialystoker. As soon as I have earned the money for the fare, I'll take my pack on my shoulders and journey home. This single thought sustains me.'

On the eve of her second May Day in the New World, mother can think only of Bialystok. She pictures the Bund locale on Ulitza Lipowe, where last-minute preparations are being made for the annual march. ‘How great would be my joy if I were there with you now.'

Many letters are missing. The last one from Wellington is dated May 15, 1934. Mother regrets the weakness she had shown in her previous letter. ‘I know you will not derive much joy from it', she writes. ‘It was silly of me to have sent it.' She has set her sights again on finding a way to bring Meier over. This is mother — the determined one, the stoic — as I would come to know her many years later, her life narrowed down to the single objective of raising her three children, the remnants of her once-large family. She did this with a quiet persistence, broken only from time to time by her abrupt scream emerging from a dream of villages on fire, or by a sudden rage with her hypnotic refrain echoing again and again: ‘I have a story to tell! No one sees! No one understands! No one knows who I am!'

But increasingly I do, as I criss-cross the pages of her letters, and criss-cross Judenrein landscapes of her vanished past to uncover tombstones sinking into mud and dust. Each stone resonates with unfulfilled hopes; and each page of mother's letters resonates with unobtainable dreams. I see her walking the streets of the New World, surrounded by strangers and locked doors. I see her confronted by her aloneness, her yearning for love and reunion. 1 see her search for a harmony, a sense of belonging and trust, while the years slowly erode her faith. Yet also I see mother acquiring, perhaps unwittingly and at great cost, a subtle wisdom which years later would be fully expressed only in silence.

On May 11, after three-and-a-half years of applications, rejections, appeals, delegations, threats of deportation, last-minute extensions and interventions, and a final plea at the eleventh hour from a friend of a friend, who knew the Minister for Immigration, father arrived in New Zealand. As he checked through customs he caught glimpses of Hoddes, among the circle of friends she had made during her two years in Wellington.

‘In that moment she seemed like a searing beam of light', father tells me, ‘and as soon as I was able, I rushed towards her in a blur of excitement. But to tell you the truth', he adds with a laugh, ‘I think her friends were somewhat disappointed with the greenhorn who emerged from the boat. They looked at me with great curiosity. Was this the Romeo they had heard so much about, the writer of such poetic letters, the object of Hoddes's tireless passion, reunited at last with his Juliet?' Father warms to the story. ‘On the same boat, there had in fact arrived two immigrant Jews', he recalls. ‘Meier and Abrami. While I was small and wiry, Abrami was tall and handsome. He would have made a far more appropriate hero.'

Nevertheless, it was a time of great simche. From photos of that time I see a handsome couple at parties, on picnics with young friends, seated on beaches side by side: ‘A miracle for Bialystoker', father claims. ‘We had come from a vast inland to a slender island, where the sea flowed from the skies and shades of blue permeated our lives.' Mother strides confidently through Wellington streets, always smartly dressed. And father seems content. He exudes the heady lightness of freedom, unshackled by Old World obligations and fears.

Their goals appear simple and clear, to establish themselves with some capital. Father becomes an assistant in mother's dressmaking business. They open a small shop, where he takes care of sales. ‘We had dreams of being able to send money to our families', father tells me. ‘Particularly Hoddes — she was always talking about repaying Chane Esther for her many years of sacrifice. She planned to bring over her nephew Chaimke, her youngest brother Hershl, and her Aunt Rivke's daughter Freidele. We fantasized that we would one day return to Bialystok on a visit, in style, radiating success, our suitcases laden with gifts, just like others we had seen who had made good in the New World. “Alrightniks”, they were called. We would be alrightniks on a triumphant return to the Old World.'

Again the soothing rhythm of trains. From the heights of Zakopane, the beginning of a return, one last visit to Bialystok. Day and night I move, through cities of an ancient dreaming, stopping for a day here, a few hours there, in renowned centres of Polish Jewry.

In Wroclaw it rains. The leaders of the kehilla escort me through their cemetery with a familiar lament: ‘We do not even have enough left for a minyan.' In Lodz the burial ground is vast, overgrown, the stones hidden under long grasses that bend to the wind. Highrise flats loom on the edges, as if anxious to stake claims on occupied territory. Back through Warsaw at night, the train hurtles past a sprawl of solitary lights, and I glimpse figures stumbling under an avalanche of rain. By midmorning I am on a stone path which bears the name, ‘The Black Way'. It curves through a pine forest and opens out onto a clearing. In the centre stands a grey monolith, a mausoleum over ten metres in height, surrounded by a symbolic graveyard of jagged rocks. Each one represents a village, a town, a city, throughout Europe and remote outposts of the Reich, where victims were herded into wagons and railroaded here. Treblinka. A place of country solitude in a land of peasants. By night I am again on the move, southeast; and at dawn I am on the streets of Lublin, city of saints and talmudic scholars, centre of pilgrimage and rabbinical courts to which seekers once flocked from all corners of the realm. And just beyond the city limits I come upon it — a desolate field, surrounded by guard towers and barbed fences — a raw wound called Majdanek.

Towards evening I make my way back to the Old City quarters, a rambling neighbourhood of tenements with pastel-shaded facades. The winding alleys are deserted except for children who play by the wall which encircles the cemetery. Tufts of weeds poke out between cracks. The wall glows a mute crimson as it absorbs the sun's rays. Never before have I felt so strongly the impact of this hour, when day gives way to night and when, for a moment, light and darkness meet in the luminosity of twilight. It seems impossible a Majdanek could have existed. Where have I been today?

The train circles north, towards the Bialystoku region. 1 doze fitfully through the night, occasionally jolted by the screech of brakes and flashes of light from stations rushing by. Months of travel coalesce in a trail of menacing dreams; and I envisage how it may have been, in the dying days of the Reich, as the Red Army moved in from the east, and the Allies from the west, liberating remnants from death camps, forest hideouts, attics and barns, a handful here, a few there. Like spectres they move, the survivors, across war-ravaged landscapes, in a trance, returning with the instincts of homing pigeons, urged on by faint hopes of finding someone alive: family, a former neighbour, a familiar face, within that vague, half-forgotten mirage they had once known as home.

In the streets of New Zealand delirious crowds are dancing. Yet my parents cannot recall a celebration, a sense of relief, or an ending, but merely a daze and an ominous blight, a ‘black stain', father has called it. The search extended for years. They scoured Red Cross lists and personal notices in the columns of Yiddish newspapers, astounded that they could not locate even one distant relative, when thousands were emerging from the wreckage — this one from a refugee camp, that one from a Siberian prison, another from a remote town in Asia Minor, or any one of the many far-flung enclaves where temporary refuge may have been found while the storm was raging. In all parts of the globe lists were being scoured. And increasingly it was becoming obvious how immense, how complete, the Catastrophe had been.

In 1947, or thereabouts — I have never been able to find out exactly when — a notice appeared in a local paper, addressed to father, from a camp for displaced persons; and, in time, I would become aware of bitter quarrels, accusations, evasions, of matters enshrouded in obscure hints and denials, which seemed always, eventually, to hearken back to that message from yener velt, from the kingdom of night.