Writing a Jewish life - Personal Essay
I grew up in a minefield.
As a child of Holocaust survivors, I never knew when I might say or do the wrong thing and spark a devastating comment from my parents, something so dark and humiliating that I would feel as if the ground under me had exploded and a whirlpool had opened up and swallowed me alive.
Nothing could be wasted in our home, nothing could be thrown out. If I were scraping some unfinished food from my plate into the garbage can, I might be greeted with, "You know what we would have done Custom Essay Writers for something like that in the war?"
No, I didn't know, not really, and I was afraid to ask, because I was wasting food when my parents had starved during the war. How could I be so thoughtless and cruel?
Of course, it was always "the war"--as if no other war had ever occurred in human history and no other tragedy had ever befallen the Jews. It was the air we breathed, the silence between words, the beast in the jungle waiting to spring. It was the horrible nightmares my father had, nightmares that had him crying out wordlessly, waking everyone up except Custom Essay Writers himself. Their grip was so fierce that my mother had to shake and shake him to bring him back. I never knew the content of those dreams, just their coordinates: the war.
For me, growing up, there seemed no other significant experience in the world but that war, the one that had stolen from my parents their family, their friends, their home, their country, their past. There were no mementos of their lives in Europe before the war, hardly any photographs. Even memories were in short supply because they were dangerous--they invariably led to pain.
But there were mines, everywhere, waiting to explode.
Like Custom Essay Writers the time when I was around eight years old, making a hand puppet from an old white sock on which I'd crayoned a face. He was going to be a superhero, so I tied a handkerchief around his neck to make the cape. But he needed an emblem, which I drew on his chest with gold glitter. A bolt of lightning. It looked so good I drew a second one and showed it to my mother, expecting praise and smiles. I was the kind of kid whose school art projects were almost always misshapen--these even bolts of lightning were a real Custom Essay Writers triumph for me.
"It's just like the SS insignia," she said. So, the everyday scene of a child showing off his creation to a parent--played out tens of thousands of times in every family--was turned into a lesson of unpredictability and shame. It could happen anytime, anywhere. Whatever I was proud of could set off an explosion, could take my mother or father away, could crush me into insignificance.
And there were more than just these spare and critical comments. There were flashes of something closer to narrative, like flares lighting up the scene of devastation on a battlefield, or eruptions of some Custom Essay Writers smoldering volcano. Who can remember what set them off? A song on the radio, an article in the newspaper, even something in my homework. Anything. Everything.
Though I was a mouthy kid, I had no words with which to respond. What can a child say when he's having after-school milk and cookies and somehow the war has joined him and his mother at the table, as inappropriate and ineluctable as death?
"In the ghetto," I remember my mother telling me, "we ground up glass and wrapped it with a little food to put in the rat holes, then stuffed the holes with whatever Custom Essay Writers we could find." My mother seemed proud, and I think I was supposed to admire her cleverness. The resourceful Jews trapped by the Nazis, taking care of themselves.
But all I could think of was the rats, imagining them coming through the walls, my walls. Even as an adolescent, I was silenced. Once, while frantically looking for my keys, I threw things around my room and left without picking up the huge mess on the floor. When I returned, my mother told me it was just like when the Nazis stormed into her house in 1941 and started tearing it apart.
Tolstoy famously Custom Essay Writers wrote that "all happy families are like one another; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." But I think that doesn't hold true for families of Holocaust survivors because we share a common landscape, the one that Lesbian Jewish poet Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, described this way: "where I came from was/burned off the map."
What might be a little different is that my search for understanding of what happened to my parents, what had spoiled and twisted their lives and left me an inheritance of terrible ambivalence about being Jewish, led me to become a writer.
In other words: a traitor, a Custom Essay Writers spy, a betrayer of family secrets.
How did it happen?
I was in love with storytelling from an early age. My mother read to me, but I learned to read by myself quite well and quite early--partly through studying the captions to photos in LIFE magazine--and I was also writing little stories myself. In second grade I discovered science fiction and wrote a story about an alien who landed on earth, looked around and didn't like what he saw, so he flew away. Surprise, surprise.
I was a stranger in a strange land, and I don't just mean America, I mean my family. Novelist Custom Essay Writers Elizabeth Benedict puts it this way: "The living room. The most treacherous country of all." Even in second grade, I was trying to make sense of this alien territory that was home.
My parents spoke Yiddish and read a Yiddish newspaper, had Jewish friends, and yet looked down on American Jews. Partly, it was because American Jews had done so little to help my parents when they immigrated to the United States in 1950 and had even failed to live up to promises of support, but mainly because, to them, American Jews were inauthentic, a cheap imitation of the real thing. The Custom Essay Writers real thing was the Jewish Atlantis, a lost and mythical Yiddish-speaking land that had been destroyed by catastrophe, burned off the map.
Even though my father kept his store open on Saturday, he and my mother made fun of the Reform rabbi who drove to the shul down the block, and mocked the ungemacht (overdone) hats of the women going to services. "It's an Easter parade!" And my father often told variations of a joke I'm sure many of you have heard. A woman asks her Orthodox rabbi to say a bracha over her new car and he refuses: "What are you, Custom Essay Writers crazy? Who does such a thing?" She finds a Conservative rabbi, and he also says no, but more politely. The reform Rabbi she locates is affable and says, "I'd be happy to--but first you have to tell me--what's a bracha?" That was my father's verdict on American Jews, the smiling disdain of a man who grew up in the same part of the world as Elie Wiesel but never set foot in a synagogue after the war.
For a long time during the war, my father had to pretend to be Christian. He learned to read the Latin prayers so well that Custom Essay Writers he forgot how to read Yiddish and had to be taught by my mother when they met after the war. My multilingual mother, who prided herself on her literacy, not only remembered her native tongue, but, as she would be happy to inform you, spoke a pure and literary Vilno Yiddish. The Yiddish she heard in America made her cringe. What she encountered in the United States was no better than a Yiddish version of Brooklynese, or, you should excuse the expression, Pig Latin.
My parents made me attend an Arbeiter Ring Sunday school, but I never enjoyed it much. Why should Custom Essay Writers I? Despite speaking Yiddish, these were people my parents didn't have an ounce of respect for, especially the ones who had offered my mother a job when they saw her work in Brussels, but reneged on the promise. She had been teaching Yiddish literature at a Bund-organized school whose students were either survivors or hidden during the war. They thought she was terrific in 1947 in Brussels, but, in 1950 New York, they thought she was nobody. I'll never know why. But I can still recall the way one of my younger teachers looked at my mother the first time they Custom Essay Writers met, sometime in my early teens, mouth slightly agape, clearly drinking in my mother's beautiful Yiddish with as much rapture as a Czarist Russian emigre meeting someone claiming to be Anastasia.
When my consciousness of Israel started to develop, I asked why my parents hadn't gone there after the war and the answer was unswervingly angry from my mother: "Live with all those Jews! I had enough of them in the ghetto and the camps!" So--being with Jews, being Jewish itself did not seem something to be proud of. Worse, it was dangerous.
We had an uncle in Israel. There were pictures of Custom Essay Writers him and his family. Why didn't my mother write to him? She didn't say it outright, but it had to be because he and her other brother had managed to escape from Vilno into Russia when the Nazis came, and she was left to take care of her parents. Left. A small word that covers an enormous tragedy. The five of them were on the last train from Vilno, but the Russians cleared it of Jews at the border. My mother's brothers ran after it, urging my mother and their parents to run too, but they couldn't. And so the three Custom Essay Writers of them made their way back to Vilno, on foot, 400 kilometers my mother said, with bombs falling around them. Take care of her parents? Impossible--the Nazis shot her father at Polar and gassed her mother at Treblinka.
In first grade, perhaps around the time of the Eichmann trial, a girl at school told me that "they threw Jewish babies up in the air and caught them on bayonets." This was a people I wanted to identify with?
I don't think it's an accident that my favorite book as a little boy was The Three Musketeers, which I read over and over so Custom Essay Writers many times that it annoyed my mother, and the book's binding broke and frayed. It's a novel where swords are wielded not against infants but adults, a book where a solitary young man plunges into a tumultuous world of adventure in which he triumphs. It's true that little boys often imagine themselves as powerful and daring because they are surrounded by giants, but for me this book had deeper resonance. I see now that it was a story of conquest while the few stories that were emerging from my parents were anything but heroic, at least as a boy would understand Custom Essay Writers them. My parents had been victims; people had tried to kill them. Later I would learn that it wasn't just--just!--the brutal machinery of Nazism that they faced.
My father had cheated death twice before being imprisoned in Bergen Belsen. Once as a slave laborer in the Hungarian army when a Hungarian officer had lobbed a grenade at him and missed, a second time when he was standing in front of a firing squad and the RAF started bombing the area and he escaped. And he had cheated death a third time at the war's end when the train he was on from Custom Essay Writers Bergen Belsen was stopped by the U.S. Ninth Army, and the Jews crammed onto it were saved from being machine-gunned and thrown into the Elbe.
Though I was an extroverted and noisy child (my mother said that she always knew where I was in our large, rambling apartment), I spent much of my growing up deep inside books. From an early age, if I liked an author, I read everything that person had written, some of the books twice or three times. Call it training to be a writer, call it escape. It served both purposes very well.
I read four or five Custom Essay Writers books a week from the local library housed in a turn-of-the-century Gothic pile, always relishing my own choices over what was assigned at school, which was usually less interesting and less complex. For years I read science fiction and history, fascinated by alternate universes and by maps of Europe that showed vast territorial changes. Look at one page, a country exists. Turn the page to another century, and it's gone. I knew something about such disappearances. I read obsessively about dolphins, about attempts to communicate with them. Of course I was interested in this kind of investigation--wasn't I living in a Custom Essay Writers murky submarine world of my own, with connection out of reach?
But when I discovered Henry James in junior high, where an English teacher had assigned his short novel Washington Square, something precious beckoned to me. Though I wouldn't have been able to express it at the time, this story of the shy, ungraceful daughter tyrannized by a contemptuous father struck home, struck a chord in my home. I knew what it was like to feel out of place, criticized, different at home and in the world.
It may be hard to remember, but the 1950s and 1960s were not remotely like the Custom Essay Writers 1970s--there was little open discussion of the Holocaust yet. As Alan Mintz has written in Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory in America, in the post-war celebration of victory over fascism there was no room in America for this dark story without a happy ending. American Jews themselves were busy entering American society and making their mark, and for the most part they didn't want to hear what survivors had to say, so Holocaust survivors often felt stigmatized and silent. Survivors didn't have moral stature yet, and the whole subject was painful and embarrassing. I knew no better way Custom Essay Writers to stop a discussion with my Jewish friends' parents than to say, "My parents were in concentration camps."
My parents were not only burned and branded by the past, they were resentful of the present in which money was extremely tight and their suffering only seemed to count for something among their network of friends who were all Holocaust survivors. My parents were angry, and their anger could erupt unexpectedly. With all their wealth of languages--Yiddish, Russian, Polish, Czech, German, French and more--they spoke English with embarrassingly heavy accents and could become enraged--in public--over what seemed to me to be trivialities. They Custom Essay Writers embarrassed me, and in my grammar school classes I had the misfortune of being the only child of immigrants in a crowd of children whose parents were all comfortably bourgeois yekkehs. My classmates had large allowances, went to summer camps, joined the boy scouts, even traveled outside of New York for vacations. New England. Florida. California. These were all impossible for me.
A difficult environment to grow up in, but a rich field of observation--yet it remained buried treasure for years. I took creative writing courses in high school and college and discovered a stronger facility with language and imagery, with words, Custom Essay Writers than I'd known I had. But my writing was as far away from myself as possible, and by that I mean as far away from my world, my own observations, my truest knowledge. The fiction that I wrote expressed my desire to erase my difference, to flee into another reality, any reality. My writing was profoundly un-Jewish, it said nothing about the Holocaust, and ignored my growing sexual conflict.
I was afraid of outrage and retribution both from non-Jews for being Jewish and from Jews for being either bisexual or gay. I had seen and studied the incredible uproar in the Jewish Custom Essay Writers community generated by Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint, which was published as I entered adolescence. The book terrified me for its defiance of taboos, for its open shouting at Jewish fearfulness and restriction. Roth once observed that what really made the book so infamous was that no one expects a Jew to go crazy in public. Not Jews, and especially not non-Jews, who as Portnoy says, "own the world and know absolutely nothing about human boundaries."
This was not mere rhetoric to me, this was real. My parents had seen their neighbors in Poland and Czechoslovakia eliminate human boundaries. And so was afraid Custom Essay Writers not only of betraying them, but also of exposing myself to potentially hostile goyish eyes. No wonder my fiction was full of disguises. It read like a series of desperate flares sent up for help.
But my creative writing professor in college understood those flares, and kept encouraging me to write something real. And even though I shared with her my confused sexuality, it took until my senior year before I was ready to begin claiming my talent as a writer. I was deeply in love with a non-Jewish girl who wanted to marry me, and the many layers of conflict were Custom Essay Writers boiling over.
I needed her. I loved her. She loved Christmas--could I have a Christmas tree in our future home? It seemed impossible. Every time I walked down an imaginary road to our life together, I stumbled. What about our children? I knew nothing about how to raise a Jewish child, but I couldn't stomach the idea of raising a non-Jewish one. It would make me even less connected, less authentic, less me.
That was the year I read Henry James' The Portrait of a Lady and finally found an entrance into myself. It's a story of a free-spirited, independent, optimistic woman who Custom Essay Writers finds that a huge inheritance leads into the blind alley of a loveless, cold marriage. Understanding at last the nature of her trap, she sits in front of a fire, mulling over what her life has come to, realizing that her imagined home of free expression and love openly given and received is really "The house of dumbness, the house of deafness, the house of suffocation."
I read that passage at three in the morning and was never the same again. That was the house I lived in. I saw it, felt it, finally had the words.
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