a first draft of a long short story that I'd like to make much shorter or break into pieces
“Time roars with our longing for home” Nelly Sachs, poet and Holocaust survivor
“Get out of here you shicker
shaygetzes, you drunken
skunks, ” shrieked Magda, to the three wobbly farm workers, laughing and
singing, back from blowing a week’s salary in Newark bars on Saturday night.
“Just need to pay the
cabbie from the train station,” pleaded Johnny. From the dirt road cutting into
the farm, a cab driver blinked his brights and honked his horn, despite signs
that my father and I had painted in legible English with metal stencils warning
“Please Don’t Blow Your Horn.” The chickens were especially distressed by loud
noises, so the noise made the coops reverberate, the ducks clatter and the
huddled geese honk. Even Charley, the clingingly friendly watchdog unfortunately
chained to his dog house, howled.
“Dock our next check,”
begged Rosco.
“Apukam, go get your
rifle. It is two o’clock in the morning. You have no right to interrupt our
peace and quiet. My husband, he is getting his rifle. You better leave before
he shoots you,” screamed Magda, who claimed to be terrified of drunks since her
Russian liberation from the Nazis.
“Onyukam, dear wife. There is nothing to
be afraid of, “ her husband, my grandfather, Zeidika said softly. “These are
our kind workers. We will talk money in the morning, when you are all sober and
my wife has calmed down.”
Meanwhile, we three little
grandchildren and our parents watched the drama unfold from our separate
entrance to the farmhouse. My mother marched over in her bathrobe to pay the
cab driver and apologized for the delay.
“Hey, I need my sleep,
too, Lady,” the driver shouted. He screeched a fast U-turn onto Pickwick road,
calling back “Damned Kikes and Coloreds” as he floored it.
“Now all of you get some
sleep,” Mom said to the workers while nudging them away from the stage of the
drama queen, my step-grandmother, Magda.
“Bless your kind soul,
ma’am,” they chorused, then staggered off to their apartment above the
hatchery. Magda sobbed. “See why I need my vacation from this place? See why I
have to go to Saratoga tomorrow? Yoy, Gotenyu! What did I do to
deserve such a miserable life?”
Hayim, Hebrew for life,
was called Apukam, Hungarian for Daddy, by his daughters, step-daughters and
second wife, Magda. He was a gas chamber widower. All the grandchildren and cousins called him Zeidika, Yiddish-Hungarian
for grandpa. Hayim gently led Magda, now ranting in Hungarian, back to
bed. His daughter’s family
returned to our beds, but not before I, the eldest child, overheard my mother
mutter to my father, “We need a vacation from that witch! She’s driving us all crazy!”
At
dawn, Magda emerged singing as she descended the outside stairs from the attic
to the side yard. She heaved two leather valises that even her towering figure
could barely lug. I trudged behind, dragging a satchel by its handle, with my
little sister, Lucy, behind me like a caboose, bumping an overnight bag down
the stairs. We prickled with
excitement over our inclusion in Magda’s preparations and plunked the bags on
the grass. We dusted the luggage with rags, then polished the leather to a soft
glow.
“The only vacation I get the whole
year,” lamented Magda as she emerged from the house. She carried an armful of
glittery dresses to air out on the clothes lines on this breezy June morning.
“From
what?” scoffed my mother under her breath, hauling a basket of wet laundry past
us to the clotheslines strung along one side of their enormous back yard,
separating it from the vegetable gardens and unmowed fields beyond.
“Anyone want to help me with actual
housework?” she hollered. My sister and I argued.
“I did
it last time,” I, the elder, trumped the younger. So five-year-old Lucy
trundled off to help Mom, as seven-year-old me continued polishing the luggage
and daydreaming of Saratoga, a “poor substitute for Budapest or Boloton, the
real cities of spas, but what choice do I have?” Magda had told me, serenading
me about its horse-races, spas and night life.
Magda was the only
person on Faraway Farm who took vacations. The rest had not traveled, for as long as I could remember.
They were contentedly nestled in rural New Jersey after the upheavals of war.
Who needed adventure after spending years in places like Auschwitz,
Ravensbruck, Dachau?
For holidays and
summers, the farmhouse often swelled with relatives from Brooklyn and the
Bronx, European refugees, who flocked to their country cousins to escape the
city heat. To them, Faraway Farm was Paradise. Lucy and I were always happy to
explore what seemed to us a vast universe of adventure on our hundred-acre
farm.
But
Magda inhabited a sphere separate from everyone. She told tales of
the most extraordinary of former lives, with barons and castles, operas
and balls. She claimed to be a
former Budapest socialite marooned by historical accident with country
bumpkins, though like the other adults she was a concentration camp survivor
and an Orthodox Jew.
“Supposedly,” my mother added when
referring to anything her step-mother said.
“Budapest
was on the exact opposite side of Hungary from the poor village where your
Zeidika and mother had lived until the war,” she said. “There was nothing where
they came from, just like here. That’s why they don’t need a vacation. They are
used to this poor farm life.”
Magda
hummed along with a recording of Listz’s Hungarian
Rhapsodies. as she cooked and cleaned in preparation for her trip
“They
play that one on Daffy Duck and
Tom and Jerry cartoons,” I insisted,
just to irk her.
“Number
Two? Impossible,” argued Magda. “ You are mistaken, I told you. This is very
classical music. You don’t know what you are talking about.” I knew I was right, and hummed along
loudly to prove it.
Once
cleaned, the valises were flipped open like treasure chests on Magda’s vast
bed, itself religiously questionable, as Orthodox couples were supposed to
sleep in two single beds side by side, like my parents. I curled up in a corner armchair,
watching.
Out
dresses came from stuffed garment bags, one by one. Magda held them in front of
her so I could croon compliments.
“Nodyon Seip! Beautiful, no, for a
farmer’s wife? But really I
should give them all away. What
use are they to me? Just one week a year in Saratoga. Without my husband
even. How can he leave the
farm? Who would take care of
it? Not your father of course. My
husband is trapped. Yoy, Ishtanem! Such a hard life I
have.”
She
held up an array of ensembles, shimmering with sequins like mermaid skins: ruby
red, emerald green, sapphire, silver and gold, dresses with matching jackets,
feathery hats and fur-trimmed capes, glittering shoes and beaded handbags,
little white gloves and long elegant black ones that reached to her
elbows. From a three-tiered
jewelry box on her dressing table, she scooped handfuls of gold costume jewelry
laden with colorful stones.
“I have
to pack every outfit I have. What use are they on a chicken farm?”
So she packed many more
than seven outfits, stuffing both suitcases, then several hatboxes, shoeboxes
and garment bags. She clearly
planned to change clothes as often as I switched paper doll outfits. I drew
those extensive wardrobes herself, tracing the dolls’ silhouettes and modeling
overflowing shoeboxes of tiny paper garments with white tabs on Magda’s fashion
shows and magazines.
Magda
bragged of loyal of friends who, like fans, bestowed upon her extravagant
gifts, for they pitied her ending up stranded on this lowly farm instead of in
the palace she so deserved. My mother cast doubt on every word Magda uttered
with caustic side comments, including “She spends too much money on herself.”
Under
her bathrobe, Magda was already armored in girdle and bra, just requiring me to
fasten a few of the unreachable middle hooks, binding Magda into a firm
hourglass, with funnel breasts overflowing on top in an infinitely deep cleavage
that flat-chested me hoped to someday sport herself.
Magda sat enthroned at
her curved dressing table with a mirrored top cluttered with small, crystal
bottles of scents and golden-rimmed velvet compacts of powders and rouges.
Everything reflected in the three-way mirror surrounded by movie-star lights.
Pin curls peeped through Magda’s hairnet as she applied first shiny
moisturizer, then dull cream foundation, then a flurry of powder. She tweezed, then penciled her eyebrows
into perfect apostrophes. With
liner, mascara and smoky shadow, she enlarged her brown eyes into mysterious
lakes surrounded by gray clouds.
The ridges of her high cheekbones were rouged to highlight bone
structure of Hungarian royalty.
Her red lips were painted and blotted with numerous shades until they
stood out like a drive-in movie close-up. The beauty mark on her chin was
transformed with an eyebrow pencil into the emphatic dot of an exclamation
point.
I knew this routine by
heart, and practiced it often with my own beauty kits and other child versions of
womanly art supplies, often including Magda’s discarded lipstick tubes and
powder compacts. Magda removed the
hairnet and pin curls, and shook, then brushed her silky waves of black hair.
She held her breath and closed her eyes as she sprayed a cloud around her to
keep the hairdo perfectly in place.
Then she stood and misted her whole body with a cologne atomizer,
applying more concentrated perfume to her wrists, behind her ears and into her
cleavage. Finally, she wiggled
into a dress that I stood on the bed to zip up, while both coughed, sneezed and
laughed in the fog.
“Not bad for a farmer’s
wife?” Magda said, gaining her composure while admiring herself in the ornate
oval mirror inside the armoire door.
“You look so beautiful,
like a queen,” I crooned, because Magda loved to hear compliments and besides,
they were true. I had learned early from her mother though, that inside beauty
was what really counted, and that Magda was an ugly witch inside.
Tires crackled on the
gravel in front of the house. I
scurried to greet Kata, Magda’s best friend, pulling up in a whirlwind of dust
in her white Cadillac that looked brand new. She worked as a maid for the CEO
of a large pharmaceutical company nearby, wealthy people who bought a new car
every year. This one was a hand-me-down, as were all of Kata’s elegant clothes
and most of Magda’s. Kata
inherited closets full of castoff formal clothing from her employer: suits,
dresses, and ball gowns, which she and Magda divided up like booty. They were both Hungarians who first met
at the beauty parlor in town, each recognizing in the other a high-class soul
trapped in unfortunate circumstances.
They shared a love of pampering themselves and a yearning for a higher station
in life.
Kata’s
proximity to wealth matched the allure of Magda’s Budapest roots. Kata had the advantage of access to
props, Magda to dreams. The two
women wore the same size as the matron of the wealthy family. They traded
outfits like twins. But unlike the original owner, Mrs. Cornelius, neither of
them attended corporate and charity dinners or cocktail parties. Aside from the
occasional wedding or bar mitzvah in Brooklyn or the Bronx, this annual trip to
Saratoga Springs was their only chance to dress up.
Magda’s white
wide-brimmed platter hat tilted over one eye, she emerged in red high heels
from the pale gray farmhouse in a white dress with red polka-dots and a white
bolero jacket. She carried a large red pocketbook over one white-gloved arm and
her round red cosmetics bag in the other hand. Zeidika sweated behind her with the two valises that he
could barely carry despite powerful muscles that easily hauled bags of chicken
feed and cases of eggs every day.
Several trips were required by everyone to load the car with additional
hatboxes and garment bags. The entire trunk and back seat were so stuffed that
Kata worried she could not see out the back window. Magda insisted that she
would help navigate the car, as she could leave nothing behind. After a briefly tense interchange, they
were off to the ball.
“Like two
Cinderellas,” I sighed.
“Like two evil
stepsisters,” Mom muttered as she turned back to the house
I could easily see Zeidika’s attraction
to Magda. She moved like a dancer,
swinging her wavy hair, long legs, and large breasts, rising above the short
adults around her. Whether
speaking, singing or ranting, Magda’s melodic voice resonated in the open
fields like opera, crystal clear even when I wandered from the house. Magda’s opinions were passionate
contradictions of everyone else’s.
When most upset, she shouted exclusively in Hungarian, a language I did
not comprehend but adored for its syncopated intonations.
Magda
astonished Zeidika. I could see it
in his eyes, the way she roused him from reveries of the past, that faraway
place he retreated to while busily accomplishing his farm work or returning to
the farmhouse for meals. There
were rare instances when Magda went so overboard as to provoke flashes of
annoyance in even him, the world’s most patient man.
Magda and
had Zeidika had met after the war,
he still grieving the loss of his first wife Gittel and their four youngest
children at Auschwitz, she claiming to have lost her husband somehow or another
in the war.
“He was
killed by the Nazis,” she often said, at other times claiming, “I don’t know
what happened to him,” or “He ran off to Austria,” or “He just disappeared.”
“We all
slave to keep the farm going and she wastes all kinds of money on her narishkeit, such stupid things,” Mom
complained. “Why should such a good man like my father have to suffer from such
a terrible wife?”
Mom
resented Magda’s existence as if she had murdered Gittel herself. She implied
that Magda had used trickery to bewitch her father into marriage.
“It is
the only possible explanation. He was still grieving when she met him, such a
kind and handsome man. She took
advantage. She is the exact
opposite of my godzalikeh Mama. I shouldn’t speak of them in the same breath. My Mama was so
good-natured. Magda has a rotten
nature. She aggravates everybody. Look at what she did to my husband. Achh!
Don’t get me started!”
Magda
used to upset my father by accusing him of not pulling his fair share of farm
work, even though he commuted four hours a day to a full-time job sewing mink
coats in New York City. His job provided a regular paycheck to supplement the
fluctuating cash flow of the farm. Dr. Lyons finally warned him that unless he
ignored Magda completely, he would develop a bleeding ulcer or worse.
Thereafter, whenever Magda spoke in my father’s presence, he just looked away
and recited passages from the Book of Job. While it was hard to ignore her volume, it helped that when
angry, she ranted mostly in Hungarian, a language foreign to my father’s native
Polish and Yiddish.
My
mother worried about Magda’s power to make her children sick as well. The week before Magda’s trip, Mom had
to leave me with a fever in the care of Magda in order to go food shopping. First my mother inoculated me against Magda’s “evil eye” by
soaking some stale bread in water overnight. Just before departure, Mom sprinkled some of the water on my
forehead, right there in Magda’s living room, as if she wanted Magda to beware
that her daughter was protected.
Whenever Magda complimented any of my mother’s children in her presence,
which was admittedly rare, Mom spat three times, another evil eye protection.
That
night, as she tucked in her three children, Mom’s rage at Magda was irrepressible.
She confided to me accusations of the worst possible crimes a woman can commit.
Magda deserted her first husband in Hungary without divorcing him. She abandoned him during the war, then
tried to abandon her two daughters, Susy and Judit, when they were both just
six and five. But the children were on her passport and the American Consulate
would not let Magda leave Hungary without them. When she went back for her
daughters, all three were sent to Theriesendstadt for the duration of the war.
“A show camp,” Mom often
said. “For the Red Cross. A picnic compared to Auschwitz. Mothers and children could live
together. That is why they are still alive, Susy and Judit. In all the other
camps, children their age were immediately killed along with their mothers.”
That night, I dreamed of
Saratoga. I could hear Magda’s rubbery enunciation: “Sarra-toh-gah,” as if it
were a Hungarian spa near
Budapest, like Boloton. I
remembered everything Magda had ever said to her about Saratoga, for Magda
waxed rhapsodic the whole year long, waiting for this brief dip into her
wished-for life like a fountain of youth, Magda and Kata stayed at a fancy
kosher hotel. Its formal dining room provided a chance to change outfits for
every meal. At night, they wore
ball gowns to the dances, changing partners until they could not stand up.
Magda was such a lively dancer that ” No one ever believes I’m just a farmer’s
wife,” she often repeated. Magda
and Kata were according to themselves, the most beautiful women there, tall and
elegant, towering over the little Jewish women at the kosher hotel, like goddesses,
envied by all the women and attractive to all the men with whom they danced.
“And who knows what
else,” I had overheard her mother mutter to her father. The fact that Kata was
“a divorcee and a shiksa”
enhanced my mother’s suspicions of the friendship in general and the trip
itinerary in particular.
I could secretly imagine
this daring duo all week, Magda and Kata strolled along the boulevard and
parks, arm in arm, like sophisticated sisters, stopping to drink tea at the
cafes and sample the spring waters in the park. She much preferred these
reveries over the alternate images that insinuated themselves in her brain of
those real sisters, my mother and Ibi, starving together for a whole year as
teenagers in various concentration camps.
She pushed these thoughts away to envision Magda and Kata betting
modestly at the horse races which was attended by people in expensive clothes
peering through binoculars.
I imagined Magda soaking
in bubbly mineral water in elegant bath houses named after great American
presidents like Washington, Lincoln and Roosevelt. In a private room, Magda
eased her naked body into a deep tub that curved to the shape of her back,
brimming with hot fizzy water. The bubbles tickled, pulling out tension,
sickness, suffering, making Magda feel younger each time she immersed herself
for a long soak in what she called hot champagne, which she did daily. Stepping out onto the black and white
tile, she admired herself in the full-length mirror, the way the filtered light
from the window hit her curves and heightened her rosy glow. She dried herself
with plush white towels, wrapping her hair as the attendant, like a servant,
helped her slip on a long white robe. Magda sank onto a nearby lounge like
Sleeping Beauty.
A bit later, the attendant
awakened her, then accompanied her to a private mudroom, where again Magda lay
naked on a soft table. She was
slathered with warm black mud full of minerals that leeched out poisons even
water could not reach. Anger,
bitterness, maybe even some of her rotten nature, were replaced with youthful
energy and calm. She lay there, a slithery seal gradually stiffening into a
wrapped mummy, tightening her skin as she drifted into slumber, until it was
time to shower off the mud and proceed to a massage from head to toe with
fragrant oils. Emerging from these daily treatments, Kata and Magda felt their
skin gradually transform back in time to that of newborn babies. They floated through the streets of
Saratoga weightless, like feathers, for the rest of each day.
Wednesday it rained. By
then, Magda’s absence had grown so ponderous that another much worse absence
emerged to the surface. Mom clearly began missing her real mother, Gittel and
her four younger siblings, all killed in a gas chamber.
I felt guilty about
missing Magda, as my mother wept for her own mother. I helped Mom clean the
house for Shabbos. This meant a thorough washing of the linoleum tiles on the
porch and kitchen floors, scrubbing the windows with Windex, floors with sudsy
pails of Spic ‘N Span, and wiping off the porch table with lemon oil. Mom vacuumed cobwebs and the living
room rug, and changed all the linens.
Clothes that had been dried on the line the day before were ready for
ironing. I loved to iron everything from Dad’s shirts to Zeidika’s
handkerchiefs. By afternoon the sun emerged to reveal a double rainbow.
I accompanied my mother to
the garden to pick string beans for her cinammony cold string bean soup. As we
snapped the fresh beans off the vines, I kept whispering “Sarra-toh-gah” under my breath with
Magda’s intonations. The bathhouses of Saratoga were like the bathhouses of
Budapest, nothing at all like the bath house at Auschwitz, where Grandmother
Gittel, had died. Had she lived, I was certain her namesake would never have
been vain or immodest enough to attend one of those luxurious bathhouses in
Saratoga.
To my mother, who
yearned for own mother, Magda was a constant irritant. With Magda absent, my mind drifted to Saratoga. But my
mother’s reveries carried her to her pre-war life with her own mother. Sensing my mother’s sadness, I shadowed
my mother, constantly talking, helping her around the garden.
Despite this, my mother began
to daydream aloud as we snapped the ends off pods, then snapped them in half.
“My mother loved her
life, hard as it was. She said the
countryside around us came to life like the Garden of Eden every summer and
could not be more beautiful. She
was always grateful to God for what we had and always shared with those with
less. She gave her sister Fanny, who was married to a poor tailor, a cooked
chicken and some challahs for every Shabbos. She never dreamed in her worst
nightmares that her life would end as it did with Aaron and Avraham and Hannah
and Lazer. Even when we
heard stories from the countries around us, we never understood what was going
to happen in Hungary. We thought, I don’t know what we thought, we just thought
the war would soon be over and we would all be together and safe. We never thought the war would come to
Hungary, even though we were surrounded.”
Neither of them paused
snapping beans.
“We had very few
luxuries, sometimes not even necessities.
If I had two good dresses for Shabbos, that was a lot. We never bought a dress. We bought the
material and had someone sew it for us. Only wealthy people had many
clothes. But we had enough. My
mother always found extra for those less fortunate. She was very religious and rabbis who were passing through
always ate at our house because they trusted the strictness of her kashrus. She loved her children, the farm animals, her cats, our big
white sheepdog, Bodri, and her gardens that she grew all around the house and
barns. There were roses climbing the front of the white clay house and a field
of sunflowers down the road, so that she planted their seeds in every corner of
our yard as well. She said they made her happy, reminding her that even from
darkness can come the seeds for new life. She had a big herb garden and people
came from all over for advice, and she sent them off with little packages and
instructions. We never dreamed it would end up like it did.”
Her voice finally caught
and she looked around dazed, as if suddenly awakened from sleepwalking, holding
the colander of snapped green beans for rinsing under the well water I loved to
pump outside. My mother wiped her wet eyes with her apron and shooed me away.
“Enough of this
talk. I can’t get anything
done. Go help Zeidika in the
chicken coops tomorrow. He needs your help more than I do.
Thursday morning, I
headed for the coops. Morning egg collection was fun because eggs were
everywhere, in the airy, sprawling open spaces with lots of windows, because the chickens stirred up so
much dust and needed the fresh air.
Morning eggs were not just in the nesting boxes, but even on the chicken
wire in the middle of each gigantic room.
My movements had to be in slow motion, for the chickens were easily
startled and if one flapped in fear a chain reaction led to an explosion of
wings and cackling and dust churned up, and knocking eggs out of nests and
breaking them. It was easy to see why chicken was synonymous with fear.
I helped Zeidika collect eggs from
underneath the warm, silky bellies of reluctant hens. They worked their way together through the four expansive
rooms of the main coop, an ancient, two-storied cinder-block building that must
have once been a mansion, I imagined. The farm workers took care of the three
other sprawling coops.
After the morning egg
collection, Zeidika and his workers put the baskets one by one through the egg
washer, then left them out to dry, near the central room of the main building,
where I helped to grade the dry ones. Zeidika and a worker carried over the
baskets and gently placed each egg
on a ramp that moved them through a series of scales, then rolled them down one
of the six ramps based on weight, from jumbo to pee-wee. From there, they
loaded the eggs in cardboard flats arranging one on top of the other in big
cases labeled with egg sizes. These were stored in a big refrigerator trailer
that was picked up by a truck once a week.
Most eggs ranged from
medium to extra-large, with the occasional jumbo and the rare pee-wees that
were obvious even without weighing.
The trick was to load and unload the egg-grader quickly but gently enough
not to break any eggs. I was
highly skilled, as good as any of the farm workers according to her
grandfather. Lucy was pretty good
too. But my brother was too young and city step-cousins were always fired
immediately, one of the few things that actually irritated Zeidika, for he had
to stop the grader after every accident and clean off the ramps before the egg
mess dried and stank. Any broken eggs were served as treats to the large
population of barn cats guarding the attached silo of corn feed from rodents.
By focusing on one egg at a time as it moved and paused in rhythmic arcs
along the ramp, I could vividly daydream at the same time. She imagined Magda
soaking in a claw foot bathtub filled with ginger ale, violin music wafting in
the window, dust floating in a stream of sunlight striking a white towel. The rolling syncopation of the
egg-grading machine echoed the rhapsodic rhythms of the Hungarian language
itself, Nyerbelteck, Budapest, Baloton, Sarra-toh-gah.
With Magda gone, the
farm was peaceful. My father’s stomach
settled down. The fields were void
of arias other than crickets at dusk. The longer Magda was gone, the more my
life filled with the presence of my real grandmother’s absence and the more I remembered
Magda’s contrasting flaws.
“I taught her to walk,”
I must have heard Magda brag about a hundred times.
“Even though children teach
themselves to walk,” my mother had explained.
Magda always introduced
us children as “my husband’s grandchildren,” distinguishing them from her own,
while Zeidika always referred to all of them equally as his grandchildren.
Magda
picked favorites, changing loyalties every day so no one ever knew where they
stood. She could be charming one
minute, sarcastic the next. She
played a game of vaguely insulting someone, a grandchild or
step-grandchild, and then claiming
that person disliked her, which was true, but the victim was then forced to
deny and prove this false by being extra nice and helpful. All the children were Magda’s little
handmaidens, grandchildren and step-grandchildren alike. Lucy adored her
because Magda once told her she was her favorite in that family. I was not as easily seduced, yet
resented when I did not merit approval and felt compelled to earn it back. I wanted to remain loyal to my mother
and dead grandmother, yet have Magda adore me at the same time, a seemingly
impossible task.
Most of
all, I was aware that while my real grandmother had loved her life, my step-grandmother “was never satisfied” among a group of
people who felt lucky just to be alive.
I could not help but think that had my own grandmother had the good
fortune to be sent to Thereisenstadt instead of Auschwitz with her six
children, she and Zeidika would be living together on this farm. Their four
youngest offspring would still be alive, married somewhere, with children who
would be my many real cousins. Grandmother Gittel would have no complaints
whatsoever, only gratitude for her life, and a steady love for her
grandchildren, like the fleeting sparkles in Zeidika’s blue eyes.
But while I loyally
complained aloud to my mother of Magda’s flaws, I never admitted that I also
missed Magda’s distracting them all from the hole of Gittel’s absence. The farm, teaming with life, seemed
empty without Magda’s riveting of our attention into the present moment with
one hysterical overreaction in melodious Hungarian after another. With Magda
gone, they were off in their separate dream worlds, distanced from each other.
Magda would never measure up to Gittel. But neither would the rest of them, and
it was a relief to have such a bad example around. None of them, except maybe Zeidika, would ever measure up to
the generous soul of Grandmother Gittel. I knew for sure I shared Magda’s evil
envy. Despite my shame, I was often mean to the younger kids and felt all those
nasty, angry emotions that Magda dramatized so well.
Though I was named after
Gittel, in fact Magda was the only grandmother I had known. My mother repeatedly reminded me that
Magda was a poor substitute for a real grandmother, a superficial shell of
wants. Magda captivated attention on Faraway Farm like an actress on a stage.
She filled the fields of loss, performing daily as a lightning rod for all of
the sadness and anger the rest of the grown-ups dared not direct at God.
Magda’s trip coincided
with the end of school. On those long summer days, I often imagined herself
only an insignificant insect compared to the Ruler of the Universe. My
resentment towards His indifference and mayhem festered as I grew, uttering the
requisite memorized Hebrew prayers of homage day and night. I spent hours
outside with my sister studying lines of ants marching between their food
sources and tunnel homes. I would
guiltily thrill at randomly selecting ones to kill and ones to spare, imagining
the ants inventing elaborate stories to explain why some of their colony had
survived while others had perished.
Certainly they, like her parents,
would decipher meaningful patterns to her completely random carnage,
though she could not even tell them apart.
Who will I
be like, I wondered. Superficial
but hypnotic Magda or kind and modest Gittel, a ghost in my life with sturdy
substance, whom I felt watching me at all times alongside God, with helpless
compassion? Or would I be like my sad mother who was doing her best to get on
with life? It was hard to model myself
on an absence. Yet while Magda’s
presence seemed more vivid at times than the rest of the living, she also
seemed less real than any of them, dead or alive. Like a paper doll, she had no
depth. She seemed desperate not to disappear from their attention, lest she
blow away.
“ If I strive to be more
like Gittel,” I thought, “ will I end up sharing her fate? Will some
similar disaster swallow me up? Is it better to be selfish than generous? Is
survival more likely? How exactly does this universe work?”
All these thoughts while
grading eggs.
On Friday, I helped her
mother prepare for Shabbos with baking and cooking. Flour clouds filled the air like ghosts as Mom dusted the
rolling boards with flour for pastry doughs, like Gittel used to bake. Flour up to Mom’s elbows, on my nose
and hair. Fridays’ hectic pace
made Shabbos seem all the more peaceful in contrast. Cinammony ruggelach,
squished out of a molded tube
shabbosdikah vanilla cookies, flaky apple strudels, lemony sponge cakes, peppery eyah kichel, those
thick Hungarian crackers.
All done by dusk, when my father arrived home. The deer emerged from the periphery of the forest around the
field across the river, visible from the kitchen, pausing to watch the younger
children who paused in their backyard swinging to watch them back.
Saturday was
Shabbos. Everything mechanical stopped.
Everything was like it had been on Shabbos for centuries before technology, in
that faraway world now destroyed.
Long walks through the orchards with Yoshua. Wild strawberry picking and eating on the spot. A big lunch and long naps. Eden. Even when
grief-stricken, Jews must suspend their grief on Shabbos. But still never forget.
“We would have loved to
eat what you leave on your plate in the concentration camp,” my father would
often repeat during lunch on Shabbos. I was a picky, skinny eater, but it was
the wasted food left on the plate that infuriated him.
“It’s my fault. I give
them too much,” interceded my mother. And, indeed, as she, too, had starved for
a year in concentration camps, she was terrified of than empty feeling and
never wanted her children to feel it. As a result, she went overboard, paying
no attention to my small size and always piling my plate high with way more
food than I could eat. I usually managed maybe a third, which would then
trigger my father. We went through this ritual at the Shabbos lunch table every
week, where I inevitably sat with a knot in my stomach as my parents full attentions were focused on the
food on my plate, a symbol for the food that was completely lacking during the
concentration camp years of their lives.
Summer evening at twilight, the Sabbath
drew to a close. Grown-ups
languished on blankets under the silver maple that dominated the front yard,
towering over the old farmhouse, like the wings of a giant bird. Familiar words, “Die
Lager,” the prison camp, wafted over in muffled Yiddish. I flew to the other end of the yard,
propelled to the far edge of the large vegetable garden, so as to escape
hearing about There, that place called Europe, that they still referred to as
Home.
Fireflies twinkled like
sparks in the deepening dusk, dancing to the rhythm of thousands of crickets
and the honking of hundreds of geese settling down for the night, like an army
of small ghosts roaming the field just across the river from the house. Damp grass tickled the children’s
bare feet. I brushed against the
tall zinnias and pungent marigolds of her father’s garden, that she helped him
to water at the end of each day, so that his passion for gardening was passed
on to her. Children’s lunging released
the flowers’ fragrances, as they captured fleeting phosphorescense that greenly
illuminated the inside of their cupped hands. I transferred each bug to a glass
jar with air holes, smelling its distinct traces on her fingers, like freshly-mowed
grass. Lucy, David and I weaved
around the yard as if intoxicated, giggling and crying out "I got one, I got one," each
in turn.
When
three stars were visible, we gathered around Zeidika, under the hovering tree
for the weekly ritual of Havdalah. He
lit a braided candle. It was
Lucy’s turn to hold it high. He
chanted the blessing that praised distinctions: between the Sabbath and the
rest of the week, the day of rest and the days of creation, between Jews and
other people, between day and night, light and darkness. They filled lungs with
the aroma of cloves from a silver box, in order to have a pleasant week. They
each in turn, from oldest to youngest, sipped sweet wine from Zeidika’s silver
cup. Then, Zeidika poured some of the wine into a saucer, and Lucy plunged the
flame into it, extinguishing it with a hiss. Everyone dipped fingers in the
waxy wine and put drops in pockets for prosperity and onto foreheads for wisdom as they wished each other “Gut voch, gut voch, a mazeldikah voch, a
parnasadikeh voch, a hatzlachadikeh voch.” Yiddish for a good week, a lucky week, a prosperous week, a
successful week like so many millions of Jews have wished each other week after
week over the generations.
Then
it was bedtime and night prayers whispered in bed.
Drifting off to sleep, I suddenly
remembered the luminous glass jar filled with fireflies. She ran barefoot over
the moist grass to the soft glow in the far corner of the yard, under the full
canopy of the night sky now pierced with millions of stars. I opened the jar and waved it high,
watching the tiny lights rise up towards the stars like sparks. I tried to
count them, fleeting sparks transforming into stars, but there were too many
and they were too far away and she was so weary she could no longer distinguish
the sparks from the stars they were becoming. She returned to the fort and was blanketed in slumber.
Sunday morning, my
father took us kids fishing, with homemade poles made of long sticks attached
to real fishing line and hooks. I helped my father dig through the chicken
manure for worms. I loved worms squirming, even after they were torn in half
and put on hooks.
After fishing, my father
set up a grill for the rare rainbow trout. We also caught many catfish that
lacked scales and therefore were not kosher, but the farm workers appreciated
the bonus. Sunfish were too small to keep and were all flipped back into the
water. My father had set up the ping-pong table in the side yard, near the grill,
so all the food could be served there, picnic-style. Kosher hot dogs and buns,
hamburgers, barbecued corn, potato salad, coleslaw.
At the end of that long
week, that stretched out in all directions like the echoing fields surrounding
the farmhouse, my heart leaped with excitement, my mother’s stomach dropped
with dread, and my father took out his antacids and recited over and over from
the Book of Job “I am but dust
and ashes.” For Kata’s white
Cadillac had pulled up on the gravelly farm road, and they all anticipated the
rise of the curtain upon Magda, who would distract them from all absences with
her performance about to resume.
“Yoy, Ishtanem! Such a hot ride home,” Magda declared, emerging
from the Cadillac in her new shocking pink dress.
