AAARGH FEUILLETON
First Installment
May 2008
[email protected]
HarperCollins
2007 ISBN-10 : 0-06-117345-2
ISBN: 978-0-06-117345-5
IT WAS NOT THE FIRST TIME that the father-and-son team Maurice and Norman Messer, respectively chairman of the board and president of Holocaust Connections, Inc., were traveling home from Poland, but it was definitely the saddest. In all their business dealings for clients they had always come through with flying colors, which was how they had built their enviable reputation and their legendary success. But this time, in a most painful personal matter involving an exceedingly close member of their own immediate family, indeed, the very future of their line, they had failed completely. Nechama, only child of an only son, had absolutely refused to see her father or her grandfather, either one-on-one or in any constellation. She had, in any case, as they were categorically informed, taken a vow of silence. This was communicated to the two men by a matronly nun in sunglasses who came to meet them outside the gate of the Carmelite convent-the new convent, that is, some five hundred meters from the perimeter of the Auschwitz death camp, to which the nuns had moved after an that ridiculous fuss. "Sister Consolatia requests that you respect her right to choose," the nun told them with finality, in English, though Maurice of course knew Polish. From the signature phrasing, the Messers, father and son, could not deceive themselves that this was anything other than a direct quotation from their apostate offspring, now reborn as Sister Consolatia of the Cross, their lost Nechama.
[4]
Nevertheless, despite their unquestionably genuine and heartbreaking
disappointment, they made themselves comfortable, as usual, in
their ample seats in the first-class compartment of the LOT airplane.
They always flew Polish, as a matter of policy, to maintain healthy
relations with the government with which they had most of their
dealings, and they always flew first class, because to do otherwise
would be unseemly for men like themselves, steeped as they were
in such nearly mythic tragic history, a history that set them
apart from ordinary people and therefore necessitated that they
be seated apart. And from a business point of view, from the purely
practical side, it would look bad to go economy, it would look
as if their enterprise were falling on hard times. Everything
in their line of work, naturally, hung on image. "Look,"
as Norman formulated it, with the usual pauses and swallows that
heralded the delivery of one of his aphorisms, "we already
did cattle cars. From now on, it's first class all the way."
Clients expected a premium operation from the Messers, and Holoeaust
Connections, Inc., billed them accordingly. This trip, for example,
was covered by an anti-fur organization that was eager to firm
up its honorary Holocaust status, and Norman had managed, even
in the midst of his private anguish, to do a little work for them,
still in its early stages admittedly, involving the creative use
of the mountains of shorn hair of the gassed victims in the Auschwitz
museum-a ghoulish idea on the face of it, which he was now massaging
and dignifying in order to establish the relevant ethical connection
that would ennoble the agenda of the fur account and give it that
moral stamp of the Holocaust.
By now, of course, the father and son partners knew all the flight
attendants on the airline, specializing in the women. Maurice
persisted in referring to them politically incorrectly
[5]
as "hoistesses," a teasing liberty for which he took
the precaution of propitiating them, just in case, with small
offerings from the luxury hotels of Warsaw and Krakow-miniature
shampoos or scented soaps from the bathrooms, chocolate hearts
wrapped in gold foil plucked off the pillows atop the turned-down
bedsheets. He squeezed and harassed their vivid blondness and
springy buxomness hello and good-bye and thank you, muttering,
"Don't worry, girls, don't worry, I'm safe." "And
he gets away with it too," as Norman painstakingly and unnecessarily
explained to his wife, Arlene, "because he's this cute little
tubby old bald Jewish guy with pudgy hands and a funny accent,
and the dumb chicks from Czestochowa, they think he's harmless-big
mistake, ladies!-so it turns into a stereotypical Polish joke."
They boarded the plane ahead of the common passengers, wearing
to the very last minute their trademark trench coats-thc sexy
semiotics, as they interpreted it, of international mystery and
intrigue. Then one of the attendants, Magda or Wanda or someonc,
without even inquiring, her brain imprinted with their preferences
as if the storage of such information were her reason for existence,
glided forward with a welcoming smile such as had long vanished
from their wives' repertoires, bearing before her living and breathing
breasts a tray with their usual-for Maurice, his glass of Bordeaux
("I'm a red wine male," as he liked to confide urbanely
at official functions), for Norman, rum with Coca-Cola, two containers
of chocolate milk, and a dozen bags of honey-roasted peanuts.
For a long time they sat side by side in silence, each with his
own thoughts, perfectly at ease with the other, apart yet joined,
Norman tearing open with his teeth pack after pack of the peanuts,
pouring them out into the ladle of his palm, jiggling
[6]
them around like dice, and then, with his head tilted slightly
back, dumping them into his mouth with a sharp flat smack. He
went on doing this automatically, mechanically. It was okay to
dispatch the nuts this way when he traveled with his father. The
old man didn't mind, most likely didn't even notice, like other
survivor parents maybe just registered gratefully that at least
his son was eating, and for Norman it was a stolen pleasure because
this was not a snacking style in which he could ever have indulged
had he been with his wife or daughter. That robotic, cranelike
up-and-down motion of his arm drove the two of them crazy, they
could feel its vibration even if they weren't looking directly
at him. Maybe that's why Nechama went into the convent, Norman
speculated-because of his annoying habits.
As for Arlene, well, he was just not going to spoil everything
by thinking about his upcoming meeting with her while he was masticating.
He simply refused even to start thinking about how he was going
to manage her on the Nechama problem when he got home, how he
would confirm that, yes, unfortunately, it looked, at least for
the time being, as if this nun thing was a done deal, there was
nothing they could do about it for the moment except, of course,
to use Arlene's idiom, to go on being supportive, to love their
daughter unconditionally, it goes without saying, to always be
there for her, but, at the same time, we need to allow time to
grieve-figuratively grieve, that is, not actually go into mourning
by sitting shiva for seven days like those ultra-Orthodox fanatics
when one of their kids converts-and then, of course, we need closure,
we need to move on with our own lives, to let go of all this bad
stuff, put it behind us, give the healing process a chance to
work, blah blah. "Look at it this way," he could say
to Arlene, "the bad news is,
[7]
it's a fact-shc's a nun, so that makes her a Christian, I guess,
a goy, a shiksa, even worse, a Catholic, we just have to face
it. And also it's a problem, I suppose, that she had to go and
pick that Carmelite convent right by Auschwitz, of all places,
for her nun phase, where three-quarters of our family were incinerated.
Know what I mean? On the other hand"-and here he would slow
down and suck in air for greater effect-"the good news is,
she's safe, she has a guaranteed roof ovcr her head and what to
eat every day, guys can't bother her anymore, and, from a parent's
point of view, we will now always know exactly where she is at
all times."
Hey, he loved the girl as much as Arlene did, Norman thought resentfully.
Why was he always the one on the defensive? Did he really need
this added grief? Nechama was his daughter too, for God's sake.
This whole mess was no less of an embarrassment for him than it
was for Arlene. Jesus, this could even impact their husiness,
their lifestyle-you hear that, Mrs. Messer, hello? How was it
going to look? he demanded of the wife in his head: Holocaust
Heiress Dumps Jews. It was an emergency damage-control situation
requiring a rapid response. He had to figure out some way to market
this negative to their advantage, to turn it around-something
like, you know, the ongoing trauma of the Holocaust, the continuing
threat to our survival, the Holocaust is not yet over, et cetera
et cetera.
No problem; he was prepared to deal with it. But there was one
thing he wanted to know, just one thing-why was it the case that
he was always the one who had to be, as Arlene would put it, supportive,
like some kind of jockstrap? Why couldn't she be supportive of
him once in a while? Had it penetrated her ozone layer yet that
everywhere her poor schlump of a husband went he was a big man,
he was greeted like a hero? Was
[8]
she cognizant of that fact? In Warsaw, the women adored him, especially
since he had lost all that weight; but the fact is, over there
they had always loved him, they loved him in any shape or form,
they loved him for himself. They came up to his hotel room carrying
bouquets of flowers and bottles of champagne, with beautifully
made-up faces and beautifully sprayed hair, in shiny high-heeled
shoes and gorgeous real-leather minidresses with exposed industrial-strength
steel zippers running from neck to hem-not that he carped the
diem, needless to say. In the States they worshiped him, idolized
him for his aura of suffering, like a saint, like a holy man out
of Dostoyevsky, they revered him for never letting up on this
miserable Holocaust business, for immersing himself in it every
minute, for schlepping the Shoah around on his back day and night,
for sacrificing his happiness to keep the flame going-not for
his own health, obviously, but for the moral and ethical health
of humankind. The anguish in his eyes, the melancholy in the set
of his mouth, the manifest depression in how he blow-dried his
hair, the sorrowful awareness of man's-inhumanity-to-man in the
way he belted his trench coat-it turned them on, yes, it turned
them on.
So big deal, his wife didn't appreciate him. So what else was
new? She was happiest when he was away from home, that was obvious,
she was delighted that his job required so much traveling. Fine,
he could live with all that, too, so long as somebody appreciated
him, so long as someone somewhere was glad to see him once in
a while and showed him a little respect. But it was another thing
entirely to blame him for the whole fiasco. C'mon, was he the
one who put the kid in the nunnery? Please! And why was he going
home now, of his own free will, to listen to all that garbage?
He must be out of his mind, meshuga. It was
[9]
masochism, pure and simple, a sick craving for punishment-he should
call a shrink, seek counseling, as the mental healthniks say.
Did he have any doubts whatsoever about what Arlene was going
to dump on him, with her squeegee social worker's brain and her
prepackaged psychological explanations? Oh, it was an old song,
he had heard it a thousand times already. She would start in again
with the whole bloody litany-how it was all his fault, everything
that had happened was his fault. Right from the start. First of
all, what kind of sick idea was it to insist on naming a baby
Nechama? A poor, innocent baby, to give her a name like Comfort,
as in "Comfort ye, comfort ye, oh my people," like some
sort of replacement Jew, like some sort of postcatastrophe consolation
prize, as if they were all depending on her to make things right
again after the disaster. Such a heavy load, such an impossible
burden to saddle a kid with-no wonder the poor girl took herself
out of this world. Did he think names don't matter? There was
a whole literature on the subject, on the effect of names on development
and identity and self-image. What kind of father would do such
a thing to his own flesh and blood? It was criminal, unforgivable.
Why couldn't she have been given a normal name, some sort of hopeful,
pursuit-of-happiness American name that people could at least
pronounce, like Stacy, or Tracy?
And then this whole second-generation business that he had gotten
himself involved with, dragging Nechama along like some sort of
archetypal sacrificial lamb, like Jephtah's daughter, like Iphigenia.
As a matter of fact, Norman knew very well that most mental health
types just loved the second-generation concept, they ate it up,
but Arlene-surprise, surprise-didn't believe in it at all. Why?
It was completely predictable: because it served Norman's agenda,
that's why, because it legitimized
[10]
and explained his obsession, and gave it status. There was nothing
in it for Arlene. As far as Arlene was concerned, second generation
was a made-up category, an indulgence for a bunch of whiners and
self-pitiers with a terminal case of arrested development. The
so-called survivors, they were the first generation; they were
the ones who had been there, they had experienced it all firsthand,
and after them came their children, this bogus second generation,
these Holocaust hangers-on, Norman and company, throwing a tantrum
for a piece of Shoah action. So all of those tough, shrewd, paranoid
refugees who came out of the war-you don't even want to begin
to think about how they made it through-suddenly they get turned
into sacred, saintly survivors with unutterable knowledge, and
then the second generation, born and reared in Brooklyn or somewhere,
far, far from the gas chambers and crematoria, gets crowned as
honorary survivors. Suddenly these lightweight descendants are
endowed with gravitas, with importance, with all the seriousness
and rewards that come from sucking up to suffering. What could
be neater? All the benefits of Auschwitz without having to actually
live through that nastiness-Holocaust lite.
And what did they do to deserve this honor, this second generation?
What exactly are their suffering bona fides? Well, they had it
rough, poor babies-they were victims too, you can't take it away
from them, as they reassured one another at regularly scheduled
2-G Anonymous support group meetings in synagogue basements. They
were damaged by the damaged, suffered the psychic wounds of being
raised by mistrustful, traumatized, overprotective parents with
impossible expectations. They bore the weight of having to transmit
the torch of memory, that kitschy memorial candle, from past to
future.
[11]
They endured a devastating blow to their self-esteem in consequence
of the knowledge that their lives were a paltry sideshow compared
to their parents' epic stories. It was sick, sick, pathetic-"Holocaust
envy," a new term for professionals, coming your way soon
in the next updated, revised cdition of the DSM-IV bible of mental
disorders. And to think he would expose his own child to such
a pathological situation-to think he'd go ahead now and render
this acute condition chronic by prolonging the agony, by trying
to pass the whole load on to Nechama like a life sentence, like
indentured servitude, like guilt unto the tenth generation. Is
it an accident, then, that she abandoned the Jews for the ultimate
martyr religion, complete with vicarious suffering as its main
value and a tortured skinny guy on a cross as its main icon? Is
it an accident that she found her way back to the gates of Auschwitz?
Had it never dawned on him where this morbid H0l0caust fixation
would lead?
*
"Maybe we should've
come mit one of those deprogramming fellas," Maurice was
now saying. "Maybe we should've climbed the wall from the
convent like that crazy rabbi-what's his name?-when it used to
be in the other building where they used to keep the gas in the
war. Maybe we should've kidnapped her from the schwesters."
Norman shook his head. "Bad idea, Pop." He swallowed
portentously before elaborating. "It would have been disastrous
for Polish-Jewish relations, a nightmare for Catholic-Jewish relations,
not to mention curtains for business relations."
"Nu, anyway, you have to be a younger man for that kind of
monkey business, climbing walls-you know what I mean? And you're
not so young anymore, Normie, ha ha, and I'm not
[12]
in such good shape-like your mama says, svelte. I'm not so svelte
like I used to be when I was a leader from the partisans and fought
against the Nazis in the woods."
Norman had to catch his breath and squeeze the bridge of his nose
to stem the keen rush of longing for his daughter that swept over
him at that moment, as Maurice recited that familiar refrain in
exactly those words about having been a partisan leader who fought
the Nazis in the woods. It was a private joke between Norman and
Nechama. They would mouth those exact words of Maurice's every
time he uttered them, flawlessly imitating his grimaces and gestures
and accent, mouth them behind the old man's back at gatherings
with friends and family or even at the public speeches that he
regularly gave in synagogues or community centers or schools about
his career as a resistance fighter, which he always began with
the sentence, "I'm here to debunk the myt' that the Jews
went like sheep to the shlaughter." Norman and Nechama would
mouth this sentence, too, in fits of choking, mute hilarity. It
was a harmless father-daughter ritual that had started when she
was about eighteen or nineteen years old, after Maurice had given
his standard talk, at Nechama's invitation, in the Jewish student's
center at her college, opening, as usual, with that sentence about
the sheep-to-the-slaughter myth, and ending, as usual, by snapping
smartly to attention when they played the Partisan's Hymn, "Never
Say This Is the Final Road for You."
In a moment alone with Nechama during the reception following
Maurice's talk, the two of them facing each other with their clear
plastic wineglasses filled with sparkling cider, as if playing
a couple just introduced at a social gathering, Norman casually
mentioned-in another context entirely, he forgot what-that of
course nobody really knew exactly what Mau-
[13]
rice Messer had done during the Holocaust except that he had hidden
in the woods all day and stolen chickens at night. No shame in
that, of course, under the circumstances. "You just gotta
face it, kiddo," Norman went on, in the grip of something
bevond his control, "he never shot in the woods-he shat in
the woods! "
"You mean Grandpa wasn't really a partisan leader who fought
the Nazis?" The child seemed genuinely shocked. Norman raised
an eyebrow. His daughter was not being ironic. Maybe he had gone
too far this time, maybe she really was an innocent, maybe she
was just too fragile for this kind of realpolitik. Incredibly,
it looked as if she truly had not fathomed until that moment that
her grandfather's story was just an innocuous piece of self-promoting
fiction. For a devastating pause, Norman felt as if he might have
violated his child in some irreparable, unforgivable way, but
when, after a long silence to absorb the new information, she
mischievously blurted out, "Okay, Dad, I won't be the one
to tell the Holocaust deniers that it's all made up," he
breathed again with relief, impressed by how quickly she had caught
on, how alert she was to where her interests lay and her loyalties
belonged, how sophisticated she was in accepting human weakness
as another amusing fact of life.
"Look," Norman intoned, "it's not as if he didn't
really suffer. You think it's easy being considered a victim all
the time, having people feel sorry for you-especially for such
a macho type like Grandpa? You're a big girl now, Nechama, you
can understand these things. The Shoah was an extremely emasculating
event, as your mother might put it; strangers could come along
and really screw you. For men like your Grandpa, this was very
hard to take-so that afterward it became psychologically
[14]
critical for him to find ways to prove that he hadn't been castrated,
that, to put it bluntly, he still had balls-and he turned himself
into a resistance fighter. It's as simple as that. Anyway, who's
going to be hurt by an old man's little screenplay starring himself
as the big hero?" He slowed down emphatically now to make
way for the bottom line. "The Holocaust market is not about
to collapse due to one old man's pathetic inflations, trust me.
Those loonies who say the whole thing never happened should not
take comfort."
Should not take comfort, he had said-not take nechama.
Anyway, it was from that time on, as he recalled it, that they
began their tradition of delicious mockery, all in affectionate
fun, whenever Maurice warmed up and delivered his partisan spiel.
It had evolved into their own personal father-daughter thing.
And it was the memory of this innocent conspiratorial bonding
with his child that took possession of him now and overcame him.
"Nu, Normie," Maurice was saying, "yes or no? Why
you not talking? You remember that hoo-hah mit the schwesters
at the convent mit that crazy rabbi, like your mama calls him?"
Maurice liked to quote his wife whenever possible, to whom he
gallantly conceded superior mastery of English idiom and pronunciation,
and whom he regarded as a nearly oracular source of common sense.
For example, whenever the subject came up of that rabbi who had
created an international incident with his protest against the
presence of a Catholic convent at Auschwitz, where more than a
million Jews had been gassed-the very same convent in which, in
a more acceptable location ordained by the pope himself, their
granddaughter Nechama was now a nun praying for the salvation
of the souls of the Jewish dead-Blanche would open her eyes wide
and
[15]
exclaim, "But, darling, he's crazy!" In consequence,
Maurice never failed, when referring to that event at the old
Carmelite convent, to include the epithet "that crazy rabbi"-as
if the rabbi's mental state were a certifiable clinical diagnosis,
since Blanche, with her peerless common sense, had declared it
to be so. Common sense, in Maurice's opinion, was an exceedingly
desirable quality in a woman, and there was a time when he had
advised Norman to put it at the top of his list in choosing a
mate. To which Blanche would always remark coyly, "When they
tell you a girl has common sense, that's code language for not
so ay-yay-yay, if vou know what I mean-in other words, not so
pretty." "Common sense together mit pretty," Maurice
would then chime in with alacrity, "just like mine Blanchie."
They discussed everything, he and Blanche, even the subjccts they
did not discuss. They discussed but did not discuss, for instance,
their shared sense of the limitations of their Norman's capabilities-it
was not an understanding that they cared to seal in words. But
around the time they sold their ladies' undergarments company,
Messers' Foundations, from which they had made a more than comfortable
living, the Holocaust had become fashionable, more fashionable
even than padded brassieres and lycra girdles. At first, the two
of them booked up their retirement by becoming leaders in the
survivor community and popular lecturers on the oral-testimony
circuit. The Holocaust was hot, no question about it. Blanche
then urged Maurice to start the new consulting business, Holocaust
Connections, Inc., and to take Norman in as an equal partner-"Make
Your Cause a Holocaust," as their smart-aleck Norman packaged
it, he was just too much. It would be first and second generation
working and playing together, an ideal setup, a perfect outlet
for their Norman, the original futzer
[16]
and putzer, as they lovingly called him, whose jobs until then,
they both agreed, had been totally beneath him, totally unsatisfactory
and unchallenging. Now Norman could hang around all day long,
talking creatively with clients on the telephone, holding forth
with all his brilliant opinions, cracking his wicked jokes, writing
an article now and then for a Jewish newspaper, traveling and
schmoozing in diplomatic channels and the corridors of power with
all the other politicians and insiders and players-the best possible
use of his considerable gifts and talents. Unspoken was their
shared sense that Norman needed their help, that fundamentally
he was a weak person, that he could never manage on his own. Never
mind that he had gone to Princeton University-Princeton Shminceton!-where
he had even taken part in a sit-in in the president's office for
three days and nights, though his mother had not hesitated to
march right into the middle of that nonstop orgy to personally
hand him his allergy medicine. Never mind that he had a law degree
from Rutgers, where they trained poor schlemiels to become a bunch
of creepers and cTawlers. Never mind that he was an adult, to
all appearances a grown man, with a social-worker wife and a beautiful
but moody daughter. If the war broke out tomorrow, they knew in
their hearts that their Norman would never make it. Without saying
it out loud, they recognized that, unlike themselves, Norman would
not have survived.
Survival-that was the bottom line. You couldn't argue with it.
It was the fact on the ground that separated the living from the
dead. That was the lesson they had struggled to drum into their
Norman: first you survive, then you worry about such niceties
as morality and feelings. When someone tells you he's going to
kill you, you pay attention, you take him seriously, you believe
him. You wake up earlier the next morning
[17]
and you kill him. If you survive, you win. If you don't survive,
you lose. If you lose, you're nothing. What is rule number one
for survival? Never trust anyone, suspect everyone, take it as
a given that the other guy is out to destroy you and eat him alive
before he gets the chance. Why had they survived? Luck, it was
luck, they always said. But they didn't believe it for a minute.
It was the accepted thing to say, so as not to insult the memory
of the ones who hadn't survived, the ones who, let's face it,
had failed, the ones who were now piles of gray ash and crushed
bone that people stepped on. The real truth, they knew, was that
they had survived because they were stronger, better-fitter. Survival
was success, but even among the successful, there were categories
and degrees. Look at your survivors today, for example, the ones
who had staggered out of the camps like the living dead. There
were your classic greenhorns, eternal immigrants, afraid to offend
by harping on the Holocaust-why make a federal case of it?-a bunch
of nobodies until they had their consciousness raised by the survivor
elite, by Blanche and Maurice's circle, the ones who survived
with style, the fearless ones. "Me? I'm never afraid!"
Maurice always said; it was his motto. Now, thanks to them, the
Holocaust was a household word. They built monuments and museums.
They were millionaires, big shots, movers and shakers. They ran
the country. Survival of the fittest. Blanche had once read in
a magazine that cancer cells were the fittest form of life because
they ate everything else up, they spread, they reproduced, they
succeeded, they survived, they won. Maybc this wasn't such a wonderful
example; maybe this didn't reflect so nicely on her and Maurice
and the rest-to be compared to cancer. Cancer was bad, but in
this world if you survive, you win, and if you win, you're good.
[18]
They were a formidable team, Blanche and Maurice Messer, a fierce
couple, and proud of it. For their fortieth wedding anniversary,
Norman and Arlene had given them a plaque engraved with the words
"Don't Mess with the Messers," which they hung in "Holocaust
Central," their den off the living room, right above the
composition that Nechama had written when she was eight years
old, in third grade. The topic was "My Hero"; Nechama
had chosen Maurice. "Grandpa had a gun in World War II. He
killed bad Germans with the gun. He was a Germ killer. He saved
the Jewish people. He loved the gun. He kissed the gun goodnight
every night. He slept with the gun. After the war they gave Grandpa
a ride on a tank. He was holding the gun. Then they took the gun
away. Grandpa was sad. He cried because he missed his gun. So
he married Grandma." The teacher gave her only a "Fair"
for this effort, but Blanche said, "What does she know? It's
not by accident that she's a teacher," and she hung the composition,
expensively framed, on the wall. "I'm the gun," she
asserted defiantly. Maurice also didn't much care for this composition.
"What for is she telling the ganze velt this partisan
story? It's private, just for family." "What are you
worrying about, Maurie?" Blanche demanded. "Every survivor
is a partisan. Survival is resistance." "Don't be so
paranoid, Pop," Norman put in. "It's safe to come out
of the closet now." Then, swallowing deliberately and pausing
pregnantly, he added, "Ziggy and Manny and Feivel and Yankel,
and everyone else who was with you in the woods in those days,
they're all dead by now, may they rest in peace-and quiet."
Again, it was a question of survival, this time the survival of
the Jewish people in an age of assimilation and intermarriage
and the mixed-blessing decline of anti-Semitism in America-another
Holocaust, frankly, even more dangerous in its
[19]
way because it was insidious, invisible, underground. There was
nothing that Blanche and Maurice would not do to ensure Jewish
survival, no effort or sacrifice was too great, and, as they knew
very well, there was nothing like the Holocaust to bag a straying
Jew-it was the best seller, it was top-of-the-line, it got the
customer every time. Why did God give us the Holocaust? For one
reason only: to drive home the lesson that once a Jew, always
a Jew. You could try to blend in and fade out, you could try to
mix and match, but it was all useless, hopeless. There was no
place to hide, no way to run. Hitler with his Nuremberg Laws of
racial and blood purity, almost as if he'd cut some kind of deal
with the anti-intermarriage rabbis, would find vou wherever vou
were and flush you out like a cockroach. Thank you, Mr. Hitler!
And what could be more effective in sending this message loud
and clear than a partisan leader and his wife-herself a survivor
of three concentration camps, maybe four, depending on how you
counted-telling their story over and over again until they were
blue in the face, pounding in nonstop, day and night, the lessons
of the Holocaust. Whatever it took to beat in the message, even
if it meant pushing themselves into the limelight in crude ways
that ran thoroughly counter to their nature, even if it meant
giving the misleading impression that they were exploiting the
dead, they would do it, not for personal fame and glory, God forbid,
but for the cause, because this was their mission, this was why
they had been chosen, it was for this purpose that they had survived.
They were the first generation, the eyewitnesses. Norman was the
connecting link. Nechama was continuity.
Yes, continuity. She was their designated Kaddish, their living
memorial candle, the third generation. And now she
[20]
was a Christian. This was tragic-tragic! How could it have happened?
Who could ever have foreseen such an outcome? It was beyond human
imagining. They had thrown everything they had into that girl,
she had always been the ideal apprentice and protegee. She was,
as Maurice used to say in his speeches, the spitting image of
his mother, Shprintza Chaya Messer the guerrilla fighter, murdered
by the Nazis during the roundup in Wieliczka while screaming at
the top of her lungs, "Fight, Yidalech, fight!"
To this day, people still talked about Nechama's bat mitzvah speech-how
she had turned to address the ghost of the Vilna girl with whom
she had insisted on being twinned with the words, "Rosa,
my sister, you were cruelly cut down by the Nazis during the Holocaust.
You never had a bat mitzvah. Today I give back to you what was
so wrongfully taken away-because today I am you." Arlene,
with her naive American O-say-can- you-see attitudes, had called
this gruesome, morbid, a form of child abuse, and had threatened
to walk out of the sanctuary, but everyone else felt spiritually
uplifted and morally renewed by Nechama's words, and wept contentedly.
And who could forget the Holocaust assemblies that Nechama had
organized in high school, at which either Maurice or Blanche gave
testimony, and once even Norman, as the ambassador of the second
generation, addressed the teenagers with their yellow paper stars
for Jews pinned to their Nine-Inch Nails T-shirts, pink triangles
for homosexuals, black triangles for Gypsies, and especially who
could forget Nechama's original dance composition, presented each
year, entitled "Requiem for the Absent," with the flowing,
twisting scarves and the arms reaching poignantly toward the heavens?
She had always been so proud of
[21]
her family, those Holocaust relics who would have mortified your
average adolescent, and had even invited her grandparents and
her father to accompany her to Poland for the March of the Living,
with thousands of other Jewish girls and boys from all over the
world, but she was in a class apart, she was a Holocaust princess.
And she wasn't ashamed of the VIP treatment that she then received
because of her family's position in the Holocaust hierarchy, and
she wasn't embarrassed to walk at a slower pace alongside the
old folks for the three-kilometer march from Auschwitz to the
actual killing center in Birkenau, with its remains of the gas
chambers and crematoria, and ash and powdered bone underfoot;
she had turned to them and said, they would never forget it-"I
see them, I hear them, I feel them, the dead are walking beside
us." And then there was her essay on her college application
in which she had written, "The one thing about me that you
may or may not have learned so far from this application is that
I am, in the most positive and constructive sense, a Holocaust
nut. What this means is that I am totally obsessed by the Holocaust,
the murder of six million of my people, and am determined to do
everything in my power to make sure that these dead shall not
have died in vain." "Beautiful, beautiful," Maurice
declared, "like the Shtar Shpangled Banner!" She was
rejected by Princeton, even though she was legacy, because deep
down they were, as Maurice put it, "a bunch of anti-Semitten
and shtinkers." So she went to Brown.
With such Holocaust credentials, who would ever have predicted
that she would turn her back on her people and become, of all
things, a nun? Convent and continuity-these were two concepts
that definitely did not go together, they did not mix well, they
were not a natural couple. The idea of a
[22]
nun was foreign to Jewish thinking; among Jews every girl got
married one way or another, every girl had children, and if one
didn't-well, that just never happened, who ever heard of such
a thing? Ever since she was a little girl she had talked so movingly
about how she would have at least twelve children to help make
up for the millions who had been murdered-heads bashed against
stone walls, hurled alive into flaming pits, shot and gassed.
She was going to he a baby machine for Jewish continuity. She
was a pretty girl, everyone remarked-a little full maybe, "zaftig,"
as Maurice said; "baby fat," said Blanche. Her favorite
food, according to family lore, was marzipan, and even that preference
was regarded as a sign of her superiority; it was so European,
so Old world-what ordinary American Mars Bar kid knows from marzipan?
The boys who were attracted to her were usually considerably older,
usually foreigners. One of the family's favorite stories was about
how she had stayed out very late one night, and when she finally
came home, at five in the morning, her excuse to her parents was
that this Salvadoran guy named Salvador had asked her out, and
she didn't want to hurt his feelings, so she had to explain to
him that she could never date a non-Jew because of the Holocaust-it
was nothing personal, but it was her duty to replace the six million.
And then, of course, she had to tell him the whole history of
the Holocaust so that he'd understand where she was coming from-starting
with Hitler's rise to power in 1933, and so forth until the end
of World War II in 1945, which took a long time, which was why
she was so late, she hoped they weren't mad. "So what did
Salvador say?" Norman asked, ohviously not mad at all, obviously
swelling with pride. "Oh, he said, 'I only asked you out
for a cup of coffee. I didn't ask you to marry me.' But that's
not the point."
[23]
And she never did date a non-Jew, so far as they knew. In any
case, soon after she entered college, her romantic life became
a mystery to them, off-limits as a subject. She did, it is true,
bring home a number of gentile boys, but this was "purely
platonic," as she put it-"We're just friends."
She knew them in connection with her activities to end the persecution
of Christians throughout the world. "There's a Christian
Holocaust going on as we speak," she declared at dinner in
the presence of one of these guests, "and as a Jew who could
have been turned into a lampshade, I cannot in good conscience
remain a silent bystander." She brought home a Chinese graduatc
student who descrihed how he had been beaten and tortured because
of his memhership in an underground church, She brought home a
Sudanese lab technician whose family members had been burned or
sold into slavery for practicing their faith. As they narrated
their stories at the table, she listened raptly, her eyes moist,
her mouth slightly open, even though she had surely heard them
before. "Any guy who wants her will have to show torture
marks," Arlene said. "What for is she fooling mit the
goyim?" Maurice complained to Norman. "Where you think
Hitler got all his big ideas from about the Jews, tell me that?
And the pope, you should excuse me, his holiness, what was he
doing during the war-playing pinochle?" "They're trying
to hijack the Holocaust," Norman wailed. "Christians
are not-I repeat, not!-acceptable Holocaust material. This is
where we draw the line," They tried to wean her from this
new fixation by offering her a partnership in their business-complete
control of the Women's Holocaust portfolio: abortion, sexual harassment,
female genital mutilation, rape, the whole gamut-but she wasn't
buying, "The Christians are the new Jews," she said,
"Christians have a right to a Holocaust too. Since when do
Jews
[24]
have a monopoly? That's the problem with Jews, They think they
own it all, they never share." So they broke down after all
and offered to take on the Christian Holocaust as part of their
business, however alien and distasteful it was to them-to have
her create and head up, in fact, a new department devoted entirely
to this area. "Forget it," she said. "You guys
are too compromised and politicized for me. You'd sell out the
victims for the first embassy dinner invitation."
*
The last time any member
of the family had seen her was a few days after she called to
tell them that she would be entering the Carmelite convent near
Auschwitz as a postulant, and since it was a contemplative, enclosed,
"hermit" order, she would not be available much afterward
for visitors. She insisted that though she would soon become a
novice and then eventually take vows, she would always consider
herself to be a Jewish nun. They should keep that in mind. They
were not losing her. They should not despair. It was decided that
Arlene would go alone to see her. She accepted the mission despite
her frequently voiced resolve never to step foot in that "huge
cemetery called Poland-it's no place for a live Jew; this back-to-the-shtetl
heritage nostalgia trip is obscene; these grand tours of the death
camps are grotesque." The day after Nechama called, Arlene
flew to Warsaw.
When Nechama convertcd to Catholicism, she had told them that
this was a necessary step toward the fulfillment of her "vocation,"
but they should know and understand that, like the first Christians,
she remained also a Jew. "What you mean?" Maurice had
demanded. "Are you mit us or against us, are you a goy or
a Jew? You can't have it bot' ways. You can't have your kishke
and eat it also! Better you should for a little while just
[25]
make believe like you're a Catholic-then finished, fartig-it
will be just the same like you did it." Norman wanted to
know if this was some kind of Jews-for-Jesus deal, but no, she
said, it was in the best tradition of the early Church fathers.
Norman then made the hopeful point to the family that nowadays
maybe you could be both a Christian and a Jew, just as you could,
as everyone knew, be both a Buddhist and a Jew-a Jew-Bude, it
was called, something pareve, nothing to get excited about, neither
milk nor meat.
Even so, her conversion was a devastating blow, though not entirely
unexpected, given her increasing immersion in the Christian Holocaust.
After college she had worked full-time for the cause at its Washington
headquarters, and then she had set out on what she called her
"pilgrimage," her "crusade," to bear witness
to the persecution firsthand at the actual sites throughout the
world, and to offer comfort and strength to the oppressed. She
had been kickcd out of Pakistan for agitation and promoting disorder.
In Ethiopia she had been arrested, and it had required major string-pulling
to spring her, which, fortunately, they were able to discreetly
pull off thanks to her family's position in the world and their
fancy connections in high places-"a little schmear here,
a little kvetch there," as Maurice recounted with satisfaction.
As it became clearer and clearer to them that she was heading
toward conversion, Norman tried to make the case to her that she
was far more useful to the Christian Holocaust as a Jew, that
her Jewishness was an extremely effective media hook, it piqued
people's curiosity-what was a nice Jewish girl like her doing
in a place like this? It made her far morc interesting and, let's
face it, bizarre, especially as she was so Jewishly identified,
with her family so prominent in Holocaust circles, bringing even
greater atten-
[26]
tion and visibility to the cause. "Besides," Norman
added deliberately, "you don't have to be Christian to love
the Christian Holocaust. When I do the Whale Holocaust, do I become
a whale? Think about it, Nechama'le. Think again, baby."
From contacts in Poland, they knew almost immediately when Nechama
had arrived there. She began a slow circuit of the main extermination
camps, stopping for a few days at each one to fast and pray-starting
with Treblinka, then Chelmno, Sobibor, Majdanek, Belzec, until
she came, finally, to Auschwitz-Birkenau. She called home to say
that she had lit a memorial candle in front of the Carmelite convent
for a "blessed Jewish nun," Saint Edith Stein-"Sister
Teresa Benedicta of the Cross," as she called her-who was
martyred in the gas chambers there. "Oy vey," Maurice
had said. "She's talking about that convert Edit' Shtein?
I'm not feeling so good!" In another telephone conversation
she made the comment that traditional Judaism provides no real
outlet for a woman's spirituality. "I mean, suppose a Jewish
woman wants to dedicate her whole heart and soul and all of her
strength to loving God and to prayer. Where is there a Jewish
convent for that? Does Judaism even acknowledge the existence
of a woman's spirituality in any context other than home and family?"
She took a room in Oswiecim to be near the nuns, "They're
such holy, holy women, it's humbling and uplifting, both at once.
How could anyone ever accuse them of trying to Christianize Auschwitz?
It's just ridiculous. Everything they do, they do out of love."
Nechama arranged to have Arlene meet her at the large cross near
the now abandoned old convent, the building in which, during the
Holocaust, the canisters of Zyklon B gas with which the Jews were
asphyxiated had been stored, just at the edge of the death camp.
She was already there, praying on
[27]
her knees, when Arlene's car drove up. Arlene asked the driver
to wait for her; she had no intention whatsoever of visiting the
camp. After she finished with Nechama, she would go directly back
to Krakow, she would be in Warsaw by evening, she would be on
a plane flying out of this cursed country the next morning. As
she approached the cross with her daughter kneeling hefore it,
she could see two nuns in full habit posted in the distance. Nechama
herself was wearing an unfamiliar type of rough garment-probably
some sort of nun's training outfit, Arlene thought.
Nechama heard Arlene approaching, and with her back still turned
she signaled with her thumb and index finger rounded into a circlet-a
gesture she had picked up during a teen trip to Israel-for her
mother to wait a few seconds more as she finished her devotions.
Then, after placing her lips directly on the wood of the cross
and kissing it passionately, she rose to her feet. "Mommy,"
she cried, and she ran to embrace her mother. Arlene shocked herself
by breaking out in racking sobs that swept over her likc a flash
storm. Her mascara streaked down her cheeks.
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, she kept on repeating.
"What are you sorry about? Go on, cry. Crying is good for
you-it cleanses the spirit. There's nothing to be ashamed of."
"I'm sorry for letting them screw you up," Arlene sputtered
into the coarse cloth of Nechama's shirt. She had not planned
to begin this way, but she could not stop herself now. "I'm
sorry for not fighting harder to keep them from poisoning you
with their Holocaust craziness. I should have fought them like
a lioness protecting her cub. They crippled you, crippled you,
they destroyed any chance you might have had to lead a normal
life-and I did nothing to prevent it."
[28]
"Mom?" Nechama pushed Arlene to arm's length. "Two
things, Mom. Number one, I'm not screwed up, and number two, the
Holocaust, believe it or not, is the best thing that ever happened
to me. It has made me what I am today. I'm proud of what I am.
I'm doing vital, redemptive work. By dedicating myself to the
dead I bring healing to the world. Do you understand? I don't
want you to pathologize me-okay, Mom? I'm not a sicko."
Wiping her eyes with a tissue that she clutched in her fist, Arlene
now took the time to look closely at her daughter. Nechama's face,
framed by a kerchief that concealed all of her thick, curly hair,
her best feature, was exposed and clear-no makeup, and no sign
either of the acne that had troubled her well into her twenties.
So convents are good for the complexion, Arlene concluded bitterly.
Instead of contact lenses she was wearing glasses with a translucent
pale pink plastic frame. The expression in her eyes was serene
and benevolent-too placid, Arlene thought, she looked drugged,
brainwashed, dead to life. There was a faint mustache over her
upper lip; in her new life of poverty, chastity, and obedience,
there was no place any longer for the facial bleaching in which
Arlene had instructed her as part of the beauty regimen of every
dark-haired woman, Around her neck hung a daunting cross made
from some base metal. The womanly fullness of her barren hips
bore down earthward against her skirts, pulled down inevitably
by gravity whether they fulfilled their biological function or
not, Arlene could see that. She had put on a little weight-not
that it mattered anymore. At least she was getting enough to eat.
Nechama quickly sensed her mother's appraising eye, and for a
moment she was seized by a familiar irritation that she recognized
from the past, from those times when her mother
[29]
would rate her appearance down to the last fraction of an ounce,
and would register mute disappointment. By an act of the will,
Nechama shook off this feeling, which she considered unworthy
and a vanity.
"You look nice," Arlene finally said. She avoided Nechama's
eyes, gazing up instead at the twenty-six-foot wooden cross looming
behind them. "So this is the famous cross that the Jews and
the Poles are beating up on each other about."
"Yes-isn't it ridiculous?" Nechama said. "I guess
I'll just never understand what Jews have against a cross."
The Crusades, The Inquisition. Pogroms. Blood libels. The Holocaust.
If she can't figure out what we have against the cross, Arlene
thought, especially when it is planted right in this spot, where
over a million Jews were gassed and burned, then she has strayed
a long, long way from home, she has gone very far indeed, she
is lost to us.
"I mean," Nechama went on, "what everyone needs
to realize now, if we're ever going to get beyond this, is that
each Jew who was murdered in the Holocaust is another Christ crucified
on the cross. When I pray to Him, I pray to each one of them,
I pray every day to each of the six million Christs."
Suffering and salvation. Martyrdom and redemption. This was not
a language that Arlene recognized. The cross cast its long dark
shadow over them and onto the blood-soaked ground beyond. The
afternoon was passing, Arlene adjusted the strap of the stylish
black leather bag on her shoulder and glanced toward the waiting
car. More than anything else in the world now, she wanted to get
away from here, from this madness that breeds more madness, from
this alien sacred imagery that justifies unspeakable atrocities.
She wanted ordinariness, dailiness, routine-plans, schedules,
menus, lists, programs,
[30]
things, material goods, "Do you need anything, Nechama?"
Arlene asked. "I mean, before I go-like underwear, vitamins,
toiletries? Tell me what you need, and I'll see that you get it."
"Oh, I don't need anything anymore-I'm finished with needing
things," Nechama said, breaking her mother's heart. "We
live very simply here, Other people have needs. They send us long
lists of what they need, and we pray for them. That's what we
do. I can pray for you, too, Mommy. Tell me what you need."
What did she need? She needed to think and see clearly. She needed
to remember everything she had forgotten-or she would soon lose
faith that she had ever existed at all. "I need to have you
back with me," Arlene said quietly, in the voice she would
use when she would lie down in bed beside her daughter at night,
to ease the child into sleep.
Nechama smiled rapturously. "We'll pray for you," she
said, and her gaze moved from her mother and the cross above them
to encompass her whole world, the two nuns motionless in the distance,
and the more than a million dead inside the camp who never rested.
End of the first part.