The Watchmaker's Daughter: A Memoir Read online

  Me, at first I loved narishkeit. Until I started school, my best friend was the television. I ruthlessly daydreamed about a “Dad” who smoked a pipe while sitting in a lounger, offering bemused yet well-considered advice. I wanted a slim-hipped “Mom” who wore heels in the house, a ruffle-edged apron tied about her trim waistline. My father sported thin, white, sleeveless undershirts, with fringed prayer garments above, the latter in observance of the biblical law to wear just such a garment. The outfit was completed by the bottom half of a suit, neatly creased and belted. He had no concept of leisure except for the Sabbath day, on which he prayed and tried to rest. Hence, no baseball caps, no sneakers, no tennis sweaters—it was either the whole suit, with a tie, and tie pin—or this undershirt-based ensemble.

  With the upper body of a circus strongman and a bald head, my father looked like Yul Brynner as the despot of Siam in The King and I. He had a similar dangerous accent and charismatic aura. His posture was military; his carriage, aristocratic. Even his vocal timbre was the same, Slavic and deep. When I called him “Dad,” he’d mimic darkly.

  “Dad? Dad?”

  In his voice, it sounded like “Ded? Ded?”

  He would roar, “You want me to be DEAD?” He seemed ready to deal with that threat, as he had too many times before.

  So “Daddy” would do just fine.

  My mother, estrogen to his androgen, wore busily floral “housedresses,” which closed with snaps, or one long zipper from neck to knees. In the kitchen, she and her mother, who had also survived, stirred pots together. On her small feet she wore pink calfskin slippers called shlurkes. While my grandmother sat, emitting a sense of sepulchral gloom, her daughter scurried around, mopping, dusting, spraying polish on the heavy mahogany furniture, shining away with assorted rags. As she cleaned, she wore a permanent, almost ecstatic sheen of perspiration and would sometimes stand by an open window and let breezes blow on her face, eyes closed as gauzy white curtains danced in the air.

  “Oy, a mechayeh!” she would say. Oh, this makes me live.

  In our home, the language was Yiddish. I did not then know that this German/Hebrew blend I spoke, my first language and mother tongue, was dying, spoken as it was primarily by survivors of the Holocaust in Europe. It was only when the dark wooden doors of our television set were opened like an ark, the set clicked on to slowly reveal another world, that I realized our family spoke one language, but the rest of America spoke another. English was cleaner and clackier; it was more sensible and far less tender. People who spoke English were lucky and immune. They really knew what they were doing.

  Every morning, I ran into the living room and swung open the TV doors to search for paradise. I turned on the set to watch a show called Romper Room, then waited as the TV’s inner light began to glow, expanding. There she was: a calm, smiling lady, holding up a magic glass to her face. The goddess of children. Through it, she could see every kid in America. The lady would say:

  “I see Bobby and Nancy and Anne-Marie. I see Richie and Stevie and Mary-Lou. I see Jeffrey and Billy and Susie and Chris. I see . . .”

  “YOU SEE ME! I’M RIGHT HERE!”

  I stood before her, jumping up and down on our frayed green carpet. This was how I watched television: standing on my spot, swaying, praying, desperate to contact the world outside my world. (The area where I stood was growing threadbare; I could see the beginnings of a dun mesh below the crushed nap.) I hopped on one foot for Captain Kangaroo. I showed my frilly panties to suave Sandy Becker. I twirled in tribute to the flickering cathode ray image of Ricky Ricardo, Lucy’s Latino, an accented immigrant like my parents.

  I was besotted by the fact that Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz had married each other, so in love that their show began and ended with a gleaming satin pillow on which was scripted their blended name—“Desilu.” They had crossed a great divide and met in the middle, like a fairy-tale kiss that broke all curses born of cultural distance.

  “I see Kevin and Linda . . .”

  “Call my name, lady! Call ‘Sonia’!”

  For that, of course, was my name. In Yiddish it was Shayna.

  Sonia, much less Shayna, wasn’t on the list of possibilities, unless the magic mirror lady could take a U-turn into a vat of savory schmaltz and say, with a thick, Semitic catch in her throat:

  “Oy! Wait a minute! Now I see Ruchel and Dvora and Selma and Yizkhak and Menny‘shu. Gevalt! I see Maxie, Irving, Irwin, Perel’le and Yacccchhhhim!!!”

  Romper Room lady couldn’t take that U-turn. It was I who had to.

  “Hey, I know what you can call me in American!” I exclaimed to my parents with can-do optimism, as though I were teaching them to do the peppermint twist (which I myself was then learning from a show called American Bandstand). Often, they asked me how to say something in English, which they never completely mastered.

  They were especially shocked by colloquialisms like “Get out of here!”

  “This is polite to say?” my father would ask wonderingly. (He was also puzzled by the violent expression “son of a gun.”)

  “Sure, you say it when you don’t believe someone. Like, someone tells you that they are gonna be on a TV show. And you can’t believe it, so you say, ‘No! Get out of here!’”

  “Get out of here,” said my father.

  “Get out of there,” said my mother.

  My grandmother was silent. Finally, she muttered, in Yiddish:

  “We already got out. What they want from us??”

  “So what do you tell us about your name, now, Sonialeh?” asked my mother, lightly dipping a Swee-Touch-Nee teabag into a handled glass of boiling water. We were sitting down to breakfast in the kitchen. Pigeons flapped on the windowsill, and on our round, oilcloth-covered table sat butter, sour cream, rye and black breads, hunks of farmer cheese, and cut-glass dishes of preserves.

  “You can call me ‘Susie’ now!” I blared. The sound of my high, ridiculous voice hung in the air.

  “Huh, that’s dumb,” said my brother, who often sensed that his little sister was off.

  My father stared at me for a moment, biding his time. He spread a thin layer of blueberry jam on his toast. It rasped like the weekend bristles on his chin, which, when in a good mood, he let me scratch with my fingertips. And then, he intoned, in his basso profundo, with dignity, slowly:

  “Sonia, be proud of your name. My mother, she should rest in peace, who you are named for, died by the hands of those Nazis, murderers, may their names be erased from the world.”

  The Susies and Nancies were not named for the victims of psychopaths whom one was never allowed to forget. They skipped down the street, pigtails bouncing. They giggled, teased, and wrinkled their noses. Their parents found them adorable, “spoiled them rotten”; they braided their hair and put satin ribbons in it.

  To my father’s last comment my mother would not fail to respond.

  “At least she lived her life, your mother. She grew up, she married, she had children. My poor little brothers died young, teenagers! Shot like animals! They had no life at all! What did they do to deserve it? Why did they have to die?”

  Three years older, my brother tended to escape these inquisitions, and now, grabbing half a rye bread, cucumber, and butter sandwich, ran off to his room. Auburn-haired, freckle-faced, Manny was a whirlwind of activity with a pocketful of bottle caps and marbles. Sitting him down was a challenge, much less posing to him the Greatest Hits of Moral Philosophy. But me, I was a brooder. From the time I had begun asking “Why?” they had begun to respond, “Yes, why? What do you think?” And I had attempted to answer.

  At night, after everyone fell asleep, I would get up, run to my brother’s room next door, and grab the flashlight out of his bedside drawer. Back in bed, lemur eyes and flashlight to the page (so I would not wake my grandmother, with whom I shared a room), I’d open my picture book of Genesis, worrying myself. The sacrifice of Isaac was a special concern.

  Why does Abraham try to hurt his own child? I’d cr
eep out again, fretting to myself, running in the dark corridor past Manny’s room, the bathroom, the kitchen, the living room, and then, at last, bursting though the French doors, into the sanctuary of my parents’ bedroom.

  “What do you mean, Sonia? He was obeying God,” my father might say, stirring, turning to face me. My father’s side of the bed was the one near the window. In the night, it would be lit by the passing cars, and he would wake up to my voice with kind concern, eyes coming alive in the flickering light. Being called in the middle of the night to discuss the sacrifice of Isaac was an actual pleasure for the man. He’d pat my head affectionately.

  “What a smart little girlie,” he’d murmur. “With her good questions.”

  “Do you think it was easy for Abraham?” my mother would add, still lying down. “He suffered, too.” She, too, could talk about suffering in her sleep.

  “Yes, but—don’t you think maybe Abraham should have talked with God a little? For his kid’s sake?”

  “You think talking to God is enough?” said my mother, raising her head to look at me. “If only ...”

  “Yes, it can be enough sometimes,” my father demurred. He was sure his prayers had saved him in the war.

  “Maybe someone could find the right exact sentences!” I’d persist. I didn’t think my father’s prayers had done that much good. He and my mother still seemed so upset. God had let bad people hurt them.

  “Maybe you can find them, then, the words we are all looking for,” my father added. “But now, go back to sleep so you have the strength to look for them.”

  And now, at the breakfast table, my mother was asking me her own stumper of the day. She turned to me and pleaded: “Why did my brothers have to die? Why? They were fine, good boys!”

  My grandmother glared at me. As well as I knew the English language, and good as I was at school, I did not have the answers to all questions, theirs or mine.

  My middle name, Judith, was in honor of these two brothers, my grandmother’s lost children. I wished it were Jane.

  “All right, fine, so this one you don’t know, I don’t know, no one knows,” said my mother, sweeping up the table crumbs with one cuffed hand. “But remember them, mein kind,” she added, her hand now full of collected scraps. After a minute, she stepped on the garbage can lid and tossed them away with a tsk.

  In telling me their stories, my parents felt that they were nourishing my character as a Jewish daughter. The last thing either of them wanted me to be was flighty, or free of history. To them, telling me about the Holocaust was like telling me about the secrets of the cosmos. I just wasn’t clear about what it all meant—that the universe, God included, was a big bully? I could never agree to that. Inwardly, I fought that. Their little soldier was a double agent, half in love with hope.

  “OK, Mommy,” I said, wriggling away from the folding wooden stepstool that served as my kitchen chair. “I’ll remember your brothers.”

  But first I want to see another commercial for Patty Playpal.

  “Do you want more to eat something, Sonialeh?”

  “Zie hat gantz nit gegessen,” muttered my grandmother. “Gornisht.”

  “I did eat! I want to go watch TV.”

  Life was not monstrous in that box, nor, I suspected, in the America it portrayed. In America, God was a big ray of sunshine on a neatly mown lawn. He was the smile on happy parents’ faces, beaming joy on their children.

  The living room was adjacent to the kitchen. I was about to turn on the TV again when I heard my father’s raised voice.

  “Wait, Gita. Did you say shot? Your brothers, they were shot? On my mother, they didn’t want to waste a bullet. They shoved them all, naked, into the showers. And what sprays out? Not water, gas. Suffocated. A horrible death. It makes me sick to talk about it.”

  There was a moment of silence. And then my mother, rebounding:

  “But at least she had a life!”

  That was part of the competition—my life was worse than yours. It was part of the great theme. The Jews suffered more. You don’t know from suffering. You didn’t have a potato peel? I didn’t have teeth. You didn’t have teeth? You were lucky—from me, they pulled out all my teeth, one by one . . .

  “All right, Gita, my mother Sonia, she should rest in peace, had a life, once. And I am glad of it.”

  I wanted a life, too, I thought, turning on the television that made happy faces come glowingly to life. And there she was, the Romper Room lady. The show was not over, and soon she would take up her mirror.

  One day, I knew, she would see me. My mother would see me; my father would take out his loupe and really see me. The Sonia who was not her dead brothers or his dead mother, but a real live girl.

  Arpeggios and Arpège

  MY MOTHER, Gita, was seven years younger than Simon in age, and lighter, more pastel in temperament. Most people, including myself, found her fragrant, pretty, cuddly, cute. She possessed a certain ineradicable joie de vivre that fate had not taken from her. She was stubborn in her happiness; she could hum through her frustrations, and a good apple or orange could change her day entirely.

  “Oy,” she would say, the oy in this case meaning something positive: “Oy, is this good!” And she would be talking about a bite of McIntosh apple (her favorite), or the simple act of coming home into a warm house in the winter, or a cool house in the summer. The windows open, no air conditioning (a little stuffy), and still she would say, “Oy, a mechayeh!”

  Gita’s childhood and early teen years had been brought to an abrupt halt by politics; from the time of the Nazis she had stayed hip-close to her mother. Thus, she remained something of a child, a good girl who causes no trouble and asks no questions. As a condition of marriage, her only request was that her mother, Liba, who had survived the concentration camps with her, be allowed to live with them. My father, in turn, requested that his wife be a helpmate, working in his store. (Liba would take care of the children.) Gita had agreed—and spent the rest of her life catering tirelessly to him until the day he died.

  A piano virtuoso, her conservatory career had been ruined by the war. She had had to leave her piano behind to go to the ghetto (and later, the concentration camp); she had even lost her music books and practice notebooks. Gita was not used to mopping floors, cooking endless meals, or helping out in a watchmaker’s store. Nor had she anticipated the suddenness and severity of her new husband’s wild temper. Since becoming his wife, she had learned about a merciless demon deep inside him. It was a kind of cuckoo, I sometimes thought, something that popped out of the works and then popped back.

  “GITA!!” he’d roar. “Are you really bad or just plain stupid?” If an argument occurred during a meal—which it often did, as meals forced closeness—he’d slam his plate, food and all, to the floor as she wept, as much over the wasted food as the shards of broken china.

  This cuckoo-man had no pity for a child-bride who cried easily and who wanted nothing more than to be romanced, as in a dream that had been interrupted when the Nazis had stomped in. Debussy, Czerny, and especially Chopin, she said, had led her to great visions of love. Now, she raced about him urgently, like a child trying to please but fearing she wouldn’t, rising early each morning to cook and pack her husband’s lunch (fried flounder in a buttered roll, a tomato, an apple) and fill a tartan-patterned thermos full of coffee (Nescafe, instant). Simon would leave early, descending into the subway when it was still dark outside. In his late thirties, it was up to him to climb out of poverty once again, with no family but a twittering wife and her sullen, traumatized mother.

  When Gita came to work, she would be sent on errands to find gears and springs and watch straps, or told to straighten the showcases and arrange the jewelry neatly. Regardless of how much polishing she did, the place always seemed to smell of dusty smother to me—a feeling of gray in the air, a rime of whiteness on the black velveteen trays. The steel light fixtures seemed dull, too, the fluorescent rods within them colorless and dead. Cold chrome was e
verywhere—on the lamps, on the edges of the glass, in the heavy-based mirrors that stood on every table so that customers could see themselves.

  I loved smoothing the honey-colored wood panels in the back of the showcases. They seemed warmer and more alive. With the twist of a tiny key they opened, sliding apart as I’d help my mother reach a tray to bring up to the counter. My father’s workbench, too, was of a worn, tawny wood. My parents were selling jewelry as well as watches, so Gita busied herself with wrapping boxes for paramours buying modest rings and bracelets (these young men made her smile), or dowagers buying large “cocktail rings” with semiprecious stones. Her equipment was a roll of silver paper, a monumental, weighted tape dispenser, and cherry-red velveteen bows, which she tied with meticulous care. My mother hummed as she worked; she was born happy; she had had almost eighteen happy years; and now she would always revert to joy by nature.

  Yet there was a precarious quality to her happiness; when, unpredictably, its vague borders were touched, she would weep, or close down in disdainful rejection. She never told her mother how her husband’s shouting and insults hurt her, but she did, very early, tell me, in her own special locution:

  “He is trying to make from me a Nothing.” Even the Nazis had not done that, she would bitterly observe. He was as strong and strict as any German, and proud of it.

  He, in turn, would confide to me that he was baffled to have married such a silly woman. He found her “moods” ridiculous. His mother had never shown moods, not even when she had had to bury her husband and run with her three children into “deep Russia.” My mother would respond, under her breath but in my earshot, that his mother sounded like she literally did wear army boots.