Single Jewish Male Seeking Soul Mate

by Letty Cottin Pogrebin

  Israel also elicited contradictory views from Zach’s father who, in one breath, would declare Zionism “the national liberation movement of the Jewish people” and trumpet Israel’s Labor Party government as the standard setter for all Socialist states while in the next breath, would call for a world without nationalities, flags, and borders. Zach knew for sure that his father was back in night school when Nathan paraphrased Robert Frost: “Israel is the place where, when we have to go there, they have to let us in.”

  By the time he went to bed that Friday night before his bar mitzvah day, Zach Levy had made four promises to his parents: that he would grow up to be a mensch, marry a Jew, raise Jewish children, and tithe ten percent of his earnings to help keep Israel safe so it would always be there if a Jew needed it.

  CHAPTER 3

  DETAILS

  THE FROSTY, STEEL-GRAY DECEMBER MORNING SNAPPED with the promise of snow as he and his father made their way home from their weekly outing to Daitch Dairy. The warmth of a dozen bagels, purchased straight from the baker’s oven, radiated from the paper sack that Zach cradled against his woolen jacket. Nathan carried the butter, eggs, onions, tomatoes, farmer cheese, scallion cream cheese, and a half pound each of whitefish and lox—an abundance guaranteed to yield a surfeit. That, too, was part of their ritual: Nathan always bought much too much food for the three of them, which meant that Zach inevitably would be sent across the street to give their untouched leftovers to the staff at the Jewish Home for the Aged. Even as a boy, he understood that the impulse to stuff the larder and overload the table was beyond Nathan’s control, a need born of wartime privations, a hedge against an old hunger.

  That Sunday morning after his bar mitzvah, Zach decided to appeal to his father man-to-man and this time refuse to take no for an answer. Like the lawyer he would become, he began to build his case.

  “Rabbi Goldfarb said I’m a man now, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Do you think I’m a man?”

  “If Rabbi says you’re a man, that’s good enough for me.”

  A yeasty aroma wafted up from the paper bag—onion, sesame, poppy—but Zach resisted reaching for a bagel, knowing it would set his father off on a tear about how instant gratification was a sign of weakness. Swallowing hard, he scrunched down the edges of the bag to trap the mouthwatering aroma.

  “If you really thought I was a man, you would quit treating me like a child. You’d tell me what happened in the war.”

  “Don’t they teach the war in school?”

  “Not the whole truth.” (A line he’d picked up from Perry Mason.) “Not what happened to my brother.”

  “Such details, nobody needs,” Nathan said.

  Zach, having anticipated his father’s obstinacy, had an argument at the ready. “People do need details when something matters to them. Take you and President Kennedy. He was assassinated more than two weeks ago but you’re still glued to the TV. The whole reason you bought a television was to watch the funeral. You’ve seen the motorcade replayed twenty times. You get upset every time you see Oswald or Jack Ruby. Mama asks you to turn off the set but you keep watching the replays. Why? Because you want more details.”

  “Oswald wasn’t Hitler, Boychik. Ruby’s not Himmler.” Without breaking stride, Nathan transferred the shopping bag to his other hand.

  “I’m not saying they’re the same, I’m saying we’re the same. You and me. We want the whole truth. I think I deserve to know my family’s history. And that includes what happened to Yitzhak.” The whoosh of Zach’s corduroyed legs sounded like waves on a beach. “I never knew my brother, but I love him.”

  Nathan’s jaw clenched. His eyes seemed to drill through the stolid brick buildings to a distant place. A cutting wind sliced through the seams of Zach’s jacket and snaked up his sleeves. Shivering, he grasped his father’s hand—the mitt of a hat blocker, palm stiff as sisal, fingers calloused, their surgical finesse long gone—and pulled him into the recessed entryway of Herman’s butcher shop.

  “Let’s stop here for a minute, Papa.”

  A handwritten message with no punctuation hung on the door of the lontzman’s shop: CLOSED NOW PLEASE TO COME BACK. They propped their parcels against the brick wall of the entry area and sat on the concrete step. Zach, who often gagged watching his mother pluck a chicken, found himself eye level with the butcher’s refrigerated window display—a goose and two ducks suspended by their necks from iron hooks, a side of beef, a cow’s tongue, a slab of liver, bloody in its white metal tray. Nauseated, he had to turn away.

  Despite the cold weather, Nathan’s face glistened with sweat. “Okay, Boychik. When you’re right, you’re right. I’ll give you details but you have to promise not to tell your mama I told you.”

  For what felt like the tenth time in two days, Zach said, “I promise.”

  NATHAN AND RIVKA lived and worked in a four-story townhouse on Florianska Street, a few blocks off Kraków’s Grand Market Square. The ground floor was split into two medical offices, each with a separate entrance for their separate practices. Rivka, a pediatrician specializing in premature and low birth weight infants, was also known as a gifted diagnostician with remarkable success treating the gravest childhood illnesses. Nathan, a pulmonary surgeon, had a slew of grateful patients—gentiles and Jews—who credited him with their very breath. Life was good for the two young professionals. They were well settled in a cosmopolitan European city with a thriving Jewish population and, thanks to the esteem in which they were held, their relations with their gentile neighbors and colleagues were cordial, even warm. Yet when the hate was uncorked, everything they were, and everything they had done, counted for nothing.

  On November 9, 1938, the Nazis attacked and over two days burned more than four hundred synagogues and Jewish-owned shops in Germany and Austria. By the end of Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, thirty thousand Jews had been arrested, nearly a hundred killed. When Rivka and Nathan learned the extent of the carnage, they considered leaving Poland for Palestine or the United States but were impeded by the fact that she had just discovered she was pregnant and he had just been inducted into the Polish Army.

  After less than a month in combat, his unit was captured and sent to a POW camp. Nathan was still confined there when Yitzhak was born the following June. The Nazis invaded Poland that September, rounded up all the artists and writers, and the professors at Jagiellonian University, and shipped them to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Rivka was certain that the doctors and lawyers would be next but with Nathan imprisoned in Germany and an infant to care for, she felt immobilized.

  On Yom Kippur 1939, Nazi storm troopers charged into the Kraków synagogue and ordered the men and boys outside at gunpoint to fill in the trenches that, only days before, the Jews had been forced by the Polish Army to dig to defend the city against the Germans. Jewish shops were looted, Jewish businesses shuttered or seized, Jewish homes commandeered for German officers. The Nazi Governor General and his family took up residence in Wawel Castle. Rivka Levy was given forty-eight hours to shut down her practice, pack all of their belongings, and vacate the house on Florianska Street.

  A wealthy medical school classmate offered temporary shelter for her and her parents, three younger sisters, unmarried brother, and two grandparents in a large manor house in the South of France. Without Nathan’s signature, Rivka could not access their personal bank account but she withdrew the last penny from her medical office account and bribed the stationmaster to secure a couple of first-class compartments that would accommodate her entire family. Early the following morning, without incident, all of them had settled in their seats in the first passenger car when it became obvious that Yitzhak’s diaper needed changing. Eager to get the job done before the train started moving, Rivka carried him to the ladies room several cars back and was just pulling up his rubber pants when she heard a plane overhead. Seconds later, a deafening blast cracked the ladies room mirror. She scooped up the baby, ripped off her yellow
armband, raced out onto the platform, and ran toward the front of the train, only to find the first car a tangled mass of twisted, flaming metal, and flung here and there, a blackened seat, a shard of china, a charred human leg. The Luftwaffe had scored a direct hit. No human body could survive such a fiery inferno, one needn’t be a doctor to see that. The freakish silence, the absence of cries or screams, confirmed the futility of a search for a living person to treat or rescue. A part of her wanted to stay and grieve over the remains of her beloved family, but, were she to have any hope of saving herself and the baby, she realized she must avoid being associated with any of the Jewish victims, that staying would serve no purpose except to ensnare her and Yitzhak in the unfolding horror and sear on their brains the image of her parents’ corpses.

  With these thoughts swirling through her head, Rivka steeled herself against any show of emotion that might reveal her to be a Jew. She walked past the stone-faced German soldiers on guard around the conflagration and calmly turned away from the platform as if she had been a disinterested passerby, a Polish mother who’d been attracted by the explosion and had stopped to do some rubbernecking. Outside the station, her feet raced as fast as her mind. But where to go? Most of her and Nathan’s friends had already left Kraków. Who was left? Whom could she trust? The word conjured her father’s law partner, Kadish Freifeld, whom her father once said he would “trust with his life.” Kadish had bought out her father’s share of the practice and given him a farewell party that Rivka and Nathan had attended at the Freifeld’s home. Where was it? In the Jewish section, for sure, but what street? Jozefa. Yes. She couldn’t recall the number of the house but she remembered its front door was painted red and affixed with a huge brass knocker.

  Hasia and Kadish Freifeld, who had heard about the airstrike on the radio while they were having breakfast, insisted Rivka stay with them until Nathan was freed. Their son’s room was empty; he was at university in England and under the circumstances, would not be returning anytime soon. Kadish called his office and instructed two of his non-Jewish law clerks to hurry to the station to claim Rivka’s luggage, assuming it was still in the rear baggage car—which she’d seen was undamaged by the blast—and, if necessary, to bribe the Germans to release it. Hasia went up the street to borrow a portable crib from a neighbor whose grandchild lived in the States. Within hours, Rivka was in possession of her belongings, including her medical equipment and infant supplies, and in utter despair of her future.

  Three weeks later, Nathan showed up at the red door, twenty pounds thinner, with long hair, an Old Testament beard, and a harrowing tale of escape. He had been assigned to the laundry detail, which required him to collect the German officers’ dirty linen from their living quarters and dining rooms and deposit it in a large canvas bin that, when filled to capacity, would be loaded into a van and trucked off the premises to an industrial laundry. One afternoon, while the guards were looking the other way, Nathan had leaned over the bin with his last pickup of the day and let his body fall in with the laundry. Then he’d burrowed under the smelly heap and waited. No one had noticed that the bin was heavier than usual when, sometime later, he felt it being tilted and rolled up a ramp. Hearing the van’s doors slam shut, the hum of the engine, the clank of the gates closing behind the vehicle, he knew the van had left the camp; all he had to do now was get out of the van to safety.

  Because of the traffic sounds and the frequent stops and starts, Nathan surmised that the van was being driven through a city, and when the stops became more intermittent and he heard fewer cars whishing by from the opposite direction, he figured they were riding through an outlying district, a sparsely populated area, and he had better make his move before the driver reached his destination and came around to open the doors. Scrambling out of the stinking laundry bin, he crept over to the van’s porthole window and, seeing no traffic coming up behind, threw open the doors and rocketed his body to the side of the road.

  It took Nathan six days to make his way to Kraków where one glimpse of the Gestapo patrol outside the house on Florianska Street told him to keep his distance and head for the Jewish Quarter. A few discreet inquiries brought him to the Freifelds’ house and a blissful reunion with his wife and son; however, their safe harbor on Jozefa Street was short-lived. On March 20, 1940, a new order came down from the occupying forces: all Jews remaining in Kraków must either relocate to the Podgórze Ghetto on the other side of the Vistula River or evacuate the city altogether.

  The ghetto was sealed. The municipal trolleys continued to run through the area but passengers were not allowed to get on or off within its walls. Yet Polish people rode the trams as if nothing had changed. Gentiles who had been Rivka’s and Nathan’s friends, neighbors, and patients, had only to look out the window as the tram chugged through Podgórze to see desperate Jews suffering and starving. The Poles looked but wouldn’t see. They didn’t want to know. Or they knew but didn’t care.

  Hasia and Kadish elected to relocate to the ghetto. Nathan and Rivka took refuge with his cousin, Chaim, who had a small chicken farm in a village near Niepolomice, twenty kilometers southeast of the city. Chaim was a bachelor with a bad case of asthma so the prospect of having two physicians under his roof, one of them a pulmonary specialist, was more agreeable to him than it might have been otherwise. In return for access to his eggs and pullets, Nathan treated Chaim’s asthma and Rivka cooked their meals. Chaim looked after Yitzhak when both doctors were out on calls. At that point, of course, no physician had the luxury of a specialty so the Levys provided whatever medical care the local families needed, from vaccinations to skin grafts, obstetrics to amputations. They ministered to malnourished babies, old folks, people crushed by tractors or riddled with worms, anyone in pain. As circumstances grew more dire and medication scarce, they bartered their services for goods and produce, a few bruised tomatoes for a tetanus shot, some goat’s milk for a plaster cast. Like all Polish Jews, they wore the yellow star and stepped off the curb at the approach of a German, or a Pole for that matter, and watched helplessly when the Nazis amused themselves by scissoring off the beards of old Jewish men or forcing old women to dance in their underwear until they dropped.

  Still, nothing prepared the Levys or anyone else for the liquidation of 1942. As usual, the German orders were precise. On August 25 at 8:00 a.m., every Jew within a six-kilometer radius of Niepolomice was to assemble at the stone church with a maximum of ten kilos of baggage, a weight limit that forced the Levys to choose between their medical supplies and a stockpot, an extra pair of shoes and Yitzhak’s stuffed dog, Bubbee. In Rivka’s practice, under circumstances far less traumatic than those her son had endured in his first three years of life, she had frequently observed the fierce attachment between children and their comfort objects. This next dislocation would be difficult enough for Yitzhak without trying to wean him off of Bubbee, so she crammed the stuffed dog into the valise and when the scale tipped a hair past ten kilos, she removed the heavily fringed piano shawl.

  Aware that the homes of deported Jews were routinely pillaged by German troops (unless the locals got there first), Nathan’s cousin Chaim decided that they should fill a metal footlocker with things they wanted to save, and bury it under one of the chicken coops until the war was over. Once he had packed his favored belongings, there was barely enough room in the trunk for Rivka’s Shabbos candlesticks (a wedding gift from Nathan’s parents), a few items of clothing, the piano shawl, Yitzhak’s bronzed baby shoes, and the photo album she had wrapped in a flowered pillowcase to protect it from mold.

  The air was still and sultry on August 25 when a long line of Jews began their arduous march from the stone church to a soccer stadium about five kilometers away. A group of disheveled people in night clothes were already there, some in bedroom slippers, others with bare, bloody feet. They looked like victims of a natural disaster or fugitives from an insane asylum, but turned out to be Jews who’d been evicted from another nearby village. A man wearing a bathrobe said
the Germans had roused the town at 2:00 a.m., their trucks rumbling through the streets, bullhorns blaring, their mobile execution squads breaking down doors and barging into homes. Anyone who resisted the roundup had been summarily shot. He said he’d seen a crying baby thrown against a brick wall and a frail old woman dispatched at the point of a bayonet.

  Inside the stadium, Nazi guards ordered women and children under twelve, to one end of the field, men and boys over twelve, to the other. When a mother clung to her terrified young teen and refused to be separated, one of the guards shot her in the back, killing both of them with a single bullet. In that instant, Rivka immediately released Nathan’s hand and, clutching Yitzhak to her chest, folded herself into the mass of women. A bullheaded Nazi handed out chalk, shouting for the women to write their names on their handbags and luggage and place everything in the roped-off section to be claimed later. After she printed R. LEVY on her valise and purse, Rivka thought she would memorize the objects nearby to facilitate locating them later. She noted the straw satchel, tan suitcase, large carton, muslin bag, then, looking beyond them, realized there was far more luggage in the roped-off area than could reasonably be accounted for by the ten kilos allotted to the people currently detained in the stadium. Clearly, others, many, many others, had been here before them and had left without their baggage. Requiring the Jews to label their belongings, she realized, was just a ruse to get them to surrender everything without a struggle and thereby spare the Germans the inconvenience, time, and effort to take the plunder by force.