The Almost Legendary Morris Sisters

by Julie Klam

  I don’t know, but here I was coming back (well, for a week) over a hundred years later.

  Thirteen

  Bucureşti, România

  When we arrived at the Bucharest Henri Coandă airport, we spotted Valentin, a much younger man than I had envisioned. He drove us to our hotel in Bucharest, the Athenee Palace Hilton, which I had picked to offset the no-star Focşani hotel we’d be staying at in a couple of days. It was grand and beautiful, and Dan said it was exactly like the nicest hotel in Cincinnati and not at all European or Eastern European. But that was where he was wrong. Everyone who worked there was Romanian and you had to pay in Romanian lei, which I know for a fact they do not accept anywhere in Cincinnati. The hotel had a little bar that served English pub food, and the lobby, the staff, and everything in our room were five-star fancy, which I loved and Dan loathed. Also, the stuff in the minibar in the room was actually the price you’d pay in a candy store in 1979. Like a bag of M&M’s was fifty cents and a giant bottle of water was seventy-five cents. My cousin David told me that once when he visited the Morris sisters in Southampton, Marcella gave him a large bag and directed him to their next door neighbor’s farm to “pick”—I believe the technical term is “steal”—as many potatoes as he could carry. Given their interest in managing their food budget, I think they would approve of the minibar bargains.

  We spent our first day in Bucharest with Valentin. When Dan and I traveled in Europe before, we liked creating our own schedules and keeping mostly to ourselves. We never used a guide. But I kept saying this trip was work, not a vacation. And after meeting Valentin, I wanted to bring him on all our future trips and maybe bring him home to live with us. He was informative and affable, and knew all the right people who could get us into all the right places. And he knew where to direct us for great meals and real Romanian atmosphere. The Morris sisters would have loved him, I was sure.

  Bucharest in winter was cold and felt a little windswept. The Christmas decorations were out in full force, every lamppost decked in garland and bows and twinkling lights. A loudspeaker played what sounded like American Christmas carols in English, but none we’d ever heard before. One that was frequently repeated was “A Big Kid’s Christmas.”

  It was snowy and dark even early in the day as we walked the city’s streets. Though I completely bundled myself up into a long down duffle coat, wool hat, scarf, and gloves, the icy wind went right through me. So I was delighted for two reasons when we stopped at the majestic Romanian Athenaeum. First because it was warm, and second because it was also a breathtaking, neoclassical-style arts center.

  Valentin spoke quietly to the people in the box office—they were clearly buddies. He told us that there was a concert rehearsal underway but that we could look into the theater as long as we didn’t start singing or clapping along or otherwise making noise. So Dan and I peeked inside the door of the main concert hall and saw a full orchestra onstage in the midst of rehearsing a piece. The music was hauntingly beautiful and familiar. I wanted it to be the soundtrack of my trip, but my former steel trap of a mind couldn’t place the name of the piece. I took a short video of it and when we got outside I texted it to my aunt Mattie, who is best friends with the conductor of the Cincinnati Ballet. Two minutes later she texted me back: “He said it’s from Scheherazade.” Of course, I should have known: I had played it on my flute for a seventh-grade band concert. The piece, he said, was “Kalendar Prince’s Theme” and he even wrote out the notes we heard. After we left the Athenaeum, I hummed the melody as we walked until Dan told me to knock it off. Valentin was too polite to say anything, but I suspect he agreed with Dan.

  * * *

  • • •

  We walked about twenty minutes to the stunning, ornate Templul Coral, or the Choral Temple, the main Jewish temple in Bucharest. Inside, Valentin spoke to a man who looked us over as he listened. They spoke in Romanian for a bit and then the man turned to us and spoke in perfect English. He was Gilbert Saim, the gabai of the temple, a sort of lay director who is not a rabbi. He asked us if we could Like the temple’s Facebook page, which I did immediately. (I know the value of social media—it’s like a twenty-first century version of tipping.)

  Gilbert talked as we looked around. It wasn’t really a tour because we could see everything from the spot we were standing. The architectural masterpiece was built between 1855 and 1858. The wealthier Jewish community in Bucharest at the time wanted a place to congregate and worship that was as magnificent as the synagogues in the major capitals of Europe. The Jewish community leaders chose as a model the Leopoldstädter Tempel in Vienna. Since the Leopoldstädter burned to the ground in 1938 on Kristallnacht, the Choral Temple is the only surviving replica.

  Gilbert pointed to the balconies where the women would sit during services, this being an Orthodox temple. Above them was the hand-painted ceiling done in a Moorish Byzantine style in royal blues and pinks and gold. He said that when the temple was first built, there was always a choir that sang, which is how the Choral Temple got its name. In 1866 it was destroyed during the terrible pogrom, but a year later it was rebuilt. He explained that prior to World War I, wealthy Jews were the exception in Bucharest. Most synagogues were not like this one, Gilbert said, but instead looked like simple houses.

  I was interested in what happened to the Jews in Romania after the Morrises left, because this could have been their fate if they had stayed. Gilbert said the current Jewish community in Romania is between 9,000 and 17,000 out of a population of more than 19.5 million. Before World War II, the number was 850,000. Some 450,000 Romanian Jews were killed during the Holocaust by Hungarian and Romanian fascists. After the war, many emigrated to Israel. Israel actually made a deal to pay a “ransom” to the Romanian Communist government for its citizens to emigrate there. The amount of ransom depended on each immigrant’s level of education and social rank.

  After a brisk five-minute walk we ended up at the Great Synagogue, also called the Polish Synagogue. It was built in 1845–46 by the Polish Ashkenazi community that lived in Bucharest. Ashkenazi Jews are from Eastern Europe as opposed to Sephardic Jews, who are from the areas around the Mediterranean Sea. The Polish Synagogue is no longer a functioning synagogue, and when we visited, it housed a large exhibition about the Holocaust. When we entered, we came across a group of old men with yarmulkes who were sitting around talking in the dim light. Valentin bowed and explained to them who we were. Then Valentin turned to us to say that all these men were Holocaust survivors.

  A tall, thin man with a long, gray beard slowly stood up to take us around. I told Valentin to tell him that we could just look on our own, and he did, but the man shook his head and said he wanted to take care of these very special visitors from New York. And then he winked at me.

  The man came over to us and stood with his hands clasped together and told us (through Valentin) that the exhibit was put together to show what life was like for Jews in Romania before, during, and after World War II. He told us that “Holocaust” means “burning completely” or “complete destruction.”

  The exhibit was a collection of carefully arranged photos, documents, and signs. The first pictures in the exhibition showed Ion Antonescu, Romania’s authoritarian prime minister and ally to Hitler during the 1930s. He was “the worst man to us,” our guide said. He shook his head angrily and Valentin translated, “Antonescu governed through extermination and destruction.” The man pointed to a collage of Romanian newspaper clippings that reported the Antonescu government’s discriminatory declarations. “He cut off the Jews from economic possibilities, leaving them with no financial freedom, but they had to pay extra in taxes!” the man said.

  We saw photos of trains crowded with passengers. “One hundred fifty thousand Jews were deported from North Moldavia,” the man told us. It was a chilling piece of history to learn: North Moldavia was where my family had come from, and we were headed there tomorrow.

  The man co
ntinued walking past pictures, stopping to point out a photograph of people leaving the town they lived in on foot. “They couldn’t take anything with them,” he said.

  I looked at Dan. I had always told him that my grandparents said the reason my grandmother had so much good jewelry was because Jews have had to leave places with just what they had on. You couldn’t stash a Rembrandt in your pocket. At least with diamonds and gold, they’d have something to sell when they got to wherever they were going.

  “They were forced on foot and they became exhausted and sick from the inhuman hygiene,” the man told us. He stopped and looked at us. “These events were administered by Antonescu and the people who helped him.”

  He paused at a display of train schedules and pictures of people jamming into railway cars. The man pointed to a yellowed map. “Jews from the Northern Transylvania territory were given to Hungary through Hitler’s Second Vienna Award in 1940. They were all deported by 1945 by the Hungarians and sent straight to the concentration camps in Auschwitz-Birkenau, where they were exterminated. In Northern Transylvania, there were one hundred sixty-six thousand Jews, and one hundred thirty thousand were killed.”

  The man looked at a photo of a beautiful young girl wearing the striped uniform of the camps. He spoke to Valentin and I heard him say, “Elie Wiesel.”

  I nodded and told them, “Yes, I have read Night many times.”

  Wiesel’s first book was about his experience as one of the Transylvanian Romanians deported to Auschwitz.

  The man nodded back at me and said something else.

  In response I said, “I have no words for it.”

  Valentin translated and the man nodded again. We understood each other.

  * * *

  • • •

  Dan and I looked at the rest of the exhibit, and when we were done we thanked the men and said our goodbyes. As we were leaving, a wave of emotion washed over me. These gentlemen—these Holocaust survivors—were in their nineties. Soon time or illness would take them all. I felt both gratitude and sorrow for all of them, and in that moment I especially missed my grandfather, whose family had fled Bessarabia, which had been part of Moldavia, east of Romania. When he was alive I used to ask him questions about every aspect of life before I was born. What movies did he like? What did he do for fun before television? Did the Jews in the United States know what was happening to the Jews in Europe during World War II? He answered my questions so patiently, so kindly. Standing in a former synagogue and seeing the remnants of the horrors that had been inflicted on people his family may have known, I realized how painful my questions must have been. While it’s so important to remember, it can be difficult, too.

  * * *

  • • •

  I asked Valentin if we could head somewhere upbeat, and he pointed us toward Strada Cluceru Udricani. On the way we passed a large bust of Vlad the Impaler, the inspiration for Dracula. Valentin told us that he is actually something of a hero in Romania. I asked him why he has such an awful reputation. “Very bad publicist,” he said.

  We found ourselves at the door of Caru’ Cu Bere, which translates to Beer Wagon. Its bright, festive jolt instantly made it one of my favorite places in Europe. Built in 1898, the neo-Gothic building has a vaulted ground floor richly decorated with brightly colored paint, stained glass, mosaics, and carved paneling. Music was playing, the waitstaff danced around the room in traditional Romanian costumes, and the taps were flowing with the Romanian beer Ursus. It was sort of a Romanian version of a German biergarten. This felt like a vacation.

  The Morris sisters traveled quite a bit as adults. I had found their travel documents online, and they had been to Lisbon, Paris, Cairo, Cuba, the Netherlands, and London, but they never returned to Romania. This seemed like the kind of place they might have enjoyed.

  We sat upstairs on a balcony overlooking a luminous, grand Christmas tree. A cherubic waitress presented us with tall, multi-paged menus, and Valentin used his to shield us from a neighboring table where he said a disgraced politician named Gabriel Oprea was sitting. He had been an interior minister who had recently resigned after protests against him. A policeman in Oprea’s motorcade had been killed. After we ordered, Valentin giddily posted the sighting on his Facebook page.

  After dinner, we walked back to our hotel and planned to meet with Valentin the next morning for the drive to Focşani and Râmnicu Sărat.

  I had emailed and Valentin had called the synagogue in Focşani several times in the weeks leading up to my trip, and neither of us had gotten any response. We decided that we were going to just show up there and see what we could learn. (I realize how silly that sounds, but I didn’t feel as if we had another choice.) We just hoped we would find something when we got there.

  Fourteen

  Focşani

  The next morning on the two-hour drive to Focşani, Valentin told us about his work as a tour guide all over the world and his life growing up in Communist Romania.

  “Prior to the revolution, my parents had some friends who were smuggling things through Yugoslavia, as Yugoslavia was just a better Communist country than us,” he explained, chuckling. “They were able to get blue jeans, which was a big thing back in the day. So I was bragging about it in school and the principal found out about it and called my mom, and she was terrified, but it just turned out the principal wanted a pair, too!”

  He also talked about his grandfather, who had been in jail for six months. “After 1947 when the Romanian king, King Michael, was coerced into abdicating, the change came. And by 1949, because of nationalization, everything was confiscated from people. Everything became state owned. My grandfather owned some horses as he was working the land for others. And the horses were taken away, and he received that message loud and clear, but then he was given a bonus of six months in jail to think about what he had done”—owning property.

  We talked about the fact that Communists didn’t recognize religion, but people still built churches and synagogues and set them far back from the road so as not to attract attention. There were a lot of steps people had to take to preserve some semblance of control in their lives.

  As we drove down the highway, Valentin told us about seeing bands of Rroma people. “When I was a kid, they were still travelers, and would go from village to village selling various things, sometimes for money, sometimes for barter, for food. This was my first encounter with the Rroma. And when I was a kid my grandmother told me, if I didn’t behave, she would let them take me with them! So they became scary to me. Like storybook witches. You would always see them at the borders of the village, basically camping out. You’d see them with these horse-pulled wagons. We were taught to have this animosity toward them. If you were misbehaving you were said to be behaving like them. We couldn’t imagine they had the same values we did. But that was because they had difficulties integrating, let alone assimilating.”

  We talked about the similarities between what happened to the Jews and the Romani. He told us that Romanians are sort of seen as “lower status” in Europe, and when tourists from Western Europe meet him, they don’t expect him to be smart and capable, which made me mad. Valentin struck me as personable and incredibly well informed about Romanian history and even the specific dates of events. He could do whatever he set his mind to, I was sure. He was more than a guide, he was a teacher, and I found myself writing down everything he said. I know that if he ever visited the United States and we took him around the country, I would say something like, “Yes, our Civil War occurred sometime between, oh, 1700 and 1940, don’t quote me on those dates . . .”

  We arrived in Focşani, a city of about one hundred thousand people northeast of Bucharest, in late morning and headed straight for the synagogue, which was located on narrow Oituz Street. The building was of a slightly dingy white stone, with tall windows and two Stars of David and a Torah carved into its facade. There were a couple of bare trees and a
chain-link fence with stone pillars painted a dark cranberry color in front. There was a sign by the door that said “Federaţia Comunităţilor Evreiştie Din România Comunitatea Evreilor Focşani,” which means “Federation of Jewish Communities of Romania Focşani Jewish Community.” We went up to the door, which was also behind a gate, and knocked. There was no answer, so we knocked again. Still no one answered.