Exodus: A memoir

by Feldman, Deborah

  My friend and I went out on the town as soon as I arrived, because I insisted I could sleep later. Here was a city I wanted to get to know. Here was the possibility of finding my groove. We listened to battling saxophones at a jazz club, ate deep-dish and stuffed-crust pizza at 3 a.m., and made plans to get the city’s best brunch in the morning. The life here is the same as it is in Manhattan, I thought.

  Before I left, I visited the famous sculpture Cloud Gate, known as “the Bean,” and made my way through the Art Institute. As I turned a corner from a room filled with Manets and Boudins, I found myself suddenly face-to-face with a famous Nazi propaganda poster, The Eternal Jew. The familiar image, that of a wizened, humpbacked Jew holding coins in one palm and a whip in the other, set on a bright yellow background, seemed discordantly out of place in a museum of art. Nothing could have prepared me for its assault on my consciousness. Underneath the poster was a description of the temporary exhibition of Nazi and Soviet propaganda posters from World War II.

  I stepped inside the room, which was quiet, lined with brown carpeting that muffled my footsteps. Dimmed as if in a theater, spotlights shone softly on the yellowed posters stretched and displayed in glass cases on the walls. Many of them contained Jewish symbolism juxtaposed with images of horror and evil; always there was the ugly face, with its hooked nose, its piercing eyes peering from under thick, dark brows, and its menacing scowl.

  I moved from poster to poster, feeling as I progressed through the exhibit that each one resonated with something inside me, that in every image was something recognizable, something horrible yet true.

  It is this that terrifies me about the stereotypes I learned growing up, and the ones I’m still incorporating as I make my way through the world as a new sort of wandering Jew—that there is always a speck of truth packed into the core of each accusation, and that I will never be able to fully rid myself of that self-affront. I did not want to leave my world only to be forever chased and haunted by the identity it bestowed on me. I had been raised in America without knowing what it was to be an American—it was that problem that I had hit the road hoping to resolve.

  Here in the Art Institute, I felt that the rest of America was busily involved in discussing the influence of Jews in art and culture, but that the physical Jewish presence was concentrated only in negligible pinpricks throughout the country, a speck here and there, except for the powerful communities that coalesced into a blob on the East Coast, ignoring the presence of the rest of the world. Here in Chicago, I felt I wasn’t even real, but just an apparition. I felt keenly that I had no identity other than the abstract of the Jew; I could pretend to blend in, but it would be a false construct that would deflate upon first test like a pricked balloon. I could write the word “Jew” on my forehead, and at best I could hope for a simple lack of recognition in the other’s eyes; at worst I could expect to be treated like a crazy person.

  I left Chicago that night, anxious to return to New York, vowing never to venture out into the unwelcoming territory of greater America again. The sun set over the flat, impoverished plains of Indiana; Ohio and Pennsylvania passed by me unnoticed in the night, because I drove intently without stopping, until I crossed the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge at dawn.

  To get to Manhattan, I drove through Brooklyn, and even in those early hours, the city was sweltering and stagnant in the summer heat. Although the streets disgorged their familiar spectral memories, nothing about New York City struck me as particularly welcoming on that day. I came home to nothing more than a feeling of homelessness, a paucity of roots that had been underlined and emphasized the whole way across the country, finally forming a coherent bowl of emptiness in my soul. My grandmother had always said that it was bad luck to present an empty dish; she had filled any borrowed container with gifts of fruit or cake. “No one wants to open the door to an empty container,” she had said. How true, for I had opened mine to just such a ghastly vision.

  V

  spirituality

  I may not have recognized myself in America, but on my very first trip to Europe I experienced the immediate, reverberating sensation of making contact with something old and almost, but not quite, forgotten. And so I kept coming back, thinking that if I felt that again, that maybe this time around I’d understand what it was.

  Three years after leaving I found myself in Paris in a café by the Arc de Triomphe. It was spring, and the maple trees surrounding the Place Charles de Gaulle were in full blossom. Down the avenue Carnot, two rows of plane trees were still only puffed, their thin, gnarled limbs spreading tremulously from a satiny-barked trunk. As I finished my café sans lait, I felt a lump in my throat, remembering how my grandmother thrilled to the blossoming trees each spring, calling out their names as we passed them, explaining to me what made each species unique and special. Cedar was prized for its aromatic wood, acacia for its delicate yet strong leaves. An occasional linden tree would remind her of Europe. How she would have loved Paris, I thought. How sad that she never got a chance to visit.

  When I was a child, I watched my grandmother light the traditional Jewish yahrzeit candle every morning on the same table, where it would burn for twenty-four hours until the next one was lit. It was a grieving custom, but in this case the expression of it was subversive. It was not permissible to mourn relatives who had passed so long ago—Jewish law limited the mourning period to a maximum of one year. After that it was considered imperative that the grieving move on; after all, one had to accept God’s will. But my grandmother never stopped lighting those candles, and although she claimed that they were for this one or that one, I knew that the one flame represented the souls of her entire family, from her two-year-old baby sister to her seventeen-year-old brother, all of whom had been gassed in Auschwitz.

  I carried that mourning with me. I spent nights lying awake picturing the faces of all those dead children, tormented by the idea of their aborted existence. Was I really here simply to replenish the family, as my grandfather had said? Was it up to me to birth their souls into the world so that they could live again?

  Or was it enough, I considered now, looking down into the dregs of my coffee cup, to retrace their path, so that they could be seen—so that their memories could live on forever in my spirit?

  I looked up at the blossoming trees, their leaves glowing a pale, luminous green in the sunlight, and asked myself, Would my grandmother have wanted to visit Paris? No matter how eloquently and nostalgically she talked about Europe, not once did I hear her express a desire to revisit. Was it all burned landscape for her, a wasteland of murdered souls and spilled blood? Or did she feel rejected by Europe, in the sense that it had spit her out and sent her to America, refusing to recognize her birth as legitimate?

  Either way, here I was, struggling with a portion of what she must have struggled with, feeling at once rejecting, rejected, and at home.

  That dizzying emotional cocktail had first stirred within me the previous September, when I found myself magically whisked away to the City of Light on a spontaneous trip that would last only four days. Sabine, a friend whom I had met through a group of Yiddishists in New York who strove to preserve a dying language, was preparing a performance of old Yiddish melodies and needed help with their reconstruction; she was a renowned French opera singer with a performance scheduled at the Olympia.

  I was thrilled to walk the narrow, winding streets of Paris. Everything about the city lived up to my expectations, if not exceeded them. I stopped sleeping altogether, not wanting to waste a moment of my time there. Sabine eagerly showed me what she considered Paris’s most interesting and secret corners. When the first night of Rosh Hashanah arrived, she took me to a Masorti synagogue (Masorti being the European equivalent of Conservative Judaism). The rabbi was an Alsatian Jew, and he, along with his wife and children, had a shock of platinum blond hair and pale blue eyes. They looked like a family of Scandinavian supermodels, not Jews. Some of the other members we
re Moroccan, and the congregation alternated between Ashkenazi prayer styles and warbly Moroccan melodies.

  Sabine did not speak English, and I did not speak French, but we communicated in Yiddish. It was my native language and the birth language of the people who raised her, one she had been studying for three years and was speaking moderately well. When the rabbi delivered his sermon in French, she leaned over every so often to deliver a summary of his points in whispered Yiddish. The other congregants eyed us curiously. I could tell that Yiddish wasn’t spoken much around them. It had once been the language of these people, but it had gone the way of the ghetto, been obliterated from the European map.

  Only a dozen people attended the service on Rosh Hashanah, arguably the most important Jewish holiday of the year. Even the most lax of Jews show up at the temple to pay their respects on this holy day. I surmised that Paris simply didn’t have many Jews left, and I had flown here expecting that, anticipating a city wiped clean of Jewish remnants—something I had been assured was true of all Europe since World War II.

  After the service ended, Sabine and I rushed to the metro to make it in time for a celebratory holiday dinner hosted at her aunt’s garden apartment in the neighborhood of Belleville. We entered the house from the side, through a pair of sliding doors that opened onto a secluded, leafy yard. Inside, we found a brightly lit, noisy room, teeming with people. Twenty friends and relatives were there in total, from all over the world. At least ten languages were being spoken at once. Food was already being eaten and distributed, and while I noticed the familiar gefilte fish and pomegranate seeds, there were a lot of foods that looked exotic and unfamiliar. One man wore a colorful woven headdress; others had knit white caps draped over the sides of their heads. Sabine sat across from me and introduced me to everyone in French, but I couldn’t find anyone to communicate with. The couple next to me was Israeli and spoke only Hebrew; the man on my right was Hungarian and spoke neither English nor Yiddish. Finally, a young woman across from me identified herself as German, and I attempted to Germanize my Yiddish just enough to be understood.

  As a child, I was taught that there was only one way to be Jewish; everyone else was just faking it. Even when I widened my circle to include the American Ashkenazi Jewish population at large, I was still faced with the same homogeneous approach to Judaic practice. It had never occurred to me that just over the Atlantic Ocean lay a whole new world of interpretations and traditions.

  The next morning, I resolved to visit the old Jewish quarter in Paris, located in what was now the flamboyantly gay district of the Marais. It was a typically gray Parisian day, and I biked nervously over the Seine, trying to avoid being knocked off the road by street traffic. I had never biked in a city before. Here I was, though, biking in Paris! I was wearing my retro sunglasses and a flowing cashmere wrap to keep me warm, and my hair whipped past me as I cycled leisurely along bike lanes, nodding in thanks as cars and buses paused to let me by. I felt like a girl in an advertisement for a feisty French perfume.

  By the time I made my way into the heart of the Marais, wide boulevards had given way to the narrowest streets I had yet encountered in Paris, streets too narrow for anything bigger than a Smart car, so narrow that when I looked up, the roofs seemed to cave in toward one another so that only a sliver of sky remained visible above them. On the rue des Rosiers, a short cobblestoned alley said to have been the original main street of the Jewish quarter, the air was redolent with the smell of fresh falafel. Everywhere I turned, tourists stood holding foil-wrapped pitas, trying not to drip tahini everywhere. After a quick look around, however, it seemed that falafel was the only thing remotely Jewish that the rue des Rosiers had to offer. I bristled at that; I hadn’t grown up eating falafel, so it didn’t necessarily feel Jewish to me—more Middle Eastern than anything. Just because there was a Star of David on the store’s awning didn’t make it Jewish.

  I walked my bike over to the center of the street, where it formed a T shape with a longer alley that led out into the rest of the Marais. I passed chic clothing boutiques and quaint bakeries that claimed to sell “Yiddish specialties” like knishes and rugelach. No one inside these bakeries could speak Yiddish or boast of any knowledge about where their goods were prepared or whether the recipes had been passed down or simply reinvented by French pastry chefs. Certainly the challah looked nothing like the fluffy braided loaves I had grown up with; they were simply brioche under a different name.

  But at the center of the rue des Rosiers stood a small, unassuming machine, looking almost like one at which you’d buy metro tickets. Its touch screen leaped to life when I put my finger on it. I could choose from a dozen videos, in French with English subtitles, which turned out to be testimonials collected from people who had actually lived on the rue des Rosiers, describing what life was like back when that street was the heart of the Parisian ghetto. I listened to them all, and had to put my sunglasses on to hide the tears slipping defiantly out of the corners of my eyes. Luckily, no one in Paris thinks it’s strange to wear sunglasses on a cloudy day.

  One of the videos really moved me. An older man, identified as a professor now living in the United States, recalled the shame he once felt when revealing his original address. “It was like saying you had failed to make something of yourself. The rue des Rosiers was a place of stagnation, where only by the pulling up of your own bootstraps could you hope for something better.”

  He’s talking about a ghetto, I thought. I certainly knew of the lost ghettos of Europe and their conditions. Even the Lower East Side had once been a stagnant, stinking ghetto for Jews, the Irish—any poor, oppressed immigrant, really. And then it struck me: Williamsburg was a ghetto. I might have been raised in one of the last ghettos in existence. Although the original ghettos were mandated by society and the government, and Williamsburg had been a self-imposed isolation, the result was the same: a bubble, an invisible wall that effectively divided the lives of those on the inside from those on the outside.

  The man in the video seemed both nostalgic and dismissive. He clearly had nothing wonderful to say about the rue des Rosiers as a place to grow up, and yet his voice was tinged with regret over knowing that the place of his birth was gone for good, never to return. It made me wonder what exactly I was mourning, having shown up here expecting something and feeling angry that anything remotely Jewish was gone. Did I want to bring the ghetto back? Of course not, but it would have been spectacular to have discovered a world in which, for once, I could find the familiar, could feel instantly at home. It was roots I was looking for, thinking that of all places, the ghettos of Europe would most likely feel like they were a part of me and my past.

  I chided myself after I watched the video. It was a good thing that the stifling ghettos were gone. But I guess it would have been comforting to see some sort of modern, thriving Jewish life in its place, instead of this cold absence, this lack of proper commemoration.

  I walked onward, toward the end of the street, where I had spotted a sign that read “Judaica.” But the shop was closed, and the posters framed in the window were crude and unflattering portraits of Hasidic Jews sweating and lifting dumbbells, part of a collection titled “Oyrobics.”

  I certainly did not get the French sense of humor, I muttered to the British man next to me who was ineptly handling his falafel. Then, suddenly, as I was about to bike out of there in a huff, I heard the most incredible sound. It was a shofar, loud and steady, coming from the upper stories of one of the buildings nearby. I raced toward the sound, shaking with excitement at the prospect of a real live Rosh Hashanah service in what had once been the Jewish ghetto. Could there still be a Jewish community in the Marais after all?

  But alas, I couldn’t find an entrance to a synagogue anywhere on the street. Bystanders watched me zoom from doorstep to doorstep with bemused curiosity, their hands holding their falafels frozen in front of their mouths as they waited to see what would happen next.


  And then I saw a young man, dark-skinned with thick, curly hair covered by a small kippa, a knapsack weighing down his thin shoulders.

  “You’re Jewish!” I exclaimed triumphantly. “Do you know where that sound is coming from?”

  He seemed taken aback by my urgency. In broken English he said, “That’s what I’m trying to find out. Wait here and I will ask the falafel salesman.”

  He emerged from the storefront a few moments later, saying that he did not know where that particular shofar was being blown but that there were apparently two synagogues nearby. Two synagogues? On a street I had assumed to be devoid of Jewish life?

  I found myself following the dark-skinned man down a dimly lit alley and wondering about the likelihood of any situation that involved following a strange man down an alley ending in a happy conclusion. But a second later, there we were, in an archway that led to two doors, one to a Turkish synagogue, the other to an Algerian one. He went right, I went left, and suddenly I was behind a thick velvet curtain, in another world.