My grandmother’s passport did not have a shiny leather cover like mine does now. It was a simple folded sheet of card stock. It was temporary. It said stateless in bold black letters. It was the passport issued to her by the Swedish Aliens Commission after the war, when Hungary didn’t want to recognize her as its citizen anymore, and no country wanted to step up in its place. Until her American naturalization, my grandmother used that declaration of categorical homelessness as her ticket across borders and oceans. She was, for many years, a displaced person who relied on the sporadic generosity of host countries and international relief organizations.
In the story of the Jews, I had learned, we are technically all displaced persons. The last time we had a home, my teachers had proclaimed, was before the Second Temple was destroyed in AD 70. Then God punished us by sending us into exile, or galuth, as we call it, and the diaspora happened. We were cursed with wandering; we moved from region to region, from country to country. Every time we settled into a comfortable routine, something would come along and shake the earth from beneath us. Crusades, Cossacks, Tatars, Nazis. The earth shook in 1944, and a few years later my grandmother came to America with her stateless passport.
Enclosed in the brown envelope was all the correspondence between her and the bureaucratic government agency in charge of her naturalization. She was addressed as DP3159057. At the time, she had told me, she was working as a secretary in Williamsburg. She didn’t mention the company she worked for or what she did exactly, as a secretary, but she did mention that she shared an apartment with roommates on Hooper Street and that at night she was awakened by the cries they emitted in their terrible dreams. Everybody around her was haunted in the same way. So she gave her information to a matchmaker.
“I’m ready to start a new life,” she had said. She wanted to have many children. She had just gotten her period for the first time at twenty-four years old, and she was relieved. She had lost ten siblings in the war. She would ultimately give birth to eleven children. She did not raise her kids with the same traditions with which her parents had raised her. It was a postwar generation, and if you hadn’t given up on God completely, you were well on your way to the other end of the spectrum. She had married an avid follower of what was beginning to be an extremist movement. My grandfather, while educated and successful at a young age, was the only man she had met who insisted on keeping his traditional beard in the New World. Later, their sons and daughters would grow up in a self-imposed ghetto led by rabbis who were trying to make sense of the Holocaust and appease the angry God that had razed the European Jewish population.
Over the years, my grandmother had paid little notice to the winds of fanaticism blowing around her home. At times when the community was in its grips and my grandfather brought news of tightening restrictions into his home, my grandmother waved it away and sang a little tune as she carefully frosted a hazelnut torte. I remember that the little things made her very happy. She prepared such beautiful and tasty food, food the likes of which I had rediscovered only recently, in the restaurants of Paris and Madrid, food I would recognize all around me later, when I was living in Europe and each visit to a restaurant offered an unanticipated trip to the past hidden in its menu items. The food I grew up with was regal and classic in the way people rarely cook anymore in the United States, and because food was such a central part of our world, it stands to reason that my attachment to it did not fade, even after I had left. I would seek it out as a doorway to common ground with the culture and history of an entire continent.
To my grandmother I had attached ineffable elegance, even then. There was no elegance in Hasidic life, but there was elegance in her, in her origins, in her story, and in her inimitable cooking. My grandmother was European, and though as a child I could not fully grasp what that meant, I imagined that it was something wonderful and otherworldly. I cherished the photos taken of her as a young woman in gorgeous hand-sewn dresses of silk and lace. I loved the way her slim ankles looked in delicate high-heeled shoes. There was something spectacular about the loveliness and poise she maintained even in her old age, a bearing that stood in sharp contrast to another photograph I had found in her drawer, the one of her being carried out of Bergen-Belsen on a stretcher by the British Red Cross. To embody beauty after you had endured the ugliest of assaults, that was magic to me. I surmised that there was something very powerful at the core of my grandmother’s spirit.
My grandmother’s passport gave her name as Irenka, Hungarian for Irene. It was not a name I ever heard her called, but then no one called me by the name on my birth certificate either. It was custom to have a secular name, to make it easier for the outsiders to relate to us. Better that than they should resent us for having to break their teeth over our Hebrew names. My grandmother’s religious name was Pearl, a beautiful name that I had thought I would like to give my daughter someday, except that, I reasoned then, I would have a daughter too early for that. We didn’t name our children after the living, like Sephardic Jews did. It would have to be my granddaughter’s name.
Of all the passive and submissive women in the Bible I could have been named after, somehow Deborah had ended up on my birth certificate. No one in my family had ever had that name, and Ashkenazi Jews never give their children random names. The custom is always to name a child after a dead relative. Indeed, I was given two names at my kiddush, the Jewish equivalent of a christening for girls: Sarah and Deborah. I was called Sarah growing up. There were plenty of dead Sarahs in my family. Deborah was an afterthought, rarely mentioned. I never heard any tales told about an ancestor with my name. When I scoured the family tree I had managed to assemble through careful sleuthing, no one by that name showed up, even when I went back seven generations. Why Deborah?
In the book of Judges, which I sought out now in its English translation, Deborah is introduced with the words eshes lapidus. I knew it was common for people who appear in the biblical texts to be tagged in such a way, with descriptions following their names. “Wife of,” “son of”—that’s how they were identified in those days. The weird thing is, if the words eshes lapidus, or “woman of Lapidus,” are to mean that Deborah is a wife, why is Lapidus never identified separately in the scripture?
Lapidus is a Hebrew word for torch or fire. It is not the mundane term, but a literary word, a term with elevated connotations. It is an unlikely name for a person. Scholars infer that the description of Deborah therefore translates to “woman of the torch,” or “fiery woman,” as opposed to wife of anyone.
Woman of fire, I thought, and smiled inwardly.
Nothing was beyond the scope of Deborah’s achievement. She is undoubtedly the most empowered woman in Jewish history. She was a judge, a leader, a military strategist and commander, a prophetess, and an icon. The Greeks later put her effigy on a coin. She was revered for her beauty, her wisdom, and most of all her strength. Men tried to marry her, rabbis surmise, but she refused. So she was given the ambiguous affixation—eshes lapidus.
When I first applied to college, needing a legal name for documents, I had discovered that my birth certificate said only Deborah, and from then on, the Sarah was dropped. To me, Sarah was my old name, a name for a passive girl. Deborah would be my future.
Deborah, woman of the torch.
Centuries after Deborah’s rule, Jews were still talking about her, but not necessarily politely. The group of rabbis who sat around a table in a synagogue and argued with one another about every word in the Bible, and who had the minutes of their meetings transcribed into a collection of work that would become the Talmud, made a point of belittling, with a pernicious determination, the few women who had made it into biblical history. They focused on Deborah with unreserved vitriol, for of the paltry group of women who received positive mentions in scripture, she is truly the only threat. Not just a holy woman, neither a mother nor a wife, Deborah broke every rule in the book by occupying a position that had only ever been held by men a
nd would never again be held by a woman. She died untamed, although surely there were those who wanted her retired into a convenient marriage to sink behind the name of her husband into obscurity.
There is a particularly memorable passage in the Talmud that records a conversation in which rabbis compete with one another to mock the names of the female prophets. By happenstance, some of the women were named after animals, names designed to denote industriousness, a cherished quality in a Jewish woman. Deborah is the Hebrew term for bee, a hardworking creature. The rabbis poke fun at Deborah by attacking her name as vulgar and unsophisticated. But Hebrew, as a language, works in a particularly interesting way. Words are composed of three-letter roots, which have altered meanings based on suffixes, prefixes, and vowels stuck in between. The root of Deborah consists of the Hebrew equivalents for D, B, and R. This is the root word for speech. The Hebrew version of H, tacked on to the end of an action word, usually denotes feminine gender. Therefore, DeBoRaH would literally deconstruct as “she speaks.”
These sorts of language gymnastics are a beloved sport of Talmudic rabbis. They spend countless pages indulging in a game called gematria, in which they use a code that assigns numerical values to Hebrew letters to draw connections between different words by showing their sums to be equal. The acrobatics involved to draw these complex conclusions are necessary because too frequently they are cited as the only evidence to support a rabbi’s claim.
Hebrew is certainly a language that invites the obsessive code cracker. It is very layered, packing meaning upon meaning. Words often have dual or triple uses. The poetic nature of Hebrew scripture has allowed for centuries of conjecture and deconstruction not unlike that which I experienced in a poetry class in college. My grandfather understood this concept. He often warned me that, although we were living our lives according to a strict rabbinical interpretation of the Torah, there was a distinct possibility that we had a lot of it wrong. He was the first person to explain the concept of a metaphor to me. That’s the thing about the Hebrew language, he said. You never know if you’ve picked the right meaning. It could be literal or figurative. The language could be deliberately obscure, designed to cloak a meaning that only someone with the right code could access. And codes can go wrong. You could be using the wrong key to crack it and get an entirely mixed-up result.
My grandfather was confident in his rabbi nonetheless. He reminded me that faith in the righteous was our insurance against error. If we had the right intentions in hand, it was ensured that God would modify his wishes to align with those of the saints leading us. Such reverence was there in heaven for our holy rabbis. The same holy rabbis had mocked Deborah, who had been chosen by God to lead the Jewish nation to extraordinary victory, who had been blessed with a reign of unparalleled peace and prosperity, and most important, who had been beloved by the nation’s subjects and fondly remembered by them.
The author of the book of Deborah was clearly of a very different mind than the fastidious group who chronicled their highly subjective opinions in the Talmud. For now my finger traced over this sentence: “And Deborah rose, a mother in Israel, and spoke.”
In the story of Deborah came my first opportunity to find a positive reflection in the Judaic mirror. In those early years after leaving, everywhere I went, someone or something wanted to show me an acquired perception of Jewish culture. A stereotype, a joke, a Woody Allen reference, countless such instances of a projected identity I had never been aware of, at least not as aware as I was of my existence within the framework of Jewishness I had grown up in. No one had ever mentioned Deborah to me, except in passing. The stories of Moses, David, and Solomon were told and retold gloriously, but somehow the women slipped from collective memory, and only their shadows remained.
I wanted to hold the memory of this overlooked woman aloft in a way that could not be ignored.
* * *
• • •
It’s hard to explain why I started to feel closer to my grandmother in the years after we had last seen each other than at any moment during the time we spent together in my childhood. I had once stood alongside her in the kitchen and mixed bowls of cake batter and meringue, and perhaps we had talked of this and that, but even then I was yearning to know the person she had once been. By the time I came along, my grandmother’s life had been greatly diminished. I never knew her in her heyday, when she was raising a family of eleven with aplomb, sewing her children’s clothes by hand according to the latest fashions she spied at Saks and Bloomingdale’s. She could look at a dress and instantly know how to make it; she didn’t even need a pattern. Neighbors whispered that her rich husband gave her free rein, but they didn’t know that the opposite was true. Despite his financial success, my grandfather didn’t believe in spending money on material things. So she slaved away instead, and they kept up appearances.
My grandmother was almost a ghost to me then. Perhaps for that reason, her spirit seemed to accompany me on my way out. I did not feel the separation so keenly because I had always been attached to the memory of her, and that would never fade, no matter how far I traveled. Instead, by freeing myself from the bounds imposed on relationships by the Hasidic community, I was finally able to explore the person my grandmother had been. I opened that folder stuffed full of photographs and documents and started to piece together as much as I could, assembling a chronology of dates, places, and people. Yet there were many missing elements, and I knew I had to start at the beginning if I was ever going to get the full story.
She was the ultimate model of displacement for me. Her story of exile and wandering felt more urgent to me than the story of how she had settled into her new life in America, the only life I had known her in. As I experienced my own exile now, literally wandering around the world looking for a new identity, there was no one I could feel closer to than the memory of her young self, traversing rivers and oceans in search of a place to call home. I finally had permission to dredge up her past.
* * *
—
That meant traveling to northeastern Hungary, where she had been born and raised, and so, in the summer of 2013, amid an uncharacteristic heat wave, I emerged from the airport into the humid haze of Budapest. The capital of the northeast region was Nyíregyháza, and as an acquaintance of mine in New England had connected me with the president of Nyíregyháza’s only college, he had arrived now in a chauffeured Mercedes to drive me there. A Hungarian novelist and poet in addition to university head, Zoltán had started studying English only a year ago, so we communicated in his broken, outmoded German and my Yiddish. It was painful for him, he said to me then, that with the mind of a novelist and the desire to convey all things beautifully, he could not communicate effectively with me. Although we understood each other just fine, I could feel his frustration. For me too it would always rankle to be hampered by a limited vocabulary, but this was also my fate in a sense, as I would never again be able to speak my native language to someone capable of understanding me, and every language I adopted, no matter how hard I toiled, would never serve me in the same way. Luckily, Zoltán had grown up around Yiddish speakers, and my odd turns of phrase and archaic grammar did not stump him.
“The second language in Hungary used to be German,” he said, “but now it’s mostly Russian. English isn’t even on the table. Don’t expect to be able to communicate with anyone directly,” he warned me. He had found me an interpreter, someone who worked at the college but who had studied in America for a year. I was relieved to hear that.
We took a brief walking tour around the city. The banks of the Danube were inaccessible then, because of all the flooding—across central Europe, train lines were submerged and low regions turned into stagnant ponds. The Hungarian Parliament Building, normally the architectural pride of the capital, was covered in scaffolding; only its imposing white spires could be seen amid the extensive renovation effort. We retreated from the noisy dump trucks and work crews and walked down An
drássy Avenue toward the famous Heroes’ Square. Zoltán had a story for everything; he knew every sculpture and statue. He’d mention them by name and ask me if I’d ever heard of this person or that, but all the names sounded equally foreign to me. Famous Hungarian poet, he’d point out; famous Hungarian artist; famous king; famous general; famous writer. I wondered if any of them were famous outside Hungary.
My first glimpse of Budapest—so different from Europe’s other capitals in that it lacks both contemporary chic and the varnished grandiosity of antique glamour—was jarring. Immediately I sensed just how influenced my childhood milieu was by the Old World aesthetic I saw around me. The voluminous block buildings, their facades cracked and darkened with age, reminded me of the impressive synagogues that rose between the tenement buildings of Williamsburg; I especially noticed the various flyers posted at eye level, some of them new, others rotted to strips and pieces by time and weather. Williamsburg too had been covered with such posters, called pashkevillin; because we had no radio or TV, we had resorted to more old-fashioned means of communication and advertising.
Exodus, Revisited Page 16
