by Sonia Pilcer
“Do you remember Henry Kissinger’s parents?” asks Miecho. “They had an apartment on Fort Washington Avenue.”
“What’s it all about, Alfie . . . ” croons Arnie Keller. Several couples rise, the men taking their partners’ arms, floating to the dance floor. Arthur Murray doesn’t have anything over these couples who really know their moves, twirling in unison.
“Did you have a bagel?” my father asks me.
I shake my head. “Not yet.”
“Eat something. Do you want a drink?”
“I’ll get it,” I say. “Mom, a screwdriver?”
“I don’t know,” she says unsurely. “It always goes to my feet.”
This must be a Polish expression because most people talk about liquor going to their heads. But for my mother, it is always her feet. She sits down at a table with my father.
The musician sounds the first notes of the “Theme from Dr. Zhivago.”
“You know how to dance?” my father asks me.
He takes me out on the smooth wood floor, placing his arm firmly around my waist. “One-two-two-one, one-two-two-one,” he counts softly, pressing the small of my back. He is wearing a freshly starched, short-sleeved cotton shirt. I brush my hand past the blue numbers on his arm. My mother smiles as she watches her husband of over fifty years dance with her no longer young daughter.
“Did you see that film on Channel Thirteen, In Our Own Hands?” asks Viktor, a tall man with a single dark eyebrow strung across his forehead.
“The one about the Jewish Brigade?” says Zamul, who emigrated to Israel after the war. “Sure. I lived that movie.”
“We’re not the ones that need to see that movie,” my father says. “The Americans do.”
“No matter what we talk about,” remarks Abe, a furrier who made my mother’s mink coat, “we always end up back at the Holocaust.”
“Soon there will be none of us left.” Viktor shrugs. “Who will remember?”
My father looks doubtfully at me. “Ach, maybe it’s better they don’t remember too much.”
Pola approaches our table. “Please, Genia. Ask your grandson to sing. He has such a nice voice.” Last year, he had wowed them with his voice so pure and high, singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”
“Do you want to sing?” she asks Jesse.
“You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” I add.
“Sing for us, kindeleh,” says the musician. “What do you know? Hava Nagila?”
“I want to sing my own song,” Jesse says.
“He wants to sing his own song,” the musician repeats. “Okay, ladies and gentlemen,” he announces over the microphone. “We have a special guest. What’s your name, kid?”
Jesse looks down from the raised stage. I hold my breath. Then he digs into his pocket and pulls out a hat and a pair of dark glasses. Slipping them on, he cracks a huge grin as he begins his Will Smith rap.
We are the Men in Black
the only chosen members
the good guys are dressed in black
Men in Black? Chosen members? I have a vision of Jesse with a group of Hasids in Williamsburg, dressed in black hats and coats, peyes whirling wildly.
Remember that
in case you make contact
M–l–B
Jesse spins on his right heel, my dervish, then extends his arms and struts across the stage, waving his arms and shoulders. Mr. Hollywood himself.
When he’s finished, Jesse bends over and, with his right arm across his waist, takes a bow. Then he removes his hat and shades and flashes a smile at me, his mother, a special smile. And there is applause for my son, the kosher ham, who has no stage fright. Jesse has confidence that life is kind, that he will be loved.
“Hey, kid, you got talent,” Arnie Keller announces over the microphone. “Know how to get to Carnegie Hall? Take the A train.”
My very own grandson, my mother murmurs to herself. When she thought there’d be none. Jesse, named after her baby brother, taken away with her parents, Yom Kippur 1942. Baruch Hashem.
My father rushes up to the stage. “Yossileh!” he cries out, then raises Jesse high into the air. The boy flies like an angel. My father toasts their friends of over fifty years. “L’Chaim!”
Acknowledgments
My parents’ circle of survivors have surrounded my life. I feel privileged to be among their scribes.
I wish to acknowledge Carl D. Brandt and Diane Cleaver, who was representing The Holocaust Kid at the time of her death.
Many read this book during its nearly twenty-year gestation. I am especially grateful to Susie Kaufman and Catherine Hiller.
Rabbi Bob Gluck showed me a way back to Judaism, which, of course, is part of this story too.
Thank you, Gareth Esersky and Karen Braziller, for taking on the challenge.
Finally, I wish to express gratitude for family: my husband Morton Makler and our son, Jacob Pilcer Makler.
The Virginia Center of Creative Arts offered me fellowship and a well-lit place to work.
—S.P.
Other books by Sonia Pilcer
Teen Angel
Maiden Rites
Little Darlings
I-Land: Manhattan in Monologue
Some of the stories and poems in The Holocaust Kid have appeared previously, in different versions, in the following publications: Ann Arbor Review, 7 Days, Baltimore Jewish Times, Jerusalem Post, The Forward, New York Post, The Voice of Piotrkow Survivors, Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era (KTAV, 1976), Visions of America: Personal Narratives from the Promised Land (Persea Books, 1993), New York Sex (Painted Leaf Press, 1998).
Copyright © 2001 by Sonia Pilcer
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
Requests for permission to reprint or to make copies and for any other information should be addressed to the publisher:
Persea Books, Inc.
171 Madison Avenue
New York, New York 10016
The Library of Congress has catalogued the printed edition as follows:
Pilcer, Sonia.
The Holocaust kid : a novel / Sonia Pilcer.—1st U.S. ed.
p. cm
“A Karen and Michael Braziller book.”
ISBN 0-89255-261-1 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Children of Holocaust survivors—Fiction. 2. Jews—New York (State)—New York—Fiction. 3. Jewish families—Fiction. 4. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. 5. Women authors—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3566.I48 H65 2001
813’.54—dc21
20010221297
Manufactured in the United States of America
Designed by Rita Lascaro
FIRST EDITION
ISBN: 978-0-89255-480-5(e-book)
