The Watchmaker's Daughter: A Memoir

by Sonia Taitz

  While noting that Simon was “merely” a craftsman, and though some who knew him said he had a terrible temper, my grandmother liked her daughter’s suitor. Simon was gallant and respectful to Liba, promising that she could live with him and her daughter forever. After a few more dates, during which he was charming, and she shy and receptive, Gita agreed to marry Simon. Until the end of their lives they loved “La Vie en Rose,” and always danced together beautifully, as though—in some fairy tale in which nothing else impinges—they had been made for each other. Sometimes, on a wintry New York Sunday, they even ice-skated together in Central Park, he guiding her through routines both forward and backward. Still, much was to detract from their harmony. The dark and Heathcliffian man she married bore no relation to her kind, gentle father.

  Menachem Mendel Wery-Bey, my maternal grandfather, was a prosperous gentleman with “a neat blonde moustache and cornflower-blue eyes,” my mother would say, with an odd touch of pride. “No one could ever tell he was Jewish.” She often retold a story about his encounter with a German SS officer. Wearing the yellow cloth star all Jews had been forced, by Third Reich law, to wear, he’d been stopped while walking in the street, or rather, the gutter, as Jews had been pushed off the pavement.

  “You! Dirty Jew!”

  He had turned around and swept off his homburg. Seeing my grandfather’s pale blonde hair, parted neatly in the middle, and staring into his pale eyes, the SS officer had softened and said:

  “Here! Really! Are you truly a Jew?”

  And my mother told me that her father had answered without hesitation: “Yes. I am a Jew.”

  In the hierarchy of heaven, this was the highest form of nobility. He had acted al kiddush Hashem—to sanctity God’s name. While of course it was permissible for those who could to hide their Jewishness—all rabbis agreeing that nearly anything was permissible in order to save a life—this avowal was the heroic approach. Simply to stand in the gutter, wearing a yellow star, and affirm—given a chance to deny it—that one was a Jew, faithfully following the commandments, was a mitzvah, and showed a man’s sense of principle.

  “A filthy rodent Jew?” shouted the Nazi, grabbing his lapel, smiling, a gleeful hound finally grabbing his little fox. He wrapped his free arm around my grandfather’s neck, and, bending him in half, dragged him over to a nearby trough (“for horses,” my mother explained, “so they should drink”). The Nazi forced Menachem Mendel’s head into the water, pushing it down as far as he could. My grandfather nearly drowned. Finally, he let him up for air, and asked him:

  “And now. Did the water clean you? Or are you still a dirty Jew?”

  Barely able to breathe, my grandfather nodded his head, yes.

  “What ‘Yes’? You’re clean? Or you’re a dirty Jew?”

  “I am ...” he gasped, “... Jewish.” Yiddish was the word he used, a word full of tenderness when spoken by Jews.

  Jude was the word the Germans used, the word emblazoned on the yellow star. Yoo-deh. Didn’t they know the word was based on the people and land of Judah? The insignia of the tribe of Judah was a lion, rampant! Our word for Jew was Yehudi, and my middle name, Judith, or Yehudit, in its original Hebrew, was not an insult, but a badge. It meant Jewess, a woman from the tribe of Judah. A lioness. A warrior. Maybe, I wondered, everyone couldn’t deal with this kind of history. We had lived in what was known as the Holy Land. Our name was Israel, Judah, Judea. We once had a kingdom; Jerusalem was our center. These were powerful things. The Bible itself—and most everyone seemed to believe in it—said we were chosen by God. Were our enemies jealous that we were teacher’s pet? Did everyone want to be the “special one”? Was this why Snow White’s stepmother, that usurper, wanted her step-daughter’s heart cut out in the woods—so she, the Queen, could for once be “the fairest”? The Nazis liked to consider themselves a “Master Race.” Was this simply sibling rivalry, like madman Cain killing gentle Abel, like Joseph’s big brothers throwing him down into the pit? And did we have to keep playing this game?

  OK—you win! You’re chosen! Or as we used to say in the playground—“You’re It!” That meant that everyone would now chase you. Good luck with that! As for us, could we say “Not It”—and be safe?

  What a relief that would be—to be treated as normal, neither predator nor prey. My grandfather was a middle-aged bourgeois with a well-groomed mustache. He just wanted to get back to his family. He wasn’t hurting anyone. He had never hurt anyone. He wasn’t even that religious—and whom would it have hurt if he had been?

  But the Jews were “it” that day, and so his head was shoved back underwater, a sick baptism of hatred. My father told me that Europe’s Christians had blamed the Jews for everything from poisoning their wells, to causing the Black Plague, to drinking the blood of Christian children (Jews were thought to “need” this blood for their Passover matzohs). Didn’t anyone know that Jews are forbidden to taste blood at all, that this clear injunction can easily be found in our mutually beloved Bible? Did they really think Jesus had eaten unleavened child-blood bread at his Last Supper—a Passover meal called a seder? Why, if they worshipped him so much, did they attack the religion he’d followed?

  As a child, my father would avoid the churches as they let out on Easter Sunday. After hearing about the death of their Lord, mobs of screaming boys would chase him, screaming, “Blood Drinker! Christ Killer! Child Murderer!” Their parents, the women wearing crosses, would watch and do nothing. But it was Simon’s father, who had a grain mill, a wife, and three small children, who had been murdered, and these very mobs, screaming boys later grown to dangerous men, would jeer and shove as he and his widowed mother were carted off on their via dolorosa to the death camps.

  “My Papa came home that night,” my mother continued. “He was nearly dead from being so much in that water. He couldn’t speak. Later, he told us, with a voice that was breaking:

  “‘They asked me if I was a Jew. I told them. I will tell them this even if they kill me.’”

  “And he did,” she said, “and they did.”

  My grandfather’s younger brother David took another route. Apparently, he looked even more like an “Aryan” than my grandfather did. Granduncle David had a long, handsome and strong-boned face, flaxen hair, and pale blue eyes. His nerves may well have been as steely as those of an SS officer. Passing as a Christian, he hid in plain sight, walking boldly on the pavements of Kovno, no yellow star to mark him. He married a Catholic woman and had children of his own, baptized—for their own safety—into his wife’s religion. David eventually died of pneumonia in a hospital, in a bed with clean white sheets, under a cross nailed to the wall over his head, nursed by compassionate sisters. He was buried in a Christian graveyard. My mother never talked about him, or his wife and children—her aunt and first cousins. I found out about them only when I was grown, with children of my own.

  “Saving your life like that, I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t judge him. But his family—no one knows they were Jews. Thousands of years of history, lost.” Not for the first time, I thought: Ignorance can be bliss.

  Then she said: “Sonialeh. Do you think I know all the answers? Maybe he did the right thing. But my father was a proud Jew—and now we talk about him. We honor him. Right? I lived, I had you and your brother, and you will remember who we are and what we stood for. Your children will have a soul full of precious history. Knowing who you are, where you come from, that’s a reason to live. About my uncle David, what can we say? Did that person even exist?”

  His family lives in Las Vegas now, most of them croupiers. It thrills me to think of them sometimes, my kin safe amidst that anonymous dazzle of a timeless (clockless) world. And then again, without the known history, without the weight of time—are they really my true kin?

  The Almost Blind Watchmaker

  IT WAS GROWING HARDER for my father to put life into his timepieces. He’d wind them regularly, keys held by his dexterous but increasingly thick fingers. He had acqu
ired a rare brain disorder in America—acromegaly, a pituitary tumor that gradually, almost imperceptibly, caused his face to change, coarsening his features until he was nearly unrecognizable. Slowly, his feet widened and his fingers broadened. As his jaw grew, his perfect, white teeth began to splay and his straight nose became bulbous. From a handsome man, he became a giant trapped in a too-small frame.

  When I played with my skinny, angular Barbie doll, I began to use another doll—not Ken, but a baby doll, all rolls and sausage-like extremities—to play the man, the husband. Both this doll and my father were bald, which added to the feeling that he was a circus strongman, a sideshow, perhaps, but formidable and forbidding. Had a doctor not diagnosed his illness, my father would have eventually gone blind. When he told me this, I dreamed repeatedly of his poor right eye, the one that held the loupe, sightless. And the poor loupe, with no eye to see into the truth of a ticking world. And the poor clocks, forever to be broken, heartbroken. And the world unfixed. A quick operation removed the tumor, however, and my father’s sight was saved.

  On the other hand, the damage to my father’s appearance was permanent.

  I realized, as his face grew, that my hopes of having a normal, conventional life in any sense were close to nil. His voice deepened, becoming darker and more sepulchral. When he answered the doorbell or the phone, he sounded like Lurch, the Frankensteinian butler from the Addams Family TV show.

  “WHO IS DIS?” he would rumble, like a giant saying “Fee, Fie, Fo, Fum.”

  Sabbath brought a change to everything. Simon never worked on that day, and the importunate ticking of clocks (like the ravages of illness) was ignored. Instead, the synagogue became my father’s sanctuary. He would arrive as soon as the doors opened and take his seat on the corner of a long wooden bench, a silken, white prayer shawl draping his shoulders, its case lying next to him to save my brother’s seat. An hour or so after the services started, my mother would appear with Manny and me. She and I would take our seats in the women’s section, high above the men’s. My brother would slide in near his father, who would show him the place in the prayer book, then sink back into his own devotions.

  My mother and I could hardly see them from our aerie near the brass chandeliers. During most of the service, in fact, the women talked amongst themselves, picking up important information about one another’s children, their struggles and beaming accomplishments. I loved to listen to the gossip, sniffing my mother’s Arpege off her silk scarves, playing with her rings and her bracelets (often borrowed from the store’s showcases). My mother would happily slip off these treasures, shining them on her embroidered handkerchiefs and putting them on my own hands and wrists. The women’s service was in its way as restorative as the men’s. It was cozy to sniff our perfumes and jingle our charms, cozy to hear words of satisfaction whispered in Yiddish behind hard-working hands, now at leisure.

  My father prayed with a deep intention, which the Orthodox call kavanah. It was the same deep intensity that he gave to the fixing of watches, but in prayer he appealed to the single and limitless heart of God. As he sang along with the congregation to the old melodies, Simon’s voice soared. He had always had an operatic skill, and though untrained, his voice could carry a heartbreaking vibrato. If anything, subtle new depths in its timbre gave it a richer, more prophetic sound as he rose to the bimah and chanted the Torah’s verses to the notes of ancient cantillation. The holy, hopeful words rose to the heights of our little sanctuary, trailing into the women’s section, vibrating off the brass chandeliers that hung from the ceiling, sailing into my ears.

  A big “shhhhh” would travel through the congregation—and even our homey ring of chatter would become still. And then we’d hear a massive voice, disembodied, echoing through the congregation and somehow transforming it. So serious, the words, the voice, the source, and that collective, reverberative hush. I’d almost be relieved when it was over, and my father would return to the world as he always was, standing near me to take his little paper cup of wine as other men clapped him on the back to congratulate him or solemnly shook his hand.

  “Yesher koach” they would say. Extra strength, or More power to you.

  It did not matter then that his speaking voice was a shade too deep, or his fingers too thick. From his early childhood, Simon had had no father, but God was his father, and he had sung to him. And the men had surrounded him and blessed his strength, even after the pituitary tumor that had almost felled him.

  My father never complained about his malady, or his appearance. He would laugh about his looks, which I found charming and heroic:

  “I wonder if I am the handsomest man in New York now,” he’d say, or, less facetiously, “I know it sounds ridiculous, but I used to be quite a nice-looking fellow.” He kept a picture on the dresser from years past; he had looked like an old-fashioned movie star before I ever got to know him.

  His massive hands, about which people sometimes remarked, were still gentle and deft. His eyes, which had almost been blinded by the growing pituitary bearing down on the optic nerve, saw deeply, and radiated innocence, honesty, and wisdom. They were still handsome, set off by his dark, expressive eyebrows.

  I loved my father through and through. In his absence, I felt unknown and unseen. Even when he sang in the synagogue, I was removed from him, exiled in the women’s section, apart. But there were times when my father entered my world, took his loupe out, shed the prayer shawl, and pulled me toward him. My joy was boundless—I had been “selected.” Only then, chosen, did I feel fully alive.

  It was my father who would make my bland food palatable. On special occasions, he would make me neat, yummy omelets, the way I liked them—the eggs anything but soft and runny. He would cut thin slices of potatoes and make crisp fries for me, slice cucumbers and lay them down in sandwiches with thick brown bread and butter. He was deft with a knife, and could slice potato finely, pare an apple peel into one long circle, drop M&M’s into my farina bowl without my noticing, one by one, making them appear to pop out of the gray sludge, a bit of sweet hope and color.

  He would also tuck me in at night, tight, like a mummy, which I loved—the covers tucked even under me, so that I felt snug and safe. Then he would call me by a pet name: Karaputzi. He told me it was a Slavic slang word meaning “cute little child.” I liked the sound of it. When I was sick with the croup, it was he who would stay with me all night, leading me from my bed into a bathroom steaming with vapors from the shower, waving the mist toward my mouth. At moments like this, as when he fixed watches, he was infinitely patient—and I felt loved.

  If I awoke in the middle of the night and called out for him: “I’m scared of this darkness, Daddy,” he would say, “Read the bedtime Sh’ma.” The Sh’ma is the prayer all Jews know, attesting to the oneness of God. “Hear O Israel, Adonai is our God, Adonai is one.” These words may have comforted me, but more comforting was the man who tucked me in again, assuring me that I was safe in the world, no matter what had happened in the past, or what time it now was.

  Still, it was hard for me to sustain that feeling of safety when the real world was so fragmented, not just Jews and non-Jews but my father’s doting love for his Karaputzi, and the more conditional appreciation he felt for my “specialness.” It was possible to please him, and it was also possible to deeply disappoint him.

  “God has given you something extra,” he’d say, “and these gifts have been there from the moment you were born. I could see them from the moment I first saw you. You are going to be a great lady.”

  These words were like an official coronation, with the accompanying sense of responsibility. I was required to do my share, under my father’s watchful approval. He would witness my deeds and affirm my extra-chosenness. Heavy is the head that wears the crown that a wounded, moody father imposes on his child. And such tributes, focused on a scrawny, black-haired daughter, would cause my mother to tighten her lips and show me her rare cold side. It didn’t help when, during a marital argumen
t, her husband would drag me into it and draw a virtual bull’s-eye on me:

  “Gita! What took me ten hours to explain to you—and I still don’t think you will ever understand it—this little girl, this klayne maydel, she understood it in the very first minute!”

  It probably also didn’t help that these praiseful words made me beam, like the desperate, foolish child I was.

  He even liked my dark hair, which came from his dark, intense side of the family. The original Sonia Taitz had been beautiful, he told me, with black hair and deep, blue-green eyes. When I’d wish for blondeness, he’d remind me that I had a special beauty, an ancient Jewish charm. He comforted me with tales of dark, exotic beauties such as Queen Esther, who, long ago in Persia, had won a beauty contest, married a king, and saved her people. He assured me that dark eyes and hair were rare and desirable. In Lithuania, he told me, as in Poland or Russia, any peasant could produce a crop of illiterate towheads with dumb pale eyes that understood nothing.

  So, like my paternal grandmother, I was a Snow White in coloring, and my mother was already showing a slight tendency toward the stepmother side. Who could blame her? It wasn’t some magic mirror saying that I was the fairest of them all—it was my father, her own husband, her man.

  Piano and Potatoes

  My MOTHER’S EYES were spring-green, cat-green, her round cheeks pink as a Dresden doll’s, her nose dotted with small freckles. While my father had an ageless old man’s demeanor (not only Yul Brynner, but Zorba, or the later Picasso), Gita remained dewy, fragrant, and unlined throughout her life. Her favorite color scheme, and it suited her, was “flowers”—any color, all colors. They blossomed on her sheets, in her dresses, in vases all over the house, on the towels and paper napkins. Her hands were soft, but there was ready power and capability in them from her years of practicing the piano. She had lived in the pretty Lithuanian town of Kovno, practicing her Bach inventions and Hanon exercises and arpeggios in a stately redbrick home overlooking the river. Her duplex had large French windows opening out onto the treetops, and on the ground floor of this building, which he owned, was her father’s little department store, right across from the university.