by Sonia Taitz
Chopin was my mother’s most beloved composer, and although she was seemingly not fiery herself, his notes flew out of her body and transformed her, and everything around her, into a magic tapestry of passions, tears, dashed hopes, and soaring emotional resurrection. In Europe, my mother had practiced and given recitals on concert grand pianos; in Washington Heights, she played on a carved mahogany upright with creamy ivory keys. At four, I began pressing down on those keys, my mother’s fingers on top of mine. Later, my mother found me a teacher from Juilliard who had been trained by the legendary Madame Rosina Lhévinne (of the Moscow Conservatory). After a short audition, Mrs. Ruskin said I was promising, but I shied away from the piano and rarely practiced, and thus never arrived beyond the “Für Elise” and sonatina stage. I preferred a subsidiary role, taking solace from the world my mother could create out of sound.
Each week, my mother would drag me to this teacher, who lived beside the Hudson River in a poorer neighborhood about twenty blocks south of our own. Mrs. Ruskin’s life was music. She had raised her son to become a concert pianist, and her small apartment was filled with grand pianos. One, with silent keys, fascinated me especially.
“That’s so that her boy could even practice during the night,” my mother whispered to me. “Even I never had such a thing back in Europe.”
During my lessons, my poor, devoted teacher made brilliant notations all over my music sheets or demonstrated concepts like the diminuendo with her capable hands. I focused mostly on the fact that she shaved her arms, leaving a rough stubble that I could feel when she slid her arms under mine to give me the sense of an arpeggio sweep. While Mrs. Ruskin would scribble endless tips in my spiraled workbook, I took the opportunity to daydream, my mouth watering from the hamburgers that Mr. Ruskin always seemed to be frying.
My mother, meanwhile, sat just to my left, on a wooden adjustable stool like mine, enraptured by the lesson. After my hour was over, she would stay with Mrs. Ruskin as I escaped to the living room to better inhale hamburger smells or play a muted chord on her son’s silent practice piano. From there, I would hear my mother’s music emerge from the lesson room, rich and strong. Sometimes her notes were followed by a pause, a conversation, Mrs. Ruskin’s suggested phrasing, and then the improvement, coming from my mother’s own powerful hands—and making all the difference. Her melodies could soar without the use of crescendo; they could get right into you and make you forget this world. It never occurred to me then to mourn my mother’s lost career as a performer. I never let her guide my practice on the piano back home, which I balked and avoided. My increasingly detailed assignments, including the awful Hanon exercises, became more and more tedious to me.
Instead, I waited for the times when my mother would make her own music come to life. I sat below her, watching her delicate, small feet on the pedals create gorgeous diapasons of weeping notes that soared and reverberated until the world disappeared and all that existed was the world’s one great soul, yearning. Safe under the keyboard of the heavy old Knabe, I felt my eyes fill with welcome tears. I felt rich, full, and satisfied, surrounded with jewel-like tones that matched my glistening, teary, rainbowized world, sounds that never ended but were sustained by her pedaling. There was no place I felt happier as a child than by the feet of my soft, pretty, and talented mother, the quintessence of all that was fruitful and giving and female. I felt all of the best of Europe there, the fairy-tale palaces, the delicate cakes I had sampled at the bakery, with names like Linzer, and Sacher, Black Forest and Napoleon. Something in the old wood of this piano, something in the yellow Schirmer book of Chopin, something in the language of music itself hinted at these lost but not forgotten worlds.
My mother’s hands smelled of Camay soap, and the cameo etched into the bars looked like her, as did the bonneted, bonny lady on the Sun-Maid raisin box, joyous in her native vineyard. In the kitchen, however, Gita took on the savory soul of onions, potatoes, bay leaves, and dill. She would sit at the round table with her mother, humming as she pared, peeled, and chopped. Sometimes, she would take a heavy, metal meat grinder and send beef out in curling pink ribbons, which she formed into her klops and her galuptzie. From early morning, pots would clang as she dragged them out, a cacophony of metal, from under and over the sink.
On weekends, my mother would cook enough for an entire week, boiling chickens and chopping liver, hacking iceberg lettuce and tomatoes into sturdy wedges. She would make great vats of chicken soup, of which she jarred large portions for her housebound neighbor Mrs. Shroodel. My grandmother might be shelling peas alongside, and if I went into the kitchen, one or the other of them would offer me some arbeslach.
“Vilst du doch essen?” So, do you want to eat?
I was a mouth to be fed for the both of them. If I said “no,” they often looked stricken, and one or the other might say:
“Someone’s life could have been saved from such good food.”
“But she doesn’t eat it.” They often talked like this, to each other, over my head, about me. Shelling the peas, shaking their heads, philosophical, disappointed.
“Spoiled.”
They saw that my father thought I was special, perhaps too special to be part of the kitchen crew. They saw how he favored and selected me, the little dark latecomer, over my older brother and them.
“You give her something so good, and she turns her face from it.”
When they talked about saving lives from starvation, they were not referring to the proverbial, oft-imagined, starving children in India or Africa. They meant real people, people they knew and remembered, perhaps even my own dying blood relatives. They had seen children like me starving during the war. The least I could do was be grateful.
So they persisted, holding a handful of hard peas or a juicy slice of tomato to my mouth, and eventually I’d share in the game by accepting the life-saving food, nibbling it from their palms like a small rooting animal.
Veal in Love
IN MY EARLIEST YEARS I was raised like a condemned veal calf: restricted activity, sunless in my crate, muscles kept weak, tender, and white. But there actually were times that I got out of the house. The problem was that I got out with my grandmother, who was so afraid I’d run away (or run at all) that she kept me on a leash. Actually, it was a harness that wrapped around my shoulders and belted around my waist like the top of some wonderful lederhosen ensemble. On the other end was Bubbe, who liked to sit on the bench right outside the gated “water sprinkler area” in the park. I was tethered to her in the heat as the other children, primarily Irish, ran barefoot in their underwear beneath the cold sprays.
My grandmother wore dark, loose-fitting dresses with a narrow little belt of the same fabric, suggesting the latitude where her waist had once been. She was neither fat nor round, but staunch and distinguished, with the stolid, unmovable air of an Indian chief in an old daguerreotype. Her wispy hair surrounded a strong, tragic face with high, dignified cheekbones and thin, unimpressable lips. Bubbe was grim in her task of keeping me from all harm, and harm began at the door of our apartment. When I look at it now, the playground she took me to seems mild and tame. In my childhood, I saw it through her eyes, as a wilderness full of naked savages (the “other” children, the “gentile” children), mountains (a little rock formation where my brother used to climb, out of her line of sight, free as a goat in Heidi’s Alpine wonderland), some metal swings, a sprinkler area, monkey bars and a couple of seesaws. Our poor little grandma was tired and sad and old. My mother often told me that she had been happy and game before the war, that she had had a beautiful voice and sang well. There was a picture, from much later, of my grandmother laughing, as she and mother rowed a boat together. For years and years I thought this was how they had come to America. And I thought that that was the last time she really enjoyed herself, side by side with her daughter, rowing to freedom (they were actually on the lake in Central Park).
To me, Bubbe was someone who wore boxy brown old-lady shoes, tying up the
sides with assertive laces. I wonder now—when did grandmothers stop wearing this uniform? It must have been relaxing, in those days, to be permitted to give up so thoroughly, to simply surrender to softness, comfort, and anonymity. My Bubbe, like many others, wore dark colors, those amazing shoes (they must have been reassuring, a solid, yet soft, base for her on earth), a tichel covering her head on colder days. The grandma palette contained nothing but soothing browns, grays, and nearly black navy blues. Fabrics tended toward the tweedy and fuzzy. Buttons were large and often interesting. Cardigans were de rigeuer. In the rain, Bubbe would pull out a polka-dotted, plastic version of her kerchief. She wore no makeup, and over her regal bones the skin was soft and scored with majestic wrinkles, suggesting vast knowledge which no child could understand. In her bag, which closed with a large metal clasp, she carried no lipstick, no mirror—just a little money and a white, embroidered handkerchief with which, in the summer, she dabbed moisture off her face, or wiped the ambient dirt off mine.
I wore little white socks with lacy edges, and well-polished, sturdy white shoes of the type immortalized in brass on many a mantel. I wore a stiff cotton dress with a ruffled petticoat underneath, and a cardigan with embroidered flowers and pearly buttons. But I had eyes, and I could see something I liked. There they were—children playing gleefully. These were our neighbors, fellow immigrants’ kids, with runny noses, scabs on their knees, dirt under their nails. They suggested a wild, unbridled freedom—the freedom to hurt, to be hurt, to soar, to fall, to laugh and splash and be crazy. Two of these, a pair of twin sisters, used to come up to me sometimes; their clear blue eyes and crazy orange hair amazed me.
“Hey, I’m Loretta!”
“Hey, and I’m Charlotte!”
“Whycome you can’t play?”
“And whycome you don’t talk?”
“Who’s that lady, your great-granny or somethin’?”
Long pause for staring.
“Doncha wanna get wet?”
Oh, yes. Yes. I did want to get wet, muddy, and wild. All that spoke of the world outside, the world that increasingly drew me. But what was I to do, tethered (literally) to my elders, who feared wildness in both its natural and human forms, who could take a chicken and boil it to whiteness and serve it with limp, exhausted vegetables and a fifty-pound potato kugel, thus stopping all impulses to sense, to lust, to budge? And how could I explain all this, when the only language I could speak was Yiddish—forged from millennia of exile from my own precious, base nature?
Bubbe spoke for both of us. Grudgingly, she opened her mouth and muttered: “Gey aveck, du vilde chayes!” (Go away, you wild beasts!) Not looking at them, she would make shooing motions with her hands, as though to say, “Why do they keep tormenting us, these goyim; what do they want from us now? Does it hurt them to see us alive, in one piece, resting and enjoying the sun? Or do they want to help us break our bones?”
Loretta and Charlotte did not speak Yiddish, but they understood. Looking back, it is more than likely that their fathers and uncles were the very men who came into our buildings and fixed the boilers and the water pipes. I am sure there was plenty of Yiddish in their lives in that neighborhood. After staring some more at both of us, pityingly, without hostility, searchingly, the girls would resume their wild, wet frolics.
And I would be left alone again, to look at Billy.
Billy was the one who rode the faucets—rode them, I tell you. I did not have the vocabulary yet, but this was Nietzchean, primal, anarchic, audacious.
Shall I compare him to a stormy day? Was my image of my people so set already, with the idea of “trouble”—in the form of chaos, pogroms, machismo, already counterpoised? No Jewish boy would ride the faucets like that. They wore yarmulkas and glasses, and sounded out the ancient letters, their heads buried in books (literally; the way to study was literally to hunch over a holy book and bury your head between its hard, embossed covers as though making a brain-sandwich with God at the center). But my father had a streak of this wildness in him, in his temper and in his vaunted exploits of the past.
And Billy had this streak of wildness that I can now unabashedly term goyish. The word goy, so often misunderstood, literally means “nation.” It comes from the Bible—and it simply means the nations of the world. Jews are goyim too, in that sense. But in my book, it will always mean “free of restraint and free of pain.” We Jews can fake it, but no one who has been touched by the Holocaust, my father and myself included, can actually and consistently make it. We are too sad, too worried and exquisitely broken into facets.
Billy would sit on the fountain spigots and water would spray from all directions, its power nearly blowing him off, but no, like a mad rodeo star he’d maintain his seat, squashing down the waters that would nonetheless rise around him in a cloud of mist and power.
This boy’s eyes were smudgy and blue, even the lids seeming dirty, narrowed, full of the smoke of the cigarettes that he would likely pick up within a few years. There was a sense of pale fire within, a virile appraisal and direct approach to the game. Thor with a thunderbolt, all of six years old. His knees were covered with scabs, his chest visible under his pathetic thin and sleeveless undershirt, his lean arms already muscled. He was barefoot, of course he was, barefoot with large flat feet that splashed through the water and got where they needed to go. How did I know his name? Everyone was shouting it, especially the other boys; he was the alpha male of the Washington Heights (at 173rd Street) playground sprinkler.
I needed Billy, I wanted Billy; he would be the antidote for me. If I was the Jose of the picture, the Ricky Ricardo, Billy could provide the American ballast to my untoward exoticism.
I wished to see Billy’s name, along with mine, on that luminous Desilu pillow. Wild Billy—the exquisite, dirt-covered boy in my playground. I chased him around once—got free of my Bubbe and chased him. He stopped running away, then came at me and threw me down abruptly, shoving dirt by the handful into my mouth. I was totally shocked, but glad of the information. Billy had talked to me in his own language. It was foreign to my poignant Yiddish, and even his dirt had the taste of life in it.
Operation Blue-Violet
ALL MOTHERS WORRY about their children, but mine must have been uniquely afraid of losing me or my brother to some sudden tragedy, and uniquely aware that such disasters could, and did, occur.
As a small child, I kept getting cold after cold, bronchitis, fevers, croup, and chronic tonsillitis. I remember my doctor, a twinkling Jewish immigrant from Germany, coming regularly to see me. Dr. Hershowitz was an old-world gentleman, patient, genteel, and kind. Though he was a pediatrician, he himself was childless. When I visited his home office, his wife, a stout, middle-aged woman with yellow-blonde hair and piercing blue eyes would lead me into a waiting room that held a birdcage of canaries. Having little birds was very Mittel-European, very bourgeois. Though their apartment was as small as my own, and the “waiting room” really a dark foyer, I could envision the large, airy sitting room in Frankfurt where Dr. and Mrs. Hershowitz may once have served tea and cakes, as their canaries twittered by sunny French windows.
“See my Fritzl sing to my Dietzl,” Frau Hershowitz would say, or something to that effect. (I always wanted to laugh, but she was dead serious about those fragile birds, who, even when dead and replaced, were always named Fritzl and Dietzl.) After listening to the songbirds, I’d take a seat on a tiny little chair by a tiny little table and take a comic book down from a shelf. All the comics were Disney, and all were about the Duck family. I especially loved reading about Daisy, who wore elegant shoes and screamed hysterically at Donald. It seemed a good turnabout, so unlike the situation in my own home, where no one dared talk back to my father, much less raise their voice to him.
When I was really sick, Dr. Hershowitz would pay a house call, carrying a heavy leather black bag that closed on top with a big brass snap. Out of it would come his large rubbery stethoscope. The old doctor would meticulously insert the earpieces an
d, after asking me to lift my pajama top, hoist a cold metal disk to my chest. In German (which I somehow instantly understood), he would ask me to breath hard and to cough. Removing the earpieces slowly, the doctor would then shake his head dramatically at my mother, eyes raised to meet her consternation. Sitting on the edge of my bed with folded hands, he would say:
“Sie ist echt krank.” She is truly ill.
The language was remarkably like Yiddish. But there was a formality to it, a tightness of the lips and tongue, which made it seem as though stern things were being spoken of, and in this case they were.
“Echt krank?” My mother would answer with her own perfect German accent, of which I could see she was proud. She seemed transformed from her Yiddisheh Mama self when she spoke like that. There was a layer of her that was of course concerned about the sickness being discussed, and another in which she was a lady, educated and well-postured, who could converse, any day, along the streets of the Danube or Rhine. After all, she had lived in Germany for years after the war, awaiting her American papers, and even dated a German Jewish doctor, whom, she always noted when telling the tale, drove her around in a convertible. In Germany, my mother apparently was Grace Kelly. Here, however, she was a tired mother with a pale, black-haired daughter who always seemed to have bronchitis, strep, croup, or tonsillitis.
The fact of my illness established, the remedy was applied.
“So! Sie must haben die Spritz!”
