The Watchmaker's Daughter: A Memoir

by Sonia Taitz

  Rabbi Lichtiger was a “Janusz” to me, a safe core within a harsh world. He realized, as my parents sometimes did not, that we were just children, and that nothing was required of us other than to exist, survive, and even enjoy life. Sometimes he gave us candies when we learned an especially hard verse in Hebrew. In the past, we learned, fathers and rebbes used to put honey on their children’s fingers as they learned the biblical letters, so that they would forever associate learning with sweetness.

  I was also comforted by Rashi, the biblical interpreter. An eleventh century medieval scholar who had lived in France and Germany, Rashi’s life had been devoted to a simple yet profound interpretation of the Torah, verse by verse. Without him, many of the passages made no sense. Rashi would explain the meaning beneath these surface mysteries. He was my first literary critic and guide, and I deeply appreciated the role he had taken in life, that of “explainer.”

  Still, even with his help, the Torah often seemed rigid. Boundaries and opposites seemed to be key themes in traditional Biblical Judaism. When the Sabbath is over, for example, the Havdalah prayer is sung. The word means separation.

  Hamavdil bain Kodesh Lechol

  (He who separates between the sacred and the profane)

  Bain Or Lechoshech

  (Between light and darkness)

  Bain Yisroel La’amim

  (Between Israel and other nations)

  Bain Yom Hashvi’i L’Shesheth Yemai Hama’aseh

  (Between the Seventh Day and the six days of Creation) ...

  That same binary system—those who follow and those who don’t, those who are holy and those who are profane—showed up again in a magazine I used to pick up in the yeshiva’s library, Highlights for Children. I found it fairly biblical in its judgments of two imaginary boys called Goofus and Gallant. (You could easily call them Cain and Abel, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau.)

  While Goofus would not say “please” or “thank you,” Gallant would be very polite. Goofus, like Esau wolfing his mess of pottage, would reach across the table and grab. Gallant would say, “Would you please pass the sugar?”

  I made up some of my own:

  Goofus eats shrimp cocktail. Gallant says, “No, thank you, that’s not exactly kosher.”

  Goofus worships idols (he bows to little plaster saints in his room). Gallant is faithful to a God who is everywhere, who has no form and requires the leap of imagination.

  Goofus goes shopping on the Sabbath day. Gallant goes to services, then eats cholent (a heavy bean stew), naps, and later enjoys a leisurely shaptzier with his parents, greeting all the neighbors and sharing his accomplishments with them. He says “hello” politely to Mrs. Friedman.

  Goofus likes to shoot birds with BB guns. Gallant is kind to the mother bird, and if he needs the eggs, he sends her away so she will not feel anguish. He will never eat a hunted animal—they must all be ritually slaughtered, with a blessing. Their blood, which is the soul, must not be tasted.

  Goofus fails school and can never conjugate the Hebrew verbs. Gallant becomes a doctor—no, a specialist. In his spare time he reads the Talmud in the original Aramaic.

  Goofus lives in Riverdale and doesn’t know even which day is Sukkot. Gallant knows, and eats challah in the sukkah with his parents.

  When I ask Rabbi Lichtiger about all these rigid judgments and separations I see in Judaism, he thinks about it for a minute, adjusts his black, silky yarmulka, and says.

  “How wonderful that you ask, maydeleh. The meaning of the word Israel is wrestles with God. Do you remember how we read about Jacob wrestling with the angel?”

  “Yes.”

  “That is what the greatest rabbis did. God loves questions.”

  Rabbi Lichtiger was a big door-opener in my life. All I had were questions. Some of them were my parents’, but increasingly, more of them were mine.

  Beauty Queen

  TO ME, the most important holiday of all was the postbiblical one called Purim. There was once a king in Persia called Ahasuerus. He’s kind of stupid, and kind of a drunk, but he’s very powerful, and his kingdom is enormous. When his own wife does not obey him, he sends for all the beautiful women in the land, looking for a new bride. Amongst these women is Esther, who just happens to be secretly Jewish. Ahasuerus picks her to be his new queen.

  Imagine that. I did.

  “No, not the blonde. Not the redhead. That one with the light-blue eyes, nah. Wait, wait—I see someone I like! Look at that black hair! Those big dark eyes. And she seems to be quite intelligent, too!”

  “Yes! I’ll be very helpful to you! I get a lot of stars! Pick me!”

  “I do—I pick you!”

  Meanwhile, the king’s advisor, Haman, decides that the Jews are bad and dangerous, and must be annihilated. They draw lots (purim), and choose the date for this genocide.

  Esther, learning about this plan, bravely runs to the king. Esther knows that it is dangerous to enter the royal chambers unless Ahasuerus has allowed it by showing his golden staff, but she enters anyway.

  She finds him in a loving mood.

  “Why, Esther, my beauty, what is wrong?”

  “What is wrong is that Jewish people are going to all be killed soon! And no one is going to stop it! God might be busy, you never know! Maybe you should do something!”

  And he says, “But Esther, my love, why do you care?”

  And she tells him, “I care because these are my people. I, the woman you love, am actually a Jew myself,” she says, “a Jew like my mother’s father, the one with the blonde moustache and cornflower-blue eyes.”

  The king does not dip her head in the trough over and over, nor send her or her relatives to their deaths in Dachau. Instead, he immediately saves the Jews and sends their enemy Haman to his death. Because of Esther, all the Jews in Persia are saved. Purim is celebrated on the day that the Jews were meant to be destroyed. It is a happy day of mischief and masquerade. Jews are even allowed, no, urged, to get drunk on that day.

  At Yeshiva Soloveitchik, every girl dressed up as Esther on Purim. Since we were all fairly poor, we’d portray our beauty queen in our mother’s lipstick. Bunny Milcher wore a hot magenta, like Jayne Mansfield. I wore Revlon’s Cherries in the Snow, and was sure that I was transformed into an irresistible future queen when I rubbed it over my lips (perhaps a bit of tooth as well). Then we girls would add a bobbly beaded necklace (in the Wilma Flintstone vein) and a golden paper crown with square, plastic gems in it. Some preferred a woolen, paisley scarf slug over their hair like babushkas, tied under the chin. Bunny added sparkling white cat-eye sunglasses without the lenses, broken shades her mother had once worn in Miami. Glamorous.

  The boys wore paper eye-masks, which, with their gold and purple swirls surrounding the eyeholes, were meant to evoke the exoticism of the famous king of Persia. Most also wore their clothes backward, a witty fillip to the art of masquerade. Buttons down the back of a boy’s shirt or cardigan! Like a girl! You can just imagine the merriment.

  One day, I mused, tar-head crushed under my cardboard crown, I too would capture the heart of a savior, my own potentate. I would make him love me and my people—and that is how our suffering would end. All I had to do was grow up and become beautiful. Which was not easy, because I was developing into quite a scrawny and pale girl, with thick glasses and buck teeth. When I’d keep asking my father if I was beautiful, he’d still answer, annoyingly, “There are more important things than beauty.”

  What, in heaven’s name, what?

  A Lament for Esau

  My BROTHER’S BIRTH was a grand consolation to my mother and grandmother. Gita had lost not only a father but two teenage brothers, who had been shot by the Nazis while still in the Kovno ghetto. So this little boy, Manny, who bore her father’s name (embodied in the first initial “M”) and carried his faded memory in a boy’s healthy body—what joy!

  On the other hand, Manny tended to irritate my touchy, proud father. He was a spirited boy, full of humor, sass,
and challenge. Nowadays, he might have been labeled “hyperactive” before he finished a single zigzagged lap around the block, but at that time, he was simply a typical, mischievous boy. My father, however, saw him through God’s judgmental eyes. He had bought into Judaism’s dualities—day and night, Jacob and Esau, right and wrong, us and them. My brother, to him, was “them.”

  Having known no father himself, he saw his boy as Esau: threatening, wild, and primitive. Dr. Benjamin Spock was on most night tables in those days, but not on my parents’. Thus, unlike the indulgent and stage-sensitive developmental pediatrician, my father saw unique defiance in his son’s every age-appropriate kick and raspberry. What was he to make of a little boy who seemed to learn about life from Dennis the Menace (a true paradigm of hyperactivity), Huck Finn, or Howdy Doody—who knew, and relished knowing, that he was “just a kid”?

  “Hey! You’re hurting me!” my brother would say. “And I’m just a kid!”

  What did the phrase just a kid mean to someone like my father? He had never been “just a kid.” After his father had been shot by the Cossacks, my father had had to be unwaveringly strong for his mother. There was no part of his life that had not witnessed tragedy and demanded sacrifice and resolve. So he had little experience with children, other than assuming that they obeyed their revered parents without question, as he had done.

  My father could not afford books for school. An athletic, resourceful boy who ice-skated everywhere in his frozen Baltic village, he was often forced to lend his skates in order to borrow a book and try to catch up. Even with his two older siblings becoming independent, he saw that he was a drain on his mother. So by age thirteen, instead of preparing for a Bar Mitzvah, he settled down to the discipline and promise of hard work. Later, he enrolled in the Lithuanian army and thrived under the rigors that, he felt, made him equal to all other men, rich or poor, Jewish or not. He believed in sacrifice, in unwavering routines. He had loved the army, where, he often told me, the officers complimented him on his being a good soldier “for a Jew.”

  How equipped was he to deal with American children, nourished and spoiled and played with and idolized? From the start, when my brother began to shout “No!”—sometimes punctuating his resistance by jumping up and down—my father took his little boy’s bravado as another mortal threat.

  “WHAT did I hear?”

  “You heared me say NO, Daddy!”

  “YOU—DARE—say ‘NO’—to ME???”

  “Yes, Daddy,” said my poor, normal, American brother, a kid with whom any other less exhausted dad would have loved to play catch.

  “Yes Daddy what?”

  “YES I Say NO to YOU!!”

  A beating followed, and would follow for years (for neither would stand down), ceasing only when my father’s arms were tired. This was a process called shmitz in Yiddish, a cognate for the word smite (which the biblical God was often wont to do). It was methodical, brutal, and sad.

  Yiddish has several words for hitting. There is the frask—a sort of slap (I received frasks from my mother for being “fresh,” but never on the face). There is a klahp— more of a one-time blow. And then there is the far more serious shmitz—implying a more sustained beating, perhaps with a belt (the dreaded rimmen). My father had no need for the weaponry of buckles. His own massive hands drove the fierce message home.

  “OW! HEY! STOP! OWWWWW!”

  “Oy Shimon! Herr opp!” My mother would cry, which would make my father even wilder. He hated tears; they added to his rage.

  “THIS! WILL! TEACH! YOU! TO ANSWER ME LIKE THAT!!”

  “Watch his head! Pass opp zein kopp!”

  “AN! ANIMAL! YOU! HAVE! TO! BEAT!”

  “Ushtaks, Shimon!” Now she spoke Lithuanian to him. Stop!

  And then he would finally stop, exhausted.

  With loud theatrical sobbing, my brother crumpled on the linoleum.

  “I think you broke my head, you baldy!”

  “WHAT DID YOU CALL ME?”

  “Nothing.”

  It was simply impossible for my poor father to be dominated, or imagine the challenge of domination, by anyone, of any size, anymore. And his son was made of the same determined cloth. As for me, I picked up right away that it was best never to contradict my father. Not openly. I could never decide if my brother was brave or stubborn for challenging his unstoppable, windmill-fisted father.

  My mother found my supposed immunity annoying. “Why don’t you ever hit her?” I once heard her say, after her boy had been beaten down and quieted.

  “Is she too special to hit, your precious Sonia?”

  Progression in my mother’s preference for my brother (who, like her, suffered from her husband’s wrath). Progression in her steadfast resistance to me and my supposed charms. Here is my deepest loss, a life increasingly lacking in my mother’s good will, in which all my successes became her failures, and fueled a subtle, seemingly perverse resistance to both my father and me. I seemed to represent a challenge to her: all the books she did not read, all the insights she did not understand, all the messages to me that my father never gave her.

  “Let her be in the kitchen, you need to study,” he’d say to me, of my mother.

  That was fine with me, but all my mother wanted was a daughter with her in the kitchen, particularly when her mother died and left her alone. Liba had been hospitalized for pneumonia, caught, my mother said, when she’d picked me up from school on a wintry day. One night in the hospital, the nurse didn’t come when Liba had rung for her. Needing to go to the bathroom, she had climbed out of her bed, over the iron railing, fallen, and broken her hip. Not long after, an embolism in her lung had killed her. My mother was left, as she saw it, alone. Her husband was no substitute for the mother she adored, her confidante, her best friend. And I, perhaps the cause of her greatest loss (she had saved her mother from the Nazis but not from me), was meager comfort.

  When I played the piano, a flashy, precocious version of my mother’s dimensional virtuosity, Simon had commented: “Gita, you play faster, maybe your pieces are a little harder. But Sonia, you put more feelings into your few notes than I have ever heard from your mother. You brought tears to my eyes.” And this was no metaphor; he would actually wipe his eyes. It was really unfair—she was the one who had studied all her life, who, even now, enjoyed those lessons with Mrs. Ruskin. I didn’t even really know my scales, and hated practicing.

  Later, my mother would make sure she weighed in on the matter.

  “Oh, you’re so smart,” she’d say by the time I was ten. “Such a talent. I really admire you.” Young as I was, I was aware of the bitterness. It came from a side of her that hated to be shown up by another woman, and her daughter, at that. Though she loved me, I felt she truly did not like me. It frightened me that any strength I had seemed to weaken her. Even strengths that I really didn’t have, like knowing who I was outside the world of praise.

  My Hellen Keller Fixation

  ANOTHER RIFT between my mother and me arose be cause of the most famous blind and deaf person in the world. One Sunday, as she often did, my mother took my brother and me to the movies. Usually the films were light and fluffy Hollywood fare, but this time, as the lights went out, there was no Doris and no Rock. Instead, the screen illuminated in somber black and white and the words THE MIRACLE WORKER

  Suddenly, with no warning, I was lost in the world that came to life before me. Sitting in the darkness, I met the tragic child, cursed in her crib to be different. No one understood Helen Keller, no one knew her. Treated like an animal, in pain and wailing, lost in a world of unreferenced pain. Kicking. Trying to escape. Until the teacher came and released all her beauty. Until someone finally freed her from her jail.

  When the lights rose, I could not move from my seat. My brother and my mother were already standing in the aisle, ready to move on and out to the delicatessen nearby. Then they noticed me, sitting in a daze. I begged my mother to stay and wait with me for the next showing. Sometimes, if a mo
vie was really good, we did that. If I had had my way, I would have sat in that dark theater all day, waiting for the lights of the story to unfold, waiting for Helen’s inner light to be revealed. But my mother had found the movie disturbing. Worse, still, was my reaction to it. She hated when I was intense like my father. She hated when I was weird and fixated and dramatic about something she could not or would not feel.

  Even so, I could not shake the spell of The Miracle Worker; I took the movie home with me, and it went wherever I went.

  “WATER!” I screamed, pouring showers from the faucets in the kitchen, in the bathroom, and running from one to the other, splashing my hands and face.

  Not vasser, as in Yiddish. “Water.”

  “Bist du ganz meshugeh?” Are you completely crazy? What had she done to deserve a daughter like this?

  “I’m Helen Keller!” I replied. I even loved the name. The pain of her private “hell” was embedded in the first name. Keller meant cellar in Yiddish and German. That is where her soul had been stuck, in fear and in hiding.

  “God forbid you should be a Helen Keller!” my mother screamed.

  From that day on, my mother forbade me from talking about my idol and multiply disabled doppelganger. She did not know, however, that my school had a Scholastic book on which the movie had been based. Helen herself (what a prodigy) had written her own memoir, which I took out of the library and renewed and renewed and renewed.

  From her book, I learned that Helen Keller had, despite her misfortunes (or maybe because of them), resolved to go to Radcliffe, then the sister school to Harvard. This was what she deemed to be the hardest, toughest, and most demanding school in the world. Helen would prove herself. Just to show them. It was not enough for her to walk and talk and do everything “normal” people did. Normal was not part of the equation for Helen. She was no Bunny Milcher who went to Miami in the winter, whose mother wore magenta lipstick and blue mascara, who wanted to be “average and happy.” She was great; she wanted to be abnormal and different and special. Like my father and maybe like me.