The Watchmaker's Daughter: A Memoir

by Sonia Taitz

  I should have listened to my mother, who loved flowers and fresh, ripe tomatoes and her little apartment that gave her joy. She is the one who, whenever I told her how tough the professors were, how pressured the world I had entered, would answer, simply:

  “Let them plotz.” (Explode.) How wise she was.

  She would have been happy if I had simply wanted to stay with her a few hours every day, and make some wonderful soup, redolent with dill and bay leaves. Or eat a shtickl pound cake, drink a glass of tea with honey. We could have enjoyed the little things together, flowers (plastic maybe, silk if we were lucky, but flowers.), pushed and pulled our wagons up and down the avenues hunting for the best and cheapest apples and tomatoes and cantaloupe. But at that that point, chicken soup, honeyed tea, and apples were the last things on my hubris-warped mind. I didn’t like law, but I would not come home.

  Escapes, West and East

  MY BROTHER, meanwhile, has started a new, exciting life as a lawyer in California. On a trip out west to check out summer internships, I visit with Manny. His light and airy “garden apartment,” with its patch of grass and a lemon tree, is as antithetical to my parents’ old-world ambience as Westwood is to Washington Heights.

  He drives me around in a rented blue convertible. We drive up hills and down thrilling canyons. Manny is tan and muscular, more handsome and long-haired than ever. His bell-bottoms are cleverly worn out, and he wears them low on his hips. As our car circles up toward the glass aeries of millionaires and movie stars, my brother asks if I would like to see anyone’s home.

  “You—you know these people?”

  “Well, no, but you don’t have to know them to—”

  “Do you know where Elizabeth Taylor lives?”

  “Eliz—nah! It’s not like that. Who cares about the stars? You don’t have to be such a tourist! It’s like heaven here. Everyone’s so open and friendly. You just ring the doorbell and they let you in.”

  “Really?” Back in Washington Heights, our door had three Medeco locks and a chain. Before letting anyone in, my mother would ask, with a put-upon, almost terrified timbre: “Who is it??” And even when she got her answer the chain would stay on until she had peered for a good minute through the little peephole.

  “Los Angeles isn’t full of worries and hang-ups like New York,” my big brother is explaining. “Where we come from, yeah, everyone is uptight and farkrimt,” he says, meaning that their faces are pursed and pruned as though they’d tasted too much bitterness to loosen up.

  “Oh, I know. You don’t have to tell me how farkrimt they are.”

  “Well, little sister. It’s just a different world here.”

  Manny pulls up to a mansion that seems to teeter on the edge of a cliff. He opens his car door and gets out, and I follow him to the huge wooden front doors of this palace.

  He must have rung a silent bell that I didn’t even notice, because after a minute or so the doors swing open to reveal acres of white marble on the floor, polished smooth as a skating rink. I peer in—just beyond, past another pair of impressive doors (glass, French), lies a pale blue pool that stretches into the pale blue horizon, cool as nothingness.

  The woman who has opened the door has long, brown hair. She is barefoot, and on her big toe is a shining diamond. Tanned and slightly worn, she is dressed in a sheer Grecian gown, under which we can see a black bikini with gold straps. From the way she looks at my brother, you would think she knew him for a long time.

  “Hey,” she says, with an unnatural (to me) happiness.

  Yes, I said it. Happiness is kind of unnatural to me, and not only in Los Angeles. But I could get used to it. I am having fun. I want to go into her kitchen—it’s probably vast—and ask for a dish of strawberry ice cream. With a maraschino cherry, my mother’s touch of luxury.

  “Hi,” my brother is saying. “Wow. My little sister here and I—well, we were driving around your neighborhood, and we noticed your lovely home.”

  “Oh, thanks, uh huh?”

  “Yes, well, my sister, she’s from New York.”

  Manny and the barefoot Grecian lady exchange sympathetic glances.

  “Oh...”

  “Yeah, I know,” he says. “Can I show her how people live out here?”

  As though everyone in Los Angeles lived on cloud nine.

  She did. Her furniture is all soft and white (without plastic). A large wolfhound pads about lazily. The lady’s feet, though shoeless, seem small and soft. Past the white marble, there is thick white carpeting, and past that, around the pale blue pool, an exquisite orangy tile that rhymes with the sunlight.

  “Thanks for your hospitality!” my brother says, as he slams the car door. I look behind me as we whirl down the hills, but the house vanishes into a swirl of yellow dust and tenacious cactuses.

  Even my law firm interviews in Los Angeles had an unsprung feeling to them. One of them, conducted toward the end of the day, ended with me and several other candidates for a summer associateship herded into a hot tub, bobbing like dumplings under the stars. A partner passed us flutes of champagne whose bubbles mingled with Jacuzzi foam.

  If that didn’t want to make you leave your worries behind and start fresh, what could?

  But I still had this sense of “promises to keep.” What did that mean? I didn’t know. But I didn’t think it meant sipping Premier Cru or cooking like a matzoh ball in a vat of boiling water. Even the lure of entertainment law (where I could meet someone like Liz) was not enough. My brother had traveled west and found freedom in its lack of history, its open, sunny acceptance. I, unable to settle, unable to rest, chose escape in another way—equidistant, and in the opposite direction.

  Europe was full of history, turf wars, grudges, vendettas, pogroms. And if California was always sunny, England—I was soon to discover—offered a moody gray rain that never seemed to stop.

  From the time of my early disaffection with law, I had toyed with the idea of transferring to Oxford or Cambridge to study literature. Many of my law colleagues had gone there for extra degrees before stepping up to the practical rigors of American jurisprudence.

  “Eeew! Why would you go there?” said a dissenting law school friend, who had actually turned down a Rhodes scholarship after visiting the boggy campuses of Oxford and Cambridge.

  “It smells like rotten milk and Lysol,” another, who had been there, insisted. “No one has a chin, the food reeks of boiled cabbage and rotting pig, and the men are all gay. You can’t be serious.”

  Oh, I am serious; I have made a radical decision. I have applied and been accepted to Oxford to study nineteenth-century English literature. To my parents’ consternation, I plan to become my true self there, and even to write. After only one year of law school, I have decided to cross the ocean, eastward. Now, I have secured a berth, student passage, on the regal vessel QE II, named after England’s reigning monarch.

  In this mid-Atlantic limbo, past and present seem to flip-flop. As though we already were in the nineteenth century, people voluntarily sit on the windy deck, wrapped in coarse blankets and drinking beef bouillon. Or endless milky cups of tea, in thin bone china. I read Dickens on deck. Time moves counterclockwise and I love it.

  I am sailing away from everything I know. I am going to be alone and in a foreign land. I am not really reckless (though my mother doubts that). I am still a good and responsible girl. I have managed to fulfill all my first-year requirements. I have even obtained a bona fide leave of absence to go to Oxford from Yale’s dean, a benevolent fellow with a broad mind.

  According to my plan, I would enter Europe sitting proudly on my safe academic perch. These were the dangerous louts who had chased the Jews out, over and over, for centuries. Spain, home of the Inquisition. France, home of the Dreyfus trial and Vichy government. Germany, Poland, and Lithuania, my parents’ country, all vying for the title of most bloodthirsty. England, which purged all its Jews in the twelfth century (with a spectacular rout at York), yet has nevertheless managed to p
roduce literary grotesques like Shylock and Fagin out of a centuries-long, Judenrein vacuum. Who, as more recent fillip, patrolled Israel’s harbor at a crucial time in the ’40s, sending boatloads of Jews back to a sure death in the Old World.

  So off I go, away from Big Dreams, Big Bucks, and Big Gulps, into an oddly provincial part of the bloody checkerboard. Perhaps God, as the psalm promised, would set a table for me in the presence of my enemies, the landed sno-bistocracy. I would graciously invite Europe to join me in eating—what would it be—chicken soup. And they would slurp it, love it, want more, and even ask me for the recipe. I would bring them vats of it, as my mother had done for Mrs. Shroodel on 172nd Street between Broadway and Fort Washington Avenue. And they would pat my head and give me hard candy with soft fillings. They would row my boat to safety, under the light of stars, and I would plant trees in their honor in the Avenue of the Righteous, in Jerusalem.

  I do, of course, need my father’s permission to leave law school and America. It is hard-earned.

  This is how I explain it to the poor, long-suffering man:

  “I want to learn more broadly. Law school is practical, but I have a deeper side to me.”

  It’s an odd concept, but I know that my father has that deeper side within him, too. He nods thoughtfully.

  “I don’t want the dry Talmud and not the Torah, the polemics instead of the poetry. I want my knowledge pure and not relative to time and place and jurisdiction. I want to be a real scholar, not just a shallow businesswoman. Please give me one last chance to learn—really learn—at the oldest and most prestigious school in the world. Oxford University.”

  “Oxford? Yes, of course. I have heard of it,” says my father.

  “It is almost a thousand years old. Kings and—and Sultans have studied there.” There’s that Ahasuerus motif again, and I’m seeing myself in that paper crown and big plastic jewels that declare me a winner.

  “It’s the hardest school to get into, particularly for an American—and of all the schools in the world, it is the best.”

  I truly mean these simple, naive words. For me, Oxford would be the ultimate chosen place, the Promised Land of scholarship. This could be my true Radcliffe. Having majored in English literature at Barnard, I was dazzled by the idea of going to its source.

  “I always worked hard for you,” says my father, “and I always wanted you to have all your opportunities. I can see that you want this very much, my Karaputzi.”

  “It’s the door I’ve been looking for. And after this, I’ll go back to law school. I have an official leave. I can come back and finish”

  “Yes, you must complete what you start. It is cowardly to quit.”

  I don’t agree; sometimes quitting is heroic. I simply don’t have the guts to let go of law school.

  “I’ll end up with two wonderful degrees, don’t worry,” is all I can say.

  “Good. I think I will let you go to Oxford University.”

  But before I can relax, he adds:

  “But first, I must ask you to make this vow to me.”

  The Vow

  HERE is my father’s request:

  “You must promise that no matter how far you go, what you experience and what you learn, you will remain faithful to your God and your people.”

  Long silence. I am thinking. He gives me time to consider my answer.

  He is probably only talking about my inner identity. That is probably solid. I have been marked, by him and my mother, since birth. I know you cannot promise to keep believing something, but that is what we all do. We swear eternal love. We swear faith and allegiance to a country. We continue to pray when faith wavers. I believe in passionate avowals, but a part of me wants also to remain porous and open. I want to be touched by the new; otherwise, why travel at all? On the other hand, Jews have always traveled, yet managed to retain their identities. Somehow, no matter how long the axis, how far from the center it takes them, the center does hold true.

  So although I find the question oppressive, and oppression antithetical to loyalty or love, I am able to be honest when I make the vow. I cannot fight the fact that I am Jewish. Indeed, I will fight the fight for the Jews. I will even look for the next fight so I can start fighting it. Let’s face it: I went to Europe to open a dialogue. To resume the old fight that’s never silent in my head. And in that sense, I am my father’s most faithful daughter.

  In the more conventional sense, however, I betray my father from the moment I enter the Sceptered Isle. I am finally, finally, outside their world. Intriguingly, I am also deep inside their past. Europe is the Old World, still holding to dark, creaky theories that cripple it. I can wrestle with, and perhaps subdue, my parents’ and my people’s atavistic nightmares of not belonging.

  On top of which, the Old World, or what’s left of it, is damnably beautiful. I can see the appeal of having your own country, which goes back for centuries, with history and banners and old mulled wine in stone pubs. I can see what joy there could be in being a native son. A horse, the saddle, the land, the trees ...

  So vow, shmow. It’s not easy to stay sober in England, in any sense of the word. Despite its wetness—or perhaps because of the vagueness of water—the place is seductive. The Kingdom feels like this: haze of rain, smell of fireplaces, old rugs and sherry, leaded windows and cobblestone paths. Swans on the River Isis, flowing like white ribbons. Bicycles jingle, and punts sail slowly by, pushed by lanky, long-haired boys whose cheeks are flushed pink. Yes, it is all sensuous, and I start to loll immediately. The leather-bound books smell rich and savory, as do the pubs, with their loamy scent of spilled beer and cigarettes. Church bells toll in the misty air, lavender at dusk.

  A few months after I arrive, I encounter an English actor on the Oxford stage. I am already well seduced by England’s post-Raphaelite art, by dusty first editions, ancient carpets, and cool mini-flutes of sweet sherry. I have fallen deeply into nineteenth-century English literature—Romantic poetry and some of the world’s greatest novels, turning page after magical page in a place where you could still smell the fireplaces and climb the cold stone staircases, a past still gleaming through the fog and mists. How hard did the wind have to blow to tip me over? Not hard. And this man was a hurricane.

  There he was, in flowing eighteenth-century wig and a poet’s shirt, playing the irresistible lover, Don Juan, in Moliere’s version of the legend. The play was performed when winter thawed, when springtime brought intoxicating fragrances to the countryside. There, at the Oxford Playhouse, professional actors and equally brilliant students, members of the estimable OUDS (Oxford University Dramatic Society), trod the boards together, producing works of remarkable quality. I fell into a deep obsession with this particular artist’s long, strong frame, sensuous mouth, satin shoes, and dandified wit. I loved the way “Juan” tossed the women into his net, then discarded them. A real courtesan like me would be more of a scene-partner for him, I thought. So I had only one thought as I came back to see this man onstage, over and over, like a stalker.

  Bring him to me.

  Here, my hormones averred, was my own alien king. Here was my challenge. He was my prey, and I his. I determined to find my personal Don Juan.

  I thought the man was a professional actor. He seemed older than much of the cast—with his dark kohled, shadowy eyes and decadent manner, he seemed to be at least thirty. I asked student amateurs I knew if they had seen the play or heard of its star performer. I searched all the directories to find his address—Oxford, the nearby town of Reading, even London and its suburbs. I could not find this name—an unusual name, though English.

  And then, one day in college, I heard the porter at the lodge call out.

  “Mr. Deards! Mr. Deards—if you please!”

  When I turned, I saw a fleeting figure, flying by on his bicycle.

  I asked the porter if the person he had called, the one who’d flown by, had indeed been the man I was looking for.

  “Yes, Miss.”

  “P
aul Deards, the—the actor?’

  “Dunno about that, Miss. He lives here in St. Catherine’s College, is all I know, and he’s got a package from his mum.”

  A package from his mum? For Mr. Deards? Here?

  “More often than not, it’s biscuits. They’ll keep, I expect.”

  Was I supposed to believe that the man of my dreams was a biscuit-eating student at my own college? The boys around here were thin and tiny, with amazingly spotty skin. Many actually had white-taped glasses and wore pen-holders, and they weren’t in Halloween costume dressed as “nerds.”

  “Which staircase?” Each staircase led to a bunch of rooms.

  “Staircase Seven.”

  That was my staircase!

  “Which room?”

  At this point, I really expected this Alice in Wonderland dream to continue with his saying, “Your room, Miss, check under the pillow!”

  But, in fact, it was almost as good. Don Juan lived right below me.

  I was already on top of him, I exulted internally!

  Later that day, I knocked on his door.

  A tall, gangly, and somewhat spotty blonde boy with lanky, flat hair stood there. He looked to be about eighteen or nineteen years old.

  “Uh, I’m actually looking for Paul—Paul Deards?”

  He stared at me somewhat coldly.

  I repeated my sentence, and he said, “What about?”

  Peering into the dorm room, I saw a variety of English types: the guy who sat in the corner, on the floor, intensely trying to play guitar chords, with a few straggly hairs growing out of his chin; the one with the really short bell-bottoms (they called them “flares”) ending at his calf and revealing droopy gray socks; and the wizardy one with brown teeth and incredibly thin legs crossed at both knee and ankle. On one wall was a Snoopy poster; on the other, a tiny kitten swept up in a ladle over a bowl of chicken noodle soup, with the motto “Hang in There.”