The Watchmaker's Daughter: A Memoir

by Sonia Taitz

  You don’t have to be Jewish to be a Lamed-Vavnik. In fact, the legend is that none of them are. These are the people who saved the Jews. These are the people who can feel other people’s pain, their hearts are that big.

  My mother, astute, smiles thinly. For all her usual cuddliness, she can be harsh and dry when the boundaries of her familiarity are crossed. She is like God in the garden: You have so many good fruits, why do you need this apple? Just to make trouble?

  “So you met what, a shaygetz?” she spits out, decoding expertly. This word, unlike goy, is deadly pejorative. She pushes her glass of tea away and looks angrily over the hills of this enchanted city. Her eyes are narrow, hurt. From shkutzim (the plural) comes only pain. From shkutzim she has had only grief—a dead father, dead brothers, neighbors rounding them up in the middle of the night. Many wearing crosses and feeling good about the Christ-killers in a forced march out of town. She will never, ever go back to Lithuania. For her, at bitter times, all people and places can transform into Lithuania. Even I, her daughter, can be Lithuania. She would not be surprised.

  “Well, he’s not exactly Jewish right now, but he is good, and kind, and—”

  “Yeh. Sure. So good and kind. Romantic, like Clark Gable.”

  I’m surprised by the movie-magazine reference. Not that it is fanciful and out of place. No, the opposite. For me, those people and their stories have always been real. Ricky is real, and Lucy is real, and Elizabeth’s magical eyes? Nothing truer. Surely, Doris Day was real to my mother. Doesn’t she realize that most of these people were—are—goyim, shkutzim? Has she really never taken our folk legends seriously? I have. The legends taught me that anyone is accessible. Even an English actor, handsome as Henry Fonda, dressed as Don Juan, can descend from the stage and see you one day.

  I turn to my father, who has always had his poetic side.

  “Didn’t you ever meet someone who was surprisingly wonderful—so much so that you questioned everything?”

  “I know what you are talking about,” he says, kindly not bringing up the vow I made to stay close to Judaism, and not in this new, contrived way of the special goy who loves me and my people.

  “Here, in Jerusalem,” he continues, “I sometimes talk to the priests and ministers. I see them everywhere. They have great souls, many of them. I tell them of my life in the camps, and how I believed in God, and they understand me. And I understand them, too. I think of them as my friends here.

  “And yet,” he goes on, “there are only thirty-six Lamed-Vavniks. And the world has almost six billion people in it. It is possible that you met one, but not so likely.”

  “But what about the Nazi you talked about—the nice one?”

  “You mean the one who—?”

  “Yes, tell me that story again,” I say to my father. “I want to hear it again.”

  “I heard it enough times,” says my mother, but she takes up her tea glass again and sips from it. She seems cheered as my father tells his tale.

  My father had met someone special from the hidden world of goodness back in the concentration camp. He had brought out the kindness in him, so that it showed to all the Jews in his watch shop.

  It was Passover time, and of course there would be no matzohs—the unleavened bread that Jews are commanded to eat for eight days, to remind them of their years of slavery in Egypt. They had left in an exodus so swift that their bread had not had time to rise. My father had tried to keep his faith during his time in Dachau. As Passover approached, he began brooding about matzoh.

  One of the Nazi officers liked him, he told me. One of them admired his workmanship, his watches. He had liked the little touch of hero in my father, his direct and honest ways. They could talk sometimes, my father said, as though one were not a dirty Jew and the other an evil murderer.

  As Passover approached, my father worked up the nerve to talk about it to this Nazi. He approached him, and said:

  “My mind is very troubled. I cannot work.”

  “You can’t work? What do you mean, you can’t work?”

  “A man needs bread to work.”

  “Fine, yes, we give you bread.”

  Indeed, the Jews in the watchmaker’s shop were fed fairly well for Dachau prisoners; with indoor shelter and peaceful labor (or the semblance of it, since most could not really fix watches), many kept their strength and survived the horrors, thanks to my father.

  “Yes, you give us bread. But there is a time that we cannot eat it.”

  “What are you talking about?” The man was becoming irritated.

  My father paused for moment, then asked:

  “Do you believe in God?”

  The Nazi thought for a minute, then answered, “Yes.”

  “Have you read the Five Books of Moses?”

  “Well, so?”

  “Well, I too believe in God, and in this Bible, God commands the Jews not to eat leavened bread on the days of Passover. In a few days, it will be Passover. And I am forbidden to disobey him.

  “There is a special kind of bread that is allowed. It is called matzoh. This unleavened bread we can eat. In fact, we are commanded to eat it.”

  “Where do you think you are getting such bread here in Dachau?”

  “It is very easy to bake. My father was a miller, and my mother used to take a little milled grain, add water, and bake it for no more than three minutes. No more, no less—that is how you make matzoh.”

  “And this is what you Jews eat every year?”

  “Yes. This is a lasting commandment, and we must all follow it, whatever the circumstances.”

  The Nazi walked around the workshop. He looked at all the workers, bent over their watches, then returned to my father.

  “How much would you need for your people here?”

  “Not much—we really only have to eat an ‘olive-size’ piece each day. But more would of course be better.”

  “I will talk to my wife about this.”

  And with that, the Nazi turned and left.

  When Passover came, the man returned with a large box of crudely made flatbreads. He also took several glass jars out of a net bag.

  “These are preserves, which my wife makes. She thought her matzoh looks so dry, maybe you would need something else with it. You will eat strawberry? I think it is her best.”

  My life has been inspired by that story, in particular the way my father found an angel inside the devil. It is what I was looking for in Brendan, the Irish seducer of Columbia University, and in Paul, the angel of Oxford who once turned his shining countenance on me. Sometimes these angels are dangerous to look for, hard to keep. But I need to keep trying.

  Lovely, Dark and Deep

  ONE DAY, I toss everything away on one phone call, made while staring at the flower arrangement on my majestic law-firm desk. The fragrance of lilies and roses has made me think of weddings, of my wedding, and why I did not end up marrying Paul.

  Paul picks up my transatlantic SOS and the first thing he does is shout: “Why didn’t you answer my letters?”

  He sounds like he is in the same room, he is shouting so loudly.

  “You wrote a letter? To me?”

  “More than one, you imbecile. You told me you were going to get married, so of course I kept writing to you, over and over.”

  My mother must have hidden his letters from me. Or tossed them out.

  My mother must know that she has tossed out love letters from Paul. She must have known this for years and never mentioned it. But I have no time to dwell on this betrayal. In her mind, Gita was saving me from danger (putting me back on my playground leash so the vilde chayes did not hurt me), and in any case, Paul is now, this minute, sort of proposing.

  “Not marrying you myself was the worst thing I’ve ever done,” he says. “You are the only person like you in the world, and everyone here bores me stupid.”

  Please repeat?

  He does.

  In no time at all, like a crazy, I am on my way back to England.
Running, as my mother did, back to the one she loved. Redeemed, relieved, restored.

  My mother, of course, is in shock. I am leaving my husband? My job? My long-awaited normalcy? Dan and I have been married for several years. If I had an announcement to make, it should have been about a grandchild for her, not this step back into the meshuggeneh times.

  My father wants to take my side, but it’s harder and harder to do.

  “For this—this Paul”—the name sounds truly odd in his mouth—“you would leave your life here with a good, hard-working man, a Harvard-Yale graduate, a lawyer?” He knew me too well to think I was happy with my legal career and its grinding, militaristic routines. But what of the fact that I was married to a man with a life of accomplishment?

  “I always loved Paul,” I say. “I married Dan out of fear and sorrow, and to make you happy. But I was never really happy with him. We were like brother and sister, a pair of worn old shoes. We didn’t dance.”

  This last piece of information alarms them both. After all, they had met at the Survivors’ Ball; they had waltzed together to Strauss. For all their battles, my parents had always danced together and shared a physical bond.

  “You didn’t dance?” My mother cannot believe that I, whom she has grown to approvingly consider a real “hotsy-totsy,” would marry a mild man like that.

  “He doesn’t like to—to dance with me. And even when we try to dance,” I add, the true metaphor reappearing, “it’s very boring. For both of us.”

  “That’s not good,” my mother acknowledges, shaking her head.

  We are all back in my childhood kitchen, eating bagels and farmer cheese and jam, and drinking tea. My father, as he always does at the table, is wearing a yarmulka.

  “And what about your Jewishness? What will happen should you eventually marry this English man?”

  “I will always be Jewish,” I say. “I promised you that before I left for England. I hope, someday soon, that Paul will convert. He has indicated that Judaism draws him.”

  My mother wants to interrupt, but I speak quickly and forcefully: “No matter what, my children will be Jewish, as the Jewish law itself says. If the mother is Jewish, the children are Jewish, too. I will raise them to know who they are and who you are and who I am.”

  It is to my parents’ eternal credit that when they waved goodbye to me at the airport there were tears of hope in their eyes.

  The final step of Paul’s conversion is a mikvah, a ritual pool of sunlit fresh water in which he floats like a fetus. He has been studying Judaism, its practice and philosophy, for a year, and his naked immersion is the final metamorphosis. He also draws close to my parents. Their old-world simplicity both amuses and moves him. He loves their warmth, their desire to touch, to ask nosy questions.

  During his time of Jewish study, Simon and Gita have grown to accept Paul like a son of their own; they shower him with hugs and plant money in his pockets. My father asks him regularly, as he has always asked me, “What did you accomplish today?” Paul is glad to be asked; in England, most fathers do not fawn on their sons or crave details of their life’s minutiae. Nor are career and business always the first topic of conversation there. My father cannot get enough of this man, who listens, in return, to all his stories.

  My father’s interest in his future son-in-law is timely. His daughter is not what she used to be in the ambition department. With Paul in America, I have gone off the bullet-train rails a bit, writing articles and stories and plays, practicing law only in the most desultory fashion (part-time in a small, white-collar criminal firm), wondering about when to start a family. Paul, on the other hand, who has no end of talents (he is numerate and a good negotiator), has found a job at a big New York bank with a legendary, German Jewish name. He wears a nice suit and commands a good salary and bonus. This man is a mensch: he will be a provider, maybe even a philanthropist. He sits tall in the synagogue’s men’s section near my much smaller father, a tallis on his shoulders. He eats my mother’s holiday food, the chopped liver and the kreplach, the kosher jello laden with canned fruit. Though his Hebrew is still rudimentary, he tries to sing along when my father says grace after our Sabbath meals. “Chana, bracha, lecha, kol,” he attempts. He even calls me “Sonialeh.” As in, when my mother asks him, “So, are you happy here in New York and being a Jew on Rosh Hashanah?”

  He answers sweetly, “Of course, how could I not when I have my Sonialeh?”

  Our small wedding takes place in the Ritz Carlton, on a winter’s day, overlooking Central Park. Snow on the ground, snowflakes in the air, champagne, white roses, hansom cabs below us.

  After the ceremony, my father takes Isabelle, his new in-law, aside.

  “I feel that I must apologize to you,” he says to Paul’s mother.

  “Whatever for?” she says, momentarily taken aback.

  “I am so sorry that my happiness and joy come at your expense.” He is talking about Paul’s leaving her Christian faith and becoming a Jew. He is talking about my small victory over the past. In some way, I have stolen her son to shore up my people. In some way, I have fought an old, bloody battle (in my head, but perhaps also in hers) and won. But now, when people speak up against the Jews, my tall blond husband will stop them. He will say (with that English accent):

  “Now see here. I myself happen to be a Jew. My wife and children are Jews. Stop that nonsense at once.”

  He actually does make a similar speech when, early in his career, a colleague (who soon also marries a dark-haired “Jewess”) bangs and rocks a soda machine, yelling, “Stop jewing my money!” Paul has heard jew as a verb before, in England. In the past, he was silent, but now he knows what to do. From small words of hate, anything can happen. Did happen. One third of the Jewish people died in the Holocaust, along with gypsies, homosexuals, the disabled, and other insulted and despised minorities. But now, what was lost will be made right. The same year I remarry, Dan does, too. He and his wife will have three Jewish children. (Jacob also begets three Jewish children.) And Paul and I will have three Jewish children of our own.

  Isabelle does not wear her cross to the wedding ceremony. She wears a kelly green suit with a stylish hat to match. On our turf, though beautiful and elegant as always, she is fractionally shaky, and Simon has the heart to reach out to her. He has been where she has been, a stranger in a new land. And so he apologizes to her.

  But she answers, with shiny tears in her eyes:

  “No, Simon. I am truly happy today. They are a beautiful couple, a prince and a princess, and they should have been together long ago.”

  She has had long talks with her vicar, who has reassured her that Jews are their spiritual ancestors. All will be well in this marriage, he has promised. Everyone in her village parish, Isabelle tells my father, has prayed for a successful journey for her and her husband, and that their meeting with my parents would be joyful. And it was. They share deep similarities—honesty, love of learning, lack of pretension—and faith.

  The fact that my parents live in their small apartment and do not try to impress anyone—the very fact that they are not like their Riverdale friends (cigarette holders, scampi)—relaxes Paul’s equally unpretentious parents. They like listening as my father talks simply of a familiar God, the one who saved Daniel from the lion’s den, the one in the psalms, who comforts the hurt. They love my cute, pink-cheeked mother, who runs in and out of the kitchen, dewy with service, offering up tea with lemon and home-baked pound cake. Fears melt away from both sides of the divide.

  “Oy,” says my mother, finally sitting and lightly dunking her Swee-Touch-Nee teabag, “you are such nice people!” And there is joy in her eyes, for the relief, for the tea, for the cake that goes with it.

  “As are you,” says Rikki.

  Isabelle takes Simon’s large hands in hers as she says, tears in her eyes, “We have so much in common.” And he answers, “We share the same world and the same God above us. Your son is my son, and my daughter is your daughter.”

>   After we are married, Isabelle and Rikki visit frequently, and each time they visit, they stop by Overlook Terrace for a Friday night meal with Simon and Gita, whom they have grown to love. The four of them share their own holy communion over bread and wine, as candles glow on a table set with white lacy cloth (covered, you should know, with plastic). My father sings, his voice deep and passionate, of the Sabbath peace. The mantel clock tolls the hours in Westminster chimes. The brass notes reverberate, are still. Time stops, hovers, with a sense of infinity

  And so, we are all together. We travel, celebrate, share simchas, birthdays and holidays. We are joyful, we parents, children, and grandchildren, for the next ten years.

  The Great Bully

  IT MUST HAVE been especially hard for my father to actually have to die. He had survived so many near-deaths—not just the Nazis but the Communists just before them, not just the Germans but the Lithuanians alongside, and the Cossacks, before, who had murdered his father. On some level, amid all the bloodshed and violence, he must have felt oddly immortal.

  Here, in America, where he became more and more devout year by year, he continued to put his faith in God, the Father who’d saved him, who would always be there. He had had the bravery to start life over, have a family, build a watch and jewelry business. And though he had been robbed a few times, he had done well overall. He felt safe in the world, contented with the fact that he had succeeded in sending both children to graduate school, not once, but twice (I with my law and MPhil degrees; my brother with law and business degrees). He even had a “nest egg” that he was saving up for us and our children. All of it was locked behind the impenetrable doors of the Jewelry Exchange vault.

  And then, in his eightieth year, he was robbed again.

  The safe, somehow, was blasted wide open and emptied of everything—the best of his pocket watches included. This was like losing a museum full of irreplaceable art. Like losing a village of people, or a family.