by Sonia Taitz
In his last days at the nightmarish hospice, as I feed him the orange that drips all over his gown, my father looks at me so sorrowfully that all I can think of saying is:
Min hametzar karati Yah
Anani bemerchav Yah
From the narrow strait I called out to God
God answered me with his freedom
I am quoting from his favorite psalm, recited on all the Jewish pilgrimage festivals. I am hinting that death can be a broad and freeing place. My father is trapped, and neither of us can stand the indignity of it. Death has never been spoken of before, not ever, but now it is his only hope of liberation. God will answer you with freedom, Daddy. You deserve never to worry again about being trapped and hurt.
Silently, Simon’s lips begin to mouth the words:
Shma Yisroel
Adonai Elohenu
Adonai Echad
These are the last words that are spoken by an observant Jew. They were surely spoken by a million doomed voices in the Holocaust he had survived. Forming those words, over and over, my father, at last, was surrendering.
Real Lamed-Vavniks
AFTER A GREAT DEAL OF EFFORT, I find my father a bed in a better hospice outside Manhattan. Improbably, he is headed for Calvary Hospice, run by the Catholic diocese. How many times had my father railed against the Catholic Lithuanians who had helped the Nazis take over their country and send him to hell? How many times had I heard about his childhood Easter Sundays, dodging the congregants, freshly released from their Judas-laden sermons, itching to bash in a Jewish skull?
“Why do you deny it, Simon?” even his Catholic friends, little boys whom he skated with, with whom he threw chestnuts, would taunt. “You know you killed Christ. And you know that you make your Passover bread out of blood. The blood of Christian children. Admit it.”
It was doubly ironic to me as a child, knowing that blood, even animal blood, was forbidden to Jews. “The blood is the soul,” the Bible explains, using the Hebrew word nefesh—simultaneously elevating us and the world of the animals. There was a soul in the world of flesh. And there was no blood, I knew, but lots of soul, in the matzoh the Nazi’s wife had baked for my father and his fellow workshop men, in Dachau.
My father had said he smelled “Jewish blood” in the stones of the Spanish monastery in Washington Heights. The Cloisters were not, for him, a place of holy contemplation, but of trials and torture. There was a straight line, for him, between the Inquisition and the boys who shouted at him after Easter services, between those who killed his mother and those who watched, unmoved by mercy.
And yet, this merciful hospice is quintessentially Catholic, full of ministering women called Sisters. No place could be more full of grace in its treatment of the dying. The nuns, who remove a large crucifix from above Simon’s bed, are as gentle as the mothers of newborns. I think about how Christ’s skinny, twisted form is so like that of the dying, indeed so like the bodies of those who suffered and starved in the Holocaust, in all the global genocides that never seem to end. The nuns know suffering as I do—that makes them my spiritual sisters and mothers. Through them, I realize the full meaning of gemilut chassadim, the granting of mercies. These humble women are the real Lamed-Vavniks—the people whose modest goodness supports the world. They never give a ranting person Haldol, or tie him to a steel bed with thick, black hospital restraints. They sit with the poor soul, invigilating restlessness. Their silent goodness calms even my father, my wounded lion of Judah.
He rests.
In the end, the watchmaker’s hands move slowly in the air above his body. It is a kind of survivor’s last ballet: He lies in a coma, but his hands still open the magical gateways of pocket watches. On his last day of life, my father wakes up and looks into the round, pale face of Gita, his wife. Despite all the years of thankless work and insult, she bends over and kisses him, and he responds. He lowers his hardworking hands and puts them on her cheeks, which he covers with kisses. He does not want to let her go. It is as though he has seen her sweet and loyal face for the first time. But it is also the last time they will see each other on earth. My mother gives him one last hug and leaves the room hurriedly. Her face is wet with tears and with his kisses.
I follow her out. “I can’t anymore,” she says. “I can’t watch him die. I’ll go to the store and take care of the merchandise.” She is referring to the watches and clocks, still coming in every day, but which will never be fixed. They will be returned to their owners, sent off to another watchmaker (the new ones come from India and South America) or sold at a loss.
Returning to my father, I sit and begin to understand why Gita had had to run from the hospital long ago when my tonsils were removed. She had seen too much suffering and death in her life to ever wait for more. Now my mother runs to the Jewelry Exchange on Forty-seventh Street. She has to figure out how to carry on a business without its heart, what to tell the customers who once knew Mr. Taitz, and how to close it all down. She will mind the store for the next year or so, then, at last, retire from midtown Manhattan.
My brother and I stay with my father. Manny has come to New York from Los Angeles, where he has now been living for decades. Tan and prosperous (he wears a fine Rolex), he pulls a chair up to my Simon’s hospice bed. His body is vigorous and strong next to his sick father’s.
“Why don’t you take five,” he says to me. “You look exhausted.”
I leave the room and wander the halls. Dying people are everywhere, all thin and twisted, their faces pure as babies’. Having been there for several weeks, I am growing used to this odd place, this concentration camp of sorts, where the world of the dying literally separates from life and into a spiritual concentrate. There is a holiness here, a privileged beauty. It is the kind of humble wisdom, in time, to which we all come.
In one of the common rooms, relatives play cards or watch TV shows that seem out of place in this land of silence. The floor of this room is beige linoleum, with beige walls to match, like my childhood home. There is one picture of the seashore, and a dirty window. I look through the panes at the faraway sky, wondering if that clear, pale blue light indicates where my father will soon be going. How can sick people take the trip from this world to the next when they are not even feeling well enough to get out of bed? Are their souls young and light and happy? That would be just. That would be fair. That would make sense, after all the weight of painful existence.
I return to the room to find my brother sitting with his head in his hands. He does not look up as I enter.
“Are you okay?”
“He’s gone,” says Manny, not looking at me.
“What do you mean?”
“Daddy’s dead.”
Even though my father has been dying for months, this comment seems outlandish. There is no apparent change in my father’s appearance.
“No, no, that’s how he always looks,” I say, explaining all that I know so far. My brother has only recently arrived; he has no idea that hospice patients can look dead for weeks, months sometimes, before they actually go. I have grown used to this nightmare; I could go on like this forever. In fact, to me it no longer seems so bad; the atmosphere among the dying and the nurses is more full of tenderness than the tough world outside. And the sky is really so thin and far away. Let them all rest here a little longer.
“Check his breath,” says my brother. “He’s not breathing.”
I walk briskly over to my father and lean over him. His powerful chest seems to be moving up and down. It takes a while for me to realize that I am the one who is moving. I am shaking, I am crying, my face is near his, and my arms are around him. I am feeling only the ticking pulse of life in myself, and I still want to give it all to him.
I used to think that when my parents died, so would I. After all, they were like my children, my kinderlach. Who can live without their kinderlach? It was my job to restore their lives, to make everything good again, to give them hope.
I try to calm down enough to see wh
o is breathing: He or I? My body is shaking, my heart is pounding, but he is still. My father’s struggles are over. He is really gone from this world.
Right now, all I can do is try to make his poor departing soul feel better.
“You were my hero,” I say, weeping over him, hugging his thin body. “You’ve overcome so much. Thank you for everything. Thank you for giving me your strength.”
Manny waits until I am standing up again, until I am upright and wiping my eyes.
“You want to hear something amazing?”
“Okay,” I say, sniffling. My hand is still touching my father, as though to keep him in the conversation. One of my brother’s hands is touching him, too. If only the right electricity could pass through his two children, my father could come alive again. But we are there; we are alive, and between us, we have given him five grandchildren.
“I was talking to Daddy when you were out of the room. I told him I was sorry for disappointing him. I asked him to forgive me for, I don’t know, being such a tough, challenging kid to raise. You were always more what he wanted.”
“You asked him to forgive you?”
I thought about all the times my father had struck this boy, this child, my brother. If there was one thing death was good for, it was for enlarging people’s emotional capacities.
“And Daddy started waving his hand, back and forth, as though to say, ‘Nothing to forgive.’”
“Both his hands? Like fixing watches?”
“Just one hand, like saying, ‘Don’t worry.’”
He demonstrated the gesture.
“Wow.”
“And then he opened his eyes really wide. He looked at me, almost like a kid seeing the world for the first time. Remember, his father was killed when he was just a baby. He didn’t know how to be a father, really, a father to a son.”
I nodded.
“We looked into each other’s eyes,” continued my brother, “and there was nothing but love there. And then he took my hand and kissed it, three times. He said to me, ‘I love you.’”
And then, my brother continued, almost unable to say the words.
“I actually felt Daddy’s soul leave his body and rise up. It was a feeling you get when someone you love steps into the room. You don’t have to look. You know they’re there. You feel them with you.”
My father hadn’t left his son behind. In the last seconds of the last hour, he had stepped in and healed him.
I was glad Simon Taitz had died with a salved heart, salving a heart.
Women’s Studies
HER HUSBAND of forty-five years is gone, a man she not only lived with, but worked with every day. A man whose lunches (broiled fish, plum tomato, Golden Delicious) she packed into brown paper bags, and whose Nes-café she poured into a tartan thermos. Gita, now in her late seventies, lives alone in Washington Heights. She still climbs the hills up and down the neighborhood on Sundays, shopping for fruits and vegetables from little greengrocers. She still buys fresh, seeded rye from the bakery, sliced for her by a large chrome machine, and wrapped in a wax paper bag. She still buys Linzer tarts and babkas, housed in white square boxes tied with peppermint-striped strings.
When my family comes over to see her, she runs down the hallway to greet us, leaving her door wide open. She wears her apron, smiling, beaming, still capable of real joy. If anything, having grandchildren has released a certain grudging part of her. She loves my children without reservation, without self-preservation. As we approach, we all smell her cooking—chicken soup, chopped liver, matzoh balls. She is ecstatic, running into and out of the kitchen, carrying dishes and watching us eat.
But most of the time she is alone, and many of her friends are old or have moved to Florida. Not only the Riverdale set is gone, but also the loyalists of Washington Heights, who spend more and more months of the year walking the boardwalks and taking in the sun. Though my family lives in Manhattan, it takes a long subway ride or expensive taxi for her to come see us. As they grow, too, our children increasingly have activities of their own on Sundays. Even when Gita comes over (bringing me magazines and bags of cooked food), they are often out playing sports or seeing friends.
“Mom,” my brother says, “you need to live closer to your einiklach.” He uses the Yiddish word for grandchildren. But she knows that although she and her mother traveled side by side, arm in arm, through their lives, she will not suddenly have the same intense relationship with me. She is reluctant to leave the few old friends she still has in the Heights, women who understand her, whom she sits next to in shul even as their population dwindles and is replaced by loud, new immigrants from Russia.
My brother is worried. He thinks the neighborhood is too dangerous for a “little old lady.” He and his family live in a beautiful house in Beverly Hills. Lemon trees blossom in his garden. He drives a serious car with a quiet engine. Manny has heard, over the years, about drug deals in the Heights, muggings, old people thrown to the ground and robbed at gunpoint at the entrance to the subway or in their own lobbies. He hears rumblings from those who have left, mutterings about the changing flavor of the neighborhood—striped convertibles now playing salsa at glass-shaking, deafening levels, horns that blare “La Cucaracha” as they pass. In the park where the few remaining survivors take their Sabbath stroll, extended families set up tables, radios, grills. They roast whole pigs and drink party-colored sodas. They dance in the open air.
This neighborhood, though, and this apartment, have been the core of Gita’s life for decades, and it is dear and familiar to her. Hers has never been an upscale life, and neither she nor my father ever cared about their supposed lack of status. Indeed, they liked not showing their money; they liked economizing so that there was money in the bank for a rainy day. They liked having enough money to offer all their grandchildren a Jewish education, as they did, or to feed the hungry, as they did.
Even now, my mother likes knowing that poor immigrants come here for sanctuary; she understands them, with their close ties to lost worlds. She understands the Spanish-speaking grandmas who wear plastic combs in her hair, the little girls who wear swirly polyester dresses and ruffled socks. She loves seeing the big families, all together (she would love to have such a big family, with daughters who never felt they needed to outdo their families with academics or fancy-shmancy jobs in sterile offices). These are her people. She, too, loves to dance, and they, too, know how to choose a good melon in the fruit store. She and they both cover their good sofas with plastic, and love fake flowers (they never die!). And which Jewish woman of a certain age has not been moved by Latin rhythms? Along with her Chopin and her Rachmaninoff, my mother also tinkered around on the piano with passionate melodies like “Besame Mucho,” which had always been big in the Borscht Belt.
Still, she listens when Manny begs her, for his sake, to move to a better location. Her older child, this tall and prosperous son, is now the “man of the family,” and she transfers her obedience from my father to him, saying she will do as he asks. He buys her a new place near me, more than a hundred blocks to the south of her former home. It even has a terrace, just like the old place did.
“She’s going to love being so much closer to you and the grandkids,” he assures me. I have my worries. I cannot replace her lost mother, I cannot replace her lost country, I cannot replace her lost husband, and I cannot replace her neighborhood, Washington Heights, that vanishing echo of a lost Jewish world. After having children, I understand her better. I can finally grasp the value of a good bowl of soup, a sleeping child under a blanket, the warmth of tradition. I can understand the need to take time to drink tea and eat a buttered onion roll.
But now the deed is done, and Gita has been transferred to the Upper West Side. She and I sit in a pastry store on Seventy-second Street, the heart of her new locale. Yes, it is a kosher pastry store, and the Upper West Side, in parts, is something of a shtetl in itself, full as it is of synagogues and Orthodox families promenading in Riverside Park. But many of t
he mothers have gotten MBA’s along with their Mrs’s. They and their husbands are doctors and lawyers, not watchmakers, pearl-stringers, and bakers. They have nannies and maids to take care of their kids, and no one here even tries to speak a good and proper Yiddish.
I myself have forgotten most of the words. While I understand my mother, I can no longer converse with her in our “mother language.” Down here, it is even hard to find The Forward, the Yiddish paper that she and my father have read since they arrived in America. You can occasionally find it only in its new, abridged English translation.
In the pastry shop, Gita and I share an “almond horn,” a marzipan-like confection that ends in a crescent of thick chocolate. She drinks a weak tea with milk, and I have a cappuccino. (“This is what you drink? So strong? No wonder you are always nervous!”) A woman steps over and interrupts our snack. She is fortyish, American, bright and friendly. She wears a new, expensive perfume, and her hair has artful highlights.
“Hi, Mrs. Taitz! You’re the jewelry store lady, right? I was your customer! I bought opera-length pearls from you, for my mother!”
“Oh, yeh?” my mother takes another sip from her tea. “You look familiar, maybe.”
“So!” the woman continues. “What are you doing here? Do you live around here? It’s nice, right?”
“Yes, now I do, for a few weeks only.”
“Where did you live before?”
“Oh,” she sighs, “I lived always in Washington Heights, near the Fort Tryon Park, the Cloisters. But I guess it was a ghetto, like people told me.” The word ghetto hurts my ears. It is a horrible word for a place she once loved, from which she was uprooted. This move has driven her back into the European past before the American past, and back into her first upheaval. It is the beginning of my mother’s going backward.
