by Sonia Taitz
A few months later, on the children’s school break, she travels with us to Barbados. There, under the tropical sun, my mother talks about Nazis and death camps to anyone who will listen—waiters serving fresh mango with mint sprigs, glamorous guests sprawling on chaises, children running to the water slides. She has never avoided telling her stories to us, but now she seems pressed to tell them to as many strangers as possible. It is as though she is running out of time to change the world. To warn it, to wound it. To mark it forever, as she has been marked.
“Would you like some dessert, Madam?” a server might say.
“No, no, I ate good, not like in the camps where we got thin soup so many people starved.”
I am perplexed by her inability to relax on the sand, enjoying the blue skies and the Caribbean Sea. I think about my entire life in the shadow of these jarring comments, this indelible, warped perspective. What I don’t realize is that a tumor is slowly growing in her brain. As with my father’s late rages, which stemmed from a brain metastasis, normal and abnormal are so hard to tell apart.
When we return from Barbados, my mother brightens. Now that my father is gone, she tells me, and she doesn’t have to cook or clean, wash his shirts, or run errands at the Exchange, she will take courses in women’s studies at a nearby college. She asks me, as she and my father so often did, to help her with the paperwork.
“Take a pen,” she says, “and let’s write something.”
We sit with our heads together and I fill in the information that the college requires. I ask her which courses she wants to take.
“Give me the ones that explain what it means to be a woman.”
“Oh, Mommy, you know better than anyone.”
At this point, I am also a mother with children—and I wish I could do it half as well as she did. I am only beginning to appreciate what it takes to keep a warm family together, clean and fed.
“No, Sonialeh, I need to learn more. I want to know things like you do. I want to be smart like you.”
She says it now without irony, her admiration unmarred by envy or resentment, stroking my free hand as I fill in the forms. With my father gone, we are no longer rivals, but sisters.
“I’m sorry I tore up Paul’s letters to you,” she tells me another day. “You were about to marry Dan, and I wanted you to be happy, and—and I made a mistake and I hurt you. You married the wrong person and had to get a divorce and even a get,” she says, referring to the Orthodox Jewish divorce that required three bearded rabbis to stare down at me with great disapproval.
“My poor Sonialeh, I injured you,” she concludes humbly.
“It’s okay. I’m happy now.”
“You had four years between your first marriage and your second. I cost you so much time.”
She had always been sad to have lost years in the war, always thinking she had married “late.” By the time I married Paul, I was thirty-one.
“It was so long ago. Everything is good now. Who knows what would have happened otherwise? And now we have Emma, Gabriel, and Phoebe.”
A few weeks later, on a Sunday, she forgets to call me. Sunday—the day she always visited her grandchildren, arms laden with food and toys. That’s all it takes, and I know something is wrong with her. Remorsefully, I think about how often I’d scolded her because the cheap toys, bought on a sidewalk, would break, or because I was cooking organic mashed yams or some other dreary supermom concoction, and she was giving my thrilled children potato chips, cola, and lollipops.
Now, all that, I fear, is over. The peppy, sometimes peppery grandma we knew is gone. For the first time in her life, my industrious mother has started sleeping during the day. When I call to ask when she is coming over, she says she is a little tired, and lets the phone clatter down.
When I call her, the next day, she says, apologetically:
“I think there is something a little wrong with me.”
We go to the hospital where my father’s tumor was discovered, and wait on the same floor, deep in the basement, for tests. We are there for hours, in a cold limbo with glossy, gray-painted walls and floors, evoking the feeling of hopelessness. By the end of the day, we have the death sentence: My mother has a glioblastoma multiforme. A deadly and incurable brain cancer, large as a lemon and inoperable. Of course, my “research” soon informs me that some have had the operation, and that it has bought them more time. I track down the best neurosurgeon in the hospital and tell him that Ms. Taitz is a concert-level pianist who survived the Holocaust. I tell him that her grandchildren need her. Surprisingly, my words cause him to rush to her room.
After reviewing her chart, he realizes he cannot help. The tumor crosses the corpus callosum, he explains, taking me outside. This is the vital tissue that connects left brain to right. Operating on it would make the rest of her life totally miserable.
“My dear lady,” he says, leaning over her hospital bed and taking her soft, strong fingers in his, “I wish I could do more for you.”
She answers, “Oh, you are very nice.”
After he leaves, she starts crying, and then, suddenly, she looks at me intently and says: “I am so sorry to leave you, Sonialeh, a mother with three small children. But at least they are not babies anymore. And you are strong.”
My oldest is now nine, the middle one seven, and the “baby” almost four, the age I was when I entered the hospital asking for my box of sixty-four colors. Unlike me, these children are happy, engaged, alert; they not only have their jumbo boxes of Crayolas, but tempera paints; Play-Doh kits; dolls, pocket-sized and large, that talk sensibly and hold down jobs; and magical cities, often mechanized, made of limitless amounts of Lego. But now, despite all my care, they will be bereft of a Bubbe who burbles to them in Yiddish about how much she loves them. Gita is irreplaceable, to them and to me. There will be no more Simons or Gitas in this world, ever.
“You’re not leaving us,” I say, trying to comfort her, trying to convince myself.
“Okay,” she answers agreeably.
“We’ll figure something out,” I say. But this time, I am not so sure.
A Life
FOR THE LAST TIME, my mother tells me how she and her mother survived the war. It is, of course, a story she has told me since I was born. But now it is as though she is passing the story over to me, and for all the times I have heard it before, it sounds as though it now contains a secret meaning that, perhaps one day, I will understand.
“My mother and I were still surviving, at the end of the war,” she says. “We had spent so much time digging trenches in the cold, almost giving up, but we had survived.
“And now, the Russians were coming, and the Germans were fleeing. They were trying to hide all the evidence, and kill all the witnesses. So before they could leave us poor women behind, they decided to finish with us.
“From bunker to bunker, they came in, with needles, shots, filled with gasoline. They were giving injections to the women in their veins with this poison that burned them. When they ran out of the gasoline, they used only air; that also killed them. I heard the poor women screaming in pain. I knew they were being killed and losing their lifes.”
My mother used that word often. Lifes. Whenever she said or wrote the word alive, she gave it, perhaps inadvertently, an extra meaning with her version of it: “a life.”
“My mother and I didn’t know what to do. The Nazis were rushing from bunker to bunker. Finally, I said to your Bubbe—let’s run, Mama, let’s run quickly to one of the bunkers where already they killed everyone there.
“I knew it was risking our lifes but there was no other choice. It was nighttime, it was dark. So I grabbed my mama and we ran. I pulled her so we could go fast into one of the bunkers where the women were dying. There were many lying dead already. We lay next to these poor women, we stayed there, we lay quiet.
“And then, after many hours, the morning came. We heard voices shouting:
“Come out! It is over! You are free!’
�
�We were a life, Sonia, among all the poor dead. We were a life.”
Now, I take my mother home and try to keep her alive. She is, truly, “a life,” always capable of joy and laughter. For as long as I have known her, she has hummed as she cooked and cleaned. And now, despite her tumor, she still hums and cooks and cleans. (Her favorite, for some reason, is now “Cielito Lindo.”)
I think about how my parents have always kept themselves useful and busy. Both parents, he with his watchmaking hands, rising above him in his deathbed, she with her happy, constructive housewifery. Always making something, going for something, accomplishing something, from returning a dead wristwatch to life (and strapping it onto the hand of a grateful owner) to seeing to it that everyone was fed, wore fresh clothes, and slept on clean, soft sheets.
I, on the other hand, am more and more like that “lovely, dark and deep” forest that Robert Frost wistfully regarded. The “promises” I have had to keep have faded away; they seem intense and silly. Yale. The Jewish people. Fight this, sustain that. Shoulder the burden of memory. Increasingly, since marrying Paul, I have come to live in the world of moments, moods, and colors. I read, I write, I even publish, but mostly, I tend to my children. When I am sad, I wallow deep in some primordial bog that is hard to escape. The fight has gone out of me, and the roiling ambition. Instead of grabbing diplomas or wearing power suits, I crave cuddles with my children and pets; I wear yoga pants and T-shirts.
My mother, at seventy-six and with a tumor in her head, still dresses in pretty floral frocks; she wears hose and cherry red lipstick. She still bakes more honey cakes on Rosh Hashanah week than I have ever done in my life. Joyfully, her fingers fly over the keyboard, when I have long forgotten my greatest musical accomplishment—the “Für Elise.” The gorgeous, passionate music of her life envelops me. It is heard only by me, her daughter, and not a concert hall full of applauders. I appreciate her more and more as a person, as a woman and as an artist. As Thomas Gray said in his “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”: “Full many a flower is born to blush unseen/And waste its sweetness on the desert air.”
Gita’s sweetness is no longer wasted on me.
But this cancer is deadly and the prognosis horrifyingly bad. As with my father, the possibility of her dying of a horrible illness after all she’s been through seems obscene to me. Don’t such people deserve to die peacefully in their beds at the age of one hundred? Again, I run around trying to make that possible. The thought of my father’s last days and months, the anger and sense of betrayal, haunt me. I felt his Holocaust in those last days when, chained to the bed, he ranted and fought his fate. Though I was his “special girl,” his chosen of the chosen of the chosen, I did not save him. What, then, was I born for?
I will save my mother. I will perpetuate this cute Jewish grandma in my children’s lives, and they will appreciate her as I never did, as I am just beginning to. For being, simply, “a life.” A sweet and modest life.
Over the next few months, I find experimental treatments, torturous attempts at hope. Fortunately for her, I eschew the goat trachea and mitaki mushroom route. Instead, I discover an experimental treatment protocol in her hospital. It involves thalidomide, that awful drug that, decades ago, caused babies to be born with rudimentary limbs. The theory is that this drug is an anti-angiogenic—it stops blood cells from replicating, and hence kills off tissue—hopefully, in my mother’s case, cancerous tissue. I fight to make sure she is entered into the experiments, even though technically her tumor is too large. I plead and beg to put her on the line for life. And she does enter the experiment.
The tumor shrinks. Scans show that it has gone from lemon to olive. Gita stops talking about ghettos and holocausts, and, though weak, is as happy as I have ever seen her. She looks at me with pure love now. She offers no advice, no criticisms. She enjoys her food, the weather, flowers in a vase. She continues to play Chopin flawlessly Like my father’s hands, hers remember, and they enter the soul of this rich music.
It is early afternoon on a cozy winter’s day. Gita is in bed, and I am at her side, when she looks at me and says, emphatically:
“Sonialeh: Du hast nicht keine shlechte bein ... ”
I am massaging her limbs with her favorite almond-scented cream, and my hands stop. Did she really say that? The words she said, they mean: You do not have one mean bone.
Has she forgotten how mean I have been, so arrogant, such a snob, thinking that I, with my fancy diplomas, was superior to anything she could ever achieve? Has she forgiven me for even daring to accept my father’s praise, conditional praise, which should have all, unconditionally, been given to her?
A terrible memory floods my heart at this moment of forgiveness.
When I first returned to law school after Oxford, I’d rented a small apartment near campus. My mother had called to see how I was getting along, and I complained about how filthy the place was. In frustration, I mentioned that I needed to go to a cocktail gathering for new and returning students. What if I never got the apartment clean in time for the party?
The law school get-together was to be held in a festive little grass area between grand gothic buildings. In the end, I was able to go, able to relax in my sorbet-colored sundress and pretty cardigan, and toss my hair. I was able to live it up, because my mother had come up to New Haven, and was cleaning my filthy apartment. Gita had insisted. She had hung up the phone and run to Grand Central Terminal in an ecstasy of being needed, after so long, by her daughter.
It was all, of course, perverse and painful, unnatural and wrong. There I was, having a good time meeting the faculty at a garden party. There was good champagne; there were cunning little sandwiches. My high-heeled sandals made divots in the lawn, and if ever I wobbled, a strong, blazer-wearing male arm was there to gallantly catch me. We all exchanged witticisms—legal, intellectual, literary bon mots. Oxford had given me polish and veneer, and I felt cool and confident. As the sun set and the air chilled, I began to feel relief about coming back to law school. This circle of practical wisdom could shelter me for the next two years. All I had to do was study. Perhaps I could even meet someone new here, someone whose parents did not fear a smart, ambitious Jewish lady. A sterling career was open to me again. Maybe I could even find time to write.
When I returned to my apartment, laughter and chatter rang in my ears. I looked forward to sharing my good mood with my mother. But when I opened the door, everything vanished. There she was, my mother, crouched in the dark, scrubbing at the floor with a brush, like a mythical slave.
“Why are you in the dark, Mommy?”
It was like some kind of sad Jewish joke. How many Jewish mothers does it take to screw in a light bulb? None! Thank you, don’t worry about me. I’ll just sit in the dark. I’ll just clean your mess in the black world you threw me into.
“Your light went out, I don’t know what happened.” Her voice was exhausted, accusing. “It’s broken,” she said. “And I can’t find new bulbs. I can’t find anything in this dark place of yours.”
“Oh, Mommy,” I said, running to the kitchen to find a fresh bulb for the overhead fixture and get her some water. My mother was covered in sweat. There was no air conditioner, and though it had been cool in the courtyard, my new apartment now seemed suffocating.
“So, Sonia,” she said, taking a long drink. Her eyes sized me up in my pretty dress and sandals.
“Did you have a nice time at your party?”
“Yes,” I admitted, crying, hugging her. “I did.”
Now, as I sit before her, rubbing her work-worn fingers with cream, can she see how my heart broke—as hers must have—that evening? My mother was a concert-level pianist. She could have been famous—a champagne drinker in privileged stone courtyards—were it not for the war. My father and I often reduced her to what she called “a Nothing”—a terminal designation she refused to accept. But even if all she was was a jeweler’s helper, someone who sold solitaires, tied ribbons, ran errands, and sometimes str
ung pearls, even if all she was was a mother, a mopper, a soup-kitchen slave, she was worth ten of me. Can it be that she forgives me for not seeing this before? For thinking she was any less “special” than my father?
It is clear that she does forgive me. She has always known how to live, and even now, she seems to know how to cherish each moment. Few remain, and yet she enjoys them. She is the parent who will teach me to surrender to love, however battle-torn and damaged, and what it is to die with grace. Without saying the words, we both know that her diagnosis is terminal, and that the end can only be postponed for precious days like this one.
My mother’s eyes are calm with love as I rub her hands, lingering over each finger. She gives her floor-scrubbing, music-making hands to me, and I soothe them. They soothe me.
Speedo
WHEN SHE DIES, Gita is wearing a pretty pink nightgown and white Speedo sweat socks. Looking at her feet, I see her as someone who was always ready to run and do some “menial,” essential task for someone else. And now her feet have come to a rest, and I remember how many times I’d seen those white socks on them.
There were Speedos on her feet when we watched Peyton Place on her bed, or read Modern Screen together. She always told me that my feet looked like hers, both small with high arches. She wanted me to be like her; this small area of consonance gave her comfort.
“Look,” I said one day, trying to amplify the bonding. “Look at my second toe, exactly the same length as the first, right?”
“Right,” she said agreeably. “Just like me.”
Lying on a flowery bedspread, we created a game in which our feet moved together in rhythm, left and right like windshield wipers. I’d talk to her feet, and they’d answer: a “nod” for yes, side-to-side for no.
