Short Flights
Solomon, Barbara P.
SHORT FLIGHTS An awakening -and a heartbreak PROBST SOLOMON All my daughters1 relatives are mixed, both Harold's family and my own have gone in for 80 percent assimilation. Oh, the new left...
...Why couldn't I be like some vulgar Miami Beach lady, with too many diamonds on her fingers who shrieks, Oy yo yo, they killed my family...
...Jews have no inner protection against being despised by the left...
...I heard my voice rise in a terrible shriek...
...I only know that if Europe rejects Israel, it will break Jewish hearts...
...Harvard classmates would do eulogies...
...Why couldn't my anger be recognized, legitimized...
...It is set in America and Europe, focussing on Spain and the resistance movement there in the period before and just after Franco's death...
...To the right...
...Mark sent for Marte to come back to America...
...I was your friend, an observer of Spanish fate long after Orwell was dead...
...As a Jew 1 am not as qualified as most, 1 am a stranger to Israel, I do not hate the Palestinians, but let me speak about Europe...
...Somebody at the Times arranged a lengthy obit with a picture...
...Remembrance of Things Past is not about sponge cake, but Proust's isolation from French society after he became a Dreyfusard...
...Oh, I was cool that first day...
...1 was silent and cool...
...Why did our relatives have to disappear, shot, burned up, turned into lampshades and soap bars, dumped, and afterward such silence...
...We had come in for Christmas from California and were visiting my parents...
...No Arabs fought in the Spanish Civil War to aid the Republican government...
...She had been vacationing with nieces and nephews in East Germany, Magdeburg...
...I cannot give you Marxist information, I cannot write dialectic...
...I ordered banks of flowers to be put on the casket...
...Jews these days are the imperialists...
...Forget our bibilical claim to Israel...
...That New Year's Eve he got taken to Mount Sinai Hospital because of a heart attack...
...Arafat is in New York...
...I was 37 then...
...Poor Proust, he thought he was French, but he got crushed by the Dreyfus case...
...After that, all she had was Mickey and me...
...Copyright © 1983 by Barbara Probst Solomon...
...The left has taken away from us our identity, our place in the world...
...Perhaps Israel does too much battle...
...Until the night Harold died...
...Just, "I'm sorry" or, "It never should have happened...
...If I were to bring that up now, the left would say No tit-for-tat...
...But when I returned to New York from Europe, after living in Germany, with Paco, and I said to Marte and my parents...
...Marte also made no reply...
...Lutheran German Marte...
...I told them in a way that would make them cry...
...At 17 I saw Dachau, 1 was there, I saw it all, three years after the crematoriums were shut, before the places got fixed over for the tourist trade, my mother, my father, made no reply...
...Mickey and I have never had a conversation about us being Jews...
...It is Europe, not the Arab countries, that breaks the heart of Jews...
...Then Mickey, now Mark, spoke quietly to the rabbi and pointed out all that was needed was that Jewish prayer at the end, the man was to make no extra remarks...
...Then, after 1 had collected myself, 1 told my daughters the news...
...And Marte stayed on, my fraulein...
...I don't think like that...
...Perhaps we remember Hitler too much—but is it normal, rational or fair to expect people within a generation to obliterate from their hearts such genocide...
...I combed my hair, and instantly forgot I had ever had a husband...
...But until Israel, we owned no land, and we were not farmers...
...he told us we were Jews...
...other countries are clamoring at the door...
...It is Europe that breaks the Jewish heart...
...I never knew, as a child, about "we" and "they...
...Europe has the power, Europe did the damage...
...So I became Jewish...
...And because 1 was trained to be civilized, I gave her the sympathy she wanted for her dead boyfriend in the SS...
...I have this hunch that nothing will work out if Europe abandons Israel...
...Jews have no answer when the left attacks them and names them Hitler...
...Speak to Pepe...
...But that wasn't his style...
...My married name, Solomon, is very Jewish compared to the original Probst...
...In Europe, until the 20th century, we were not permitted in many regions to own land...
...New Yorker Barbara Probst Solomon is the author of Arriving Where We Started and The Best of Life...
...Then I stared at her...
...He bought a gallon jar from the Rumanian pickle works, and three months later we married...
...My family never used words like "goy...
...How could I have felt they...
...No matter how hard I tried, coolly, intellectually, to arrange the allegiances of my heart, in crisis, I turned to Marte...
...Oh, they were against six million dead...
...I learned Yiddish argot as I learned French and Spanish...
...But the International Brigades were filled with idealistic young Jewish men...
...When I became involved in matters Spanish, I never took a vow to speak as a Marxist, so, you see, I am not even an ex-Marxist...
...it just has never come up...
...I can't give exact information about territorial rights, but let me tell you about Jews...
...Harold, after a week of feverish new love, coupling together in his East Ninth Street skylight walk-up, took me to Orchard Street...
...Inez's uncle, from Warsaw, died at Teruel...
...Bunny, my father called from his room (he knew), the doctor needs to talk to you...
...In my mind, 1 planned a funeral that would be right for young daughters...
...Harvard would do the talking...
...This is a selection from her forthcoming book...
...Marte, Marte, Marte...
...she scrubbed my hair with camomile tea, and wept, when she got news from Germany after the war that her boyfriend in the SS had been reported missing...
...He loathed Zionism, thought Israel a mistake, had no use for religion...
...But, Marte, who asked you to go back to Germany in the 30s and pick up an SS type...
...she was wearing her dark-blue wool winter coat and her good gold lapel pin...
...Short Flights, a personal and political memoir to be published in June 1983 by The Viking Press...
...Europeans feel we have outworn our welcome as 20th century victims of tragedy...
...My father said we were a civilized family, and civilized people don't blame a nation of individuals for its maniacs...
...Take Marte, who considers herself my daughters' grandmother and my mother...
...I said my mother was my mother, and Marte the fraulein...
...I made the arrangements for the white chapel at Campbell's on 85th Street...
...She was bent over...
...Buried was the formal, colorless Protestant language of my childhood...
...It was their distant relatives in Europe who got polished off...
...Just marginal...
...But I am not to notice that...
...our family is a smaller number now, and made up of few Jews...
...In 1974, it turns out, the Spanish * left inside Spain are Arab lovers and ' Israel haters...
...I guessed, too, 1 took the call in the guestroom, and afterward stayed in there alone...
...I kept screaming, and suddenly, with a terrible force, 1 threw myself toward her...
...Where are we to go...
...I am not to name such things as anti-Semitism...
...She walked into the apartment vestibule, her suitcases deposited by the elevatorman at her frail knees...
...The Arabs, then, were Hitler's friends...
...I learned words like "shmuck," "shmatte," and "gornisht helfen...
...he wants Israel suspended from UNESCO...
...Talk, talk...
...Is that a normal expectation...
...that's up in the north of Germany...
...But all I wanted was that Marte would say something...
...You're savvy about existentialism," he said, "but your life's been lacking in a solid pickle...
...the inner controls broke...
...I was conscious of that...
...Some successful Jews of his generation tried to pass themselves off as Protestants...
...Fourteen days later, at four in the morning, the doctor telephoned...
...I was very quiet...
...the memory nodes inside my skull cracked...
...What happened...
...Marte said nothing, she just kept on loving me, I was her daughter...
...We never went back...
...Bunny, my father said, don't be a blamer...
...Tabula rasa...
...Oh, the new left would have approved of my father...
...Harold, oh, my God...
...A small vestigial memory, a backward nod to the past...
...I am not so crazy as not to recognize the mama love Marte gave me...
...But not much on that subject...
...Jews of my generation were taught that we were too passive a people, we didn't do enough battle against Hitler...
...In my 20s, I read Bellow and the other New York urban Jewish writers, and my writing rhythms ape their slang...
...Why did I have to be burdened with such rotten, civilized understanding...
...And, oh, yes, we had a sort of Passover ceremony...
Vol. 8 • April 1983 • No. 4
