Marrying Into Memory

Abelson, Norman

MARRYING INTO MEMORY NORMAN ABELSON It is difficult to remember, these 28 years later, whether it was viewing a movie called "The Juggler" or seeing for the first time the fading, blue...

...Something removed, never to be shared...
...On VE Day I was an adolescent who joined with the neighbors in singing patriotic songs and enjoying a picnic...
...Not a thought—at least not from me...
...Perhaps I never can be one of them, but I know that always I have been one with them...
...I was a 23-year-old non-practicing Jew from an Orthodox family settled for a generation in a working-class community outside of Boston...
...Fortunately for me, they were wise enough to sense my feelings...
...Nothing said or felt about them, our Jews in darkness...
...What did I know of them'] I knew nothing...
...MARRYING INTO MEMORY NORMAN ABELSON It is difficult to remember, these 28 years later, whether it was viewing a movie called "The Juggler" or seeing for the first time the fading, blue tattoo...
...All of our neighbors and my father's business associates, nearly all Christian, were there...
...I had celebrated my bar mitzvah more than a year earlier...
...I was the first outsider in the family, and despite the warm flow of affection I received from the beginning, I was quite aware of the difference...
...In those same years I was in high school preparing for my future...
...It was an old standard, thanking my parents for bringing me up as a Jew and detailing Jacob's wrestling bout with the angel...
...It is as close as I have been able to get, perhaps as close as I ever will get...
...bitterness was a stranger in their house...
...The mother, the oldest son and the youngest daughter had been murdered...
...In retrospect I can say with honesty, and dismay, that my initial feelings toward Dina were unrelated to her wartime experiences...
...At some point in the movie I began to feel uneasy, and I thought: "My God, what have I done...
...When Shabbat ended, we gathered for a party...
...But they often used English, as well—my feelings of being an outsider in my new family were due not only to different languages...
...There I was, a young Jewish American, a practicing journalist, and yet I felt no connection with and had no meaningful knowledge about those years of horror, years through which I also had lived...
...How conscious was I of the starvation, the torture, the gassing, the incineration...
...For me, the war was air raid drills, rationing and war movies on Saturday afternoon...
...For the first time in my life, I wanted to kill, I wanted to feel myself killing Nazis...
...None...
...But it was not possible for such feelings to be sustained for long in that home...
...Israel had determined that I was "a nice boy" who was away from home and who needed to be fed and otherwise nurtured...
...First there was language...
...Afterward, as we walked back to her apartment, conversation was strained...
...I was ashamed of how little I knew of the times and events through which this family had lived...
...I was standing, frightened and confused, on the bimah in an old Orthodox shul, chanting my Torah portion and reciting from rote a speech written Norman Abelson, a general consultant living in Concord, New Hampshire, frequently lectures about the Holocaust to church and college groups...
...He has held back nothing...
...Dina, a Jew from Poland whose family was engulfed in the Holocaust and who herself was a survivor of Auschwitz, had recently left New York to care for her father, also a survivor, who was employed as a master tanner in Concord...
...she said that she would stay...
...When the family gathered, depending upon who was speaking to whom, I heard Polish, Yiddish and German, with sprinklings of Swedish and French...
...Only with time would I learn the proper balance between the two tendencies...
...How could I be so unfeeling as to bring this young woman to such a film...
...As to our Jews of darkness, now called Survivors, I still gave not a thought...
...by my rabbi...
...Years passed before we were able to discuss that evening...
...My shame gave way to a new tangle of emotions...
...I was the accordionist for the German Honor Society, playing and singing the old beer hall songs with great gusto...
...The father and his six remaining children had survived the death camps...
...All of my relatives, including the ones with the accents—my zayde and his brothers and sisters who had escaped the oppressive anti-Semitism of Eastem Europe—were there...
...Were we not all slaves in Egypt...
...It was a gay evening with an overflow of kosher food and drink...
...Piece by piece, slowly at first, they began to tell me the story...
...I didn't want to hear the stories, yet I knew that I had to listen, I must listen...
...I have come to understand that humor holds a place of honor in the worst of Jewish experience...
...Three months later we were engaged and six months after that there was a gala wedding...
...But I worried: What would they think if they discovered how uninformed I was...
...It has taken more than a quarter of a century for me to understand this difference and to feel comfortable with myself about it...
...In the after-war years of 1946 to 1949, those who had lived so long with death were trying to cope again with life, no homes to return to, most of their families wiped out, moving from concentration camp to displaced person camp...
...For more than 25 years he has been telling me the story, and the end still is not in sight...
...This confused me...
...No, the reason was that these people and I were different...
...Not a word or a murmur—at least not from me...
...But nothing about them, our Jews in darkness...
...Before long I was a nightly addition to their dinner table and after-meal discussion...
...Not knowing what to say, I reached out and our hands remained locked together through the rest of the film...
...Their experiences had taken them beyond my ability to understand, beyond even my ability to imagine...
...I was not conscious of it at all...
...In September of 1939, as the Nazi machine pushed into Poland, I was playing the play of an eight-and-a-half year old, toting my toy gun to kill all the bad guys...
...But still, nothing about them, our Jews in darkness...
...Yet just five years later I was walking into a theater in Concord, New Hampshire, on my third date with a young woman who had been through the worst of it, from Auschwitz and back...
...Now, I am actually able to join in the laughter...
...It is I, the outsider, who asks questions, presses for details, laughs at incidents from a time of hell—almost as if I had been one of them...
...One evening, at dinner at her home, Dina removed the jacket of her suit, and I saw it there, imprinted on the inside of her forearm: the Auschwitz A followed by several identification numerals...
...I had come north to Concord, New Hampshire, on a work assignment...
...As the hours pass his voice smooths out, softens...
...I listen, in a semi-trance, uttering not a sound...
...One tale reminds him of another, some horrible, others lighter...
...I was not unaware of this Nazi practice, but seeing the tattoo for the first time, and on the arm of this graceful woman whom I already had come to love, unleashed my anger...
...Then it strikes me...
...Back then, in those first days, I was far from comfortable...
...Their courage, their endurance, their will to live had been tested far beyond anything I could comprehend...
...While the entire family has helped with my education, the oldest brother, Alter, has been my mentor...
...Quickly, I came to love them, and they reciprocated...
...At first, humor seemed out of place, irreverent, in the Holocaust experience...
...We were introduced on a blind date and within a week I had proposed...
...Buia contradiction existed: The more conscious and curious I became, the more sensitive I was about not dredging up the terrible memories for Dina and her father...
...The film we watched unfolded the experiences of a Holocaust survivor, a juggler by profession, as he made his way through a maze of DP camps, and of his heroic but unsuccessful attempts to reach Israel...
...How many nights have we sat up together until dawn, while the family sleeps...
...It is important because it has to do with the first time I made the connection between myself—both as a Jew and a human being—and the reality of the Holocaust...
...At least not from me...
...Am I not a Jew, even as they are Jews...
...We danced and we sang, Yiddish songs with verse upon verse, many of them improvised to fit the occasion...
...With the tattoo, it happened suddenly...
...How many prayers did I speak on their behalf...
...He tells me how it was and how it felt, recalling the most minute details...
...I knew that there was a part of Dina's experience that always would be separate from our life together, no matter how deep our love or close our friendship...
...What were they doing, I wonder now, my wifeand family-to-be, on that unseasonably warm Shabbat in March of 1944...
...Both Dina and her father, Israel, seemed incapable of hatred...
...Five of the children already were married to other survivors at the time of my marriage to Dina...
...This new aspect of family life, shared with these two lovely people, made me want to learn more about the Holocaust from the lips of the survivors...
...Black beads of inhuman atrocity strung between little jewels of humor...
...I asked her if she wished to leave...
...My father stood on a table leading all the rest: "Bim, bom, bimbim-bim, bom...

Vol. 8 • May 1983 • No. 5


 
Developed by
Kanda Sofware
  Kanda Software, Inc.