A Child's Journey from Cracow
HOFFMAN, EVA
A CHILD'S JOURNEY FROM CRACOW EVA HOFFMAN I am lying in bed, watching the slowly moving shadows on the ceiling made by the gently blow- ing curtains, and the lights of an occasional car...
...in the constant tug-of-war between church and state, the church, for the moment, has won a substantial victory...
...They feel good, those hands, and I like the way she folds me into a towel as if I were a small, pliant animal...
...We don't exactly know how to behave...
...We only know that Vancouver is very far away...
...Just remember, everyone is human, everyone has the same feelings," she often tells me...
...For one whole year, my parents were sequestered in this man's attic, where they mostly sat on a clump of hay—cold, lice covered, often hungry...
...This is a splendid response...
...Most people we know decide immediately, and the exodus begins...
...I get a particular thrill when some clear, strong voice emerges from the unison crowd...
...my parents, until that official announcement, don't stop me...
...It's a drizzly day, and the platform is nearly empty...
...In this repeated scene, I am older, perhaps about nineteen, and I've managed, somehow, to come to Israel...
...there are excellent music teachers here, and, if necessary, she'll get a scholarship...
...We begin running toward each other, and then—finally, at last—we fall into each other's arms, and hold on to each other for minutes on end, wordlessly...
...Indeed, insofar as I acquire any explicit religious education, it's Catholic...
...We've brought gifts we thought handsome, but in addition, my father gives him all the dollars he accumulated in Poland— something that would start us off in Canada, we thought, but is now all gone...
...I kneel down with the others, and I sing the beautiful anthems...
...we wouldn't be lost in a country whose premier himself cares enough to write a letter to us...
...I'M NO PATRIOT, nor was I ever allowed to be...
...it's one of the markers of our difference...
...Everything is the color of slate...
...I don't want to leave Poland at all...
...This signals a shift in the political balance of power...
...A few days later, the area was intensively searched by the local Gestapo...
...For a long time, my parents hesitate— but in the end they sway in favor of Canada...
...there are no curves, niches, odd angles, nooks or crannies—nothing that gathers a house into itself, giving it a sense of privacy, or of depth—of inferiority...
...The only rooms that really impress me are the bathroom and the kitchen—both of them so shiny, polished...
...But your father, he wanted to live so much...
...On the street, we often see nuns in their cowls and priests in graceful long soutanes, and I know by the respectful looks people give them that they're special, exempt from ordinary rules...
...Timidly, I walk a few steps away from my parents to explore this terra incognita, and I come back with snippets of amazing news...
...By that time, it just didn't matter...
...After about a week of lodging us in his house, Mr...
...I don't want to be any sort of saint," I tell her firmly by the time we're on the swing...
...I didn't care anymore whether I lived or died," she told me...
...It has fed me language, perceptions, sounds, the human kind...
...That's what saved us...
...I coo and murmur ingratiatingly...
...Perhaps everything will be well after all...
...For a while, his spirits get so wild that my mother forbids me to see him or play with him: but it's no use—I run to his house at every opportunity...
...I guess he knows I don't belong...
...You should never be afraid of anybody...
...But then, he takes himself very seriously...
...So now, Ciocia Bronia lives with us, the first of a series of women—after her, they are all simply maids—to inhabit the narrow bed in our narrow kitchen...
...A Polish Girl's Reminiscences of Growing Up in Post-War Poland and Her Voyage to America MY FATHER IS A SHORT, powerfully built man who, of course, seems very tall to me, and who, in his youth, had a reputation for being "strong as a bull...
...Fantasy is a sapping strategy, but for a long time I can't stop recycling it again and again, like a helpless somnambulist...
...my mother says furiously...
...His two strapping sons belonged to the Banderowcy—a Fascist group of pro-German partisans...
...Say thank you," my mother prompts me in preparation for receiving a batch of clothing...
...This is the kind of gesture she knows how to make...
...But is it...
...I don't know whence this conviction comes, but it's very strong...
...Where have I been brought to...
...In the next few years, this is a skill I'll have to use often...
...but by that time, my mother and father had found someone who was willing to shelter them...
...Then she dries my hair and molds it into waves, so that I'll look "as pretty as a flower...
...Rosenberg, a worn-faced, nearly inarticulate, diffident woman, would probably show us more generosity were she not so intimidated by her husband...
...It was in this house, also, that my parents came to know Ciocia Bronia...
...My mother has dressed my sister and me in our best outfits— identical navy blue dresses with sailor collars and gray coats handmade of good gabardine...
...She's my parents' only link with the prewar past—and with the prewar hierarchy of the shtetl...
...Perhaps he mistook someone else for my mother's sister...
...We can't be leaving all this behind—but we are...
...In 1957, prayers and religious classes begin to be instituted in Polish schools...
...We're Jewish and Jews don't do that...
...I feel almost relieved at having it officially confirmed...
...The absoluteness of those loves can never be recaptured: no geometry of the landscape, no haze in the air, will live in us as intensely as the landscapes that we saw as the first, and to which we gave ourselves wholly, without reservations...
...On another occasion, my mother comes home incensed...
...I'm looking out at the crowd that has gathered on the shore to see the ship's departure from Gdynia—a crowd that, all of a sudden, is irrevocably on the other side—and I want to break out, run back, run toward the familiar, excitement, the waving hands, the exclamations...
...But then, my life was claimed from near death too...
...Then we betake ourselves to the schoolwide assembly, where every day we sing the Internationale, whose stirring melody never fails to fill me with the requisite inspirational feeling...
...My parents' faces reflect anticipation and anxiety...
...We talk to each other ceaselessly, and in games with other kids, we're a team...
...Too many Ukrainians were on the Germans' side...
...I'm beginning to master the trick of saying thank you with just the right turn of the head, just the right balance between modesty and obsequiousness...
...We have no place to go, no way to pay for a meal...
...When we come in on that last day, he beckons me into the "third room" and tells me that this is a serious moment, and I should allow him to kiss me in front of the others: we should not act like timid children anymore...
...Can you imagine something so primitive...
...It's a notion of such crushing, definitive finality that to me it might as well mean the end of the world...
...He tried to pull my mother after him— but she refused...
...The familiar rooms, which used to be warm and muffled with their thickness of furniture, now echo with emptiness and the wooden crates that line the hallway...
...Of course, I've known we're Jewish as long as I can remember...
...IT IS AN AUTUMN afternoon in 1958, and we are all going, dressed more formally than usual, to Marek's house...
...It lives within me despite my knowledge of our marginality, and its primitive, unpretty emotions...
...Get off the train on the right foot," my mother tells us...
...The fantasy ends there, and then I am returned to the street I'm walking on and a state of ashen deprivation...
...IT IS A BEAUTIFUL, sunny day in Cracow, and I'm holding my mother's hand as we stroll toward our favorite park—Park Krakowski...
...We do not like to let talent go to waste in Israel...
...In 1957, the ban on emigration, under which most of the Polish population lives, is lifted for Jews...
...Ciocia means "Auntie," but I know that she's not a real relative, and that in our house she has an ambiguous status...
...I'm snuggled under an enormous goose-feather quilt covered in hand-embroidered silk...
...I want to roam the world and have adventures...
...But if we're not to risk falling into that other absurd, in which we come unpeeled from all the objects of the world, we must somehow preserve the memory and the possibility of our childish, absurd affections...
...This man, whom my father helped in some way at the beginning of the war, offers to sponsor us as immigrants to Canada, which, he writes, is the real land of milk and honey, the land of opportunity, the place where you can grow rich and be happy...
...From then on, whenever she could, she brought my parents some extra bread or soup...
...The apartment has been transformed from a place in which people have lived cozily and for a long time into a space from which they are fleeing— that image of lives being torn and uprooted that will be, from now on, imprinted on my retina with quickening regularity...
...sufficiency because . . . well, just because I'm conscious, because the world exists and it flows so gently into my head...
...But somehow the anger does not become wholesale enough for my mother to stop seeing Pani Orlovska, or even liking her...
...She was so young, eighteen or nineteen—"She hadn't even lived yet," my mother says— and she died in such a horrible way...
...In spite of the risky games we play with each other, I have a deep belief that his greater physical strength is there to protect me...
...Across the room from me is my sister's crib...
...MY MOTHER wants me to know what happened during the war, and I keep every detail of what she tells me in my memory like black beads...
...Copyright ©1989 by Eva Hoffman...
...I hardly see how I can be extracted from all of this, from everything I've experienced so intensely...
...This is the day when she died," she says, looking at me with pity, as if I too were included in her sorrow...
...I'm trying hard not to fall asleep...
...It is larger than any apartment I have seen in Poland, with enormous "picture" windows, a separate room for every member of the family and soft pastel-colored rugs covering all the floors...
...I can't stay away from him, even though sometimes he plays boyishly mean pranks on me: he drops an enormous tome on my head when I pass in front of his window, and once, he tries to stuff me into a hole in the forest, which turns out to have been left there by the Germans, and might still have some mines in it...
...The subject of anti-Semitism comes up frequently, but when my parents— mostly my mother—speak of it, there is anger rather than shame in their voices...
...To atone for what happened, I should relive it all with her, and I try...
...Before we're sure where we'll end up, my mother, who is worried about my future as a pianist, writes to no less a figure than Ben-Gurion, a cult hero who is also ' 'one of ours," to inquire whether I'll be able to get piano lessons if we come to Israel...
...My parents' faces fill with a kind of naive hope...
...People like to be appreciated...
...Catholicism is everywhere...
...That's why everyone died in the war...
...The sense of impending loss makes me want to hold on to what I've had with all my might...
...My friends, with whom I play on the street or at the tiny local playground, are much concerned with the question of sainthood...
...Sometimes, on summer evenings, we climb up through the forest to an open, flower-filled meadow, and we join a group of barefoot peasant children who are baking potatoes in an outdoor fire...
...The Ukrainian never caught on to the fact that he was harboring yet another Jew in his house...
...I feel it as a nonhuman hardness, a conversion of flesh and feeling into stone...
...The sense of being Jewish permeates our apartment like the heavy, sweet odor of the dough that rises in our kitchen in preparation for making challah...
...It has given me the colors and the furrows-of reality, my first loves...
...There are some trunks and suitcases, and there are people awkwardly standing about...
...But in my heart I feel no real gratitude at being the recipient of so much mercy...
...She was ostensibly a servant, working downstairs for the relatively rich peasant...
...But in the middle of this relaxed saunter, the tone of her voice changes as if she wanted to tell me something very important...
...perhaps she helped save their lives...
...There is only the open sincerity of the simple spaces, open right out to the street...
...And yet, this glum, seemingly harsh man started showing signs of affection and attachment to my parents, and found it hard, when the time came, to part with them...
...She had come from far enough so that nobody in this village knew it, and she looked enough like a Pole—large boned and broad faced—that she could easily pass...
...In this particular instance, the Germans were diverted...
...After all, during the war she helped save them from near starvation...
...His voice is in fact so serious, and so full of urgency, that I say yes, he may—though when it comes to the point, we're both so nervous that his kiss lands awkwardly on my chin...
...It's hard not to...
...In Ben-Gurion's case, her resourcefulness pays off, for within several weeks, a letter typed messily on onionskin paper and signed by the premier of Israel himself, arrives at our address...
...And so begins yet another segment of this longest journey—all the longer because we don't exactly know when it will end, when we'll reach our destination...
...I understand the force of this argument, but still, the thought of a place called Canada fills me with a sort of horror vacui...
...I'M IN MY BASSINET, placed on our living-room table, and I'm being washed by Ciocia Bronia's rough, large hands...
...Rosenberg whom my parents knew before the war and who lives Jn a place called Vancouver—or "Vantzo-ouver," as we pronounce it...
...So when I was born after all these travails, in the safety of a city hospital and with some prospect of a normal life resuming after the horror, I must have signified, aside from everything else, a new beginning— and my parents wanted, badly, to begin again, to live...
...My father comes home one day reporting on a fistfight he got into when someone on the street said to him that "the best thing Hitler did was to eliminate the Jews"—that classic line so conveniently brought out whenever a Pole quickly wants to express a truly venomous hatred...
...No, not really...
...That strikes me as a fairy tale more cruel, more magical than anything in the Brothers Grimm...
...Dutton...
...From this bleakness, two figures approach us—a nondescript middle-aged man and woman—and after making sure that we are the right people, the arrivals from the other side of the world, they hug us...
...To leave or not to leave now becomes the main subject of conversation...
...WE ARE IN MONTREAL, in an echoing, dark train station, and we are huddled on a bench waiting for someone to give us some guidance...
...Rosenberg with the respect, even a touch of awe due to someone who is a certified millionaire...
...My parents have no doubts about the matter...
...They all had a hunch—yet another one of their hunches—that they'd rather be in Poland than in the new Russia...
...My father looks up to Mr...
...They're not, after all, believers themselves, and they don't want to make my young life unnecessarily difficult...
...The letter is no bureaucratic form either...
...For my father, this is an irresistibly alluring vision—to become a man of means in the American way, a man of substance...
...But I can't draw away from it either...
...He's my best friend, I suppose, except there's a twist here—I'm in love with him...
...Immediately after he leaves, I take to my bed for a week and plunge into fits of unstoppable tears, ending up in the dull thud of migraines that will visit me from now until our own departure...
...For luck in the new life...
...Occasionally, a few blocks away, I hear the hum of the tramway, and I'm filled by a sense of utter contentment...
...But I fear that my Destiny is going to take an abrupt swerve...
...I came into the world about two months after the end of the war Marek knows exactly what he wants...
...He has made stinginess into principle...
...The Rotenbergs leave...
...The man who saw her go into the gas chamber said that she was among those who had to dig their own graves, and that her hair turned gray the day before her death...
...I have not accepted the knowledge that Marek is about to leave "forever"—for that is how I understand it...
...Maybe she lived and emigrated to one of those strange places I've heard about, like New York, or Venezuela...
...Mrs...
...In the uncompromising vehemence of adolescence and injured pride, I begin to see Mr...
...but I don't feel much warmth in their half-embarrassed embrace...
...And yet, the country of my childhood lives within me with a primacy that is a form of love...
...All it has given me is the world, but that is enough...
...Rosenberg not as our benefactor but as a Dickensian figure of personal tyranny, and my feeling toward him quickly rises to something that can only be called hate...
...It doesn't have the same palpable reality as the Cracow tramway...
...After the war was over, my parents and Ciocia Bronia, all of them left without any family, cleaved to each other...
...Eventually, a man speaking broken Polish approaches us, takes us to the ticket window, and then helps us board our train...
...it's the atmosphere I breathe...
...You should kneel down and kiss the ground," the man tells my parents...
...That man was the only witness to what happened...
...the picture windows are designed to give everyone full view of everyone else, to declare there's no mystery, nothing to hide...
...Or maybe it's that I don't believe in saints, as I don't "believe" in what goes on when we attend church on Sunday...
...the burned skin of the potatoes tastes delicious in the night air, and afterward, we make our way down using the gnarled tree roots as steps on the dark path...
...It's time you stopped crossing yourself in front of churches...
...It is Cracow, 1949, I'm four years old, and I don't know that this happiness is taking place in a country recently destroyed by war, a place where my father has to hustle to get us a bit more than our meager ration of meat and sugar...
...It is a period during which we almost literally live out of our suitcases, during which my father, as the result of wanting to emigrate, loses his job, during which I am taken in and out of school—during which the matrix of ordinariness begins to dissolve in the suspended, provisional state of waiting...
...I am thirteen years old, and we are emigrating...
...They tried to get out once before, shortly after the war, when some Jews were given exit visas, but didn't succeed...
...Is it blind and self-deceptive of me to hold on to its memory...
...Then I begin to make weekly pilgrimages to the Bergs' building, as if standing in front of it could prevent their afterechos from vanishing...
...I didn't understand its implications...
...My parents' hunch turned out to be right...
...We are going to say good-bye to the Bergs...
...I never forgive him...
...Does she want her daughters to end up on a battlefield...
...There are other parts to Pani Orlovska, after all, as there are to all the people who have drunk anti-Semitism with their mother's milk, but among whom we live in friendship and even intimacy, and with all the complexities of affection and impatience that those bring...
...I am unprepared for this...
...I don't like this supine position...
...I fear that we are going to end up in Canada...
...I came into the world about two months after the end of the war...
...The question is not whether to leave, but for where...
...Danuta Dombraska, an earthy, blond girl who lives in the next building to us and is one of my best friends, informs me earnestly one day, while we are waiting our turn at the swing, that she wants to be a saint when she grows up...
...Being awake is so sweet that I want to delay the loss of consciousness...
...You're grown up enough now to understand this," she ways...
...I have believed this also...
...Her eyes grow dreamy...
...I can't imagine a state of affairs in which one would want to discard the delicate transparent bathrobes and the angora sweaters they pass on to us, but luscious though these items seem—beyond anything I ever hoped to own—the show of gratitude required from me on receiving them sours the pleasure of new ownership...
...Pani Orlovska, the mother of my friend Krysia, and a "better" person—she is educated and a doctor's wife—wanted to know, in the intimate confidence of their friendship, whether really, really, it was true that Jews mixed in some Christian blood with their matzo for Passover...
...the gesture of a person who does not have enough power or standing to go through the normal channels of influence but who can cut through the rules and appeal to some grand personage's ordinary humanity, to what's similar in everyone...
...It's something they drink in with their mother's milk...
...These are all features that, I know, are intended to signify good taste and wealth—but there's an incongruity between the message I'm supposed to get and my secret perceptions of these surroundings...
...You're lucky to be here...
...I LIKE THE GRAY-STONE, curvy baroque facade of our neighborhood church, and its incense-smelling interior...
...While my mother was in the advanced stages of pregnancy, my parents made the trek from Lvov—which during the war • was unceremoniously switched from Polish to Russian territory—to Cracow, where they were going because it was the nearest large Polish city...
...this is clearly a pleasurable, romantic fantasy...
...I think it would be blind and self-deceptive not to...
...Only Jews who are involved in the life of the culture, or are part of the Communist elite, remain—until 1968, when most of them too are forced out by an "anti-Zionist" purge...
...To me, these interiors seem oddly flat, devoid of imagination, ingenuous...
...I am later told that almost the only time he has ever been seen crying was when I was born...
...Except that this is real...
...But I don't understand what I remember...
...It doesn't come as that much of a surprise, really...
...After spending some months in Lvov, they made their journey to Cracow together...
...In accordance with his principles, he demands money for our train tickets from Montreal as soon as we arrive...
...Yes, almost a relative, except my mother comes from a family of solid merchants and she aspires to being a "better" person, while Bronia will forever remain a poor Jew, nearly a peasant...
...I look out of the train window with a heavy heart...
...I can't stop thinking about her...
...My parents met Ciocia Bronia in a house where they came to be hidden in the last year of the war, after their forest bunker was discovered by some Ukrainians...
...I keep the distinctions blurry...
...But the knowledge has been vague, hazy...
...There is this young girl, maybe my age, in high-heeled shoes and lipstick...
...We don't have the remotest idea of what we might find or do there, but America— Canada in our minds is automatically subsumed under that category—has for us the old fabulous associations: streets paved with gold...
...Maybe it didn't happen after all, maybe it's only a story, and a story can be told differently, it can be changed...
...She looks so vulgar, I complain...
...The maid—one of a succession of country girls who come to work for us—is sleeping in the kitchen...
...I know who "she" is...
...What are the ceremonies for such departures— departures that are neither entirely chosen nor entirely forced, and that are chosen and forced at the same time...
...I am disembarking from a ship, and there, on the shore, I see Marek...
...The two women also give us clothing they can no longer use...
...After all we've gone through they still hate us," my mother says bitterly...
...Before we leave the Bergs' apartment, he shakes my father's hand, and, looking him straight in the eye, tells him that we must come to Israel, because I am supposed to be his wife...
...Where have I been brought to...
...Veronica, maybe, or St...
...Be assured, Ben-Gurion tells my mother—or perhaps someone from his office does—that your child, if she is talented, will receive all the attention she deserves...
...For the few days we stay at the Rosenbergs', we are relegated to the basement, where there's an extra apartment usually rented out to lodgers...
...He wants me to follow him to Israel...
...to him too his wealth is the proof of his righteousness...
...Rosenberg is a big man in the small Duddy Kravitz community of Polish Jews, most of whom have made good in junk peddling and real estate—but none as good as he...
...It's a kind of charade, made more satisfying by all the trappings of seriousness—as if one got to play house on a very grand scale...
...I look out of the train window with a heavy heart...
...Let her go and play with the others is their implicit message—and that's how the whole thing feels...
...Does she herself want to go through a war again...
...Maybe I'll find her and bring her to my mother, whose suffering will then be assuaged...
...Once the decision is made to go there, persuading the authorities that they should allow us to follow our choice will take two years...
...No peering out the window here, to catch glimpses of exchanges on the street...
...BY THE TIME we've reached Vancouver, there are very few people left on the train...
...Later, of course, we learn how to be more parsimonious: how to parse ourselves into constituent elements, how to be less indiscriminate and foolish in our enthusiasms...
...And once, as we kneel in a row to receive the priestly benediction, the priest puts his hand on my head and, looking worriedly into my face, tells me that if I want to ask him anything, I should come in and talk...
...So now, after the morning roll call, the class stands up and, led by the teacher, recites the Lord's Prayer—the Polish version of it, which includes a special plea for the Virgin Mary's intercession...
...MAREK AND I have known each other since babyhood, running races in the park, visiting each other's houses, and practicing our piano lessons together...
...And, my father reminds my mother, whose impulses really draw her toward Israel, in Canada there is no war, and there never will be...
...Or, on sunny days, we stand under a waterfall, getting our clothes soaked through, and I feel both the wildness of my own spirits and the safety of being with Marek...
...Despite the assurances of some chance passersby that their secret was safe, my parents knew that it was time to move on...
...I love riding the tramway, with its bracing but not overly fast swaying, and I love knowing, from my bed, the street over which it is moving...
...This hardly makes him the most popular, but it automatically makes him the wisest...
...As soon as I enter the apartment, though, I am jolted into an instant recognition of departure, finality, the end...
...In Israel, there's a constant danger of war, and they take even girls into the army...
...I can't go as near this pain as I should...
...But until I'm seven years old, I cross such markers regularly...
...Privately, we comment that this is not real food: it has no taste, it smells of plastic...
...IT IS APRIL 1959, I'm standing at the railing of the Batory's upper deck, and I feel that my life is ending...
...it is lengthy and sounds as if it were written by an actual person...
...Here is something worth describing to my friends in Cracow, down to such mind-boggling details as a shaggy rug in the bathroom and toilet paper that comes in different colors...
...A CHILD'S JOURNEY FROM CRACOW EVA HOFFMAN I am lying in bed, watching the slowly moving shadows on the ceiling made by the gently blow- ing curtains, and the lights of an occasional car moving by...
...Rosenberg, who is now almost seventy, had the combined chutzpah and good luck to ride on Vancouver's real-estate boom—and now he's the richest of them all...
...As the train approaches the station, I see what is indeed a bit of nowhere...
...It was here that my father once saw the Germans approaching, presumably for a house search—and without thinking twice, decided to jump out of the back window...
...Jesus, Joseph, and Sainted Maria," my mother says in a humorous tone, when she's exasperated, or when things get out of hand...
...Marek has been a part of my Destiny...
...And so we begin <8...
...Yes, I go to church with Danuta and other kids quite often...
...She's my mother's younger sister, who was killed during the war...
...They made this journey on a rattling truck filled with potato sacks and other people trying as quickly as possible to cross the new borders so they could remain within their old nationality even at the cost of leaving home...
...There's no solid wood here, no accretion either of age or dust...
...In my head, without telling anyone, I form the resolve that when I grow up, I'll search the world far and wide for this lost aunt...
...But it's her sister whose memory arouses my mother's most alive pain...
...The Rosenbergs' house is a matter of utter bafflement to me...
...She's a social inferior—that much is clear to me—but she also occupies a special, untouchable place in my parents' affections...
...And this is an intelligent person...
...I only know that I'm in my room, which to me is an everywhere, and that the patterns on the ceiling are enough to fill me with a feeling of Excerpted from the book Lost in Translation: A Life in a New lumguage by Eva Hoffman, by permission of the publisher, E.P...
...Canada is the land of peace...
...My mother offers a strange picture of the peasant who was effectively their savior—stingy, nearly mute, a hunchback...
...From the next room, I hear my parents' breathing...
...Being a saint means lying down in a white dress, perhaps on a cross...
...I stoke up the images of Marek—they are not memories yet, he is too much alive within me—as if my will could make him materialize...
...They need signs, portents, at this hour...
...Anyone who is Jewish can now automatically get permission to leave for Israel— and everyone who is Jewish is confronted with a decision...
...IT'S THE MIDDLE of a sun-filled day, but suddenly, while she's kneading some dough, or perhaps sewing up a hole in my sweater's elbow, my mother begins to weep softly...
...It's a matter of honor to remember, like affirming one's Jewishness...
...Rosenberg decides that he has done enough for us, and, using some acquired American wisdom, explains that it isn't good for us to be dependent on his charity: there is of course no question of kindness...
...This possibility arises because of a letter we receive, out of the blue, as far as I can make out, from somebody named Mr...
...the Leitners leave...
...The Jewishness lives in that bread, which other people don't seem to make...
...The spaces are so plain, low-ceilinged, obvious...
...His face never lights up with humor or affection or wit...
...All the other members of my mother's family died as well—her mother, father, cousins, aunts...
...I feel as if I've always known it...
...As it is, she and her daughter, Diane, feed us white bread with sliced cheese and bologna for lunch, and laugh at our incredulity at the mushy textures, the plastic wrapping, the presliced convenience of the various items...
...But for the less important, even if they've never given much thought to their Jewishness, there is, after a while, almost no choice...
...I repeat to myself that I'm in Cracow, Cracow, which to me is both home and the universe...
...but one day, she revealed to my parents the tainted secret—she too was Jewish...
...You never know what can come out of a person," my mother says musingly as she talks about him, and sometimes tears come to her eyes...
...Teresa...
...Not true, of course, but that's the statement...
...the Taubes leave...
...And every day—religiously— I go through a ritual fantasy about Marek...
...Poland is home, in a way, but it is also hostile territory...
...Then we all get into an enormous car—yes, this is America—and drive into the city that is to be our home...
...But such leavetakings are becoming more frequent...
...We'll take care of her...
Vol. 15 • February 1990 • No. 1
