Me Tor Nisht
Lefkovitz, Lori
ME TOR NISHT A STORY BY LORI UFKOVnZ When she was twelve, she wrote Tonya's story for the first time. Simple in its morality, it began both red in sun and blue in water, heat and relief. She...
...Anne Sexton (from "Begat") * Dying Is an art, like everything else...
...Merry knew undemanding father love, where there is, or seems to be, only a father punished for the generosity of his love...
...She kept the old title, but left out the sun and began only with the water...
...Merry told Jan that she had had a great-aunt named Tonya whom she had never known but who had been deaf, and who, they say, had broken rules of religion, back then, by going swimming in immodest clothing (can you imagine...
...She wouldn't write those stories though they had begged her promise when she was twelve that she would grow up and be famous for writing down all of their stories...
...Winter" and "George Washington" and the notebook stories they had written until something put a stop to it at puberty...
...She found out that she wouldn't find out any blue truths about the beautiful deaf girl who, if she ever was, would have been, or would be, only sixty now, who had had a father and mother and brothers and sisters who adored her, they say, and loved her in her deafness, and protected her until the war, but who began by escaping into a wet ungraced and graceful silence, and who ended by denying their God (wasn't Hitler enough...
...No, the father would not take over in this telling as he takes over everywhere else...
...There was no sympathy for her heroine growing up into war and without hearing, only anger, and blame lay heavy on the girl who stood for herself because she had been given father-love and returned daughter-love, spite and willful vengeance...
...Borden had a hidden lesson...
...And she was blown up with adventure and anticipation...
...Over coffee, the two women talked of the poems, "Mr...
...she would dress modestly, have tea with the old lady and find out...
...Selfish act, you know...
...It must have been much like that with little Tonya, his last among eight children, much younger than the rest, and loved and protected all the more when it was discovered that she was deaf and that the world was getting more dangerous for their little girls and for Jews in Poland as this world was ready to rage and burn with fire and sun all the Jews...
...Couldn't write her term papers and couldn't muster any interest in Jane Austen...
...Yes, not ten years before Merry's mother, Tonya must have sat on that same knee and tugged at darker side locks and reached to yank off the skullcap, only Father couldn't say the words, they must have had a private sign, stronger than no, that meant me tor nisht, that meant God Himself won't stand for it...
...Yes, she had promised, I will write those stories and yes, she had thought, I will get famous...
...For love of the father, in the grip of the father, out of duty to the father: me tor nisht...
...Sylvia Plath (from "Daddy") On that rainy afternoon she wanted to write the story again and dim the old man and highlight Tonya's dark silence...
...Borden...
...Tonya had been on her mind's brink those hot days beside the pool, undefined anger thick in her own throat, good and ready to leave hot home love, the heat of summer and the cool of water, she knew, she fancied, how it had been for Tonya ripe with sex sense and no campus of escape...
...She left Tonya and rebel gestures behind for college until she was drawn to a pale girl called Mara and moved in with Jan who studied linguistics and worked with the deaf...
...Borden...
...he was like a monster, a child's bogeyman...
...At fourteen, she wrote Tonya's story again for a young English teacher whom she feared privately without yet knowing why...
...Merry's grandmother had a sister in Jerusalem...
...And Jan wrote one day, sit down, I thought you might want to know, I got word that Mara, you were friendly weren't you, was found dead in her dorm room last week...
...and who had killed their sainted father with a wound to the loins when Hitler had missed the chance...
...Dead for certain, her grandmother had said, and then cast the doubt in Merry's mind by adding the paradox, the tautology, "dead is dead...
...From her great grandfather's daughter, Merry found out that "me tor nisht" meant not speaking about and, God forbid, writing about Tonya...
...Dead from an unromantic hernia operation, not from a haircut or his granddaughter's or daughter's betrayals...
...She had never seen this face before, and he lay there shaven from the operating table, no whiteness, no side locks, bald...
...One year in every ten I manage itA sort of walking miracle, my skin Bright as a Nazi lampshade, My right foot A paperweight My face a featureless, fine Jew linen . . . Missing details...
...They say her father was sight enough to break your heart...
...An overdose, maybe accidental, sleeping pills...
...When Merry's mother assumed position on that knee her Aunt Tonya was adolescent, strange, special, different, treated like porcelain, dangerous and delicious to handle...
...Merry, uneasy, told about her vow the summer before college and Mara told of hers a few earlier and now Mara couldn't write at all...
...That wasn't my question," he said lightly...
...Mara had cried in English class because she couldn't write any more...
...She would show this time that father-daughter love was a knife with two blades...
...She found out, ten years later, that even if she had been able to write about this woman whom she had believed in since she was twelve, still she couldn't...
...Killed, Merry wrote, by an unromantic hernia operation, not by ungrateful children...
...he asked good-humoredly, and she choked in the humiliation...
...She found out...
...And she cursed the heat, arms flat on her desk top and vowed there and then to let it lie...
...Fathers are stricken by heart attacks, not breaks, suffer Auschwitz memories, not their daughter's fumblings in the dark with some neighborhood boy...
...This time the old sainted white-bearded father, Tonya's father, her own great-grandfather would not take over...
...blood into the blue language of blood-disguised man language...
...There he wasn't kindly and white and gentle...
...She rewrote Tonya's story once more on a rainy afternoon, the summer before college...
...She died in the war, so they say, but I'm not sure because the sin is so great that they would have mourned her figurative death even if she had not literally died...
...It was when Merry's mother had been the child on her grandfather's knee and when Tonya was become a dark beauty that the trouble must have started...
...and it stung as she imagined only a whip could sting and she wanted to say, if she had only known how, that she'd lived with Tonya for years, from the time that she had pieced her together from the grey whispers of old people, and that she had lived with the sentences of her story, rearranging them and crossing out words in her head for two years since she had first made up her story, that she couldn't go swimming without imagining that she herself was as lithe as Tonya and without holding her breath under water and trying not to hear...
...She said almost angry and almost aloud that they make you make promises before you are old enough to know what they mean and that you are not bound by such promises, and she would not, would absofuckinglutely not be wrong to refuse to write about dead Jews...
...Me tor nisht" resonant and echoing had spoiled Merry's first night of teen-aged lovemaking...
...Mara, whom Merry had not invited to her wedding because she didn't want that sad drawn face there on the day they called hers and because they had only been coffeehouse friends...
...The stories of Siberia and displaced persons' camp and getting to New York that are her mother's stories and concentration camp and gassed Momma and starved Poppa that are her father's stories...
...Merry suddenly remembered Mr...
...He is my history...
...I have done it again...
...Sylvia Plath (from "Lady Lazarus...
...Frozen again, inside this time, but like in the snow drift, there were the old man's melting blue eyes dancing at her, both arms reaching towards his granddaughter frozen in her tracks because this was not he...
...A casual telling one night over term papers...
...Remembers having missed the old man, remembers that the air smelled of sorrow since summer and that she was being taken to see grandpa in the hospital...
...they had lost touch...
...Is it your blood I carry in a test tube, my arm, to let fall, crack, and spill on the sidewalk in front of the men I know, I love, I know, and want...
...Merry would include this moment to show how the old man could frighten his little girls, and she would leave out the earlier moments her mama tells of, when as a child she ran short skinny fingers through his white beard and pulled at his side locks, symbols of Hasidic piety, and twirled them, and reached to yank off his skullcap when he took her hand firmly, blue eyes dancing and said "me tor nisht"—it is forbidden...
...And Mara cursed her father, a writer, and her boyfriend, another writer, for making it so...
...She followed Mara into the ladies' room and they had coffee after Austen for weeks into the spring of Merry's senior year, Mara's junior year...
...This time she would get it right...
...Daddy, I have had to kill you, You died before I had the time— Not God but a swastika So black no sky could squeak through Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you...
...In the morning she would try, for the last time, to write Tonya's story—finally, hot with swallowed woman blood...
...Crumple...
...This time anger and sentimentality attached themselves to Tonya and so the crisis failed...
...He would not fill up the pages as he filled up the talk of old people, Tonya's living brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews, among them Merry's mother and grandmother...
...Merry wrote long letters from Jerusalem to Jan, now a teacher of the deaf, and others back home, but not Mara...
...Was there some talk that a deaf girl would not find a proper Hasidic match...
...Next day the old man was dead...
...Merry's mother remembers with the regret and guilt that is her bequest a traumatic childhood moment that winter in Siberia after Tonya left, visiting her beloved, her blessed grandpa in the strange Russian hospital...
...I do it exceptionally well...
...Remembers being taken one day, led by the hand, to see her grandpa in the hospital...
...It was in a Siberian summer that Tonya left and in the Siberian winter Merry's mother remembers being a frail school child almost frozen in a snow drift en route to school wearing her uniform and Youth League scarf...
...And her father had said how he counted on his very own little scribbler and had asked just last week why she didn't give him poems any more on his birthday...
...Or is my college girl too grown up for poems...
...for the freedom of it, she laughed, and who had been beautiful and who had committed the greatest sin of them all in Siberia by running off, they never said this but so she gathered, with a non-Jewish Russian communist soldier...
...The crisis of the story worked to a terrible moment so full that when the day came to read their stories aloud, Mr...
...For here stands my father, a rosy Santa, telling the old Rumpelstiltskin to me, larger than God or the Devil...
...They gathered up in cattle cars, deported and leaving the spreading Hitler until the train stopped in Siberia, safe in the cold of Siberia...
...frozen at the door, she was led away nauseated and empty as she had been led in blown up with glee...
...Borden, light and easy, didn't call on her until last...
...Tonya had been sixteen, almost seventeen, two generations ago when she left and Merry was sixteen, almost seventeen now, good and ready, good, too good, and ready, ready, she .thought, for anything, ready to leave, and ready, like Tonya, to love...
...She called it "Me Tor Nisht," a phrase she had often heard her grandmother mutter, a phrase that made her mother wince, and a slur of words that taught her religion and the guilty easy dis-ease with which one can make the rules of the ages or aged crumble...
...The terrible moment had been full enough that Borden said, first, "I cried for the old man when 1 read your story at home, Meryl," and Merry stood on the edge of embarrassed delight...
...Father in my mouth, on my lips, in my tongue, out of all my womanly fire . . . Diane Wakowski (from "The Father of My Country") She would plow through her mother's memory more selectively this time...
...She had pressed her grandmother on this point once, Merry went on, asking if she knew her sister to be dead for certain or if they only said dead...
...Yes, the double-edged sword, steel-icy, iron-hot...
...Until Mara—a quiet woman who sat beside her in an English seminar for upperclassmen and who Merry noticed one day had been weeping silently through a lecture on Jane Austen...
...Then, "Did you write it...
...She didn't say that the beautiful deaf romance girl swam towards a freedom worth the having...
...Was there some lake in Poland to which Tonya stole away in order to shed dark stockings and swim naked and graceful until her father somehow branded into her that me tor nisht...
...Had she died...
...They stopped asking for stories and Merry transformed the boil of her Lori Lefkovitz is a graduate student in English literature at Brown University...
...That night Meryl screeched blood and dreamed of the poetesses who put a stop to their fathers by killing themselves...
...The white-bearded rabbi, gentle and canonized as Jews canonize, by the memory and talk of survivors, blessed old man, no, he would not take over...
...It was an informal vow on that day...
...Tonya was my grandmother's sister...
...Instead she said, "It's a true story, Mr...
...Did she run off with her communist in Siberia, the enemy not even second to Hitler, or had she grown accustomed to stealing away with soldiers in the night...
Vol. 7 • March 1982 • No. 3
