Ironic Rambings

Fantastic Fantasies of a Fanciful New World

The question came up recently which set my mind thinking.  What to do with the French Jews facing more and more terrorist attacks, kidnappings, robberies, insults?  They really can’t stay much longer or feel safe anywhere in Europe any longer. 

From historical experience, they need to pack up and leave quickly, or perhaps wait until the coming elections to see who becomes the government.   But if they leave, it needs to be orderly, and also make a grand political gesture, that they are taking their wealth, their experience, their heritage with them.  It would have to be the young and busy people and their families, and not just the elderly and the retired.  They could leave France to stew in its own cauldron of Muslim fundamentalism.

But where would they go?  Not all of the Jews of France can move to Israel and into Netanya sur le mer and loll about the cafes and support the importers of fine cheese and wine.  It would be a shame to give up their French language and culture.  So maybe they should go where so many others have in the last five years, to la belle province of Quebec, and help develop Montreal as the Paris of North America. That then might in turn start to inspire non-Jewish intellectuals, artists and academics, who aren't swept away in the ride of left-wing post-structuralist and post-modernist suicidal political correctness, to go over to Canada as well.  Finally, a strong and free non-Americanized Canada; and the weather is warming up too, with more land becoming arable in Labrador, if only the Esquimaux could share in the wealth and progress, without losing even more of their heritage.

Most of Europe has sold out completely to the Islamic masses.  Other sane and secular people might also make the move and there would be a strong of cultured, democratic semi-autonomous statelets or non-Anglophone enclaves within 150-200 kilometres of the US border, filling in the gaps between the already existing Canadian cities. 

There would be no use going southwards to Trumpish/Sanderonian, Clintonic America, full of reactionary Tea-Party, xenophobic and anti-Darwinian dumbies, racdketeers, corrupt bankers and Wall Street blowhards. The good Americans could perhaps then actually do what they threaten to do if any of the above came to government, move to Canada.  They might squeeze on to Prince Edward Island, if there were enough.  Or if they really came in droves, Wagons north! perhaps a deal might be struck with Greenland to begin to settle and farm some of the unfreezing territory, provided the new immigrants were willing to learn Inuit languages or at least Danish.

Most of Latin America is still full of basket-case economies and drug-cartel crime.  Only Belize or a rented out Galapagos island or two seems a feasible option. Uruguay has taken too many extreme positions lately to be trusted. And the Falkland Islands have already had their fair share of international attention. 

New Zealand, or as it is better known today, Middle Earth and Xena the Warrior Princess’s stomping ground, or at least the balmy South Pacific?  If only the French hadn't given up on Akaroa and developed their colony, despite the British treaty with the Maori Tribes on the North Island.  I am not sure the French Jews could go in large numbers to Tahiti, New Caledonia or other small Polynesian or Melanesian islands, even though there was a brief period when the Queen of Tahiti was married to a Jew—and something interesting might have developed had he not been more interested in little commercial ventures.  Ditto for the German Jewish shopkeepers who went to Tonga, Samoa and German New Guinea.  When the would-be German colonists came to New Zealand, there probably were no Jews among them, but, even if there were, when the burgher families saw what they had thought would be a good place to settle from what they saw on the map back in Deutschland, and it turned out to be White Island, that is, a volcano and a pile of guano, they quickly turned around left, leaving at best a handful of Lutheran pastors to build a hut or two on some tiny islands between Stewart Island (then called the South Island) and the South Island (then called the Middle Island or New Munster).  That's why there are so few Lutherans here today.

An alliance between Monaco, Andorra and Lichtenstein might take a good lead in organizing these transformation of geopolitics, although if a superpower such as Malta, Luxembourg or Costa Rica (should we add East Timor?) would lend a hand, the process would run more smoothly.  St.-Pierre et Miquelon have always stood for a toehold of France in North America, and so perhaps, if we push aside the rum smugglers and illegal fishing boats, we might be able to use them as advance staging posts for the new armada of Jewish and other intellectual refugees.  

Archaeological Poem

An Old Synagogue Mosaic in Susiya

I have sat here many centuries, under the blazing sun,

once my roof collapsed, and then the sand

covered these wonderful mosaics, lovely colours,

images of piety and pleasure, such as one

might see in a far off rich and goyish land,

but eventually as they say, eventually time blurs

everything, and no one saw me anymore.

Then other settlers, not really very long ago

crossed over the river and built a village, used my name;

they never noticed me sitting here in the middle,

always waiting for the time to pass again,

and my own descendants to return and brush

aside the dust of centuries, until now, that is,

without the poetry of dreams or the piddle

of politics.  I watch the scientists rush

to poke and measure what lay beneath the surface,

and while they don’t exactly appreciate my faith

inscribed in pagan illustrations, they

are my own people, finally, and claim

me as their own, while the others fiddle

with the law and turn time upside down

as though they were here first like the sand and dust,

eternal and natural, like the wind and the dervish swirl

of made-up history, violent and ephemeral

in ugly tents and vicious lies. 

How I would hurl

invectives at these enemies and cast them down

in all their arrogance, but I am old and know a thing or two,

that what was not there ten years ago cannot now be true

and must learn patience yet again and bite my tongue,

though I could not have done that when I was young;

the poetry you see in these mosaics came from anger—

how fierce I was in the faith I had in God!

Now like the sands that slowly yield my face,

I sit here at the side and wait for your response.

Memoirs

Memoirs of Someone Born at the Wrong Time in History

but in the Right Geographical Place

As I have grown up to realize what the world I was born into was like, I am aware that I was very lucky—what else can one call it?—to have grown up as a Jew during the Holocaust but was safe in America.  In my attempts over the past more than twenty years to write out a personal history of those times, often in what I have called “almost true stories”, I have tried to see and hear beyond what a small child could be aware of in the adults around him as they became aware of and increasingly frightened by the events occurring in Europe during 1940 to 1945, that is, from the time of my birth until I was five. 

At times, I created Yiddish voices, comical faces and farcical actions that made the fictional persons more aware than they actually were, or could have been.  All this acted as a protective filter or I would not have been able to continue probing my memories.  But because all other efforts to make sense out of my memories were confounded by a lack of proper chronology and the incoherence of narrative “facts”, these “almost true stories” also seemed the only way to grapple in words with the unspeakable, unimaginable and inconceivable reality of the Holocaust. 

However, for the sake of my own children, my one grandchild and any great-grandchildren that may yet be generated, I will attempt here to put down the evidence insofar as my memory allows.  Someday someone perhaps may be able to verify the facts and distinguish between fact and fancy.

The Romanian Connection

After my mother died in 1970, my father remarried a neighbour, a widow, Anita.  She was Romanian and told us she had been hidden in a Catholic convent during the war, thus surviving the Holocaust.  Though I had known her as one of my best friend’s mother most of my life, she was not a very pleasant person.  Nevertheless, when Martha and I went to Bucharest in 1972, we met some of Anita’s family and they helped us out, at least gave us an occasional time and place to relax during an otherwise very tense situation.  What we didn’t find out until much later was that after each of our visits to the large flat shared between three families, Uncle Ile and his wife, Uncle Moise and his wife, and a younger son and his daughter, the place was thoroughly searched by Securitate—for what I cannot yet imagine.  Anita’s Family in Bucharest had been long-time members of the Communist Party, been in jail for that during the 1930s under the Antonescu regime and then by the Nazis as political prisoners, but for a while when the CP took over they were on the Central Committee and been chosen as the first Romanian ambassador to China, something which didn’t last long because of their age—or as Tanta Nora said, who wanted to live in China?

The old people told me some stories and I didn’t know enough then to probe.  Life was too difficult from day to day until eventually we managed to get out of Romania three or four months before schedule on New Year’s Day 1973.  The main thing I remember was Uncle Moise’s account of what happened in Cluj-Napoca in the early 1940s.  Jews were marched through the streets, and then taken to an abattoir where they were hung on meat hooks and tortured to death.  I have seen this event mentioned elsewhere and yet am not sure whether Moise had seen it himself or even been a victim who escaped.  All his other stories were about how the Russians took over the country, helped the Communists into power and cut deals with former Fascists and collaborators.  His only further remark on the Nazis was how they turned their anti-aircraft batteries on the city as they left Bucharest.

Of course, my real blood connection with Romania comes through my mother’s mother, Grandma Molly (Malka), whose father she would always proudly proclaim to have been the Grand Rabbi of Dorohoi.  His name was probably Krasner and he may have been born and educated in Czernowitz.  Either he or his father (my great-grandfather) wrote a pamphlet in Yiddish “proving” he was a direct descendant of King David.  On the one hand, this is all a bubba meysa, and everyone—not just Jews—if you go back sufficient generations and not all that many, is related to everyone else.  On the other hand, there are two interesting happenings which make one stop and think.  First concerns the visit of Queen Marie to New York City in the mid-1930s.  Grandma Molly was invited to tea with Her Majesty.  It was, to be sure, along with several dozen women who had some important connections with the kingdom and the royal family, and thus would seem to confirm that Rabbi Kasner was treated as having a certain noble status in the Jewish community at the end of the nineteenth century. 

The second event that lends some sort of credence, not to the historical connection with Dovid haMelech, but with Rabbi Kasner’s claims and its recognition by old people in the Jewish community, came when my wife-to-be and I went to see my father in hospital about August 1964.  My father had had a severe appendix attack and was operated on in Maimonides Hospital (originally called Israel Zion, the place where I was born in 1940), so that Martha’s introduction to our family came when she was asked to give blood on his behalf.  My mother, notorious for gossiping and telling everybody about her past, had let it be known that was a daughter of Rabbi Krasner of Dorohoi.  When I arrived, several elderly gentlemen, quite feeble it seemed to me, got out of their beds and were preparing to kiss my feet as the latest incarnation of King David.  Needless to say, I skeedaddled from the room as quickly as possible.  If I had more presence of mind and could have restrained my embarrassment, it would have been interesting to hear stories from them. 

Now back to the Old Country and my great-grandfather and my grandmother.  The rabbi had been murdered, along with his wife and his other children, in one of a series of pogroms in 1909, at which time, luckily—and luck does seem to be a trait of some of us our family—Molly was travelling overseas with a nurse, nanny or companion.  While in North America she received a telegram telling her not to return.  She must have been about eighteen at the time.  She had an older sister, Leah, who lived in Montreal, and perhaps went to stay with her.  There were also relatives in Philadelphia, but the story goes cold here, perhaps because of some bad feelings.  In any event, it seems that she is next known to have been in   California where she married a Mr. Goldner.  They then returned or went to New York, and he died soon after Molly gave birth to a son who may have been named after him, Jack Goldner, my Uncle Jack. My mother used to tell me that Goldner Square in Lower Manhattan was named after him, but that somehow the title was taken from my grandmother.  Not long after that, Molly married a widower, Moses Hermann, and he also had a son, my Uncle Bertram.  My mother was born as the only issue of this new couple.  More of these people anon.

The Hungarian Connection

Grandpa Moe, a cloth-cutter, came from Hungary, but there are no other details.  He had been married and was a widower, with a single son named Bertram, thus my mother’s half-brother.  In the 1930s Bertram joined the US Navy and was in Honolulu at the time of Pearl Harbour on 6 December 1941.  The family received a telegram that he was missing-in-action.  Despite repeated attempts to find out more information over the years, nothing was ever disclosed.  Even into the 1950s, my mother kept writing to the War Department (before it changed its name to the Defence Department), and every time she would see a sailor in the street she expected it to be her lost brother; she often fainted. 

The Ukrainian Connection

Then on my father's side, the background is in Poland and the Ukraine. Grandpa Dave was actually born in America in the early 1880s.  His father was one of three brothers from the Ukraine, probably from the town or district of Simnowa, and though he was supposedly born a Djimnabowski, he took the name Simnowitz (supposedly more Polish to please my Grandma Ida).  The three brothers were all from a family in the timber trade: they and a saw mill, travelled up river to purchase fresh hewn logs, and then floated with them down to their mill.  Apparently there was a very rich and large, extended family of Jews called Simnowitz, with perhaps each smaller unit having their own surnames.  The brothers had been taken away for forced labour to build the Trans-Siberian Railway, and when they came back were threatened with being drafted into the Czar's Army, for twenty-five years among (of all things) the Cossacks.  They then ran off and ended up in Hudson, upstate New York, where Grandpa Dave (Mendel) was born.  I have written about his life in another place.

The Polish Connection

Grandma Ida, from Lomza in north-eastern Poland, was known as Rosenberg until my Uncle Will told me that she changed it from Czarda or Chacha when she arrived in America about 1910.  Her brother was Abraham Rosenberg, one of the founders of the ILGWU, and who was shot by the Pinkerton Men after the great Triangle Building fire that killed so many working girls in 1911.  His face was on a banner at the head of the May Day Parades in New York for years, and during World War Two a minesweeper was named after him.  

But Ida's family had come from Lomza in north east Poland.  But nobody knows any more, at least no one left alive in our family, which was never very large.  In fact, by the time either my sister or I were mature enough to be interested, virtually everyone was gone, or too sick to be seen—and more than that, I was at the other end of the world.  My sister is a professional storyteller and writes books of her own or other tales she collects, and when she mentions our family it is in terms which are--so far as I can tell--completely fanciful and "mystical".  Except in one children's book (which won prizes and was listed on the NY Times list for a while) in which every name is changed except mine, and in the days when I could travel and met her friends--or anyone who knew "Rotten Teeth"--they simply assumed I was the absurd character in that book.

America in the Holocaust

My father was thirty-three years old when enlisted in the Army in 1943, when he was given the choice of being drafted or volunteering and becoming an officer.  He was a dentist.  The story of his war time service is appropriate in another place.  Suffice to say that he went first to Europe, then to Asia, and did not return until late 1946.  When he came back to New York, he was a stranger to me.

As for the rest of the family left in "The Old Country" (Poland, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary) and who were murdered in the Holocaust, all I know is that I was brought up to be at once the "new American" who would be free of the old "tuchas-warmers'" superstitions and the replacement for all those rabbis, scholars, tailors, woodcutters or whatever they were.  Aside from my stepmother Anita (the woman from Romania whose family we visited in Bucharest), no one ever spoken of or perhaps even knew what happened to the "old people" left behind.  When I look back, I think there are hints and signs, and these are what I have developed in my short stories and poems.  In one of these fictional recreations, the three or four year old protagonist watched his grandfather becoming sicker and sicker, dying in a long drawn-out way, becoming depressed when he reads the Yiddish newspapers and talking to friends from the Old Country.  Everyone is also whispering and signalling not to speak about “such things” in front of “the kid.”

The Almost Very True Stories of Boro Park

The closest the actual events impinged on my life is in a “distant cousin”—that’s all I can recall--who came to live with us about 1947 or 1948.  He was a survivor, someone who could not face having lost his wife and children "over there"—and who hanged himself in our attic.  Nobody ever spoke about him to me or explained what happened.  My family was "shtum" on almost everything.  I was too dumb or numb to ask.  Later, of course, I wrote a wrote an almost true story in which I tried to imagine what he was feeling and why was driven to suicide; this could only be done obliquely and by drawing an analogy to a silly prank played by my friends and I one Christmas Eve in a downtown department store. 

Another little story deals with childish incomprehension of young boys when they go into a little grocery run by recent migrants from Hungary and tease them because the family do not understand English very well, are full of pity and anger at the lack of sympathy they find, and try to hide the numbers tattooed on their arms.  The narrator (myself) is told off by his father.

Still another story tells of a boy who plays at destroying ant nests in the garden with fire crackers, until suddenly, as he gloats over the piles of incinerated bodies of the dead creatures, he realizes what he has done, and then spends the rest of the summer holiday trying to rebuild the little world he destroyed, bringing lumps of sugar to make amends, building new paths through the grass, and weeping uncontrollably at what he does not understand.

Poem for early August

A Philistine Cemetery Discovered in Ashkelon

I knew one day they would find me here in Ashkelon,

Where I was buried almost three thousand years ago,

And I am not ashamed to be seen here, now in my bones,

All other features missing with the passing time, and so

Let them say what they will about my people, Philistines,

That we were not all what they thought when they used

Our name to mock and scorn a nation without art or sense

Of beauty; we weren’t brutes devoid of culture,

And we had no dark propensity to evil crafts.

Nor was it even our fault that others came and found us foreign.

There had been a promise and they believed, but none

Of this was known to us when they swept in out of the South

And attacked our cities and our temples.  In truth,

We could have fought together against the real enemies,

If only we both had the patience to listen to the wind.

But history already had decided otherwise, the earth

Could not be shared, no more than the voices that arose

Out of the depths in the places where we both lay down to dream.

If only I could express myself in such a way

That both our ancestors could hear, or our descendants,

I would feel my death and silence over centuries

Had not been in vain.  Nebuchadnezzar gave false

Prophecies, established wrongful boundaries,

And finally covered over all our arts and wishes.

If necessary, I can wait another three thousand years,

Now that my silence has been recognized, my bones exposed,

For that is the meaning of memory, images on screen.

Recipes

Gourmet Foods and Drinks of Forty-Seventh Street 1947-1953

Half-sour pickles must be straight out of a wooden barrel and wrapped in brown paper. East as you walk down the street with a parent or a friend.

Charlotte-Rousse: in a small cardboard container, with bottom that can be pushed up, made with sponge-cake, whipped cream and a bright red cherry.  Don’t eat too quickly.

Good Humour Popsicle on a stick, vended by a man riding in a white truck playing recorded music, and a bell.  Comes in all flavours, but only available in chocolate and vanilla.

Eskimo Pie ice cream block, no stick, chocolate sandwich-cookie, only sold by a man on a  bicycle with small chest strapped to it. No songs.

Knish, either potato or kasha, brought to you by an old man pushing a little trolley with heating unit. If you want, add some salt and pepper, a little shmear of mustard, or by itself it’s so delicious.

New York pretzel, big and chewy with large lumps of salt outside, to be scraped off as you walk, in the style of Hansel and Gretel leaving a trail behind them.

Real Italian pizza made in a bakery out of left over dough, very thick and crusty, with tomato sauce and mozzarella cheese: five cents a slice.

Bagels right out of the oven, shmeared with fresh cream cheese and a thick slice of lox. Also drink a tall glass of milk.

Bocksa, or Saint-Johns Bread, sold in long black strips, from some mysterious source. Chew until all the juice comes out, and then throw what remains at other kids on the street.

Sticks of sugar cane, to be chewed, sucked dry, and the fibre spit out; see recipe for  bocksa for method.

Chicken from the market, still alive when you point it out, then its neck twirled and killed, and a specialist flicks its feathers, but always in need of extra preparation at home.

Egg Cream made with fresh whole milk, Fox’s U-Bet chocolate syrup, and Goodhealth seltzer spritzed directly into the glass or jelly jar.  Give a little stir with a spoon and sip.

Fish taken out especially from a large stone tank where it swims with its fellows, then walloped until dead, split, gutted and scraped clean of scales.  Take home and cook however you like.

Italian ices.  Available from a man with a cold-box held by straps around his neck.  You want, he opens, there is a block of ice, he chips away a few minutes into a Dixie Cup and, if you have an extra penny, then you can ask for cherry or strawberry syrup on top.  Excellent for very hot days.

Chopped liver made from calves or chicken livers, one or two hard-boiled eggs, a bit of schmaltz, a finely chopped onion and maybe some garlic, served on saltine crackers.  On special festive occasions add some parsley leaves and shape into statues.

Grape soda made from grape jelly in a jar with a spritz of seltzer.  Put in two or three spoons of jelly, fill the jar almost to the top, and stir vigorously: the more you stir the sweeter it gets.

Lox and onion and eggs (scrambled).  Eat maybe with a warmed (never toasted) bagel. Goes well with chocolate milk made with Fox’s U-Bet syrup.

Fried salami and eggs (substitute for bacon & eggs).  Slice the salami as thin as possible until you can almost see through it.  Add eggs, as many as you want and stir for a while.  Cook slowly in a big pan after melting in some chicken fat or (if you can afford) schmaltz (goose fat).  Serve with salt and pepper and as much bread as you want.

French toast.  Take left-over Shabbos challah, slice into nice thick chunks, and soak in a bowl of eggs and milk whisked delicately, fry until crispy, sprinkle on cinnamon, drip over with some real Canadian maple syrup.  You will kvell. 

Doctor Brown’s Cel-Ray Tonic. Excellent with pastrami, corned beef and other delicatessen.  Try to get in a bottle not in a can, as it tastes better.

Frosted: fill up a metal malted milk container about two thirds with ice-cream, then whizz on the machine until the contents becomes almost liquid, serve in a tall glass.

Cherry lime ricky: fill a tall glass three quarters full of Pepsi Cola, add lime and cherry juice, spin for a few moments, and enjoy.

Bialy sandwich.  Carefully slice a bialystock roll down the centre, separate the two parts, add a sliver of pickled herring, ads as many onions as you like, and stick together again with cream cheese.

Onion roll open sandwich.  Heat the bread for a few moments in the oven until warm.  Put on a big blob of butter, watch it melt over the top.  Add if you want some diced scallions and/or radishes.  Bite carefully.

Chicken soup.  Pour water into a big pot.  Add a chopped onion or two, a sliced carrot, a handful of rice or noodles.  Bring to the boil.  Throw in two or more chicken or duck feet, the yellower the better.  Let simmer for six to eight hours.  Alternative suggested by one of my grandmas, if made in a bad week when no fowl feet are available: cause a borrowed still living chicken to fly two or three times over the water. Remove any feathers that happen to fall in.

How to make a sour pickle, according to Grandpa Dave.  Go the pickle factory on 39^th Street and watch the cucumbers move down the conveyor belt and then make faces at them when they pass. For half-sour pickles only grimace a little, like this.

If you have other suggestions or corrections let me know.  It doesn’t even have to be about Boro Park or Thirteenth Avenue.