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.