Art of a Jewish Woman (11 page)

Her mother was witty, too flirtatious with her friends, and more intelligent in a social way than her father, who had an excellent mind for business. Her father stepped in briefly when friends were there to say hello and get a cup of tea, then returned to his office. There was something Felice didn’t like about her mother’s visitors. She wasn’t sure what it was, but it didn’t seem right. She’d put a chair in the corner of the room or in the doorway and do her homework and watch. “My mother tried to shoosh me away, but I wouldn’t budge. I didn’t know what I was watching for, but I did it anyway.”

When her parents or her mother and her friends didn’t want her to understand something, they switched from Polish to Yiddish, but Felice understood. She knew when they were talking about money or somebody’s bad behavior, even though implications of the words she overheard remained mysterious to her. She used to wonder if somebody would go to jail, or if somebody’s father would go away, a strange and horrible thought, even though divorce was unheard of in those days.

The most sobering time in Felice’s childhood was when she came down with rheumatic fever at age twelve. She had to return home from middle school in Kolno and stay in bed for weeks with a high fever, inflamed joints that hurt too badly to walk on, and a fluttering heart. Dr. Tomashevsky came every day. Each time he examined her heart with his stethoscope, he said she would get better, “but you mustn’t do you homework. You must rest.” She thanked him with a smile and did the homework the school sent after he left.

There was little else the doctor could do then, for there was no penicillin for the streptococcus. It could be lethal during the initial infection, as it was to the father of the family with whom Felice lived in Tel Aviv several years later. Many victims who survived the acute phase ended up with damaged heart valves and died prematurely in middle age, for there was no cardiac surgery until the 1960s. Felice recovered undamaged.

As soon as Dr. Tomashevsky said she was well enough to go outside, they couldn’t keep her indoors. It was market day. Every Tuesday and Friday was a market day, and she loved to run across the street to the Rynek, which teemed with wagons, horses, animals, and farmers, and was so crowded she could hardly make her way through. The farmers who leased land or worked it for the landowners were known as the peasantry and they came from the countryside to the market with their wives to sell their products—all kinds of foodstuffs, fresh vegetables, fruit, cheese, eggs, butter, and milk.

The landowners and farmers came from a radius of about 20 miles, about three hours wagon or buggy travel to town over gravel and dirt roads, to negotiate the selling of crops. Moses Ovezerovicz met with them, telling them how much they could expect, then he would sell the crops to agents with whom he had developed relationships in Bialystock, Koenignsberg, Riga, Warsaw, Frankfurt, and Berlin, and keep a commission. Some crops the farmers brought to town in wagons and stored in Moses’s granary, while other farmers whose crops Moses contracted for in advance would take them directly to the rail heads at Suvalky, Lomza, and Grajewo.

Felice’s mother bought all their fresh food on market day. At dinner she would complain about how anti-Semitic the milkwoman was. Felice’s father asked her what made her think that, or how did she know? He never wanted to create conflict; he always tried to see both sides of things. But her mother went on about how
this peasant
or
that peasant
made crude comments about Jews and was saying, “This Jew did that” or “That Jew did something else,” calling us
those people.
Felice was embarrassed that Manya or Katrina, who adored her, might hear what her mother was saying. She was especially embarrassed that her girlfriends might hear her mother talk that way.

When she got older, they had a summer house on the Bug River a few miles away and some of her girlfriends would come and stay with them. She would beg her mother not to say nasty things about peasants. Sonia from the boarding school in Wilno, who lived in Suvalki, came, and Felice visited her one summer. Luba Kossofska from school came from her home in Bialystock. Felice went to visit her sometimes for two days, going to school or coming home. Bialystock was a big, modern city, and Luba had a large house with a piano. They lived like kings, it seemed. Moses came on weekends to their summer house. Her mother liked guests and would invite relatives too, and her father hated guests. He’d say, “Our house is not a hotel. Let them stay in a hotel.” Her mother smiled and said, “Let him talk; we will have our guests.”

The country house, though modest, had large porches, and they would put cots on them and sleep on the porches, so they actually had more space than in town. What Felice did mostly there was read through Polish literature from the first epic poems to contemporary novels—Adam Mickiewicz, Julius Slowacki, Sienkewicz. If friends were visiting, they’d swim in the river and pick blackberries. They’d go to a neighboring farm with a bucket and bring back fresh buttermilk for the berries. And gossip! They loved to gossip while they lay in the sun exposing their bodies as much as possible to get some color, because they would get very pale during the long winters. The air felt so balmy.

Wilno

The wolves. That’s the first thing Felice remembered about high school. Their cry from the forest. You couldn’t see them most of the time because they’d stay just beyond the fields in the woods. You could hear them calling and howling and sometimes catch a glimpse of them, black shapes in the distance, starting to cross the snow toward her and her friends. Mostly they were invisible, yet Felice knew they were there, and they knew where she was.

It happened her first Christmas vacation arriving home from
gymnasium
in Wilno (its former Polish name; now Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania; in Yiddish, Vilna). Snow was falling and the ground was already covered. Felice and her girlfriend Sonia got off in Grajewo after almost twenty-four hours on the train with a change in Warsaw.

Her father had sent a sleigh to meet them and bring them the last eight miles to Szczuczyn. Two great horses pulled them. It was bitter cold, and they huddled together under large fur blankets to keep warm. They sang school songs, Polish songs, Yiddish nursery rhymes, anything to pass the time. It was already turning dark, and they didn’t recognize the way at first because the fields were all white and the forests were black as coal. The driver sat high on a seat wearing an immense wool coat and fur cap. He had a beard with icicles in it and his breath was like steam. Then the wolves started howling. The driver lit two torches, one for each side of the sleigh and said, “Don’t worry. Now the wolves will be afraid of us.”

It was as if Felice placed an asterisk beside her childhood journeys to mark a threatening animal in her path: a rat when she left her grandparents and wet nurse in Kolno at age four and came home to Szczuczyn to live with her parents for the first time, a rat when she visited Warsaw with her middle-school class, wolves on her first trip home from high school. These emblematic memories must have represented her fear of being unloved by her mother—or, vice-versa, her fear of not loving her mother—threats she projected outward onto the frightening animals. The memories almost certainly meant she felt anxiety when she was separated from what was familiar to her, anxiety that she hid from herself and others because to them she was cute, happy little
Fegele,
a little bird in flight.

The asterisk probably also meant that Felice felt the undercurrent of anti-Semitism and the fear that Poland’s struggling new socialist government and its tolerance for the different ethnicities within its borders would not survive. But when Felice talked about herself, her sense of living life as an adventure from childhood on came to the fore and suppressed her anxiety, as it must have for most of her life.

Mostly, from the socio-political point of view, there was little to fear on the surface of things during Felice’s years in Wilno from 1925 to 1929. Going away to high school felt like another exciting new beginning in her life. The Etta Djemkovsky School was a sought-after, competitive university preparatory high school. Getting her wardrobe ready heightened her anticipation. She and her mother had gone to the dressmaker in Szczuczyn and had two wool, navy blue, pleated dresses made. Blouses were white, and girls had school-issued, embroidered, black alpaca aprons to wear over the dresses against the cold and damp. Stockings were dark, and shoes leather. Boys wore caps and heavy suits. In warm weather the outfits were linen. Her parents had arranged for her to live in her classmate Sonia’s aunt’s home. Sonia herself was from the town of Suvalky, where Felice’s father did business, and her aunt was a dentist in Wilno.

At Christmas she told her parents how much she loved Wilno. It was different from the rest of Poland. There was a certain mystique about it because it was the capital of the little province of Lithuania and the townspeople treated it like a beloved, only child. After Poland annexed it, all the Polish papers and magazines began to describe the Wonders of Wilno—its schools, universities, big river, and hills. It was large, green, and beautiful. It was so cold in winter that the windows were covered by fairy-tale designs in ice. “We were young,” Felice said. “We didn’t care about the cold.”

The Wilno of Felice’s time in the mid to late 1920s was thriving. The end of World War I had freed it from Germany and brought it into the Polish commonwealth. At that time it had a population of about 215,000, of which Jews comprised approximately 30 percent. Some 114 newspapers and magazines were published there in Polish, Jewish (a tongue that was a mix of Hebrew and Yiddish which itself had linguistic roots in Russian and German), Belorussian, Russian, and Lithuanian, reflecting the city’s ethnic mix. There were cinemas. Drama and dance groups flourished. And political movements ranging from the militant right to the militant left debated internally against themselves and externally against each other, struggling for toeholds in elections. The parties focused on workers’ needs, social reform, and claims of representing the region’s “true” national identity which they variously stated to be Polish, Lithuanian, or Polish-Lithuanian.

The Bund—the Jewish workers’ union that became an international socialist party—was founded in Wilno in 1897. It was a counterpart to the Polish Socialist Party. Wilno was also a cradle of Zionism, the movement to bring about the return of Jews to Palestine. The Return would be the actualization of a primordial, eternal myth of return such as no group of people had accomplished in recorded history.

The same year Felice arrived in Wilno, the YIVO (the Jewish Scientific Institute) was established there for the study of Jewish traditions, language, and literature. It was unique in the world, and Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein were honorary directors. Also in Felice’s time Czeslaw Milosz, the future Nobel Prize winning poet and Catholic crusader against totalitarianism, was attending prep school there, and the pianist Arthur Rubenstein was a fellow student in her school.

Miloscz wrote in his memoir, “Wilno was always a city verging on a fairy tale. Picturesque, secret societies, slogans, newspapers, manifestos, lodges, discussion groups. Was the multiethnic former Lithuanian Grand Duchy to be restored or was it to be part of Poland, enjoying the serenity of Warsaw’s embrace?”
⁸

The progressive students, he says, were “naïve reformers…who believed in mankind’s reasonableness.”
⁹
In his memoir he wrote that he felt that the university students knew the absurdity of World War I--the folly of armies mutually murdering each other with the help of machine guns, artillery and tanks. The absurdity was obvious to them as it was probably also obvious to the military itself and the government leaders, but no one could stop it because that would be the equivalent of declaring defeat.
¹⁰
He describes how Polish and Jewish poets and writers attended each other’s meetings. Occasionally some “idealists” crossed the border into Russia to “build socialism” and were never heard from again. They were sent to the Gulag camps. By contrast, Milosz says the pious accepted their lot as sent by God and tried to bear it cheerfully and stoically.
¹¹

Felice said, “Wilno was the Jerusalem of the North for learning and culture. For me, a high school girl, it was the temple of learning and culture. It was known that one went to Wilno for spiritual values and learning. If Jews wanted to make money, they went to Lodz in Poland or Odessa in Russia.” There was a great university in Wilno, Stefan Batori University (today Vilnius University), created in 1597 during the reign of King Stefan Batori when Pope Gregory XII elevated the existing Jesuit academy to the status of a university.

Physically the city was situated in a broad river valley that rose to the north and south. On the south side, atop the gentle incline up from the Neris River, was the train station with lines to Klaipeda, the port on the Baltic Ocean, and to Warsaw, Riga in Latvia, St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Minsk in Russia, and Koeningsburg in Germany (now Russian Kalingrad). Higher up overlooking the city were the ruins of an ancient castle. Whenever the city changed rulers, the first thing the conqueror did was place its flag on its highest wall, just like the Crusaders and Ottoman Turks did on the parapets of Jaffa.

A main street descended gradually to the central market and then to a central square. The street, Pilies, continued for several blocks to the river, which had many parks and athletic fields along its banks. Descending from the central square on the left was the medieval Jewish quarter, where perhaps half of the Jewish citizens still lived.

The quarter was an ancient enclave into which Jews had formerly been ghettoized by order of King Vadislas Vasa in 1633. In Felice’s time the ghetto streets were still twisting and narrow, lined with small shops on the ground floor of sagging wooden structures and brick and stone tenements. Peddlers, men and women, called out their wares, their entire stock in their baskets and carts. Open sewers flowed down the middle of the same streets.