You Saved Me, Too: What a Holocaust Survivor Taught Me about Living, Dying, Fighting, Loving, and Swearing in Yiddish (17 page)

They put a girl Helen had grown up with on one side. They put her on the other. The girlfriend lives in Brooklyn.

Helen was only twenty.

There was a man you wanted me to call. You opened your pink address book and pointed to the name. Arnold.

“Who?”

“Arnold!” you yelled. “Mendel’s son.”

Mendel had a son? Mendel, concocter of schemes, stealer of iron, had a conventional life after the war?

Not exactly. First, he continued to scheme and steal.

While living in the DP camp, he worked the black market as you did. But he either went further or wasn’t as careful. From what you remember, he used counterfeit ration cards that he’d gotten from a gun dealer to buy butter at a legitimate shop. The owner called the police and Mendel ran to an apartment building and hid under the stairs. But the cops found him and a judge threw him in jail.

“I’m a Holocaust survivor,” Mendel appealed. “I’ve been imprisoned for four years.”

“Now it will be four years and six months,” the judge declared.

When all the displaced persons were scattering, he chose to go to Israel. He served in the army, met his Czechoslovakian wife, and had two children, a girl and a boy. They sent you a picture of the kids, the big girl holding the baby, with the words
THE FRIENDS OF ARON
scripted on the back. You got to see them in person when the family moved to the Bronx in 1959. Mendel got a job painting houses. You remembered that he used to call you long distance from his customers’ phones.

You visited him whenever possible—as often as once a month, you said. His wife was a good cook and you loved his kids. Arnold remembers that you’d give them five or ten bucks whenever you saw them. His sister said you and Mendel were like brothers. She remembers even deeper generosity: When the family had financial trouble during their early years in the United States, you gave them money out of your deli-counter wages and Holocaust reparations to help them get by.

When the kids grew up, Mendel’s daughter moved back to Israel and convinced her parents to join her in 1984. You visited them and still talked on the phone, but the time between contacts grew longer by the year. That’s what happens when friends move to a different part of the world, as I well know.

It had been years since you’d spoken to Arnold, who’d moved to California with the military and stayed for a career with the postal service. After you gave me his number, I called and arranged for him to call my cell phone at a specific time while you were living at a
temporary nursing home. We sat in the hallway and I handed you the tiny phone.

“Hellooo!” you said to Arnold.

Then a smile. The conversation must have brought you back to those nights around his kitchen table, when you were a welcome part of a family. You seemed relaxed and in control for the first time in a long while. Arnold told you that his mother had died that fall, and you said you were sorry, that she was a good woman. Arnold didn’t tell you what a rough father Mendel was; that he told him little about his wartime experiences, but played out his rage often.

In fact, you didn’t talk about Mendel at all as I sat next to you in that hallway. He had died two years earlier, at age eighty-five, having outrun death for more than sixty years.

Your marriage was the opposite of a storybook romance. It was another of your tragedies, another area where you got ripped off by life. But I’m not sure you and your low self-esteem see it that way. So I’m giving you this memory as an outsider sees it.

Once upon a time, a lonely man finished his workday washing floors and clearing dishes at a Boston deli. He took the trolley to the next town and entered a room full of people from the Old Country. They were all Holocaust survivors who met to talk about getting settled in America and collecting reparations from Germany. The meetings comforted the man because everyone spoke Yiddish.

On this night, an American girl joined the group. She spoke Yiddish, too. She’d come to the meeting to find a man. Though she was a talented pianist from a comfortable family, she was very overweight. At twenty-five, she still had no prospects for marriage. Her name was Bibi.

She and the lonely man talked that night and exchanged phone numbers at the end. She began to help him. Living with his aunt wasn’t working out well because she wanted him to pay rent and she expected
him to bring home free food from the deli. Bibi found him a room to rent for $7 a week. It was close to her house in Roxbury, a hot spot for Boston’s Jews.

Her father owned a nice restaurant called Speigel’s. He hired the lonely man and put him behind the take-out counter. The man knew enough English to fill an order for a cup of coffee and a roll. But when someone asked for a cup of java and a bun, he was confused. Bibi’s father gave him other jobs until he learned more words.

The man didn’t love Bibi and she most likely didn’t love him. The gossips said she spent time with a married Gentile man who was the real object of her affection. But the lonely man liked her parents and they liked him. Her father promised to set him up in business if he married Bibi. He liked that Bibi was smart. It seemed like a good-enough compromise.

They got married in late September. A rabbi performed the ceremony, and twenty guests, including the man’s great-aunt and cousin, attended. He wanted to wear the suit he’d had made in the DP camp, but Bibi wouldn’t allow it. The man loved that suit; it didn’t even wrinkle in the rain. But she made him give it away. She loaned him the money to buy a new one and made him pay her back every month. It was a sharp suit: double-breasted dove gray with wide lapels. He wore it with a matching hat and a sky-blue tie patterned with a funky sprinkling of rectangles. He weighed 137 pounds, but looked happy on his wedding day. She wore a dark green dress, weighed considerably more, and looked annoyed.

They honeymooned in New York, at the Victoria Hotel. It was a short honeymoon in all ways. As soon as the newlyweds came home, things got bad. Bibi’s father sold the business he had promised the man. Bibi spent more money than he earned at his new deli job. They couldn’t get pregnant. The doctor said the lonely man’s sperm were fine, but that his wife’s tubes were closed. She could have had an operation to open them, but because of her weight and her diabetes, the doctor couldn’t guarantee success. The man wanted children, but he didn’t push too hard. Bibi refused the operation.
They couldn’t afford to adopt. No one would ever know what kind of father he would have been: cruel and angry, like another survivor he’d heard about, or tender and delighted, like he was with other people’s children?

There weren’t many kids around to remind them of what they were missing. Bibi’s brother had a couple, but neither of her older sisters had children, the eldest having lost one in infancy.

The lonely man and Bibi began to fight all the time. They moved from apartment to apartment, usually together, but sometimes apart. He had a temper and she was strong-willed. She continued to see other men. He worked ten hours a day, six days a week. On his days off, he’d often take the train to New York to visit his best friend from childhood, or his brother.

He could have stayed there. His brother offered to get him a job at the car upholstery business where he worked, but the lonely man worried that he wasn’t strong enough to pull out car seats all day. And he didn’t really want to leave Bibi.

“Good, bad, I come home, she is there. A meal is there. I had somebody. If you’re divorced, you have nobody,” he said.

He couldn’t go back to having nobody.

Everyone talked about their awful marriage. They were schizophrenic with all their on-again, off-again nonsense, one of their brothers-in-law said. They were like oil and water, said another.

When the lonely man became a citizen in 1954, Bibi asked him to change their last name. Libfrajnd was too hard to spell. She chose Lieb and told him it meant love.

The Liebs went to dinner with other couples once in a while, or to the park with her parents on summer afternoons. They went to New York together sometimes, and ate Jewish food on Delancey Street. Bibi didn’t dance, but the man missed it. Twice he went to dance halls by himself, spinning with women he knew but sitting by himself between numbers.

Bibi graduated from community college when she was in her fifties. Wherever he lived, the man hung the photo of her receiving her
diploma. She worked at a hospital as a medical transcriber, and eventually she was promoted to head cashier. She lost almost one hundred pounds early in their marriage, but gained it all back. He was frustrated because she didn’t take care of herself. The doctor said she was “digging her grave with her teeth.”

He almost left her twice. He was tired of the fighting. “I say day, she says night,” he told people. The first time he took off, thirty-five years into their marriage, a girl was involved. He bought a one-way plane ticket to Israel. He’d been invited by a woman he’d known in the DP camps. Back then, she had married a different survivor from Zychlin, the man’s hometown. After her first husband died, the woman wrote to the lonely man. She wanted him to divorce Bibi and marry her. He packed his bag and went to the airport in Boston, but the flight was canceled due to storms. He was supposed to return to the airport the next day, but he got scared and stayed home. The other woman married somebody else a few months later.

The lonely man still wanted to get away from Bibi. Later that year, he tried again. This time he was serious. He mailed all his winter clothes to his brother for storage. He boarded a plane, even though he hated to fly, and made it to Israeli soil. He stayed with his childhood best friend, but felt unwelcome. They fought. He didn’t know Hebrew, so he felt as isolated as when he’d arrived in America. He had a talk with himself.

“I am real foolish. In the United States, I know everything. Here, I’m sixty-five years old and I can’t order a cup of coffee.”

He flew back home. He’d only been gone for a week.

He nursed Bibi through the last years of her life. When she lost a leg to diabetes, he pushed her wheelchair. When she couldn’t wipe her butt, he did it for her. He dressed her and cooked for her. Her sisters, who were quite well-off, didn’t come to help. One of them even stopped taking Bibi’s calls, saying they were too upsetting. When Bibi died at age sixty-six, the man didn’t invite anyone to the funeral. Because of how her family had neglected her, he thought he’d feel like
a hypocrite if he welcomed them at the end. It was just the funeral home guy and him at the graveside.

The next day, he was lonely all over again.

Your Timex sits on the night table. This must be one of the first days since the war that you haven’t worn a watch.

I have spent almost as much time shopping for watches as I have picking out new electric razors for you. Without these two items in perfect condition, you get rattled. But you’re not easy to please. When you first asked for a new watch, I bought you a nice one with a metal strap and shiny roman numerals from a jewelry store. You sent it back. Then I exchanged that for a digital with a stretchy band. You sent that back, too. It took me a while to realize that what you really wanted was an analog watch with large, clear numbers and a leather band. It took me even longer to find that simple watches like that don’t seem to exist anymore. Except at Wal-Mart, where I found exactly what you’d asked for in the spinning Timex display. You were thrilled.

Now I understand why. I’m reading a book about Feldafing, your displaced persons camp. The author, a man who lived there himself, noticed that by the winter of 1945, most of the DPs had acquired watches.

“Feldafingers wear watches all the way up their arms, so that they can be seen easily by all,” Simon Schochet wrote. “They are highly-polished and pampered, much like the pets of the idle and lonely.”

He thought it was strange to see “undernourished and poorlyclothed” people almost obsessively fiddling with and talking about their watches. But he understood it.

“For the former prisoners, a watch was proof of being a person of worth once again. For them, after years of deprivation, a watch represented all that was civilized and comfortable in the modern world.”

Watches, like Holocaust survivors, are becoming more memory than reality now. People use their cell phones and computers to tell
the time. Not me, though. I look at my wrist and see that it is close to noon. You’ve already missed breakfast, so you must have lunch. It’s time to get up now.

After your father-in-law sold the place he’d promised to give you, you found a job on your own. Blue Hill Avenue was Main Street USA for Boston’s Jews, and Jewish delis were its town halls. One of the well-known joints was called Jack and Harold’s. You worked there as a counterman for ten years, one week of the 4:00 p.m. to 12:00 midnight shift followed by a week of the 6:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. day shift, like a coal miner.

But Jack and Harold’s was like a farm team compared to the most famous deli of them all: the G & G. You took up an apron there in 1963, the year I was born. It was a big place, with about 250 seats that opened at 5:00 a.m. and closed at 1:00 a.m., seven days a week. Contractors came in the mornings to hire day workers, as if it was a union hall. Families broke their Sabbath hibernation with Saturday-night dinners there. College kids, cops, couples, even residents of the local mental hospital—everyone came to the G & G for all the classic Jewish foods: bagels and cream cheese, gefilte fish, chicken soup, brisket, tongue, and, most famously, corned beef sandwiches, which, of course, you didn’t eat, being partial to well-done roast beef or grilled cheese sandwiches on your breaks.

Besides being the center of the Jewish community, the G & G had been a political hot spot since Roosevelt stopped by during his 1932 presidential campaign. When Vice President Hubert Humphrey made an appearance in 1964, 20,000 people crowded the streets around the deli to see him. Jack and Teddy Kennedy made requisite G & G stops, with Teddy assembling sandwiches during his Senate campaign. And Boston and state politicians would end their campaigns with final speeches at the G & G the night before Election Day. They’d stand on tables or on a platform set up under the neon G & G sign and make
their final pleas for the Jewish vote. The most famous Jewish politician at the time, State Representative Julius Ansel, spent so much time at your deli that he had its phone number printed on his business cards.