A Simple Life

It was a simple life. A time when an apple was a treasure, and indoor bathrooms were an unheard-of luxury. There was an icebox for a refrigerator and kerosene lamps for cooking. We weren’t rich, but neither was anyone else.

My mother, who once created gorgeous belts for the rich, now sewed canvas bags that children used as briefcases. Our life was one of day-to-day subsistence, and she used her skills to earn bread and the basics.

The Agudah hired my father to take charge of all religious matters at an absorption center in Haifa. Thousands of new olim brought a flood of needs to an overtaxed country. Tents and ramshackle huts near the port provided “housing,” but the immigrants also needed food, jobs, and schooling. Religious needs was my father’s department. For kashrus, weddings, a bar mitzvah, a bris — everyone approached him for help.

But his main occupation became the kitchen that fed poor immigrants hot, nourishing meals.

“When I went into the kitchen for the first time, the cook wasn’t religious, and it was a Purim shpiel in there. All the keilim were completely mixed up,” my father told me.

The cook was a tough Sabra who yelled at this insolent religious Jew interfering with his duties, but my father stood firm. I remember the cans of red and blue paint he schlepped into the industrial kitchen to mark fleishig and milchig utensils. He kashered every last spoon, and made sure the kitchen door was padlocked unless he was there to supervise. At six foot two, my father cut an imposing figure, but all the immigrant kids soon learned of his soft heart. Anyone who messed with the kitchen was in trouble, but punishments were followed by something sweet. He was firm, but everyone loved him.

So many of those olim had no one except for organizations like the Agudah to care for them, but I was rich in relatives — even though I wasn’t always sure how they were related. This wasn’t the reality for many children of survivors, but under the beneficial influence of his mother, dowager Queen Helen, King Michael of Romania assured the Nazis, “I will take care of my Jews,” and he did — although not quite in the way the Nazis preferred. His defiance meant that small pockets of Jews escaped the worst tragedies, and I had grandparents who moved to postwar Israel.

I luxuriated in the personal attention of Saba and Savta, spending days at a time in their home. There were other older relatives, “cousins” and “aunts” and “uncles” from somewhere in the tangled family tree, and of course, there was Mindu Neini (neini is aunt in Hungarian), my mother’s sister, trapped under Communist rule in Europe. For years, my mother sent Mindu Neini packages of goods, the occasional censored letter, and money she scraped from our uncertain finances. Relatives kept cropping up unexpectedly — when we immigrated to America, one man from Canada would show up at family weddings, and at every kiddush and bris I made.

“Who is he?” I wondered. “How are we related?”

“He’s just a cousin,” my father answered evasively.

Even when I named my children, I didn’t always know who they were named after. Years later, rejoicing over my firstborn girl, my father requested I name her Mindel. Mindu Neini, my mother’s sister, was Mindel, so I assumed my father was asking me to name my daughter after whoever she was named after. Was the original Mindel a great-grandmother?

“Who was Mindel?” I wanted to know.

“Eppes a babbe,” was the quick reply.

Preoccupied with the demands of my first baby, I didn’t pursue it. My beautiful little girl became Mindel, after “eppes a babbe,” and I was content.

The Perfect Doll

I loved Eretz Yisrael, but my parents felt that there was greater financial opportunity in America. My Romanian father couldn’t receive a visa to America because of immigration quotas, so he looked elsewhere. Finding an ad seeking a rebbi in Argentina, he responded, and the South American Jewish community arranged our itinerary. Preparations were underway for weeks as my mother packed and prepared. Kosher food on the ship would be nonexistent, so my mother stocked up on cans of sardines, containers of yellow soup mix, and sturdy boxes of matzah. Always enterprising, she planned on using fruits and vegetables from the ship’s galley to concoct nourishing meals. I was seven when we set sail for Argentina, home to a small but strong Jewish community.

The journey seemed endless, a circuitous route that first led to the sun-drenched city of Genoa, Italy. I can see myself, a skinny little girl, staring out the window of the place we stayed until the ship sailed on, watching a solemn procession of red-robed cardinals and Italian peasants shuffling down the dusty road. I wanted to run downstairs for a closer look, but my mother firmly refused to let me be part of the “goyishe zach.”

Three weeks aboard the ship, in a cramped cabin we shared with a group of nuns, didn’t make for an especially pleasant trip. My mother was wary of the black-garbed women, and never let me speak to them. Her control slipped only once.

We were on the ship’s deck and needed something from our cabin. I darted below, only to discover a nun in the room.

“Come here, little girl,” she said softly, smiling. Politely, I came closer. She showed me a picture which I now know was a religious image.

“Kiss it,” she urged me, sliding the paper closer.

I didn’t know what it was, but Hashem awakened the primal Jewish instinct in my neshamah, and I felt the jarring knowledge that this wasn’t right.

“No, I won’t do it,” I retorted.

“Just one kiss,” the nun coaxed.

Gratitude for my teachers and parents wells in my heart today, because everything I’d been taught about clinging to Yiddishkeit flashed through my mind as I faced my adversary.

“I’d rather die than kiss that picture!” I cried, hot defiance pouring from my innocent lips.

I never told my parents. The nuns never bothered me again.

To my little girl’s mind, the incident that made the deepest impression occurred on the sugar-soft sandy beaches of the exotic La Palma Island. It was the only stop during our long, three-week journey, somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Morocco. The captain allowed us to stretch our legs while the ship was provisioned, and we found ourselves in the middle of a bustling bazaar.

Clutching my mother’s hand, we wound through throngs of vendors, embroidered fabrics, vibrant fruits and vegetables, and freshly caught fish. I had eyes only for one vendor. He was holding the most beautiful doll in the world, a two-and-a-half-foot tall, realistic toy. Breathlessly, I watched as he pulled a magic string to make the doll turn her head and mechanically utter, “Mama, Papa” over and over again. My eyes popped, heart squeezing with longing. We were too poor for dolls, except for a “sock” doll my mother made by cutting arms and legs in the fabric and sewing on button eyes. I knew better than to ask, but I couldn’t make my feet move from that booth.

Suddenly, my mother bent down and to my bemusement, removed her shoe. She yanked a piece from her heel and retrieved a precious five-dollar bill. After some haggling with the man, she reached over and handed me the doll. That was five dollars she must have scrabbled and pinched to save for a moment of dire necessity, but she used it to buy me a doll. I was the happiest girl in the world as I carried my treasure back to the boat.

I’ve never forgotten that doll.

A New World

Coming from the Jewish homeland, Argentina was both strange and exotic. There wasn’t a big frum community, and there wasn’t much of a Jewish neighborhood. We were scattered among the native Argentineans — the shul was 30 blocks from where we lived — but our apartment was beautiful, with a gas range and a refrigerator, unheard-of luxuries in Israel.

July was winter in Argentina, and I was abruptly thrust into the bewildering world of school, where Hebrew, Yiddish, and Romanian weren’t much help, and the ABCs were just so many squiggles on the page.

Sweet, patient Senorita Laura tutored me in reading and writing until I was proficient enough to succeed in the morning at public school, after which I spent the afternoon at the Jewish school under my beloved Morah Rivka. Inkwells were standard, and every notebook was a model of my perfect penmanship. We even completed math problems in ink. Complex multiplication and division problems I’d painstakingly put down, marched in orderly columns across my papers.

Resilient as children usually are, I adapted to my new Argentinian life, to a new language, to a new school with new scholastic demands, and to a world where chalav Yisrael milk, for example, necessitated a trip to milk cows and then a long stint with a butter churn.

What I didn’t know was that the political situation in my new home was precarious. Perón, the dictator of the country, was kind to the Jews. He had lost his beloved wife before we arrived and had been impressed by the flawless Spanish eulogy of Rabbi Amram Blum, a talmid of prewar Pressburg who moved to South America. Cultured and intelligent, he caught the attention of Perón, who made this talmid chacham his personal advisor. It was a beneficial relationship for the entire Jewish community, but the country as a whole seethed with discontent, and two years after we arrived, revolution exploded in the form of a military coup. Rabbi Blum had to flee the country, and my father worried for our safety.

“I can’t immigrate to America,” he told my mother. “The immigrant quota for Romanians is too low, but you registered as a German after the war. The quota for Jews from Germany is much higher. Esther’s a minor, so you can put her name on your passport, and you should be able to leave Argentina.”

My childhood world was once more uprooted, but this time I was traveling without my father. More than a year would pass before I saw him again.

Land of the Free

America was big. America was strange. America was frightening.

We started life in Philadelphia, City of Brotherly Love, in November of 1956, at the home of my mother’s widowed aunt. I was bewildered by her thunderous rebukes when I didn’t wash the dishes to her strict standards, and disbelieving that in such a house, Shabbos was nonexistent.

We needed to leave, so three months later, my mother found a cramped apartment for the two of us in Williamsburg, where she began to work in a sweater factory, armed with a green card due to a cousin who was a lawyer. She was determined to move heaven and earth until we could be reunited with my father. The difficult months melted away when my father was finally able to join us in February of 1957. Tall and charismatic, he found himself besieged by curious landsleit introducing themselves to this “officer in a shtreimel,” as one friend put it.

We eventually rented a house on 43rd Street in Boro Park. There were three other Jewish families nearby. I was enrolled in Rav Ehrenreich’s Bais Yaakov, my father became the menahel in the Satmar cheder of Boro Park (which occupied three storefronts crammed with milk-crate seats and plywood “desks”), and my mother happily settled into her role as a wife and mother.

Peace

We gloried in the peaceful, uneventful years.

I threw myself into my studies, and evenings over schoolbooks were set to the background of my mother’s beloved Tchaikovsky, Mozart, and Beethoven. As a girl, my mother learned halachos from a rebbi, and whatever she needed to know to build a Jewish home. She was intelligent and well-read (my mother knew who the authors of the classics were).

But her appreciation of learning and knowledge didn’t diminish her love of nourishing her family physically. A master old-world cook, recipes with precise measurements weren’t part of my mother’s culinary wisdom. She made sweet-and-sour stuffed cabbage, melt-in-your-mouth kokosh cake, strudel with apples and raisins bursting through sugar-dusted crust, and the Romanian dish called mamaliga — creamy cornmeal with a splash of milk, thickened with sour cream and melted cheese, which we often ate for breakfast.

Our home was small, but my mother kept it open for people in need. A hot meal for new immigrants was part of a regular day, and I remember when a newly arrived aunt and uncle with three children stayed with us for a while. What I don’t recall is how we fit, but it’s possible that I slept on the floor. For my mother, giving was as natural as breathing.

My mother sewed me gorgeous dresses that were the envy of my teenage friends and gave me the love and security of a beloved only child. With artistic flair and a masterful needle, she was even able to create realistic portraits of people with nothing more than a piece of fabric, colorful skeins of thread, and an expert eye. The one thing she couldn’t give me was my freedom. Traumatized by her experiences in Auschwitz, she wouldn’t let me attend camp. Who would supervise me? And when my graduating eighth-grade class went to Washington, D.C. for graduation, I wasn’t allowed to participate. It was painful, but I wasn’t the only girl with overprotective survivor parents, which made it easier to bear.

But she did find me a shidduch. Her closest friend from Europe lived in Washington Heights, but they often spoke on the phone. My mother’s friend knew a wonderful boy from Australia learning at Nitra Yeshiva in Mount Kisco. The family had moved to America to find shidduchim for this boy and his four younger sisters. Their mission was a success, and our wedding was joyous (followed by the weddings of my four sisters-in-law). We settled in Boro Park, not far from my parents.

I Knew Your Mother

After three girls, the birth of my first son was incredibly exciting. Our Canadian relative came, as usual, and bought me a baby outfit for my son. As soon as I felt strong enough, I went to 13th Avenue to exchange the size.

“Who bought this?” the store owner asked, eyeing the frilly outfit.

“A relative from Canada,” I answered.

“What’s your name?” he inquired. I told him, somewhat impatient. Why was he making such a big deal out of changing an outfit’s size?

He heaved a gusty sigh.

“I knew your mother.”

“You know my mother,” I corrected him indignantly.

“I knew your mother,” he repeated, shaking his head, and I suddenly felt the foundations of my world tottering. Pieces half-understood — the place of my memories (which I later found out was an orphanage I had been placed in until my father’s remarriage), the “relatives” who must have been related to my birth mother, eppes a babbe — my mother? — were tumbling and rearranging themselves in my mind. I fled abruptly, careening down the streets with my carriage, eyes blind with tears.

Once home, I jammed a pair of sunglasses over my reddened eyes and called my father’s sister. She was only 15 years older than me, and we were as close as sisters.

“Rechel, I have to speak to you,” I croaked over the phone. When she opened her door, I didn’t even step inside. “Who is my mother?” I cried.

She looked at me, and I saw the tears welling in her eyes.

“I knew her,” she whispered. “She died of pneumonia when you were little. Your father lost his first wife and daughter in the War. Your birth mother was his second wife, and your mother now is his third wife.”

I found my birth mother and lost her on the same day.

She lived and died in that moment, a shadowy figure I never knew.

“But what happened? How did I not know?”

At home, I poured out the story to my husband. One look at his face, and I knew that he knew. My relatives knew. Even my best friend knew. But Hashem had seen fit to help them conceal the information from me until I was 32, and the mother of four children.

My husband tried to calm me down. “Before we got married, your father went to the Satmar Rav with a kvittel for a brachah. He asked if he should tell you the truth. ‘What for? She can’t say Kaddish,’ the Satmar Rav told him.”

It took three long, tortured months for me to absorb that so much of my life wasn’t what I had imagined. I was a kimpeturin, sensitive, emotional, and constantly crying.

My father was visiting three months later, and the words finally pushed themselves out of my heart. “Ich veiss. I know,” I told him.

He didn’t ask what I knew. He understood. And the realization hit me — he’d wanted to share the information, but he must have made an agreement with my second mother that he wouldn’t tell me the truth. I found out later that my second mother had endured hellish experiments in Auschwitz that made it impossible for her to bear children. She wanted to be my mother in every sense of the word.

She needed a child to love.

I needed a mother to love and to love me.

Hashem brought us together.

You Are My mother

When the turbulence of my discovery calmed, I felt an overwhelming sense of gratitude.

I never grew up feeling orphaned. I had a normal relationship with my parents, with no doubts or insecurities. I never took out my teenage angst on a “stepmother” by questioning her love for me. I walked down to the chuppah with the woman who raised me, embraced by her complete devotion. I never wondered for a moment if I was enough for the woman who showed me every day that I was her entire world.

But I made one tremendous mistake that I still regret — I didn’t tell my father not to tell my mother that I knew.

We were talking about something, I can’t even remember what — and I said, “I like it, do you?” My mother didn’t agree with my opinion on the subject. “But I like it,” I insisted. Totally normal, a mother and daughter not agreeing on something trivial.

But not for her.

“You can do whatever you want. I’m not your real mother,” she said softly.

I froze at the shards of pain piercing her voice and realized that he had told her. I was in agony, not sure what to say.

“You are my mother,” I finally choked out. But it was a constant battle that needed to be fought again and again.

When her role as my mother was taken away, as she saw it, something broke inside. Her life was being my mother, and when I knew she wasn’t, an element of my mother’s identity was lost.

“You’re more than my mother!” I once burst out. “You did for me what no real mother could do!”

I hope it helped soothe her pain because every word was true.

I couldn’t bear to see her suffering.

Two Mothers

As my mother grew older, cancer weakened her once-tireless hands and stilled her ceaseless care for her family.

Summertime found me working in the camp my father had founded many years before. I made sure that my mother was ensconced in the comfortable room closest to the office where I took care of all the camp crises. A Jewish caretaker helped, but I felt privileged to care for my mother whenever I could, sitting outside in the fresh, country air, and cooking special foods to tempt her nonexistent appetite.

“I would like mamaliga,” she said to me one day, wistfully.

This was in the days before “exotic” ingredients like cornmeal became de rigueur in every grocery store, and so began a spirited cornmeal hunt. Scouring the nearby stores yielded no results, so I traveled farther afield, finally hitting the jackpot in Woodridge, at a hole-in-the-wall Chinese grocery.

Cooking the gritty cornmeal into a warm bowl of buttery yellow sunshine was an honor. Each bite was an act of devotion, every spoonful overflowed with love.

It was the last summer of my mother’s life.

She was niftar before the end of August.

The levayah, at my father’s shul in New York, was devastating. When I lost my birth mother, I didn’t realize what had happened. Now I knew what it was to lose a mother. The pain was indescribable.

When the men brought out the aron, I broke through the ranks of mourners, not heeding curious eyes and sympathetic stares.

“You are my mother!” I screamed through my sobs, my last tribute to the woman I loved so much.

It was then that I finally told my second mother’s secret to my children (one daughter had suspected). I have grandchildren named after both my birth mother and my second mother, who my children loved as their Bubby.

Today, I keep two yahrtzeits. Every summer in Av, I try to go to Eretz Yisrael to visit the kevarim of both women — the one who gave birth to me, and the one who raised me.

I never resented the secret of my childhood.

Secrets cast long shadows, but shadows are not only darkness. Shadows can soften, give welcome shade, blur the edges of pain. I had a normal, beautiful childhood because of the secret cloaking my loss.

And I am a daughter of two mothers, davening that both should be meilitzos yosher for my children and all their descendants.

My birth mother gave me life, and I am forever grateful.

But Mommy, my second mother, you also gave me life. You made me who I am today.

I love you.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 911)