But even with jobs, their incomes were meager. H.I.A.S. provided a small monthly stipend per head, but generally not much money was to be had. So Feter would attempt to ration his cigar supply, smoking judiciously. Always one cigar with his morning coffee, one after his midday meal of boiled mushrooms on toast, and one every evening after his usual bowl of kasha with a side of chopped eggs and onions. Or maybe the fried cheese kreplach with cream if he could manage a two-dollar supper at Ratner’s and still afford his niece’s lettuce and tomato sandwich for thirty-five cents.
But mostly the food was irrelevant to him. Feter Fritz had been taught to eat to survive by Auschwitz, which meant to eat without joy. The cigar, however, was what he savored. The ritual. The strike of the match, the whisper of flame. The rhythmic pace of puffing that kindled the tip into a glowing ruby. The long, low hush of smoke. It was during those few precious moments relishing his cigar that he would return to the man that Rachel had known as a child. The confident, charming, canny Feter Fritz, not the displaced person. Yet it was like watching a ghost inhabit a living body, a dybbuk of hubris that would possess him and then slowly dissipate with the smoke.
Out of the heat of the shower, Rachel’s hair is dripping. Chilly air has slipped under the bathroom door as she towels herself down. Because she is always cold, she has bought a heater. An EverHot Ray-Vector space heater that’s stationed under the bathroom sink. The heating elements glow in red-gold coils when she switches it on. The wave of heat calms her as she dresses in her slip, the rayon clinging to her skin. She wipes the steamy fog from the medicine cabinet mirror with her palm, gazing into her own reflection. Then she pulls open the mirror that squeaks on rusty hinges.
The shelves of the medicine cabinet are crowded with a half-used tube of Brylcreem, a little dab’ll do ya, a packet of razor blades, an aerosol can of Old Spice Smooth Shave, and a bottle of Kings Men aftershave. A Vaseline jar, a pocket tin of Anacin tablets, ten cents on special at Block Drug Store, a roughly squeezed tube of Preparation H hemorrhoid salve, because Aaron has problems with that and often needs more than a little dab. She has to rearrange everything to find the small bottle of pills prescribed by her shrink as a minor tranquilizer. Miltown it is called.
Her mother had sometimes dosed herself with an extraite de l’opium known as Laudanum de Rousseau, because a single teaspoon every three hours reduced the grief of menstrual cramps. It wasn’t much of a secret. Women in Eema’s circles carried on a love affair with laudanum. Eema decanted her elixir into a rose glass bottle with an elegant crystal stopper. But Miltown? Not so much elegant as commercially manufactured. It’s a sedative with an advertising profile.
In the newspaper ads, wives and mothers on Miltown get their husbands off to work and their children off to school calmly and without fuss. Picking up a prescription for Miltown, the ads assured her, is as common and wholesome as picking up a quart of milk from the grocery. Two tablets, four hundred milligrams each, twice a day, morning and night. Rachel unscrews the cap from the bottle and swallows her dosage as fortification against her meeting with Feter Fritz. By the time she boards the Eighth Avenue IND at West 22nd, she should be feeling as relaxed as a cat poised on a sunny windowsill.
2.
Promise Me She Is Dead
At the end of the war, it had been nearly impossible for young Rashka Morgenstern to prove that she was actually Jewish. A problem because by the time she had arrived at the gates of the displaced persons camp in the American zone, it had been designated only for Jews. So what was she to do? She was an adolescent girl on her own. She had no tattoo on her arm from a concentration camp. No documents stamped with a purple J. Her papers, in fact, said she was an Aryan! But then a young American officer with a fuzzy moustache and a pistol holstered at his hip asked her a question.
Azoy, iunge dame, aoyb ir zent take a eydish, kenen ir redn mit mir in eydish?
Tears flooded to her eyes. She cried with unadulterated joy as she answered him. Ya! Yo, ikh kenen redn mit ir! Ikh ken redn mit dir!
Yiddish had saved her.
It was her heritage. Not the holy tongue but the mother tongue. The language of Eema’s parents, Chaim and Freidka Landau, living in the sunny, clement city of Tarnów under the Hapsburg dynasty. They were religious people, Chaim and Freidka. Observant Jews, pillars of the synagogue, but also deep thinkers. And though she never knew them while they lived, this is the way they were always described by both mother and uncle to little Rashka Morgenstern growing up in Berlin. Zey zenen tif tingkerz, deyn zeyde-bobe. Intellectual people. Teachers. Her grandfather taught languages—German, French, also Hebrew—in a local school, and her grandmother taught piano from the parlor of a comfortably appointed house on Lwowska Street.
When they left Tarnów for Berlin, so that Chaim could fill an important teaching position at the Jüdische Mädchenschule, maybe they spoke German in the streets, the classrooms, the shops and public spaces. The language of assimilation. But if they retained a comfortable dialect of Yiddish in their own home, who would care? And if they continued in Yiddish after their daughter, Lavinia, and their son, Fredrich, were born, who could criticize? Yiddish was the language of the heart. So when the time came that Eema had her own daughter, was it utterly unthinkable that she share the language mother to child, just as her mother and her mother before her had done? Just as she shared the very essence of Jewish blood mother to child since Sarah, wife of Abraham? Besides, with this child, it was obvious. This was a daughter with a God-given talent for languages. “If she can hear it, she can speak it,” her eema would say of Rashka. “Just like her grandfather of blessed memory. If she can see it, she can read it. If she can read it, she can write it.”
Even so, because Rashka grew up in Berlin-Wilmersdorf, that staid dominion of bourgeois Jewish fortunes, their Yiddish remained concealed as the language of hearth and home.
German only in society! Um Gottes willen! Don’t embarrass yourself with Yiddish in front of other Jews. What do you think, this is the Ukraine?
So it was for her a secret language that little Rashka Morgenstern spoke with Eema and Feter Fritz alone. Now, however? In the city of New York? The tribes speak aloud. One is likely to hear all variants and varieties of Yiddish anywhere and everywhere, at least on the Lower East Side. Even today on certain street corners, between Canal and Houston, in certain coffeehouses and meeting spots, outside certain delicatessens, it is the language of public conversation, for heaven’s sake.
The Orchard Café and Dairy Restaurant is one such certain place where Yiddish is king. A Lower East Side institution. It is the domain of the “alter kockers” as Aaron calls these weathered old men. White hair, silver hair, no hair left at all. Many of them men who have transplanted their bodies but not their souls from the old country. They are roosting here on the Lower East Side, bent, round-shouldered, over their chessboards, their backgammon games, slapping down cards and poking pegs into their cribbage boards. They smoke and drink coffee together and deliberate. The State of Israel, the state of Zionism, the state of Jewish socialism, all topics of debate and examination. And they argue. They argue as if they are deciding an ancient biblical grudge over the general decline of everything. Especially literature! Especially art! Especially the Yiddish theater ! Especially the quality of the potato knish now that you can buy it frozen in the grocery like those ummeglich little pizza pies!