A few short months after Mama’s death, Papa made a dramatic announcement.
“I am going to Israel”, he said.
Days later, he bade me farewell, handing me a thousand dollars and the keys to the apartment. My sense of abandonment was complete. I was eighteen years old. Any feeling of optimism completely evaporated.
My two aunts would have taken me in, but they had no room. In the depths of feeling not only hopeless but homeless, I remembered Mama’s faith in my ability to take care of myself. Her early lessons in survival served me well. She had imbued me with inner courage. I’m in good hands, I thought to myself. My own.
I called a close friend who was studying for a PhD in math at UC Berkeley, California, and he invited me to join him on the West Coast. As soon as I arrived in Berkeley, two weeks after Papa left for Israel, I realized I’d made a mistake, although my friend went out of his way to make me feel welcome. He shared a small apartment with three adults and two children, who all slept on mattresses strewn on the floor. I found the arrangement extremely uncomfortable. I enrolled in a few classes in the hope they’d distract me and make me happier. And I took a job in a bagel shop whose profits helped the Hopi tribe of Native Americans, whom we visited once a month. In solidarity with their status as a marginalized minority, I was paid with meals instead of money.
Although I was surrounded by people, I felt very much alone. The nightmares, which I thought had been banished, haunted me once again. I was homesick for a home that no longer existed, and I couldn’t adjust to the California lifestyle. In desperation, I contacted the Berkeley campus rabbi, who was very sympathetic.
“What’s a nice Jewish girl from Brooklyn doing here?” he asked. “Go home”.
Before I left, he gave me the telephone number of a psychiatrist in Manhattan named Lillian Kaplan. Our special relationship changed my life.
For the next four years, I had weekly therapy sessions with Dr. Kaplan, who specialized in helping young trauma victims, including those from the Holocaust. In the safe atmosphere of her office, for the first time in my life, I was able to express all my pain, sorrow and fears. I wept as I unburdened myself about the guilt I harbored over Mama’s death and all my painful war memories that I could never share with my mother because I wanted to spare her feelings.
Dr. Kaplan secured for me a place in the Girls’ Club — a residence for homeless Jewish girls attending school, run by the Jewish Child Care Association. The beautiful brownstone building stood in the residential district of Park Slope near the Botanical Garden and the Brooklyn Museum. I lived alongside girls from wildly different backgrounds and with a wide range of traumas. They often acted out. Some had been abandoned by their families or expelled from school. Some had spent time in psychiatric institutions. Others were fugitives from abusive homes or, like me, became homeless after one or both parents died. Besides offering shelter, the Club provided emotional support through dancing, music, art and counseling. These activities were tailored in a therapeutic way to help us overcome our individual traumas.
After almost a year away, Papa returned from Israel in the middle of 1958. He was accompanied by his new wife, Sonia — a survivor of a Soviet labor camp in Siberia. Sonia was beautiful, kind and intelligent, and although she didn’t have any children of her own, she was extremely sensitive to my feelings. She was smart enough not to try to replace Mama in my affections, but her moral support and kindness mitigated my sense of loss. With Dr. Kaplan’s help, I accepted Sonia and the guilt over my mother’s death subsided. I recognized my good fortune in having such a wonderful therapist and she inspired me to follow in her footsteps. She had planted the seed for my future vocation.
After graduating from college in 1960, I resolved to move to Israel. To my surprise, after years of not keeping in touch, Maier Friedman, who had been studying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, appeared one day at the Club.
“How did you find me?” I asked him.
“I never lost track of you”, he responded.
When I told him about the vaccines I had just received in preparation for my trip, he said simply: “Let’s get married first and we’ll move there together”.
We had known each other since I was eleven, but we had never actually discussed marriage before. Now we both just knew we were meant to build a life together in Israel.
We were married in Brooklyn two months later, on June 11, 1960. It was a traditional Jewish wedding, and while representation on my side was small, Maier had a large, sprawling family. I considered myself fortunate to be embraced by the Friedmans. At last, I was part of a big, loving family and felt accepted, protected and no longer alone. But I missed Mama terribly. She had been gone for three years already, and it made me profoundly sad that she never lived to see me marry.
Maier and I didn’t have time for a honeymoon. We drove straight to San Diego in California, where Maier had a new job lined up. But West Coast living didn’t agree with us. We missed our family and friends, not to mention the vibrancy of New York, and after only six months, we returned.
Maier had a brilliant mind, and he inspired me to strive harder. He began a PhD in biochemical engineering at Columbia University, and I enrolled in a master’s program in English literature at the City College of New York. Both schools were located on the Upper West Side, and we decided to move to nearby Harlem. In 1961, Harlem was considered a dangerous part of Manhattan and we would definitely be a minority there. Our decision stunned our family and friends.
“How are we going to visit you?” Papa protested. “It’s so dangerous in that neighborhood”.
“It’s not too dangerous at all”, I replied. “There are police everywhere”.
We weren’t just motivated by a convenient commute. On our West Coast road trips, we had been affronted when we encountered segregated restrooms, restaurants and water fountains. Coming from the northeast, we had not come across the daily effects of segregation, and our sense of indignation stayed with us when we returned to New York. Maier and I were actively trying to live by our abiding principles. Our membership of Habonim, the Zionist organization, had not just strengthened our belief in the right of Israel to exist; it had also reinforced our commitment to genuine equality across the racial divide.
By the time we were husband and wife, America’s Civil Rights Movement was in full swing as African Americans demanded an end to segregation and discrimination. Jewish activists played a significant part within the movement, not least because Judaism stipulates that we have a moral obligation to uphold the fundamental rights of others. We marched alongside African Americans in Washington as they called for integration. Talking about equality wasn’t sufficient. We decided to live it.
We moved into a nice two-bedroom apartment overlooking the famous Apollo Theater, on 125th Street. We were the only white kosher Jewish couple among nearly 800 African American and Latino tenants in our twenty-one-story building.
At first, our neighbors were hostile and didn’t acknowledge us, even in the tiny elevator. I hoped the ice would break somehow but wasn’t sure about the best way to approach even the people on our very floor. We avoided eye contact and passed each other silently in the hall. Months passed before neighbors began to even nod when they saw us.
It’s a start, I thought to myself.
But Maier and I knew we were getting somewhere when we joined a tenants’ meeting and a few familiar faces smiled at us. I began to attend various smaller meetings in individual apartments, where tenants discussed safety, cleanliness and sanitation. I wanted to contribute, and I saw these meetings as a bridge toward acceptance. And so it proved. At first, I invited myself, but after a while, I was asked to attend. The barriers had come down. Our neighbors saw that we had the same concerns as they did.