From This Day Forward (20 page)

 

SR: There's now a lot of talk about society recognizing the economic contribution that housewives make, and this was a classic case. There was simply no way I could have been a foreign correspondent without Cokie's help.

 

CR: Essentially, I managed the office as well as the house. If I didn't do it, Steven would have had to hire someone else because he was on the road so much; bills wouldn't have been paid. For a single person, it would be very difficult not to have some support system in place. Being a family meant we were connected to the community. We had a completely different experience living in a foreign country with children than we would have without children. And Greece was a delightful place to be with children. No one thinks of them as nuisances; they are accepted everywhere. We spent many a winter Sunday in a country restaurant having a long meal while the kids ran around with the other children there. In good weather we packed picnics to enjoy in some wildflower-studded field. Early on, Steve instituted a Sunday rule. The family had to spend Sunday together and make no other plans. As the kids got older they chafed under that stricture, and I did, too, sometimes, but it turned out to be very wise to guarantee time together.

 

SR: I was the culprit who broke the rule one time. The phone rang one Saturday in Athens and I heard this familiar breathy voice on the other end, “Mr. Roberts, this is Jacqueline Onassis.” At first I thought it was a joke, but in fact it was Mrs. Onassis. She had started working as an editor at Doubleday and she wanted to talk to me about writing a book about Greece. It was a subject she knew a great deal about, and she had been reading my articles. Obviously, I was flattered, and intrigued. But when she asked Cokie and me to join her at a friend's house for Sunday lunch, I blurted out, “But we have a Sunday rule.” She told me that was the only time we could meet, so I essentially asked the kids for their permission and we went to lunch with Jackie Kennedy.

 

CR: She was very gracious about the children. As we were leaving she pulled me aside to say, “Tell your children that I'm grateful they let you come, and tell them that President Kennedy loved and admired their grandfather very much.” It was a lovely moment. But Steven didn't want to write a book about Greece, he just wanted to write for the newspaper, which continued to mean a lot of traveling.

 

SR: Leaving a family behind means separation, and guilt. Once in California, when I was packing for a trip, Cokie said she was sorry I was going, and I gave some stupid reply like “Well, dear, I have my job….” And she just looked at me and said, “Aren't you glad I'm going to miss you?” It was a telling moment; I've never forgotten it. And in recent years I've had occasion to remind her of the same story, as she leaves town to cover a story or attend some event. But in the end I think it's easier having a family. Cokie was paying the bills and managing the office, but her role was much more than that. Psychologically it was very important for me to know that the family was there to come home to.

 

CR: From my perspective, as a woman alone a lot of the time, children forced me out of my own innate shyness. I
had
to go to the park. I
had
to go to the school. I needed to form a community for the children's sake. I would hate to have to move to a new place without children. For women particularly, I think the sense of universality of mothers in a park is enormous. It doesn't matter what language anyone speaks, we all respond in the same way when a child falls. I think that it would have been awfully tough to have been there without children.

 

SR: We all see things through the lens of our own narrow experiences, and living abroad provides a different perspective. I always thought that the key word in the term “Jewish mother” was “Jewish,” that the mothers of my tribe were particularly attentive, and at times overly attentive, to their children. But spending an afternoon in a Greek playground was a revelation. Here were these women, all acting like “Jewish mothers”—some of them even fed their kids, a spoonful at a time, as they pushed them on swings. It made me realize that the key word is “mother,” not “Jewish,” that all mothers in all cultures share common traits. I'm not sure I would have learned that if I'd never gone to a playground.

 

CR: But things could get confusing, not just for us but for the kids, too. Steve's folks had given us a children's encyclopedia and the kids were leafing through it one day and saw a picture of a Ku Klux Klansman in full regalia. Of course that was intriguing, what was that? I made an attempt to explain the Klan and their hatred of people who were different. A few months later we're sitting on the beach in Crete and Rebecca suddenly burst into tears. When I asked what was wrong she sobbed: “I'm getting really, really, really brown and I'm Catholic and I'm Jewish and we're going home to
America where the Klan is going to get me!” Oh dear, that was my child's view of America.

 

SR: Our view of religion evolved during those years. We were a Catholic-Jewish marriage living in an Orthodox country and traveling regularly to the Muslim world. Not only did we celebrate our own holidays but we celebrated the local holidays as well. One of our favorites was Orthodox Easter, and even in our suburb of Athens our neighbors kept a custom common in their home villages and islands. At midnight everybody would gather in church, and it would be totally dark. We went to our local church, St. Sophie, which was just a few blocks away. The priest would light one candle and say,
“Christos anesti,”
Christ is risen. Then he would light one worshiper's candle, and gradually, candle by candle, the flame would be passed from hand to hand.

 

CR: So the church gradually goes from pitch darkness to full light—with no electricity, only candles. Everyone's expected to live close enough to a church to be able to walk home with a still-lighted candle, and we did. Then, following the tradition, we made a sooty cross on the doorpost with the flame. It's ritual clearly taken directly from the Passover story—the paschal mark, telling God to bless and protect the house and “pass over” the family as He carries out the ten plagues against their enemies.

 

SR: Living in that part of the world often reminded us of how Jewish and Christian traditions are so intertwined. That made it easier to raise the kids in both religions and celebrate everything! They, of course, loved getting all those presents, and had no sense of irony when they chose their own treats. Once we were on the island of Rhodes for the first night of Hanukkah, where Becca picked out an olive-wood cross for her present. Another time we were in Egypt shortly after
Passover and Lee bought an Arab headdress with the money my folks had sent him for the holiday. Our Seders have often included non-Jews and mixed couples, and several of our celebrations in Greece were quite emotional. We had one friend, a German woman whose father had been an officer killed in France during World War II. She asked to come to the Seder, very much as a gesture of reconciliation. To this day, it's one of the most moving Seders we've ever had. Another friend with German origins, a correspondent from an American publication, also asked to come one year.

 

CR: And he had a black Southern Baptist wife, just to add to the ecumenical spirit.

 

SR: Our friend Neo, the Reuters correspondent, had been very kind to us and we invited him to the Seder one year. But he was running a wire service, he had to be on constant call. If you went out to dinner with him, he was always jumping up and going to the phone. But at the Seder, to our amazement, he never moved once. Toward the end he started getting itchy and asked if the ceremony was over. When we said, yes, it's over, he leaped for the telephone! He had made this incredible gesture of friendship, telling his office not to call him until the Seder was finished. Seders were very important to us in Greece, as were all of our religious rituals, because they connected us to home and to our roots.

 

CR: But they were also a lot of work! Making potato pancakes for Hanukkah in that kitchen was not easy. Remember that this was pre-Cuisinart. I grated everything by hand. But after the cheesecake fiasco I did find matzoh. We actually lived right around the corner from Greece's only real supermarket and for a price you could get many imported things. Many of our American friends had PX privileges on the military base, but they weren't supposed to shop for unauthorized
people, like us, and boy, did they follow the rules! Something like matzoh they could justify for religious reasons, but peanut butter, no. Our standard request from America, the things I could never seem to find locally, were Tabasco, peanut butter, grits, chocolate chips, and Fig Newtons. The fresh figs in Greece were beautiful, but they never learned to “Newtonize” them like Nabisco.

 

SR: One family that came often to our Seders, and still does, were the Friedmans. Townsend was Jewish, a diplomat in the American embassy, and his wife, Eli, was a Brazilian Catholic. They were raising their two girls in both religions, just like us, so it was perfect. In one of the Seder rituals, the youngest child opens the front door to see if Elijah, the messenger of God, has come. One year we sent out Elisa, the younger Friedman girl, and she disappeared for a while. When she finally wandered back in we asked if she'd seen Elijah, and she replied, “No, but I saw God.” It was one of the high points. I told the story recently at her wedding dinner.

 

CR: One year, I guess it was our first real Seder in Greece, Lee asked, “Daddy, when you were a little boy and both of your parents were Jewish, did Elijah come?” He thought Elijah was boycotting me, the
shiksa
! But I took very seriously the responsibility of making both religions part of our family life. The Catholic church I usually went to was a pretty chapel in the neighborhood where the priest said one Mass in Latin. With so many foreigners attending, that was the easiest common language. It had a little yard with swings and rabbit hutches and the kids loved to go, but when I wanted them to hear and understand a Mass in English, we'd attend the Anglican church.

For Jewish High Holy Days we'd join the armed forces. The U.S. military owned a hotel near the airport, and one year at Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, when Steve
was out of town, I took the kids to morning services. The military would bring in a visiting rabbi and I found him sitting out on the balcony of his room, looking out at the water. I knocked and asked, “Sorry, are there Rosh Hashanah services here?” He explained that at services the night before, the other families had decided not to come back again, but he was hanging around in case anybody showed up. So I said to him, “Here we are.” The kids were four and six. It was perfect. He pulled out the Torah and let them see it and touch it. And then he pulled out the shofar, the ram's horn that is blown to signal the start of the year. He let them try to blow it and of course they couldn't, but it was a neat thing to try. Then we all went downstairs in this American hotel and the kids had real American ice cream and the rabbi and I had American beers. Happy New Year!

 

SR: My grandparents had come to America from what's now Russia and Poland, and like many Jews of my generation, I grew up in a very different world and felt little connection to the lives they had led. Right before we moved to Greece, I was contacted by a representative of Amnesty International who wanted to feed me information about the Greek military government. We met in a restaurant in the Los Angeles airport and she told me her own story. As a young Jewish woman in Italy before the war, she came home one day to find her parents gone, arrested by the Fascists. She fled in terror, joined the underground, was captured and tortured. As I listened something deep inside me just gave way. I started sobbing, right there in the restaurant. She was talking about my people, my heritage, and I realized that moving to Europe would give me a chance to reconnect to that heritage. So as we traveled over the next few years, we got in the habit of looking for signs of Jewish settlement.

 

CR: And sometimes we found signs when we weren't looking. We were riding bikes on the Greek island of Chios, just
off the Turkish coast, and it started to rain. We hid under this clump of trees for shelter and it turned out to be an old desecrated Jewish cemetery. It somewhat undid us.

 

SR: The gravestones were in three languages.

 

CR: Right, they were in Hebrew, Ladino, and Italian. The island had belonged to Italy at one point.

 

SR: Ladino is the Sephardic version of Yiddish, both languages that Jews spoke to each other. Ladino was a corruption of Spanish, the way Yiddish was a version of German. On another occasion I was in Salonika, a port city in northern Greece, once a thriving Jewish community that had been totally wiped out by the Nazis. Behind an Orthodox church I found a large pile of headstones with Hebrew writing on them. The Nazis had torn up the Jewish cemetery and the priests had tried to collect and preserve whatever relics they could find. It was one of many moments during those years that brought me closer to my own history. But the experience that was most meaningful to both of us was a trip we all took to Israel, our common Holy Land. We took a children's Bible along to read with the kids as we visited the sites where the stories had taken place.

 

CR: This Bible had been approved by so many priests, rabbis, ministers, and psychologists that it sometimes verged on the ridiculous. We were at one of the holiest spots in Jerusalem, which is supposed to be where Abraham almost sacrificed Isaac. But that crucial story had been excised from this Bible, apparently because children would be upset at the thought that their fathers might actually kill them. But Lee was such a pain in the neck that day that I was feeling a certain sympathy for Abraham! I didn't care what the psychologists said, I was telling the story!