Great Kisser (27 page)

As a child, he was looked down upon in the Jewish school as a child of Polish descent, not a pure German Jew but an
Ost-Jude
. A double bind.

Sometimes he would have liked to join in and march with the Hitler youth. Trumpets in the street, enthralling parades, nifty uniforms, camaraderie, gripping, pulse-quickening music, great sporting events, powerful leaders in whose footsteps one could follow. He would have loved to be part of it.

“I saw Hitler in 1936,” Oscar told me. “I lined up to see him with the crowds. The army came first, goosestepping very high in the air. Horses! Drums! Music! The police, the SS. Finally Hitler appeared in his black Mercedes. Everybody was screaming ‘Heil Hitler.' Carried away. Then,
‘Sieg heil, sieg heil, sieg heil!'”

By 1938 the Nazis had taken his family's bank account, all of their money, his father's jewelry business.

The Nazis tried to deport the Polish Jews in Cologne to Poland. Oscar's entire family was arrested and marched to the train station. They were put on a train to the Polish border. But the Poles would not let them in. They didn't want the Jews either. Oscar and his family waited in the train. It moved forward, lurched backward. All the Jews were sent back to Cologne. They were charged the train fare for their deportation and return.

Soon after, the Nazis came to the house and arrested Oscar's father and two uncles. They were again taken by train to the Polish border. They were removed from the train, and the Nazi guards chased them across to Poland. But the Poles were waiting again, shooting in the air. They chased the Jews back to the German side. This went on night after night. The Poles chased the Jews back to Germany and the Germans would grab them and chase them back to the Poles. On one of these nights, Oscar's father and his brothers escaped and found their way to America. Oscar's father had gotten a visa and pleaded with his wife to take the children and flee with him, but Oscar's mother was afraid of a new country, a new language. Oscar was left in Germany with his mother and brother.

Within weeks of Oscar's father's and uncles' escape, Oscar, his mother, brother, aunt and niece were evacuated to the Cologne fairgrounds with a thousand other Jews. Their jewelry, watches, wedding rings and all their identification papers were confiscated. They were herded into the main hall, enclosed with barbed wire, and left lying on the wet wood shavings for 24 hours. Then they were taken to the Deutz railroad station, locked in the freight train and deported to Riga.

The trip took 80 hours. They were driven from the Skirotava freight yards by Latvian SS men armed with whips and iron rods, by soldiers and German shepherds. When they arrived in Riga, the streets were covered with blood. The white snow had turned gray and red. The corpses in the snow were of old men, women and children. He saw trampled baby carriages, children's sleighs, purses, gloves, galoshes, bags with food, baby bottles filled with frozen oatmeal, children's overshoes. The corpses were still warm and soft, the faces were covered with blood, the eyes were open. In the house that Oscar entered, the kitchen table had plates of uneaten or partially eaten food on it. Everything was frozen.

45,000 Jews had been murdered that week in the forest to make room for the new arriving Jews.

“You never saw a child playing,” Oscar said. “All of them clung timidly close to their mothers or sat in gateways.”

Oscar was caught with a piece of bread and taken to the graveyard with some others to be shot. When a guard sneezed and partially turned, Oscar threw himself down behind a gravestone and hid. When the murdering was over and there was the silence of death, the soldiers, a good day's work done, left. Oscar went back to his mother and brother.

The war was over, and during the day my grandmother with her babushka, holding my hand, took me down to the lower East Side to shop. And my father was always drawn back to the old neighborhood, to Yonah Schimmel's for knishes, the Garden Cafeteria where Isaac Bashevis Singer would later sit and write, Ratner's, Molly's Restaurant with the singing waiters. But still Yiddish was always a badge of shame; it was what you left behind. My father and mother spoke no Yiddish. They were modern; no greenhorns.

But they were pulled back to those East Side streets by unquenchable nostalgia, the National Theater on East Houston where they staged watered down versions of Yiddish classics, Moscowitz and Lupowicz for a hot corned beef on rye and a celery tonic, Russ and Daughters for sour pickles, Maurice Schwartz's Yiddish Art Theater—all dying by then, dead, 80-year old men in tattered tuxes as matinee idols, the Jews like my father and me returning again and again to the sacred streets—Cherry, Catherine, Stanton, Delancey, Ludlow, Rivington, Monroe.

As I grew up, I felt left out of World War Two, I'd missed the romance of it, the intrigue, the excitement, lovers parting on a Paris street singing “We'll Meet Again,” the sweep of tragedy. Just as I liked to travel through picturesque, suffering Harlem, looking at the sweltering souls through the tenement windows from my subway or train car. Something told me early on that I would miss the real engagements of life, just as my father had done.

My father, his face sunny and unlined into his late 80s, untouched by human contact and sweat, his expensive clothes mint fresh and shining, his red rosy Cadillac (yet he lived in one boarding house room). He could stand no pressure, no annoyances, (a missing button could ruin his day) and somehow managed to remove most of them from his life. Who could resist the blandishments of a father who pointed to every danger, every catastrophe that lurked everywhere, to all of the ways people fell through the cracks—and who promised me protection and safe, harmless passage through every stage of life's tests, risks, challenges. Why sweat it if you didn't have to? Sometimes I felt a thrill go through me, as much as I hated it, I felt a huge laughter roaring out of me like a waterfall that I had to control, to think I could sail through life unharmed, untouched, and get my father's pot of gold when he croaked. And get this: How could I ever die if I'd never lived? Nothing would wear out!

Cowardice was a code of honor to him. Jews didn't announce they were Jews. My parents proudly knew no Yiddish and didn't draw attention to themselves. When my father said the word “Jewish,” he lowered his voice and sometimes looked around him.

My father did not like dark, swarthy complexions like his own. White was nice, blonde, smiling and perky. He loved blonde WASPS from “good families.” He liked the old ladies' tearooms too, with names like “Miss Mary Elizabeth's,” ate basic clean American food—meat loaf, mashed potatoes, chicken pot pie, apple brown betty, lemon meringue pie—served by no-nonsense white-haired dowagers of unquestionable Christian lineage. He wanted to plump himself down, weird as he was, right in the heart of the generic normal center of American life. His insurance company didn't let the Jewish salesmen rise in rank; the insurance business was rife with anti-Semitism.

He avoided greenhorns, immigrants and Holocaust survivors. He panicked when I had a black friend in school, afraid I'd be pulled down into the pits of suffering he feared for me and for himself just by associating with someone even more vulnerable than a Jew. Playgrounds, ruffians, boxing rings, wrestling, stickball, swimming, Boy Scouts, dancing, draft boards, baseball, football, the military, Irish bars, college tests, SATs, first dates, petting, snowy nights and flesh grappling, hayrides, roller-skating, were out—“Are you crazy?” bellowed my father. “Not for you, my son. That's for the goyim. Lie back and take it easy. You'll always have your father in back of you.”

My father gazed at me and smiled. I knew that smile. “Don't be so sad, Michael,” he said with utter sincerity. “When I die, your life begins.”

Later his manic mood returned big time. He grinned, his face glowed red with pearly beads of sweat. He reached up to the top of the closet and took out a bottle of schnapps covered with dust, opened it, took a sip and was instantly high. He hopped over to the phonograph and flipped it on. “Come on, Michael, buck up!” His favorite record, the Russian song, “Oh Che Chanya” played. My father rushed out of the room, rushed back in wearing only his underpants and Russian boots, jumped, his hands to the heavens, clapped his hands, stomped his boots, “Hey! Hey! Hey!” As the music got faster and faster, my father swirled, he dropped to the floor and did deep knee bends to the music, grinning at me, shouting, “You'll be rich! rich! rich!”

So that even now, in the midst of writing about the Holocaust, I can pause to snivel and complain about this high voltage, strutting, screaming, sweating, gleaming, handsome, untiring body of flesh—my father, bounding through life, whose unstinting, unflagging devoted aim in life was to make me into a cripple. Whom I did not have the courage to walk away from, because he held out such high promise to me of getting through life without a scratch. But he had to die first.

When I met Oscar, it was as if I were returning to the start of my life, to the time when I knew that Jews led lives of peril. When the Holocaust was just over, and the Germans and Poles and Austrians and Ukrainians were draining the forests and the camps and the prisons and the barracks of mountains of blood and bones and brains and ears and eyes and testicles and ribs. When Jews were roaming the world in search of a place to live and rest and reflect on all the mothers and husbands and wives and children and uncles and aunts and lives that had been righteously taken away from them because in the opinions of those who murdered them and those who watched or stood by, they had not the slightest right to exist.

And Oscar Schwartz saw me as viewing him with contempt, or using him, or making a good buck from him, or pitying him for his faltering English, or his stolen years, or not caring about his fate, or seeing an old man before me, very uncool and out of it. He waited for me to cross him, or abandon him, or exploit him, or ridicule him, or underestimate him, or distort or diminish his story. What could I understand of what he had gone through? I would rob him somehow. I would take his wife, perhaps: I was so much more modern, I could talk to women as people, I was hip, I liked jazz and theater and film. In business, he knew there were the fuckers and the fucked, and he was not going to be fucked ever again.

And to me Oscar was my encounter with the fate I had averted by chance, by birth, by geography—splashing around in my bathtub—he was the embodiment of what all those mysterious brethren of mine, the Jews, had gone through.

The story was one story, only one, whoever told it, however varied the details. The story always had blood in it, buckets of it, mountains of black smoke billowing to the sky night and day, a sea of ashes, and German shepherds, and windowless, barred, freezing or roasting freight cars, and whips, and huge rats, and endless rain and snow, and furnaces, and locked gas chambers, and hours like days or months or years, and frozen corpses, and bodies standing outside in snow barely clothed and people digging their own graves, disrobing and placing their shirts and pants and shoes on separate piles, being shot and falling into their graves. And the feeling of abandonment by the entire world, in which all this took place, the smiles of glee.

Oscar marching with the other Jews to the camp through the streets to a chorus of shouts from onlookers: “It smells like garlic around here!”

This is not a postmodernist story, and may be boring to those hungry for new styles, content, technique, abstract thoughts and fresh ways of seeing and defining truth. For instance, the soldiers laughing as they decide to put a Jewish girl in a bag, put a cloth in her mouth, tie her up and (all these plans they disclosed in front of her) beat her until there were no bones left in her body. This they proceeded to do, then poured the remains of the bag into the square for all the Jews to see. Then they lit cigarettes and talked of a job well done.

Or the woman who, against the rules, gave birth to a child. Obersturmfuhrer Krause, head of the Riga ghetto, herded hundreds of Jews to watch as he stood on the balcony and gave the signal to the police. Wachmeister Kabnello carried the baby out, and, lifting him high over his head, he displayed it to the Jews in the courtyard watching. Then, holding the child by its feet, he swung his arm and struck the child's head against the porch steps. Blood spurted out. Kabnello wiped off his face and hands with a handkerchief. Then he brought out the mother and father. They were shot on the spot, next to the corpse of their child.

When I listen to Oscar and then leave him, all the images rise up in me of chimneys, of smoke and ghettos and dark alleys. I grow increasingly fearful of walking the streets, that the sidewalks will open up and swallow me, that people will suddenly turn on me and hurl me into pits and bury me alive.

I have difficulty with technical details. For my entire life I have struggled with trying to get the picture: the Nazis 1) gassed the Jews and then 2) burned the bodies, dead or alive. Why is that so hard to understand? Yet I cannot grasp it. I could grasp it soon enough if it were done to me.

In the middle of working with Oscar, I took a vacation in Stonington, Maine, a fishing village founded by Italian immigrant stonecutters. The doors were not locked and the event of the week was a movie or concert at the barn called the Opera House. There were no Italians anymore, and there were no Jews or blacks.

The adults of the town adjourned to sleep by 9 or 10
P.M.
and then on this island of more churches per capita than anywhere in the country, in the dark the kids took over down by the glistening pier. Sudden unearthly, celestial sounds of rippling, excited subversive laughter bursting free and young and breathless echoed through the little town, illicit and salty from the sea and fresh and green and erotic. The knock of sailing boats, the fish in the tide, lapping of water, smell of pine, laughter come and gone, and again repressed laughter breaking free, unleashed; the courtship dance. And then quiet, only the salty wind for a while, pinpricks of laughter again, far whispers in the wind, the sounds mainly of young girls, their red lips, their darting tongues, their bursting bodies. Sounds so innocent Dylan Thomas might link them to Adam and Maiden and “Time let me play and be golden in the mercy of his means.… Time held me green and dying, Though I sang in my chains like the sea.”