The Souvenir (7 page)

I slowly made my way down into this artificial underworld, cautiously moving into what I sensed to be the center of the crypt. I stopped and panicked. I wanted out. Then it occurred to me to look back at my point of entry. The light from outside was dazzling, framing the stairs in a brilliant white rectangle. When I closed my eyes, the glowing shape was visible through my lids.

I glanced back into the dark with open eyes, and was completely blinded. “Where are you?” I yelled and was startled at the sound of Lloyd's voice just a few feet away. I thought of those monkeys jabbering like crazy humans in the jungle night. I turned and saw the faint glimmer of daylight at the far end and started to walk toward it as fast as I could.

It was then I realized that I could never, really, grasp the fear my father and his fellow soldiers had felt in the jungle. In Luzon, when they sealed the caves dug by the Japanese, the GIs took turns entering the dark caverns all alone. It was incredibly dangerous. They checked for stragglers, then lobbed a grenade and beat a hasty retreat. For months at a time my father had slept with his hand on his rifle, in a hollow in the dirt, struggling against the fear that he would not return home.

We turned back to the cottage and each headed into our respective workspaces. I was relieved to be sitting in the warmth and light of my little office. I could hear Lloyd cursing through the wall as he worked on a painting. I read some letters and began transcribing.

M
Y FATHER WAS
five and a half years old in 1921 when he emigrated to the United States from the town of Zhitomir in Ukraine. He traveled with his seven-year-old sister, Ruth, and his mother, Rebecca. His father, Herschel (American name: Harry), had left Russia a year earlier to lay the groundwork for the family's new life in America. He waited anxiously for the first sight of his wife and children as they arrived on the boat at Ellis Island.

As my grandmother walked down the ramp, with her daughter at her side and her small son's hand held tightly in hers, the immigration officer gestured them aside, pointing to Aunt Ruth's shiny black braids. “I thought he wanted to admire her beautiful hair,” my grandmother told me seventy years later, “but instead he told me to untie the bow so he could look for bugs.”

I found my grandmother's transit visa from Russia in one of the many dusty boxes in my parents' condo. The yellowing paper was inscribed with sepia ink and stamped by the Polish Komisar: “Legation De Belgique En Pologne,” it reads. Born in “Imperium Rosyjskiego,” the Russian empire. The photo on the visa shows my thirty-year-old grandmother, Rebecca, in a high-necked silk dress surrounded by her two children; my father with close-cropped hair and a ruffled sailor collar; my aunt Ruth with her long braids in a modest pinafore and white blouse. The children
gaze solemnly into the camera.

I used to pester my father with questions about his childhood in Russia, but he claimed to have no memories at all. If he did, he said, he could not distinguish them from dreams, and he never remembered his dreams. My grandmother, on the other hand, did not hesitate in recollecting the life she had left behind. It was as real to her as the carton of milk on the table. “Do you know, Louisey,” she would say, “how we came from Zhitomir?”

“That happened so
long
ago!” my father would admonish the tiny straight-backed old woman. Or he'd say, “Mother—you've already
told
us about that.” That was invariably true, but I never got tired hearing her tell the story again. With each telling she added new details, a slight twist of emphasis. She waited until her son left the room, and then resumed her tales.

Except when he was in the army during the war, my father was never separated from his mother. After she was widowed and moved into the Golden Crest Retirement Hotel, he drove across town after work almost every night to visit her. For the last decade of her life, she moved in with my parents. “Your father breathes in; your grandmother breathes out,” my mother used to say with a hint of exasperation. When she and my father purchased a crypt at the mausoleum, my mother chose a location two floors above her in-laws. “One lifetime is enough,” she quipped.

My father wanted to marry Annie Weiskopf, my mother, from the moment he saw her. She was a precocious, feisty fifteen-year-old. He was nineteen, a student at New York University. They met at a Socialist Party dance. She was struck with the serious, handsome young man with wavy blue-black hair and pale blue eyes, but she was far too young to make a commitment. He courted her for five years, made her agree to date no one else. They married two months before her twentieth birthday, and celebrated with a weekend in the Catskills.

His family was far more prosperous than hers. Grandpa Harry, my father's father, owned a haberdashery in the Bronx. My mother's parents were poor Polish immigrants. Louis Weiskopf, my mother's father, sold newspapers from a stand on lower Broadway. He ran numbers and the gangsters paid him off. Sarah Weiskopf, my maternal grandmother, worked in a bakery and brought home stale cream puffs to add to the meager family larder. My mother shared a bed with her sister, Doris. Her brothers dropped out of high school to take jobs. In contrast, my father was his parents' cherished only son.

Nourished by my grandmother's stories and intrigued by his reticent memory, I tried to imagine my father's Russian childhood for him. The small boy playing hide-and-seek with his sister among bolts of worsted and gabardine in his grandfather's store. The fine china plates piled high with kasha varnishkas, roast chicken and garlic on his grandmother's Sabbath table. The enormous goose-feather puffs that covered him when he went to sleep each night. I imagined his father's trips from Zhitomir to Warsaw on horseback to buy velvet collars and fine woolen fabrics for the women's coats his grandfather sold in his dry-goods store. It did not occur to me that my father might not
want
to remember his early years.

He left Russia three years after the execution of Tsar Nicholas II and his family by the Bolsheviks. In addition to the bloody civil war between the Bolsheviks and the Tsar's White Army, which had claimed thousands of lives all over Russia, western Ukraine had been the scene of some of the worst anti-Semitic violence in Europe since well before the Russian Revolution. Most anti-Semitic pogroms were carried out by Ukrainian nationalist forces and by Cossack horsemen fighting on the side of the Tsar.

In the three years prior to the Steinman family's exodus, there were at least three major pogroms in Zhitomir. “Cossacks!” my grandmother used to hiss, rolling her eyes heavenward with a
sense of unspeakable horror.

My father did not remember how he slipped out of Zhitomir at night, with his mother and sister, hidden under straw in an oxcart driven by a Polish farmer. He could not remember what I remember for him: the caresses of his mother, her soft breasts, her hand over his mouth to keep him quiet. He could not remember the itchiness of the straw, the warmth of his sister Ruth's body, the sound of her breath in the dark a counterpoint to the creaking of the cart wheels on the rutted dirt road.

He did not retain these memories, but the loss of them may have been instinctively self-protective. With the good memories, he may have also lost memories of old men laid out on cold cobblestones in the marketplace, wrapped in their prayer shawls, their faces shorn of beards, their tongueless mouths contorted in pain. The four-year-old boy may have been able to forget the dead bloated cows littering the road, the ruined bridges, the ransacked synagogue, the upended tombstones, the bayonet thrust in the belly of a pregnant neighbor, the infant thrown down a well. He may have forgotten the thundering sound of the Cossacks' horses racing through the streets of Zhitomir, a terror his mother would remember until the day she died.

B
Y CHANCE, MY
father's army regiment had both Russian and Japanese connections. The Twenty-seventh Infantry Regiment (later part of the Twenty-fifth Infantry Division) was sent to Siberia by the U.S. government in 1918 to join other foreign troops—English, French, Czech, German, Turkish, Greek, French, and Japanese—in bolstering the White Army against the Bolsheviks. It was in Siberia that the regiment earned its nickname, Wolfhounds. After a twenty-five-mile march, the Japanese troops at the head of the column began to fall out along the road. When the United States Twenty-seventh Infantry passed through the scattered Japanese columns, General
Otani, the Japanese commander in chief, commented that the Americans marched like Russian wolfhounds. From that day forward the regiment became known as the Twenty-seventh Infantry Wolfhounds. Their insignia shows the profile of the head of a Russian wolfhound with the Latin motto below: “Nec Aspera Terrent,” which translates, “Nor do they fear difficult missions.”

Though my father displayed little interest in his Russian origins, on some level he apparently still thought of himself as Russian. “I may be a Melancholy Slav,” he wrote in one letter home, “but these last two years have made me even more melancholy.”

The Twenty-fifth Infantry Division began the year 1944 in New Zealand, an ideal spot for rest and recreation after grueling campaigns on Guadalcanal, New Georgia Island, and Arundel Island in 1942 and 1943. After Guadalcanal, the Twenty-fifth Infantry Division was known by its nickname, Tropic Lightning. Their insignia was a bright red taro leaf with a streak of yellow lightning inside it.

According to
The 25th Division and World War 2
(the 1946 army-issued yearbook for veterans of the Twenty-fifth), there were “too many distractions” on New Zealand to allow for good training. The yearbook points out that “New Zealand boasted civilized amenities like white women, automobiles, billboards, and traffic cops.”

By mid-February 1944, the Twenty-fifth Division packed up and moved out. After two weeks they landed at Noumea, the principal city of the French island of New Caledonia. Here they would train for upcoming combat “somewhere” in the Pacific. (For reasons of security, grunts like Private Steinman were not informed in advance where that combat would be, though there were always rumors.)

The yearbook describes the months of enforced waiting on New Caledonia as “rehearsing the old and learning the new modes and methods of waging war.” The exhausted old-timers were relieved
to have a long break from the rigors of combat. The newer recruits, like my father, had yet to be tested in the real theater of war. The long wait, the building apprehension, took a toll on their nerves. To keep up morale, there were movies every night. Bob Hope and Jack Benny showed up on New Caledonia's Oua Tom Airstrip. A few lucky men drew from a lottery a few days at rest camps during the long spring and summer months.

My father's anxiety about impending combat, wherever in the Pacific it was going to be, was compounded by his anxiety about his wife and the impending birth of their first child.

On their last evening together at Camp Fannin, in Texas—just days before he left for the Pacific—my parents conceived my sister, Ruth. Over the next nine months—from January 1944 to September 1944—while the Twenty-fifth Division was in New Caledonia and New Zealand preparing for combat, Ruth prepared for her own perilous passage. The separation from his pregnant wife exacted an immense strain on my father. September 1, 1944, two weeks before his daughter's birth, he wrote:

He had wanted his firstborn to be a girl so he could name her Ruth after his sister. He sent money and specific instructions to his sister-in-law in New York to buy his wife a white gardenia and bring it to her in the maternity hospital. When the cablegram with the good news reached him on September 23, 1944, ten days after his daughter's birth, he was instantly ecstatic. “It must be because I so badly want to be with you at this moment and the telegrams never could tell one how you are—I'll never be happy again until I get back to you and Ruth,” he confessed. He handed out cigars and three cases of beer to his buddies in celebration. “I passed out cigars and the guys all teased me that I wasn't ‘man enough' to father a boy. Little did they know how much we wanted a daughter.”