Art of a Jewish Woman (10 page)

As soon as she was home on holiday, she asked her parents about the woman. Her name was Leyna. What had happened was that Felice’s mother had gone into labor but couldn’t deliver her. After a day, she and Moses went from Szczuczyn to the clinic 18 miles away in Kolno, and there the doctor told her father that her mother needed a caesarian section, which would mean she wouldn’t be able to have any more children. Felice’s father, a stubborn man, wouldn’t accept that, so he took her mother in great pain by train to Koeningsburg in Germany on the second day of her labor. It was a day’s ride, but from his travels as a grain merchant he knew the medical care there was the best. At the end of the third day the doctors succeeded in delivering Felice without a C-section, and her mother almost died. She suffered from puerperal fever for many weeks and months, sometimes lingering between life and death. She also lost several front teeth from the septicemia.

Felice would go through life thinking her mother blamed her for damaging her beauty, although later Bela was proud of the gold bridgework Moses paid for to restore her face. However, there was always a distance between mother and daughter. Felice’s mother never hugged or held her. She gave her a lot of spankings. When she was four, five or six, just saying “No, mama” could cause her to pull down Felice’s panties and spank her. Felice thought it was a mean, angry thing to do, hitting her. Then when her father saw that she did very well in school and started paying for her special education, her Mama resented her even more. The money he was spending on her came from what he could have given to her mother, who liked to entertain visitors.

After Felice was born, Moses left Bela in the hospital in Koeningsburg and took Felice away because the doctors said it was necessary to keep the newborn from contracting the infection also. He brought her back by train to her grandparents in Kolno, where they found a wet-nurse, or
nam
, for her, a poor woman with many children, one of whom was a toddler ready to be weaned. The wet-nurse loved Felice and, when she later recognized her she couldn’t take her eyes off her or stop kissing her. In Kolno everybody talked Yiddish, so Yiddish in a sense became Felice’s mother tongue.

Felice had only one memory from the first four years of life with her
nam
. It was in the winter of 1914, when she was four. The Germans invaded and were pushing eastward toward the Russian border. She saw soldiers with no idea whose they were. She would sit on a small, low windowsill in a house that wasn’t her parents’ home, watching the panorama of marching men and trucks outside unfold. It was like a fantasia that had no meaning for her then except that it filled her with an inchoate sense of movement and restlessness that would stick with her forever.

Her next earliest memory came after her parents brought her back to join them in Sczuczyn shortly after her sister Hanka was born in 1914. There was an enormous rat. She was looking out the window in their small apartment, and, she recalled, “Such a big rat ran out of the building onto the street. It gave me the shivers. Children chased it, but not me. I didn’t dare.” It would become a mental marker for the peril in her life.

The next eight years was the only period that Felice really lived in Szczuczyn with her family, years during which another sister, Miriam, was born in 1918. She remembered a great deal from this period—the domesticity, the family drama, and the community of which she was a part. Her parents’ marriage was arranged by a
metapelet
, a matchmaker. They were both from gently upper middle-class families, though by American living standards they were poor. In her mind the large landowners were the aristocracy and the industrialists in the large cities were the upper class. Her mother stopped going to school after the elementary grades, as soon as she had learned to read and write, which was typical of girls of her generation. She loved to write letters. Felice’s father had gone through high school in a Jewish
cheder
run by a rabbi. Their first home was a small ground floor three-room apartment on the
Rynek,
Market Square. There was no running water, no electricity, but they had one of the first telephones in Szczuczyn. It was in her father’s office, which occupied one of the rooms in the apartment. Felice wasn’t supposed to use it. It was just for his business, but later, when some of her friends’ families had phones, she would sneak in when her father was away and call them.

His company was called Zbozopol—Wheat Export Firm. He got started in the business because his own father had worked with grain merchants. Her wonderful uncle Lejb, who always had a twinkle in his eye, helped her father, but he had bad luck with one of his daughters, Rivka. She had a terrible reputation. It was said that she would go to the edge of town and hitch rides on the wagons and sleep with the Poles. Her Papa twisted his hands in a circle and said, “See, Fela, if you behave like Rivka, I will do like this to your neck. I will choke you with both my hands.”

The father’s business prospered and grew; his brother Lejb joined the firm as the accountant, and Lejb’s oldest daughter Sonia became the secretary. After a few years the family built a home on the southeast corner of the Rynek, where Kostyielna Street (Church Street) came down from a little hill and met the square. The new home was modest, though it had a second story with three bedrooms under the eaves. There was still no running water, no bathtub, and the toilet was an outhouse in the cobblestone yard. They still used washbasins at home with water heated on the stove and went to the public bathhouse weekly. By the mid-1920s, there was electricity for lighting until 11 pm. They also had a small buggy with two large wheels, a driver, and one horse.

Church Street ran two blocks up a gentle slope to the Catholic church. “It was large and beautiful, baroque in a modest way, not over-decorated, not smothered in gilt and flowers. When I was small I thought it was the finest church in the world. Our neighborhood was mixed Catholic and Jewish. On Catholic holy days there was a lot of drinking, so everyone cautioned the children to stay indoors and lock the doors and windows. But I never saw anything bad happen. I and the other kids used to say to each other that we should never look through the iron fence around the Catholic deacon’s house. We might, God forbid, see the priest walking in his garden, and something terrible would happen to us.”

Sometimes they’d play a game of dare with each other and run to the fence, peep through, run back and brag, “Saw the priest, saw the priest,” even if they hadn’t. But she didn’t believe as she had been told that the Catholics were dangerous or that they would throw rocks at Jewish children. One day she marched out of the house and walked to the market square, which was full of Poles from the countryside celebrating a holy day, and when she came back she told her parents, “It is a lie, a big lie! I don’t want to live that way.”

Her father said to her, “If you won’t listen to me, you will have to go to Kolno, where your grandparents will watch you.” There was that kind of tension between her and her father. With her mother, it was more like a distance. Felice didn’t trust her.

Hanka Reshevska Tetenbaum lived next door and had a small bookstore. Hanka was her mother’s great friend and the woman Felice admired most because she read everything. As soon as she could read Mrs. Tetenbaum started lending her books. Out the front door of the house, down the street that ran toward the square from the house where her family lived were little shops, mostly owned by Jews—the candy store, the bicycle shop, the beauty shop, the dressmaker. Most families lived either behind their stores or on the second floor. Felice had a dreamy view of their little town. Just a few blocks in the opposite direction, the Wissa River had a wooden bridge over it where she and her friends used to gather as teenagers. There was a little beach for swimming. Past the river was a bog where workmen went to cut peat for stoves.

Though the town was small in population, many of the buildings around Market Square were impressive two story edifices constructed from brick, stone, wood, and plaster. Their roofs sloped gently, sometimes broken by mansards, and often their exteriors were enhanced with vertical running pilasters and small ornamental balconies and canopies over tall windows framed by wooden shutters. In the southeast corner of the square was the modest New Synagogue. Behind it, the rabbi’s house had a rickety outdoor staircase leading upstairs to the classrooms of the school he ran. Behind that, at Moyshe Farberovicz’ grain mill, two horses plodded in a circle all day long turning the grindstone. Faberovicz was the second of the three licensed grain dealers in the Bialystock government district, and according to Felice’s father he was a
goniff,
a thief, a dishonorable man whose promises and contracts could be disingenuous or dishonest.

Diagonally across the square in the northwest corner was the Old Synagogue, near a quarter where only Jews lived. Very large in scale and erected early in the 19th century in the familiar broad rectangular
shtetyl
style with a conical roof, the Old Synagogue was the second most imposing building in town after the church. Its sanctuary was spacious and airy with high windows. The ornate, delicately decorated ark for the Torah scrolls rose from the level of the pews to the roof.

Also on the square was the Jewish meeting hall and library, and on the west side the city hall where Felice’s father, twice elected as a progressive socialist, served as mayor. He was a dignified man, well respected by Poles and Jews alike. When they walked around the square together, people would come up and greet him, “
Pan Ozerovicz, Pan Ozerovicz.”
He would nod and tip his hat sometimes, though Felice often thought he should speak with them. Until she was fifteen, when businessmen came to his office from Germany or Russia or Latvia, if she was home he would call her in, and she was supposed to curtsy. He proudly told them she would be a government minister some day. Finally she told Papa she was too old to curtsy, and her mother backed her up.

After she started going to boarding school, when she was home on vacations and walking in the square, older people would come up to her and offer her little cakes or sweets. She was the mayor’s daughter, the happy extroverted, introverted girl, strange because she went away for education. The attention people paid her gave her mixed feelings. She internalized an attitude that she was special, the princess. That was a mixed blessing: if she was exceptional, she should be able to tolerate bad things that other people couldn’t, but at the same time things should come to her that others didn’t have. And all the time she didn’t really feel special inside, didn’t really feel she deserved more than somebody else.

Just beyond the square, the volunteer fire department also served as a venue for meetings, community events, plays, and, once in a blue moon, a movie. On those occasions the fire wagons moved outside and volunteers set out rows of chairs on the stone floor facing a stage in the back of the building. When she was sixteen and home from boarding school, Felice performed on the stage. The director of a summer theater saw her walking in the town, saw children admiring the sprightly, pretty, smiling teen, scooting around the little bird who was alighting for a few days or a few weeks at home in Sczuczyn on holiday from faraway schools, the child rumored to be the smartest girl in town.

Thinking Felice would be just right for the role of the ingénue who resists conventions in
Di Vilde Tsilke
(Yiddish for Wild Tsilke, pronounced
Silka
), the theatrical director approached Felice. Getting her into the troupe was not easily accomplished. The director was a thin, very alive man. Felice liked him and wanted to do the part. She was excited, but her father thought that actresses were immoral. She told the director to come to their home, meet with her father, and reassure him that there was nothing wrong. When he came, her father threw him out and said to her, “If you go to those crazy people, I’ll lock you out of the house.” The director knew what to say to her. He asked, “How can a girl of your education be afraid of your father?” She persisted with her father, and in the end he relented. She played the role two or three times a week all summer, her hair in one long braid with a ribbon on the end to the bottom of her back. Moses came to the play on opening night and enjoyed himself. He smiled afterward and couldn’t be angry. She enjoyed acting immensely and threw herself into the role with her heart and mind. Afterward her father said she could be a very good actress, “but as long as I am alive you are going to university!” Her mother didn’t come to the play; she stayed home with her lady friends playing cards.

There was also the public elementary school Felice had attended just north of the square. Every morning the dressmaker’s daughter would come to the house for breakfast; she would carry Felice’s books, and they would walk to school together. She felt bad that her friend carried her books. Such an indignity. Did her parents ask her or did she want to?

Zalman Kaplan’s photography studio, where the family went for portraits, was near the Old Synagogue, and in the neighborhood to the south was the horse market and her father’s granary. Beyond were fields and forests.

Although her childhood memories of Szczuczyn were romantic, Felice did not remember her home as especially warm. Her parents were formal with each other. She did not see them hug or kiss, and she didn’t think her mother had much time for her. Even when they started to employ two Polish maids, Manya and Katrina, to cook and clean and help with Miriam and Hanka, her mother still didn’t have much time for her. She was a great entertainer, and every day friends came to call. Avron Finkelstein came at 10 a.m. and Iczy Savitsky came at 3 p.m. for tea and little cakes. They were devoted friends of her mother, and they loved to visit. They were married men with families, yet Felice thought they must have been in love with her mother, though it was an unspoken feeling. Hanka and Freyda Tetenbaum were also regular visitors. Sometimes Felice felt jealous if they didn’t bring cakes for her too.