Don't Tell Me I Can't Do It! (5 page)

Unfortunately, this is one area where I’m often at odds with the rest of my family. Case in point: Johnny had a childhood friend who had an inexcusable habit of making derogatory remarks about Jews. I’ve always believed that prejudice is the incurable disease of the feebleminded. One time, as we were climbing into our car, he asked us where we were headed, and Johnny told him: “Disneyland.”

“Oh,” he exclaimed, “you’re going to Jew-land!”

I could keep my peace no longer. I let him have it.
“Mikey, I don’t ever want to hear such remarks out of you! If you can’t keep your Jew remarks to yourself, you will never be allowed in our home again. Do you understand?” I can still see his nine-year-old face, bewildered by my tirade.

Jerry and the kids did not share my ire. “He’s just a kid,” they said. “He didn’t mean anything by it.”

I didn’t think so. It was a big deal for me. I’ve always spoken up whenever I’ve been the target of anti-Semitic comments, and I’m truly sorry that neither of my children has shared my passion on this point. They respect the heck out of me for it, but they still think I’m too abrasively outspoken. I always will be! Apathy simply isn’t part of my being, and silence isn’t an option for me.

When I first arrived in Israel as a young woman, I tried to emulate the Israelis around me. They stood tall and seemed indifferent to what was “polite and proper.” They were
dugri
(direct), and you always knew where you stood with them. Though they never intentionally hurt others’ feelings, they weren’t overly concerned if they did so by accident. At home in their own land, these Jews didn’t have to watch every word and gesture to avoid offending others, and so they kowtowed to
nobody. I loved their attitude and wanted to be like them. Being outspoken and straightforward suited my temperament just fine; it was a more natural, authentic way of being, even if it could be a bit crude at times. No phoniness, no games, no surprises—knowing what to expect just felt safe and made sense to me.

It’s one of the ways I’ve learned to flex my muscles in America, too. I don’t like to waste time playing games of social etiquette. Let’s just get down to business. I can handle brevity without taking undue offense; I inspire others to do so as well.

On our first date, Jerry suggested that we go to a movie together, but I objected. “I don’t want to go to a movie,” I said. “I want to get to know you.” Apparently I made quite the impression, because Jerry never forgot that moment. He later told me he was impressed by my assertiveness, realizing that I wasn’t at all what he had envisioned—a geisha-like foreigner who would pander to his every whim. He could see that I was a person of substance with a mind of her own, and he liked what he saw. Back then, I didn’t wear makeup. I figured that if someone wanted to marry me, it would be for my brains, not for my looks. Jerry apparently shared my
disinterest in such superficiality. He needed someone strong, understanding, and emotionally supportive, and I was all of those things. The rest is history.

My family and friends have all had their objections over the years, and that’s okay with me because there have also been plenty of people who have told me at various times that they find my artless simplicity refreshing. “You say aloud what other people dare not utter,” is their typical response. I cherish those kinds of comments. As an individualist, I believe that a healthy society depends on having an abundance of healthy, self-actualized people, and I consider myself just such a person. I see it as my obligation to express myself in order to explore uncharted territories and model the audacity of following one’s own path, even (perhaps especially) when it means not conforming to social norms and others’ expectations.

My elders’ warnings and punishments never succeeded in reining in my adventurous nature as a child, and the same holds true for the rules of etiquette today. I walk to the beat of my own drums. My life is my own: life according to Erica.

I watched my mother flex her muscles the day Papa pleaded to be left behind in Mogilev. I saw her rise up and become the capable, take-charge figure my family most needed at a moment when our solidarity teetered on the brink of disaster. I saw how Mama could be strong when the circumstances called for it.

Alas, they so rarely did.

My father grew to be self-centered and self-indulgent later in life. Perfectly oblivious to my mother’s needs, he seemed far more interested in spending a lot of money on himself, getting dressed up in fine clothes and making himself into a portrait of elegance. My mother, on the other hand, rarely spent anything on herself and seemed almost to go out of her way to be a slob (or so it seemed to me at the time). She just didn’t care. Indeed, she never seemed to be a viable person in Papa’s world, existing instead merely to serve him, a role she passively accepted. Papa was charming and self-educated, the life of the party, the person others wanted to be around. Mama was just there.

After the army, when I moved back home with my parents, I enjoyed a special relationship with my father. We shared many deep conversations about important topics—philosophy and religion, the ways of the world, the cruelty men could show one another. All the while, I couldn’t help observing how my mother remained outside the loop, a mere onlooker to our animated discussions. No one ever prohibited her from participating, of course. She simply had nothing to say, and that removed her from my sphere of interest.

I remember feeling as if someone needed to “feed” her with attention. She seemed so lonely, and I felt sorry for her. Today I regret letting my youth and busyness get in the way of supplying some of that coveted attention, but I’m also grateful that the image of my mother that sticks with me is not that of the quiet homemaker who sat just beyond the fringes of my relationship with my father, but rather of the bold heroine of Mogilev. I know I haven’t followed Mama in many of the ways she might have preferred that I would, but I do hope that I’ve managed to live up to that audacious spark I glimpsed in her so many years ago. It’s thanks to her that I’ll never
forget the importance of doing what needs to be done, even when others say it’s time to give up.

We have an attitude in this country that selfishness is a bad thing, but that’s a misunderstanding. Being selfish doesn’t have to mean exploiting others. It simply means taking care of oneself. In a flight safety drill, passengers are taught to strap themselves in first before attempting to care for their youngsters and others on the plane. If we neglect to take care of ourselves, we leave ourselves with nothing left to give away. We so easily succumb to the “poor me” attitude and become victims.

Never again. No more waiting for others to take care of me. Call it selfishness if you must, but I choose to be the heroine of my life.

I
could tell that I was not like the others.

I was so excited to finally be going to a real school with children my age in an environment that wasn’t impossibly cramped and unsanitary, where I didn’t have to worry about whether my teachers and fellow students had managed to survive the night before. My family had just moved to Sibiu, in Transylvania, where I was admitted to the fifth grade class of a local Catholic school. Romanian was now the country’s native language—not the German I grew up speaking in Romania before the war. Though I was ever so eager to participate, something was wrong. Between Hail Mary
prayers, I furtively looked around in hopes of finding someone else like me, someone not wearing a cross. Alas, I was the only one—a Jewish outsider in a room full of Christians.

It was a subtle twist of irony. Though I wasn’t ashamed of my family’s ancestral heritage, in that tender moment I would have very much liked to have a cross of my own to wear, just so that I wouldn’t stick out. There was a time not long before, though, when I would have given anything not to wear a religious symbol, for the same reason. When the Germans came to Romania, the yellow Star of David we were required to wear marked us as refuse to be gotten rid of. Today I was free of that cursed emblem, yet I still felt like a marked person.

Something else made me stand out, too. I was smart.

Our teacher was a heavyset, matronly woman who looked just like an “old maid” schoolteacher was supposed to, complete with a severe gray bun and wire glasses perched on a beaklike nose. She could be stern, but I knew she was working hard and challenging us to learn difficult concepts. One day she asked the class a physics question, something about Newton’s theory of
gravity. In the silence that followed, I hesitated. No one knew the answer. Dare I raise my hand and call attention to myself? I wondered. My heart pounding, vulnerable yet excited, I decided that for once, I would be acknowledged. I raised my hand.

When the teacher summoned me to the blackboard, I grabbed the piece of chalk and had soon written out the correct formula for all to see. The teacher became noticeably animated, waving her pointer at me while addressing the whole class. “Look at this little Jewish girl,” she exclaimed. “She can’t even speak our language, and yet she knows the answer! What’s wrong with the rest of you?”

I don’t have many vivid memories of my time in that school, but this is one of them. It was a peak experience, forever imprinted on my self-image. Yes, I was different. I was the only non-Christian in the class. I was an outsider with a different language who had not even had the privilege of a regular grammar school education prior to that point. I wasn’t pretty, and I wasn’t popular. I had no advantages whatsoever. Yet I was smart, and I was special.

I owned it.

By the time I left school, I had reversed my fortune. I emerged as a natural leader among my peers, because organizing events and being in charge came easily for me. It still does. I became involved in a drama group and discovered the thrill of acting, singing, and dancing before a live audience. In spite of my differences, I made people watch me, and they applauded and threw flowers on the stage before me. I translated “being different” into “being unique,” and I built on that. I became a ham—a “kosher ham,” as it were—and I came to be quite popular after all. People predicted that I would grow up to be a performer.

Their prediction came true. Today I’m producing, directing, and acting on the stage of my life with great vigor.

It was no secret that when my mother was pregnant with me, my father wanted a boy for his second child. When I came along, I later learned, he was so disappointed that for days he didn’t even want to look at me. I was far too young to appreciate such a thing, of course,
but somehow it must have affected me subconsciously. I became the son my father never had.