Daughters of Absence: Transforming a Legacy of Loss Read online

  In “Writing the Jewish Future: A Global Conversation,” an international Jewish writers’ conference convened by the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, Semel further explicates this feeling. She says: “The survivor wasn’t a character in a black and white film, in a history book, a slogan in school. The survivor was very close, right in the kitchen where I grew up, next to the pan with the meatballs and mashed potatoes. The Holocaust survivor was my own mother.”

  Semel says that it is a moral imperative to remember the destruction of European Jewry, particularly in Israel. “Writing about the scar of the Holocaust is my rebellion against the rigid model of the ‘neo-Israeli,’ supposedly untainted by the past.... In this era of hedonism, post-Zionism, and the illusion that we can be as any other people in the world, the Holocaust is pushed once again into a ritual corner.”

  Whereas for Semel the familial memory that she represents through storytelling, essays, and public speaking has long been in the public domain, for other women included in this collection these essays represent a first foray into openly sharing their confrontation with the abyss. Kim Masters describes how she accompanies her parents to a small town in Czechoslovakia. On this trip, she recognizes that concrete objects, landscape, and photographs are not enough for members of the second generation to know who they are. She goes to the Jewish cemetery and is confronted with the stark reality that her lack of knowing Hebrew prevents her from finding her grandparents’ gravestones.

  The reader is jolted into understanding that knowing the dead and remembering the dead is singing their songs, reciting their prayers, learning their language, discussing and living the values and traditions that were important to them.

  The contributors’ connection to their Jewishness is diverse. Some of the women grew up in homes with a Jewish education that connected them to the pre-Holocaust Jewish life that was destroyed. These include Hadassah Lieberman, the wife of Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut; poet Miriam Mörsel Nathan; Rosie Weisel; and Mindy Weisel. While Helen Epstein and Aviva Kempner realized as adults that their home was devoid of rich Jewish culture, Epstein decided to attend university in Israel, Kempner celebrated her bat mitzvah, and both began celebrating the Sabbath and holidays.

  Even for the second-generation women who enjoy a spirited Jewish family life, a drive persists to live between two worlds. A case in point is Miriam Mörsel Nathan. Through her creative programming work at the District of Columbia Jewish Community Center, she has exposed the lives of many to Jewish culture. However, her vivacious veil is stripped away when we read her poetry, and a window into her inner core reveals “how a child of survivors can never say goodbye.... It’s see you soon.” Funerals, coffins, graves, grief, roll call, lovers, and dead men from another time and place are the kind of surrealistic images that live in Mörsel Nathan’s poetry. She travels to Germany for professional reasons to attend the Berlin International Film Festival, but she cannot avoid wrestling with the murderers of her grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. The blending of two worlds is also the theme of Vera Loeffler’s photography of past and present.

  Another contributor, author Helen Epstein, tells us about her first trip to Germany to promote her recently published book, Where She Came From, which was translated into German. Like Miriam Mörsel Nathan, Helen Epstein straddles two worlds. When she was a toddler, Epstein emigrated with her parents from Czechoslovakia to New York City. In her ground-breaking book, Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors, we see a successful journalist searching worldwide for her peer group. Thousands of children of survivors who did not know how to verbalize the impact of the Holocaust on their lives felt validated, through Epstein’s writings, for what they were feeling. Epstein’s openness about her own fears of opening up an iron box, fantasies she envisioned riding a New York City train, despair about all the losses in her family and how that made her different from her peers, demonstrated to other offspring of survivors that no matter how American they become, they are living in a time tunnel—the past is superimposed on their present.

  Whereas Nava Semel’s writings broke through the denial about second-generation survivors in Israeli society, Helen Epstein’s seminal article, “Heirs of the Holocaust,” which appeared in the June 19, 1977, New York Times Magazine was pivotal in revealing an invisible group in the American landscape. In the process Epstein facilitated the groundwork for the creation of a second-generation movement, founded several years later under the leadership of attorney Menachem Rosensaft.

  Because Epstein experienced so much of her present as if it were her ancestors’ past, she decided after her mother’s death in 1989 to search out the specifics by doing a family history of three generations of women in her mother’s family. Through her personal search for meaning she unearths for all of us the history of Jewish women in the Austro-Hungarian Empire for the last hundred years. In her book, Where She Came From, Epstein gives us a case history in assimilation: the social history of Czech Jews. Where She Came From mourns three generations of Jewish women. By exploring their lives and the cultural context in which they lived, Epstein gives us a lost treasure that has proved meaningful not only to the second generation, but to general audiences in the Czech Republic where it has recently been published.

  In “Normal,” the essay for this book, Epstein is on her way from Prague to Germany for a book tour for Where She Came From. We feel her fear and anger, and her sense of living between two worlds, as she crosses the border between the Czech Republic and Germany to her destination in Berlin.

  Another woman who exposes a little-known segment of Jewish history is filmmaker Aviva Kempner. In her ground-breaking production, Partisans of Vilna, she dispels the myth of “Jews going to the slaughter like sheep.” Before the commercial release of Partisans it was commonly assumed that the Warsaw ghetto was the only place where Jews resisted. Kempner, who was one of the first Jewish babies born in Berlin after liberation, took tremendous pride in showing her film (directed by Josh Waletzky) at the Berlin Film Festival. For Kempner, documentary film as a medium, particularly when it comes to the Shoah, is a more powerful political tool than the written word. The voices of survivors and the raw footage that accompanies their words cannot be dismissed.

  Aviva Kempner’s mother, Helen Ciesla Covensky, was silent about the fact that she survived disguised as a Polish Christian woman. By talking to other survivors Kempner began to understand her own mother, as well. Ciesla Covensky’s abstract expressionist paintings are an affirmation of life. Thus, even in silence, Kempner felt her mother’s fighting spirit. Kempner has spent her life helping other oppressed groups fight for their rights.

  Another daughter of survivors who focuses her energies politically is Hadassah Lieberman. She was asked to join a U.S. congressional delegation to the fiftieth anniversary of the commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz. (Lieberman recorded her trip in the Congressional Record, August 9, 1995, which is reprinted in these pages.) She has known of Auschwitz since childhood because of her mother’s stories of being imprisoned there.

  Writer Sylvia Goldberg prefers a more distant encounter with the murderers of her family, particularly the loss of her two sisters. During a chance visit to the Goethe House in Washington, D.C., she is given a map of Munich that spurs her to gather the details of their whereabouts, and hence, to begin to mourn.

  Not all daughters of survivors who are involved in transforming their feelings into a meaningful existence are involved in politics, or education, or Jewish continuity. Some are breaking the silence by using humor. Humor is a psychological defense that we tend to shy away from when we talk about the persecution of Jews during the Holocaust. The juxtaposition of jokes and mass murder is deemed sacrilegious. But in the performances of Deb Filler and the writing of Lily Brett, we laugh with them rather than at them. The daily pain and angst of their survivor families becomes more bearable rather than overbearing when we can laugh.

  Semel explains it bes
t when she says, “The art of storytelling is also the art of healing.” She continues, “Through my story-telling I embraced my mother’s personal account of pain and loss, and the scar she would carry for the rest of her life. In the process I was conscious of the virtues of healing, yet I was also well aware of the fact that a complete repair—tikkun—wasn’t possible.”

  Patinka Kopec, a gifted violist and founding faculty member of the Perlman Music Program, is also interested in healing. She feels that her playing the violin helped to heal the wounds of her parents’ wartime experiences. She wanted to bring them joy through music.

  Many dynamics come into play in the mother-daughter Holocaust-survivor relationship. Having a mother who was a Jewish victim is an added dimension in the identity and development of female offspring of survivors. Through the psychological process of identification, women tend to identify more with their mothers, though they also incorporate characteristics of their fathers. This is an unconscious process; both generations are unaware of its occurrence.

  Many factors influence Holocaust survivors’ daughters’ identification with their mothers. Questions include: During what developmental stage did the mother experience persecution and losses? How did the mother survive? What role did the mother play in her family’s survival? What losses did she incur? How did she cope with her victimization after the Holocaust? How did she communicate her experiences to her children? Did the mother experience any traumas or psychological problems before the German occupation? Who is the daughter of survivors named after?

  Daughters of survivors must first appreciate their mothers and fathers as people who had a life before being persecuted. Only then can the daughters move beyond identifying as victims themselves. This is often enigmatic because when a parent is a victim, others tend to have a skewed image of that parent who is frozen in people’s minds as a victim. The daughters of Holocaust survivors who have contributed essays to this volume tend to perceive their mothers as flesh-and-blood beings, rather than only as victims of the Holocaust. By recognizing her mother’s positive and negative attributes, a daughter of survivors can begin to assimilate those characteristics that are life-affirming and that signify coping, rather than those elements of the mother that suggest only victimhood.

  EVA FOGELMAN, Ph.D., is a social psychologist and psychotherapist in private practice in New York City. She is senior research fellow at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Dr. Fogelman is founding director of Jewish Foundation for Christian Rescuers and ADL, and co-director of the Training Program for Psychotherapy with Generations of the Holocaust and Related Traumas, Training Institute for Mental Health. She pioneered groups for this population and has done extensive work with child survivors of the Holocaust through child development research that she co-directs. She is the author of the award-winning, Conscience and Courage: Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust, and writer and coproducer of the internationally acclaimed, Breaking the Silence: The Generation after the Holocaust. Dr. Fogelman serves as adviser to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, and has written and spoken extensively about the psychological effects of the Holocaust.

  Chapter 1: Normal by Helen Epstein

  For Franci Epstein (1920 - 1989)

  and Kurt Epstein (1904 - 1975)

  In her book, Children of the Holocaust, Helen Epstein became the first voice of the second generation. Her writings helped the world understand the difficulties faced by survivors’ children. After reading her then groundbreaking—now classic—book, I found the understanding, support, and empathy I had searched for my entire life. Helen’s piece, “Normal,” takes us with her through the anxiety and experience of her first trip to Germany. –MW

  Are the rails smoother? Does the train move more easily along the tracks? I press my ear to the window of the dining car and gauge the sound of metal against metal. Would I be listening like this on a train crossing into Canada from the United States? Of course not. I’m traveling on a different train, the Inter-city Express. We’ve just left the Czech Republic and crossed into Germany.

  The landscape does not change as we cross the frontier, but everything else in Germany looks more vivid, as if the people, the buildings, signs, even the trees have all been given a fresh coat of paint. The Czech crew disembarks; the German crew comes on. Is it an accident that the air conditioning begins to function? We have run consistently behind schedule in the Czech Republic; in Germany, we quickly make up the time. The Czech crew was casual; the Germans are crisp, official. Am I seeing what’s there or what’s in my mind?

  The train is nearly empty at midweek. I’m the only diner in the dining car. The simple tables with their little lamps, white tablecloths, and silverware are far removed from the iconography of my childhood: the cattle cars with slats instead of windows, the bucket in the corner, the dogs, the endless tracks. I will be served dinner while listening to the sound of metal against metal that thousands of Jews heard during their deportation east. I unfold a cloth napkin, take a sip from my glass of ice water.

  I imagine that normal travelers eat in this dining car undisturbed by thoughts of those other trains, gazing out the picture window as the countryside rolls by, noting the towns and geological landmarks they learned about at school. Before the war, my parents were among those people. My father traveled to Berlin to participate in the Olympic Games; my mother, to attend the fashion shows. When she was sixteen, she fell in love on this train with an art student who boarded in Dresden and stood with her in the corridor pointing out the sights. But I have only recently retrieved those images—my father in his thirties suit, my mother a romantic girl—and they are not nearly as powerful as the bucket, the slats, the dogs, the tracks. The Inter-city Express for Berlin departs from the same station where thousands of Czech Jews were sent for deportation during the war, Holesovice Station, about nine minutes by trolley from the center of Prague.

  Now, more than fifty years later, the present slips out from under me like an escalator running backward at Holesovice Station. I took the trolley here from the center of Prague, noting the last views of the city that my parents might have taken with them: the river Vltava and its bridges; another red trolley passing by; planters overflowing with geraniums on an upper balcony. The distance by trolley from the center of Prague to Holesovice Station is so painfully short, like the distance between normal and not. “Your parents did the right thing to leave,” the Czechs who would have been my friends, classmates, and lovers have told me. “You grew up normal.”

  I grew up in the Czech community of New York instead of the Jewish community of Prague. Everyone in it was a displaced person who had escaped Nazism and Communism and lost almost everything a human being can lose. When I was a child, the loss that seemed most obvious was people: Each of my parents was the sole survivor of his or her immediate family. Only later did I understand the importance of losing culture and language. My parents could speak fluently and be fully understood only within their own community. No matter how well they spoke English, no matter how many American friends they made, no matter how integrated into the Jewish community they became, they were not themselves in English. And, on top of that, their basic sense of self had been bifurcated by the war—into before and after. Almost all of the adults I knew as a child—Jews and Gentiles, men and women, people from Prague, Vienna, Budapest—had before and after spouses, before and after professions, incomes, relations to law, art, politics, success and failure, God.

  They laughed at seemingly fixed American measures of status, such as houses, or incomes, or titles, as illusions of naïve people who had not lived through much. They valued practical skill, intelligence, the ability to improvise and adapt. Men who had been lawyers were now working as taxi drivers; celebrated members of Prague’s literary world were announcers for Radio Free Europe. My father, whose family had owned a factory, now worked in a factory. My mother was one of the very lucky ones: she had been a dressmaker before the war; she was a dressmaker after it. She was able to earn a living
doing work she had chosen, not work she had settled for.

  My parents had no professional agendas for their children, not for me or for my two younger brothers. They did not even venture an opinion of what work we might choose for our lives. For the first dozen years in America, they were so immersed in the day-to-day business of keeping our family afloat that they did not think much about the future. Later on, they were too tired or they had lost faith in planning or maybe they felt they could not read the culture well enough to advise us on how to compose our lives. How did I become a writer? I think now that it was my consciousness of how language empowers: my years of writing letters for my opinionated but linguistically challenged father; my years of watching my mother set out to conquer the New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle. I know that both my parents, olev hashalom, would be thrilled that I am taking the Inter-city Express to Berlin on professional business, as they did. For the third time, a book I have written has been translated into German, and I have radio, newspaper, and television interviews scheduled. In Germany, I’m a Jewish author and today in Germany, as my host will tell me dryly, Jews are news.

  The night before I travel to Berlin, I manage to lose my train ticket somewhere in my cousin’s one-bedroom apartment. I made my trip to Germany conditional on a round-trip airline ticket to Prague, where I speak the language, drink in the views, eat the food, and have to stop myself from treating everyone I meet like a distant relative. I don’t want to leave, and I spend my last hours there turning over the contents of my small suitcase again and again. How could I have lost my train ticket to Berlin? It’s been twenty years since I finished psychoanalysis. My parents are both dead. I have children of my own. The war’s been over since 1945. When does normal return?

  What were your fantasies before coming to Germany? an intent young reporter will ask me.