In my first two essays, I described growing up with parents who had survived the horrors of the Holocaust. Unlike many other survivors of deep trauma, my parents talked about what they'd gone through all the time. It was a part of my childhood's atmosphere to live in a perilous world of contrasts. Good and evil. Us and them. Before and after. But there was no after - just a constant present tension. I was wound up and wanted to spring out heroically. I dreamed of doing something that would decisively clear out the ashes in the air. My father had saved lives in Dachau, and I took his heroism as a mandate to live heroically, to live exceptionally, and to live for others.
As I mentioned, I had a knack for academics, which took me to the top of the top. I got into Yale Law School, and then, shortly after, took a leave to go to Oxford University, the bastion of European culture. My parents had been kicked out of Europe - my mother forced into a ghetto just before she would have graduated from her music conservatory, my father torn away, penniless, from a watch business he had arduously built from scratch - but I would come back as a scholar. Something was driving me to prove myself to Europe, to the people who, I felt, had hurt my parents. So to Gothic Oxford I went, a place where grace was said in Latin before meals, and girls like me were scarce. In this chilly, stone environment, I felt I could achieve the greatest heights of academia. There and then, perhaps, I could find answers to the biggest existential questions in the world. Why does Cain kill Abel? Why is there never any peace? Why is the world so full of baseless hatred? Why do we suffer and suffer and suffer?
My parents actually did ask me these questions.
"Why, Sonia?" my father would say, even when I was small. "Why do they hate us? Did we not give them our years of work and good citizenship? I was even in the army, good and brave as any one of them!"
"Why?" my mother would echo. "Didn't we Jews invent the polio vaccine?" (She was fixated on Salk and Sabin.) "And what did I do in my life to deserve that my little brothers should be shot, that my father should be gassed, that I should be forced from their world to a camp with my poor mother?"
My Oxford education did not go exactly as expected. Before I left, I had been forced by my father to vow that I would not abandon my Jewish practices. My mother was dubious about a journey that might give me even more worldly polish (we both used to talk to each other in Yiddish) - and perhaps leave her far behind. And both of them were shocked when I fell madly in love with an Englishman, an Oxford student who came from an observant Christian family. Yet, somewhere in my soul, this love affair was sparked by a wish to lay down arms. I didn't want a world of enemies and blood-brothers; I wanted a world where mutual love brought communion and peace.
This wasn't an easy wish to fulfill. My boyfriend's parents were as afraid of the Jews as mine were afraid of the gentiles. His mother had been brought up in a Welsh village; her own mother went to church more than once a day and thought alcohol was the devil. His father, though from a middle-class, urban English environment, had never knowingly befriended a Jew. (He may well have known some, but Jews in Europe did not announce themselves as readily as they do in this good country.) Both seemed to think that my "race" (a word that stung teutonically in my ears) was different, suspect, wily. But my chosen one did not feel that way, and I did not feel, as my mother in particular did, that all gentiles secretly hated all Jews. In fact, I knew one who really loved them.
I remember, in the early days, talking about the Bible with Paul, who quoted God's vow to Abraham, that he would make his people "countless as the stars." We both knew that this prophecy did not compute mathematically. Six million Jews had been killed, and now only about twelve million were left - a tattered remnant, trying to rebuild.
"Countless as the stars, maybe not," he mused. "But brilliant as the stars? Yes."
Paul wished to be counted as one of us, and I wished for the same. It took many years, a separation of time and distance, but in the end, we were married. My husband, by then, had converted, and my in-laws had sat at my father's Sabbath table in New York City. They had broken bread together, his parents and mine; they had blessed the Kiddush wine together, and answered as one, "Amen." A healing, on all sides, had begun.
