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May 24, 1966, Tel Aviv
My Dearest Feliks,
Your silence after our last letter has not gone unremarked. Hanka and I not offended, don’t let that worry you, darling. We trust you’re busy with your titillating military duties and are not in any way displeased or annoyed with us. Word is that your People’s Army has been charged with the task of ensuring the safe passage of beets and potatoes to Moscow… Bravo! Tell me, Feliks, is it you who oversees so high stakes an operation?
Well, don’t take me wrong, it is lovely to finally be able to tease you again. Please know D. is trustworthy, so do pass him something for Hanka and me next time he’s in Warsaw. You know how we wait. Each word from you and Lilka is balm to our souls. Don’t make that face, it’s perfectly true. Even our Zosia (not “little Zosia” anymore, she’s grown taller than me this year) still asks regularly after your boys. I find her sometimes curled up on the rug, surrounded by old photographs of summers at the lakes, or at the Tatry, or at the Baltic. She grasps, poor dear, for her lost childhood. “Which one is this, Tata,” she’ll ask me, pointing to a photograph of one of your boys. “Is this Tomasz or Zbiggy?”
“How old was I here with the sunflowers?”
“Was this the summer of the blueberry pierogi?”
She has a nostalgic soul, and we know whom she got that from, don’t we?
Feliks, Hanka has just appeared at my shoulder. She wants me to assure you yet again that Zosia’s Polish remains every bit as clean as a seventeenth century aristocrat’s. She’s jabbering now about that trunk of belles lettres we dragged here with us, almost ten years ago. Do you know that my wife and my daughter still sit together Sunday evenings and read aloud in Polish? They’ve been through the whole collection thrice. Women, it seems, have this sort of sentimentality when it comes to language.
I, too, as I get older find myself reverting, devolving… dreaming increasingly in Polish. What to make of this, Feliks? I coax my mind back to Hebrew, or at least Yiddish, but it won’t always go.
In any case, our latest: Hanka is back at TAU after our semester in London. With her at work and Zosia at school, I have the house to myself most of the day. Ostensibly, I write. You’ll be glad to hear that I continue to cull invitations from esteemed international conferences on Central European geopolitics — apparently, I’m ‘expert in the field.’ England comes calling, Germany, even the United States. Seems there’s no one left on earth not dying to know about the mysterious goings-on behind the Iron Curtain. But what can I tell them, Feliks? What can I, sipping my juice on a terrace overlooking the Mediterranean, know of the old country anymore? Maybe you’ll finally take a moment out of your busy life to remind me? I don’t mean share state secrets, Feliks, I can figure out myself how to transport potatoes from Gdansk to Moscow! (Don’t mind these stains on the paper, darling, they’re merely the salt from my tears!) But tell me: what do the Warsaw streets smell of today?
Has the low steel wool that hangs over the city all winter seen fit yet to clear?
Are the chestnut trees in bloom?
And, most vitally, the woods…Oh my dear sweet woods! Describe to me the sweet musty smell of the forest at dawn, the crunch of the pine needles as you trod upon them. How were April’s morels this year?
And please, write, too, of the boys, and of your Lilka. How I miss that woman’s potato dumplings… Hanka tries, but hers dissolve into a wet mass upon the plate. (She’s protesting now, pulling on my ear, insisting I explain that the dumplings disaster was on account of what passes for a potato in these parts — what do you expect from tubers cultivated in a desert?)
I have a story for you. This happened two weeks ago, the day after we returned to home from London. We went for a family walk early in the morning to reacquaint ourselves with the city we’d left for nearly a year. The streets were largely empty that early, but just there, a block or two from the sea, we encountered a family that looked quite lost. A couple, three children, and a grizzled grandma leaning on her cane, more dead than alive. All six of them woolen-haired, with a sweet, spicy smell about them, so much less off-putting than the stale, meaty odor that trails newly arrived Europeans. The father, his head reaches only up to my armpit, and you know I’m hardly endowed where it comes to height. They wave a pile of documents at us, chatter away in some God-forsaken language, Hanka and I just look at each other in confusion. Luckily, our Zosia speaks a bit of French and she’s able to decipher that this little crew is here from Casablanca.
Later, I spoke with Olsztein and he confided in me that we expect 100,000 of these short-statured Jews to appear on our shores by year’s end. The Mossad struck a secret deal with King Hassan II, with the help of the very same refugee organization that made it possible for us to make our Aliyah in ’56. King Hassan is no dumb Polack, though, Feliks, he didn’t offer up his persecuted Jews for free. Israel pays a price for each head. An “indemnity,” they call it, rather charmingly.
We looked over our new friends’ papers and saw that they’d been asked to report at a resettlement office that morning. We could not fathom how they ended up on our street, miles from their destination. Hanka being Hanka, she took some shekels out of her purse and put the lost souls into a taxi. The whole family made a big fuss, crying and thanking us in French, pulling at our sleeves, demanding our address so they could pay us back. We told them no need, it was our pleasure and duty to help you.
If you’re having déja vu it’s because you’ve heard this story before. Hanka told it years ago, in the weeks after we arrived here every bit as disoriented as these flustered Moroccans. A kind passerby took pity on us as we clutched our documents on a street corner and peered up at illegible signs. How I cursed myself then for having been so recalcitrant a Hebrew student when we were boys in Łódź. I had forgotten the incident, but Hanka reminded me after we sent the Moroccans on their way. She has a better memory when it comes to peoples’ kindnesses. As you know, I tend to recall mostly insults and slights.
I can hear what you’re thinking. “Nonsense! Zionist propaganda!” But I assure you, it’s true, every word of it. We never again saw the kind family who put us in a cab that day, but do you know that for years I often thought I glimpsed them in the streets? And in a way I did, Feliks. In a way I did.
My dear brother, I don’t mean to bore you yet again with my heartwarming tales from the Promised Land. I bring it up only because of your boys, and on this Hanka agrees with me 100%, as a matter of fact she’s calling to me from the kitchen now, telling me to be sure to give you some hell about it.
As Tomasz, Zbiggy and Maks grow older, as the tensions rise again — because even if you don’t write to us, we have our sources, we hear about the dismissals, the expulsions— you’ll become increasingly powerless when it comes to guaranteeing their safety, or even their basic dignity. (You’ve never told me what it’s like for your boys, adolescents in a “People’s Poland,” but eh, Feliks, can’t I imagine?)
Look at my Zosia. She’s free of the fears, the complexes, the insecurities that our parents, bless their souls, were incapable of protecting us from. I’m not saying the situation here is perfect, far from it. We have our dissolving dumpling and, as you never tire of reminding me, our dispossessed Arab brothers. But my Zosia: she never has to wonder if some drunk-on-the-street’s antisemitic rant is a joke or an actual threat of violence. If she’s passed over for a spot at the university it’s because she flunked the exam, not because the dean is embarrassed to have too many -bergs and -sztajns and -baums in his department.
And, as we well know, it is all much harder for boys. Even the most avid antisemite has a place in his heart for a pretty Jewess. But you, with your three sons… Clever and good-looking young men as well (having, of course, gotten their looks from Lilka and not you). I don’t believe you if you tell me they aren’t feeling the petty everyday humiliations the Poles just can’t help but mete down on us. I have nothing against the Poles, as you know. I just don’t want to live among a people who wield power over us, and will never forgive our successes.
We marvel, Hanka and I at the liberty our daughter feels. She believes in a better future. She believes she can achieve things. Crazy, beautiful things. She’s nearly sixteen now, and she’s full of ideals and opinions. You should hear the verbal lashings our child is capable of against her poor old Old World father. “You!” she says, “Some socialist you turned out to be! Whatever have you done for the disenfranchised here in this land! All you ever write of is Jews, Jews, Jews!” My own daughter wouldn’t deign read “Doublespeak” — she calls all my writing “ethnocentric,” which I’ve come to believe is what the younger generation calls any theory whose truths they don’t have the patience to contend with. (I can hear what you’re thinking, and yes: there are difficulties involved in raising an Israeli child.)
And if it were only me she criticized, Feliks, I think I could just about bear it. But no. My Zosia dares question the whole experiment that has allowed her such chutzpah, such beautiful benevolence: “How can a Jewish state exist that oppresses an entire people?” my plucky little daughter wants to know. “Isn’t it the moral imperative of the Jews to ensure justice and fairness for all?” And this is just the conversation around the breakfast table, if I told you what gets said at dinner time it would burn a hole right through the airmail sheet. Yet look at me, Feliks. I’m old enough now that all I want is to feel the sun on my face as I sip my juice on the terrace. Don’t I, after all we’ve been through, have the right?
Hanka and I… well, what can we do, we know where she got it from, right? And what a relief, I tell you, to raise a child who feels sufficiently entitled to fight for the good of others instead of spending all her time crippled with complexes. Hanka insists we take her seriously. She kicks me under the table if I dare even crack a smile, if I try, in the most reasonable voice I can muster, to point out the startling contradictions in my dear child’s viewpoints. If I say, “but sweetheart, do you realize the privilege you have of even being allowed to articulate such a thought?”
And I mustn’t dare mention the Holocaust — God forbid I mention the Holocaust! When we first left Poland, Zosia couldn’t get enough of the Holocaust. She was livid with us for never having spoken of it. But of course we didn’t speak of it, as you know, no one in Poland ever did, we feared it would cripple us to do so. We feared we’d traumatize our children with our own traumas… As if living in the Great Silence were healthier somehow.
There’s no right way to remember, it turns out, and there’s no good way to forget.
But here, people speak truth, at least in our circles. Zosia’s little school companions were scandalized when they discovered our daughter’s various ignorances. We got a letter home one day, telling us we must appear at the school to discuss a situation that had come up around the issue of a certain “Anne Frank.” Who is this Anne Frank, we asked Zosia, thinking that she had had a falling out with a classmate. Zosia — only six at the time — wouldn’t tell us. So, Hanka and I put on our best clothes, took the bus down to the school and sat down with the headmistress, who treated us as if we were war criminals personally responsible for the murder of this Anne Frank. Finally, she took pity on us in our ignorance and provided us with three different biographies, each more depressing than the last, of this unfortunate little Dutch Jewess, Anne Frank, whom, apparently, everyone in the world outside of Poland has heard of. Look her up, Feliks, just not in a Polish encyclopedia.
We do what we can to help our daughter find a healthy outlet for her frustrations. Hanka has started accompanying her to an orphanage across town, a place filled with broken children, a horrid place I can barely stand to hear them speak of. (Feliks, I can no longer witness suffering… I take it very badly.) But the activism seems to be doing Zosia good, so I’m supporting the volunteering, and we’ve just donated a set of bicycles to the orphanage. I just hope she doesn’t bring home typhoid. Next year she’ll be up for the draft and then she’ll move on. But if she wants to pursue a career in social services? That is okay too. It’s one of the advantages of living in one’s own country. In Poland, the social services were put into place for us; here its we who provide social services to others.
Which position do you prefer?
Which brings me back around to my point about your boys…
Let us not be naïve, dear brother. We thought it would all end with the War. Then we thought, oh, well, now, after what happened in Kielce, what more can possibly go wrong? But here we are, decades have passed, and you and your ilk are still sitting like slugs, thinking: ’56: now that was really the end. Now we Jews in Poland are finally safe and snug.
And yet your brave Gomulka is starting to squirm. You’re mad if you think your leader is going to put his career on the line to save the few thousand Jews still limping along in Poland. (I stumbled upon this line in my research recently, it’s from conversation between Stalin and Gomulka just after the war, during which Gomulka tells his Soviet counterpart: “Each jew taken alone is a wonderful fellow, it’s as a group together they are a problem.” Real comedians, the both of them.) Gomulka, for whom Jews are so wonderful he went ahead and married one of his very own. But this is how antisemitism today works, Feliks. It’s not the “chase them into the gas chambers” variety any longer. It’s weirder and harder to pinpoint but just as insidious and even more cynical.
Don’t roll your eyes at me.
I’ll leave you with that. I realize a soldier of the People’s Army cannot travel to Israel, where he might divulge all the high-tech secrets of vegetable transport, but if any or all three of your boys want to make the trip, we will, of course, welcome them with open arms, and our daughter will take them on a tour of all the most unfortunate spots in this magnificent country. And should they decide they like the land of the Jews enough to stay… well, no effort will be spared to ensure they establish a dignified life, here among their own.
Yours with boundless love,
Bruno
P.S. I forgot to mention: Hanka travels to Jerusalem twice a week for work, so we had to buy a new car. A Volvo P1800S. I don’t mean to taunt you, but she does drive beautifully.
P.P.S. It goes without saying, but make sure not to get lazy about destroying this, and anything else coming from abroad. D. is absolutely trustworthy, but you heard, I trust, about the Kirszenbaums?
____________
Basia Winograd is a New York City-based writer, filmmaker and writing instructor. Her story, Our Aunt of the West, is forthcoming in the Jewish Book Council’s literary journal in 2024. A previous story, The Realist was part of the 2020 edition of Paper Brigade. Basia was the recipient of a grant from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture in 2022. She teaches creative writing at Hunter College.