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13. The Wooden Box
- Wayne State University Press
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The journey to Moscow and Baku whetted my brother’s appetite for more, and one day he returned from a solo trip to Paris with a whole set of photographs of Peppi. Who was Peppi? Peppi had been Ruth’s governess in Czernowitz , hired to protect Mother’s third child from the fate of the second, to free up evenings for Mother to perform her songs at the Masada Club, and late mornings to resume her clandestine correspondence with Seidman. Peppi had done such a splendid job raising a German-speaking Frauline— speaking German was de rigeur in a place like Czernowitz—that family folklore still preserved an aphorism from my sister, age three. “Tante Elke,” she is reputed to have instructed Elke Kieses (whoever she was), “women in front of other women have no need to feel embarrassed.” Somehow Ben discovered that Peppi was still alive, having survived the war in Paris, and had never married. Mother put on her reading glasses to take a closer look at the photograph and decided to bring Peppi over to be governess to Ruthie’s younger son, thus freeing Ruth up to pursue her academic career, and Peppi was about to immigrate to French-speaking Quebec and rejoin our family when she was run over by a car and severely crippled . Though I never set eyes on Peppi nor heard her speak German-accented French, an important relic was unearthed thanks to Ben’s adventure. That 75 13 The Wooden Box night after Ben went home and Father had left for one of his interminable meetings at the Jewish People’s School, Mother went upstairs, located her huge bundle of keys, opened the cedar closet, and took out a carved wooden box. Inside I could see packets of envelopes, the older ones wrapped in red ribbon, the newer ones in red rubber bands. Carefully untying a red ribbon, in a matter of seconds she found the envelope she was looking for and extracted from there lockets of delicate blond hair, which she placed in the palm of her right hand, a propitious moment, since she was now seated in the Library, formerly Ruthie’s room, for me to sit down on the floor in front of her, a signal of my willingness to listen. I knew without Mother telling me that the hair had belonged to Odele, her firstborn daughter, not to blond-haired Ruthie, her replacement. But did I know that Czernowitz was Father’s big break? In 1934 he was invited to build the first rubber factory in northern Romania, and within a year Caurom (short for Cauchook Romania) was up and running. They lived on Urban Jarnik 4a, in the upper town, with the aforementioned Peppi as governess and a private chauffeur named Stefan, who drove the director to and from the factory compound. So smooth was the ride in the Packard, so luxurious the leather upholstered seats with their mahogany finish, that Leybl did not feel the cobblestones below. These creature comforts he did not take for granted, both because he still held fast to his democratic principles, and because his regimen of constant pain had already begun, the result of colitis that probably worsened in the wake of his mother’s death. Leybl had been called to Odl’s bedside to nurse her back to health and contracted diphtheria himself. Odele, then, was named after my paternal grandmother . Whereas Krosno had been a sojourn in the desert, Czernowitz was for Mother a kind of homecoming. The huge neoclassical torsos on the façade of the Jewish Community Building reminded her of the two bulvanes, the half-naked torsos that stood guard at the entrance to her courtyard on Zawalna 28/30. Once again, the actors of Ararat could come to town, because Czernowitz boasted its own Yiddish theater, just down the block from the opera house. Now they could gather not around Grisha’s table but around her own, with Father taking the pictures instead of Grisha, and with Zosia the Maid in full servant’s attire standing at an appropriate remove from the foreign guests. Whereas in Krosno, the only showpiece was their dinner table made of inlaid wood, here they could patronize the arts, like Leon chapter thirteen 76 [18.209.66.87] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 15:02 GMT) Kopleman’s painting of a war veteran on crutches, which Masha, however, found so revolting that she insisted on hiding it under the couch...