Lies About My Family: A Memoir

The Madorskys Come to America

49 the madorskys come to america The Moiseyev Dance Company toured the United States for the first time in 1958, to usher in a new era of cultural exchange. My mother, who loves ballet, excitedly gathered the family to watch the special performance on the Ed Sullivan Show. “Come see, Ma,” my father called my grandmother. She too enjoyed dancing, as well as singing, acting, performing—doing them, watching them. Her father, she would reminisce, would take her, Rose, his oldest and smartest, in the wagon with him when he traveled from Rogachov to Mogilev. Business finished , they attended the famous Mogilev theater. (Famous in Rogachov, I thought when I heard this story, but the theater is still there and still a tourist destination, with a picture on the Internet—a daunting orange building with a strange bulging tower and about a million wings.) On the way home, they sang over and over the songs they had heard, committing them to memory, and they stayed with my grandmother for the rest of her life, even through the Alzheimer’s. Her daughter, my Aunt Norma,wouldwalkwithherupanddownthehospitalcorridors, as they sang the old songs together. Norma tells me this, and I think of my friends Michael Bronski and Walta Borawski, when Walta was in the demented final stages of AIDS, and Michael said, “He barely knows his name, but he could be a contestant on Opera Quiz.” Music is 50 lies about my family the last thing to go. Music, and Yiddish: another friend tells me the story of her grandmother, a woman who spoke English for her entire adult life, but who after a stroke could speak only mamaloschen, the Mother Tongue. My grandmother took one look at the TV and stomped out of the room: “Feh, Cossacks. Pogromchiks.” She hated them like poison—although that didn’t at all diminish her pride in her knowledge of Russian or her mockery of my grandfather for his poor accent. “Always with their songs about the white birches,” she said dismissively, when as a child I pointed at a single, bright tree. Sterile, spindly things. In her yard was a peach tree. That was a tree. It flowered in the spring and produced sour, wormy fruits in the fall. With a small, sharp knife she cut away the holes and bruises, steamed off the skins, made preserves. But pogroms were not what had driven her family out, or at least they were not the immediate cause. “The pogroms in Russia of 1881 to 1883 did not spread to Belarus,” explains a history text. Of course, attacks of all kinds on Jews were constant before, during, and after that period; it’s just that the government , for whatever reason, didn’t allow them to rise to the level of riots at that time. Instead, the family’s problem was economic . My grandmother’s father, Isaac, a big wheeler-dealer, had the idea to borrow a lot of money and build a five-story office building, named for himself: The Madorsky. Brick, maybe it’s still standing, like the theater. But he’d overreached. The lender demanded his vig—the Jew must have more cash squirreledawaysomewhere —and Isaac, finally getting it through his head that however beautiful or even practical his projects, they would always come to nothing in that place, found it prudent to leave town. He took his family and went up to the land of Palestine: his mother, Tsivia Schnitz; his four children from his first marriage to Nechama-Belinka, who’d gone mad and was put away in an 51 the madorskys come to america asylum; his second wife, Sarah-Feige, known to all as Mumeh; and the three children he’d had with her. He had a new scheme: oranges. Labor-Zionism had been all the rage among forwardthinking Jews in Belarus, and Isaac had a cousin who’d gone off to drain the swamps in the Galilee. My grandmother Rose was herself an avid Labor-Zionist all her life and met my grandfather, who was also dedicated to the movement, in Detroit, at the big Poele Zion picnics on Belle Isle. Their photograph albums are full of sepia portraits of the Buffalo, New York, chapter that they joined later, when they moved there, everyone lined up in rows and smiling for the camera, Norma and my father sitting in front on the floor holding a banner, little mascots...