Yiddishlands: A Memoir

11. The Black Canopy

64 Wheneverwe’ddrivebytheCatholiccemeteryonMountRoyal,theonethat faces Beaver Lake, Father would say, “A cemetery—what a fine place to make out with a girl.” That Eros and Thanatos made natural bedfellows was a startling observation coming from Father, because on no other occasion would he indulge in romantic reverie, and even more startling given what I now know about cemeteries in the compass of Mother’s past. No way would she have made out with a man surrounded by gravestones, so if not with her, then with whom? Mother became a cemetery-goer after Father died, not only in the month of Elul, the time that was sanctified for communing with our family dead, but whenever I happened to be in town. The drive to the cemetery on de la Savane was something of an outing, in view of the fact that after my brother died, Father sold his forty-year-old burial plot at the Adath Israel and secured as close a grave to Ben as he could in the new Jewish cemetery. StandingatBen ’sgraveside,eitherbecausethewoundrefusedtohealorremained unacknowledged, Mother said little, and would grow more talkative when we reached her own grave, where Father’s flamboyant epitaph, “undzer eyntisker ,ourone-and-only,”hadbeeninscribedasperherwish,andwhereher own epitaph, “shma kolenu, hear our voices,” would some day be engraved 11 The Black Canopy on her side of the joint headstone. Hear our voices, O Lord, hear our outcry, our protest, we will not let Thee off the hook, O God of Vengeance, until Thy job be done. One brisk Friday morning in September she wore her black and brown tweed suit with matching hat. From the jacket pocket she removed an almost pearl-white stone that she had saved especially for this pre–Rosh Hashanah visit. “You know,” she said, polishing the stone in her hand, “every Tisha b’Av, whenIwasgrowingup,ontheanniversaryof JudahLeibMatz’sdeath,Fradl wouldhirethreecarriagestotakealltenoftheMatzchildrentohisgraveside intheOldVilnaCemeteryatShnípeshik,theretorecitetheKaddish.Mother herselfalwaysstayedhome.Once,whenIwasoldenoughtoaskwhy,sheexplained , ‘ikh geher shoyn nit tsu im, I don’t belong to him anymore.’” “Because she was now remarried to your father?” “That’s right. Judah Leib had no spiritual claims upon my mother. But Fradl’swaywardoffspring,theywerestillrequiredtorecitetheproperKaddish .” Looking around at the spare surroundings, Mother suddenly grew indignant . “So how come Mrs. Oberman managed to get the cemetery to install a bench right next to her husband’s grave, while we are forced to stand? I asked Rabbi Baron to intercede on my behalf, made a very handsome offer, but to no avail!” Good and angry now, and perhaps in the face of her own mortality, Mother laid bare for me her self-defining moment, the untold story of her mother’s unveiling. ThemomentFradldied,Mashawasleftinthecareoftheonemanforwhom she had cared the least. Her father, refusing all offers of marriage, also refused to move out of their suite of apartments at Zawalna 28/30. It was just the two of them now, plus the maid. Exactly what happened next is a bit sketchy, because the story picks up eleven months later when, according to Jewish custom, it was time for Fradl’s tombstone to be unveiled, and Masha, instead of squeezing into the last carriage with her siblings, headed for the new Jewish cemetery at Zarecze in a separate carriage with her father. She didn’t quite know what to expect, for all the arrangements had been made The Black Canopy 65 by sister Rosa, who was back in the wake of her affair with Sergeant Kornicker . Rosa had been freed to marry Kornicker, as I surely remember, because his wife had committed suicide during the war, and the engagement was to take place in Berlin, where Sergeant Kornicker was to have met her at the train station. And he was there all right, waiting at the Leipziger Bahnhof, only instead of the man she had fallen in love with, that dashing officer in full uniform, who had accompanied her so perfectly at the piano, she was met by your typical Jewish burgher, somewhat comical, in fact, in his tight-fitting vest and half-coat. The Hebrew inscription on the black marble obelisk was simple and stark: The Beloved Mother of Great Eminence fradl daughter of moshe matz 18.X.1921 Masha could not believe her eyes. There they all stood—her half-brothers and sisters, for whose sake she had renounced her own father—and they hadwrittenheroutofthefamily.“Vosbinikhepes,amámzer,”shecried,turning to Rosa, “what do you think I...