Yiddishlands: A Memoir

15. Lisbon

86 Who can forget the opening sequence of Casablanca, the greatest movie of all time, when a sonorous voiceover leads the viewer, whose knowledge of geography cannot be trusted, through the preferred escape route from Europe ? Remember the point of embarkation to freedom? It was Lisbon, the same port city where my parents and two siblings ended up in the fateful summer of 1940. Taken together, Mother’s European photo albums, numbered 1–4, provide much more scope than Warner Bros. Wouldn’t you want to see Ingrid Bergman as a brooding eleven-year-old? Her huge family circle? Her first outings with friends, her late-night parties? Ingrid Bergman in a flapper gown and a string of pearls, or better yet, in drag? Especially if you can’t just order the video and replay that scene on the rainy tarmac where the lovers part forever, but you have to wait and wait for your mother to be in just the right frame of mind to remove the coveted albums from her main linen closet and offer to take you through them. Any one of these photos can suddenly lift her spirits for the rest of the day, like the one of the impromptu concert staged by Grisha and her friends dressed in makeshift costumes. Erik, she laughs, tore up a copy of this very photo when he recognized the man with his arm draped around her shoulders as Pinkhes Kon, mit di pukhke levoves, that bleeding-heart Democrat. 15 Lisbon But watch out for the family portrait in the Czernowitz album that Ben refused to pose for, in punishment wherefor Mother left for Vilna without him on her last trip home, in 1939. I know exactly what my brother must have felt, because she pulled the same trick on me after my son Aryeh was born and I made the mistake of displaying photos of the delivery at the dining room table. Shocked by the impropriety, Mother boycotted my lecture at the Jewish Public Library that evening. Mother is happiest when holding an infant, this in stark contrast to the one and only icon of her mother, Fradl Matz, a miniature of the life-size portrait that hangs over our parents’ bed. She wears a high lace collar, slightly open at the neck, with a tiara of her own light brown braids, and take a look, Fradl still has the high, tightly laced bosom of a bride, because she hired nursemaids for every one of her ten children, half of whom by that time had already been born. When Father finally makes an appearance, near the end of Album 2, he is hard to recognize without his glasses, which he still took off when being photographed,orwhenhe’swearingthatblackrevolutionary-styleshirt,or surrounded by other students, whether holding hands in a circle dance or in the chemistry lab in Stefan Batory, and also on account of the brooding, almost surly look in his eyes. Only after his engagement at the beginning of Album 3 does he start looking like himself, with black-rimmed glasses and the smile we know so well, equivocal, almost apologetic, as if to say: How does a boy like me come to hob-nob with these writers, artists, lawyers, and doctors? He stares at Grisha’s camera with a weary smile, even on their of- ficialweddingday,whenIexpecttoseesomeglintoftriumphovertheBlack Canopy, the secret nuptials that he staged the day before (if there’s any truth to that). Halfway into the Krosno Album there’s another manly shot of him standingattheentrancetotheWudetaplantdressedinawhitelabcoat,and one more, in a tweed suit, as director of the Caurom rubber factory in Czernowitz . If only there were pictures taken when King Carol awarded him a medal for his services to the country. How soon, I wonder, after posing in that tweed suit did Father say “lkh ken nit leyfn, I’m incapable of running, ikh ken nor forn, I can only travel,” which prompted him to set out for Bucharest alone, to secure the exit visas, issued on the condition of no return? Earlier that year, there had been talk of mother flying with the children to Annushka in Kovno. If I leave now, she said to Father, we’ll never see each other again. And if only there were a Lisbon 87 photo of Boncescu, who was in love with Feygele, Aunt Malcia’s married sister, the gentile who landed a job in the...