1956 to 1962, Johannesburg, South Africa

By Dov Fedler

It is not greed that motivates her family to press for the massive settlement but rather a guilty duty to “see her right.”

The German government will pay her reparations, but she will have nothing of the blood money. It is too painful a reminder of all she has lost. It is insulting to imagine that the debt can ever be repaid.

Instead, she gives it to her poorer sisters for their children. I suspect that there is an arrangement whereby one of her brothers-in-law acts as her proxy so that she never, ever has to see the tainted envelope, to read a German word.

So a charade is created in which no such envelope exists. But should the monthly bloody package from The Deutsch, y’mach shmo v’zichro (may his name and memory be obliterated), not arrive with Teutonic regularity every month - due to a clerical error, perhaps - who knows what action she might take. Impossible to even imagine.

But let us assume that such an event never occurs. There would have to be some communication to her that the check has indeed been cleared that month. So perhaps the sister brings her pairs of shoes and dresses for the girls, and asks her opinion. It is done in the same circumspect manner in which she will instruct the maid to turn on the light in the house on Shabbat.

“It’s dark in here,” she says. And there is light.

She looks at the shoes, the dress, and asks simply, “Expensive?”

“Only the very best!”

“Not good enough, but it will have to do.” So the poorer of the brothers-in-law is doubly bound to her in duty. To pay her for her generosities and to help her get a life, with the big house and the fine things that she so deserves – only more!

They are, for now, saddled with the guilt of the crimes committed against her. She is the stake in the heart of their perfect lives, the broken glass under the bare foot of their simcha (joy). They must see her right. They want to be rid of her. Who can blame them?

So it is we who are too bound into this atonement, like Isaac to the Akedah.

She is a widow and a mother robbed. She is owed a husband and a son. Who will give her that ? The Deutsch, y’mach shmo?

Chona, my father, steps forward as the willing sacrifice. He has two sons; take your pick. He knows all about debt. He owes his sight to his father, his life to his sister, his independence to his uncles. Is there a life beyond debt? He knows no other.

And what living Jew does not owe his life to the 6 million?

Debt is our genetic disease. Holocaust is written in our DNA. Every experience is branded with it. It is our mark of Cain. It’s as if we were not allowed to exist beyond the Holocaust: Remember the first temple. Remember the second. The First World War, the second, the Inquisition. Operation Entebbe, Munich. And let us not forget, thee, oh Jerusalem.

With that image of my mother keening on her bed, a word creeps up on me like a draught of smoke through an open window: Crematoria! Crematoria! I remember being instantly terrified of the word. Crematoria. A word so Yiddish in sound. Like chaleria. A chaleria af zey-y’mach sh’mam. A malaria on them – may their name be….

And instantly I see the face of my stepmother in that rictus sneer.

May they be obliterated. A hatred forged in a furnace. That is her daily prayer.

If by some mishap, the mention of y’mach should somehow slip into a conversation, she spits out her invective: “Die gutte zollen liggen tsuvissen die gutte! (The good ones should lie among the good!) A klola. (A curse on them.)”

After the year of mourning for my mother, there was this expectation of a life of reward for the deprivations of that awful time. And with barely a heartbeat, we were thrust into the bosom of Fanya.

At cheder (elementary school), we whispered what had happened to her, and when I returned to school after the week of mourning and came into the classroom, everyone seemed to look at me fearfully for bringing a death into their young lives. It was something so removed from their possibilities. I felt like a leper.

Finally, at “Sixteen Going on Seventeen,” I was beginning to learn to live in the now. To carp over my diems. When Dad dropped the bomb on us, I could see it all coming: Our yerusha, our inheritance, was to be the Holocaust.

Watching the Sean Penn film, I understood why someone walks ahead, calling, “dead man walking!”

Step aside. Don’t be tainted with this. Run. Hide. Get out the way. But we were made to stand without objection in the path of the death march and were steamrolled for the weight of her awful history. The only Atlas in the family was Dad’s dead brother. It was too much for us.

I am bound to do justice to Fanya. I am advised.

Use fictitious names. Don’t upset her family. But if I were to use a fictional name, then Hitler has truly won. It would be as if her memory had been obliterated.

Like it or not, I am her family. She was married to my father for more than 25 years. She is the person my children knew as Bobba.

Had she once screamed out the agony of her soul, her inconsolable grief, and had I once been allowed to put an arm around her in a show of some compassion, perhaps I would have been able to cross that bloodline and been able to pretend to be whatever she wanted me to be.

Had she liked us, at least, it might have helped. Had she just once displayed some weakness, like any normal person, we might have stood a chance of making something of the charade.

Mom lost a mother, a father, a sister and nieces in the Holocaust, but never a husband or a son. And Mom crumpled like balsa tree under the weight of that.

Not Fanya. She was unbendable, unbreakable, simply because she had been bent and beaten like a Samurai sword, folded over and over, and yet again forged and hammered into her grief beyond any possibility of the weakness of any human embrace and beyond the grasp of frailty. Fanya carried it alone.

And when she died - and I did not say the Kaddish prayer for her at the funeral - there was a whispering among her family, and the son of her niece expressed his righteous disappointment by saying, “After all she did for them.”

I am sorry I was unable to say the Kaddish for Fanya, but then I never sang for my father either. When he died, the rabbis came, in one solid phalanx of righteousness, to prevail on me to save my father’s soul. They told me that if the Kaddish is not said, a soul wanders in limbo and cannot get to Heaven.

Well there it is. I am damned before I start. I have no sons to say the Kaddish for me. And the soul of my father embraced me, and I told them, as Solomon would have, “He was 87 years old. He’ll get to Heaven on his own recognizance.”

There was no way that I would spend another year of my life in that moribund year of mourning.

When I was about 3, Dad wrote that I returned from synagogue once, put on a yarmulke, wrapped myself in a towel, and sang. “Kliskkala Klishkala Sho Rabo” was my version of “Yit’gadal v’yit’kadash sh’mei raba,” the opening verse that exalts God’s name.

So I guess I sang for my father after all. But just that once, I should have pretended to be Fanya’s son.

Dov Fedler is a South African political cartoonist. He has three grown-up daughters and three grandchildren. He has just finished writing his family’s history, The High Windows.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Thursday, August 2nd, 2007 | Email This Post

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