‘But that doesn’t make any sense …’
‘Don’t argue. Clean your plate.’
A banner with a silver star hanging in the window meant a man from the household was overseas; a gold star meant he had been lost in action, so much we knew. How, or why, or even exactly where were our menfolk risking their bones and leaving them? Most of us little Americans were spared that knowledge. We Jewish children, girls in headscarves and boys in adorable little black hats standing behind our candles and twisted loaves at Miss Carnes’s festival, knew a little more than the others. The unnatural tears of our grown-ups, their whispers, the anguish in their eyes when they watched us silently and didn’t think we were noticing, told us something very, very bad was out there and aimed at us. But God forbid anyone should tell us precisely what was the snarling terror or how it had been unleashed, often with the acquiescence of neighbours, clients, tenants, patients and even old friends in the big and small places where our people had settled and lived for centuries. We were the lucky Jews, the safe Jews, American Jews, transplanted in the course of our race’s history, always in the nick of time. We had not merely survived; we had thrived and we lived well.
Sure, anti-Semitism was abroad in the States. Where has it not been? It is the quintessential racial prejudice of the West. In certain universities, country clubs, on some American streets including my own we were excluded, taunted, on meaner streets than mine we were beaten up. My father carried visible and invisible scars from his childhood on Manhattan’s lower East Side; mother would have been in greater danger still, her small town in Indiana supported an active branch of the Ku Klux Klan, except that her family was isolated and discreet about its origins, and besides, the Klansmen were too stupid out there to recognise a Jew who wasn’t wearing horns and a tail. All in all, far and away the heaviest burden American Jewry has had to bear is the guilt accruing to good fortune.
‘Hitler is a psychopathological maniac,’ my mother coached me to say as a tautological party turn when I was barely four. He had a silly moustache, too, and, it was said, only one ball. Whatever that meant. My best friend, Judy Brenner, thought it probably meant that Hitler grew up poor without many toys. But salacious quivers wake early in bright children and something told us not to bother asking Miss Carnes or any other adult. By the time I was in the fifth grade and it was the turn of my class to present the Festival of all Nations, the Führer had been dead for eight months and the number of balls rotting in his grave was academic.
‘So Hitler has killed himself. Folks, we gotta mourn the loss of a hero!’ one of the Catskill comics started his shtick that year at the hotel where my grandparents used to holiday. ‘If only a Jew had got him first!’ he cried, and slapped his forehead. ‘What a hero that Jew would have been!’
Children raised within hailing distance of New Amsterdam, in a city with its most posh street called Van Nostrand Avenue, in a nation headed for as long as they could remember by a man named Roosevelt could be expected to take Holland seriously. However, of the Normal School’s fifth-grade cute displays, the cutest by far was Dutch. Wooden shoes and windmills and little white hats with turned-up flaps, tulips and round red Edam cheeses: how sweet!
‘July 1954: The crossing to the Hook of Holland was quite rough. Poor Evelyn was sick for the entire journey. I never get seasick. The Dutch dockers were pink and well-scrubbed, and were real flirts.’
Under sail one dark and stormy night in the Bay of Biscay decades thereafter, foolhardy child, you will remember and regret your early hubris on open water. To boast about never being seasick is like saying ‘I don’t often lose my temper, but when I do …’ or ‘I’ll see your twenty and raise you twenty …’: commonplace pretensions that court disaster. Believe it or not, my little neo tar, I envy you the historical roll and pitch of your first Channel crossing. William the Conqueror’s challenge, Napoleon’s mistake, Hitler’s hurdle has these days been Disneyfied into a sort of ‘English Channel Experience’: a penny-ante casino and aquatic mini-mall catered by McDonald’s and Burger King. The monstrous cross-Channel vessel that carried me to the Netherlands offered but one outside deck and it was barely the size of an urban bathroom. Instead of sea air and billow we were given a choice of Hollywood movies people of taste would cross water to avoid.
While the graceful masts of Harwich were receding into our widening wake, I found a seat in one of the bars near a porthole blurred by salt spray and tried to read, for once a book most apposite: Embarrassment of Riches. Simon Schama’s dissertation on Holland is brilliant, but awfully heavy in the literal sense, a kilo at least. Announcements were being made in English and in Dutch, an incomprehensible language for me except I recognise its tone of common sense and cajolery: ‘Please listen – to know the location of life preservers is for your own good. You can understand that, can’t you?’ At a table nearby a bunch of balding cockneys were getting drunk, shouting and laughing in the early afternoon. Behind them a couple of young Goths, pierced, tattooed, both with heads half shaven and dressed in black leather, held hands and gazed into each other’s eyes. Television screens suspended overhead showered us with rubbish and bad music. Screaming, hyperactive children thundered past, trailing mothers behind them like limp security blankets. Evenly spaced on the far horizon five container ships processed at a stately speed towards the English coast, and watching them through a porthole, I gave in to a melancholy that had been threatening me since my departure from Liverpool Station. Why does an old woman travel? No change will ever again be for the better.
The big blonde next to me in the shuffling queue of disembarking foot passengers introduced herself as Chrissie from Liverpool. Without preamble, as if continuing a weathered conversation, she told me she’d had her first baby at fourteen, a girl, who at sixteen is now pregnant.
‘Are you pleased?’
She shrugged.
‘She’s awfully young,’ I said.
‘So was I. And I survived.’
Chrissie could never travel alone like me; she said she’d be too scared.
‘Of what?’
‘Dunno. Just scared.’
Her sister, who was waiting for her in the port, had lived in the Netherlands for twenty years. As a woman grows old, her intuition becomes more and more difficult to distinguish from experience: one or both – call it wisdom – told me not to ask why her sister had become an expatriate; it was not an edifying story, I was sure, and nothing I needed to know. Chrissie was on her way to meet a Turkish boyfriend, also a Dutch resident, whom she expected to make husband number three. A few months earlier Chrissie had been in a serious car accident; she told me that she’d nearly died. Suddenly her face knotted and she drew back, as confessional Englishwomen almost always do sooner or later. Why was she telling this nosy American her life’s story? It had to be the strong painkillers; she’d been taking them ever since the car crash and they’d loosened her tongue.
‘You’re not supposed to mix that stuff with drink,’ I said.
She held her paper cup under my nose as