Helena was silent, but her mind was racing. She couldn’t bear the idea of a life trapped in Kraków, where she was in love with an unattainable young man but was threatened with the prospect of marrying another. She would be condemned to the same deathly boring fate as her mother, her aunts, her grandmothers, and all those generations of women before her: countless children, monotonously repetitive Sabbaths, endless prayers and nothing but submission.
Tradition could not be changed. Particularly not to please young women. ‘She’s the eldest, she must be the first to marry. Otherwise, how will we find husbands for the others?’ shouted Hertzel. ‘You have already turned down so many good matches! Who do you think you are? You’re nothing but a pretentious nuisance!’
Helena could hear her sisters whispering behind the parlour door. Not one of them would come to her rescue, for they were all terrified by their father’s shouting. Besides, Helena had gone too far. She wouldn’t get out of it this time.
Helena lifted her chin and stood tall like a rooster preparing for battle. Maybe she couldn’t have Stanislaw, but she wasn’t about to have old, bald Schmuel, either. At the age of twenty-one she was no longer a little girl. No one else had the right to make up her mind for her. Helena ran out of the room, hurtled past her sisters, slammed the door and locked herself in her room. She collapsed on her bed, sobbing with rage. I hate them. I want to leave. Everything here is old and ugly and poor, and nothing ever changes. If I stay here I’ll die.
So Helena left.
She was amazed she found the courage. She sought refuge in Kraków with her aunt Rosa Silberfeld Beckman, one of Gitel’s sisters, who agreed to take her in for a few months. Not more than that, she warned; just time enough for Helena to find her bearings.
Helena had no intention of living in Rosa’s dreary little house, or sharing a bedroom with her cousin Lola, for long. She had other ambitions. One of her mother’s sisters, Chaja Silberfeld, lived in Vienna, where she was married to Liebisch Splitter, a furrier who ran a huge store with his three brothers. The magnificent Chaja invited young Helena to come and stay with her.4 Helena would help her aunt to look after the house and work at her uncle’s business.
The Splitters lived more comfortably than her parents. Their house was more spacious, their furniture more modern. Liebisch had a keen business sense; he was not a dreamer like Hertzel, and didn’t spend his days with his nose in a book. He was making his fortune. Her cousins were kind to her, and Vienna was a real capital, with a wealth of museums, theatres, cafés and concert halls. Kraków was provincial in comparison.
Helena improved her knowledge of German and learned the basics of the luxury retail trade. There was no one like her for latching on to a customer, keeping her there and selling her the most expensive fur. She liked wearing them too. There is a photograph from those early years showing Helena posing in a black astrakhan coat.
Two years sped by. Helena had no time for leisure. She was working.
Her only entertainment was a ritual stroll along the banks of the Danube or in the Prater Gardens on the Sabbath. In response to Gitel’s pleas, her aunt had introduced her to a few young men, but Helena turned them all down. Chaja Splitter did not insist. Her niece had made herself indispensable at the shop.
Helena wouldn’t speak to her father, but continued to write to her mother. In all her letters Gitel asked the same question: When do you plan to get married? Helena invariably evaded the question; marriage wasn’t a woman’s only fate. Her sisters’ letters brought some consolation, but what they told her gave her no desire to return to Kraków. Nothing ever seemed to change there.
Selling furs was no life either. Not for her in any case. It was time to move on. Her cousin Eva, the daughter of her uncle Bernhard Silberfeld, Gitel’s brother, had begun to write to her on a regular basis. Eva’s mother had died young, and she had lived for a long time with Helena’s family, like a ninth sister. When they were children they had been very close.
Eva had joined her father in Australia and had married Louis Levy, a violent alcoholic who raped and beat her and on two occasions nearly killed her. Somehow Eva found the strength to file for divorce. In her letters she asked Helena for help in looking after her three small children. Theodore, the youngest, was still an infant.
Australia? Helena had thought about it from time to time without really dwelling on it. She knew very little about that huge colonial country, but it definitely seemed an attractive option. When Eva described the vast amounts of space, the unending wilderness, the modern cities, Helena dreamed of freedom.
She gave it some thought, then confided in her aunt, who in turn spoke to her husband about it. They considered it to be an excellent plan. The Splitters were going to move to Antwerp, and would have no room for Helena, which meant that before long they would be leaving their niece without a job or a roof over her head. She didn’t want to go with them anyway.
So Chaja wrote to Gitel, and everyone agreed: Helena should emigrate. As usual, later in life she would embellish the reasons for her departure: ‘For a long time, since I was a child, it had been one of my dreams to go to Australia. My uncles had settled there before and our imaginations had been fed on letters from this remote land.’5 Her decision to go into exile so far away would allow her to shape the legend of her adventurous life as she saw fit. If she was leaving, it was because she wanted to. She didn’t want to owe anything to anyone.
It was out of the question to let anyone suspect that it was her family who wanted to get rid of her by sending her thousands of miles away. Everyone viewed the Australian solution as an honourable way out for an unmarriageable young rebel. Alteh moid, old maid: that was the fate in store for her. But perhaps in the outback she might still meet a gvir, a rich husband, who would be willing to take her on despite her age, as Gitel never stopped hoping.
Helena let them say what they liked for fear they might change their mind. Once she was in Australia she would be too far away for them to come pestering her with that marriage business.
Gitel sold a piece of jewellery, one of the few she had left, and sent Helena the money with twelve jars of her precious face cream. Helena packed them in her suitcase beneath her dresses of pleated silk. The Splitters and other members of her family contributed to her purse.
Helena was able to buy a ticket in cabin class without dipping into her savings. And one day, more alone and more determined than ever, she boarded the train for the port of Genoa in Italy.
NOTES
1 Rubinstein, Helena, Je suis Esthéticienne, éditions du Conquistador, 1957.
2 Rubinstein, Helena, My Life for Beauty, op. cit.
3 ibid.
4 Woodhead, Lindy, War Paint: Madame Helena Rubinstein and Miss Elizabeth Arden, Their Lives, Their Times, Their Rivalry, John Wiley & Sons Inc., 2004.
5 Rubinstein, Helena, The Art of Feminine Beauty, op. cit.
Helena snapped her parasol shut before entering the store on