And so my grandmother’s dead body was returned to the same hospital where her beloved daughter Bianca lay recovering from a botched appendectomy—a recovery that had to be swift, because she was now left to care for her widowed father, her seventeen-year-old brother, Marco, and her ten-year-old sister, Aurika.
Bianca raised Aurika as if she were her own daughter, with love and devotion that knew no bounds and with an overwhelming feeling of guilt.
One day, when she was twenty-eight, Mom walked into David’s photography studio and laboratory and summoned him to the cemetery to take a photograph of her mother’s gravestone. David’s parents had died and bequeathed the photography studio to him and his brother, Jacko. David scrutinized the very thin, very elegantly dressed woman in the long brown coat and red hat, set at a jaunty angle. Mom had very curly brown hair, deep, highly intelligent brown eyes above high cheekbones, and fair skin. In those days women took great care to avoid tanning their faces, and a pretty woman was one who was interestingly pale. When they arrived at the cemetery and David saw that Grandmother had been fifty when she died, he asked Bianca what had been the cause of her death, and Bianca, out of a profound sense of guilt, replied that it had been “an appendectomy that went wrong.”
David sympathized, “Those doctors, you can never trust them.”
“And what about photographers, can they be trusted?” Mom asked in rebuke.
“Of course,” he replied, “the pictures will be developed by evening. I’ll deliver them to you in person.” David was instantly invited to dinner and told to bring his younger brother with him. Because at that very moment, Mom had made up her mind that David was the man she was going to marry.
What’s more, Mom had already decided, even before she’d met David’s younger brother, that this was going to be a double wedding, hers with David and his brother’s with her sister, Aurika.
That evening David delivered the pictures, and everyone was thrilled at how sharp they were and how clearly Grandmother’s name showed up on the headstone.
Mom laid a tasteful table for dinner and served a carefully prepared meal, since it’s a well-known fact that there is no better way to a man’s heart than through his stomach.
Mom told David and his younger brother that she wished to send the photographs to her two older siblings in Palestine. She spoke with great pride of her brother Niku and sister Lika, who lived in Hadera and were engaged in drying swamps.
David showed a lot of interest in the situation in British Mandate Palestine and the ways in which the inhabitants made a living, and even asked if he could correspond with Niku and Lika, since he had been raised on the Zionist ideal, and now that his parents were no longer alive, he wanted to follow in their footsteps by realizing their great love for the Land of Israel.
Mom’s endeavor had succeeded. After that family dinner, David asked if he could meet her again. At their fourth meeting, he asked her to marry him, and Mom accepted happily, but made her acceptance conditional on waiting for Aurika to come of age so she could marry his younger brother, Jacko. David agreed to this very logical arrangement.
In 1941, David told Mom that he had made up his mind to leave Nazi Europe, to emigrate to Palestine, and to set up a photography studio in Hadera, since her brother Niku had written that Hadera was now dry of swamps, there was a dearth of professional people in the country, and there was a demand for practically everything—or so he wrote. Mom knew that he simply wanted them all to join him in Israel, and that things weren’t quite as rosy there as he wanted them to think.
It was agreed that David and his brother would be the first to go, and after they had settled in, Mom would join them with the rest of her family—and that is how my mother’s life was saved.
David and his brother boarded the ship Struma in the Black Sea port of Constanza, together with a cargo of Jews wishing to make their way to Palestine. With its engine inoperable, the Struma was towed from Istanbul through the Bosporus out to the Black Sea by Turkish authorities with its refugee passengers aboard. It was torpedoed and sunk by a Soviet submarine on February 24, 1942, and all but 1 of its 768 passengers perished.
Even after marrying Dad three years later, Mom refused to become pregnant—something that was virtually unheard of in those days—until Aurika found a husband to replace the one she had lost at sea.
Dad, who was head over heels in love with a non-Jewish Romanian woman, was persuaded by his sisters to marry Bianca because she was single and had a dowry and because his mother, Tante Vavika, the one who died when I was nearly six and my sister saw God and the angels when they came to carry her off to the heavens, would never, but never, have allowed him to marry his Romanian shiksa.
By the time Dad learned that Mom had no dowry and Mom found out that Dad didn’t know how to take photographs, it was too late and they were already married.
When Yosefa was born in 1950 in the Romanian capital Bucharest, Dad swore at Mom and accused her of not even “being capable of giving me a son.”
Still, when he looked at the baby girl who had been born with the same black hair and slanting eyes as his, his heart melted, and he decided to raise his family in the land of the Jews. Mom protested fiercely; she didn’t believe that anything good could come out of a small country surrounded by hostile neighbors, especially since ships were being sunk on the way there, but Dad was adamant. He wanted his children to grow up in a Jewish state. My father, who was probably the only Jew in the whole of Romania never to have experienced anti-Semitism, because everyone loved him, didn’t want his children to ever know the humiliation of persecution merely for being Jewish.
All his life Dad was loved by everyone, except by Mom. But he didn’t really deserve my mom’s love, because he loved everyone except her.
In Wadi Salib my parents and my eight-month-old sister, Yosefa, were given the small kitchen, which lacked windows, air, and an outside view.
Mom whined to Dad, What could they expect already from his side of the family? And to shut her up, they had sex for the second time in their lives.
When I was born, and Father was annoyed with “that one who doesn’t know how to produce sons,” we were given the room that opened onto the balcony.
The room was a hundred and fifty square feet in size and had all the advantages of a studio apartment. It had a separate entrance from the yard that opened straight into the kitchen. There was a kitchenette that included a slab of marble worktop, with a length of fabric hanging from a wire spring down to the floor, behind which, next to the sink, the laundry basin used for boiling the baby’s diapers was hidden from sight.
Nearby stood the tiny refrigerator. When there was enough money to buy a quarter block of ice, it even managed to cool the watermelon that took pride of place inside it.
There was no need to store food, since the flour, sugar, mamaliga, and coffee were kept on the worktop, and everything we ate, chorba soup or mamaliga, was cooked and eaten on the day. Thursday, the day of the big clean, we ate chicken soup. Mom made the chicken soup from the wings and feet, after Dad had first chopped off the chicken’s toenails with an ax.
Yosefa and I ate the wings with our soup, Mother ate the feet, and Dad ate out. Mom saved the choice pieces of chicken, the breast and drumsticks, for Shabbat dinner.
A single stair, hinting that the kitchenette began two steps away, led into our front room. The room