“She immigrated to Israel in order to go to college. If I’d left Barcelona for the same reason, there would have been no problem. But my parents object to my leaving home to move into a rented apartment with you. It’s just not done here. Spain is a very conservative Catholic country,” he added.
“But you’re a Jew,” she said, so quietly that he didn’t hear. Or perhaps he did.
My father didn’t have a regular job and was forever changing professions. Well, not really professions; jobs. He didn’t have a profession. That was the problem.
When he entered a real estate partnership with someone, it was he who did all the work; he was familiar with all the houses in Wadi Salib and downtown Haifa and was brilliant at persuading people to buy; he ran around all over town, but in the end, his partner screwed him and threw him out of the business that Father himself had established.
Father then opened a restaurant, and he was once again screwed over. He opened a garage that sold tires, and Mom yelled that no one in the region owned a car.
He went into partnership with a Moroccan and opened a café, brought in the whole neighborhood to play backgammon, brewed strong Romanian coffee as only he knew how, poured his soul into that finjan, together with the best-quality ground coffee; the café lost money and had to be liquidated at a loss.
Between jobs, Father was the neighborhood graphic artist, painting store signs in colorful stylized Hebrew letters on cardboard marked out with lines, so the letters shouldn’t spill over. Whatever was asked of him—a barber here, a cobbler there, a café and a real estate office. Father was paid no money for this work but was rewarded in other ways, such as free movie tickets or ice cream for his girls.
Our dream was for Father to have permanency. To us, permanency was a word that held promise, and smelled of money; we loved our father so much, but knew that without permanency it was hard to rely on him—and the guy suffered from an excessively good heart. It just spilled out of him in all directions, and he was quite prepared to give away everything he owned—except his daughters—if it would help the human race. He was charming and charismatic and very, very funny. And everyone loved to spend time in his company.
With his black hair and slanting green eyes that dipped slightly at the corners in a kind of self-conscious sadness, my dad was an extremely good-looking man. It was no coincidence that my sister thought he resembled God. He bestowed his green eyes on me; Yosefa, whom I called Fila, got their slant. We both inherited the sadness.
In Romania they had owned a movie theater—Nissa—near the Cişmigiu Gardens. Back then Mom and Dad had been important people, especially since they got to see all the movies and were familiar with all the actors. At home they spoke about Greta Garbo, Judy Garland, and Frank Sinatra as if they’d been to school with them. In a way they felt some kind of patronage over the shining Hollywood stars, since without their movie theater, the people of Romania would have never been exposed to all that glamour.
Before the war that began in the late 1930s and came to an end in the mid-1940s, when he was twenty, Dad and his brother-in-law Herry did odd jobs in Bucharest.
They went from house to house and always found some broken gate or peeling plaster, crumbling paint or a wobbly table that needed fixing. Dad, with his honeyed voice, had no trouble persuading the Romanian housewife to prepare a surprise for her husband, who, on his return home, would find it stylishly renovated and revamped to the glory of the Romanian nation, and all in return for such and such a sum of Romanian lei and a cooked meal for two. The women were captivated by Father’s smooth and charming tongue and Herry’s skilled hands, and as the result of an aggressive marketing campaign of an intensity that was rare in those days in Romania, Father and Herry found themselves with a reputation for being efficient and reliable odd-job men.
One day they entered one of the more elegant buildings in Bucharest, and a very beautiful woman opened the door to them.
“We’re in the odd-job business,” Father said and looked at Mrs. Dorfman with his piercing green eyes.
“I have nothing in the house that is out of order except my husband,” replied Mrs. Dorfman.
“I’d be happy to mend your husband,” Father told her and smiled a smile that melted her heart. He entered the house, his brother-in-law Herry dragging behind, and she led them to a dark room, where her husband, who suffered from multiple sclerosis, sat in a chair, his head drooping on his chest.
“Since you are here already, you can help me take him to the lavatory. It’s quite difficult to do on my own,” Mrs. Dorfman said to my father and gave him a cheeky smile.
For two months, Father would drop by every evening after finishing all his odd jobs and help her take her sick husband to the lavatory.
After two months, Father persuaded Mrs. Dorfman to take him on as an active partner in her movie house, he being the only one who could save the business from bankruptcy, because her husband’s illness had forced her to stay home to care for him.
Mrs. Dorfman, who was a very pretty woman, was a member of the Romanian aristocracy. She was a devout Catholic and came from a very well-connected family in Romania’s high society, with close ties in high places. Mrs. Dorfman took on Dad as a business partner and as a lover. And indeed, Dad saved her business. He devised novel advertising methods, and their movie house was soon bursting at the seams with patrons. His advertising campaign, with the slogan “Get out of the box and come see a movie,” promised two movies and a cabaret for the price of a single movie ticket. During the long intermissions, everyone ate at the bar, which his sister Vida, together with her husband, Herry, operated under franchise. It was in my father’s movie house that all the young talent—stand-up comics, male and female dancers and singers—were discovered, performing during the intermission between one movie and another.
My father’s friends included members of the Romanian Iron Guard, and he employed them as bouncers in his movie house. He paid them generously, as if knowing that one day he would need their services. And they in turn kept the place in immaculate order and made sure no drunks and hooligans found their way into the business.
When World War II broke out, all the men were sent away to forced labor camps except my father. His friends in the Iron Guard arranged for him to be issued the necessary documents recognizing his work in the movie house as vital to the war effort by maintaining Romania’s morale and fighting spirit. This exemption did not prevent the Iron Guard from persecuting other Jews and handing them over to the Germans; they justified their sympathetic attitude toward my dad by saying, “Well, you’re a different kind of Jew.”
My father’s sisters, Vida and Lutzi, worked mornings for an Italian company checking reels of film for scratches or tears; when any were found, they cut and pasted the film with gentle efficiency. This work was also regarded by Father’s friends as being important to the war effort. In the evenings his sisters worked in Dad’s movie house.
Vida and Lutzi were both very active in the Zionist movement in Romania, and throughout the war years they harbored Zionist activists on the run from the Iron Guard, who wanted to hand them over to the Germans. Under the noses of his Iron Guard friends and with Dad’s full knowledge, the sisters hid Zionist activists and, later, youngsters who had managed to escape the death camps and made it to Romania on their way to Palestine.
For several months Vida’s home provided shelter to four young Jewish youths who had escaped from Poland and Russia. During the day they were locked in the house; in the evening they went out to breathe some fresh air on a bicycle belonging to young Lorie.
Lorie was eight and desperately wanted to be accepted by her peers. When she was invited to the birthday party of the most popular girl in her class, she wore her best dress and brought an especially expensive gift. It was a birthday party in the middle of