SEARCHING FOR WORDS

As I join my friends for our monthly luncheon, I hear one of them say:
“I got a call from the hospital. She had climbed up on the stove to reach the top of the kitchen cabinet.” - I picture her little granddaughter out cold on the floor.
“Poor kid. Did she break anything?” I want to know.
“I am talking about my mother!”
Yes. Mothers. The inexhaustible topic of retirement-age daughters. Once upon a time we talked about how to change the world -- or at least the men in our lives -- about our children and, of course, our jobs, and how to manage a plate much too full. Nowadays, with the children raised and retirement around the corner, our plate is nonetheless still far from empty. It is filled with our responsibilities towards the women who raised us, fed us and now need us. Most of our fathers have died, but many mothers in their eighties, nineties are still alive and, some of them, kicking.
My friend Carol visits her mother every other day: “At least I try to, but often she has left the key in the door to be safe from intruders. She is too deaf to hear the bell, but refuses to wear her hearing aid. Later she calls me: Honey, I waited for you by the window all afternoon.”
“At least you can just drop by, Carol. With me it’s all or nothing.”

Having immigrated to Canada as a young woman, I now visit my mother in Germany twice a year for a few weeks. The rest of the year I phone her every day at six-thirty a.m. my time, twelve-thirty her time. Or better: I try to. With the cordless stuck between ear and shoulder, I prepare my lunch. I let the phone ring until it goes on strike. A few minutes later, already in my coat, I try again. Sometimes I luck out.
She is out of breath: I ran to the real phone,” she says, meaning the old black rotary in my father’s former study. She doesn’t believe in using that silly blue cordless thing ringing right next to her chair in front of the TV.
“How are you?” I ask. My lips mouth the answer; it’s the same every time:
“How should I be? Could be better, could be worse. Occasionally she tells me of yet another acquaintance that has passed away: She was at least ten years younger than I,” she adds, strangely animated.
Another time she says she can’t talk because a nice young man in her apartment has plans for her.
“What young man? I want to speak to him!” She calls him to the phone.
“Young man!” It’s her caregiver who comes twice a week to give her a bath:
“He lets me stay in the bath a lot longer than that other one, that bossy woman.”
There are more and more days when I can’t reach her. She removes her hearing aid as soon as her daily help has left. I go to work, hoping either her TV is just too loud or she is out with one of her loyal friends. Yet I can’t help worrying that she may be lying on the kitchen floor out cold. My mother has severe osteoporosis. Once, after a bad fall, she crawled to the phone when I called. I felt helpless but managed to call the ambulance in her city, Duesseldorf. The dispatcher’s befuddled first response: “You are calling from Canada? Don’t you have any ambulances over there?”
My brothers and I got her one of those emergency buttons, a functional pendant. She calls it her medal and only wears it when she has company or wants to indulge us. I ask her over the phone and insist I wait on the line until she has put on her medal.
Order obeyed, mission accomplished, she announces a few minutes later. I imagine her facial expression, impish and defiant just like that of my three year old granddaughter trying to get out of trouble. There are various similarities between the ninety-three and the three year old. Once, my son and I spied through the half-open kitchen door. We watched the two of them stuffing their mouths with sugar cubes, grinning at each other and casting furtive glances towards the door.
Home fried potatoes, bread with extra-fine liverwurst, chocolate and sugar cubes: These are my mother’s staple foods nowadays. As kids we weren’t allowed dessert until we had finished our veggies.
“I am 93,” she challenges us, when we worry about her eating habits. More troubling is her refusal to drink liquids. A cup of coffee in the morning, that’s it. Occasionally, she wets her lips on a little mineral water. Thinking of how much she loves to tend her geraniums on the balcony, I tell her,
“Your brain--like a flowerbed-- needs water; you will remember things better if you drink more.” She smiles.
As long as she has company, my mother still enjoys life. She, who used to relish solitude, now suffers from loneliness. She used to read for hours on end. Last year during one of my visits, she put down Die Frankfurter, the sophisticated daily paper she had been subscribing to as long as I can remember.
“I must ask them to change back to their old style. I can’t understand a word. Could you write that letter for me? My wrist hurts.”
“It’s not their style; it’s your ... bad memory,” I say searching for words, gentle yet honest.
She looks me straight in the face.
“Please cancel the subscription. I know my mind is flying away from me.” How I wish I could chase after this sharp, inquisitive mind and return it to its rightful owner, my mother, a woman who was proud of her intellect at a time when intellectual prowess in a woman was scorned in Germany.
With increasing senility she has become gentler. How appreciative she is of kindness done to her. She showers her caretakers with chocolates. She also can enjoy little things a lot more than she used to and gets excited over a penguin with a bow tie in a shop window, a tacky plastic thing she would have scorned in the past. Kitsch. In the spring we go and look at all the Easter bunnies; she tells me my father used to call her ‘rabbit’. Of course, I know. Gone are the days she listened to classical music only. At my last visit we danced to pop music in the kitchen.
Mostly agreeable, she is adamant, however, about staying in her apartment surrounded by her art and her books, even if she can’t read them any more.
“If you think a nursing home is so great, why don’t you go and live there yourself!”
She loves an outing to the Altstadt, the old part of town. This requires preparation. I comb her hair; she hands me the various pins. I still can’t do her hair as well as my father. We choose the proper outfit, comfortable yet classy, and matching jewelry. Already in her coat, she realizes she is wearing brown shoes over grey pantyhose. No way.
Finally downtown, she stops by a lingerie shop. I tease her: Do you want the red lacy panties for your birthday? She winks and giggles. At her favourite cafe she orders a piece of Black Forest cake. If we are lucky, there are noisy kids at a neighbouring table. She waves to them while other guests in the restaurant look peeved.
“The children think I am one of them because I am so small. And doesn’t this little girl look exactly like my oldest great-grand daughter? Oh dear, what’s her name again?” Sometimes in the park I push her on a swing. Then we sit on a bench and she leans her head against me. I recall her words from my childhood: ‘Your father is better at cuddling. I never learned it as a child because I had no mother.’
“We are a good mother- daughter team,” I whisper in her ear.
“Mother, daughter,” she responds and cuddles some more.
Often she is searching for words. Recently we saw a young soldier.
“This ... war man had better know what he is getting into.”
“German soldiers nowadays are peacekeepers; I wish Onkel Martin could have been a peacekeeper.” She nods. Her only brother went missing in action in ’44 on the Russian front. Years later, as a small child, I waited for him, sitting on the curb for an hour every day. My mother never told me there was no point in waiting.
At home she spends hours in front of the idiot box. These dumb old cooking shows, she complains when she turns on the TV in the late morning. We were the last family on the block to get a TV. I was seventeen. We were only allowed to watch the evening news and the occasional good movie. Now we watch a “Krimi”, a crime show, together almost every night. She points at the detective towards the end:
“Is he the bad guy?” What can I say?
At 87, she still gave presentations at her Women’s Literary Circle, her last a lecture on The Road as Metaphor in Literature. I miss my old mother. Often nowadays she sits there with this I-am-not-at-home expression in her face. Where has she gone to? What has happened to our vivid discussions, our arguments?
Last year, my daughter and I visited her in Germany arriving from opposite sides of the world. We were sitting in the living room, talking. My mother watched us, content, not interrupting every sentence as she had done during our last joint visit. At one point, my daughter said: Mom, I would love you to read some of your favourite German poems but slowly, please. I located my mother’s big poetry anthology and began reading. Suddenly my mother’s voice, joining in:
The leaves are falling,
Falling from afar,
As if gardens were wilting in the heavens ...
My daughter’s eyes widened, I continued reading, accompanied by my mother’s voice.
“Omi, you still know the poem by heart!” my daughter exclaimed. Omi nodded happily. We read for hours.
Now I recite poetry with my mother whenever I get a chance. These are the good times. But when I am about to go out with some friends, and she asks for the ninety-ninth time: “So, where are you going tonight?, and: You are coming back at ...?” I can feel my patience fly out the window.
“I have told you many times already!”
“But I forget. Tell me again.” I do and then lock myself in the bathroom. Oh gosh, I used to do this twenty years ago when the kids were driving me nuts. She knocks at the bathroom door: “And you are coming back at?” I swear, if and when I feel my mind flying away, I will lie down on frozen Lake Ontario one night and wake up dead. When I am composed enough to leave the bathroom, I kiss her good-bye and tell her one last time I will be home at midnight. She smiles at me: “Midnight is okay, I am a night owl. I can wait that long. But don’t be late and don’t get in trouble. You know I always worry. You are such a handful. Make sure you take a taxi home. And you are coming home at ...?” She waves from the window as usual. I wave back.
“See you in a few hours,” I shout. It’s a lot easier than having to say: See you in six months.
Old people often live in the past; less so my mother. Orphaned as a young girl, she learned early to focus on the road ahead. She had to cut herself a path through the jungle of life. A teacher told the ten year old girl at the village school she had the brains to go to an academic institution in town; he would try to arrange a scholarship. She went to his desk every day until she had her stipend. My mother went on to law school, graduated at the head of class, but as a woman wasn’t allowed the award. She wanted to become a judge in Juvenile Court, but again, wasn’t allowed; Hitler did not tolerate women in robes. She kept a Jewish couple in her apartment until they could flee. After the war she represented the Female Social Workers’ Union, fought all the way to the Supreme Court and achieved pay equity. Does she remember any of this?
She does enjoy looking at old photo albums. Family holidays by the North Sea or in Italy when we were children. The later albums of my parents traveling through Europe, their visits with the grandchildren, their visits to Canada. How especially my father loved cottage life. She laughs when she sees the unlikely picture of him drinking beer from the bottle.
Later, a photo of her at the Calgary Stampede a year after my father’s death. ‘I want to travel where I never went with your father,’ she had requested and we took the train West.
She points at the photo of a young cowboy on a bucking bull.
“Doesn’t that hurt ... his thing?” She asks me. I play mean:
“What thing?”
“Come on, you know, his thing down there.”
I assure her it’s well protected. We had had the exact same conversation at the Stampede.
Out of the blue, she asked me a year ago, what I would do differently in life. All I could think of on the spot was: “I would have taken French at school rather than ancient Greek. Would have served me better in Canada.” She frowned.
“What would you have done differently?”
“Your father enjoyed concerts, and I enjoyed theatre. We almost always went to the theatre.” - I doubt she would be capable of such an insight now.
Yet on our final walk during my most recent visit, she suddenly said, as we left the grocery store: “I so like it when you or your brothers or any of the grandchildren come. But one has to depend on oneself. One can’t expect other people to solve one’s problem. Complaining gets you nowhere.” She spoke fluently, did not search for a single word. Suddenly my old mother was back if only for a fleeting moment: “I am a tough old bird,” she added, putting her right arm through mine, while her little shopping bag was dangling from her left, filled with 100 grams of extra-fine liverwurst, a box of sugar cubes and a chocolate bar. I knew better than to ask her to let me carry it.

YAD VASHEM

TO MY PARENTS’ GENERATION OF GERMANS

Before you all leave
I will come
and ask for your shame-
I want you
to show it to me.
With your leathered hands
dig deep into your soul
to where your shame must be.
In the dark age
you danced with the devil
hummed his tune
or simply
just covered your ears.
What am I to do with your shame?
I am your child
and you were good to me
Do not burden me with your excuse
you merely owe me your shame:
hand it to me
so that I may carry it
to Jerusalem,
to the place
where candles burn
like stars
in the mirrored universe.
With your shame on my shoulder
I will walk
'round and 'round
and listen
to the sound of names
the song
of millions
trampled
in your deadly dance
with the devil.


YAD VASHEM

AN DIE GENERATION MEINER ELTERN

Bevor ihr alle geht
Komme ich
Und frage
Nach eurer Betroffenheit.
Mit euren zittrigen Händen
Greift unter die Haut
Die alte, verschrumpelte
Und zieht das Erinnern ans Licht.

Ich frage nicht
Nach messbarer Schuld
Will kein Entschuldigen
Nur will ich
Von euch
Die Einsicht in euer Versagen.
Damals habt ihr getanzt
Mit dem Teufel,
Gesummt,
Geschmettert seinen Marsch
Oder auch einfach nur
Die Ohren verschlossen,
Dem Schrei der Zeit.

Wie kann ich euch Urteil sprechen,
Ich komme von euch
Und ihr ward gut zu mir,
Aber ihr schuldet mir
Euer Wort
Über die Zeit des Versagens.

Auf meiner Schulter will ich
Eure Betroffenheit
Nach Jerusalem tragen
An den Ort
Wo Kerzen
Wie Sterne
Im Weltall brennen.
Dort will ich folgen
Dem Weg durch die Sterne
Und hören die Namen
Der unendlich vielen,
Der Kinder, die ihr zertreten
Bei eurem Tanz mit dem Teufel.

FOR ALL THE ONES TAKEN

Last summer I had a conversation with a wine grower in my native Germany.
“Our family has been living and working on this vineyard for four hundred years,” he told me.
I am in awe. I think of my own family: five generations, four different countries, four different languages, cultures. My Catholic, Polish paternal grandparents moved to Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. I myself, born shortly after WW2, immigrated to Canada as a student. Of my Canadian born children, my oldest son made Aliyah to Israel after he had officially converted to his father’s Jewish faith. He is a rabbi in Jerusalem now.
I played with hordes of kids in the rubble in Duesseldorf, We shared our apartment with a refugee family; I shared a room with my two brothers. My three children each had a room of their own in our spacious house in Kingston. They played on the shore of Lake Ontario, a lake so big that all of Israel would fit into it. When I told this to my Israeli grandchildren, they exclaimed: “Wow, Israel must be big!” My four granddaughters, again, share a room in their Jerusalem apartment, the boy sleeps with his parents. The children play with hordes of kids in the alleyways of this ancient city.
As a child, I wore skirts and dresses. My daughter wore mostly pants; my granddaughters now don skirts, shirts and dresses that cover knees and elbows.
When “my Israelis” come to visit us here in Canada in the summer at our cottage by a pristine lake, all generations jump into the water, enjoying nature and the coming together of our diverse family. Three languages echo across the lake. Hebrew, when the children shout to each other, English in a joint conversation or joyful shouting match. My little Israelis doze off at night to the gentle sound of German lullabies.
Seven year old Hallel asks: “Do you have border patrol for your big property?” It hurts to have a seven-year-old child think in these terms, though I understand where she is coming from. “The people in the country next to you? Are they your enemies?”
“No, we don’t always agree, but we are not enemies.”
“In Israel we have enemies; sometimes I am scared at night, and want to sleep with the window closed.” I feel heavy around the heart.

When I was a child, there were many reminders of the past war: ruins, rubble, duds, damaged infrastructure, maimed people hobbling on their crutches, room on the mantle piece for pictures of the war-dead of the family only. Yet somehow I believed that all bad things had happened before my time. The ruins were our playground; when I heard no bombs had fallen in America, I was sad. Where would the American children play, then? Anecdotes of miraculous survival were more frequent than tales of terror and destruction. Though I was shocked and haunted by images of concentration camps, I heard all too often: That was then, this is now. Our parents’ generation fervently wanted a sane, safe and secure world for us removed from the horrors of the recent past.They wanted their children to be innocent-- for better or for worse.
My grandchildren have no reason to assume that everything bad happened before their time. But still, they live their happy lives, structured by every day routine, the week culminating in Shabbat and frequent religious holidays each with its own colorful story and almost magical rituals.
The street games of Israeli kids resemble those of my childhood, unlike the past times of most children in Western developed countries nowadays which are structured to the extreme.
On Friday night at dusk in Jerusalem, I am fascinated by hordes of children appearing outside clad in Shabbat clothing; little fairy tale figures: the girls in their festive, often frilly dresses, the boys in their white shirts, which soon hang halfway out of their black pants when they run and play. Yarmulkes sail from boys’ heads and are expertly caught and put back on.
I watch young children looking after younger ones. Seven year old Hallel takes two year old Moriah piggy back and makes very clear to her she has to keep quiet during hide and seek.
One Friday night I sat next to an old lady on a bench.
“How does Hallel manage to keep Moriah still?” I wonder. The old lady takes a deep breath: “If the little one makes a noise, the two of them will just be found by their playmates. We…we had to keep my little brother quiet so that the Gestapo wouldn’t find us—for three years we had to keep quiet—. My little cousin… his mother suffocated him when she could couldn’t keep him still… in order to save her other children. And now I love watching these kids play their harmless hiding game.” I, moved to the core, gently, touch her hand.
A boy is racing by on his bike.
“Riding a bike on Shabbat is mukse,(not permitted)” five year old Maayan explains.
“Why?”
“He might have to fix the chain. Fixing is work. No work on Shabbat. I’ll ride on Sunday again.”
From all the rules, all the mitzvahs they have to follow, the children learn appreciation, restraint and self-discipline. Our children love to draw. It’s forbidden to hold a pen on Shabbat. So they create interesting lego structures and play with their bubbas, their stuffed animals. Any kind of making a fire or spark: turning electricity on and off as well as driving or telephoning is off limits for Orthodox Jews on Shabbat, I learned early on. Yet any law may be broken if it means respecting a more important one: such as protecting a life, for example, calling for a taxi when the mother is in labour.
Some laws make less sense to me than others. No toilet paper torn off the roll?! Odd. Nothing should be ripped apart on Shabbat, the children explain to me.
On the Seventh Day thou shall rest: I have come to appreciate this. Heavenly peace on Shabbat. No talk about problems or money, no rushing around. Family time. Tasty meals embroidered by rituals which the children know so well and are happy to guide their Safta through.
Children take the world and culture they live in for granted.
“When are we going to be blessed with a large family?” nine year old Hadas wants to know after the birth of her 4th sibling. I gasp.
Yet, my grandchildren, like all other kids, love individual attention. I do a special outing with each child each visit. These times are precious.
During a recent visit I took six year old Maayan to the playground in Gan Sacher. Suddenly a class of Arab Israeli girls, first Grade, I would guess. Down the slides, hanging from the monkey bars, climbing onto the swinging basket. Maayan seemed overwhelmed.
“There is a free swing , hurry,” I encouraged her. She raced a little Arab girl to the swing. They shove each other. The other girl trips, cries, clutches her knee. Maayan mounts the swing, jumps off and squats next to the crying girl. She then runs to me. “We’ve got pretty band aids, right?”

On the last day of my recent visit ten year old Hadas asked me about Nazis who killed so many Jews in the Shoah.
“You are from Germany, Omannette?!” I attempted to explain the unexplainable to her. Her reaction similar to that of my children when I tried to talk about Germany’s dark past to them. Hadas wanted to know if our family, my parents, had been Nazis and done bad things to Jews. I assured her that Opa had crossed his name from the Nazi party list on which he was automatically put by his employer, and he consequently lost his job. Then I showed her a brass plate hanging on the wall with Hebrew writing on it. It had been a present to my mother from a Jewish couple who tried in vain to immigrate to Israel.
“They brought her this plate as a thank-you for letting them live at her place even though the Nazis told her not to.”
“Did they live? Did Oma save them?”
“No, the Nazis caught them in Holland.”
“Why do so many people in the world not like the Jews and hate them?” Her big brown eyes shine with sadness. “So many have tried to kill us, again and again.”
I search for an answer I know I will not find. Suddenly the other kids bounce into the room. “Yoel can walk!” He hobbles towards Hadas. She beams.
Touched at the core, I look around me. My Jewish grandchildren. Jewish children. For all the ones taken, I have given some precious ones back.

TO FIND THE RAVENS (synopsis)

The novel is a fictionalized autobiographical account of a Canadian woman, born in Germany. It shows Bettina’s struggle to come to terms with the complexities of Germany’s problematic past. Bettina was born in Germany in 1946, but as a young woman left her country of origin to live in North America, first in the U.S. then in Canada. She married an American man of Jewish origin. Her physical distance from her native country as well as her older son’s increasingly Jewish identity and growing awareness of Germany’s devastating history of the Third Reich, have added to her own strong ambivalence towards her native land.

In December 1989, a month after the opening of the Berlin Wall, Bettina travels back
to Germany, accompanied by her three children: Leon (12), Jonathan (9), and Jessica (6).
This proves to be a journey of psychological and emotional intensity. With the Berlin Wall
crumbling, Bettina senses a possibility for other “walls” to come down, walls not too securely
erected in the psyches of the German people during the early post war period. They had been
erected to block from view the suffering inflicted by the Nazis .The novel examines the
traumata experienced by some ordinary Germans and culminates in the focus on the Jewish
victims of the Holocaust and the struggle of individual Germans with the more than shameful past of their country...

Significant memories from her early childhood, triggered by events immediately following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, are resurrected. They include encounters with a kaleidoscope of characters: an emotionally destroyed German war veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress; a housekeeper who lost several brothers in the war and is convinced Hitler is still alive; a woman who, confused by the conflicting ideologies at home and in public life, has turned to prostitution; and another woman who had been driven to infanticide. The reader is witness to Bettina’s emotional upheaval after a beloved father figure from her childhood is exposed as a former SS officer. The reader witnesses her moving encounter with a young Jewish girl who reluctantly lives in Germany. Brought back to life are the stories of a young German boy whose longing to re-unite with his veteran Afro-American father has tragic consequences, and of Bettina’s own grandmother, who in her Alzheimer dementia, believes a soccer game to be a Nazi assembly. Finally, we meet Bettina’s history teacher who is tormented by the fact that she has to teach year after year about the Nazi regime of which she was a willing and naïve supporter.
These characters and their stories together exemplify the confusion, crushed hopes and stripped illusions, the sufferings and wrongdoings, the denial and insights of those whose life was forever shaped by the Nazi experience – of all those human beings who lived in the Third Reich, some in the limelight and some in its deep shadows.

The child Bettina used to dig in the rubble for remnants and “…treasures mostly broken. It was almost impossible to find anything undamaged.” The adult Bettina digs deeper and deeper in the rubble of memories. She initially confronts the people only in her mind, in internal dialogues, the “safer” way of exploring. She then realizes she has to take on the risk of confronting real-life individuals, often prompted by her son’s probing questions.

As confrontations mount, there arises the dilemma of one who feels compelled to scrutinize and therefore hurt those who have never personally caused her any harm. Hers are the dilemmas and scruples of one who “didn’t live through it all,” but is nevertheless deeply affected by the fallout. Though not personally responsible for what happened, she feels a responsibility to expose, to tear down walls or at least poke holes into them. She struggles with her right to expose tragic flaws that led to the communal failure of a people – including her parents, who had raised her with love and care.

Bettina comes to understand that the driving forces which enable human beings to surpass limitations and limits, and give them wings to fly, can also, as with the Germans of the Third Reich, deliver us to evil and rob us of our humanity. She, the native German, reaches for her share, not of communal guilt but of communal shame. She embraces the responsibilities that arise from this. She comes to realize that her strong ambivalence towards her country of origin is not something to suppress or overcome, but to acknowledge and accept. For Bettina, this is not merely a desirable option but the only one that is emotionally and morally possible.

Annette Weisberg

( If you are interested in obtaining a copy of this novel, please contact me at: weisbergann@hotmail.com)

BEDTIME RITUAL

BED TIME RITUAL

by Omannette--written for Hadas when she was two years old.

She's had a busy day
Her abba tells me
Who took her for a walk
Just before bedtime
'lellow car 'she says
'Scary dog!'
And now she's ready
For her bed time songs.

Abba leaves the room
So it's just us
'Kommt ein Vogel geflogen'
The song of the messenger bird
Carrying words of love
To the one far away.
We sing
In a language
That for her
Still is only a language of lullabies
And I wish
I could keep it that way.
I hear her soft breath
And feel her relax.
Between songs
She talks about
Lellow car and scary dog
I bark for her
And she laughs
So it can't have been
All that scary.
It's bed time, Hadas,
No more barking
Just singing.
Sometimes her Abba holds her
When we sing
And her eyes in slow motion
Close
Yet open again
Because she wants
to be the one
to push the button
on the telephone,
Send back that messenger bird
Carrying words of love
From 6000 miles away.