You Saved Me, Too: What a Holocaust Survivor Taught Me about Living, Dying, Fighting, Loving, and Swearing in Yiddish Read Online Free Page A
Author: Susan Kushner Resnick
idea to check the place out. A nice young social worker took us around. She showed us the atrium and the synagogue and introduced you to some hardy-looking men who spoke Yiddish with you. It looked like a resort, but it was clear to everyone that you didn’t belong there yet because you could still take care of yourself.
“Y’all come back anytime,” the social worker said. Not really, but that’s what it felt like—warm and welcoming.
Time passed. I needed them because you were talking about guns. The Lady at the Party, dear friend of a dear friend, rich but so seemingly compassionate, convinced me I was right to expect them to roll out the red carpet for you.
What I got, after a whole lot of pleading, was Jerry Maguire.
Show us the money
.
I’d thought they were good and powerful, but it turned out they were only Great and Powerful, like Oz, who also turned out to be a disappointment.
J ANUARY 9, 2011
Strange that we live in a
shtetl
, too. All these towns that I drive through on my way to your bed are home to just a tiny percentage of Jews, a reflection of much of America. But our town is an upscale, contemporary version of the little Jewish villages that were like freckles on the face of Europe before the Holocaust. More than 50 percent of our town’s 18,000 souls are Jews. People used to say it was 70 percent, but that was before they built the mosque. On twenty-four square miles sit seven synagogues: two Reform, two Conservative, one modern Orthodox, and two ultra-Orthodox. I call members of the last category The Fanatics. I’m sorry; I’m just not fond of people who ban secular literature, don’t recognize women’s rights, and refuse to acknowledge people like me when we pass each other on the street because they don’t think I’m a “real” Jew.
On weekends, our roads are crowded with people who could be ghosts from your lost world. Men with wildly long beards, black fedoras, and long cloaks tied at their waists like bathrobes float in clusters down streets on their way to pray. On Shabbat, their families join them: boys with hair coiled in
payot
, fringe from their prayer shawls dripping from under their white dress shirts; little girls in oversized hand-me-down dresses and teenaged ones forced to hide their sexuality with boxy denim jumpers and dark tights; and women under broad hats and shellacked wigs who push strollers no matter how hot, wet, or icy the ground.
We live in harmony with Christians and Muslims and Hindus, which would not have happened in Zychlin, but we also weather waves of anti-Semitism. Once a white supremacist group dropped hate literature on people’s lawns. Swastikas have been painted on the outside of synagogues and the inside of high school bathrooms. Every year there seems to be some kind of Jew baiting from an opposing sports team:
Fucking Jew
, hissed through a field hockey player’s mouth guard;
Come on, kike
barked from the lacrosse sidelines. Really nothing, compared to what you grew up with.
S EPTEMBER 1996 ( AND B EYOND )
I kind of wanted to sleep with you.
When a person is depressed, she doesn’t feel anything. Then, as the medicine kicks in, she feels everything. The crush I developed on you was one of the first signs of life I’d had in a long time.
You must have felt something, too.
“Good thing I’m not thirty years younger,” you’d say again. “David would be real jealous.”
You would repeat a version of this threat often during the first half of our years together. Every time, we’d laugh at the line. But it wasn’t really a joke, was it?
In my fantasies, set fifty years before we met, I am a strong American girl who holds you when you wake from your nightmares of being chased by dogs. I am the love of your life, the one who understands you as your real wife never would.
Or the affair would happen in the present, a
Harold and Maude
type thing, with our damaged, vulnerable souls melding. The forty-four-year age difference wouldn’t
“Y’all come back anytime,” the social worker said. Not really, but that’s what it felt like—warm and welcoming.
Time passed. I needed them because you were talking about guns. The Lady at the Party, dear friend of a dear friend, rich but so seemingly compassionate, convinced me I was right to expect them to roll out the red carpet for you.
What I got, after a whole lot of pleading, was Jerry Maguire.
Show us the money
.
I’d thought they were good and powerful, but it turned out they were only Great and Powerful, like Oz, who also turned out to be a disappointment.
J ANUARY 9, 2011
Strange that we live in a
shtetl
, too. All these towns that I drive through on my way to your bed are home to just a tiny percentage of Jews, a reflection of much of America. But our town is an upscale, contemporary version of the little Jewish villages that were like freckles on the face of Europe before the Holocaust. More than 50 percent of our town’s 18,000 souls are Jews. People used to say it was 70 percent, but that was before they built the mosque. On twenty-four square miles sit seven synagogues: two Reform, two Conservative, one modern Orthodox, and two ultra-Orthodox. I call members of the last category The Fanatics. I’m sorry; I’m just not fond of people who ban secular literature, don’t recognize women’s rights, and refuse to acknowledge people like me when we pass each other on the street because they don’t think I’m a “real” Jew.
On weekends, our roads are crowded with people who could be ghosts from your lost world. Men with wildly long beards, black fedoras, and long cloaks tied at their waists like bathrobes float in clusters down streets on their way to pray. On Shabbat, their families join them: boys with hair coiled in
payot
, fringe from their prayer shawls dripping from under their white dress shirts; little girls in oversized hand-me-down dresses and teenaged ones forced to hide their sexuality with boxy denim jumpers and dark tights; and women under broad hats and shellacked wigs who push strollers no matter how hot, wet, or icy the ground.
We live in harmony with Christians and Muslims and Hindus, which would not have happened in Zychlin, but we also weather waves of anti-Semitism. Once a white supremacist group dropped hate literature on people’s lawns. Swastikas have been painted on the outside of synagogues and the inside of high school bathrooms. Every year there seems to be some kind of Jew baiting from an opposing sports team:
Fucking Jew
, hissed through a field hockey player’s mouth guard;
Come on, kike
barked from the lacrosse sidelines. Really nothing, compared to what you grew up with.
S EPTEMBER 1996 ( AND B EYOND )
I kind of wanted to sleep with you.
When a person is depressed, she doesn’t feel anything. Then, as the medicine kicks in, she feels everything. The crush I developed on you was one of the first signs of life I’d had in a long time.
You must have felt something, too.
“Good thing I’m not thirty years younger,” you’d say again. “David would be real jealous.”
You would repeat a version of this threat often during the first half of our years together. Every time, we’d laugh at the line. But it wasn’t really a joke, was it?
In my fantasies, set fifty years before we met, I am a strong American girl who holds you when you wake from your nightmares of being chased by dogs. I am the love of your life, the one who understands you as your real wife never would.
Or the affair would happen in the present, a
Harold and Maude
type thing, with our damaged, vulnerable souls melding. The forty-four-year age difference wouldn’t
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