An Imperfect Child

Gina Roitman

I was born with my nose out of joint. I don’t mean I arrived ill tempered, in fact some people find me relentlessly cheerful and have to work very hard to prove to me that the world is a perilous place. No, I mean I was born with a deviated septum, a legacy from my mother from whom I inherited other more appealing attributes like large breasts and a decent pair of legs but those didn’t develop until later.

I sometimes wondered if my mother might have been disturbed by what was then a tiny deviation in my nose. Did she find me imperfect? I think not. Probably she was comforted that we shared this physical feature telling herself or maybe my father, ‘Look how much we are alike.’

I was in fact a miracle. My mother had been told she would never bear children again yet there I was, ten months after her marriage to my father, a big baby girl, weighing in at a whopping 12 pounds, 14 ounces. And in such a hurry to get on with it, I popped out after only 20 minutes of labour. Not bad for a woman who had almost died of malnutrition five years earlier. Anyway, I had ten fingers and ten toes and was perfect, absolutely perfect, as my six-year old nephew Jake would earnestly tell me years later, except for that crooked bone in my nose.

My parents met after the war in Pocking, a refugee camp in Germany where they were introduced in the hope that they would like each other well enough to marry. They didn’t actually have to love each other. As the war was over, life could now go on. Life meant children and children meant marriage. They believed that they would learn to love each other later. They married there and there I was born. My mother explained it all to me on the day I became a woman at the age of 11, right after she spelled out the facts of life and that no, I was not going to bleed to death. In a factual voice, she explained that both she and my father had lost their families in the war. First her husband had died and then her three years old son. My father had a wife and three children who all died in Auschwitz. Drora, the eldest, would have been old enough to be my mother, all things being equal. But all things aren’t equal, are they? Why else would I have to make a quantum leap from being a tomboy to a full blown woman just because of a little blood. And then my mother said, that because I’m now a woman, I would have to be responsible and understanding. I did think to ask her if she and my father now loved each other. She said they were still learning. At eleven, that was that. I kissed my childhood good-bye.

Aside from a deviated septum, I was also born with an ‘old head’. That actually sounds much better in Yiddish, my mother tongue. An alteh kop is someone who knows too much or is wise beyond his or her years. I may have earned that epithet early on by the little gestures of comfort I would offer my mother, mimicking the actions I had observed in other mothers. Sometimes when she began to cry for no apparent reason, I would put my arms around her as far as they would reach, and I would kiss her tears until she stopped. In those times, she would pull me fiercely to her chest and scan my face as if searching for something, someone familiar. It was then she would call me, ‘Rivekeleh, meine alteh kop.’ But if I crossed her, my mother could hurl words like a knife-thrower in the circus, not meaning to hurt me, just to pin me to the wall and put on a good show. When angry, she could slip easily from Yiddish to Polish or Russian. She had a gift for languages that I did not inherit. But the words I heard most often were not addressed to me but to God. When I displeased her, she would raise her eyes heavenward and demand, “I survived Hitler for this?”

Long before I understood who he was, Hitler played a major role in my childhood. Sometimes I imagined my mother’s world was split into two: the past where Hitler was the source of all her misery and the present where I was. I didn’t always understand the horror of the stories my mother relayed, maybe because of the way she would tell them, at odd times like the one she told me when I was four and wouldn’t eat my lunch.

She and her sister, Bayla, and her five-year-old niece, Chana , were running from the Germans in a farmer’s field. The day was cold and rainy and her niece was whimpering in terror as they ran. There was a barn in the distance. My mother, unencumbered, reached the barn first and clambered up into the loft where she buried herself beneath the hay. But her sister and niece had lagged behind. The soldiers shot Bayla as she ran. She toppled over Chana who was screaming in terror. Frozen with panic, my mother watched, her face pressed against the cracks between the planks of wood as the soldiers lifted her young niece and tossed her in the air just a few feet below. Her niece disappeared and the wall shook. Dust rose from the wood and flew into the air around her. She saw her niece, like a broken doll, lifted from the ground and thrown into the air again. Once more the wall shook and once again, dust flew into the air, settling on my mother’s head and on her hands that she had crossed over her mouth to keep from crying out. By the time my mother had finished the story I had finished my lunch. Although she never told it again, I never forgot a word.

My mother had survived, the only one of five sisters and like most survivors, never ceased questioning why. She had not been the prettiest or the smartest, not even the most talented. She certainly hadn’t married well, choosing to fall in love with a handsome communist. She took pride in telling me she had been the practical one, the one who always made certain that there was a chicken for her parents’ Shabbos dinner. By age 17, she was running her brother-in-law’s sweater factory; she was always good with her hands. That I did get from her. Maybe, being the middle child, my mother survived because she had to fight for her place in the family.

Somehow my mother had salvaged a wad of photos. They were kept in a soft navy leather pouch on the top shelf of her closet, next to a pair of blue suede platform sandals from the forties that I finally convinced her to throw out six months before they came back into fashion. She hated throwing anything away and never forgave me for giving her such bad advice.

With the intensity that a child gives to a jigsaw puzzle, I would scrutinize these dog-eared remnants of another world. There were three photos of Bayla, her eldest sister, one with Chana in her arms but none of her other sisters or of her parents. My grandfather was very orthodox and didn’t believe in photography. He was a bookbinder but I got my love of books from my father.

There were many photos taken with her friends, Oskar and Lipke whose big toothy grins were a sharp contrast to my mother’s sullen smiles, parsimoniously dispensed for the camera. Sometimes they would be standing amongst a large gathering of their comrades from Habonim, the Zionist organization they all belonged to. Of course, these photos included her fiancé, David, whom she married before leaving Krakow and heading east to Uzbekistan at the outbreak of the war. She had several photos of and with him. It would never occur to her to hide these from my father.

David was strikingly handsome with a lean body, warm deep-set eyes and thick dark hair with a Superman-like cowlick that fell over a corner of his high forehead. There were several photos of them together, one of them sitting on a split rail fence and another where they were standing in a shallow stream wearing those funny loose bathing suits of the 30s that outlined more than they hid. You could see that my mother was well endowed with a small waist and lovely legs but not pretty. David must have been quite a catch for her. Their arms are around each other’s waists and my mother is gazing directly into the camera, her lips turned up in a smiled that had not reached her eyes. She appeared to be looking right through the photographer.

One photo of my mother at 17 terrified me as I child because I worried I might look like that when I grew up. It wasn’t that she was unattractive just that, well…her face was blank, like a sheet of paper before a letter is written, full of characters with interesting lines and curves. But the war would transform her face. I know this is a terrible thing to say, but misery made my mother a pretty woman.

Then there were the post-war photos taken in the lager, the Displaced Persons Camp, outside Passau in the southeast corner of Germany near the Czech border. It was from there that we finally immigrated to Montreal, when I was 18 months old. In one photo, taken in the lager, my mother is walking arm in arm with my father down a broad avenue of the town. The camera has caught her in mid-step. Her shapely leg is out as if anxious to move forward into some promising future. She looks almost happy. There’s another of her alone, visibly pregnant with me. She’s wearing a mannish hat, jauntily pulled down over her brow, and a stylish pinstripe suit, sewn by my father. It had a long tailored jacket that would still be in vogue today. There is a calm, peaceful expression in her eyes and a small, comfortable smile on her full lips. My favorite photo, however, was the one taken a few months before my first birthday. I am being held aloft, wedged between my beaming parents and superimposed beneath in Hebrew the words, Shana Tova – Happy New Year. I suppose as young as I was, I believed totally in my ability to make my parents happy by my mere existence. Later I would come to believe that I filled the vacuum the war had created in my mother’s life, replacing what she had lost. She had so often said that I was everyone in the world for her; there was no reason for me to believe otherwise.

The first home I remember clearly is an apartment building on Lajoie, a wide street with stately trees, growing straight and tall on either side, their branches reaching across the road in friendship. These mature maples marked the happy parade of seasons in my youth. A three-story square structure, with two small concrete steps leading into a marbled vestibule, it was bordered on the right by the Main Lane that ran for five blocks from the grounds of the Catholic church one street above Lajoie all the way down to Bernard Avenue in the other direction. On Bernard, around the corner to the left of the lane was Robil’s Ice Cream Parlour, the barbershop and National Variety Store presided over by the genial Louis who had two black Betty Boop curls plastered on either side of his wide, thinning scalp. At the corner of Outremont Boulevard stood the pharmacy we didn’t frequent. We would go to Clayman’s further down the street because the owner spoke Yiddish. From the building to the lane, from the lane to the corner pharmacy and from there, down Outremont to the corner of Lajoie, these were the boundaries of my young world. And in the center, behind our apartment building, branching from the Main Lane was the Middle Lane that ran parallel to Lajoie. This was the hub of my realm, the turf that I knew every inch of, that years later, I would recall in my mind’s eye as if in a scene from West Side Story, and me, a Jet leading my small gang.

Inside the building, past the vestibule with its metal mailboxes, neat names and round black buzzers, was a glass door framed in rich varnished oak that could not be opened unless you were buzzed in or had a brass key. An elongated star pattern was blazed into the glass that Ruthie Williamson once said looked like the Star of Bethlehem that had heralded the birth of the baby Jesus. A flight of steps was flanked by a marble banister polished smooth and shiny by years of hands gripping it firmly and by the many times I would slide down in a cheerful hurry to get outside. There were only four apartments per floor, two in the front and two in the back. Ours was one of the two facing the back, Number 8, on the left-hand side, right at the top of the stairs. Mrs. Crotty, a widow with gentle green eyes and a tolerance for noisy little girls, lived on the right with her black and white Boston terrier, Nipper. I asked my mother if we could get a dog too but she said we couldn’t afford any animals and that I was animal enough for any household. Then she kissed me on the head so I would know that she had not meant it unkindly.

On the other side of the varnished wooden door was our sparsely furnished, four-room apartment. From the hall, you could see straight through the double parlour to the back door balcony. The first half of the parlour served as our living room and was dominated by a big wine-coloured chesterfield in that scratchy fabric that looked like chenille but is much harsher on your naked legs when you sat too long in summer. The floors were bare and the walls, without pictures or prints. My parents had bought the sofa, a matching wing-tip chair in pearl gray, a square dining room table without chairs that stood tucked in a corner and their bedroom suite, all of it second hand, from a peddler. Every Friday around four, the peddler who smelled of onions, would knock on the door to collect that week’s payment. Often my mother would have me answer because she had her hands were full of chicken gizzards. I would do so with some reluctance as the peddler, upon seeing me half hiding behind the door, would gleefully reach out to give my cheek a mighty pinch, as if this too was something that we owed him.

Two enlarged photos decorated my parent’s bedroom. On the high boy dresser where my father kept his clothes was a tinted photo of me as a six month old, sitting up and looking as squat and solid as one of those punching bags you can’t knock down. In it, my fat little fist is holding on to a drawstring knitted into my dress which the photographer had tinted dusty rose. My eyes are deep blue but the photographer had placed a greenish wash over my scalp causing me to loathe the photo. Next to this frame stood another with a tinted photo of my father’s mother, the only photo of his dead family he possessed. In it, my grandmother’s hair is black, pulled into such a fierce knot at the back of her neck that I imagined there was no slack available for her to turn the thin line of her pink lips into a smile. She had dark eyes sunken deep beneath a prominent brow that looked out at the world with a particular fierceness.

The room I shared with my brother, Moishe, was to the left of my parent’s ‘bedroom’ behind the kitchen. There was a four-drawer dresser, my bed, and once my brother outgrew his crib, a dull, greenish gray davenport, the kind that had a spring, allowing the back to lay down flat. This became Moishe’s bed at night. Our feather-down comforters, brought in a big wicker trunk from Germany, were kept in the storage compartment beneath the seat. That coffin-like space was also where I would convince my brother to hide, promising him I would let him out as soon as he knocked twice. I never did but he fell for that over and over again, just happy to have me play with him and all to himself. Once I went to the bathroom and altogether forgot that my brother had crawled inside, enticing me to play. My mother, shaking out the sheets of her bed, heard his muffled cries, and pulled him out shrieking and all purple in the face. I escaped through the front door, knowing I would get a smack if she caught me. Escape sometimes saved me from a beating.

Early on, I knew that my mother was different than the other mothers in the building. For one thing, she was much older looking. Her hair was cut short and was dark brown with streaks of silver threading through giving her lined face a somber appearance except when she smiled. This she did not do often enough. Two other girls my age lived in the apartment building on the ground floor. Ruthie Williamson, an only child, was blond and blue-eyed, with a little turned up nose. Her mother always smelled of freshly baked cookies. For some reason, I imagined that our new queen, Elizabeth, must smell just like Mrs. Williamson. Maybe because they both wore their hair the same way and Mrs. Williamson was always smiling even when she was displeased. I envied Ruthie who had no little brother tagging after her everywhere. Instead she had a budgie bird called Tweetie, parties on Halloween, Christmas and her birthday, and best of all, a room of her own.

Terri Stroll was a year older than me but much smaller, with dark, straight hair and brown eyes that were always full of mischief. She had a teenage sister Joyce who wore white bobby sox and her hair in a ponytail. Terri’s mother, who insisted I call her Ida, was pretty and petite. She smoked cigarettes that she would tap loudly on the closed pack before lighting. Once lit, she would remove a stray piece of tobacco from the tip of her tongue with her thumb and middle finger, closing one eye to avoid the smoke. She loved to have me comb her hair. She was always making jokes at which she laughed raucously. I didn’t understand them but I loved to laugh along with her. Terri’s apartment was one of my favorite places to hang out, especially after I was forbidden to play with Monique, the janitor’s daughter, who spoke to me in French. Even though I replied in Yiddish, she had become my first friend. I used to love watching her father, Mr. Portuguese, shovel the coal into the bin when it came down the chute through a hatch that faced out onto the lane. I also loved to sit in her big kitchen with its foreign smell, which my mother said was probably pork. We never ate pork, it was trayf. Mr. Portuguese always line up his bottles of beer against the kitchen walls, starting at the right side of the doorjamb. When they had ranged all the way around the room, arriving at the other side of the door, Monique and I would be given the job of filling the wooden crate that he would then take in for a refund and a new case of beer. One day after an afternoon with Monique, my mother discovered a louse in my hair and that was the end of my visits to the basement apartment although Monique and I still secretly played together in the furnace room next to the coal bin until we both started school. After that we seemed to lose our ability to communicate as Monique never learned English and I quickly forgot whatever French she had taught me.

My friends rarely came up to my house to play which was understandable since I had neither toys nor a room of my own but did have a little brother who always wanted to join in. I think my friends were also afraid of my mother. She spoke English with a heavy accent and looked severe next to their own pretty mothers. And as I said, she didn’t smile very often. I punched Terri Stroll in the stomach once because she said my mother looked like a witch. She ran crying to report my behaviour to her mother who I suppose told her she deserved what she got because Ida never scolded me for it and never reported the incident to my mother. After that, I stayed away from Terri for a while. But I didn’t really mind that we always played at Terri’s or Ruthie’s or best of all, outside where I could roam at will. I was always eager to uncover new places where I might escape my mother, and the more difficult to access, the better.

It hadn’t always been like that, I suppose. Up until my brother was born, we had spent all of our time together, mornings in the apartment and afternoons in one of the many parks close by. Or shopping for food that we did almost every day. However, after the baby arrived, from around the age of four, I was left to play by myself or with my new friends from whom I soon learned English. And, out of my mother’s sight, I could do all the things not allowed while under her scrutiny.

Climbing - fences, trees, ladders, rooftops – this was my consuming passion. By the time I was six or seven, I would regularly scale the spiral fire escape at the back of one of the buildings , all the way up to the third story. From there, I would swing onto the nearby telephone pole that bristled with iron spikes set out to make it easy to climb but that started too high up for me to reach from the ground. With one arm around the pole, I would lean out to survey both lanes and the street, never calling out to my friends when they came into view, knowing that any mother who might accidentally spot me up that pole would quickly report such perilous activity.

I acknowledged no danger. After all, what could happen to me now that Hitler was dead? No one could find me in the places I would hide. No one could reach me when I climbed higher and higher. As I had once been convinced of my capacity to bring my mother happiness, I was now certain of my own invincibility. Like the time I climbed over the wrought-iron rail of our balcony, high above the Middle Lane. I was learning the balancing beam in gym class, and wanted to practice because the teacher said I was a natural. I had decided that the outside lip of our balcony was the perfect place to practice this newfound talent. Wiping her hands on her apron, my mother came into the parlour from the kitchen, spotted me on the wrong side of the rail, arms out, a seven year old tightrope walker, way above an imaginary cheering crowd. When she shrieked, I was so startled I almost slipped. The only word that came through clearly was “…Hitler.” My mother waited until I sheepishly climbed safely back onto the right side of the balcony before cutting off my escape. It took days for the welts on my backside, left by the strap she kept in the broom closet, to entirely disappear although by the next day, those welts were the only memory left of the punishment.

My mother had no qualms about hitting me. It was always for my own good, she said. Years later, regaling friends with my stories of daring-do, some would tentatively suggest that I might have been an abused child but I never thought so. For one thing, my mother never remained angry for very long. She would hit me and then the issue, whatever it was, was settled. We could be hugging and laughing minutes later if I didn’t decide to sulk over the unfairness of life, something I never managed to sustain for very long remembering my mother’s stories about the hardships she had survived and the sorrow she was still suffering. What right did I have to complain? Did I not have food in my stomach, a warm, dry bed and two parents who loved me. These words now slip out as easily as Jell-o from Mrs. Williamson’s warmed mold. They wriggle onto the page as if my mother were standing behind me, ensuring that I have gotten it right. She always said I would remember her words and it often surprises me how almost every day I manage to quote something she said, some phrase like ‘I cried because I had no shoes and then I saw a man who had no feet.’ Somehow, her words had been blazed into my brain like the star on the glass door in the vestibule that forever altered my perception of what lay ahead.

One of the most frequent arguments we had revolved around the wearing of dresses. I simply wouldn’t, except to school and on Sundays when we went visiting. My mother’s on-going dialogues with God in a voice loud enough for me to hear, only reconfirmed what I already suspected. I was a constant source of disappointment to her. Yet something stubborn and blind within my tough little body refused to bend to her will. Perhaps she had hoped that I would grow into a dainty little girl who liked to wear big white satin bows in her hair and to play girlish games. Instead she had to contend with scraped knees, bruised elbows and a strong resistance to wearing the new dresses my father would make at her insistence. How could I explain that dresses made climbing trees too difficult without giving myself away? I would simply insist dresses were for girls as if that was sufficient to explain my position. But my mother would just carry on as if I had not spoken at all. My wishes were irrelevant. So I learned to keep them to myself. What did I know of the world, she would say, and she knew what I would become if she didn’t hold a tight rein. I would become a vilde chayeh, a wild animal. She knew what was best. And I knew I was no match for her tenacity in a head-on struggle. After all, hadn’t she survived Hitler? How could you argue with that?

Sometimes, without knowing how it happened, perhaps sitting in the kitchen while she prepared supper, my mother and I would share an intimacy that would lift me out of my child’s body and put us on an equal footing. We would travel back through time to a place where my mother still had hopes for the future, where everything was still possible, a time when she was young. She might tell me a story about her childhood or sing to me in her high, sweet voice, some Yiddish song full of longing or drama. I loved her singing although like smiling, she never did it often enough. My favourites were Toiben shtayn oifen mein fenster (Doves are Standing on My Windowsill) and Pappirozzen (Cigarettes) which to this day, can still move me to tears. It is a ballad about a young child, begging each passerby to buy his cigarettes, ‘trichen frum der reigen, nicht fargossen,’ (dry from the rain, not damp). He needs the money to feed himself and his little sister. The song tells of how his parents die leaving them orphaned and wandering in the streets. At the part where he describes his little sister dying in his arms, I would dissolve, crying at the unspeakable horror of being left all alone in the world, alone and begging for acknowledgement. Kupice, koifche, koif de pappirozen (Please, please buy a cigarette). Wrapped in her own sorrow, my mother, tears clinging to the brim of her lower lids, would look at me strangely. For a moment, a light would come into her pale hazel eyes sweeping over me like the beam from a lighthouse then, just as suddenly, it would disappear, as if returning to search inward for some memory to match the face before her with those buried deep in some unforgiving grave.

That’s how we lived, surrounded by ghosts. They sat at the table while we ate our Sunday meal. They lay beside us in the bed as we slept, dreaming of flying through the air. They stood next to me as I watched my mother make the blessing over the shabbos candles and at Passover, they crowded around her as she worked in the kitchen, changing the dishes and pots, and packing away the chometz. In the world I inhabited with her, they filled the space between us, binding and separating us until we could not distinguish between the past and the present. And those times, when my mother would grow melancholy and silent, I could see the ghosts sitting with her in the chair, whispering softly about how lonely they were, how much they longed to kiss her again, if only they could, one more time. And I would fight my helplessness with escape up a tree or onto the edge of the roof where I would sit, looking down at a world that passed silently by.

One bitter winter’s day, I returned from school to find my mother lying in my bed with the comforter pulled up to her chin. Her eyes, red from crying, were as dark and vacant as the large hollow in my favourite tree.

‘Mameh, are you sick?’ I asked alarmed, rarely having seen her lying down in the middle of the day. She looked at me numbly as if we were strangers sitting opposite one another on a streetcar. I stood rooted at the foot of the bed.

‘Mameh, what’s wrong?’

My voice sounded strange to my own ears as she remained silent, the corners of her mouth slack. The skin on her face was almost as white as the pillow against which her hair now lay spiked like shards of splintered wood. Her lids flickered as she pulled her mouth together in an effort to release some word stuck in her throat but it could only manage to produce a small ‘oooh,’ a sound like the wind makes when it gathers its force to tear at the trees in autumn. From the foot of the bed, I slowly edged towards her, cautious in the event that any sudden movement might make matters worse.

One thin arm crept from beneath the covers. Clutched in my mother’s fist with its knuckles rough and red from housework, was a photo. The arm dropped despondently onto the comforter, exhausted from the effort of reaching out. She opened the fist and let the photo fall. I picked it up gingerly. In it, two women were standing next to each other, neatly dressed. The one on the left had frizzy hair and a large nose that dominated her face. The other was tall, radiantly beautiful, shapely. Her dark hair was swept off her face that featured large, wide set eyes that looked like they might have been blue. She wore a well-fitted, tailored suit and on her left arm, an armband with a Star of David.

‘Who are they, Mameh…who are these people?’

‘Shaindel,’ my mother whispered hoarsely, ‘the one on the right is my sister, Shaindel.’

So this was Shaindel, the beauty of the family. ‘But where is she, Mameh?’

With this, my mother began to cry, great heaving sobs that pulled at her chest, a doll being lifted by some terrible, invisible hand. Like someone was tearing at her rib cage to get at her heart.

‘The letter…I got a letter,’ she said lifting it from beneath the covers where she had buried it like a deadly secret. ‘I got a letter and this photograph. I thought she was alive…that they had made a mistake when they told me she was dead. But she is dead. The woman who’s in the picture, she lived, and someone gave her my address. She said that she thought I would want this picture of my sister. My dead sister, all my poor dead sisters…I have nothing…I am alone, all alone without my sisters who loved me. I am all alone.’

She pulled the crumpled letter against her face. From some dark cavern, my mother let loose all her ghosts at once and they flew screeching into the room, swooping and howling with their grief. The walls grew liquid with the heat of their anguish and shimmered like tar under the scorching eye of an August sun. The ends of their garments rippled past my face leaving me shivering. Still, I would not let them bully me. My hands reached out to touch this woman I could not recognize, to find my mother’s face buried beneath the surface of the twisted flesh thrashing back and forth on the wet pillow. And I held her face in my two small palms until the sobs subsided.

And I said, ‘…but you have me, Mameh…I will always love you.

About the Story
The truth is, I didn't write this story. I had not planned to tell this story because in one way or another, I have been telling it all my life. But one morning in the south of France where I had come to write other, less familiar stories, the opening line started to repeat itself in my head on a walk into town. When I returned, I sat down at the computer and the story just wrote came out. I was amazed because I had never before told the story this way. I believe that my mother, may she rest in peace, gave it to me as a gift.

An Imperfect Child

Volume 3, Spring 2002 Articles