After Long Silence: A Memoir

Prologue

The first time I heard about the bomb that killed my mother’s parents, I was five years old, and my sister Lara was eight, and we each clasped a batter-drenched beater in our hands while working our tongues around the stainless-steel blades. My mother had spread raspberry jam over the pan of linzer torte dough, using a scarred wooden spatula that looked like it had survived the Pleistocene Era.

When I was your age, Mom said, screwing the lid back on the Stop & Shop jar, my mother used to cook huge pots of raspberry jam. The whole apartment smelled of it. She broke off a small piece of dough and rolled it into a long noodle between the palms of her hands. Now, watch, she said, draping it across the pan like a plump worm. See, this is how you make the lattice top.

Her hands worked quickly, forming a crisscross pattern.

What happened to your mother? Lara asked.

My mother pinched the corners of the lattice and slipped the pan into the oven. She glanced away as she wiped her hands on her floral print apron. Oh, she died, she said.

When? What happened?

It was a long, long time ago. Before you were born.

What happened?

My mother didn’t answer right away. They died, she said slowly, in a bomb. Her eyes looked so dark and full of memories, Lara and I grew quiet.

What do you mean? I whispered. Where were you?

My mother took a deep breath. I was living at home, in Poland, but I would take the trolley each morning into town. And one day … one day I took the trolley into town— Her lips quivered; a single tear drew a shiny trail down her cheek.

And when I came back at the end of the day … My mother’s voice seemed to lurch on creaky wheels. I’d never seen her like this before, and it seemed to me that the words themselves were hurting her. Everything was gone … she said, the whole block was bombed out! There was nothing left, no trace of them. She wiped her eyes.

I stared at her. It terrified me, the thought that I might find my parents’ house bombed out, that I might go to school one day and come home and find nothing there. How could my mother manage to live without her parents, to lose them and continue her life?

How old were you? I asked.

Tears poured down my mother’s face. I was twenty.

Oh, I said, greatly relieved, you were already a grown-up. You didn’t need them anymore.

Lara shot me a glare that I will never forget. Helen! she snapped.

——

I loved them very much, my mother said, breaking into thin sobs.

My discovery that my father’s mother, too, had died in a bomb was much less horrifying. We were sitting at the dining room table, I think, and either Lara or I asked, How did your mother die?

I remember my father’s terse response: A bomb. He sounded angry, and we let it drop.

PART

ONE

1

Lara and I were raised Catholic in a small city in the Midwest. In 1960, at the age of three, I went to nursery school at the convent of the Saint James Sisters, and at six I wore Lara’s hand-me-down itchy white petticoat dress to my First Communion. It was the first and last time I would ever swallow a wafer, however, since our family always tiptoed out of church every Sunday before Communion. It’s not an important part of Mass, my mother explained, and for a long time we believed that Communion was a curious American addition to Catholicism.

My sister and I knew that our parents were from a distant and dangerous world, that they had come out of a war, and that no one else had come with them. Although we could not hear their accents, our playmates told us our parents spoke funny English; and when our schoolmates asked about our grandparents and aunts and uncles, we said we didn’t have any. Except, of course, our auntie Zosia, who lived across the ocean in a place called Italy.

I also knew that my parents had been in concentration camps. I misunderstood the meaning of concentration and assumed that in prison, the inmates were consumed by intensely focused mental activity. I believed that these camps were so deadly that they had sewn my parents into pockets of complete silence, And so I understood that two things could happen to you in a war: either you were suddenly, breathlessly, swept off the streets by a bomb, or you were scooped into a concentration camp, where you swallowed a terrible silence.

My mother, I knew, was finally sprung from the camp by her sister, Zosia, who baked goodies and buttered up the camp warden. My father had it worse—he was off on a sheet of ice somewhere in Siberia for six years, until he escaped. I never knew how he escaped, except that he had managed to jump a train and hang on for days. I pictured him dangling from his one good arm, long, tattered legs swinging an arc each time the train banked a curve.

Their love story I had been fed early and often, until it seemed part of my bones. I knew that they had fallen in love before the war, and they had been separated for six years without knowing if the other was alive; my mother escaped Poland dressed as an Italian soldier, and my father walked across Europe after the war, found my mother in Rome, and married her ten years to the day after they had first met. This was the tale they liked to tell and retell, the story they used to summarize their lives. It was a good story, because it ran a thread across the war and connected the two lovers before and after. It tied a knot in their tongues at the end, and the war remained silent; the intervening six years could never be spoken.

My father, Kovik Buchman, was a self-employed family doctor with a sharp Slavic accent, pure white hair, and a chip on his shoulder the size of a Soviet tank. He was forty-two when I was born, twice as old and almost twice as tall as other daddies. He built a little office downtown, having drawn up the blueprints and supervised the construction himself. He bought all the latest equipment, an X-ray machine and elaborate instruments, lab equipment and simple furniture. His office was dark and smelled of medicine, with floor-to-ceiling bookcases, textbooks, and illustrated medical periodicals. My mother sewed the curtains—bold op-art designs without a trace of heritage.

His patients poured in, Poles and Lithuanians, Czechs and Hungarians. They liked bantering with him in their home tongues, liked his European approach, his punctuality, his efficiency, his dry sense of humor. He worked from early morning until late at night, six days a week. He made house calls on a moment’s notice, day or night. You could almost hear him click his heels as he marched from one patient to another. His stride was enormous, his smile brief, his gaze intense. Sit, he would command, slapping on a blood-pressure band. Inhale deeply. Cough. Say ‘Aaah.’  His exam was quick and thorough. All set, he would snap. You may dress. Call me tomorrow. In a flash he would be down the hall, ushering the next patient into his other examining room.

My mother was a more slippery figure. Slender and supple, she was half my father’s size and twice as elusive. She spent the day at home up to her elbows in yellow Playtex living gloves, cleaning house. She smelled of ammonia and lemons. Be a doctor, my mother always instructed us. Don’t marry one.

In the fall she tied her hair in an aqua-green surgeon’s cap and began rearranging nature, brandishing a rake that was taller than she was. She stuffed leaves into barrels, dragged them from one end of the property to the other, and dumped them over the cliff behind our house. In the spring she planted an elaborate rock garden under the white pines, using rocks she had kidnapped from nearby streams. Kneeling in dirt for hours, she separated and reunited plants from the woods and the rock garden, until it was hard to tell where her garden ended and the woods began.

Our house itself was a crazy-shaped glass-and-brick affair surrounded by a small forest—a swank fifties Frank Lloyd Wright knockoff. My parents had fallen in love with it instantly because it looked like nothing they’d ever seen before. We moved in just after I was born, after they’d changed their name to Bocard and settled into their new American identity.

It was a loud house. The sun danced through the pines and smashed through our floor-to-ceiling windows. An overbearing sky trumpeted each new day and tossed us out of bed. From the living room, violins wept on the hi-fidelity. A fat medical text lay open on my father’s lap, the Sunday Tribune spread at his feet. The dog a respectful distance away, banished from the Oriental rug.

Kazakhstan followed my father to the new world in the form of floor covering. He wiped his feet on Middle Asia. Solzhenitsyn lined his bookshelves. The First Circle, Cancer Ward, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer. The Gathering Storm, volume after volume after volume, by Churchill. Books soared for the ceiling: The Art of Florence, The Operas of Puccini, The Roman Ruins. Dictionaries in every color and language. Volumes of German grammar, Duden.

From the moment my mother moved to the States, she and her sister, Zosia, wrote each other three or four times a week. Pale blue aerograms with every millimeter of available space filled in elite type, with handwritten notes squeezed into the margins. The Italian post was terrible, and my mother would go days without mail and then get a bonanza of letters. Sometimes the letters arrived in little plastic bags, charred, torn, and taped back together.

They wrote of the same things day after day: the weather, their bridge games, the children, books, movies, opera—or so my mother claimed whenever I asked her to translate the letters. From the excerpts she read to me, I couldn’t fathom why my mother’s face lit up every time she found a letter from my aunt in the mailbox. Zosia! she would exclaim, and race up the driveway to make herself a celebratory cup of pale tea with lemon. Then she gently pried open the aerogram with a knife, careful not to lose any words clinging to the inside edge of the folds, and settled into the chaise longue in her bedroom to read.

When I was small, maybe five or six, my mother came to my bed every night to tuck me in. She would teach me the sign of the cross in six languages: Polish, Russian, German, Italian, French, and English. Each night I selected a language, and we said the sign of the cross in that language: In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen. Then she taught me the prayer Our Father in these languages, and I rehearsed them until I knew them by heart. I loved the way gumdrop syllables rolled off the tongue in Italian and the way consonants crashed in German; I loved the tongue-twisting sounds of Polish and the fur-lined purr of French and Russian. And of course, I loved our conspiracy—my mother’s and mine. It was our time alone, our time together, and she was sending me into a night of sleep, protected by a God who could respond to me in any language, under any sky.

What I didn’t understand was that my mother was equipping me with the means of survival: proof of my Catholicism to anyone in a dozen countries.

Like most little kids, I considered my parents perfect. That is, I twisted in any direction necessary so that they always remained absolutely perfect in my mind.

My father suffered from the realization that his life had been unbearable. My mother, on the other hand, suffered from the illusion that hers was not so bad as it really was.

And so my sister and I grew up between the trunks of these two old trees, twisted and tough, throwing enough shade to shelter three or four continents. Childhood was a strange place to find oneself after so much history.

As the baby of the family, I was the tail end of that history, and by the time I would try to make sense of it, it had been erased by my elders.

In grade school my classmates and I marched single file into the blue-windowed gymnasium under the howling horn of Civil Defense drills, the heels of our patent-leather shoes clacking over the polished wood floors like the patter of rain. Our teachers lined us up in rows, then ordered us down on our knees; obediently, we offered our heads to the floor, clasping our little hands over the nape of our necks, elbows poking the shiny floor like praying mantises. I prayed the drill would last forever, cut into class time, splash the day with emergency and adventure. I never equated those drills with war or with the bombs that had wiped out my grandparents, my history, my identity. I loved Civil Defense drills for the distraction from my daily life as a first-grader.

I was free to skip church once I’d made my First Communion. Consequently, as a youngster I came to associate Catholicism with The NFL Today, which I watched on TV every Sunday while my mother and sister were at church. Highlights of the prior week’s games were replayed in slow motion, set to rock-and-roll music, with voice-over narration by Frank Gifford. The moments of impact were like a dream: Half a ton of heavenly bodies, jerseys, and cleats collided soundlessly in exquisite slow motion. This is how I worshiped my Catholic God each Sunday at noon, through the miracle of television.

My mother never really paid attention to what I watched; she was under the spell of America, and everything American, she believed, must be good for me. I ate Fritos, Scooter Pies, and Fluffernutter sandwiches on Wonder bread and watched The NFL Today.

My mother always emphasized that one’s relationship with God was personal. She had private tête-à-têtes with God from time to time, I later discovered; my mother and God would bargain a little, and she would extract from Him a promise of our well-being in exchange for her vow to go to Catholic church each week.

There was no doubt in my mind that my mother’s churchgoing was a sacrifice. Ach! she would shout, storming into the kitchen and slamming the garage door behind her. "It’s a sin the way that priest speaks English!"

I would creep out from the TV room, glance up at the clock, and realize that once again my mother had come home early from church.

 ‘Jesus died for you and I!’  she would exclaim. " ‘For you and I!’  She would shake her head in a rage. An idiot he is! She would yank off her gloves and march into the bedroom, peeling off her dress, her stockings, her slip. A waste of time! she’d mutter. I have better things to do than listen to someone who doesn’t even know basic grammar!"

The following week, of course, she’d dutifully powder her face, apply her Cherry Blossom lipstick, don one of her postwar Italian dresses, and poke the nose of the Dodge Dart down the driveway and out to church. She’d made a vow, she told me later, a deal with God, and she did not dare back down.

I did not have that sort of relationship with God. I glimpsed bits of Him here and there, but I never talked directly to Him. I could usually find His beauty on the TV, during particularly eloquent moments of grace and violence on The NFL Today. But I never thought of God during the elbow-scraping fights I got into on the playground, when Jimmy Delaponti’s knee was crushing my ribs, or when I smashed my knuckles in Jimmy’s face. My everyday life was unencumbered by religious concerns.

It occurs to me now that my parents were not keen on organized religion or orthodoxy of any sort. It was as if they had read the Cliff Notes on Catholicism, just as they subscribed to the family architectural principle of form over function. From the outside we looked like a typical happy family; it was an image that we all worked hard to achieve.

When I was nine my parents sent me to a summer camp on a remote island off the coast of northern Maine. My cabinmate and soulmate was Twinky James, a hefty lion-haired maiden straight out of the Valkyrie, with solid white calves and smooth, milky skin. She had the beginning nips of breasts, a tuft of pale yellow fuzz between her legs, which made me feel boyish and lucky. The others have slipped from my memory, except our counselor, Katherine, a tall, graceless teenager shaped like an ironing board, with thick glasses magnifying her brittle self-righteousness. She once turned me and Twinky in for eating a pack of M&M’s after lights-out.

On Sunday mornings we were expected to get up before dawn, pull on our little white skirts and blouses and socks and shoes, and assemble in the gravel parking lot behind the dining hall in the dark. Yawning and nodding, we were herded onto a school bus, which began the long, bumpy journey across the bay to a church in the town of Dragamond. There we could worship to our heart’s content, file back on the bus, and ride back to camp in the afternoon, thereby blowing more than half of a perfectly good day.

Nearly all of my cabinmates were Protestants, and our counselor, a devout Catholic, urged them to go to church as good Christians; to my amazement, nearly all of them did—if not eagerly, then at least obediently. As for me, the only other Catholic in the bunch, Katherine simply ordered me to attend church.

But church is optional, I whined. I don’t want to go! Pleeeease!

God is not discretionary! Katherine informed me coldly. It’s your obligation as a Catholic to go to church. Her enormous eyes seemed to pop out from behind those octagonal plastic frames. I will see to it that you are on the bus, she continued. "I will not stand by and watch you commit a mortal sin.

I sneaked a glance at Twinky, pigtailed, Protestant, eyes squinting like slit envelopes. She flashed me a smile behind her pink hands.

But, Katherine, I pleaded, I don’t even have to go to church at home! It struck me as the height of injustice that I should be forced to attend church now that I was on vacation.

Katherine sent me to see the Directors of the camp—two large, middle-aged sisters in stretch pants, one of whom I felt strangely fond of, perhaps because her name was also Helen. I sat in a rough-hewn straight-back chair, feet dangling a few inches above the pinewood floor, and stated my case. The Directors seemed reasonable and agreed to write my parents, asking their wishes.

Did I suffer pangs of doubt? I don’t think so. Still, I was skeptical of the Camp Directors’ ability to interpret my parents’ wishes in my absence. A tense week trickled by. My mother finally rescued me, sending the Directors written permission for me to skip church. Joyously relieved, I pranced around my cabin, dangling my mother’s letter in Katherine’s enraged face. I don’t have to go to chuu-urch, I sang gleefully, over and over. It was my most delicious religious experience.

The following summer I finally confessed to Twinky what the Russians had done to my father. We were walking to our cabin in the woods from the lavabo after brushing our teeth. I don’t remember what we were talking about—but for some reason the story about my father in Siberia was weighing on me.

Listen, Twinky, I said, I want to tell you something. We were holding our toothbrushes in front of us like candles.

My father was put in a concentration camp by the Russians, I said. For six years. In Siberia. That’s a really cold part of Russia. A bunch of prisoners ganged up on him and broke his arm— Suddenly I was fighting back tears, alarmed, and ashamed of my inexplicable need to tell someone. Twinky stared at me with horror, and the two of us were speechless for several seconds while I looked down at the ground and blinked my eyes.

Gee, Twinky said helplessly. Gee, that’s—what did they—why did they do that?

My lip started trembling. I shrugged but couldn’t speak. Night was falling softly, the air cooled, and the woods darkened. Mosquitoes found us, landed softly on our arms and legs. We slapped at them and walked back to the cabin. I was amazed and embarrassed by my emotion, which seemed to have arrived like an alien invasion, and I realized that I must never speak of our family, that our story must be kept a secret. I clutched my elbows in front of me. My smooth arms had grown from his shattered life.

In the eighth grade many of my friends were getting middle names. They were going through a ritual called Confirmation, which, I gathered, had something to do with the Church and Catholicism. The middle names captured my imagination. I was trying to decide what name I would pick for myself. My friends were all getting stupid names, like Mary and Elizabeth and Christina. I already had a stupid name—Helen. I wanted something dashing and adventurous, like Gonzalez or Vladimir.

I asked my mother about this business of Confirmation and whether I, too, could choose a middle name. My mother had never heard of Confirmation and scoffed at the idea. We didn’t have anything like that in Poland, she said with great disdain. It must be some American invention.

This made sense to me, since there were a great many foolish American institutions that did not exist in Poland. Among these were frat parties and cheerleaders, homecoming queens and prom nights, drive-in movies and backseat sex. Confirmation, I concluded, was simply one more mindless American ritual like the Miss America Pageant. I never thought of it again but was grateful that I didn’t have to go through the ordeal, which obviously involved more Sunday school attendance and more dressing up. The only thing I missed was the chance to acquire a more exciting name.

What I didn’t realize was that all our names had been recently invented. My mother had survived the war using a false name and papers: she had escaped from the Nazis dressed as an Italian soldier, under yet another name and false papers. My parents had changed our family name upon applying for citizenship in the United States. To this day I don’t even know what my mother’s real name is.

2

When I was sixteen or seventeen, our family was invited to Susie Janiczek’s wedding. Her parents were Auschwitz survivors and close friends of our parents’. They’d met in rural Michigan in 1953, when Dr. Janiczek helped my father set up his medical practice.

Dressed in our Sunday best, our family piled into my father’s forest-green Chrysler New Yorker and followed the stream of big boxy American cars from the temple to the Sheraton hotel for the reception.

My parents survived, Susie addressed the hundreds of Holocaust survivors in the ballroom, and have given me this, a new life, new friends, the future. Flashbulbs snapped, and a hush fell over the room. We have conquered the past, Susie added triumphantly to the nodding hairsprayed heads We have conquered Hitler! We will survive. We will flourish. She raised her white-gloved arms over her head, and the crowd cheered. A band of musicians in electric-blue tuxedos lifted their instruments from black cases behind her.

Lara and I and the handful of other American-born youngsters were paraded around and shown off by the older generation, who chattered among themselves in impenetrable Polish. Middle-aged ladies with layers of hair coloring and penciled eyebrows, sumptuously retouched lips, glossy fingernails in shades of berries. They clasped my hand with their diamond-studded fingers, smiled and assessed my figure, talking the whole time in Polish to my mother, who beamed with pride.

The men clustered together—solid black-and-white islands in the sea of colorful women. Unbuttoning their jackets, they smoked filterless cigarettes and drank champagne from slender flute glasses, their cheeks growing redder and redder.

I was used to seeing tattooed numbers on wrists and hearing Polish- and German-peppered accents—many of my parents’ closest friends were survivors. I liked the way the wedding celebration was turning into a joyous, arrogant in-your-face to history, to gas chambers and ghettos and starvation and mass murders, as if it were my personal mission to fly in the face of oppression. I was proof of the tenacity of my parents, and I was fiercely proud of them. The only glaring gap in my understanding of the war against the Jews was my family’s precise role in it.

It didn’t bother me that Lara and I were the only non-Jews at that wedding. We were the children of survivors in an ocean of survivors, and it seemed the most natural thing in the world for us to celebrate—religion didn’t seem to enter into it. My mother explained the Jewish traditions—the chuppah, the chairs, the broken champagne glass, so that I understood what was happening. I never questioned how she knew so much. I was used to my mother’s complete fluency with the world.

It never occurred to me that someone in my family might actually be Jewish, until a few years ago, when I was already in my thirties and working as a public defender in Boston. One evening, at a Bar Association cocktail party, I was introduced to a statuesque high-heeled, slim-hipped woman, the wife of a partner in a Boston firm. She told me she was the daughter of a distinguished family of Philadelphia WASPs, and only after she had married and had three children did she discover that her mother was in fact Jewish. We exchanged family stories over a glass of wine, and she threw back her head and laughed. You’re Jewish! she said.

No, I insisted, Catholic. Polish Catholic.

Then why were your parents in concentration camps? Her eyes gleamed a beautiful emerald-green, and she tried to suppress a smile. She did not look the least bit Jewish. When she laughed, her yellow hair seemed to break around her shoulders like waves on a beach.

Lots of Poles were imprisoned during the war or taken by the Germans, I explained. They—

Of course, she interrupted, but if they were Catholic they wouldn’t have had to escape and emigrate to the States. I bet your parents were Jewish. Or at least your mother.

It didn’t take more than half a glass of wine for me to grow fond of the idea. This would explain so much, I thought—all those mysteries of childhood, my endless tiptoeing around a jigsaw-puzzle past in which all the pieces were missing except my parents. As a child my questions about our family had always elicited strange, winding soliloquies that led to bedtime or, worse, dinner, the two most dreaded events of my day. And when Lara and I had fought as children, my mother sometimes fell to her knees, sobbing, "I should have died with my parents! I shouldn’t have lived! Bosze, Bosze, Bosze." God, God, God. This was always a shoe-in to make Lara and me stop fighting and turn into perfect children before her eyes. But by the time Mom had called upon Bosze, she was beyond noticing us.

Perhaps, I now thought, all these mysteries could be explained: Maybe we were Jewish.

A few months later I ran the idea past Lara, who was living in San Diego and working as a psychiatrist. I have this theory, I told her over the phone. "What if Mom and Dad were Jewish? Or maybe one of their parents was