Category Archives: Jewish identity

by Ruth Zelig (New York, NY)

Author’s Note: For economic reasons, my father decided in 1958 that he, with my mother, and me at age eight, would leave Israel and migrate to South America where we would wait until the United States allowed us in (1967). His goal was to settle in the United States, but American immigration quotas were too strict, in essence barring our entry. By December 1958, with utmost efficiency, my father made arrangements for a transatlantic crossing, and while waiting for the day of departure, we moved in with his step-mother, Klari.

“Early in the morning I’d look over at the bed and see your three sleeping heads. After you went away, the bed was so empty.”  This is how Klari described to us in her letters the lonely days after my parents and I emigrated from Israel in December, 1958. This is how she revealed how happy she was that the three of us had stayed with her at her one-room apartment for a few weeks after our own apartment was given up, our furniture dispersed, the suitcases packed, and the trans-Atlantic steerage tickets purchased, in pursuit of my father’s dream to migrate to America.

Klari was my paternal step-grandmother. She had luminous light green eyes. And some freckles on her face. Graying wavy hair that sometimes she gathered in a bun behind the nape. At other times worn short. But around her neck there was always a gold locket that opened to a photo. The locket cover was a delicate cameo.

She was my other grandmother, one of three, two of them living, another being my maternal grandmother. Klari married my grandfather, Deszö, in Transylvania in 1949, soon after he lost his remarkable wife, the grandmother I never met, and the two immediately moved to Israel to join my father. So I was lucky, I had three grandmothers, kinswomen shaping the foundations of my life.

The grandmother I never met was a venerated enigma; she was not a babysitter. But Klari provided childcare on occasions. She fed me madár tej — eoufs à la neige — floating islands. A dessert so milky with love, so whipped up with care, so easy to eat, it was like the breath of kisses on the lips. No one could match her dessert, not even the fancy French restaurants in New York City where I’d go chasing a dream more than half a century later.

When my childhood home was no more, and migration was about to turn my world over and revolve in the opposite direction, the few weeks of living with her kept me safe from worry. I did not know yet what loss meant, because she and her apartment were a haven. I continued to go to my old school from her home for a little while longer, walking two blocks to R. Arlozorov to catch the bus that went up the Carmel Mountain to Ramot Remez and getting off in front of the school. My mother had practiced the drill with me so I could do it alone. On the way back from school, after getting off the bus, I passed a beggar woman every day. One day I left her some coins. I had never done that before; I had never been homeless before.

After my grandfather died in 1956, Klari remained the widow who had been fun for me to visit. I watched her rapturously as she lit Shabbat candles and gathered the sacred light with her hands while murmuring the blessing. She loved my mother so much, and her attentive daughter-in-law reciprocated the affection. The year she married my grandfather, 1949, was also the year my two teenage parents wed in Israel. All these people living the second, improbable chapter in their life. It’s startling to think that Klari was married to Dezsö for less than seven years, a blink of an eye for people their age. She didn’t marry him for money; he had none, and he was very sick after years in a Nazi-led Romanian slave labor camp and needed a caregiver. He died aged fifty-nine leaving her a fatigued widow. Most likely a widow for the second time.

When I was with her, she never talked about her life before the calamity. (She did not have a tattoo on her arm.) Taking her for granted, I never asked about her prior family, her maiden name or maybe her prior married name. She didn’t have children. But maybe she had a husband, or a fiancé, who was deported during the Holocaust? There were no other relatives. She hid the pain behind a cheerful manner. I never heard a cross word; never heard a painful expression; never heard anger, wishful thinking, or regret.

How did my elders pick up the pieces and move forward? By getting married again so soon after losing an indispensable companion? By daring to cross the ocean and arrive at a Mediterranean land so alien compared to what used to be home? When the rug is pulled out from under you, when the walls around you are breached and the contents confiscated, when your livelihood is eliminated, when your essence is erased and your figure is spat upon as if you were a demon, how do you dare pick up the pieces? If you’re treated like an animal, you resort to being human.

Her humanity was boundless. Her little apartment on R. Yerushalayim was so pleasing. One room. That’s all a widow needs. A corner with a little icebox and a shelf-top two-burner primus; two small sunny windows with white lace curtains; a back door to a wooden staircase descending to the ground behind the building; a single bed. And an armoire with the prettiest dresses a seven year old girl could imagine: silk-like fabrics with pretty, colorful patterns. I’d riffle through them, feeling the fabrics, savoring the patterns with my eyes, unaware these were styles from the 1940s. I’d rummage through her necessaire de toilette, smitten by the little round orange box of Coty Airspun face powder, the one still sold today unchanged since 1935 when she was a younger woman, with the iconic design of white powder puffs on the box-top. I still delight in this design, it reminds me of her. 

In the middle of the apartment was a dainty Queen Anne dining table with four matching chairs. And a Persian rug underneath, where I’d lie on my stomach and iron the tufting with my fingernails in the direction of the weave, then alternating, learning that doing so in the other direction made the fiber stand up and change the character of the colors, while I was studying the Persian rug pattern with the medallion in the center and the repetition of the pattern in a satisfyingly predictable sequence, a fractal brain-teaser, intuiting that hand-weaving was about symmetry. And symmetry was about equilibrium, predictability, security.

But we emigrated. Equilibrium, predictability, and security disappeared. Life was not a Persian rug. 

My mother and Klari corresponded for years. Thirteen years after we left her behind, after she remarried, became widowed again, had breast cancer and radical mastectomies, a hacking which made her upper arms swell to twice their size, we went to visit her again in Israel, in a different city, a suburb of Tel Aviv. And she took us in again, and we sat at her table eating leben and drinking Nescafe. You had to heat the milk first then mix in the coffee flakes then add hot water. Old women have a way with rituals you shouldn’t challenge. She showed me her scar. She wasn’t shy. She was forthright. With the kind of uninhibited composure that made her survive the Holocaust nightmare, cancer, death, departure, separation, solitude, and foreigners. She never learned to speak Hebrew.  She managed, because there were enough contemporaries who were also Hungarian speakers.

More than anything else, I associate Klari with a cameo. Classically authentic, revealingly bas relief, unassumingly delicate, straightforwardly monochromatic, singularly solitary. She represented a woman comfortable in her own skin, devoted and caring when called upon, repeatedly alone without protest when no longer needed.

Ruth Zelig migrated three times before the age of 20, changing languages (at least five), cultures, and school systems. After earning an MA in Linguistics, she went on to study computer languages and became a computer programmer and systems analyst at IBM. As a mother, she raised her children, spent years volunteering in a NJ community at various levels of leadership, and became the president of her Conservative synagogue. English remains her primary language for writing.  She has written an epistolary memoir, “Letters From Brazil, Reflections on Migration and Friendship,” and  hopes to publish it soon. You can learn more about her and her work at these social media sites:zeligova.substack.com, jewishwomenofwords.com.au/author/ruth-zelig/, instagram.com/zeligova, and zeligova.com