Tag Archives: childhood friendships

February 28, 2022 · 7:30 am

After school refuge – 1963

by Annette Friend (Del Mar, CA)

Leaving behind
the petty fights and fires
taunts and turmoil
of 7th grade in Newark, N.J.
I’d set my walking compass
to Linda Telesco’s house.

A large oak towered over
the rickety porch, roots
eating into the sidewalk.
Furniture too large for the living room.
A gold brocade couch covered in plastic.
Jesus hung from a cross
directly over a scratched dining table.

We were best friends.
Craved the same crazy TV shows.
Reading was the outer limits of joy.
Gossiped about boys whose hair
seemed to grow longer each day,
and our teacher Mr. Ransom
who sneered at our grim pronunciation
of his beloved French.

I was only a generation from my parents’
Yiddish accents, wallet was “Vallet”
Vacuum cleaner, “wacuum cleaner”
Linda still salty sweet
from the oceans her parents
crossed from Sicily
before World War II.

We pulled out the Ouji board
clandestine in her closet
to connect to the spirit world.
Mainly the actors from our favorite
TV show “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.”

Her crush the exotic Ilya Kuriakin.
Mine the suave Napoleon Solo.
The pointer would glide
letter to letter guided by our fingers
or perhaps the spirits
while we inquired about their favorite colors
flavors of ice cream
when and where we could possibly meet.

Sometimes she’d cry afterwards
as she stared at Jesus on the cross.
Scared she was doomed to the fires of Hell
because she contacted spirits
and liked boys way too much.

I never wanted to go home
where the fires from the Holocaust
still burned every night in my parents’ eyes.                   

Annette Friend, a retired occupational therapist and elementary school teacher, taught both Hebrew and Judaica to a wide range of students. In 2008, she was honored as the Grinspoon-Steinhardt Jewish Educator of the Year from San Diego. Her work has been published in The California Quarterly, Tidepools, Summation, and The San Diego Poetry Annual.

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October 5, 2020 · 10:34 am

My year in Cleveland

 In memory of Elina Rashkovsky.

by Nina Kossman (New York, NY)

Today I can no longer say how it happened that, at the very end of my childhood, I became convinced that I would never become friends with Americans my own age. I remember my parents’ friends in Cleveland, a German-Jewish couple who invited us to their house, since we were a rarity in those days, the first Soviet-Jewish family in Cleveland, and besides, my father spoke German, which was his native language, and my mother understood German, which wasn’t her native language, she learned it in school, anyway, to get back to the German-Jewish couple who invited us to their house and who were very welcoming and very kind to us that first, dreary year in Cleveland. I remember sitting in their spacious living room, thinking that I’d never like anything in this country, no matter how spacious its living rooms or how welcoming its grown-ups in their spacious living rooms, and I remember Mrs. Kleishtadt, a cheerful, intelligent woman in her fifties, saying, “I know you feel like you’ll never belong, Nina, but believe me, soon enough you’ll have many friends in school.” I didn’t know what to say to that, and I suppose she didn’t mind my not saying anything, but if she could read my thoughts more than just that first time, she would have known how convinced I was that she was totally wrong, that I’d never be friends with any American girls because they seemed like creatures from another planet, so sure of themselves, so arrogant and grownup, and their arrogance, or what seemed to me like their arrogance, was something so totally alien to me, something I’ve never seen in anyone my own age in any of the countries I’d lived in so far. It’s not like I’d lived in so many countries – just two, the Soviet Union and Israel, not counting Italy where we spent three months waiting for our American visas and where I didn’t go to school, because those three months were the summer months – June, July, August – or perhaps there was another reason I didn’t go to school in Italy, it doesn’t matter why I’m not counting Italy as one of the countries I had actually lived in, I just don’t, that’s it, but my feeling about the arrogance of American girls had nothing to do with Italy, so why I’m even mentioning Italy, I don’t know, since I was talking about American girls my age, while boys didn’t even enter the picture, not until a little later. In the second month of my school year in Cleveland I was told by a girl whose desk was next to mine, that Tim, a boy from our class, was in love with me, but I didn’t even realize he was in my class, as I only saw him on the way to and from school, when he stood silently on the other side of the street, looking very forlorn, and I thought why is he always standing there and looking at my side of the street. I really had no idea why. He didn’t seem arrogant like the girls in our class, but there was something boring about him, the way he stood and looked. If that’s called “being in love,” I thought, then I don’t really want it, it’s boring and lifeless, and there was enough lifelessness around me everywhere, in the sky which was always overcast, in the streets where no one walked, and in the way I couldn’t speak English as well as everyone else in my school, which made me feel like an outcast, until I stopped caring about my accent and about being an outsider. I’m an outsider, and so what, I said to myself, let them deal with it, it’s their problem, not mine. After our first month in Cleveland, when we were the only “Russian” family and I was the only girl from Russia, which some of my classmates confused with Austria and Australia, as well as a couple of other names on the map of the world totally unknown to them, there was suddenly another “Russian” family in Cleveland, with a girl my age. Her name was Elina, and soon enough she started going to my school, and we sat together in all our classes, gossiping in Russian about boys and girls in our class, “Americans,” as we called them, who couldn’t understand a word we said, which is why we felt free to say whatever we wanted about them. We gave nicknames to boys and girls in our class so they wouldn’t recognize their names when we gossiped about them in Russian. There was one boy who said “oops” every time he dropped a textbook or a pen, which happened very often, and Elina and I found this new English word “oops” so funny that we nicknamed him “Oops”. “You know what Oops did today?” or “Oops came in late as usual and sat at a wrong desk and said “oops”! Ha-ha-ha!” It was so much fun talking about our classmates without anyone knowing what we were saying. I remember another boy whom we nicknamed Kozyol because his last name was Kozolsky; I can’t remember exactly – maybe it was not Kozolsky but Kozilsky, a Polish-sounding last name, and although his first name, Mark, was easier to remember as well as to pronounce, we never called him Mark, not only because we didn’t want him to know we were talking about him, but also because we decided we were both in love with him, this Mark, this Kozyol, who had no idea the two Russian girls noticed every movement he made in class, and every time he talked to another girl – one of those arrogant Americans — Elina and I made up heart-breaking stories about this Kozyol. I don’t remember the stories, I just remember we talked about him in his presence, without him knowing what was going on. When the school year was over, Elina and I spent two summer months in an Orthodox Jewish summer camp, which was recommended to our two sets of parents by the Jewish Family Service in Cleveland and which our parents envisioned as a kind of pioneer camp for Jewish kids, set in the Poconos. Neither her parents nor mine were told that the camp was Orthodox, even ultra Orthodox, and they had no idea we would be immersed, for the first time in our lives, in religion, and that we would feel even more like outsiders in that religious camp than we ever did in our school. It was in that religious summer camp that we both fell in love with another boy, whose name — and our nickname for him — I don’t remember. All I remember is that our joint falling in love with the same boy brought out an unusual rivalry, which was strange, considering we were such close friends that we often referred to ourselves as sisters and thought we would always be together. It was in the Jewish Orthodox summer camp, where we attended a synagogue for the first time and found the rituals so funny and giggled so loudly that we were told to leave the premises immediately, and where I argued with our Religion teacher telling her that everything she was teaching us about God was nonsense, and where we were not allowed to brush our teeth after sundown on Friday, and where we couldn’t wear short-sleeved shirts and shorts even in the summer heat, it was there that Elina revealed to me her terrible secret: she said she had always thought I was the ugliest girl in the world and that’s why the boy we were both in love with wasn’t paying attention to her – it’s because you’re ugly, she said, and I’m your best friend, so he thinks I’m ugly, too. It sort of spreads, from you to me, she said. Her assertion that I was the ugliest girl in the world and that this ugliness was the kind that spread from person to person, made me feel like an outsider in a new way, an outsider to my own person, therefore I had to resolve this question for myself (am I ugly or not?), which I did the traditional way albeit somewhat new to me, by looking in the mirror. There was one long mirror in the girls’ shared bathroom, and for the first time in my life I looked in the mirror with an intent totally unknown to me until that summer: I was trying to figure out something about beauty, and since what I saw in the mirror failed to convince me of my friend’s truthfulness, I started thinking that maybe Elina saw the world, with me in it, in a kind of crooked mirror, because I’m not the one who is ugly; it was she, with her long red hair and freckles all over her face, who looked like Pippi Longstocking, but there was no use telling her this, because weren’t we bffs, i.e. best friends forever, and this “forever” excluded death, of course, and neither of us could know that Elina would die of breast cancer at the early age of thirty in a small town in Massachusetts, leaving behind a small son and grieving parents, many years after the end of our friendship.

Moscow born, Nina Kossman is a bilingual writer, poet, translator of Russian poetry, painter, and playwright. Among her published works are two books of poems in Russian and English, two volumes of translations of Tsvetaeva’s poems, two books of short stories, an anthology published by Oxford University Press, and a novel. Her work has been translated into Greek, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish. She received a UNESCO/PEN Short Story Award, an NEA translation fellowship, and grants from Foundation for Hellenic Culture, the Onassis Public Benefit Foundation, and Fundacion Valparaiso. She lives in New York.

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March 20, 2017 · 9:32 am

A Paris Odyssey

 

by Janice L. Booker (Malibu, CA)

Suzanne’s parents had moved to Paris in the 1930s as a young married couple from Ukraine.  Mr. P. was a barber and opened a shop on a busy Paris street.  They wanted to start a new life away from the anti-Semitic fears in Ukraine.  Two daughters were born and the family lived in an apartment on the floor above the shop.

And then came the rise and popularity of Hitler.  And then the war.  And then the occupation of Paris by Germany.  The barber shop was shuttered and the family stayed in their apartment clandestinely to see if they could outlive the occupation.  Sarah, the younger daughter, then about to become a teenager, blonde and blue-eyed, became Suzanne as a way to fool anyone who stopped her as she was the one sent out to forage for food.

For four years they were able to avoid detection.  When Paris was freed, Mr. P.  decided not to attempt to reopen his shop, fearing that vestiges of the Vichy anti-Semitic regime remained.  Instead the family made plans to emigrate to the United States where Mrs. P. had cousins in Philadelphia.

My father was a barber and had operated his own shop for many years.  We lived behind the store in a two-story house.  When he needed another barber to work “the second chair,” the Barbers’ Union sent Mr. P, whose languages were French and Yiddish, but not English.  However, the South Philadelphia neighborhood where we lived was still primarily Jewish at that time, peopled with many immigrants, so speaking Yiddish worked fine.  After a few weeks Mr. P. said to my father, “I have a daughter exactly your daughter’s age.  She is miserable.  She won’t go to school until the fall and she doesn’t know any English or have any friends.  May I bring her to meet your daughter?”

The arrangement was made. I was not consulted, which increased my anxiety of meeting a girl my age who had undergone life experiences I could not imagine. The next day Mr. P. arrived with a pretty 17 year old who looked visibly intimidated.  We introduced ourselves and tried to find a way to talk.  My high school French had taught me “Open the window” and “The pen of my aunt.”  I didn’t think either phrase would help us communicate, but we discovered we were both fluent in Yiddish and that was our method of conversation for the next few months until Suzanne began her halting study of English.

Eventually, Suzanne married and moved to the suburbs with her family.  I did the same.  We lost touch but sometimes met at a Jewish film festival and were always glad to see each other.

Many years later I was a volunteer interviewer for the Gratz College Holocaust Oral History Project.  I decided to interview Suzanne, and in the intimacy of a two hour conversation I learned more about her years barricaded in the family apartment.  She shared emotions I had not heard before: the daily apprehension of being discovered, her inner trembling when she walked on the street to buy food, the tensions, even in a loving family, of spending four years locked together in one space, never knowing what had happened to their extended family.

I suddenly understood the seclusion and safety of the Jewish life I had led living in a Jewish neighborhood and the false sense of security this evoked in me.  The war had not been threatening to us and it was a while before we heard about the horror and devastation of concentration camps and could begin to understand the attempt to exterminate our people.  Leaving Suzanne’s house that day, I felt for myself the wrenching internal anxiety Jews had always felt throughout the world, throughout eternity.

Some time after that experience I wrote a memoir about growing up in Jewish South Philadelphia and sent it to Suzanne, certain it would evoke many shared memories.  She, in turn, sent me her memoir of those parallel years which she spent hidden in the Paris apartment and told of the loss of dear cousins and friends.  She thought she was lucky; I thought she was incredibly brave. It was not until I read her poignant memoir that I learned Suzanne had been Sarah.

Janice L. Booker is a journalist, author of four books, including The Jewish American Princess and Other Myths, an instructor in creative non-fiction writing at University of Pennsylvania, a Philadelphia radio talk show host, and a free lance writer for national publications.

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July 29, 2013 · 3:33 pm

The View from the Rue Constantinople

by Ellen Norman Stern (Willow Grove, PA)

We were both eleven years old that May in 1939 when my best friend Wolfgang and I told each other goodbye.

The late sun above the tall roofs of Berlin’s Kurfuerstendamm was starting to fade when we returned from our afternoon walk and stopped at the street corner near the apartment house where I lived.

Emma, Wolfgang’s elderly nanny, left us there for a few more minutes together while she started on her slow trip to his building a few blocks away. Wolfgang held Gustl, his brown-and-white cocker spaniel, on her leash.

Wolfgang, brown-eyed and dark-haired, was tall for his age. When he smiled, he was good-looking. He was often mischievous and got into trouble without trying. But he could also be very serious. Someday he would be a handsome man like his father.

The next day Wolfgang’s family was set to travel from Berlin to Hamburg. From there they planned to embark for Cuba on a ship of the Hamburg-America line.

For the past year and a half Wolfgang and I had attended the same private school.

I enjoyed being with him. Every day he and Emma stopped for me before she walked us some distance to the Ferbelliner Platz where we boarded the streetcar to its last stop. Goldschmidt Schule was located at the corner of Roseneck in the Grunewald.

We did not attend the same classes, but we became inseparable after school. Every day we returned on the tram to be met by his nanny and Gustl. We spent afternoons and early evenings, sometimes even suppers, together at his house until the three of them walked me home before dark. Wolfgang and I grew close and in our unsupervised conversations often pledged we would always remain that way. We never believed that anything could part us.

Emma always wore the regional costume of the Spreewald where she came from. The many layers of petticoats under her black skirts, the tightly-laced colorful vest, and the elongated headcovering with its veil trailing halfway down her back never failed to draw the attention of onlookers we met on our way to the tram stop.

Our school days ended unexpectedly on the morning a group of brown-shirted troopers marched into the building and escorted us outside. They lined everyone up on the sidewalk in front of the school and made us watch the flames curl around Goldschmidt’s facade. The gleeful expression on some SA men’s faces left little doubt about the fire’s origin. Even the youngest student sensed what was happening.

It felt strange to ride the streetcar back home so much earlier than usual. We were both quite hungry and ate the sandwiches from our lunchboxes on the tram. Because of the morning’s events we had skipped lunch recess. We were agitated for still another reason. The fire had forced the school staff to leave along with the student body. No one could call our parents to meet us. That day we worried they would be angry to have us walk that long stretch by ourselves.

After that, no more school.

Now, as he held Gustl’s leash tightly, Wolfgang stretched his other hand out to me.

“Don’t look so sad,” he comforted me. “As soon as we land in Havana I will send you our new address and we can write each other.”

But I was sad. I had seen too many people I knew leave Berlin that year. Too many goodbyes are hard to take, even when you are very young.

“I know you will write whenever you can, but I will still miss our afternoon walks.”

This saddened Wolfgang, too. He looked down at Gustl whose golden curly hair shone in the late afternoon sun. He bent down and gently stroked her long silky ears. Gustl, the companion of our walks, would be left behind. Immigration quotas did not include pet dogs. Wolfgang’s father had arranged for Gustl to live with Emma who was retiring to her native village deep in the heart of Germany.

Despite the upcoming separation from Gustl, Wolfgang tried hard to be cheerful.

“It’ll be exciting to sail aboard such a large ship. We will practice Spanish on the way. Can you imagine my grandmother learning Spanish?”

We both giggled. Wolfgang’s grandmother — like mine — was proud and regal and tried to imitate the style of the English Queen Mary.

“Of course, we won’t be in Cuba long. When our American visas are approved we’ll go there. Someday, who knows, you and I will meet again.”

I nodded, wanting to believe him. Within a few days my mother and I, too, would leave Berlin on the journey to our new home. We were more fortunate: our visas were already approved and we would travel to the United States directly.

“I don’t want to go back to our apartment yet. Everything is so uncomfortable, with most of the furniture gone and all the suitcases standing around,” Wolfgang said. “And my mother has her nervous headaches again.”

“It’s the same way at our apartment. Most of the furniture is sold, but we’re not packed yet. There isn’t one soft chair left to sit in.”

“Will you walk me back to my corner once more?” he asked. “We could talk a little longer that way.”

I was glad to. I didn’t want to go home, either.

We tried to prolong it, but finally the moment came when I petted Gustl’s shiny coat and shook Wolfgang’s hand. I wanted to kiss him, but I knew such girl stuff would embarrass him.

“When it’s your turn, have a good journey, too,” he said.

I thanked him. “Oh, what’s the name of your ship?” I asked before he turned to go.

“The St. Louis. Mach’s gut.”

He walked away. Only Gustl turned her head and looked back at me once more.

Wolfgang kept his word. Within a few days I received a post card from Hamburg with a picture of his ship on it. The card was postmarked May 13, 1939, his sailing date.

“We’re hoping for a wonderful trip,” he wrote. “My parents and I wish you the same.”

I thought of him often later that month when my mother and I crossed the Atlantic Ocean on our own journey. By this time his ship was due to have landed in Havana and I wondered how it felt to be in sunny, romantic Cuba.

A few days after we arrived in Louisville to a joyous reunion with my father the picture of a ship appeared on the front page of the local newspaper.

The caption read “SS.St.Louis refused landing permission in Cuba. 930 Jewish refugees face certain doom if returned to Germany.”

The month of June brought hotter weather than we had expected. There was so much else to get used to — a new language, new faces, new surroundings.

I sat on the front steps of the house where we now lived, speaking to no one. When it was too hot outside, I came in and sat some more.

“Eat a little something,” my mother urged often.  But I wasn’t hungry.

“Why is she so quiet?” a new neighbor asked my mother.

“It’s the hot weather. We are not used to these high summer temperatures in Europe,” Mimi answered. But she knew the real reason and did not tell.

The story of the St. Louis stayed news for only a few days. When she sailed out of Cuban waters — after no country in the West accepted her cargo of refugees — she lingered near Miami…hopefully. Then she finally turned back toward Europe.

I waited for the paperboy every afternoon, but the press had dropped any mention of the ship’s fate.

On the September day when news came of Poland’s invasion by Germany, Mimi and I sat at our small kitchen table and cried. Now it seemed certain that contact between us and our relatives and friends in Europe had been lost, perhaps forever.

Sometime during that fall a letter arrived for me from Paris. The Red Cross had been able to find Wolfgang.

“We were lucky, after all,” he wrote. “France took in many of us. It was a long trip. We thought it would never end. Now we live in the Rue Constantinople. We’re on the top floor and from our window we can see the Place d’Etoile and the Champs Elysee behind it. We hope you and your parents are well. I think of you often.”

I started school in Louisville. The first few months were hard for me. Everything was so totally different. I was homesick a lot. Perhaps I really did not question what I was homesick for since nothing I had known existed anymore. I carried Wolfgang’s letter in my pocket. Sometimes, while I was in the schoolyard and the other children played their recess games, I leaned against a wall and read the letter.

Another few months passed, and then a second letter arrived. It was postmarked Limoges, France.

“The Jewish Committee sent us here to be safe in case the war spreads. Limoges is very beautiful. They make china here. But we liked it in Paris and wish we could have stayed there while we wait to enter the United States. Now we must hope the war will end soon. My father and my grandmother are well. My mother worries a lot and suffers from headaches.”

I wrote back, sent good wishes from my family, and said we hoped to see all of them again before long. I told him the American people seemed to understand how bad things were with Jews in Europe and would make it possible for them to enter this country. “Everybody here is very nice. We have been helped to a new start. The same will happen to you when you come here.”

In June 1940, France fell to the Germans. The radio spoke of fleeing refugees camping by the roadside. The newspapers showed photographs of the miseries of war. The Vichy government turned over the Jews of France to the invading Nazis. In our synagogue special prayers were said for those Jews trapped in the Occupation zone.

Once more I tried to find my friend. I wrote directly to the mayor of the city of Limoges and asked for his help in locating Wolfgang’s family.

Many months went by. One day an official-looking letter from France arrived at our house.

“Our records do not show that any family by the name you mention ever resided in the city of Limoges. I regret we cannot help you.” It was signed: The Mayor.

I knew then Wolfgang would not write again.

Born in Germany, Ellen Norman Stern came to the United States as a young girl and grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. She’s the author of numerous books for young adult readers, including biographies of Louis D. Brandeis, Nelson Glueck, and Elie Wiesel.  Her most recent publication is The French Physician’s Boy, a novel about Philadelphia’s 1793 Yellow Fever epidemic.

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