JACK ENGELHARD: BITTERSWEET JEWISH MEMORIES
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/15698#.VCKqkBbDUy1
For some reason, or for obvious reasons, this time of year, our High Holy Days, leads us to remembering, and these remembrances are often salted with pain and broken hearts. In this week’s portion of Deuteronomy it summons us “Ask your father, and he will tell you.”
That phrase alone touches deeply, and does indeed bring back memories of my father.
Years ago I sat down to write a short, swift book of memoirs, not about the Holocaust, but what it was like to arrive in Montreal after the Holocaust.
I named the book “Escape From Mount Moriah” and it still does quite well as literature and then along came a Canadian moviemaker. She asked for permission to turn the book’s first short story, “My Father, Joe” into a short film. I said okay and about eight years later the movie was done.
I was not totally thrilled with the movie. But obviously she knew what she was doing because the 10-minute film won about a dozen film festival awards around the world and was even honored at CANNES, which is like Europe’s Academy Awards.
So why “My Father, Joe?” Why Joe?
With your indulgence, I am reprinting it here as it appears in the book of memoirs, since I cannot do it better the second time as I did it the first time.
“My Father, Joe”
From the book of memoirs, “Escape from Mount Moriah”
Now we had it good. Six million never made it out. We…we escaped France when the Nazis and their gendarmes were beginning their roundups in our district in Toulouse. We walked the Pyrenees…hid in Spain…rested in Portugal…and found refuge in Montreal, Canada — much later we moved to America.
Amazing how so much can be summed up in a single paragraph, and life, as we know, is not lived by the paragraph. Take my word for it that our escape was a tremendous adventure — two years of running, evading, a hundred close calls in cars, trains, ships, a thousand moments of doubt, fear, helplessness, and being spooked at every turn by the sights and sounds of Nazi boots.
But I won’t go into all that — that’s another book, and frankly, it’s a story that’s already been written by others — even cheapened and trivialized and, to tell the truth, unless you lived it you’ll never know. But maybe I can share with you what it was like being a refugee.
As for my father, and so much about this is about my father, let me say that he was no ordinary man. He was a man of great learning. He knew Torah and Talmud from end to end, all of which had been crammed into him as a Yeshiva-boy in Poland. He was also a man of action. When he found out that we were on “The List” no words of caution from my mother could detain him. He knew just what to do…
* * *
Now here we were in Montreal.
My father was a businessman. Like Rockefeller was a rabbi, so was my father a businessman. He tottered from failure to failure, but with pride. He was his own man.
He used to say, “I don’t know what it is with me. I can’t work for another man.” This was no weakness in his eyes. No, it was strength. A sign of character.
To which my mother would say, “Yes, a character you are.”
But, for a spell, my father did work for another man, and Mr. Snow was his name.
Mr. Snow was a handbag manufacturer. He had a factory on St. Lawrence Street where he employed 25 workers — designers, cutters, and sewers. In Europe, my father had had a factory of 40 workers — or 50, or 60, or maybe 100.
The number grew along with my father’s wrath, for he did not like working for Mr. Snow. So he’d come home and say, “He calls himself a fabricant? I had a factory of 50 and he’s going to teach me about handbags?” The next day it was a factory of 60, and so on.
My father was a designer for Mr. Snow. Father designed handbags with frames, following the classic European fashion and the style that had made him revered in the trade. Now he’d bring home his designs for my mother’s review…designs which Mr. Snow had rejected again and again.
Mr. Snow, you see, had no faith in handbags with frames.
Frames were out.
Zippers were in.
“Zippers,” my father said.
In time, though, he stopped being contemptuous… and, he stopped bringing home his designs.
Gradually, he fell into his great trancelike silences.
Mother would ask him how things were going in the factory and he’d say, “Good enough.” She’d ask him why he stopped bringing home his samples. He’d respond by staring off in the distance, and I never knew what he saw there, except Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. He lived more in their world than in his own.
Naturally, one day he forgot his lunch bag.
“Go bring this to your father,” my mother said.
I walked past the St. Lawrence Street grocery stores, butcher shops (Kosher-Bosher), bakeries and everything that was retail and wholesale. Further up, factories had been turned into tenements, tenements into factories, and in such a place, warped from top to bottom, worked my father.
Approaching the landing you could hear the roar of the sewing machines. Closer, you smelled the adhesives and the leather. Inside, I did not know where to begin. Cutters were bent over huge tables slicing up giant stretches of animal hides. Sewers were grinding in frenzy, never once gazing up, as though somewhere in their urgency of livelihood they had lost the human sense of wonder and curiosity.
For the most part, these were Jewish refugees who were paid by the piece. But the rush of their machines were like wails. These people were in a hurry to forget the past and catch up to the present.
The designers — the nobility of a handbag factory — where were they? There I’d find my father.
I stepped into the back room where rough-talking characters were packing finished handbags into cardboard boxes. These types had a look and a word for everybody.
I heard them yell, “Joe, Joe, where’s my Coke?” Then they’d laugh.
There must be an errand boy here, I thought, named Joe. Every place has a Joe.
I heard others in the factory take up the same chant. “Joe, Joe, where’s my Coke?”
This Joe, some joke he must be.
Then I saw my father. He was carrying a tray of Cokes, but not moving fast enough.
“Over here, Joe. Atta boy.”
How, I wondered, does a man go from Noah ben Jacob to Joe?
My father would have had the answer…but I would never ask.
(Note: The above story “My Father, Joe” may not be reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the author, except in the case of brief and accurately credited quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.)
Jack Engelhard writes a regular column for Arutz Sheva. The novelist’s post-Holocaust/Montreal book of memoirs “Escape From Mount Moriah” has been re-published and re-released. Engelhard wrote the int’l bestseller “Indecent Proposal” that was translated into more than 22 languages and turned into a Paramount motion picture starring Robert Redford and Demi Moore. Website: www.jackengelhard.com
Comments are closed.
