Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress Read online

  The great irony about Auschwitz was that now, apparently, you had to pay to get in. Near the entrance was a cafeteria/snack bar, followed by an ice cream stand. A few families were there already; parents sat at the tables, trying to cajole squirmy, petulant children into eating cut-up pieces of kielbasa and melty vanilla ice cream. There it was: Auschwitz—-fun for the whole family. Since I’d somehow lost both Shimon and the teenagers I was interviewing, I just sort of wandered around by myself. We had an hour before the March, and as I walked up a stony path, I came upon the official entrance to Auschwitz, the famous wrought iron “Arbeit Macht Frei” gate that had mocked prisoners with the announcement “Work Makes You Free” as they staggered to their deaths. I’d seen plenty of photographs of the gate before, yet seeing it for real was almost more disturbing than anything else I’d witnessed thus far. Before I could even absorb the shock of it, a group of teenagers from the March came barreling up the path.

  “Ohmygod, it’s the gate!” a girl in a Day-Glo orange T-shirt and a scrunchie shrieked. “Quick, you guys, we have to get a picture!”

  In a moment, four of them were posing beneath it in their shorts and baseball caps, their arms flung around each other chummily, everyone squirming and giggling. One kid made a peace sign with his fingers. “Okay,” called the boy taking the photograph, “at the count of three, smile and say ‘cheese.’”

  “CHEESE,” they chorused.

  I could only imagine their photo albums back home: Here’s me and Jason at Disneyland. Here we are at the junior prom. Oh, and here we are at Auschwitz … But then, strangely, I found myself tickled, almost gleeful. Hitler, after all, had hoped to turn a handful of synagogues into museums documenting “the extinct Jewish race.” Instead, his own machinery had been preserved as a tourist attraction, and now here we were, the shrill, popcorn-crunching crowds, the kids with cartoon T-shirts, Instamatic cameras, and picnic lunches, as mindless and ordinary as any other group of spectators, posing beneath the defunct infrastructure of genocide, laughing and squeezing together to fit into the frame of the autofocus.

  Suddenly, I felt buoyant—the best, really, that I had ever had since arriving in Poland. Oh, it was good to be at Auschwitz! Jews weren’t just victims; in the end, we were victors, too! The Third Reich was gone, but all the people they’d tried to exterminate were still here, kicking around on the planet: the Jesuits, the gays, the disabled, the Gypsies, and, yep, the Jews. Here I was, a reporter on assignment, surrounded by thousands of exuberant teenagers, and the machinery of Nazism had been converted into a sort of impotent theme park. Just how triumphant was that?

  I rounded a corner onto dirt paths separating blockhouses. Apparently, these were former barracks where prisoners had slept packed together like cattle. Now, except for a sample bunk room, they were largely empty. Yet after wandering upstairs, I stopped. Preserved behind a wall of Plexiglas was an enormous pile of hairbrushes and combs. There must have been a hundred thousand of them—piled nearly to the ceiling—and if you looked closely, you could see a few strands of hair in some of them.

  More disturbingly, the next room was filled with shoes, men’s and women’s—all sizes and styles—scuffed leather, buckles, lace-ups, high heels that had clearly been danced in—and tiny children’s shoes—the kind that parents used to have bronzed and made into paperweights, commemorating “Baby’s First Steps”—thousands of pairs, again piled nearly to the ceiling, an avalanche of footwear, all of them bearing the shapes, the sweat stains, the imprints of their former owners.

  Six million. Hearing that number, my mind always went numb. I had trouble simply visualizing a dinner party for more than twelve people. Six million was like trying to wrap my mind around the limits of the known universe: I just wasn’t capable of it. But to see the ‘ combs and the shoes that belonged to people, suddenly I could picture the woman in dark green leather pumps with cracked soles, the man with a tortoiseshell comb tucked in his breast pocket. One hairbrush, one belt buckle, and for the first time, the dead became individually palpable.

  Then, compounding this awfulness, in the next room were eye-glasses, a big, mangled tumbleweed of wire. I wore eyeglasses. As light came through the window, I could see myself perfectly, reflected in the display case.

  I don’t know how I got out of the barracks, or accidentally stumbled into the gas chambers next door, but that’s where I was next. A dank, impassive, clinically tiled room—or was it merely concrete?—I couldn’t quite focus. I felt disoriented and strangely lightheaded. Overhead were big, flat shower heads. Were those fingernail gouges in the walls, or was I imagining things?

  The first time I’d heard about the gas chambers was on the ice cream line at Silver Lake. My friend Ruthie had told me there was a man named Hitler in Europe who’d made all the Jews take off their clothes and go into a big group shower where poison gas came out of the pipes instead of water. After the Jews died, she said, they were burned in giant ovens.

  I was horrified—yet stunningly, more so by the idea of being naked in public than by anything else. “So wait,” I said to Ruthie. “Before the showers, they didn’t even let you wear towels?”

  Now, here I was, in a gas chamber myself. The horror was sonic. The room seemed to vibrate with malignancy and pain. I was out of jokes; I was utterly alone. Stepping out of the chamber proved no less devastating: adjacent to the showers was a crematorium. True to their rep, the Nazis had been efficient. The ovens were reddish brick, long and deep, with human-sized spatulas protruding from them. Even the gas chambers looked a little nonspecific, but with the design of the ovens, there was no mistaking their purpose.

  Until that very moment, I realized, I’d stupidly believed, “I would’ve gotten out of this somehow.” Until that moment, staring directly into the genocidal maw of a body-sized pizza oven, I’d somehow assumed that the Holocaust had been meant for other people— for real Jews, Jews who actually cared about their religion, Jews who had some allegiance to their people and their heritage, Jews who were earnest and pigheaded. Jews who had been weak or naive. Jews who hadn’t been nearly as savvy, charming, or modern as my family was. Surely, we would have been spared. Surely, we would have figured out some way to wriggle out of it, to avoid the debasement of it all, to be granted an exemption from a fate reserved for six million others. Surely, in trying to kill us, the Nazis would at some point have realized that they were making a terrible mistake. Look: We had a Christmas tree. I’d sung in a choir. The last time I’d checked, my mother was a Buddhist.

  Yet as if it could speak, as if a demonic voice had been summoned from the inferno of its past, the oven gaped before me and its message was only too obvious: Oh, Sister. Don’t kid yourself. This one’s for you.

  At some point, I suppose, all of us in our lives confront some unavoidable, outsized horror. Maybe it’s a tumor, or a little brother playing with a gun, or a psychopath in a day care center, but inevitably, a moment comes for all of us when we realize that we cannot beat the devil on this one: we have been targeted for injustice or tragedy. And nothing in school, nothing in daily life really prepares us for this. Maybe nothing can, except art, perhaps. Or faith. All that piousness and religion that irritated me so.

  At twenty-two years old, I had been ridiculously lucky. In my own neighborhood, I’d grown up surrounded by kids who had constant, firsthand knowledge of the world’s prejudices and cruelties. Yet amazingly, I’d remained strangely naive. Now, staring into an oven designed specifically for me—me in my shoes and eyeglasses—I was suddenly aware of just what a moral and psychological lightweight I was, how spoiled and ill-equipped I was to cope with the viciousness of the world. What the hell did I know? I was just some ambitious little asshole from New York. Until that moment, the free fall of adulthood had seemed scary enough to me, without the horrors of the world to confront. Now, I didn’t want greatness or glory. I wanted to go home and curl into a fetal position in my bedroom, then get a job replacing toner cartridges in a Xerox machine. I’d happily
forfeit substance and forgo all wisdom if it meant I’d never have to recognize this.

  I had the urge to rip open my own skin, crawl out of it, and leave it behind as I fled. Hurrying out of the crematoriums, slipping down the stony path beneath the “Arbeit Macht Frei” gate, I banged right into Shimon.

  “Whoa,” he said, as I grabbed on to him as if I were drowning. “You okay?”

  Shimon had a faint scar over his left eye from when he’d fought in the ‘73 War in Israel. He’d faced the brutality of the world long ago. He saw its handiwork every time he looked in the mirror.

  I sort of collapsed on him, then started sobbing like a three-year-old, emitting big, lunatic strangulated hiccups.

  “Ah, shit,” Shimon said. He grabbed me beneath my armpits to help keep me vertical. As I wailed, I beat my head deliriously against his flak jacket, behaving the way everyone wants to behave, of course, in front of their professional colleagues. “Okay, easy now,” Shimon said. “Steady.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said later, as I sat on the bench outside the snack bar, sniffling and wiping my nose on a paper napkin.

  Shimon shrugged. “This whole trip is a little much. In Israel, they don’t do this. We have one moment of silence once a year. A siren sounds, we say a prayer in our heads, and then we move on.”

  Move on. That suddenly sounded so wise. Shimon loaded a fresh roll of film into his camera while I slowly collected myself and opened my notebook. Together, we set out to follow the March between Auschwitz and Birkenau. For the occasion, a lot of the kids had donned bright blue March of the Living windbreakers with white Jewish stars emblazoned on the back. Even though they took their role very seriously, they were still strangely ebullient, radiating energy the way teenagers do, and I had to admit, I felt proud of them. As if cued, the sky became overcast, and a soft rain began falling as we marched past the ominous watchtowers and under the brick archway of Birkenau, where railway tracks ran, then came, chillingly, to a halt.

  The day would become even more emotionally brutal before it was over. Holocaust survivors would speak of the atrocities they’d endured at that very site. Group prayers would be said, and Elie Wiesel himself would become too choked up to finish his speech. In the end, even Shimon would be weeping. It was a mass funeral for a mass grave. There was no getting around it.

  Later that night, after Shimon and I got drunk together for the fifth and final time, I finished typing my last dispatch from Poland on the floor of the bathroom. At the tourist hotel outside of Krakow, the only electrical outlet in my room was located next to the toilet: another peculiar vestige of Cold War culture, I supposed. The next morning, while everyone else headed off to Israel, I flew back to Paris. I faxed my articles from the post office in time for my deadline, then fell exhaustedly into Didier’s bed. The day after that, I returned to New York. By then, I’d recovered enough to be disappointed that my arrival went unheralded. No paparazzi snapped my picture at the gate. I was still a Nobody, writing for an obscure ethnic newspaper. The only difference was that now I would do so with a glimmer of dedication. Amid all my bitterness and inappropriate behavior, something had occurred to me. It was noble, really, to write about nitwits, artists, dissidents, and yokels—to document Jews—or anyone, for that matter—who managed to live life passionately and inventively, who managed to do more than suffer or antagonize others. These alone, in this brutal world, were accomplishments enough. To the living and hopeful, attention must be paid.

  I’d try to remind myself of this from time to time—even as I continued bombarding other newspapers with my fatuous rÉsumÉ. Even as I still yearned to interview Kevin Bacon. Even as I sauntered into work an hour late eating a jelly donut. Even as I leaned over Lippy’s desk and said, as I grinned wickedly, “So what’s up with us nor getting the day off for Good Friday? I mean, isn’t that like a major holiday or something?”

  Chapter 11

  I Was a Professional Lesbian

  A LITTLE INITIATIVE can be a dangerous thing. My final year as a reporter for The Jewish Week, I took it upon myself to write a lengthy, compassionate article about gay and lesbian rabbis. Feeling magnanimous and, perhaps, professionally suicidal, my editor, Sheldon, took it upon himself to run this article on the front page.

  Gay spiritual leaders are hardly news. But back in the early 1990s, The Jewish Week’s idea of racy and controversial journalism was to publish a low-fat recipe for potato kugel.

  “Oh, are we going to get phone calls over this one,” groaned the managing editor. “Fifty readers canceled their subscriptions last year just because we changed the typeface. When we ran that article on Jewish nursing homes, we were besieged with angry letters from geriatrics complaining we’d given their children ‘ideas.’ Now we’ve got a photograph on the front page of a single, pregnant, lesbian rabbi.” He tossed a copy across his desk. “I might as well just harvest my own organs with a letter opener.”

  Sure enough, the paper had barely been on the newsstands an hour when the phones started ringing, lighting up the receptionist’s desk like a Las Vegas casino. Sheldon announced that while he would handle all the calls from irate community leaders, all those from lay lunatics, religious zealots, and freaked-out grandmothers should be directed to me. Helen, the receptionist, attempted to screen my calls. However, since I’d never managed to figure out the intercom system, this basically resulted in her shouting across the newsroom to me:

  “Susan, there’s a Mrs. Ida Mandlebaum on line one. SAYS SHE WANTS TO TALK TO YOU ABOUT YOUR GAY RABBI ARTICLE.”

  “Ooh,” my ever-supportive colleagues hooted gleefully from behind their computer monitors. “Susan’s in trouble! Susan’s in trouble!”

  “Have fun,” said Steven, slinging his feet up onto his desk. “Remember, our subscription office is based in Omaha. Tell ‘em they’re wasting their time coming in here for a refund.”

  Before picking up the phone, I braced myself. Certainly, I’d gotten angry calls from readers before. But until now, these had always been due to my own ineptitude: misspelling the name of the deceased in an obituary, for example, or referring to the head of the B’nai B’rith Sisterhood as “sixty-ish” when, it turned out, okay, she was only thirty-nine. But this time, my critics would not be mollified by an apology and a simple printed retraction. I’d actually have to defend what I’d written on principle.

  To be sure, there were a lot of lofty and noble reasons to profile gay and lesbian rabbis. These were people, after all, who felt such a profound love for Judaism they’d dedicated their lives to it despite the fact that the Bible condemned their sexuality. Their work was a testimony to the power of faith and to the desire to serve God. None of this, however, had been what motivated me. I’d simply written the story because the topic seemed titillating and I was sure it would piss off our readers.

  As I’d compiled my research, I relished the idea of thousands of complacent, self-righteous Orthodox Jews picking up the morning paper over a steaming cup of coffee and prune Danish, then having a seizure. It hadn’t occurred to me that, in place of doing this, they might simply opt to call me instead.

  “Yes, Mrs. Mandlebaum,” I said hurriedly. My tactic, I’d decided, was to sound offhand and distracted—and therefore, maybe, not fully accountable.

  “Are you Susan Gilman?” the woman on the other end of the line demanded. Her Long Island accent was so thick that for a moment I thought one of my friends might be playing a joke on me. That I worked for The Jewish Week seemed to amuse my cohorts to no end. Friends were constantly calling the office, asking to speak to me, then disguising their voices as they offered up bogus story suggestions. Hello, this is Mr. Manischeweitz from the Manischeweitz Matzo Ball Factory. I was wondering if you might be interested in doing a story about my balls. You see, they’re not quite as firm as they used to be. That sort of thing. Great wits, my friends.

  “Okay, who is this, really?” I said now, reaching for my nail file. “I’m on a tight deadline, you know.”

&n
bsp; “I told you,” the voice said. “I’m Mrs. Mandlebaum. And I need to know, are you the lady who wrote the story about the lesbian rabbis?”

  “Why?” I said cagily.

  “Because of my daughter, Brandi,” said the woman, “she’s smart, she’s funny, she’s attractive—and I’m not just saying this because I’m her mother, either. She has a degree in psychology from Brandeis and an MSW from Columbia. So I was thinking that—oh, Brandi would kill me for doing this—but, I was thinking that, are you by any chance single?”

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “It’s just that Brandi isn’t getting any younger,” Mrs. Mandlebaum sighed. “And some of the girls she’s dated in the past. A housing contractor. A dance instructor. Augh. Don’t even get me started,” said Mrs. Mandlebaum, clearly getting started. “Her last girlfriend was a truck driver. Can you believe that? Whoever heard of such a thing? Worse yet, that no good little gonif broke Brandi’s heart. Smashed up her Subaru, then took the VCR and the food processor when she moved out. I told Brandi, I told her, ‘Don’t date goyisha dyke.’ But do children ever listen? No, they do not. So when I read your article, it occurred to me. You’re obviously such a well-educated, nice, gay Jewish girl. So I thought to myself ‘Ida, maybe you can make a shiddach.’ Why not? Crazier things have happened.”

  “Urn, Mrs. Mandlebaum,” I said.

  “I thought ‘Who knows? Maybe Brandi and this Gilman girl will meet, fall in love, and the next thing you know, they’ll do one of those little ceremonies they do nowadays, and I’ll finally get to buy a dress. And then they can do a follow-up article on it, too, right in The Jewish Week—”

  “Mrs. Mandlebaum? I’m flattered that you’d like to fix me up with your daughter,” I fairly shouted. Glancing around the newsroom, I noticed all my colleagues were grinning at me like maniacs. “But I’m not gay.”

  “Oh,” said Mrs. Mandlebaum. There was a pause. “You’re not?”