Claiming My Place Read online

  I am very proud of my beautiful new clothes—a navy blue pleated skirt and a matching blue top with a starched bright white sailor collar. My skirt and top are made of soft merino wool and Mama says the deep blue of the dress is very becoming to my amber-colored eyes. I am happy that it isn’t too cold, so I don’t have to hide my beautiful outfit under a bulky coat.

  On my head I have a little pink cap that Bubbe Gomolinska—my father’s mother—crocheted for me.

  I have never worn my new shoes outside before, although I tried them on many times when Hela wasn’t looking.

  My only disappointment on this glorious day is that there are no heavy blond braids falling straight down my back.

  I am glad I haven’t eaten breakfast—just two sips of tea with milk and honey—because my stomach is quivering with excitement and dread.

  Will the teacher like me? What if I am not a good student? Will I know any of the other students besides Rozia and Sala? Will I make any friends? Will I be the youngest? Will I be the shortest? Will it be as disappointing and as awful as the kindergarten I was forced to go to when I was four?

  Finally, we get to the door of the beautiful brick school. Through the side gate I can see a lovely flower garden in the back. It is an extremely small school. There is only one classroom with the first, second, and third grades all together, but I know it is a prestigious private school for Jewish students from all over Piotrków Trybunalski, our town in central Poland.

  Most of the students are already in the classroom, sitting in their newly assigned seats. There are two tables, each with a bench for two children, on one side of an aisle, and two tables and two benches on the other side. The tables and benches go back five rows. Most of the forty students are girls but there are some boys, too. The teacher is sitting behind her desk. It is on a small raised platform in front of a big blackboard. She is turned toward the door and holds a paper with all of our names.

  My turn comes and my voice trembles a little as I announce, “Sura Gitla Gomolinska.”

  The teacher seems very nice. She is tall and thin and is wearing a gray dress with black dots. Her hair is light brown and she has it tied in a tight bun at the back of her head. She has small, round gold earrings dangling from her ears and a gold crucifix hanging from a chain around her neck. Her eyes are almost as gray as her dress.

  She smiles at me and then she looks at the list. “Excuse me, could you say your name again slowly?” she asks gently.

  I repeat my three names as clearly as I can and she looks at the list again.

  “I am sorry, Sura Gitla, but I cannot find your name on the list. There is no record of your registration.”

  A feeling of horror comes over me, and for a moment I can’t breathe. I realize, with my stomach sinking down to my shiny black Mary Janes, that my devoted father, who works so hard to take care of us, who never says no, and who would do anything to make us happy, has forgotten to register me for school.

  I try to explain that my father has probably just overlooked this small detail of registration. My tatte has so many important things to worry about—our meat business and apartment building and large household.

  The teacher says she understands. She expresses her regrets. “I am so sorry,” she says, and she seems sincere. “You will just have to wait for next year, because we have absolutely no extra room, no room at all in the class. All the seats have been assigned. Come back next summer and have your father register you then.”

  And, as she gives me what seems like a death sentence, she smiles kindly and gently pats me on my head.

  For the first time in my life I feel my heart break. It takes all my strength to hold back my tears as I somehow make my way home. As soon as I get there the tears burst out of me like a flood, racking my entire body with the sorrow and misery and helplessness I feel. And the anger and outrage at the injustice of it.

  I want so badly to curl up in Mama’s arms. Knowing I have to wait until she comes home at two o’clock is torture. I tear off my new clothes, put on an old smock, throw my favorite rubber ball in its net sling over my shoulder, and run out to the backyard to climb our old apple tree near the gazebo, my favorite private thinking spot.

  I’ve had that rubber ball as long as I can remember. All the children I know have one. Mine is pink, green, and white, about the size of a soccer ball. We carry them in a crocheted sling over our shoulders (my sling is pink) and then, when we are ready to play, we each take out our ball and throw it against the walls and play games with each other. I know that I am not to take my ball to school. I am too old to play with a rubber ball there. But now it is comforting and, sitting in the apple tree, looking down at the gazebo, I keep slinging the ball in its strap against the branches of my old apple tree. I go over and over every painful detail of what has happened. And each time I start to cry again. I cling to the hope that Mama and Tatte will know how to fix this.

  Finally, Mama comes home. I rush into her arms, sobbing, telling her my tragic story. She hugs me tightly and tries to calm me down. Soon Tatte comes home and Mama leads him to their bedroom to talk. When they come out, the look of pity I see on her face gives me a sick feeling.

  “Bubbeleh,” she says to me, “if the teacher says there are no more places for now, there is nothing we can do. Your tatte will register you to start school next year. When you start next year you will be one year older and smarter and able to be a much better student. I know you’re disappointed now, but when you’re grown up it won’t even matter.”

  Not matter? How can she think that? What will I do for one whole year? With all my friends in school I’ll have no one to play with. I turned six on May 15 of this year; next year I will be seven, and then I will be one year behind everyone else forever, always feeling stupid and ashamed.

  The idea of just giving up makes me want to explode. I feel so alone. And I see clearly that I have to fight for myself.

  Standing there before Mama and Tatte I make a decision and say, “I’m going back to school tomorrow to beg the teacher to let me in.”

  Tatte says, “No, you must not argue with the teacher. It would be disrespectful.”

  But Mama looks at me not with pity, but with pride. She turns to Tatte and says, “Itzak, let her go.”

  And as always, when it comes to the children, Tatte agrees with what Mama thinks.

  So the next day, in my shiny Mary Jane shoes with my blue pleated skirt and blue sailor top and pink crocheted cap and wispy blond hair down my back, tied with a blue ribbon, I walk by myself to the school and present myself to the teacher.

  The words burst out of me. “My name is Sura Gitla Gomolinska and I am here to learn. I cannot wait for another year. I cannot wait even for one more day. Please, please let me come to school.”

  The teacher gets a strange look on her face: displeasure, surprise, respect? She calmly shows me that there is no empty space on any bench, and how can I learn with no place to sit or write? She tells me that I cannot come to school. I must wait for next year. I am not registered and there is no place for me.

  With tears in my eyes, again I walk slowly home and climb my apple tree.

  “It is not fair. I want to learn. I will not give up,” I say to the tree.

  And so, I go back to school the next day, in my less-shiny Mary Jane shoes with my wrinkled blue pleated skirt and blue sailor top and pink crocheted cap and my thin hair down my back tied with a blue ribbon. And again I beg and again the teacher gently says no. But I do not give up. I return the next day and the next day and the next day and the next. Each time she says no and each day I go back. Week after week, every day but Saturday and Sunday, I go to school and plead with all my heart, fail in my efforts, and return the next day.

  Do I just wear the teacher down? Does she feel pity for me after so many weeks of begging? Does she truly admire my perseverance, my stubbornness, my sense of justice, my deep, passionate desire for learning? I don’t know. But one magical late-fall day, she finally gives in. She
finds a little stool for me and places it in a corner of the room. After that, she allows my father to pay for the registration.

  There is still no room, so I have to sit on the stool with my back to the blackboard, facing the other students, with no table to write on. I listen to everything the teacher says and try my best each day to learn as much as I can. The other students stare at me. My stubborn insistence to be admitted to school is unheard of. It would be too disrespectful for them to laugh or tease me openly, but I can feel their silent mockery as I sit at the front of the room, on that little stool, facing them. I feel like an outcast, though lucky to be there at all. Soon the staring stops.

  Then one day in late November, the teacher comes to me and says, “Gucia, sometimes one person’s misfortune is another’s good luck. I have just learned that Voicek Pavinsky has polio and will not be coming back to school this year. There is a seat for you on the bench at the front table. Go sit.”

  I know I should feel bad for Voicek, but all I can feel is amazement that what I have given up even daring to hope for, to be a regular student with my own place like everyone else, has come to pass. I feel warm and glowing inside, triumphant. My standing up for myself has been rewarded. And just like that, my nightmare is over.

  It is my first lesson in learning to think for myself and fight for what I believe is right—a lesson that will one day help give me the determination to fight for my life.

  Piotrków Trybunalski

  Ay, ay … the Yiddish print shops of Piotrków! They are known throughout the world. In the Diaspora or in Israel, when a book, a siddur, or a machzor is opened, the logo on the title page is clear and distinct: “Printed in Piotrków.”

  —Elazar Prashker, “A Stroll Through Our Piotrków”

  1922

  My parents own a large apartment building at 21 Piłsudskiego Street (proudly named after the Polish chief of state Józef Piłsudski), in the middle of Piotrków Trybunalski, our small town southwest of Warsaw and northeast of Kraków.

  There are fourteen apartments in our three-story building, and we have the largest, fanciest one. It runs the full length of the second floor and has two lovely balconies facing the street. Ours, and three of the other apartments on that floor, have private flush toilets inside them. There is a big round porcelain box on the wall above our toilet, with a chain hanging down.

  When we pull the wooden handle of the chain to flush the toilet, it makes an enormous whooshing sound. When I was a very little girl, I was terrified of the monster who lived behind the toilet.

  The tenants in most of the other apartments in the building have to make do with an outhouse that stands near the back of the courtyard behind our building, just inside the fence separating it from our huge, beautiful garden. Bolek, the janitor, keeps the outhouse spotless.

  There is a bathhouse across the street where we go every two weeks, pay for a hot, steamy bath, and come home feeling fresh and squeaky clean.

  On weekends, when farmers come in from the country to sell their fruits and vegetables, they park their wagons in our large cobblestone courtyard. At the north corner of the courtyard is a small shed where we keep our horse and wagon. Wojcek, the groom who cares for the horse, lives there, too. He has only one arm and I am afraid of him because of that.

  On the south side of the courtyard are the four modest living quarters for the tenants who rent the four shops that face busy Piłsudskiego Street. Our garden on the other side of the fence has fruit trees, including my favorite apple tree and a lacy gazebo, and at the very back end of our property is a simple cottage rented by a poor, very nice Polish family, the Dobranskis.

  In the back of the building there are a few rooms my parents use for storage and in the front, at street level, are four stores. There is the barber, Boris, a very nice man but not a typical Jew, because he keeps his shop open on Shabbos—the Jewish sabbath, which lasts from sundown on Fridays until sundown on Saturdays—so that the gentiles can get a shave and a haircut. I like walking past his shop because of the sweet smells of all his lotions and hair oils and soaps that waft outside.

  Next to Boris is a dry cleaner and dyer named Pan Zarnowiecki. After his first wife died he married a very sweet, warmhearted woman who takes care of him and his son and the two more children they have together. Often, when I walk past their shop on my way to school, Pani (Mrs.) Zarnowiecka gives me delicious freshly baked mandelbrot.

  Then there is Heska Szwartz, who owns the small grocery store and kosher catering business. Pan Szwartz is very ordinary. Shlomo Besser, the watchmaker, is not. He often beats his wife, even on Shabbos. She runs down Piłsudskiego Street screaming for help, with her husband running after her waving his belt, and the people on the street just laugh. Every time I see it happen I am outraged and angry. It is so cruel. People should go to her rescue, but no one ever does.

  Our apartment is quite comfortable and inviting, furnished with the most stylish decorations and modern conveniences. My mother cares deeply about having a beautiful home for her family and my father cares deeply about pleasing my mother. We were the first in town to switch from the old flickering, smelly gaslights to the new, bright electrical chandeliers. Our walls are not painted like in the other homes but are covered in a shimmery green wallpaper with golden fleurs-de-lis. It looks like silk. Our furniture is beautiful, modern, and tasteful. My mother’s favorite piece is their large wooden bed, because of the lovely landscape she had an artist paint on the headboard.

  The kitchen is my favorite room in our apartment. It is always filled with such delicious smells, and there is the comforting warmth of the stove during those cold Polish winters and springs, the always-steaming teakettle, and the sturdy pine table where Chana and Krysia prepare our meals. We usually eat in the dining room, but the kitchen is the place for the babies to play on the floor and for me to find cookies and bread whenever I want.

  Each evening at bedtime our two maids set up their two small sleeping cots against the west wall of the kitchen, and every morning fold them up and put them away. Because Chana is Jewish, my mother trusts only her to understand our kosher food laws.

  Krysia, who is Polish, talks longingly of the delicious pork kielbasa and bacon she eats when she goes home to the countryside to visit her mother. Of course Mama would never allow such traif (non-kosher) foods to be brought into our home. And Krysia never eats with us at the table like Chana does. I don’t know if that is her choice or my mother’s.

  At two in the afternoon every day but Friday, we all sit together as a family at the large, round, intricately carved mahogany dining room table for dinner. I love the scent and taste of Chana’s fresh tomato soup with meat bones or the chicken soup with rice. In the winter we often have hot potato soup, or hot beef-and-cabbage borscht, and in the summer cold sorrel schaav, or leek-and-potato vichyssoise, or cold beet borscht with sour cream, a hard-boiled egg in the center, and a little dill sprinkled on top. When it is a meat day we have meatballs with potatoes and carrots or spinach, and sometimes veal cutlets or schnitzel, and Chana’s scrumptious chopped liver with schmaltz (chicken fat). There are always fresh breads from the bakery on the corner at Jerozolimska Street: bialys, hard white rolls, rye bread, or pumpernickel. Of course every Shabbos we have our special freshly baked challah bread, deep yellow from the egg, beautifully braided, unlike my hair.

  (Little do I suspect that years later, during the war, we would feel lucky finding any bread to eat at all, even bad-tasting, moldy, days-old bread! And how memories of delicious food would one day lift me out of my sadness, fear, and exhaustion during those long years.)

  As the sun goes down on Friday night, we usher in the Shabbos, which is called welcoming the Shabbos Bride. The house is filled with such heavenly smells from all the special delicacies Chana has spent the day cooking. We gather around Mama as she lights the Shabbos candles and then covers her eyes and makes a blessing over them. With the candles casting a golden glow on her face and hair, Mama looks radiant. Then we sit at
the dining room table for a feast. Often an orech, a stranger, someone my father has just met at the synagogue, will join us; maybe a poor man, maybe a traveler. It is a mitzvah, a good deed, to invite strangers for dinner on Shabbos.

  We wait for Tatte to say the blessings over the wine and the challah, and then when my father is finished we all begin to eat. We start with gefilte fish, ground-carp dumplings. Out of respect for his special place of importance in our family, Tatte is served the head of the carp, the choicest delicacy saved just for him. Next comes chicken noodle soup. The noodles are always my favorite because I am fascinated by how much fun it is to make the dough for them. When Chana isn’t too busy, she lets me help. After that, we eat the main course of roast chicken or goose with candied carrots and a butter lettuce salad with hard-boiled eggs and a sweet-and-sour vinegar-and-sugar dressing. After ending with a dessert of hot compote of apricots, prunes, and figs, we move into the living room, Tatte sitting in the special chair reserved for him alone.

  On Saturday morning, Tatte goes to the synagogue, and when he returns at two o’clock we have our Shabbos dinner. Because we cannot light the oven for the twenty-five hours of Shabbos—using the oven is considered work and so is forbidden—this afternoon meal is mostly cold. We have gefilte fish and goose or chicken left over from Friday night, a cold meat aspic jellied from the front leg of a cow, and cold fruit compote. The main hot dish is the cholent, a delicious meat-and-barley stew. This is accompanied by a kugel of noodles or potatoes layered and baked separately, placed in the center of the table.

  Each Friday, just before sundown, it is my job to take the pot of cholent and the pan of kugel that Chana has prepared to the Kalisher Bakery, a block away on Jerozolimska Street. Since the bakery ovens are already on, it is all right for the food to cook in the ovens on the Sabbath overnight. The next day, along with all of our neighbors, I pick up our own pots of steaming hot kugel and cholent for our Shabbos meal.