Shmelke

They spent their summers in Atlantic City. The boy’s grandmother lived there with her second husband, in an island of Yiddish speaking immigrants who spent endless hours sitting in pavilions along the boardwalk recalling their European past. Immigrants who escaped the ghettos, pogroms, and Hitler’s Holocaust only to find themselves bewildered and perplexed by the customs and habits of the new world; who had left the inconceivable horrors of Europe to find themselves immersed in the unfathomable mystery of the post-war American experience; who only a few years prior had survived on a ration of found food and now ate TV dinners on a tray in carpeted living rooms; who struggled to understand the message of abundance and gratefulness which bombarded them every day through American television. Their past lay ravaged in the gutters of Europe, but they weren’t yet able to accept the new world.

The grandmother, Goldie, was born in western Latvia, before the turn of the century, in the town of Kuldīga, perhaps the furthest reach of the Pale of Settlement. Her father brought the family to America in 1918, just after the Great War, settling into a modest red brick row home in West Baltimore. He opened a small kosher butcher shop in the Jewish neighborhood and spent his days behind the counter bargaining with the Orthodox women. They themselves were an observant family but had shed the gaberdine, sidelocks, and fringes back in the Baltic. They were respected in the community and had favorable seats in the synagogue. They honored the Sabbath, observed the fast days, and obeyed in their own fashion the volumes of laws directing every minutial aspect of Jewish daily life. Goldie was the first to learn English and eventually made a few American friends. She attended a community college and worked for a time as a secretary in a button factory where she met and eventually married her first husband, Samuel, the nephew of the owner.

The years leading up to the war were a constant stress for Goldie’s family. Contact with relatives in Latvia and what little news they received from radio broadcasts warned of impending doom as the Nazis marched eastward. Each letter back to America was more worrisome. Goldie’s father tried desperately to get his brothers and cousins out of the country, but to no avail. Immigration opportunities were scarce once the war began. In the summer of 1941, the Nazis arrived in Latvia and began their mission of extermination. They eventually rounded up the Kuldīga Jews, herded them into the town’s synagogue, and shot them. No one survived. That synagogue was later converted into a movie theater and even later yet into a disco.

Samuel took over the button factory and ran it successfully for over a decade. There were golden years just after the war. Business was brisk and it seemed like a new day had risen for America. Samuel and Goldie enjoyed their newly found wealth and had three children in quick succession. Memories of the war, and even the Holocaust, began to fade a bit. But one September day Samuel noticed a hairy brown mole on his back. Within a few months he was dead from melanoma. Goldie married her second cousin, Yulin, the next year and soon they moved to Atlantic City.

*

That summer the family left Philadelphia, traveled north on Roosevelt Boulevard, and crossed the Tacony-Palmyra bridge into New Jersey. The trip took about two hours by car. The boy sat in the back with his two sisters. There was little conversation. A radio station played music more suited to his parents. Coming up next to a school bus filled with high schoolers, a tough-looking kid stuck his head out of the bus and spit on the passenger’s window of their car. Not a little friendly spittle, but thick yellowish phlegm that must have been developing for some time in the back of the boy’s sinus. They sat in silence. No one said a thing, the sputum lingering untouched on the window. An anger welled up and he wanted his parents to stop the car and reprimand the kid, but they sat stoically, apparently unmoved by the insult or more likely afraid of confrontation. He did not understand this unwillingness to confront. His parents rarely raised their voices in anger towards each other, but a silent resentment and tension often pervaded the household. He detested passivity. He wondered about the fate of the Jews in Europe, so recently understood. How could so many people be led to their deaths by so few? Was there no resistance? Would there be no resistance in him to life’s ordinary events?

The family had moved out of North Philadelphia years earlier, from a synagogue-centered community to the sprawling new suburbs of Montgomery County. Their home was the first on the block, a wild field of grass, weed, and shrub that would soon sprout dozens of multilevel homes. Antisemitism was strong. The few Jewish schoolboys walked to grade school together to guard against bullying. Being a smallish child, he was often the object of “little Jew boy” taunts. Schoolyard fights broke out from time to time. And over time he became convinced that under the surface of his developing personality, with all its habit, assumptions, difficulties, desires for acceptance, and dreams of glory, he was merely just another weak little Jew boy.

*

They stayed in Ventnor Beach, just south of Atlantic City. Their father rented two rooms on the ground floor of a motel. They could walk to the boardwalk. The first evening they went to the hotel where his grandmother lived. The hotel had been converted into apartments. The building was old but solid with a dark brick exterior and brass window fittings. There were slick marble floors and elaborately carved stone columns supporting the leaded entry doors. The lobby stank of the elderly and the only elevator was a “Shabbos car”—stopping and opening its doors automatically on every floor so that the rider would not have to push any buttons—and there would be no Sabbath violations for the residents or observant guests. The grandmother lived on the eleventh floor. Her apartment was small with one bedroom, a living room, and a kitchenette. She sat in an overstuffed antique chair near a window overlooking the beach. Yulin was in the kitchen, preparing lemonade and a snack. The adults spoke in Yiddish, leaving the children to their imaginations. The grandmother called the children to her and hugged and kissed them as if they were just rescued from a boating accident. Candy from the coffee table was offered and they helped themselves to more.

Yulin appeared and a plate of salami and crackers was passed around.

“Nachele,” she said, addressing the father in the familiar Yiddish diminutive of his childhood. “You’re not eating? You look thin. Are you sick? Dollie doesn’t feed you well?”

“Mom. I’m fine and Dollie is a great cook. Don’t worry about me.” He gave Dollie a wink but she was used to his mother giving her grief and merely rolled her eyes. There was little affection between the wife and the mother-in-law. They spoke about the weather and the health of mutual acquaintances. Someone had cancer. Someone’s granddaughter had gotten engaged. Another had lost some money in the stock market. Nothing about their own inner lives. A retreat into the familiar cycle of repetitive nothingness so common in their relationships.

The sun was setting behind the hotels when they rode the lift down to the lobby and stepped out onto the boardwalk. Hundreds of people milled about, window shopping or eating saltwater taffy. The air was moist, but cool and pleasant. Dozens of older women, dressed in coats more appropriate for the fall, sat on benches along the rails of the pavilions, which branched out from the boardwalk towards the distant foamy sea. The darkened beach seemed endless. Seagulls cried along with the squeals of children running in front of their parents towards the penny arcades. Families passed each other in chauffeured bicycle carts of woven rattan.

The grandmother pointed towards the pavilion and led everyone over to a small group of white-haired women engaged in animated discussion.

“I want you to meet someone . . . Hey Hennie! Come meet my son and his family,” she called. “Nate, Dollie, this is Hennie Rosenbaum. She’s also from Latvia, near my old village. Children, say hello to Mrs. Rosenbaum.”

Hennie let out a squeal, ignoring the adults and running towards the boy, crying “Shmelke! Shmelke! My Shmelke!” She hugged the boy tightly, crying and kissing his neck and forehead. The boy managed to pull away and get to his grandmother, who wrapped her arms around him.

“Bubbe,” he said. “what’s the matter with her?”

“He is the image of my Shmelke,” Hennie said.

“Shmelke was her grandson,” Bubbe said. “He was sent to the camps when he was eleven in 1941, never to be heard from again. He was killed there.”

“Do I look like him?” asked the boy.

“Exactly,” said Hennie. “You look exactly like him on the day they took him away. He was a good boy, and smart. The Nazis pulled him out of our house and pushed him into a car with a few other boys. We screamed and pounded on the car but they took off and we never heard anything after this. That was almost twenty years ago.”

“Was it because he was Jewish?” asked the boy.

“Yes, of course,” Bubbe replied. “We lost many husbands, mothers, and children in those days. In the end, we lost everyone . . . everything.”

Something inside the boy stirred. He understood. He knew only a little about the history of the Jews in Europe. But something arose in him, a feeling of belonging and a connection to a long chain of humanity going back into endless time, past his own ancestors to Abraham, perhaps to Adam, and beyond, when “man” was only an idea in the primordial consciousness. He knew about the early Jewish forefathers. His birthday was in the fall when the portions of Genesis are read in the synagogues. Moses, Adam, Cain, Abel, Seth, Noah and his sons, old father Abraham and his wife Sarah, the sacrifice of Isaac, Jacob, Joseph and his sojourn in Egypt. He read about them in storybooks and in the Torah portions themselves in lazy afternoons at Hebrew school. He believed in God. Maybe not the Elohim of the Torah, the angry Yahweh raining retribution on the enemies of Israel, punishing the disobedience of his own chosen people, or the unseen creator of miracles, the oracle of Moses and Aaron, but something more personal. He often felt an energy in his own presence and he understood that he was not alone. There was a connection to a higher being. He’d heard about the Holocaust. Both of his parents had emigrated long before the war broke out, but stories of lost relatives, beatings, and the camps were a part of his childhood. He struggled to understand man’s basic inhumanity.

One past spring day he had come upon a baby robin, broken from its egg and fallen from its mother’s nest, struggling in the bush behind his home. He’d put it back in the empty nest and checked it day after day. The mother bird never returned and shortly afterward he saw that the chick had died. Tears streamed down his face as he cradled the dead little bird in his cupped hands. Death was unimaginable. His heart ached.

That very night, unable to sleep, lying in his little bed surrounded by silence and darkness, he stared at the ceiling and wondered about death, about the eternity of it all. . . about eternity itself. He was touched with an awe and fear of the unknown and of an endless infinite nothingness he could not conceive.

*

The family, with Bubbe and Yulin in tow, walked out onto the boardwalk and ate in a nearby cafeteria. The adults were quiet and he was still shaken by Hennie’s outburst. Was he like Shmelke? Did he just look like him or was there something else?

After dinner, they browsed souvenir shops, ate soft ice cream, and watched the stream of people meandering by. They dropped Bubbe and Yulin back at their apartment and walked the last half mile to the Ventnor motel in silence.

The children shared one room, the parents another.

He awoke after midnight, lying on his back. The rhythm of the crashing waves was soothing but he was troubled. He felt he had lost something and was incomplete without it. He arose, looked out the window, and without any thinking or planning stepped out into the nighttime breeze. The argon streetlamps cackled and the ocean seemed very close. The sky was clear and a waning moon lit the darkened streets. A few stars were visible. The salty smell of summer, beach, and breeze was invigorating. He set out for the boardwalk, not knowing exactly where he was headed and hoping his disappearance would go unnoticed.

There were few children out at this hour and he walked quickly with his head down and his hands in his pockets. Passing Bubbe’s building, he noticed people still sitting at the pavilion. A shawled woman sat alone on the last bench and he thought it might be Mrs. Rosenbaum. Something pulled him towards her. He sat down next to her in silence. She put her arm around him and looked down lovingly. Nothing was said between them. He rested his head in her bosom. He was filled with a strange peace, and in that moment he forgave the world for its inhumanity. They were surrounded by silence. The seagulls had departed. Tears welled up and they both cried quietly until the last of the other people left the pavilion to return home. Only the waves and the solitary bark of a distant stray dog remained. The cool, salty night air enveloped them.

At last, she whispered, “Shmelke.”

He looked up, smiled, and nodded in agreement.