Mixed Emotions

Part One

Three weeks before Passover when I was in my second year of Hebrew school, our teacher, Geveret (Mrs.) Lieberman cleared her throat and announced that we were going to learn to chant the Four Questions, an ambitious but achievable goal. It was time we fifth graders did something other than look cute and hunt for the Afikomen at our family seders. She passed out copies of the Hebrew text.

“Do we have to do this?” asked one classmate.

“Too much Hebrew,” commented another as the full page of text hit my desk in the back of the room.

“You tell your family that your Hebrew teacher said so.” Geveret Lieberman looked around the room sternly. “It is your job this year to read the Four Questions.”

My job? Jobs were already a sore subject. Mom said my jobs were to do well in school, to keep my room clean, and to be nice to my sister. She never gave me high marks for any of those tasks. My job driving tractor last summer hadn’t gone so well either. Because I didn’t understand what a clutch was, or how to use it, I turned the tractor into a bucking bronco. Uncle Fritz thought it was hysterical, doubling over in laughter when one of the boys stacking the haybales on the hay wagon almost fell off. The boy shook his fist at me. But Grandpa, I thought, could use a helper. Dad didn’t learn much Hebrew school because of the Nazis. Mom never went to Hebrew school at all. I imagined Grandpa beaming at me after I finished doing my Four Questions job. Grandma, too. And Dad would take credit for sending me to Hebrew school so that all the efforts that Grandpa made to get out of Germany were worth it.

Geveret Lieberman cleared her throat.

“Wait!” came a cry from far left. “Why are there four questions and not five? You know: who, what, where, why, how?”

“Or twelve!” cried someone else. “Like the twelve tribes of Israel.”

Geveret Lieberman left these questions unanswered and began chanting. I tried to pay attention to what we were supposed to learn – Grandpa and all that – but I found my mind wandering to numerology, as Geveret Lieberman later told us the study of the mystical power of numbers, was called. I was famous at home and in regular school for asking questions, sometimes out of general interest, sometimes to be a nudge as Mom said, sometimes to distract the teacher from a boring lesson, and sometimes because I was struggling to understand something complex.

Over dinner that evening, I told Mom and Dad that Geveret Lieberman said it was my job to chant the four questions. Mom said she was glad that my Hebrew was improving. She was also glad that I reminded her – she needed to go out and buy Haggadahs. Grandma and Grandpa were staying in Florida. We’d be having Passover at our house. She had to get prepared.

“What?” I asked.

“Grandma and Grandpa decided to stay in Florida till May. Remember last year we had that big snowstorm in April.”

Disappointment and anger hijacked my brain. Without Grandma and Grandpa, there would be no cousins coming from New York, and none of Grandma’s special Passover dishes like Matzashalot and nut cake. Passover would be another boring meal like the one we were in the middle of.  

I looked over to Dad for a reaction. Had he known about this? Didn’t he want to do something for Passover? All I saw was a man eating pot roast with his face looking straight into his dish. If he was upset that his parents wouldn’t be home for the holidays, he certainly wasn’t showing it.

My sister Amy asked, “Will it be just the four of us?”

“Plus Aunt Erna and Uncle Adolf,” said Mom. “They are coming, too.”

“The Goniff,” said Dad without looking up. This was his nickname for Uncle Adolf, though he called some of his other business associates that name, too. Goniff, I knew, meant crook. Why Dad called his uncle a crook was never fully explained. But whenever the topic of Uncle Adolf was raised, Amy and I had more or less the same four questions:

Why was he so short? Maybe he fell off a horse, or maybe it was a birth defect.

Why doesn’t he work on the farm in Spencerport? Because he can’t get along with anyone.

Why is he always joking? He likes making people laugh.

Why doesn’t he have any children or grandchildren? He had a daughter with his first wife, but they couldn’t get out of Germany.

I wanted to ask more questions, but it didn’t seem like I’d get any more information. Dad was still staring at his meat, giving me the same pat answer as if I’d asked him what day of the week it was. I was not sure what to expect with Uncle Adolf and Aunt Erna. Would it be fun? Or would we all sit there stiffly?

The first night of Passover, fifteen minutes before Aunt Erna and Uncle Adolf were due at our house, the front doorbell rang. Amy ran to answer it, but before she could, the front door flew open wide, with Amy stopping short in her tracks so as not to get slammed between the door and the wall. “Hello, hello,” said Aunt Erna cheerfully oblivious to the near accident. She had a bad right knee, and she used a cane to step into our living room. Aunt Erna, like Grandma, wore a blue dress with a fake pearl necklace on any fancy occasion. Even though it was still cold outside, she wore no coat. Uncle Adolf walked in a few seconds later.  He wore a black suit with a black tie. I was used to seeing him in his work clothes, which, much like Dad’s, included rubber boots to the knees covered in manure. He looked stiff and formal, and when I hugged him hello, I noticed that, for the first time, I was taller than him. I giggled in embarrassment.

Dad sat at the head of the table with Mom to his right. Amy and I sat across the table from Uncle Adolf and Aunt Erna. We were only a few pages into the Haggadah when Amy asked when we were going to sing Had Gad Yad, the song she had just learned in religious school. Dad pretended not to hear Amy and lifted his wine glass for the second Kiddush. Then he called on Mom to read the paragraph for Participant 1. When Dad called on Uncle Adolf to read Participant 2, Uncle Adolf looked confused as to where he was supposed to read. Then, after Aunt Erna pointed to the spot, Uncle Adolf sounded a lot like a first grader, stumbling over every few words. I couldn’t tell if he was trying to be funny or if he never learned how to read English. Either way, Amy and I started giggling. Dad had to shush us.

We made slow progress through the Haggadah. If the Hebrew was transliterated, someone read it. Otherwise, our seder was all English. Amy asked again about Had Gad Yad and Dad started flipping through the pages.

“Wait, wait!” I yelled, worried that Dad was going to forget about me and my job. “The four questions.”

“Where are they?” Dad asked knowing that I had read the Haggadah earlier that afternoon. When I told him the page, he smiled and suggested that we make our way to page twelve.

 I began chanting. I barely took a breath during the whole passage, five long lines of Hebrew text. I made a mistake during the third question and had to start it a second time, but without Geveret Lieberman there to correct me, no one noticed.

Uncle Adolf clapped when I finished. Aunt Erna joined him. We zipped through the rest of the seder in no time. Dad skipped a lot. We also laughed a lot. No matter how many times Uncle Adolf was supposed to read the word Pharoah, he stumbled. pa-Ro-ah? Pha-ro-Ah? We all laughed. And Aunt Erna brought a huge box of Barton’s Almond Kisses. I ate a lot of them since there was neither Grandma’s Matzashalot nor her nut cake. When Amy and I went to look for the Afikomen, Aunt Erna joined us in the living room. She lifted an armchair as if it was as light as a folding chair. The Afikomen was right there. Then she gave Amy and me a dollar each, four times more than what Grandpa gave us. Even though I was sorry that Grandma and Grandpa hadn’t come back for Passover, I could honestly report to Geveret Lieberman that I had done my part and that we had a good seder.

When Grandma and Grandpa got home from Florida, Grandma asked me about Passover. It wasn’t the first thing we talked about. First, she showed me all the seashells and pieces of coral that she’d collected. I got to pick two to bring home as a present from Florida. Then she brought out an apple cake that she’d made that morning. As we ate our slices of apple cake, I told her about our seder, and how it didn’t seem like Uncle Adolf could read.

“Of course, he can read.” Grandma looked askance at me. “He was sent to school like everyone in Berleburg. Where do you get such ideas?”

I didn’t want to argue. So I asked her (probably for the hundredth time) about his back, whether he was born hunch-backed or fell off a horse.

 “I didn’t live in Berleburg when Adolf was a child. But medicine then wasn’t so good as now. They couldn’t do anything for him.”

“Why couldn’t his first wife and daughter get out of Germany?”

“They couldn’t get visas. It was very difficult to get them. You had to wait years. We barely got ours in time.” Grandma sighed loudly. She put down her fork. I could tell she was getting upset. She started talking about Grandpa’s sister Adele who couldn’t get a visa either. Adele had just stopped walking one day. No one knew why. They took her to the doctors. They took her to the hospital. “Schrecklich. Such a wonderful person.”

“But why did she stop walking?” I couldn’t understand.

“We never found out.”

“So she couldn’t get a visa. But Adolf got a visa with his hunchback?”

Grandma shrugged. Then she got up to wash the dishes. I guess this was not a good day to ask her my questions. I found visas confusing. Who needed them and why? How would you apply for one? How would I know if I needed one? Who would I ask? Where would I go with a visa? What would happen to me if I couldn’t get a visa?

I stared at my seashells as Grandma washed. I turned the conch around in my hand. As I did that, I remembered that I hadn’t even told Grandma about chanting the four questions. Compared to the visa issue, the four questions no longer seemed all that important. What I really wanted to know seemed unknowable, a mystery of the universe.

Dad and Grandma (and all the relatives really) seemed to think that the Holocaust was a thing of the past, like Pharoah in Egypt. I was a little girl, and I shouldn’t have to worry about such things. My questions were annoying, or not to the point.

I wasn’t sure when I’d find out the answer to the visa questions, or the rest of the questions that I had about Uncle Adolf, or if something could have been done so Aunt Adele would have walked again (and gotten a visa). But I was going to try. I wasn’t letting these questions go.

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Grandpa and his siblings in Berleburg, sometime between 1915 and 1920. The boys – Fritz, Julius (Grandpa) and Adolf. The girls – Mathilde, Adele, Rosa.

Grandpa and his siblings after the war: Fritz, Mathilde, Julius/Grandpa, Rosa, Adolf.

End Part One - Next installment, 50 years and the Internet Later