Four Gold Coins
My mother was seven months pregnant and weak from hunger, so my father took Hugo and me to the train. It was early in the morning, still dark, in fact: we Jews were trying not to attract any more attention than necessary. Although we had permits to leave, all our documents, the tickets, we could still be stopped at any second. I wasn’t yet ten and Hugo only five, but we knew the danger so well we didn’t need Papa’s command to be silent in the streets.
Saying good-bye to my mother and Oma had frightened me. My mother used to spend weeks away from us with Papa, but I had never left Oma before. By then of course everyone was living together in a little flat in the Leopoldsgasse—I can’t remember how many aunts and cousins now, besides my grandparents—but at least twenty.
In London, lying in the cold room at the top of the house, on the narrow iron bed Minna considered appropriate for a child, I wouldn’t think about the cramped space on the Leopoldsgasse. I concentrated on remembering Oma and Opa’s beautiful flat where I had my own white lacy bed, the curtains at the window dotted with rosebuds. My school, where my friend Klara and I were always one and two in the class. How hurt I was—I couldn’t understand why she stopped playing with me and then why I had to leave the school altogether.
I had whined at first over sharing a room with six other cousins in a place with peeling paint, but Papa took me for a walk early one morning so he could talk to me alone about our changed circumstances. He was never cruel, not like Uncle Arthur, Mama’s brother who actually beat Aunt Freia, besides hitting his own children.
We walked along the canal as the sun was rising and Papa explained how hard things were for everyone, for Oma and Opa, forced out of the family flat after all these years, and for Mama, with all her pretty jewels stolen by the Nazis and worrying about how her children would be fed and clothed, let alone educated. “Lottchen, you are the big girl in the family now. Your cheerful spirit is Mama’s most precious gift. Show her you are the brave one, the cheerful one, and now that she’s sick with the new baby coming, show her you can help her by not complaining and by taking care of Hugo.”
What shocks me now is knowing that my father’s parents were also in that flat and how little I remember of them. In fact, I’m pretty sure that it was their flat. They were foreign, you see, from Belarus: they were part of the vast throng of Eastern European Jews who had flocked into Vienna around the time of the First World War.
Oma and Opa looked down on them. It confuses me, that realization, because I loved my mother’s parents so much. They doted on me, too: I was their precious Lingerl’s beloved child. But I think Oma and Opa despised Papa’s parents, for speaking only Yiddish, not German, and for their odd clothes and religious practices.
It was a terrible humiliation for Oma and Opa, when they were forced to leave the Renngasse to live in that immigrant Jewish quarter. People used to call it the Matzoinsel, the matzo island, a term of contempt. Even Oma and Opa, when they didn’t think Papa was around, would talk about his family on the Insel. Oma would laugh her ladylike laugh at the fact that Papa’s mother wore a wig, and I felt guilty, because I was the one who had revealed this primitive practice to Oma. She liked to interrogate me about the “customs on the Insel” after I had been there, and then she would remind me that I was a Herschel, I was to stand up straight and make something of my life. And not to use the Yiddish I picked up on the Insel; that was vulgar and Herschels were never vulgar.
Papa would take me to visit his parents once a month or so. I was supposed to call them Zeyde and Bobe, Grandpa and Grandma in Yiddish, as Opa and Oma are in German. When I think about them now I grow hot with shame, for withholding from them the affection and respect they desired: Papa was their only son, I was the oldest grandchild. But even to call them Zeyde and Bobe, as they requested, seemed disgusting to me. And Bobe’s blond wig over her close-cropped black hair, that seemed disgusting as well.
I hated that I looked like Papa’s side of the family. My mother was so lovely, very fair, with beautiful curls and a mischievous smile. And as you can see, I am dark, and not at all beautiful. Mischlinge, cousin Minna called me, half-breed, although never in front of my grandparents: to Opa and Oma I was always beautiful, because I was their darling Lingerl’s daughter. It wasn’t until I came to live with Minna in England that I ever felt ugly.