Lydia and Mendel were all and everything to each other. Perhaps if they’d been able or willing to share their lives with Lizzie, she might have better understood how they got to be who they were, and why they treated her as they did. But of course that was impossible, since they hardly talked to her at all, and certainly never about their pasts.
Lydia grew up in New York, in a small town not too far from Syracuse. Because the western boundary of Richland was Lake Ontario, the winter snows were monstrous, heavy and constant from October to February. The wind cut through her, no matter how many layers of clothes she wore, and her hands were always red and chapped. Lydia’s parents met and married each other in a displaced persons camp in Ebelsberg, in Austria, after the war. A distant relative of Lydia’s father, perhaps the foster son of a sister-in-law’s brother’s second or third cousin, had come to America in 1935 before the trains started chugging with determination toward their grim destinations of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belz?ec, Che?mno, Ravensbrück, Majdanek, Sobibór, Treblinka, and other points east and west. He had for some reason nobody quite understood settled in Richland (perhaps he thought that the name was prophetic, that the streets there really were paved with gold) and built up a thriving wastepaper company. By the time the war ended he was so successful (especially as compared to the remnants of the family who’d survived the war in Europe) that he needed additional help with the business, so he sponsored Lydia’s parents, Moishe and Brona Levinetsky, which allowed them to join him in Richland, in America.
They arrived—Brona was pregnant with Lydia—exhausted and in immediate need of warm clothes, English lessons, and cosseting, in the fall of 1947; they were among the lucky ones who got out of the DP camps relatively soon after the war ended. Their distant relative found them an apartment to live in, scavenged up sweaters and coats and secondhand shoes. He figured they would pick up whatever English they needed, which they did. Outside of work, he ignored them. There was no cosseting. Possibly the concept was unfamiliar to him.
While some of the survivors clung desperately to the memories of their past lives and circumstances, Moishe and Brona determinedly discarded all evidence of the people they’d been. One of the first things they did when they got to Richland was to adopt American names. They went to the county clerk’s office, where Moishe morphed into Mike and Brona Ronnie. They also legally changed their last name to LeVine. How young they were.
Their response to having survived when so many others did not was guilt, but guilt wrapped in layers upon layers of anger, until the kernel of shame and self-reproach was unrecognizable, or at least they didn’t acknowledge it in themselves. All that was left was a deep and abiding rage. They were furious about the recent past and disgusted with the present, and didn’t view the future with any sanguinity. They came to America determined to forget their religion, which they blamed for the disaster that had all but destroyed European Jewry, and quickly made the decision that their child would be raised with no religion at all. Ronnie and Mike never understood why anyone would bring Jewish children into a world that would never let them forget their Jewishness and that would likely reward them with suffering, pain, and a tragic death.
Their daughter was born just a few months after they’d settled in Richland. They called her Lydia Ellen, an American name that still paid secret homage to their (dead) mothers, Lyudmilla and Esther. They mistakenly believed that they’d wiped their hands of everything that came before their arrival in Richland, New York.
Mendel’s grandfather Pinchas Bultmann arrived in the New World sometime during the first decade of the twentieth century. He was fed up with the anti-Semitism he’d lived with daily in the Ukrainian shtetl where he grew up, always fearful of being drafted into the czar’s army, and may also have been tired of his wife, Raisa, whom he gladly left behind when he emigrated. No more Jew haters to harass him! No forced service in an army that despised all of his kind! No wife for him! He settled first in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, of course, working alongside other newcomers in a kosher pickle factory. His job was to fill the jars with pickles and then pour liquid over them. He didn’t much care for the briny, dillish smell of the factory, and after he moved on he never ate another pickle in his life. He also worried that constantly submerging his hands in the brine would injure them. He’d been a tailor in Vinkovitz and looked forward to taking up that profession again. Plus he just didn’t feel comfortable living and working around so many other people just like himself. He stayed in the city only long enough to meet and marry Perla, also a greenhorn, also from the Ukraine, whose family hailed from Minkovitz. Vinkovitz Minkovitz: none of their descendants believed that part of the story. Whether he ever gave another thought to Raisa, whether Perla knew about his previous marriage, or why he chose to marry (bigamously) again, nobody ever knew. Or if someone did, no one told his grandson Mendel.