© 2016 Cora Schwartz
“I took this picture because it spoke to me about being able to leave darkness behind and move toward the light even if one is alone.“
(dedicated to my father, a child victim of a Polio)
I feel your shame
As you swing your bum leg
Over the edge of the rocking dingy.
I hear the thud
When you settle down hard
On the salt-weary bench.
But I see your pride
When you grip those oars
Looking like everyone else
A whole man at last on the open sea
And safe at last.
(dedicated to the troubled women I worked with in a shelter)
Tonight
When he staggers home
She will kill him
Erase him from that page in her life
And start to hope again.
Blood
Crimson as those autumn birch leaves
Will drop from her knife
Falling at last into empty eyes
In the velvet night.
But in the morning…
An Excerpt from:
GYPSY TEARS, LOVING A HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR
A book by Cora Schwartz
Chapter 1
Rudy insisted on calling our rented basement apartment his bunker even though I
complained it was depressing me. Except for the little, ground-level window over our
bed, we were cut off from the outside world. He said that was what he liked the most,
that and the hard cotton mattress propped up on cinder blocks in the corner. I cannot
remember how he convinced me to rent the dismal place, but I do remember the first
night the nightmares came. The tortured sounds he made were like the escalating howl
of a wolf.
“Tell me.” I shook him with trembling hands. “Tell me what you just dreamed.”
Rudy mumbled, “I don’t remember” and rolled over.
“You must remember. It just happened.”
“Please, I don’t remember. Just let me go back to sleep.”
“Don’t you dare turn your back on me. You just woke me out of a deep sleep. I want to
know.”
“There is nothing to know. Believe me.”
“Why do you say that? You think because I can’t see your face I don’t know you’re lying.”
Rudy groaned and went back to sleep.
Most nights, the resentment of being jolted out of my sleep, with my heart pounding
in my ears, kept me awake for hours. I’d crawl out of our bed, fix a cup of tea on the hot
plate, and watch the morning light slip under the curtain and settle on the top of his head.
I did not struggle all that much, any more than I struggled with his other eccentricities.
I knew Rudy needed to be down there, and for some reason I did too.
On those nights, I thought a lot about our first meeting that day in the Catskills. I was
visiting my mother at the Shady Nook Senior Citizen Hotel when the handsome stranger in
the black bathing suit walked up to me. He gestured with his head toward the men behind
him.
“But you know there is a Romania, don’t you? Tell them there is a Romania.”
“But of course!” I raised my voice so they could hear. “Everyone knows there’s a Romania.”
“Thank you.” The stranger winked at me. “They didn’t believe me.”
“Oh.” I brought my finger to my lips and leaned over. He bent down to meet me. I realized
by the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes and the wisps of gray hair around his temples that
he was older than I thought.
“Actually,” I whispered, “I don’t know that I do either. Isn’t Romania just a song?”
“Well, then,” he whispered back, “I’ll take you there. I’ll take you home.” He lowered my
hand to the table.
“We will find the best gypsy music. You can help me find the ring! Would you like that?”
I stared at him. “The ring?”
“Yes, of course. This is the moment that could change everything. It was meant to be.”
He raised one eyebrow and waited.
I remember thinking he was just another crazy man. I was thirty-two years old and divorced.
God knows I’d met plenty of crazies. I glanced at the book in my lap and considered
moving my chair, but instead I looked up and smiled. “Thank you. I’d like that.”
“Good. Meet me tonight. We can plan our trip.”
He walked back to the men in a slow, deliberate way with hips that seemed to rotate
effortlessly. He placed one long foot before the other as though he had invented walking.
He stopped and lit a cigarette, resting his weight on one leg, bending the other at the
knee. I wondered if he knew I was studying him. I was fascinated with the delicate
manner with which his fingers held the cigarette, the way he threw his head back with
narrowed eyes to avoid the smoke, dragging as though anxious to get it over with.
That he wasn’t an American seemed to be in the air around him. His brief bathing suit
certainly looked European.
I imagined his touch and how his leg would feel against mine.
He talked with the other men for a minute, placed his lit cigarette in an ashtray, and
walked toward the pool. It was a blistering afternoon. He splashed around with some
youngsters at the shallow end, then waded deeper where the water was up to his chest.
His arms were up close to his body. He looked scared, like he was holding his breath.
In another minute he was out.
“Afraid of the water?” I called out.
“I’m just not what you call a swimmer.” His body was golden in the light. He smiled and
the sun glinted off his white teeth.
He moved back to his chair in that same deliberate way, collected his things, and walked
across the hotel lawn without looking back. The strange melody he whistled trailed behind
him.
My mother came up behind me. She swatted me lightly on the shoulder. “You see, I told
you.”
“Told me what, Mama?”
“I told you to come up here and visit me. Look, look at that nice man you were talking to.
I told you.”
“Yes, Mama, he does seem nice, doesn’t he? But he is a little old.”
“Old, shmold. He’s handsome, that’s all that counts. So, did he ask you for your number in
the city? Did he?”
“Mama, it doesn’t work that way.”
“Sure it does. You have to show a little interest, that’s all. Just show a little interest for God’s
sake.”
“Mama, please, why don’t you understand? I’m not interested.”
“There’s no such thing. Look at you. You’re still young. You need more makeup. That’s
what it is.”
My mother started to wear makeup after my father died. Suddenly she looked like her
mother, Grandma Bessie. It was strange too how easily I now called her Mama after all the
years of not wanting to even call her Mother. I even tolerated her pestering me about how I
was wasting my life without a man. I accepted that she was incapable of understanding what
it was like to survive the kind of marriage I’d had and that now I was happy alone. But last
night, her phone call from the Catskills hotel made me feel guilty. I tossed some clothes in
my bag and drove up to Shady Nook.
Her friends plucked at me. They patted my hair, pinched my cheek, and called me a maidala,
a girl. Mama had tears in her eyes. They were all watching me from their benches under the
trees when the Romanian stranger walked over to me.
“Maybe you want to know why he’s here with all these old farts,” Mama added.
“Who?”
“That man. The one you just talked to. His name is Rudy. Maybe you want to know. Weren’t
you wondering what he is doing here?”
“Well, yes. At least he’s younger than most of the people here.”
“He came to see the owner, Mr. Hirsch. They were in the camps together.”
“You mean concentration camps?”
“What else?”
“I never met anyone who’s been in the camps.”
“So now maybe you’ll pay him a little attention?”
Rudy did most of the talking that night. The faint scent of wine on his breath pleased me
as we walked down the country road. The sun played games from behind the mountain. He
took my hand after only a few minutes, and when the evening air turned cool, and without
asking, he took off his blazer and put it around me. I turned my head to smell the cologne
on its shoulder. His stride was much longer than mine. I had to take two steps to his one.
I sat on a bench on a wooden bridge. He stood off to the side behind me looking out at the
lake. He was in the middle of a sentence when a series of distant explosions cut through the
silence. I turned in time to see him jump.
I laughed. “They’re only firecrackers.”
“Yes. I know. But they bring back memories.”
“You used to set off firecrackers when you were a boy?”
Rudy lit another cigarette before answering. “I was never a boy.”
“You have an accent. Where are you really from?”
“You have one too, but I know where you are from. The Bronx.”
“And you?”
“Oh, here and there.”
“Like where?”
“I come from nowhere. I have no country, no home. Nobody wants me. I’m a Gypsy.”
“What about Romania? Remember, you’re taking me to Romania. Isn’t that where you’re
from?”
Another firecracker went off. Rudy moved so close to me I couldn’t help thinking he was
frightened.
“So where were you in March 1944?” he asked. “Were you nice and safe in the Bronx with
your mommy bringing you orange juice in the morning?”
“Huh, well yes, you might say that. Yes. What about it? I was just a little girl then, you
know. Why? Where were you?”
“I can tell you I wasn’t in a bed.” Rudy sat down next to me. “And my mommy wasn’t
bringing me orange juice either. I can tell you that much. I was busy surviving.”
“Why are you so angry?” I pretended to fix my skirt as I put more space between us.
“We all struggle to survive.”
“You’re sure about that?” Rudy looked at me. “Are you sure?”
“Sure, I’m sure.”
“Well, imagine this.” He grabbed my hand and pulled me to the railing. He pointed out
over the lake.
“Imagine that a boy has to swim across that water down there. The moon is out just like
this. Only it is March. He is swimming to meet an older boy from the other side. The older
boy is bringing him a can of salt. Salt. Only it’s not a lake.” Rudy’s hand tightened around
mine. “It’s a river with a current. The boy is a good swimmer with strong legs. The typhus
in the camp burned up his brain so he is not afraid. He will do anything for the salt. His
people need it. He gets to the middle and treads water. He waits. The older boy appears out
of the darkness only two meters away, the can of salt tied to his back. The boy exchanges
his gold for the can.
Neither boy says a word but the older boy smiles and nods. Each boy takes a few strokes
and waves goodbye as the spotlights go on. The younger boy turns and starts swimming
as fast as he can. The bullets hit the water with little splashes. In the darkness behind him
there is a cry.”
Rudy let go of my hand and gripped the railing.
“Do not think, the boy says to himself with each stroke. ‘Do not think.’ He hears the guards
shouting. He hears their motors whining. They are coming after him.”
Rudy seems to have told the story in one breath.
“What a story.” I was breathless as well.
His flat voice filled the air around us. “It’s not a story.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” I wiped away my tears.
“Yes, I know. Everybody was sorry. They all cried Gypsy tears. Eight million people died
anyway.”
“Eight million? I thought it was six million.”
“Six million Jews. Two million Gypsies.”
“What about the Gypsy tears?”
“Real tears are dry tears, inside where you can’t see them. You see there is survival and
there is survival.”
“I understand. I’m a bit of a survivor myself. It’s just that I never heard a story like that,
never knew anyone who lived through that. I really am sorry.”
“Yes, I know.”
Rudy led me back to the bench. He stretched his arm along the back of it, crossed his legs,
and took my hand. He turned it over and studied it the way my Grandma Bessie used to do
when she was pretending to read my palm. He rubbed his thumb across my lifeline.
“I know you are sorry.” His voice was suddenly gentle. “And I know you.”
“But we met only three hours ago.”
“Oh, but I have always known you. You can feel it. Don’t you feel it?”
I contemplated his profile in the moonlight, his broad forehead, his fine nose, and the
straight, tight line of his mouth. The air was still except for the chirping sounds of crickets.
I took a deep breath.
My serious voice surprised me. “Yes, I do.”
“Good.” Rudy brought my hand to his lips and kissed it. He turned it over and kissed my
palm. “Shall we?”
I didn’t know what to say. “But it’s so dark.”
“It doesn’t matter. I can see in the dark. But that’s another long story.” Rudy stood up and
pulled me with him.
“Oh, you have to tell me.”
“Someday.” Rudy was laughing again. “Someday I’ll tell you everything. But you have to
promise one thing. You will have to believe me. You will have to believe everything.
THE END
© Cora Schwartz
Edited by the late Sid Hall Jr.
After being stood up on my first real date I didn’t think much about boys until Terry, the fast girl in our clique announced her brother was home from the Navy. Terry lived in an apartment on Morris Avenue with just her father. She was the only one in our group of fifteen year-olds who bragged she was not a virgin.
Sammy was twenty-two. Within a week of being home from the Navy he bought a used but shiny black 1953 Chevy Malibu. Every afternoon he’d wait outside the Walton High School gate to drive Terry home, and anyone else who was interested in a ride. I wasn’t allowed to go in cars but I was fascinated by Sammy just like the other girls who stood around his car while innocently crunching autumn leaves and flirting.
The October afternoons were cool but Sammy continued to wear his white tee shirt with the sleeve rolled up to hold his pack of Camel cigarettes. His dark hair was slicked back into a ducktail and a cigarette seemed to be always dangling from his mouth. He had a large nose and a crooked smile which didn’t seem to matter.
Day after day I stood at the curb watching giggling girls pile into Sammy’s car while I clutched my books high enough to hide my flat chest.
One day Sammy opened the back door and turned to me. “Want a ride? There’s room.”
“Gee, thanks Sammy. I am not allowed to go in a boy’s car.”
Sammy smiled an extra crooked smile. “Well, no one will ever know. I can drop you off a block from where you live.”
“I better not.”
The Woodlawn Express screeched from the elevated train station above us but I heard Sammy call out. “I’ll be back tomorrow if you change your mind. It’s time to grow up.”
The girls waved as he pulled into the Jerome Avenue traffic. I felt stupid standing there when I could have gotten a ride instead of walking the fifteen blocks to home.
Two days later I was crouching down low on the back seat of Sammy’s smoke-filled car. He started picking up just me and Terry. I experienced a glorious feeling as the other girls begged me for the latest details about my budding relationship with Sammy.
There wasn’t much to tell, at first. Sammy parked his car in front of the apartment building where he lived and I’d walk slowly for the last three blocks so as not to get home too early. A few days later Terry and Sammy invited me up to their apartment. I was tired of hanging around at the end of my street until it was time to go home. I said okay.
We walked up three flights to an apartment where it was obvious, even to a fifteen year-old that no mother lived there. A sunken couch and two plastic kitchen chairs on a bare wooden floor was depressing enough but the abandoned flower pots on the fire escape, outside the sooty window made me feel really sad for Terry and Sammy. They said their mother died a few years ago but somehow I didn’t believe it.
Sammy teased me about being a baby when I started to edge toward the door five minutes after we had arrived.
The next day Terry’s boyfriend waited for her in front of their building. He and Terry disappeared into her bedroom almost immediately, which left me alone with Sammy on the couch. He put his arm around me and pulled me over to him. I smelled Daddy’s Old Spice cologne as Sammy lifted my chin and kissed me on the mouth. It was a long kiss, long and hard enough for me to want him to stop. I also wanted to stand up, or push him back, show some resistance but I didn’t. I just sat there as he kissed me again and slid his hand up my sweater. I knew he would surely stop once he felt my flat chest under the padded bra. Not only didn’t he stop, he slid his tongue into my mouth and started searching around with it. He stopped when I gagged and ran to the bathroom to throw up.
“Boy, you really are cherry,” he said with a laugh.
“Huh?”
“Cherry, you know, like you’ve never been with a guy.”
“Sure, I’ve been with lots of guys.” My face got hot. “I just didn’t know that word.”
“Then why’d you throw up like that? Didn’t the other guys soul kiss?”
“Nah, they were just babies.” I picked up my books and moved toward the door. “Sorry. I’ll try to do better next time.” There was no way I was going to stay and get kissed again with the taste of school-lunch spaghetti in my mouth.
I heard Terry’s bedroom door open as I got to the hallway so I heard Sammy say to her, “Hey Terry. You didn’t tell me your little friend was cherry.”
I didn’t hear her answer but Sammy’s voice was loud and boasting. “Well, we’ll see about that.”
It didn’t take long for one of my mother’s friends to see me getting out of Sammy’s car. Mrs. Glassberg was going into Murray’s butcher’s shop on Morris Avenue. I made believe I didn’t see her but I knew I was in trouble.
To make matters worse Sammy was getting really angry with me. As naïve as I was, and even though I told myself I was totally in love with him, I knew not to let him put his hand below my waist. He’d bang around the living room each time, shouting to the walls that if I loved him, I needed to prove it.
It was also around this time that Sammy started picking us up only once or twice a week after school. He had something to do that Terry wouldn’t talk about.
When I got home the afternoon after I’d seen Mrs. Glassberg she had already spoken to my parents. My mother and father sat pale-faced, side-by-side on the couch waiting for me. Daddy was trembling in a way I’d never seen before. He forbade me to ever see Sammy again or to get into any cars ever.
I raised my voice for the first time in my life. “You don’t understand. I am in love with Sammy and he loves me too.”
“You are fifteen and he is twenty-two. If you see that scum again I will make sure he ends up in prison.” Daddy jumped up and shook his fist in my face. “I’ll kill him with my own hands.”
My parents thought I gave up on Sammy and were quite pleased with Melvin, a sixteen year old boy who wore a mohair jacket and a tie and had the worst acne I’d ever seen. Terry had arranged for this lonely boy to pick me up and deliver me to Sammy. Melvin and I were supposed to be taking long walks, going to the movies and meeting other kids from the neighborhood at Jahn’s ice cream parlour. The setup was going along smoothly for about a week until the day Melvin delivered me too early. A girl named Christine, who had a bad
reputation was just leaving Sammy’s apartment. Sammy said Christine was Terry’s friend, not his, but Terry wasn’t even home.
We were alone when Sammy grabbed my shoulders and shook me. “Well, what do you expect, huh? You hang on to that cherry of yours like it’s gold or something.”
“But I thought you loved me. You said you loved me.”
“This is not about me loving you. It’s about you loving me.” He searched around in his bomber jacket and pulled out his car keys. “I’m getting out of here.”
“Wait, where are you going?”
“I’m gonna take a ride to Orchard Beach.”
I stopped the door from closing behind him and followed him down the steps.
A brisk wind blew the leaves around our feet on the pavement. I looked up at him. “Can I go with you?”
Sammy took a long look at me and smiled that crooked smile. “Yeah, sure. I guess so.”
He didn’t open the door for me like he used to and he didn’t talk during the twenty-minute ride but Sammy was driving like a crazy man. He cut people off with his screeching tires, yelled fucker at every car he passed and repeatedly jabbed his middle finger out the window. I was scared and trapped. Daddy was right. I turned to see if there was a police car anywhere in the isolated area before the beach. I only saw white smoke bellowing up from his exhaust pipe as he gunned the motor. A few seconds later as he raced over the narrow bridge he crossed the white line. A car was coming toward us but Sammy jerked his car back into our lane just in time.
There were only a few cars in the parking lot as the season was over. Sammy found a space in the shadows between trees that still held bright red and gold leaves.
He turned off the engine and looked straight ahead.
“I want to go home. My mother and father will be worried about me.”
Sammy crushed his lit cigarette on the dashboard. Red sparks showered over my knee. “So you want to go home huh? And take that little cherry with you too I guess.”
His cold, angry look made my hand stop moving toward the door handle.
Sammy slid over to the middle of the front seat, away from the steering wheel. He turned toward me, put his hands on my waist and lifted me. Before I realized what happened he’d turned me around and sat me, facing him, on his lap with my legs spread open. In the next second his hand was under me, fumbling with the zipper on his fly.
“Stop, please! I want to go home.” Pounding on his chest seemed to make him laugh louder. “Now. Take me home, now.” He caught my fist with his free hand and held it so tight I cried out in pain.
“You’re hurting me. Let me go.”
“I’ve waited long enough for that cherry of yours. Now it’s gonna be mine.”
“I’m going to scream.”
“Scream all you want. Everyone here is fucking too.”
I rose up on my knees to escape but it seemed to give Sammy the extra space he needed. He let go of himself, grabbed the crotch of my panties to the side, and pushed me down hard on his erect penis. I screamed as a searing pain shot through my bottom.
Sammy smirked. “Now you can go home. I got what I want.”
I walked slowly and painfully from Sammy’s apartment back home. I took deep breaths and prayed I would make it to the bathroom in our railroad apartment without anyone seeing my red eyes.
My prayers were not answered. Daddy was asleep, as usual, in his vinyl reclining chair after a hard day at work but mother was on the couch listening to the radio. I passed the living room quickly but not quick enough. She came after me. “What happened?”
“Nothing.”
“How can you say nothing? Look at you. You’ve been crying.”
“It’s Melvin. He was fresh in the movies and wouldn’t stop. I said I was going to the bathroom, but I didn’t. How could he be so nasty?”
“I am so proud of you.” Mother patted my head. “You did the right thing.”
I washed blood off my thighs with the toilet paper in the bathroom and flushed it all away. I rinsed the blood off my panties, squeezed them out the best I could and put them back on even though they were wet. I washed my eyes and my face with cold water. I put my hand on the knob of the bathroom door and hesitated. If my father found out what had just happened he would kill Sammy and go to prison for the rest of his life. I turned the knob knowing I would remain alone with my suffering for a long time.
THE END
© Cora Schwartz
Outside my window
A leaf journeys to a certain death
Embraces a resting drop of dew
That glistens in the morning sun
To remind me you are here.
We are amazed by the glimmers of life and beauty
But mostly the sadness that manages to reach us in our basements.
Who can ignore that slow, sad whistle of the morning walker
Or disregard our memories from long ago.
They all come with each incessant pearl of rain
That knocks without remorse
Against our only window on the world.
This morning we open the blind to a raging storm
It attacks all that is selfless and modest.
Even that insignificant weed out there
Bends in the wind to remind us of nature.
It presses itself one last time against our window
And like a lover is gone forever.
I wrap this Yahrzeit candle
In a wool sock.
This time you will have safe transport.
Yes, I must pack and get on with life
But never , not even once, will I forget you.