When the conference ended, Papa was reluctant to leave Danzig. He resolved to return, to make it his home and to improve his knowledge of German, which was the city’s official language. How could he have known that his linguistic skills would become so useful, so soon, for all the wrong reasons?
Papa could quite easily have remained in Danzig, but he was drawn back to Tomaszów Mazowiecki for one very good reason: a beautiful young woman who worked in a bridal store, embroidering gowns. Her name was Reizel Pinkusewicz, and she was two years younger than my father. Reizel shared Machel’s vision of exploring the world beyond the confines of provincial Poland. She was studying Esperanto, the fledgling international language, so that she could communicate with people everywhere.
Mama was born in a village just outside Tomaszów called Paradyż. How profoundly ironic a name for a place that in 1939 became a living hell. For two hundred years, the region was something of an idyll for the Jewish community. Jewish children enjoyed a high level of private education from good schools. The town had a thriving textile industry. Factories made silk, carpets and all manner of clothing fabrics. Our family had a presence in Tomaszów for over two centuries.
Mama came from deeply religious orthodox Hasidic Jewish stock. Some members of the Pinkusewicz family were devout scholars. They came from a rabbinical dynasty stretching back two hundred years. They disapproved of my father, who was far more liberal in his outlook. For a start, he was clean-shaven. Within the Jewish community, a beard was a sign of profound religious faith, as was a hat or head covering. Papa rarely wore a hat, another thing that was unacceptable to the Pinkusewicz family.
A tailor by trade, in his soul, Papa was an actor and singer who loved to dance at every opportunity. He adored the theater and never missed a show when traveling performers came to town. The Pinkusewicz elders regarded the theater as frivolous. They believed a man should study the scriptures and holy matters. In their view, people who sang secular songs on stage were immodest. They didn’t approve of theater and even less so cinema, where performance was filmed close-up and, once projected on screen, was larger than life itself.
In 1936, Papa secured a small part alongside the former silent-movie star Molly Picon in Yiddle with His Fiddle, critically acclaimed as one of the greatest Yiddish films of all time. In truth, he was an extra and participated in a dance scene. The film was shot on location in Warsaw and in shtetls in the Polish countryside. Molly starred as Yiddle, a woman who masquerades as a man to land a gig as a fiddle player in a traveling band, playing klezmer music, the popular Yiddish genre of the time. Life becomes complicated and comical when she falls in love with one of her fellow musicians.
Full of energetic songs and dancing, the images in this road movie reveal a genuine slice of Jewish life in pre-Holocaust Poland. At a time of fascism and endemic anti-Semitism, it provided Central Europe’s Jewish communities with a resounding sense of identity and solidarity. Now, gathering dust in film archives and institutes, Yiddle with His Fiddle stands as an epitaph to a culture that the Nazis attempted to eradicate.
My father traveled a long way to Warsaw just to be in Molly’s presence. If you blink, you might miss him. Still, although he only had a small cameo, I’m proud that he is part of this historic work.
Given the opposition of the Pinkusewicz family, Papa held back from approaching Mama. Fortunately for him, the attraction was mutual, although she also hesitated about making the first move. The impasse was finally broken when she joined the Zionist organization together with a few of her girlfriends. Machel and Reizel started talking, and then they began meeting in secret. They took long walks, avoiding familiar streets and people.
Papa had a fine tenor voice, and when he was courting my mother, he used to serenade her with a popular Yiddish song called “Reizel”. It was written by Mordechai Gebirtig, an influential interwar poet and self-taught musician who tapped out compositions on a piano with one finger. Gebirtig was shot dead by the Germans in the Kraków Ghetto in 1942.
Gebirtig’s lyrics almost exactly mirrored the nature of my parents’ relationship and my grandparents’ displeasure. In the song, Reizel replies:
In the summer of 2021, as I looked at old photographs and books to remind myself of my past, I listened to that song for the first time in maybe fifty years. There’s a charming live recording on YouTube. I sat at home in Highland Park and wept. I’m no longer the girl who couldn’t cry.
I never heard my father singing to my mother. The eternal darkness that engulfed our apartment in the ghetto prohibited the simplest acts of pleasure. Singing such flippant popular songs would have felt almost immoral. Consequently, for my father, music also died in the Holocaust.
In Reizel’s orthodox family, it wasn’t customary for a girl of marriageable age to choose her own partner. Within the Pinkusewicz circle, it was unheard of. In their world, marriages were organized by a schadchanit, or matchmaker — a woman who knew the family background of both parties and almost everything about them. The theory was that if a couple were well matched, they would learn to love each other. Reizel, however, wasn’t prepared to tolerate such anachronistic tyranny and made it abundantly clear that she would rather remain single than succumb to an arranged marriage.
If her father had been alive, perhaps he might have been able to ban the wedding. But Mama overruled her widowed mother and married for love. My parents’ nuptials took place on August 23, 1936. As both families had limited means, it was a modest affair. And despite their initial objections, my father was accepted into the Pinkusewicz family with open arms after the wedding.
Six months later, the newlyweds shocked both sides of the family by moving five hundred miles north, from Tomaszów Mazowiecki to Danzig. No one ever moved away from family and friends. But Papa’s resolve to go back had not subsided. He wanted to open his own clothing store, but he also harbored dreams of joining a Yiddish theater that was starting in Danzig.
In keeping with her independent spirit, Mama rebelled against the orthodox Jewish convention of a married woman wearing a wig as a sign of modesty. Mama knew her refusal to conform to orthodox principles caused hurt and possibly an element of shame for some of her relatives. So although Machel was welcomed after the wedding, her desire to choose love over her family’s faith created a fault line for which she felt entirely responsible. Moving to Danzig made things worse. Seeds of guilt had been sown. And they grew.
The early days of my parents’ marriage in Danzig were complex and conflicted. The young couple were overjoyed to be in each other’s company. Papa was a talented tailor and his clothing store flourished. But with Danzig’s local authority in the grip of the Nazi party, anti-Semitism was rampant. In 1937, about 12,000 Jews resided in Danzig. Within a year, half had decided it was too dangerous and abandoned the city, driven out after a pogrom in October 1937 in which sixty Jewish homes and businesses were damaged by anti-Semitic thugs. They had been inflamed by a speech by Albert Forster, the Nazi head of the city state, who labeled Jews as Untermenschen—subhumans.