When it was time for my father to open his own practice, he decided, despite this early training in neurology, that general practice would be more real, more ‘alive.’ Perhaps he got more than he bargained for, for when he opened his practice in the East End in September 1918, the great influenza epidemic was just getting started. He had seen wounded soldiers when he was a houseman at the London, but this was nothing to the horror of seeing people in paroxysms of coughing and gasping, suffocating from the fluid in their lungs, turning blue and dropping dead in the streets. A strong, healthy young man or woman, it was said, could die from the flu within three hours of getting it. In those three desperate months at the end of 1918, the flu killed more people than the Great War itself had, and my father, like every doctor at the time, found himself overwhelmed, sometimes working forty-eight hours at a stretch.
At this point he engaged his sister Alida – a young widow with two children who had returned to London from South Africa three years before – to work as his assistant in the dispensary. Around the same time, he took on another young doctor, Yitzchak Eban, to help him on his rounds. Yitzchak had been born in Joniski, the same little village in Lithuania where the Sacks family lived. Alida and Yitzchak had been playmates as infants, but then in 1895 his family had gone to Scotland, a few years before the Sackses had come to London. Reunited twenty years later, working together in the febrile and intense atmosphere of the epidemic, Alida and Yitzchak fell in love, and married in 1920.
As children, we had relatively little contact with Auntie Alida (though I thought of her as the quickest and wittiest of my aunts – she had sudden intuitions, sudden swoops of thought and feeling, which I came to think of as characteristic of the ‘Sacks mind’, in contrast to the more methodical, more analytical, mental processes of the Landaus). But Auntie Lina, my father’s eldest sister, was a constant presence. She was fifteen years older than Pop, tiny in size – four foot nine in her high heels – but with an iron will, a ruthless determination. She had dyed golden hair, as coarse as a doll’s, and gave off a mixed scent of garlic, sweat, and patchouli. It was Lina who had furnished our house, and Lina who would often provide us at 37 with certain special items which she herself cooked – fish cakes (Marcus and David called her Fishcake, or sometimes Fishface, after these), rich crumbly cheesecakes, and, at Passover, matzoh balls of an incredible tellurian density, which would sink like little planetismals below the surface of the soup. Careless of the social graces, she would bend down at the table, when at home, and blow her nose on the tablecloth. Despite this, she was enchanting in company, when she would glitter and coquette, but also listen intently, judging the character and motive of everyone around her. She would draw confidences out of the unwary, and with her diabolical memory, retain all that she had heard.[12]
But her ruthlessness, her unscrupulousness, had a noble purpose, for she used them to raise money for the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She had dossiers, it seemed, on everyone in England, or so I sometimes imagined, and once she was certain of her information and sources, she would lift the phone. ‘Lord G.? This is Lina Halper.’ There would be a pause, a gasp, Lord G. would know what was coming. ‘Yes’, she would continue pleasantly, ‘yes, you know me. There is that little business – no, we won’t go into details – that little affair in Bognor, in March ‘23… No, of course I won’t mention it, it’ll be our little secret – what can I put you down for? Fifty thousand, perhaps? I can’t tell you what it would mean to the Hebrew University.’ By this sort of blackmail Lina raised millions of pounds for the university, the most efficient fund-raiser, probably, they had ever known.
Lina, considerably the oldest, had been ‘a little mother’ to her much younger siblings when they came to England from Lithuania in 1899, and after the early death of her husband, she took over my father, in a sense, and vied with my mother for his company and affections. I was always aware of the tension, the unspoken rivalry, between them, and had a sense of my father – soft, passive, indecisive – being pulled this way and that between them.
While Lina was regarded by many in the family as a sort of monster, she had a soft spot for me, as I had for her. She was especially important to me, to all of us perhaps, at the start of the war, for we were in Bournemouth on our summer holiday when war was declared, and our parents, as doctors, had to leave immediately for London, leaving the four of us with the nanny. They came back a couple of weeks later, and my relief, our relief, was prodigious. I remember rushing down the garden path when I heard the hoot of the car, and flinging myself bodily into my mother’s arms, so vehemently I almost knocked her over. ‘I’ve missed you’, I cried, ‘I’ve missed you so much.’ She hugged me, a long hug, holding me tight in her arms, and the sense of loss, of fear, suddenly dissolved.
Our parents promised to come again very soon. They would try to manage the next weekend, they said, but there was a great deal for them to do in London – my mother was occupied with emergency trauma surgery, my father was organizing local G.P.s for casualties in air raids. But this time they did not come at the weekend. Another week passed, and another, and another, and something, I think, broke inside me at this point, for when they did come again, six weeks after their first visit, I did not run up to my mother or embrace her as I had the first time, but treated her coldly, impersonally, like a stranger. She was, I think, shocked and bewildered by this, but did not know how to bridge the gulf that had come between us.
At this point, when the effects of parental absence had become unmistakable, Lina came up, took over the house, did the cooking, organized our lives, and became a little mother to us all, filling in the gap left by our own mother’s absence.
This little interlude did not last long – Marcus and David went off to medical school, and Michael and I were packed off to Braefield. But I never forgot Lina’s tenderness to me at this time, and after the war I took to visiting her in London, in her high-ceilinged, brocaded room in Elgin Avenue. She would give me cheesecake, sometimes a fish cake, and a little glass of sweet wine, and I would listen to her reminiscences of the old country. My father was only three or four when he left, and had no memories of it; Lina, eighteen or nineteen at the time, had vivid and fascinating memories of Joniski, the shtetl near Vilna where they had all been born, and of her parents, my grandparents, as they were in comparative youth. It may be that she had a special feeling for me as the youngest, or because I had the same name as her father, Elivelva, Oliver Wolf. I had the sense, too, that she was lonely and enjoyed the visits of her young nephew.
Then there was my father’s brother, Bennie. Bennie had been excommunicated, left the family fold, at nineteen, when he had gone to Portugal and married a gentile, a shiksa. This was a crime so scandalous, so heinous in the eyes of the family that his name was never mentioned thereafter. But I knew there was something hidden, a family secret of sorts; I surprised certain silences, certain awkwardnesses, sometimes, when my parents whispered together, and I once saw a photo of Bennie on one of Lina’s embossed cabinets (she said it was someone else, but I picked up the hesitation in her voice).
12
Many years later, when I read Keynes’s wonderful description of Lloyd George (in
To see [him], watching the company with six or seven senses not available to ordinary men, judging character, motive, and sub-conscious impulse, perceiving what each was thinking, and even what each was going to say next, compounding with telepathic instinct the argument or appeal best suited to the vanity, weakness, or self-interest of his immediate auditor was to realize that the poor President [Wilson] would be playing blind man’s buff in that party.