A Brief History of Czernowitz
1778–1918: Czernowitz is part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and a relative bastion of safety and tolerance for Jews, who make up close to 40 percent of its population.
1918: With the end of World War I, the Austro-Hungarian Empire is broken and Czernowitz comes under Romanian rule (and is renamed Cernăuţi, though its Jewish residents cling to its former name and all it symbolizes).
1927: The Iron Guard political party of Romania is formed. Purposefully antisemitic, the group promotes the idea that Jews, along with atheists, homosexuals, and others, are undermining society.
December 1937: The antisemitic Goga-Cuza cabinet is formed in Romania, advocating for an alliance with the Third Reich.
January 22, 1938: Jews lose status as citizens.
September 1, 1939: World War II begins; Romania declares neutrality.
May 1940: Romania joins the Axis.
September 1940: Soviet troops occupy Czernowitz and hold it for a year, renaming it Chernovtsy.
1941: Romania enters World War II, on the Germans’ side and against the Soviet Union; Romanian troops, along with Nazi soldiers, occupy Czernowitz as the Soviets flee.
August 23, 1944: Romania switches allegiances to align with the Allies and the Soviets and declares war on Germany; Czernowitz is reoccupied by the Soviet Army.
Part IAstra and Her Lover
Fall 1939–Spring 1940
OnePigeons and Promises
When we were very young, Astra and I made a pact.
I was six; Astra, not quite ten. It was a sultry, miserable summer day. Father was missing—again—and Mama was in bed—still. Whenever Father disappeared, Mama disappeared, too. Not physically, but in every way that mattered.
Though it was nearly dusk, I was still wearing the nightgown I’d woken up in. I’d been wearing it for three days, as there was no one to make me change out of it. I remember how it stuck to my back like a second skin. Astra skulked around the kitchen, looking for something to eat.
“Come on,” she finally said, taking the last of the jam from the icebox, the last of the bread from the breadbox, and heading to the stairwell.
I followed her, all the way to the roof of our apartment building. It was quiet up there. Still hot, but with a whisper of breeze, a promise that things would be better, soon, if we waited. We squatted side by side and took turns dipping hunks of bread into the jam jar. Down below and all around was Czernowitz. Our city. I saw people moving about, horses pulling wagons, the occasional automobile. The colorful hats the ladies wore were just small scraps of color from up here. Far away was the green metal cap of the train station, as pretty as any of the ladies’ hats.
Father was out there, somewhere.
“Do you think he’s coming back?” I asked.
Astra shrugged. “He always does.”
Yes, I wanted to say, but he’d never been gone this long. Long enough for the kitchen to grow entirely bare. Long enough for Mama to forget she had daughters.
On the roof, pigeons landed, hopeful and hungry.
“It’s so stupid,” Astra said, “how men come and go, and women have to just sit around and wait for them.” She pointed at me with her scrap of bread, its tip bloodred with jam. “Listen, Rieke,” she said. “Do me a favor, will you? Never, ever fall in love. It’ll just make a mess of things.”
I didn’t really know what that meant—to fall in love. It didn’t sound like something you did or didn’t do on purpose. Not like climbing, or jumping; those were things you chose, things you did. Falling, in my experience, was something that just happened, whether you liked it or not. I raised my shoulders, dropped them.
Astra turned to the city. “I’ll tell you one thing, Rieke—I’ll never fall in love. And I’m never getting married. You can count on that.”
I believed her. My sister was the sort of person who did the things she said she was going to do. She’d said she was going to be the youngest girl in her dance studio to go up en pointe, and she had been, when she turned nine. She’d said she was going to read every book in the city library, and she was working on it, devouring three or four books each week. If Astra said she wasn’t going to get married, then that was that. It was good news to me; it meant that no one would come between us. That I could keep her, always.
Around us, the pigeons grew thicker, bobbing their heads and begging. I tore them a strip of bread.
“If you feed them, they’ll only want more,” Astra said, watching me. “There are too many of them, and they’re too hungry. You’ll never satisfy them all, so you might as well keep the bread and satisfy yourself.”
It was good advice. I nibbled at my piece of bread, avoided eye contact with the pigeons. Ultimately, though, I couldn’t resist. When I thought Astra wasn’t looking, I tossed them the last of my bread. Four or five of them descended upon it, beating their wings and racing to eat it up. Of course, Astra saw.
Sometimes my sister was cold with me, as far away as Father and Mama. Sometimes she was as mean as a snake, calling me names
and pinching me. I never knew who Astra would be, on any given day, at any given moment. But sometimes—like this time, when she tore her remaining bread into two pieces and offered me one—Astra was the person who took care of me. Who was there, when everything else had gone wrong.
Ignoring the pigeons, I shoved her bread gift into my mouth. “I’m never getting married, either,” I promised. “I’ll never fall in love.” And then we got up, and we stomped our feet at the pigeons and waved our arms and yelled, and all of them, the great gray mass of them, startled and hopped and took flight, and Astra threw her arm around my shoulders and we laughed, loud as kings.
I was thinking about pigeons when Father returned the very next day. He even brought gifts: a bracelet for Mama, earrings for Astra, and a golden locket for me.
Mama got out of bed. Her face, which had been slack for days, burst open like a shining star. She kissed his cheeks, his eyes, his mouth; she smoothed his mustache and brushed back the curl that fell across his brow, and she begged him not to leave again.
He said what he always said: “Stupid woman. Of course, I came back. I always come back, don’t I?” He made no mention of the bare cabinets, our dirty faces, the fact that we’d resorted to using newspaper for toilet tissue.
Behind them, Astra looked at me as if to say: See what I mean? And though I didn’t, not really, I nodded.
This is what I did know: it was them—Father and Mama—and us—Astra and me.
Of course, Father disappeared again, not a week later and without leaving us a penny. Mama disappeared into her bed again, the food ran out again, and this time, Astra went to a neighbor’s door and asked them to call Mama’s father. Our opa.
When he arrived, Opa was dressed just as he always was, in spite of the heat: wool trousers and a long jacket, a tall hat which he drew off to reveal his salt-and-pepper hair, his neat round skullcap. Here he was, to save us.
“My girl, my girl,” he said. He hung up his hat and swung me into his arms. He carried me through our apartment—bare cupboards; the empty, mildewing icebox; dishes, forgotten, days old and beginning to mold, stacked in the kitchen sink.
He peered into our parents’ bedroom and shook his head at Mama, curled in a ball on Father’s side of the bed.
Then we went into the room Astra and I shared. He put me down and went to my sister, who sat waiting on her bed with a book. He kissed her head and then said, “Girls, pack your things. A suitcase each for now, I’ll return for the rest tomorrow. Come now, be quick about it and we’ll be home in time for supper.”
Supper—my mouth flooded with saliva. I practically ran to the bureau to gather my clothes; Astra did, too.
Opa went to Mama.
The walls were thin, and we heard:
“Anna, enough with this. You and the girls will come home with me. Get up. Pack a suitcase. Enough is enough.”
Voice muffled, as if her face was turned into a pillow: “I need some money, only, to tide us over until Alfred comes home.”
Astra and I froze, fists full of clothing.
I squeezed shut my eyes and silently begged, Please.
Please, I meant, please let us go to Opa’s apartment, where it was warm, where we didn’t have to tiptoe past Mama’s closed door, where his hired girl, Milka, would fix us something delicious.
“Nonsense.” That one word set Astra and me back in motion. “You, I suppose, are a grown woman, Anna, and I can’t make you come with me, but I won’t leave the girls here. Half-starved, unwashed . . . you should be ashamed.”
There was a long pause, a silence, and Astra and I shared a glance.
Finally, Mama spoke, and this time her voice was clear and rang like a bell. “You don’t know what it’s like. You don’t know what it means to have a husband who disappears, who gambles away our grocery money, who whores around, who—”
“Enough! He was a louse when you married him, and he’s a louse, still. Now, pack a bag, and make it quick. Your daughters are hungry, and I’ll see them fed before dark.”
And then Opa’s shoes pounding across the wooden floorboards, a firm click as he closed Mama’s bedroom door.
A moment later, his head peeked into our room, and when he spoke, his tone was gentle. “Are you chickens almost ready?”
When we left the flat ten minutes later, it was alongside Mama, whose eyes were puffy and red, but who had combed her hair.
That night, after a good dinner and a good bath—Astra washed my hair for me—she and I were tucked into bed. It was incredible, I thought, how quickly things could change. How we could go from unwashed and hungry to clean and full, just with Opa’s knock on our door . . . just with Astra deciding to make it happen.
They were the two I could count on. Astra, and Opa.
I heard the even, deep breaths that meant Astra had fallen to sleep. I saw Opa’s shadow as he looked in to make sure we were safe and sound. I pulled the blanket up to my chin, and whispered my promise, again: “I won’t fall in love. I won’t ever get married. And,” I added, whispering even more quietly, just to myself, “I’m never leaving Opa’s apartment—never, ever again.”
And why am I remembering this now, today? It’s because of how Astra comes into dance class—late—and because of the look she has upon her
face. I can’t place the expression, but I know I’ve seen it, somewhere, before.
I’m in the dressing room with the other girls. Penny Meyers is mooning over herself in the mirror, as usual. Didi Liebermann is trying to interest Connie Schneider in some piece of gossip, and Connie’s nodding as if she’s listening while stitching up a hole in her tunic. Ruth is helping one of the younger girls untangle a hair ribbon. Esther Glassman, my closest friend, is nose deep in one of her film magazines, oblivious to everything. Then, Astra rushes in, pink-cheeked from the cold. She’s unstringing her scarf and unbuttoning her coat as she crosses to her spot nearest to the mirror with the good lights—even though she’s late, none of the other girls has thought about taking it. She throws her coat carelessly onto the bench, steps on the backs of her shoes, one and then the other, kicking them out of the way as she yanks down her woolens and starts shimmying into her black practice tunic.
One of her plain brown Oxfords lands upright, half under the dressing table. But the other falls on its side; I can see its insole, smooth and bright from wear. My fingers twitch with the impulse to pick it up and set it beside the other, to tuck them safely side by side.
But instead, I ask, “Where were you? I waited as long as I could.”
Four days a week—Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday—I wait out front of school for Astra, whose classes run longer than mine, and then we walk together to Madame Lucia’s studio. When it’s very cold, which it will be soon as it’s already the beginning of November, I wait in the vestibule, but I prefer to stand outside. Today, Friday, I waited close to an hour, stomping my feet and blowing on my hands to keep them warm, until my watch told me I had no more time to spare. Then I rushed here, alone. Maybe Astra had gone home sick, I told myself, even though it was unlikely. Of the two of us, I’m the one who catches each cold, who has an earache every year at Purim.
“Get my buttons, will you?” Astra turns her back to me, lifts her dark curtain of hair. I smell the sweet rose of her shampoo as I slip the pearlescent buttons from their catches, each a little noose.
It’s then I notice that she’s not wearing her school uniform. When we left this morning, Astra had been in her brown woolen school jumper and white cotton blouse, identical to mine. “What are you wearing? When did you change?”
“Never mind, just hurry! You’re going to make me late.”
“I’m going to make you late?”
She ignores me. “Ruth,” she says. “Do you have an extra hairnet?”
Ruth always has enough to share and is always glad to do so. She takes one from the side pocket of her bag and sets it on the counter.
“Thanks,” Astra says, just as I free the final button. She lets her blouse fall forward and yanks down her skirt. The tunic goes up over her shoulders, and now we’re dressed the same, though the tunics certainly fit us differently. Astra will be seventeen in June; she’s grown four inches in the last year, and she’s filling out in other
ways, too.
“Where were you?” Ruth winds her own chestnut hair into a bun at the nape of her neck, ensnares it in a net.
Astra grins, slyly.
“No,” says Ruth.
Astra doesn’t answer. She smiles to her reflection as she arranges her hair, catches my gaze in the mirror, and then leans into Ruth to whisper something. Ruth gasps, clasps her hand across her mouth, laughs.
From the studio, I hear Conrad warming up on the piano, the gentle waves of the scales our cue to get out to the floor. Even though Astra arrived late, she’s somehow the first through the door, soft slippers on her feet, pointe shoes tied together by their ribbons and tossed across her shoulder. Several of the other girls have taken to mimicking her, carrying their pointe shoes this way, too. I won’t do it. I put mine toe-to-heel and wrap the ribbons around them tightly, binding them together.
I’m one of the last girls to go through to the studio. Just as I’m about to push open the door, I see Esther, still in her street clothes, hunched over a magazine in the corner. “Esther,” I say, “you’re going to get in so much trouble!”
She looks up as if I’ve shocked her into consciousness. Her glasses have slipped down to the very tip of her nose; through the lenses, her eyes are magnified into huge, gold-flecked discs. They are exactly the same color as her brother’s, though Conrad’s aren’t trapped behind lenses.
“Oh!” She stumbles up, closes her magazine, and fumbles for the zipper on her skirt. “Madame Lucia is going to murder me.”
“I’ll tell her you’re almost ready, but hurry.”
She nods and sets her glasses on the bench, fumbles blindly for her tunic. I shake my head and go through to the studio.
Madame Lucia isn’t here yet, so there’s a chance Esther still might avoid her wrath. Conrad’s head comes up when he hears me entering. He looks at me questioningly, clearly wondering where his sister is. I shake my head, raise my shoulders slightly. Conrad doesn’t need any further explanation; he knows what a featherhead Esther is.
Astra has her left leg up on the barre and she’s folded completely in half, like a billfold snapped shut. There’s no space at all between her chest and her thigh; her arm is stretched to her foot, gorgeously pointed and turned out just so, even in this casual stretch. Ruth is Astra’s mirror twin, her right leg up on the same barre, folded just as flat. Their faces are tilted toward each other, and they share secrets as they stretch. They remind me of a postcard I once saw, a picture of two birds—flamingos, they were called. Long necks, long legs, ludicrously pink.
There’s that look on Astra’s face, again. Suddenly I’m a child on the roof. If she’s a graceful flamingo, I am a pigeon, begging for scraps. The answer to my earlier question, about where I’ve seen her
expression before, scratches at my brain. I can feel that it’s about to come to me when suddenly—bang, bang, bang! Madame Lucia’s stick against the hardwood floor.
She’s beside Conrad at the piano, ash-blond hair raked into its customary bun, thin lips pressed tight, body held with rigid grace, chin up, always up. She’s parting her lips to speak when Esther rushes in, stumbling over her feet as she hastens to the barre. Madame Lucia presses her eyes closed. Her nostrils flare as she takes a deep, slow breath, as if to control herself. She practically vibrates with annoyance.
At the head of her stick, her fingers clench white, then relax. She opens her eyes and lets out the breath. Points the stick at Conrad. “Begin,” she orders, and so we do.
Then, for an hour at the barre, there’s no time to think. Only to move. Conrad sets the tempo for our shared work; Madame Lucia’s stick becomes our metronome.
One thing I love about dance is that the only thing that separates us is ability. We all wear the same black tunics; we all do the same movements, newest student through most experienced. Here, it doesn’t matter who’s Jewish and who’s not, the way it does outside of these walls. In school, for instance—when I was younger and attended public school, the teachers did their best to make girls like Esther and me feel that we didn’t belong among the Christian girls. If I failed at something, it was proof I was a waste of a seat. If I excelled, I was being sly and a show-off.
Now we aren’t even allowed in public schools anymore.
As my cold, tight muscles warm and loosen, I can’t help but steal glances at my sister. The rest of us go through the exercises, some of us well, like Ruth, others, like Esther, haltingly. But Astra—she floats. Even just at barre work, even in the simplest plié, Astra can’t help but perform. Each movement of her arm seems to say: Look. Here I am. You’re welcome.
She drives me absolutely mad. But oh, how proud I am to be her sister.
It’s when we’re changing from slippers into pointe shoes for floor work that it hits me, where I’ve seen that look on Astra’s face. It was the same as on Mama’s face, when Father came home, and kissed her.
TwoThe Way Things Are
Before we moved in with Opa, Astra was the one person I could count on. She ran hot and cold, sure, but that didn’t mean she didn’t love me. After Opa rescued us from our dank apartment, I had two people I could trust. At home, Opa made sure there was food on the table and that we went to bed on time, whether or not Mama was having one of her headaches, whether or not she joined us to eat or to help us get ready for bed. And everywhere else, there was Astra. At school, when Didi Liebermann made me cry by teasing me about how Father had abandoned us, Astra cut her down in front of everyone by saying, “We might not know where our father is, but at least we know who he is.” That shut Didi up.
On the street, if a boy looks at me in a way Astra doesn’t like, she’ll screw up her beautiful face into an ugly mask and spit in his direction.
She might be hard on me from time to time, but that’s just the way Astra is. Sometimes, she gets jealous if my attention goes away from her. Once, when I was about ten years old, I started to get really into pressing flowers. It was neat to me, the way you could preserve them, and for a little while it was all I talked about—the interesting specimen I’d found at the entrance to the Volksgarten, a sort of bluebell I’d never seen before; the variety of posies that were planted in front of our school. Three times a day I checked on the delicate blossoms I’d sandwiched between newsprint and tucked into the heaviest book I could find (other than Opa’s Bible, which he suggested maybe we should leave just to God). I worried about fungus over dinner, chatted on the way to school about how I might display the flowers once they were dry—until one morning when I went to see how things were progressing, only to find the book stripped of the flowers and returned to the shelf. The newsprint, crumpled, was shoved carelessly into the rubbish bin; the flowers were torn.
I was upset, of course. The flowers were something I cared about. But Astra made it up to me; after the incident with the flowers, she started taking more of an interest in my dancing, giving me tips after class and helping me with extra calisthenics on the weekends, holding my feet as I did sit-ups on our bedroom floor. A few dried flowers in exchange for an extra measure of my sister’s attention was a good trade, in my opinion, even if I did quietly mourn the loss of my hobby.
Opa likes to say that everything is cyclical, and I’ve seen that to be true with Astra; she might spin away, off to other interests or other friends, but she always spins back in, to me. Is it fair that Astra can have her separate interests and secrets, but I cannot? No, of course it isn’t. But it’s the way things are with Astra and, for better or worse, she’s my favorite person in the world.
I try to keep all of this in mind as I get dressed after dance class. Astra’s waiting for me just inside the door to the street; I’ve dressed as fast as I could, but one of my stockings eluded me. I found it, finally, shoved in the pocket of my coat. She’s impatient, foot tapping, as if I didn’t spend an hour of my afternoon waiting for her to appear after school.
“There you are.” She opens the door and gestures, the grand sweep of her arm implying that I’m the lollygagger and she’s just my humble servant. I could say something smart, but then we’re on the street, walking side by side; she slips her arm into the crook of mine, our steps fall into sync, and I’m glad I didn’t.
Dance class ends early on Fridays because even though Madame Lucia isn’t Jewish, about a third of her students are. It’s late fall, and though it’s only ten minutes past three o’clock, the sun will be gone within the hour. Astra and I go together up the Herrengasse, toward home. Next door to the dance studio is the milliner’s shop, and Miss Rosen is just coming out to lock up
for the evening. She’ll wait for Madame Lucia to join her and then the two of them will go home to the apartment they rent together as housemates.
She nods to us. “Good evening, girls,” she says, and we respond, together, “Good evening.”
Today she’s wearing a thick fur cap, the first time she’s donned it this year. It means the cold weather is here to stay, and that soon there will be snow. You can set the seasons by Miss Rosen’s choice of hat, and everyone knows it. Her window display is shadowed now, but I can make out the shapes of disembodied mannequin heads, turned this way and that, each with its own hat, all crafted by Miss Rosen’s clever hands.
The peanut vendor is on the corner with his cart, and maybe by way of apologizing to me, Astra pulls out a coin to buy us some. He takes a square paper from his stack, rolls its end to make a cone, and fills a metal scoop with hot, fragrant peanuts, pouring them expertly into the cone, not one peanut lost. He hands it to Astra and she thanks him in Ruthenian. As soon as he’s pocketed the coin, he begins to close his cart for the day; he’s got a way to travel to get home to his village, and though he looks smart in his tall black boots, his white linen shirt, and colorful, embroidered vest, he really should have brought a warmer coat.
The peanuts are delicious—so hot that I have to hold them loose in my mouth for a moment before I can bite them open, salty and just a bit sweet.
This walk is almost as familiar to me as the route from our shared bedroom to Opa’s kitchen, so many times have I walked it. When I was eight and Opa first signed me up for dance, Astra hadn’t been happy about it—dance was hers, she complained. It stung, that she didn’t want me there. “Anyway, there’s no point in her joining now,” she argued. “She’s too old to be any good.”
Still, Opa signed me up, and now, five years later, this walk home is my favorite part of the day, because even as Astra and I have gotten busier with school and dance and friends, this walk has remained just the two of us, together. Our arms are still linked; I tighten my elbow to squeeze her arm, and she squeezes mine in return.
I toss another handful of peanuts into my mouth. They taste just the same as peanuts have always tasted, even though the street we bought them on looks a little different lately. A few months ago, Germany and the Soviets signed a nonaggression pact—basically agreeing to stay out of each other’s way, I guess. And then on the first of September—just two weeks before I turned thirteen—Hitler invaded our neighbor Poland. Great Britain and France declared war on Germany in retaliation, and some Jewish families here in town have decided that they want to move away.
Back and forth—it’s like a dance, a scary one. Things get two steps worse and then one step better. There was an awful time a couple of years ago when two politicians, Octavian Goga and Alexandru Cuza, took over the government and promised to solve “the Jewish problem.” That phrase sends a cold shiver up my spine every time I hear it. A lot of people were hurt, and restrictions were put into place having to do with citizenship and what sorts of jobs Jews were allowed to have; that was when Astra and I had to change from public school to private because Jewish kids weren’t allowed anymore. But then, too, what Opa says about cycles seemed to be true. ...
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