The Memories We Keep

by Walter Zacharius

Genres: Jewish Fiction; International Crime & Mystery

Synopsis

An unexpected letter arrives in the mail, tying the present to the past, and promising a long-awaited reunion. . .

Mia Levy is content with the simple existence she leads on a farm. But her days weren't always spent so quietly. Over thirty years ago, Mia lived in Poland, where she had all she could want--her home, family, and first love, music--until history took its course, changing the world and the life she knew forever. Mia's struggle to survive would take her from the poverty-stricken streets of Poland to New York City, where she encountered a love that would span decades, to Paris where she would place herself in the gravest of dangers to uncover the mysterious fate that befell her family. . .

Inspired by the author's own experiences as an American soldier, this remarkable novel is a story of loss, love, betrayal, and the amazing power of hope. With its inventive storytelling skill and unforgettable voice, The Memories We Keep is a debut novel that will arrest your imagination until the very last page is turned. . .

"One of this year's more captivating debut novels." --Publishers Weekly

"A breathless read." --Booklist (starred review)

Walter Zacharius, the founder, chairman, and CEO of Kensington Publishing, served in World War II and was with the French when they liberated Paris. The Memories We Keep is his first novel.

Release date: October 9, 2013

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 336

Sample

1975

In the twilight, the grove of cypress on the Lebanese border looks like a small army, poised for attack. This is not too fanciful, for the kibbutz next to my tiny farm has been subjected to periodic shelling, and if an invasion comes there is little to distinguish me from the kibbutzim, though unlike them I have no weapons with which to fight back.

The shelling has been going on for over a year now—sometimes weekly, sometimes three or four times a week; idle entertainment for the Arab troops—but most days I feel safe. The grove that separates my fertile land from the brown, untended fields on the Lebanese side is a place of shelter, my refuge from horrors.

Although the night is quiet, I feel intoxicated. Tomorrow I am to be visited by a man I once loved, and the prospect is at once so exciting and so chilling that I cannot be still: I pace in front of my house, looking at the verdant trees, smelling the sweet air, listening to the sounds of the birds singing, and remembering his touch, his taste, though I have not touched or tasted him for almost thirty years.

Oh, I can’t wait. My flesh comes alive again even without him here, even at the thought of him. The sense memory is so strong I find I must take deep breaths to slow my heart, and when I do I am able to go back inside and pick up the letter announcing his arrival.

Dear Mia,

I saw your picture last week in a Pathé newsreel covering the border tension—and there you were—working the fields (you a farmer?) as lovely and heartbreakingly beautiful as ever. I knew immediately that I must see you. I realized how much I missed you and with a bit of detective work I found your address.

You can’t stop me. By the time you get this I’ll be on the plane to Israel, arriving at your house on the twenty-seventh, and besides, you don’t know my address. I’ve moved since we last saw each other in America.

What will it be like, our meeting? You can kick me out, or choose to say nothing, or you can greet me with a hug and we can fill in our years apart. But most of all, of course, we can remember.

Your Vinnie

Remember him, true. But by doing so, I remember all the other things as well. That’s why I’m chilled. That’s why I’m afraid. His letter has ripped open the scab, and I sit here bleeding for both of us.

Maybe if I force myself to remember it all before he comes, the sight of him will bring comfort and I can begin to love again.

Or maybe not.

Confined against my will. Trapped. Imprisoned. That’s my memory of the summer of 1939. It was, of course, long before I’d seen a real prison or been locked away.

We were vacationing that summer in Krzemieniec, “the Polish Athens,” an ugly, provincial little artists’ colony where we had stayed the past ten summers and which, until this year, I had adored. Now adolescent hormones had taken hold, spiraling me alternatively into giddiness and despair, and keeping me in a near rage at my parents, who had brought me to this hellhole while my classmates were spending their holidays at chic Riviera hotels and Loire Valley châteaux. Jews had always made up a sizeable minority of the resort’s seasonal population, and this year was no exception. The Polish families, like ours, mingled with the guests from Germany and France.

The Café Tarnopol, once the poet Slowacki’s salon, seemed old-fashioned now, dusty and boring, just like our hotel, and the bourgeoisie who rented the same rooms year after year filled the café with their mediocrity. They no longer spoke of Slowacki, or Pushkin, or even Baudelaire. Oh no. Conversations this season focused on “Jew this” and “Jewish that” till I thought I’d go mad.

It was impossible to concentrate on my music. In previous years, I’d played Chopin’s Fantaisie Impromptu or Nocturne, op. 72, but this year the non-Jews insisted on Wagner, Hitler’s favorite composer, and the Jews didn’t dare object. Aryan music had become high culture because of Adolf Hitler, and also because of him my parents, obsessed with our safety, returned to Krzemieniec from our home in Lodz, rather than go to Switzerland, which my father could at long last afford. It was too cruel. I gave up playing anything at all in public, refused to sing, and moped about the hotel, looking vainly for someone to share my misery. Jozef, my brother, was working on his doctoral dissertation in Kraków, all the other guests were as old as my parents, and the local girls shunned me and called me names.

My mother scolded me for being too dramatic and too impatient. “When it rains Mia gets wet,” she told my father, “even if we’re inside.”

The miserable summer of 1939 dragged on. Once, after a wasted afternoon of failing to practice my scales on the hotel’s piano, I escaped to my room and flopped across the massive four-poster. Catching my reflection in the full-length mirror as I landed, I jumped up, startled, to examine the mysterious creature who seemed to have taken over my body—a young woman with high, taut cheekbones, dark skin, jet-black hair, and green eyes rimmed with amber.

“You have Jewish eyes,” I told the stranger. “You have big sensuous Jewish lips, a succulent Jewish neck, and big Jewish breasts.” But my height and long waist were gifts from my mother. Although my hair was black and curly, my hands were tapered with the long fingers of a pianist, and my legs were thin and shapely, my feet small. Maybe I’m only half-Jewish, I told myself, and I should be grateful. I could pass.

Jozef, I realized, did not look Jewish either. With his tall, muscular build and blond hair (where had that come from?) he could have passed for a Nordic prince. Back home in Lodz when I walked beside him with my hair tied back with a silk scarf, he made me look like his gypsy bride. How I missed him!

I stared at my profile, trying to imagine one of those repulsive Jewish armbands with the Star of David set against my skin. Just before term’s end, a classmate had brought me one from Berlin. My father told me that if I had gone to the Salzberg conservatory instead of the lycée, in Paris, I’d be wearing one.

A wave of rage engulfed me, and I yanked off the carved ivory barrettes I wore in my hair and released the two long braids, which Mama had painstakingly, and painfully, wound around my head. The long curls bounced back wildly and spilled onto my shoulders. I was nearly seventeen, yet Mama insisted on treating me like a child. She kept me in plain cotton slips like some wretched Heidi and forbade me to use lipstick.

There was a sharp rap on the door. “Schatzie?”

My father. I raced to the latch and locked it.

“Are you in there?”

“Yes, Papa.” I sighed, leaning against the door.

“Have tea with us in the gazebo. I have a surprise.”

Father’s surprises were usually disappointing. “I’m not ready.”

“You’ve got five minutes,” he said. Then, perhaps regretting his harshness: “Is anything wrong?”

Wrong! I felt tears gathering in the corners of my eyes. How could I make him understand that everything was wrong? This place, my clothes, a summer among Jews without Jozef. Even Bach seemed boring. Mozart. Schönberg. The Café Tarnopol. Mama and Papa themselves. Boring, boring, boring!

“I’ll be right down,” I shouted and began pinning my hair up, rebelliously allowing a few stray wisps to float about my ears and neck.



Papa’s surprise was sitting beside Mama in the gazebo—a trim, immaculate man of about fifty, dressed in a three-piece suit utterly out of place in a resort. He was tugging on his long mustache.

“Here you are!” my mother exclaimed, looking angrily at my messy hair. “Pappie and I have been waiting for you to—”

“Never mind,” my father whispered in Yiddish. Then, in French, “Mia, this is Professor Jules Stern. He is a lecturer in philosophy at the Sorbonne, and a great lover of opera. And this, Professor Stern, this is my little songbird.”

Songbird! All my triumph at my mother’s distress dissolved, leaving me stranded between humiliation and fury.

“Enchanté,” Professor Stern said, rising to kiss my hand. His eyes roamed over me. “And may I call you—”

“Marisa, monsieur…Mia,” I managed.

He flashed a toothy grin beneath his mustache, and I felt the intensity of his eyes. Removing my hand from his sweaty grip, I scurried toward a chair next to my mother’s.

Papa intercepted me, grabbing my waist playfully and swinging me onto his lap as if I were a child.

“Dr. Levy has told me of your accomplishments, Mia.” The professor smiled. “A singer and a pianist both! Perhaps you’ll perform for me.”

“Of course she will,” Papa exclaimed, sending me on my way with a stinging love-spank. “My daughter is a prodigy. Why, in Paris she performed Schönberg’s Erwartung.”

I refused to look at either of them. Was this some sort of slave market at which I was to be auctioned off?

“As you can imagine,” Papa rattled on, “it was a hard decision—denying her the Mozartium. But the way things have gone for poor Austria….” His voice trailed off.

My mother poured tea, passed around a platter heaped with Sacher torte. “Our son, Jozef, is also accomplished,” she offered. “A celebrated German scholar at the university in Kraków.”

Stern ignored her. He was staring at me. “Do you know Stravinsky’s work?” he asked me. “Nobody is more talked about in Paris. I sincerely hope, Benjamin, that you and your family will be able to see his Oedipus Rex at L’Opéra this fall.”

Papa sighed. “I’m afraid I won’t be able to get away from Warsaw. I will be extremely busy at my medical clinic. But Mia will be back in Paris by then. She has another year at the lycée.”

The professor practically salivated. “I shall be delighted to accompany you myself, ma’amselle. That is, of course, with your parents’ consent.” He took a bite of his Sacher torte.

I snapped my head up as though I had been slapped by an invisible hand. I thought Stravinsky far inferior to Schönberg so wouldn’t even have gone on my own. But with this man….

My father was looking at me expectantly. “Of course, monsieur. I would be honored,” I heard myself mumble.

A piece of pastry from my plate tumbled down onto the pale violet napkin on my thighs. Blushing crimson with embarrassment, I seized the corners of the napkin, flung it on the table, pushed my chair back, bolted down the gazebo steps, and fled down the gravel path to the safety of the gatehouse at the bottom of the hill. The tears that had been building all summer began to spill.



Embarrassment for my parents filled me with shame. Wasn’t there condescension in the way the other guests hailed them? Did the Parisians and Berliners think of them as “those boors from Warsaw”? Were they the brunt of those hideous Jewish jokes?

My parents wanted me to attend the best schools because education was very important to them. I began studying the piano in Lodz when I was six and for many years had dreams of being a concert pianist. I also loved to sing. The lycée in Paris seemed to be the best school for me to attend. My father was a successful doctor, and he wanted my brother and me to benefit from his success.

Two years before, in September, Papa insisted on driving me to the lycée, taking a route through Austria and Switzerland, and touring the French countryside on the way to Paris.

In Vienna, Mama’s Yiddish—she knew no German—embarrassed her. The hotel maids and bellboys ignored her or pretended not to understand what she was saying. In Switzerland, she regained some of her composure, but in the peaceful heart of the Loire Valley, the innkeepers made fun of her French and behind our backs pointed us out as les juifs to the other guests.

When we reached Paris, Papa registered us at the Hotel Steinfeld, a place Jews preferred, where at last my mother was comfortable. I insisted that we go immediately to the Lycée LaCourbe-Jasson, and after interminable introductions and instructions, the headmistress at last directed me toward my room in a building across the courtyard.

I ran away from them, my mother, who seemed somehow tainted, and my father, who was unable to protect her. I ran without looking back, carrying my heavy suitcase, and stumbled up the steps of my home-to-be. I paused at the door of my room on the second floor long enough to catch my breath and pull my sweaty cotton undershirt away from my skin. There was light coming from the transom and I could hear girls laughing within. My roommate hosting a first-day party, I imagined. I knocked.

The door opened and a round face peered out. “Who’s there?”

“It’s me. Marisa Levy.”

“Levy did you say?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, Marisa,” the face said, and the doors flung open, leaving me revealed to six sets of inquisitive eyes.

At my appearance, the room exploded with laughter. Somebody said the words “new Jewess,” and the hilarity increased. I thought of my mother at the Viennese hotel and understood that I was experiencing now what she had—and that I always would.

For the next weeks, my classmates made fun of my textbook French, my braids, my homemade school dresses. And so I retreated into music, the piano keys my dearest companions, their sounds the balm to my soul. I played for my teachers and loved to talk to them, but with the other girls I was silent. Meanwhile, I set about building a wardrobe, mastering French, going alone to cabarets or concert halls.

A clarinetist named Benny Goodman came to Paris to perform with his band, and through the lycée I was able to buy a ticket to hear them. What music they made! It was new to me, melodic, rhythmic, filled with a sensuality I experienced throughout my body, the notes flying from the instruments like wild birds, diving and soaring around my head. Some in the audience began an impromptu dance, and I ached to dance with them, but when a young man came up beside me and asked me to join in, I shook my head and remained seated. When I’m older, I told myself. Then I will dance.

Undaunted, he sat beside me and introduced himself as Jean-Phillipe Cadoux, who had arrived in Paris from Lille two years before, now lived in the 9th arrondissement, and was working as a postal worker to support himself as an architecture student at the École des Beaux Arts. We could talk easily together, once I found that his aggressive approach masked an innate shyness, and we became friends. Just friends so far, but it was to him that I poured out my loneliness and alienation and I knew that when the time came—when it was right—we would become closer. At the end of term we parted, promising to see each other again, and as soon as I returned to Paris he contacted me and we resumed our relationship.

Back in Lodz that summer, more sophisticated and snobbish than all of my classmates combined, I was restless and unhappy. My sweet, pompous father irritated me, and I despised my well-meaning mother for being such a fear-ridden shrew. I scorned them for a lack of elegance and savoir-faire, and pitied them, too.

But at that moment, at the hotel gate in Krzemieniec in the summer of 1939, I would have given anything to be Papa’s little girl again. When I looked up and saw him coming toward me along the gravel path, I gave a little scream of pleasure and ran to him, crumpling onto his broad shoulder.

“Eh, what’s this, Mia?” he asked, stroking my hair.

“It’s that man,” I said. “Professor Stern. He—”

A loudspeaker began to blare from the top of a black panel wagon approaching the hotel. Papa held up his hand, signaling me to listen. “President Mocicki,” he said.

Fellow citizens! Last night, our age-old enemy, Germany, began hostilities against the Polish State. I place on record before God and history that our noble Poland will never be vanquished, that our gallant army will fight to the last man before….

My father grabbed my hand, and we ran up the hill to the hotel. Guests were fanning out in a dozen different directions. There was pushing and shoving. Young children screamed for their mothers. My own crisis was pushed aside. Life was reduced to motion.

By the time we’d fought our way back to the hotel suite, Mama was already packing. “I thought it would be best,” she told Papa.

“You were right not to wait.” They spoke in a fearful staccato. Papa paused in the middle of the sitting room, chewing on a fingernail. He was working on our dilemma as if it were a chemical equation.

I ran around Mama and darted toward my room. She raised her head, for once oblivious to my disheveled appearance. “Don’t fuss over the packing,” she called. “We must be ready to leave at once.”

With quick, mechanical motions I transferred piles of clothing from drawers to an open suitcase. Everything fell into a kind of rhythm. Throughout the resort village, the Volhynian mountains, perhaps all of Eastern Europe, life rushed toward a frenetic crescendo.

I carried my suitcase back to my parents’ suite. My father had picked up the phone, his hand covering the receiver. “I’m trying to get through to Jozef, darling. Yes, right this very moment. I…wait. Operator? I’m calling Kraków…. No. Kraków…Yes, madame, I fully understand…yes, of course…. But if you would only nonetheless try….” After a while he hung up with a sigh.

An hour later we were standing outside the hotel, huddled next to a mountain of traveling bags, in the midst of a long line of people shoving one another in their attempts to commandeer cars, trucks, wagons—any transportation that would take them home.

Finally we were permitted our turn. A hay cart driven by a drunken peasant rolled up. “Please, sir,” Papa called out in his elegant, educated Polish, “we would like to hire your services to take my wife and daughter, plus myself and the luggage as far as Dubow.”

“You hear that?” the driver whispered conspiratorially into the horse’s ear. “As far as Dubow.” He patted the horse’s neck with affection then spat on the ground. “How much money you got?”

I could feel Papa fighting an impulse to thrash the farmer for his insolence. “Enough to pay for a cart ride to Dubow.”

The peasant raised a questioning eyebrow. “What then?”

“Then?” Papa shook his head as if the question had not occurred to him. “We decide once we arrive. Maybe the train to Lemberg. Or Ostrog. Eventually, Lodz.”

“In that case, the price is five hundred zloty.”

“Unheard of! In Lodz, we could hire a Daimler to drive us to Krzemieniec and back for that.”

“Then do it, Mister. I was offering you a bargain only because you’ve got such a pretty daughter. I thought she might want to sit in front with me, to keep me warm. Otherwise, my price would be a thou—”

“How dare you!” Papa bellowed in Yiddish, leaping at the driver’s throat. With his free hand, the driver drew back his whip and lashed out.

My father fell to the ground, blood streaming from his cheek. His face was a dangerous vermilion.

“His heart,” Mama hissed, kneeling to open his collar.

“Filthy Jew bastard,” the peasant snarled, lashing out again at the empty air. “You’re not fit to lick my horse’s asshole.” He turned to the people in line. “Next.”

A crowd gathered around Papa. Hands stretched out to help him up. The peasant, finding no takers, drove off cursing. “We are not all like that,” a woman in the line said. “You and your family will take the next vehicle, whatever it is.”

My father, still stunned, looked at her gratefully. My mother began to cry. And I—I thought my heart would never heal.



“Grand Hotel Dubow,” our driver called out. Papa climbed out of the back of the oxcart and, with stiff, dignified gestures, brushed the dirt off his suit and handed a wad of zloty notes to the driver. “For a new breeding bull,” he explained to the astonished boy. “To replace the one you told me was lost.”

Papa helped me and Mama down, removing bits of mud and straw from our hair and shoulders. All about us, an endless stream of travelers passed to and from the train station, evidently seeing nothing unusual in a middle-class family debarking from the rear of an oxcart.

At the reception desk my father introduced himself and asked for rooms.

“Any news?” asked the graying bell captain, clapping his hands to produce a crew of help in red uniforms.

Papa shook his head. “I’m afraid I know nothing. I had hoped that perhaps on the radio….”

The bell captain shrugged. “It must be the same everywhere. Yesterday, there was fighting in Pozna. They said the Germans also attacked farther down the western border.”

Mama blanched. “Kraków?”

“Madame, the accursed Germans will never reach Kraków. I hear they’ve been beaten back at Katowice. They’re simply no match for the Polish Army. I shouldn’t worry. This so-called war may be over before lunch. Now, how may I be of service? Would the doctor care for a suite of rooms or regular connecting rooms? Normally, we’re too heavily booked for guests without reservations, but….”

I stared down Main Street. From all directions, people were spilling out onto the road. Dubow had become a town of windup toys gone berserk.

Papa reserved a suite, then reviewed his thinking for us as we sat on the horsehair settee. He thought it would be wise to stay here while the rest of Poland thrashed about. “In a few days the Polish Army might prevail,” he mused, “and the Nazi threat could be silenced forever. If not, we would of course be vulnerable in Dubow, so perhaps staying here is not a good idea. For one thing, unlike the artists’ colony of Krzemieniec, Dubow is not a town that welcomes Jews.” A frown crossed his face. “The bell captain would probably betray us instantly if it meant his own survival.”

He paced, examining our options.

“Ostrog is inhospitable, but just beyond it is the Soviet frontier. If the Nazis prevail, from there we could flee to Kiev. Or head south toward Bucharest. But getting to Ostrog would not be easy—”

Mama interrupted him. “I will not leave Poland until Jozef has joined us.”

Papa took her hand and looked into her eyes. “If bad comes to worse, then, we could make our way to Chelm or Lublin, where we have friends. That, of course, would be more difficult than going to Lemburg and taking an express train to Lodz. But surely the Germans will bomb the main railroad tracks, so that way almost surely means exhausting delays if not outright failure.” He resumed his pacing. “We could get to the capital from Lublin as well, using a roundabout route, that is, if the Nazis have not bombed the tracks there as well—but that’s far less likely—and in Warsaw, we could stop off to see your sister Esther, if she has not fled to Ostrog with David and the children….”

My father’s thinking grew more and more convoluted until at last my mother and I could only stare at him helplessly. “Lunch,” he said at last, as though he knew what to do, “but first a bath. You women will be able to think more clearly then. Meanwhile, I’ll try to call Jozef.”

He could not get through, and it was mother, frantic, who persuaded him to go to Lodz via Lublin and Warsaw. For if Jozef had left Kraków, he would surely make his way to our home. There we would welcome him with hugs and kisses, and all would be well.

“Halt.”

A surge of humanity carried me across the Lodz station, where I struggled to catch a glimpse of my parents. It had taken us days to travel from Dubow to Lublin, with a stop in Warsaw, on our way home. Although the fighting continued we knew that Poland would finally fall and we had to make provision for the future. In the train, we’d agreed that we had a better chance of avoiding the station guard’s suspicion if we detrained separately, since we were smuggling goods my aunt Esther had given us in case the Lodz grocery shops were empty. Suddenly, though, I was not so sure.

“YOU!” the same voice thundered. I froze.

My breasts and hips were enhanced by packets of wheat, flour, oats, and ground millet. I literally waddled attempting to navigate through the crowd.

A young soldier stepped in front of me. “Name?” he thundered.

Beneath his clumsy German I detected a Polish accent; he was a Volksdeutscher, a German Pole proud to be more Aryan than his Nazi counterparts. His military cap was balanced jauntily on his straw-blond curls, and his glance was insolent. I turned away.

He snatched my coat collar and raised it, forcing me to look at him. “I said give me your name!”

“Let go of me,” I ordered him in Polish. How dare he take such liberties? I was a free citizen and he was a pimply faced parody of a soldier. I dropped my suitcase and stared at him defiantly.

“You little cunt,” he roared, tearing my coat open. “I’ll teach you to defy me.” He pushed me to the ground, straddled me, and pried my legs apart. I felt no fear; only anger. A crowd formed around us. Surely they would protect me. Yet they made no move, and their gasps and cries seemed to come from far away. The guard explored my thighs, my breasts. I screamed and flailed at him.

“What seems to be the problem, soldier?” an authoritarian voice snapped above us.

The Volksdeutscher leap. . .