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PARTISAN REVIEW
assemblies, with "the six million." And that I, a ten-year-old girl, had to or
even could "understand Mother." That is, to leave the symbiosis of mother
and daughter constituting one expanded body, to cut myself off from my
child's view, and see Mother as a separate person, with her own fate and
reasons for moods that didn't depend only on me, or on my certain guilt.
I remember how, at that moment, facing the spotted paving stones, I
understood both those things all at once. Like a blinding blow.
Then came high school in Tel Aviv. Since both the principal and the
assistant principal were graduates of the Hebrew High School in Krakow,
their former classmates in that high school, including my mother, sent their
children
to
study there. At that school, influenced by the principal and his
assistant, both of them historians, there was an intense awareness of the
Jewish past and life in the Diaspora-a rare dimension in the Zionist–
Israeli landscape of Diaspora denial-and Gideon Hausner, the prosecutor
in the Eichmann Trial, initiated a "club to immortalize the Jewish com–
munity of Krakow." A group of students met with members of the
Krakow community, who taught them the history of the city and the
Jewish community before the destruction. The club also heard testimony
from the Holocaust, with a special (exclusive?) emphasis on the activities
of the Jewish underground. The women's revolt in the Gestapo prison, led
by Justina, was also dramatized and performed for the conununity mem–
bers on the annual memorial day. ("Holocaust celebrations," as the
memorials were called by members of the drama club.)
I was a member of the "club to immortalize," and I also played a Polish
cook in the performance of the history of the uprising. But in fact, a par–
tition still remained between me and the others, a zone of silence so dense
that, to this day, I don't know which of the children of the Krakow com–
munity members were children of Holocaust survivors and not of parents
who emigrated to Palestine before the war. If there were any, no bond was
formed between us. We didn't talk about it. We remained isolated, caged
in the sealed biographies of our parents.
There were other bridges here too, almost subterranean ones, which,
as far as
r
recall, were not formulated explicitly. The bond wi th the
Ii
tera–
ture teacher, the poet, Itamar Yaoz-Kest, who survived as a child with his
mother in Bergen-Belsen. In high school, there were only his influence on
my literary development and a sense of closeness, a sort of secret look
between "others." (Only later did I read the poems of
The Double Root
about his childhood "there," and his story describing, as he put it, a little
girl who looked like me, the daughter of survivors.) And there was the love
affair with the boy in my class, whose delicate smile on his drooping lower
lip looked like the "different" smile of the literature teacher. His father, the
lawyer, submitted reparations claims to Germany in those days-close
