Elisa Albert - After Birth

Scene: Deportation. Death camp. Cold. Fear.

They get herded off the train into line. At the front of the line an officer sends most to the right and a very few to the left. My grandmother clings to her childhood friend Elsa. She’s already been separated from her younger siblings. They reach the front of the line. The officer looks them over. They are huddled together trying not to cry.

Who made that dress , he barks at Elsa, who is wearing a gorgeous high-waisted wool blend with double seams and elaborate neckline with folds like flower petals. She was a masterful dressmaker from a long lineage.

She looks that officer square in the face.

I did , she says. Her German is flawless.

You did?

Yes. That’s what I do.

You made that dress?

Yes.

You make dresses?

Yes.

To the left!

He appraises my grandmother next. A beauty, pale skin, bright eyes, nice tits.

Both of you! To the left.

A great story. There was going to be a movie about it, once. Two girls, best friends from girlhood, having lost their families, are saved by beauty and skill and friendship.

Well, Elsa worked her fingers to the bone creating fine garments for Nazi wives and children; my grandmother sucked cock. The movie people wanted to whitewash a bit. The screenwriter made it so that my grandmother was simply the romantic interest of a particular, tenderhearted Nazi officer. A love story, essentially. This infuriated my mother to such a degree that she nixed the entire thing.

They went ahead and made the movie about just Elsa anyway. There were Oscar nominations. A very stirring score.

You had to hand it to my mother.

Elsa lived to be forever and a half years old on a lake in Michigan with her voluminous family. Proud Survivor matriarch, classic breed.

The other whores showed my grandmother the way. Véronique from Paris and Helge from Berlin. They showed her how to hide a small part of herself. Those girls were her sisters, united in brutality and detachment. A fierce love developed between them. Practical girls, by necessity. No silliness, no games. Each specially selected at the trains by the commandant himself: only the most exotic and slender, with the blackest hair, the creamiest Jew skin, the darkest almondine Jew eyes, the highest Jew cheekbones.

Say this for the commandant: he had excellent taste. Some of the officers were genuinely fond of the girls, brought them gifts. Jam, a ribbon, music box, perfume. Part of the trick was to act so each man believed he was your one and only.

And when it’s all over the Red Cross comes in and hands out oatmeal. She meets my grandfather in a refugee camp. He is a kind and gentle man, a superlative man, not interested in fucking, much too destroyed by his own survival, of which no one knows — or has ever told — the details.

He was ancient by the time I knew him. He’d been married with a daughter already when the war happened. The war. Always a war, always some war. The wife and daughter obviously didn’t make it out.

He’s my password for everything: IsaacRadnor36. Lucky number. Chai times two. How old he was when the war was over.

He’d pat my head absently, slip me a quarter, load up his plate, shuffle to and from the buffet. He didn’t say much. I remember him laughing with me once about something silly, the two of us in brief lockstep. He felt like a very silly very elderly brother more than anything else. Funny little old man. It’s your ever-loving grandpa , he’d say in his thick accent. It’s your ever-loving granddaughter , I’d faithfully reply.

I do not like talking to the grown-ups , he told me once. The grown-ups are boring. You are not boring, bubbeleh. Longest I ever heard him speak. He was dead before I was ten.

I liked how I got special treatment on Holocaust Remembrance Day at school. Me and Tricia Ginsburg and Daniel What-was-his-name, too. I liked how the facts of my family made me unimpeachable in small ways, socially. You just said Holocaust, you just said Survivor, and it was like I have my period. You got the equivalent of poor thing, go lie down in the nurse’s office, take it easy.

But war has destroyed a lot of people in history , I challenged my mother one day after a sixth-grade history unit on Vietnam. It wasn’t just the Jews. What about Hiroshima? What about every back-to-back war since forever? What about Palestine? This was meant to bait her.

You don’t know the horrors , my mother said, lashing out, meaner the sicker she got, or maybe sicker the meaner she got. You cannot begin to imagine the horrors. You have no idea. Absolutely none. So just keep your fucking mouth shut, why don’t you.

Anyway, Grandfather adores Grandmother no end, wants to take care of her, is extremely tender. They marry but barely touch for months. They head for Lady Liberty with her outstretched et cetera. Stand-up guy, my grandfather. Smart. Steady. Miraculously cheerful, despite it all. One of those I believe people are really good at heart types. And with quite a knack for real estate, turns out. He starts with a single tenement as soon as he can scrape together a down payment from managing a print shop, and within ten years he owns the printing business and two warehouse buildings in SoHo.

Then their problems begin.

I met my best best friend Molly at a party when we were both twenty-three. We had friends in common, don’t remember exactly. College grads in the big shitty. Adorable stupid depressed hilarious Molly.

Your basic shtetl sweetheart. Sturdy and symmetrical. Athletic. Cool, gray eyes. Prettiest girl at Jewish day school, hands down. Which is kind of like saying tallest guy at midget conference, but hey. Legs like tree trunks, which a lot of men, it turned out, against the dictates of the women’s magazines, did not mind At All. I’m talking no taper from thigh to foot, and she was kind of touchy about it.

She dressed like crap, had no interest in what to wear or how to wear it, no style to speak of, maintained this irritating coterie of vapid Jewish youth-group girlfriends she mocked constantly. Posed no threat to the Jewish youth cohort because of the absent style and tree-trunk legs and elaborate self-mocking, thus was universally adored.

Jesus, she was adorable.

Half-insane, undeniable sparkle in her eye. She was depressed, to be sure, but somehow still bubbly. How the hell do you manage to be both depressed and bubbly? Charm, it’s called. When she laughed the breath of life breezed through. And if you could make her giggle — which, I was ecstatic to discover, I could! Easily! — it was like a spring you stumble upon, parched.

Don’t remember what we talked about that night, only that we stuck together for hours, nursing weak drinks, agreeing that the party was lame, watching the others get progressively more fucked up. We laughed, I remember laughing. We focused single-mindedly on each other’s amusement. Which is a way of falling in love. Molly and I had the same sense of humor. This is comparatively rare, I understood with her, because it had never happened to me before. Crazy dorky depressed perverse goofball sluts, us two, vested with a taste for the absurd. I adored her. She was smart. Not smart as in has all the answers, smart as in funny and a downer and childlike and honest and enthusiastic. Smart as in asked the necessary questions. Couldn’t lie about herself, was not putting on a show. You looked in those pretty gray eyes, and there she was: bam , right there. No scrim, no filter, no bullshit. She wasn’t all bound up in there, gagged and furious and resentful beneath some high-pitched shrink-wrapped mess of pleasantry. Unlike the youth-group coterie. All her struggle and sorrow and absurdity, right up front. She wasn’t employing some manufactured version of herself as full-time press agent for the real self, the agoraphobic coward loner living in a deep psychic cave, see? This was a girl who could not lie about herself. I loved her immediately.