When the excited children clapped their hands, Lorie stood up in the middle of the room and said that she had some magic tricks of her own.
“What do you know how to do?” Lorie was asked.
“I can swallow medium-sized buttons and hairpins with nothing happening to me,” she replied, and promptly swallowed all the buttons and pins she was given. That night her temperature rose to 106 degrees Fahrenheit.
Her mother, Vida, was terrified of taking Lorie to the hospital; she was certain that, far from being cured, the Jewish child would be instantly put to death.
My father reassured his sister, told her not to worry, and informed her that one of the doctors at the hospital was a friend of his. He took Lorie straight to the doctor, his friends from the Iron Guard clearing the road for him with a motorcycle escort, horns hooting loudly all the way, as if the king himself was being rushed to hospital. Dad explained to his medical friend that this was his favorite niece and that he must operate on her immediately in order to remove the buttons from inside her abdomen. In any case, Dad promised the surgeon that he would “make it worth your while.”
That same evening, Lorie was taken to the operating theater, and the buttons and pins that she had swallowed in order to be loved by her school friends were removed from her belly. Later that evening, the pretty young vocalist who had appeared earlier in Father’s cabaret could be seen lying replete in the arms of the kindly surgeon.
Lorie was released from hospital three days later, and no sooner had she walked into her home than a powerful earthquake—nine on the Richter scale—destroyed half of Bucharest. As Lorie scrambled around on the staircase searching for somewhere to hide, all the stitches from her operation came apart. Father took her back to the hospital, and again she was rushed to the operating theater, where the incision was restitched.
Another earthquake shook Bucharest the next day, but this time Lorie stood, still as a statue, in the middle of the room, not daring to move. The fear of her stitches coming apart again was greater than her fear of any earthquake.
Dad’s brother-in-law Lazer, Lutzi’s husband, was sent to a forced labor camp, where he was put to work clearing away snow from the railway tracks outside Bucharest. He contracted a severe case of pneumonia and would have died were it not for Mom’s younger brother, Marko, who was a dental technician and “served” in the same forced labor camp. Marko nursed Lazer with great devotion and fed him antibiotics from the supply he kept in the dental clinic. Lazer was saved, although he had very nearly crossed the line.
In return for saving Lazer’s life, my mom’s younger brother, Marko, wanted to find his big sister a respectable shidduch. My mother was thirty-two already and decidedly unmarried, when Lazer announced that he had a brother-in-law, albeit a disheveled one, who was a thirty-four-year-old bachelor and ran his own movie house. Needless to say, he neglected to mention Dad’s non-Jewish mistress, Mrs. Dorfman.
Marko hinted to Lazer that a substantial dowry was on the books, and my father agreed to meet with the new prospect. He was annoyed at that time with Mrs. Dorfman for refusing to leave her sickly husband and marry him, even though he knew full well that his mother and sisters (and their husbands) would firmly oppose his marrying any woman who wasn’t Jewish.
Mom was a trim and slender woman, elegantly dressed and well educated, who was employed as an accountant. And although Dad’s family didn’t really fall in love with her, she made a good impression on them.
“She’s an Ashkenazi snob,” they told him, “not a warmblooded woman like us Sephardis, but she’s obviously intelligent and well educated and you can tell by her clothes that she’s well off.” And so Dad agreed to step under the chuppah with Bianca.
They got married without too much enthusiasm for each other, and Mom began immediately to manage the movie house, putting the books in order. She imposed her kind of order and made sure none of Dad’s many impoverished friends were allowed in without paying full price for a ticket. No free rides here, she would say.
Father employed his entire family and circle of friends in the movie house. He was used to making people feel good; when he came to live in Israel, he continued to help everyone. Except that he forgot that he no longer owned a movie house.
So he went into the coffee distribution business.
He would wander around in downtown Haifa with a three-tier conical tray, selling extra-strong Romanian coffee with an aroma that wafted all over Wadi Salib. He made a point of buying his coffee only from the Arab Nisnas brothers, who, while the coffee beans were being ground, would invite us in to taste their baklava and pistachio nuts before packaging the coffee in small brown paper bags.
The preparation of Romanian coffee was a very accurate and measured process. In a small finjan you measure the water and add two heaping teaspoons of sugar. To the carefully measured water, you add a heaping teaspoonful of coffee for each serving cup, and then you turn on the Primus stove. The coffee grounds take several minutes to sink into the water, and it is then that you have to stir carefully so as to prevent the viscous coffee that has been joyously incorporated into the black liquid from boiling over.
My mother, who saw my father’s extravagant use of heaping spoonfuls of coffee as an affront to the taste buds as well as to the family’s pockets, would lie in wait for him to step out of the kitchen for just a second, when she would skip over to the finjan to rescue a few spoonfuls of coffee, which she returned to the brown paper bag, before they had time to melt into the boiling water. She didn’t always succeed, however, because as soon as Dad’s eagle eye caught sight of the reduced coffee level in the finjan, he would replace the spoonfuls she had returned to the paper bag, plus an extra heaping teaspoon, to get his own back at Mom.
Mom was forever yelling that his extravagance was gnawing away at his daughters’ dowries, but we always knew that, because of our father, neither of us would ever have a dowry, so what were we missing anyway—and apart from that, he had a knack of getting us on his side in all his quarrels with Mom. What did he want, after all? All he wanted was to enjoy life here and now; unlike Mom, who was forever thinking of her daughters’ futures.
On Saturday nights we went to the movies. Every Saturday the whole family went to see a movie. It was the only thing my parents had in common—their great love for cinema. And they always took us along with them so that we too could soak up this culture.
When the movie The Ten Commandments arrived in Israel, Mom was sure she could make a small fortune. She went out a week before the first showing and bought up twenty cinema tickets; on the day, when a long queue had formed at the box office and most people had no chance of obtaining a ticket, Mom sold hers at an exorbitant price. In short, here in Israel and with no command of the language, my mother, who had once been a movie house owner, turned into a ticket scalper. How proud we were of her; even Dad was proud of her. Of course we were sorry we hadn’t bought up fifty tickets; the demand was huge, and hundreds of people queued up in front of the movie house without a hope of getting in.
We saw the movie Oklahoma! three times. But the first time we saw it, we didn’t enjoy ourselves at all. The movie was being shown at the Tamar in the Upper Hadar neighborhood, close to the Carmel and very far from Stanton, which was located on the slopes of Haifa’s downtown region. By the time Dad, Fila, and I had climbed up hundreds of stairs and arrived, breathless and pale, at the entrance to the Tamar cinema, it became apparent that Dad had only enough money for two tickets and no more; it was a three-hour movie, and consequently the price of a ticket had been doubled. All of Dad’s pleas and explanations—that we had come a very long way to be there, that he had no more money on him, and how could they allow two little girls to go into the movie house alone?—were of no avail. The stone-hearted usher would not relent; my sister and I went in on our own, leaving our father outside to wait for us. In the intermission we rushed outside to him, and with tears and pleas we tried to persuade the usher to at least let our father in to see the second half of the movie—surely he’d been punished enough, forced to sit outside for an hour and a half. The usher refused to relent, while we, our hearts breaking at the thought of Dad having to spend a further hour and a half outside, just didn’t enjoy