Every Home Needs A Balcony. Rina Frank

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ Romania they had owned a movie theater—Nissa—near the Cişmigiu Gardens. Back then Mom and Dad had been important people, especially since they got to see all the movies and were familiar with all the actors. At home they spoke about Greta Garbo, Judy Garland, and Frank Sinatra as if they’d been to school with them. In a way they felt some kind of patronage over the shining Hollywood stars, since without their movie theater, the people of Romania would have never been exposed to all that glamour.

      Before the war that began in the late 1930s and came to an end in the mid-1940s, when he was twenty, Dad and his brother-in-law Herry did odd jobs in Bucharest.

      They went from house to house and always found some broken gate or peeling plaster, crumbling paint or a wobbly table that needed fixing. Dad, with his honeyed voice, had no trouble persuading the Romanian housewife to prepare a surprise for her husband, who, on his return home, would find it stylishly renovated and revamped to the glory of the Romanian nation, and all in return for such and such a sum of Romanian lei and a cooked meal for two. The women were captivated by Father’s smooth and charming tongue and Herry’s skilled hands, and as the result of an aggressive marketing campaign of an intensity that was rare in those days in Romania, Father and Herry found themselves with a reputation for being efficient and reliable odd-job men.

      One day they entered one of the more elegant buildings in Bucharest, and a very beautiful woman opened the door to them.

      “We’re in the odd-job business,” Father said and looked at Mrs. Dorfman with his piercing green eyes.

      “I have nothing in the house that is out of order except my husband,” replied Mrs. Dorfman.

      “I’d be happy to mend your husband,” Father told her and smiled a smile that melted her heart. He entered the house, his brother-in-law Herry dragging behind, and she led them to a dark room, where her husband, who suffered from multiple sclerosis, sat in a chair, his head drooping on his chest.

      “Since you are here already, you can help me take him to the lavatory. It’s quite difficult to do on my own,” Mrs. Dorfman said to my father and gave him a cheeky smile.

      For two months, Father would drop by every evening after finishing all his odd jobs and help her take her sick husband to the lavatory.

      After two months, Father persuaded Mrs. Dorfman to take him on as an active partner in her movie house, he being the only one who could save the business from bankruptcy, because her husband’s illness had forced her to stay home to care for him.

      Mrs. Dorfman, who was a very pretty woman, was a member of the Romanian aristocracy. She was a devout Catholic and came from a very well-connected family in Romania’s high society, with close ties in high places. Mrs. Dorfman took on Dad as a business partner and as a lover. And indeed, Dad saved her business. He devised novel advertising methods, and their movie house was soon bursting at the seams with patrons. His advertising campaign, with the slogan “Get out of the box and come see a movie,” promised two movies and a cabaret for the price of a single movie ticket. During the long intermissions, everyone ate at the bar, which his sister Vida, together with her husband, Herry, operated under franchise. It was in my father’s movie house that all the young talent—stand-up comics, male and female dancers and singers—were discovered, performing during the intermission between one movie and another.

      My father’s friends included members of the Romanian Iron Guard, and he employed them as bouncers in his movie house. He paid them generously, as if knowing that one day he would need their services. And they in turn kept the place in immaculate order and made sure no drunks and hooligans found their way into the business.

      When World War II broke out, all the men were sent away to forced labor camps except my father. His friends in the Iron Guard arranged for him to be issued the necessary documents recognizing his work in the movie house as vital to the war effort by maintaining Romania’s morale and fighting spirit. This exemption did not prevent the Iron Guard from persecuting other Jews and handing them over to the Germans; they justified their sympathetic attitude toward my dad by saying, “Well, you’re a different kind of Jew.”

      My father’s sisters, Vida and Lutzi, worked mornings for an Italian company checking reels of film for scratches or tears; when any were found, they cut and pasted the film with gentle efficiency. This work was also regarded by Father’s friends as being important to the war effort. In the evenings his sisters worked in Dad’s movie house.

      Vida and Lutzi were both very active in the Zionist movement in Romania, and throughout the war years they harbored Zionist activists on the run from the Iron Guard, who wanted to hand them over to the Germans. Under the noses of his Iron Guard friends and with Dad’s full knowledge, the sisters hid Zionist activists and, later, youngsters who had managed to escape the death camps and made it to Romania on their way to Palestine.

      For several months Vida’s home provided shelter to four young Jewish youths who had escaped from Poland and Russia. During the day they were locked in the house; in the evening they went out to breathe some fresh air on a bicycle belonging to young Lorie.

      Lorie was eight and desperately wanted to be accepted by her peers. When she was invited to the birthday party of the most popular girl in her class, she wore her best dress and brought an especially expensive gift. It was a birthday party in the middle of the war, in the middle of Bucharest, and they’d put on a magic show with a real-life magician. 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 СКАЧАТЬ