My Holocaust memoir that never was
My sister Sarah reminds me that it was at this time, 1944, that we arrived in Philadelphia, my family among other Survivors.
What timing! The first days of Passover. We were delivered via the Serpa Pinto, famously, The Ship of Hope.
Now we were in the hands of HIAS and other such rescue agencies, the Jews the devil forgot. We were the lucky ones, Mother used to say, weeping.
The story goes that the Rebbe came over on the same ship, but different, earlier voyage. But for us, do I have it right, I mean about the year? Was it 1944, or 1945?
I will have to call Sarah again. She knows the full story. I know bits and pieces of this drama, which I captured in many of my novels, mainly, “Indecent Proposal."
When I get to my memoirs, I will tell what it was like being in Hollywood for the making of a movie from that book, which had become a bestseller.
I will tell everything that went right, and wrong. Nevertheless, not bad for the kid from Toulouse.
I mention this mostly good part up front to kick off some high notes from my remembrance of things past, thank you Marcel Proust.
Consider this a work in progress from what probably will be my memoir, for the many people out there who don’t give a damn.
“Those wonderful people out there in the dark," per Norma Desmond, “Sunset Boulevard."
So why go ahead? I probably will. I probably won’t. The events, and particularly the dates of my life are hopelessly scattered.
Who, what, where, when…I only know what springs to mind at the moment.’
Bewildered, there I was, in Greenwich Village, a Child of the 1960s, and this, too I wrote about, in “The Days of the Bitter End."
This did not become a bestseller or a movie. To this day, I wonder why not. Reviewers call it the best book on the JFK Years and the years of rebellion that followed.
I came, i saw, I wrote.
What a life. Was it worth living, a life of so much futility and failure; nothing but failure, if you ask me.
Oh stop that kind of talk says my strength, my hope, my redeemer, my wife. You are a success. Sure, Sure, Sure, sweetheart. If you say so.
Think of what you have accomplished out of nothing, she argues, and nothing is the right word, gotta say.
There is a famous, actually historic picture of us seated at a large table for the Seder, 1944, or 1945. I must call Sarah about this.
But even she, about 11 or 12, beautiful Sarah, looks glum among the other Survivors, who express sorrow, here in Philadelphia.
They, too, express bewilderment.
They are saying, we have been through hell, dear world, what else you got? As of this writing, not many of them are left. I’d better write fast.
Now zero in on me, ME, ME, ME. Have you ever seen a kid like this? Maybe four, or five, and already he’s given up.
Surely not, for years later he did join the IDF. But that’s another story, when I get to do my memoirs. Sure, Sure, Sure.
So back to that kid at the Seder table. No expression AT ALL. Except resignation. That, plus BEWILDERMENT.
That is the word that has carried me through life, and the life of a novelist, damn good one, too. If you ask Leslie, my wife, or me.
Altogether I have won four major writing awards, but cannot name one. I will have to ask Leslie. I did well on that score.
In Cincinnati, still a kid, I won some award for a game-winning homerun. Of course, I must tell about Cincinnati, eventually.
Eventually, I will tell about my years in Krav Maga, and my meeting with Imi Lichtenfeld, there at the Ugati, in beautiful Carmel.
That is Israel, you know, beautiful Israel that Judah Halevi longed for so dearly. Going back to the Middle Ages.
Imi founded Krav Maga, back in Old Europe as a self-defense system to toughen up the Jews against the goons who came regularly to beat them up.
Imi’s system has a hundred different moves. Imi taught me a few. That is, a few more. I was already up to Brown Belt.
I never made it Black Belt. Life intervened. Husband, father, grandfather to those two gorgeous grand-daughters.
All the way from Toulouse, only steps away from being part of the Round-Up. For them alone I must get busy with this memoir.
I already told them about the miracles. This must be told. Sarah believes that the angel Gabriel was sent to save us and deliver us.
Luck of the draw, as I have it in my novel, “Compulsive," in which I have the angels voting which way the dice will fall, life or death by one vote. So close we all exist.
I wonder how the kid absorbed the frantic events from the moment his father announced, ‘’Meer gayt." We are going. That means, leaving, pronto, Vichy is coming for us, so aided by the French Resistance, off we go into the wilderness, crossing rivers and mountains, the Pyrenees, to get us into Spain, Portugal, and if all goes well, the Free World, starting with Canada.
Only one suitcase allowed, Sarah tells me. Home, left behind.
The high priest, Father LaRoch, got us all the right papers. More on this when I write my memoirs.
Throughout the trek, when silence was uppermost, the kid made not a peep, which would give us away. For most of the journey, the kid was carried on his father’s back in a rucksack.
Bewilderment had already set in. Somehow, the kid knew the stakes. How did the kid know all this?
He didn’t. Only later in Montreal, trickle by trickle came the facts among Father, Mother, and Sarah at the Sabbath Table, Mother weeping for all that was lost.
Her family nearly all wiped out, Father turning, as always to Torah, and so explaining how our ordeal, and deliverance mirrors the Biblical Exodus.
There were even miracles during our great escape.
I asked Father how one man, Rashi, could know so much. Well, Father explained, once in a while there comes such a man, and while he slept the angels wrote for him.
They did his homework for him.
They did not write for me, asleep or awake, though I did all right in the various yeshivot that I attended.
Throughout all Torah, I loved Jacob the most. He was so human. He was so real. Just like me, he felt so inadequate and insecure, always asking God if he was doing the right thing.
Was he man enough to follow in the footsteps of Abraham and Isaac? Even when God assured him that he was fit and able, he measured up just fine, he was still plagued by doubts.
Then finally, his greatness emerged.
My hero of heroes, of course, King David, from childhood to this day, and that is me, the kid, being led by Father and Mother to a Montreal Hebrew kindergarten, leaving him behind, behind and, bewildered, among a classroom-full of noisy, rowdy, classmates, and he knows nobody.
This teacher will be his first and his best. A yom tov play is being performed. She places a plastic crown on his head and says, “You will play the part of King David."
Wonderful, but what happens when he has to go to the bathroom but is afraid and embarrassed to speak up because he does not yet know the language.
The kid wonders why only he has to make pee pee, in any language. He will have to keep it in for another two hours.
For King David, he only has to say the Sh’ma, which he learned on Father’s knee.
We were not a strictly religious home. But we were strictly Zionist.
I should note that I have already written a book of memoirs, the award-winning “Escape from Mount Moriah," which won something big from CANNES.
But that is only part of the story, the part where the kid is always the new student for every classroom, and so he would have to get tough against the gangs in the schoolyard.
The kid is growing up, but mostly bewildered.
That’s how it is when you are the mockey, the greenhorn, and besides, I was a terrible student, of which I will tell more in my memoirs.
Here is a taste. I am standing there by the door while class is already in session, about 30 kids staring at me, a few glaring at me.
‘’Look at this adorable boy," says the teacher. “Please enter.’’
I enter and hand her my note, which explains that I am new to this school, new to this country, I am a refugee from France.
There is no mention of a Holocaust.
“Please welcome him, class," and she directs me to a seat up front, as a sign that she loves me, no doubt, she loves me.
Who wouldn’t. After all, I am an adorable boy.
The next day, I am reluctant to go in, because someone is in my seat. So I wait for the invitation, as the day before.
‘’You," she says, angrily, as if I had done something terribly wrong. “Who are you?"
Has she forgotten? Yesterday I was that adorable boy.
“Take a seat," she says, “and I want no further trouble from you."
So that’s how it is, the kid says to himself, and from that moment on, his illusions shattered, he knew that life onward was going to be difficult.
Now available, a collection of Jack Engelhard’s op-eds, “Writings."
Jack Engelhard writes a regular column for Arutz Sheva. Engelhard wrote the int’l bestseller Indecent Proposal that was translated into more than 22 languages and turned into a Paramount motion picture starring Robert Redford and Demi Moore. New from the novelist, the gambling ‘’thriller Compulsive. Website: www.jackengelhard.com
From the esteemed John w. Cassell: “Jack Engelhard is a writer without peer, and the. conscience of us all."