Aspects of My Life

In 1933, in the days of gathering storms in the Western world, I was transplanted at age nine from a distant, wintery, tranquil country on the Baltic Sea, Latvia, to a hot, barren, and contested land in the heart of the Levant, British Palestine. It was a move that saved me and my parents and those few family members who came with us or who managed to follow, from certain annihilation, first by the Soviet invasion of 1940, then by the Nazi holocaust machine when Germany overran Latvia in 1941, and then again by the Soviet purge of those who were not communist enough when the Russians overran it a second time in 1944.
 In Latvia my parents were Zionist oriented. I was sent to Hebrew kindergarten, and to the Hebrew Gymnasium in Riga, but I think the family was not Zionist to the extent of packing up and emigrating, had it not been for my aunt Fanny, my father’s young sister, who at 19 went to Palestine as a member of the Latvian delegation to the first Maccabia Games, the International Jewish Olympics, 1931. When the games were over, Aunt Fanny refused to come back, and as the months went by my father was commissioned by my paternal grandfather to go out into that wilderness, that desert, and bring the girl home. “I rather think that I shall stay, and you will come here,” Fanny told my father when he disembarked at Jaffa port, and she proved to be right. Within a few years not only we but most of my father’s siblings came over, including one uncle with a young Christian German wife, and finally my grandparents themselves, Joseph and Esther (nee Brenner) Lipschitz of Ventspils (Windau), who managed years later to celebrate their golden wedding in the Promised Land.
 In spite of my speaking the language, the transplantation was not easy, especially for my parents. My father’s Hebrew was limited to what he had learnt from prayer books in Heder, and for my mother Hebrew was like Chinese. The apartment my father had arranged during his visit here was not ready. There were four of us living in one rented room for months, my father was preoccupied with finding a means of livelihood, and the heat was oppressive. I started school immediately, although the school year had already begun, and on my first day at school I was thrown out, I swear by no fault of mine. We were given a light meal in class, which consisted that day of several dates, a fruit I had never seen before. Clutching a particularly succulent one in my hand, perhaps too tightly, the pit suddenly shot out, and to my horror flew across the room directly into the principal’s eye, the whole class breaking out in wild laughter. Not many years later I became quite proficient at target practice, at an air-rifle shooting gallery on the beach, but never again did I score such a bull’s eye.
 The old world of my childhood, however, was lost forever. Of Latvia’s Jewish population of 100,000, 70,000 were murdered, and the rest scattered all over the world, some of them to Palestine. In Riga, I remember our apartment on Pulkved Brieja iela, a big house on a corner, and also, for the two years prior to our departure, the modern one-family house we occupied in a residential area named Mezaparks (Kaiserwald). There the famous Jewish historian Simon Dubnov lived, until shot by the Germans in 1941, having been too weak to be transported to the Rumbula forest outside Riga, where in two days, culminating December 8, 1941, 25,000 Jews were massacred.
 From an early age I spoke a number of languages. At home we spoke German, at school Hebrew, with Maria the maid and my playmates in the street–Latvian, with my grandparents in Ventspils–Yiddish, and with some of our relatives–Russian, which I didn’t know well enough. My parents spoke Russian when they didn’t want me to understand, and when they suspected my proximity, the password they used was “Patom” (“Later”), followed by silence, which only prompted me to learn the language all the more, and to improve my eavesdropping techniques.
 ‘Mother’ in German was ‘Mamma,’ and in Russian ‘Mahma,’ the two having quite different connotations–the first strict, the latter forgiving. ‘Mamaah,’ in German, was something else altogether. It meant my maternal grandmother Johanna Sebba (nee Eliasson) in Liepaja (Libau), and implied respect for a proud and revered lady. Indeed, she had raised nine children, and her apartment on the ground floor of a 3-storey building served as the family hub, especially during holidays, when my mother would take me there for Passover. Although not overly religious, Mamaah had enough dishes for every occasion. There were four complete sets of 24, including silverware and pots and pans, one Fleishig (for food containing meat), one Milkhig (for milk and milk products), one Pessachdike Fleishig, and one Pessachdike Milkhig (same, but used during Passover week only). The hallway in the house had a particular smell, coming from the garden in the back, where along the fence tomatoes for home use were grown. Ever since I could remember, Mamaah seldom smiled, and always wore black. She had been a widow since 1915, and as the first-born of her daughter Rosa, I was the third grandchild to be named after my deceased grandfather, Samuel. Families were huge in those days, and there were others named Sam among my mother’s 63 first cousins. Politeness and modesty were the order of the day at that time. Sisters-in-law forever addressed one another with the respectful “Sie” (‘They’ in German), and any aunt bringing a home baked cake from her kitchen was almost obliged to announce, “Today it didn’t come out so well.”
 At age four or five I made the discovery that, I believe, separates humans from other living beings: the knowledge that one day we must die. I was walking in the street with my mother hand in hand, when a very old and wrinkled woman dressed in black passed us. I remember feeling an intense fright, and I said, “Oh, I don’t want to die.” “You won’t.” said my mother soothingly. “Doesn’t everybody?” I wondered. “No,” she said, “some die, some don’t.” This seemed to me an evasion, perhaps rather an admission, a confirmation of my suspicion. It was also a lesson that for the sake of living at peace with oneself, it is all right to bend the truth a little, although even then I noticed that for my mother bending the truth was distasteful, and indeed she didn’t do it well at all.
 At age five or six, I was taken to my first music lesson. The piano teacher, a Germanic professor oddly named Schubert, sent me to the window and told me to face the heavy antique-smelling curtain. He played two notes on the piano and asked me how many notes he was playing. I said two. He played three notes and I said three. He turned to my mother, and said he’d take me on. When I came to my first lesson, I went straight to the ancient curtain and turned my back on him. “What are you doing there?” he shouted. I didn’t know that to learn the piano you needed to be seated at one. Shyly I came forward toward him.
 Summers, my parents used to rent a datcha near the sea in the Riga Bay area. I loved the beach and wading in the cold Baltic waters, but no less did I love to listen to one of the Novik girls who played the piano in the datcha next door. Although no more than twelve at the time, she played very well and practiced a lot. Through listening to her play, I got to know Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 8 in C minor, op. 13, the Pathetique, better than any of his 32 Piano Sonatas.