Eva and Eve: A Search for My Mother's Lost Childhood and What a War Left Behind

Eva, at Nine

I’VE NEVER MET this sweet child who smiles at me with the confidence of a well-loved daughter. She is pretty, well-groomed, well-fed. Her dress, purchased or perhaps sewn at home for winter family celebrations, is of a floral material, with puffed sleeves and large round buttons, trimmed in white lace at its high ruffled collar. Her dark, shiny hair is cut short, above her chin, her bangs neatly pinned to one side. If I visited her school I’d see an entire classroom of nine-year-old girls who part and pin their hair the same way. She poses on her own in a comfortable sitting room, but in her easy gaze I sense the presence of other people: parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, family friends, and the unknown photographer. Behind her, a few hints of the room’s décor—rounded backrest of an elegant wood chair, sideboard decorated with a lacy cloth, door framed in carved molding against a patterned wallpaper—all recede in layers of gauzy focus.

What is it about this girl? She seems at once so innocent, yet so knowing. Her plump cheeks are incarnadine, like a morsel of blush-tinted marzipan, yet something about the intensity of her dark eyes tells me she is fiercer than her sweet presentation.

She will need that fierceness.

In two months this girl’s country will be taken over by a cohort of extremists led by an authoritarian germophobe who hates people of her kind. He sees them as filth, vermin, contamination. In truth there have always been people in her country who hated her ethnic group, but now their views will be fully validated and normalized.

In six months this well-appointed sitting room will be ransacked and most of the remaining possessions that aren’t shattered or stolen by an emboldened police force will be sold off so that the family can survive for the next two years.

The girl’s parents will spend those two years in a struggle against a mighty bureaucracy as they attempt to get out of a once-beloved city whose majority population now sees them as enemies of a new empire. Having lost all rights, the family will now be stateless.

Across the ocean, the latest incarnation of the xenophobic, isolationist America First movement is in full sway. Immigrants are suspect, even those who have thrown off most of their traditional customs in an effort to assimilate—to become Americans. People like this girl’s family are reviled for their mysterious religion, olive skin, and prominent noses. They cannot shake off their reputation as anti-Christian money-hoarders. They speak the language of America’s enemy and surely are spies, however desperately they and their political advocates plead for safe haven from persecution. America First is about protecting jobs from immigrants who will steal employment from true American citizens. America First means resisting engagement in the conflagration that threatens to engulf faraway lands. Let those foreign countries fight their own battles. Let some other place take the great masses of the persecuted and unwashed.

The girl looks at me intently and I meet her gaze. Eighty years have passed since a camera captured her face in the midst of a gentle winter afternoon. Now the gyres of history have revolved. Promoted by another would-be authoritarian and obsessive hand washer, America First is back, emblazoned on posters, T-shirts, and red baseball caps. Different immigrants from the east and south, just as desperate, just as feared and reviled for their dark skin, language, dress, religion, and all-round Otherness, plead for entry and are refused, in the name of national security. In the sweltering days of midsummer, parents and children are separated at the border or deported even as American farmers struggle to hire enough workers to pick fruits and vegetables. America has retreated from its European alliances and the walls of isolationism rise up like the wall an American president wants to build with taxpayer dollars. In an effort to stem the tide of immigrants, right-wing politicians have persuaded fearful British voters to leave the European Union. Other European governments teeter into anti-immigrant conservatism and authoritarianism. Ironically it is Germany’s chancellor who continues to uphold the postwar European order of liberal democracy.

I flip the photograph. On the reverse side a diligent family archivist has written January 1938 in soft pencil. The nine-year-old girl in the frilly dress lived in Vienna, Austria, where a world of safety and comfort was about to end. Her name was Eva, and she was my mother. I knew her as Eve.

ON THE WINTER mornings of my childhood, crystalline waves of frozen condensation would cover the windowpanes of our city apartment like lichen on rock, blocking the street six floors below. When I pressed a warm fingertip to the frost, a tiny clearing appeared, like the porthole of a miniature ship. If I made enough of these ovals I could begin to make out a wavy image of the street through the veil of melted ice. This for me is the challenge of memory and memoir writing: we create small vistas from what we remember, and if we can create enough of them, we can begin to piece together a story from what we see. But the vistas, like those my finger made in the frost, can close up again. They might very well remain sealed for a lifetime.

When I first found a keepsake book way in the back of my mother’s lingerie drawer I thought I was looking only at a sentimental artifact from her childhood—something about which I knew too little.

Later, I remembered a high school history teacher who had pressed us students to consider the political, economic, and social implications of whichever event we were examining in class. To that end, I had subconsciously started thawing small portals long before I even understood that the keepsake book was part of something larger than my mother’s childhood, or our family history. It would take years and a political sea change for me to fully unravel its meaning.

THE REAL MIRACLE, one that kept me up at night during my childhood and into adulthood, is that they got out of Vienna at all, let alone with visas to the United States. Years after my mother’s death, the story still troubled me, that her life, and therefore mine, hung on such a slim thread of good fortune, one that was denied to so many equally worthy people deported to extermination camps. The luck of my family’s survival wasn’t entirely comforting, as it depended on the generosity or intervention of people I could never know: the employees at my grandfather’s printing factory, who produced an item of paper packaging vital to the Third Reich war effort; relatives in the United States who vouched for the Singer family and helped with the cost of boat tickets to America; a mysterious vice-consul at the United States consulate in Vienna who granted a visa; and perhaps even some Nazi officials who were open to negotiation or bribery.

My mother’s keepsake book felt like a challenge, as if she were asking me to tell our family’s story to those people of her adopted country, people who may have forgotten that we are a nation of both adventurers and reluctant refugees, and that there could be quiet greatness in following one woman’s journey from one name to another—from Eva to Eve.

PART ONE

Ending and Beginning

IN THE SUMMER of 2006, urgent orchestras of cicadas wailed in the trees of Brooklyn, where I lived with my ten-year-old daughter, Liza, and Clark, my boyfriend of two years. The insects, their life’s work complete, dropped out of the branches one by one onto the sidewalks, fragile brown wings folded against bodies desiccating in the Indian summer heat. Across the East River, in Upper Manhattan, my mother, Eve, was dying in the bedroom of our family apartment on West End Avenue.

Until she took to her bed that August, my mother was the force of nature that ran our family. She was a decade retired from a thirty-four-year career at Simon & Schuster as a designer, then art director, of trade book interiors. My father had spent his equally long career as the trailblazing art director of Simon & Schuster’s trade book jackets. The result of this unusual arrangement was that my parents ruled over the aesthetics of any book published by the company during those years. My father—indomitable, blunt, uncompromising, a thorn in the side of not a few editors and feared by their assistants—ran his department like an impenetrable castle where many young designers and junior art directors, mostly women fresh out of art school, thrived. My mother’s experience was more complicated. While she earned the respect of her many colleagues, it took longer for her to receive the validation of a vice president corporate title. She was certainly paid less than she deserved.

My mother’s working world was mostly a mystery to me as a child, except for the rare school holidays when she would bring my brother and me to her office. We had fun cutting up scrap paper from the galleys of page proofs, followed by a tuna salad sandwich plus milkshake at Schrafft’s, one of a chain of now-extinct coffee shops.

Later, when I was a teenager, my parents arranged a summer job for me researching photographs for an editor, one of those gigs that would now be called an internship. During those few months I had my first glimpse of their workday routine as we rode the number 5 bus down Riverside Drive and onward into the land of midtown office towers. I would sit between my parents. My father divided the New York Times in half—the Gray Lady was the only paper that mattered to our family—reaching across me to hand several sections to my mother. Both immediately buried themselves in that morning’s news. About halfway through the journey, in wordless choreography, they simultaneously refolded their sections and exchanged them over my head in an arc of rustling newsprint. The world of ink and paper was the raw material of their work lives, and so it became mine as well.

In old family photos my mother, Eve, was a striking young woman, petite and curvy. Her dark hair, styled in voluptuous 1940s waves, large dark eyes, aquiline nose, and expressive full mouth brought to mind several English movie actresses of Hollywood’s golden age—Vivien Leigh, in particular. By midlife, and until her retirement, my mother presented an elegant figure at work, her salt-and-pepper hair coiled in a bun at her nape, five foot two inches in tailored suits and one of her many pairs of polished Ferragamos.

She was at home in the most faithful audiences of Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Opera House, or the galleries of the Frick. You could find her test-pinching plums in the fruit bins outside Fairway Market on Seventy-Fourth Street and Broadway, sniffing a round of funky-smelling triple-crème cheese at Zabar’s, or ordering smoked salmon and sable at Murray’s Sturgeon Shop (I’ll take six bialys with that and a tub of scallion cream cheese.) She was a New Yorker: steely, savvy, thrifty, pragmatic.

During her working years, my mother did it all, but of course no one called it leaning in. She returned home from a full workday to cook meals that were both simple and ambitious. She paid the family bills and prepared tax forms. She ironed my father’s shirts and cotton handkerchiefs. If my brother or I needed money for a school trip, she opened her wallet, if only just a crack. Whether you wanted them or not, she always had opinions, increasingly unwelcome as I passed from childhood into adolescence into adulthood.

It was never easy with us. As a child growing up with my parents and younger brother, Simon (named after a grandfather, not the company), in our New York City apartment, I loved her and sometimes feared her. Later, as a teenager, I loved and feared and hated her with an intensity that separated us like ripped tendons that even the most skillful surgeon could not repair. We fought almost daily then. Some nights my voice went hoarse from screaming. Doors slammed and invisible walls rose up. My childhood friends described my mother as severe, a hard nut, scary, cold. I don’t think she consciously wanted to be that way. As a child she’d toughened herself in the face of real danger. The sky could fall again at any time. Be prepared. Don’t go soft.

As an adult I tried to love her, but at a distance. One close friend observed that when she saw me with my mother I became more childlike and eager for approval. By then I tried to avoid conflict. My mother and I embraced when we saw each other, but without the full abandon we probably both craved. Sometimes when I was with her my disappointment—that we could not seem to find a path to a less freighted love—overwhelmed me. Tears would come later, when I was safe in my own home.

IN A FEW years I would begin to understand my mother’s predicament when my own daughter turned into a teenager, seemingly overnight. Yet during that summer of 2006 my mother and I were still where we’d been for years, in a state of delicate truce. We’d talk once a week or so, and I visited for holidays and family dinners. After my husband’s sudden death from a pulmonary embolism in 2003, she did not console me much, nor did she intrude as I made my way as a newly single mother. My parents liked my boyfriend, Clark, who, born and raised in Wisconsin, was a transplant to New York. Clark and my father bonded over their shared love for the Green Bay Packers, a singular intersecting point that always made me smile. On my best days I was careful around my mother, often running lines of dialogue in my head like an actor imagining how to play a scene. On not-so-good days, I got through shared meals reminding myself how much my parents loved their only granddaughter. Though my mother wasn’t exactly the cuddly grandma type, she called Liza kitten.

UNTIL THE SPRING of 2005, our emotional lives unfolded in separate worlds. Then, a few months before my mother turned seventy-seven, she called me one evening to deliver the news—without fanfare—that she had cancer. I’d never heard of mesothelioma, a slow-growing, always-fatal rarity caused by exposure to asbestos. In her case, it was likely the result of having inhaled airborne fibers during an office renovation decades earlier. Fortunately, my father had not been exposed, as his office was elsewhere in the building.

My father told me later that during the worst of the chemo, when she could do nothing more than doze in a chair, she asked him, What did I do in my life to deserve this misery? Follow-up tests after the chemo showed that the tumors weren’t shrinking. I was grateful when she told me she’d decided to stop treatment. I’ve had enough of this game, she said with her trademark sarcasm. An unexpected brief period of rejuvenation followed. Her ashen cheeks flushed and I watched her eat meals with gusto, as if she were making up for the months of nausea and exhaustion.

While she was still well enough, my mother began teaching my father how to manage tasks that would make his future life without her possible. She was in a race against an unknown but imminent deadline to transfer all the information she had stored in her head during the fifty-plus years of their marriage. Even after she no longer got out of bed, her brief periods of wakefulness were devoted to this very task.

One day, I contemplated my impending motherless state on the long subway ride home from my parents’ apartment. I understood that my loss would be a devastating absence of change. Nothing would change. My life would go on. I’d been living too separated from my mother to grieve the empty place I’d filled with friends and a therapist. The subway was a terrible place to cry, but I was overwhelmed and let down my usual guard. A few kindly onlookers watched as I wiped my nose with napkins from Starbucks.

Beginning in August, two capable nurses traded days and nights caring for my mother at our family’s apartment. Jeanette and Carol, strong Jamaican women who laughed easily. When I visited, I smelled the fried chicken or Chinese takeout they brought in for their meals, laid out on the same round table in the kitchen where I’d eaten so many breakfasts, lunches, and dinners. They lifted my mother when she needed to use the toilet, bathed her, and dressed her in clean nightgowns. And then, as time passed, they changed her diaper, because it came to that. My mother accepted their care with a serenity that surprised me: she had always directed her life and ours.

September 2006 brought a final reckoning as her body continued wasting. This was particularly unsettling because the physical resemblance between us had always been striking. All the women on her side of the family looked alike. During adolescence I had recoiled from the evidence of my mother’s middle age, one that one day might be mine, and now as I looked at her in bed, I comprehended another possible future that terrified me. Once, she had been curvy and buxom, then her weight had dropped to one hundred pounds, and now I was afraid to guess. I’ll look like that one day, I mused as I sat by her bed, offering her apple juice with a straw. Something will get me and there I’ll be, bones overdraped with skin, just as she is now—the fate of millions that her family somehow escaped during the war.

At times, her wasting was less terrifying, as if she were being gradually liberated from her failing body. When she was awake, she often stared into the distance, as if she were peering through a window at a landscape invisible to us, the living. Her hospice doctor said it was unusual for mesothelioma patients to linger this way. She was willing her body to hold on a bit longer. I don’t want to go, she said to me one day, but I am ready to go.

DURING THIS TIME my father and I often went to a local restaurant so he could get out of the apartment for a while. For the first time as an adult I felt useful to him. Over dinner he told stories I’d never heard before, about his Depression-era childhood in Philadelphia—the good times, when his family lived in a house in a middle-class Jewish neighborhood, and then the years after 1932, when his father’s business failed, the car and refrigerator were repossessed, and their house was foreclosed upon. The family moved to an apartment over a taproom, accepting food and money from relatives who still had jobs. His most vivid childhood memories were connected to food, or more accurately, a longing for it. As he continued his stories, week after week, I could see his childhood and his sometimes food-stricken time as a soldier in Patton’s Third Army unfold like a film with a voice-over. No wonder he had fallen in love with my beautiful, intelligent mother, a gifted home cook, the daughter of a late-in-life restaurant manager and pastry chef.

One evening, on the walk back to his apartment (I’d already started thinking of my childhood home as his rather than theirs), my father pointed up to a bay window that popped out of a corner building on 104th Street and Broadway. That’s where your mother lived when I met her, he said. That was the living room window right up there. We stopped to look at that window, one I’d walked by many times in my life without knowing its significance. It was a revelation when I first met her parents. Everything was so serene. They were always gentle with each other. My parents weren’t like that at all. Your grandfather Julius was quiet, but Anna was much more outgoing, always a laugh and a smile. They had a cat; he didn’t like me much. Blackie. What a brute. But the food! He paused his story as if to catch a whiff of a dinner from all those years ago. I loved how he stored the memories of his life in meals he’d eaten. "What a cook she was, Anna. Fantastic baker. And they were running the restaurant then, so whenever I showed up it was always Frank, the future son-in-law! The schnitzel, the strudel. He sighed. I felt appreciated. Needed."

MY MOTHER DIDN’T seem to need me in the place where she was now. Where did she travel during the long hours of sleep? Sometimes I would move up close to her to make sure she was still breathing. The box containing the morphine that her hospice doctor had provided remained unopened in the refrigerator. On a few occasions I took the box out to read the label, wishing I could rip open its seal and drink the vial down to dull the pain of watching my mother disappear. She never asked for the morphine. I’ve seen it go this way before, Carol said. Where they just fade away. Let’s be grateful and thank the Lord that she isn’t suffering. I wasn’t a believer, but I was intensely grateful for this one blessing.

One afternoon, as I waited for her to open her eyes, I investigated the blond-wood, midcentury dressers my parents referred to as the Delicatessen. There were two identical dressers, topped with a glass-fronted case that I could imagine stocked with an array of lamb chops and trussed chickens, but that was instead packed with photos, books, and curios of unknown origin. Gently I pulled open my mother’s top drawer, admiring again the 1920s-era jewelry she’d inherited from her mother, who had been young and beautiful during the interwar years in Vienna, half a world away from New York. A small red cardboard box, still bearing the label of a jeweler on Vogelweideplatz held a Jewish pendant and another inscribed Evie. Near the jewelry was a soft leather pouch containing a bone-handled folding fork and spoon that had belonged to my grandfather. In another red cardboard box I found a tiny compass. I knew that my grandfather had been an avid mountain climber, and these pieces were the surviving souvenirs of his camping gear. Tucked underneath the jewelry were the dull green Third Reich passports my mother had saved from their journey. I had only peeked at them a few times in my life, as they exuded a force field of horror. But now I leafed through the pages, looking closely at the grandparents I’d never met. On the last page was an American visa, stamped and signed. I picked up a familiar framed wedding photo of my young parents—my father, a bit sheepish with his lopsided smile and horn-rimmed glasses, nestled against my beautiful mother. There had been no grand wedding—though my father’s family had offered to pay for one—just a simple service in a rabbi’s office. My mother’s bobbed curls framed her large eyes, the prominent Singer family nose and the painted lips, curved upward in the posed smile of a 1940s Hollywood starlet. She wore one of her expertly home-tailored suits rather than a white dress. I tried to take in the details of her face like a biographer. I knew so little about her young life, only sketchy memories of a lost happy childhood and what had always seemed like improbable stories of her family’s escape in 1940. Too late to ask for details now.

A DAY IN mid-October. I sat at the foot of my mother’s bed, feeling useless. A week, maybe two, said her hospice doctor. I realized I wasn’t prepared for life without a mother, even one with whom I hadn’t shared my inner life in a long time. There were so many questions I hadn’t asked and now it was too late to ask them. A wave of loneliness washed over me, and I started weeping. My mother watched me. She didn’t speak much anymore; it was too much physical effort.

No crying, she said, just louder than a whisper, but I heard her. I stopped, just like that, because she had asked as much and I didn’t want to disappoint her, not this late in the game.

October 21. My mother could no longer speak, so what turned out to be our last conversation was one-sided. No confessions, no tender parting words of love or advice. We were not a religious family, so there was no talk of meeting on the other side, where I sensed my mother already had more than a toehold.

Are you in pain? I asked.

She shook her head no. We had never opened the bottle of morphine.

Are you worried about leaving Daddy?

She nodded yes. I sighed. So this was why she’d hung on, as if she could still do anything for anyone now.

Please don’t worry. Simon and I will take care of everything. There’s nothing left to do. It’s time to go. I hoped she was still listening to me. I left that afternoon wondering if I would see her alive again, yet her will to live had surprised us all, for months now. A week more, I thought. At least.

THE FOLLOWING EVENING, my brother invited my father and me over to dinner in Brooklyn. Simon and his wife, Mary, had no children, just two adored cats, so their home was always calm and orderly. Their long dining table with multiple leaves had become the setting for family gatherings. This brief weekly meal had become another way to get my father out of his apartment.

We were all at the table, platters of grilled chicken and vegetables making solemn rounds, when the phone rang.

It’s Carol, my brother said. She says it’s going to be soon.

Moments later we were speeding up the West Side Highway in a taxi. We arrived at my father’s building and the doorman held the doors so we could rush in. Upstairs, in front of the apartment, I fiddled with my key, struggling to find the sweet spot in the old lock. You had to jiggle it just so.

She’s just passed, Carol said as we burst in. My father was stricken. My brother took him aside. I asked Carol to tell me what had happened.

Not even fifteen minutes ago, Carol said. She was lying in bed and I thought she was sleeping. She seemed to have some trouble breathing. Then she opened her eyes very wide, like she was looking out somewhere. She opened her mouth, as if to say something, and then she was gone. Don’t worry yourself. It was very fast and we see it like this a lot, where they wait till everyone’s out of the house. Some folks, they just want to be alone when they go.

My father, brother, and I approached the bedroom, where my mother’s body lay covered with a sheet. I knew I had to pull back the sheet, to fully comprehend what had happened. My mother lay still and gray, mouth open. I looked for a long hard moment, until I was no longer shocked.

My angel, my father cried, standing in the bedroom doorway. He was so upset, I hurriedly replaced the sheet over my mother’s face.

The hospice doctor had given us instructions to call the funeral home as soon as my mother died. Two men arrived speedily, as if they’d been waiting outside the apartment door. They removed my mother’s jewelry—a bracelet of braided gold and a ring of twisted gold wire. I placed these items carefully in my mother’s jewelry box—my inheritance now. The men wrapped her body in a gray blanket, placed it on a stretcher, and carried her away, so thin and unsubstantial that the blanket appeared to conceal nothing at all.

AFTER THE FUNERAL came a new rhythm of tasks in my mother’s absence. My father told me he couldn’t face living with my mother’s belongings still around. She’d owned a closet full of fine suits, trousers, skirts, blouses, and at least thirty boxes of Ferragamo shoes (alas, all one size too large for me). Her clothing from thirty-four years in an office didn’t suit my freelancer life, where my commute was ten feet from the kitchen to my desk, often still in my pajamas. Mary offered a solution—donating everything to an organization that collected clothing for disadvantaged women entering the workforce. Someone will be glad to have them, she said. It would be a relief to pass everything onward as quickly as possible so that my father could feel at ease in his new life.

Mary and I began right away. I saved the sweaters my mother had knitted (so many stitches!), and the cashmere cardigans she cared for meticulously, some dating back to the 1960s. I kept the sweater I’d given her for her last birthday, knowing then that it would soon become a keepsake. It still smelled like her favorite perfume, a gust of rose. I packed up a retractable tape measure, a gift from a printing company decades earlier. There was also a small rolling tool called a copy counter, used to paginate galleys from typed manuscripts. The logos on both looked to be from the 1960s. How like my mother to save such utilitarian analog vestiges from her years of work. I packed up the leather pouch that contained my grandfather’s folding fork and spoon, the compass, my mother’s jewelry collection of pearls and antique cameos, amber beads, gold bracelets, the necklaces that had belonged to my grandmother Anna. I slipped the twisted gold ring my mother was wearing when she died on my bare right pointer finger, swirling it round and round as Mary and I placed folded clothes into black plastic bags. The ring was a comforting presence until the shocked moment when I realized that my finger was naked again: I had lost it. I rummaged frantically in the black bags until, overcome with the futility of the search, I retreated to the back hallway near the service elevator, where I wept over the loss, cursing my carelessness and wishing I had a cigarette, even though I hadn’t smoked one in fifteen years. It was just a ring, I told myself. I stepped back inside the apartment, hurriedly washed my tear-blotched face with cold water from the kitchen sink, mumbled an unconvincing All right as my dad passed me and asked how I was doing. Then I returned to work.

I found a pebble in the pocket of one of my mother’s winter coats—soft and black, with