Article from the Israeli press   

As a child Edith Zack tried to implement the model of the Israeli ‘Sabra’, yet, at home she was coping with the memories of her parents and her half-sister who were holocaust survivors. She describes this process in her book Travels with Vera. “it is not easy. It is a constant conflict [of identities], and these two identities were part of my life”, she says.

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Every home adopts texts. When Edith Zack was a little girl, her mother Sara-Sheindle used to tell her in Slovak: “what Hitler did will be felt by many generations after me.” Young Edith rebelled against the bitter prophecy, looked her mother in the eyes and said: “nonsense, you are talking like a prophetess at the gate”. Her mother repeated her words: “your grand-grandchildren, and their children. but Edith wanted to be a real Israeli, with a ponytail and the right dress, listen to tales of valour about the Sabras who were all over the waste land, working with a hoe and singing.

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Edith grew up in a Holocaust survivors’ home, immigrants who disconnected themselves from their homeland and came to a new place, Ramat Gan. Mother Sarah-Sheindle did not spea Hebrew to her last day, and she kept the European Culture. The unique Art Deco pieces were replaced by Israeli made furniture, so that the child would be happy. Her father Zeev-Willi did not go out from the house without his brim hat, one for winter and the other for summer. He used to clean both with gasoline, which filled the house with its special scent.  

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The second generation knows that the memory of the holocaust is over everything, and it does not let go. Like a needle bush, like a stubborn reminder. It is part of the habbits at home, part of the food on the table, of the scents and the colours.  The doorbell is a constant reminds that there are those who will never come back, some music becomes a reminder of the marches that are not forgotten.

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It is difficult to understand what the second generation have been going through as it is difficult to digest the magnitude of the holocaust. The book Travels with Vera (Matar publishing house) by Edith Zack, a musicologist, pedagogue, and Doctor of Philosophy, provides a peek into a little girls world  shadowed by that war but refuses to give up the joyful Israeli maturation process.

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“There is such a phenomenon as “Holocaust Genetics” I find it in my children, and in my granddaughters; small nuances that I see. These are part of my daily coping with life."

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Imagination in Memory

From her infant years Zack was aware that 22 years separated between her and her sister Annika. Annika came from a different world. She was an Auschwitz survivor, Sarah Sheindle’s daughter from “previous life” which included a husband and another two daughters, all of whom were murdered. Sarah tried to build a new life, with a new family in Israel.

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It took Zack several decades until she dared to cope with the past of her family, and turn it into a book. The main character’s name is Vera, the name of the baby girl of her father and his first wife who was murdered in the camp. The result is a sensitive and moving novel on Vera’s life.

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The novel moves in three dimensions of time; first - Vera’s life in the new state of Israel, a small country that is struggling for its existence and is not prepared to cope with the heavy burden carried by the survivors.  Second – past time of the family before WWII, under the ironic name “Bedtime stories”, and third – Vera’s dreams.

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“I chose the name Vera for the central character, says Zack, after my father’s prematurely born baby in his first marriage before the war.   When my fourth granddaughter Gaya-Helen was prematurely born and spent her first three months in intensive care we believed she will survive as she has Annika’s (Helen’s) spirit. These are not rational decisions. Everything is associated with whatever is happening around us, consciously or subconsciously.

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Vera is Edith. Why did you not name the central character Edith?

“I started to write the novel in the third person because I found it difficult to call her Edith. It is a kind of writing strategy that helped manipulating myself to bring this girl to life. When I got to my editor, Anat Levit with a text that was mainly about the family and the holocaust, she asked whether or no I have more material which I have written. I sent her the drafts that I put aside, and she said: “this is your book, but do write it in the first person.”

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And this is what Zack did. She sat down to the computer and wrote the opening sentence: “My name is Vera Berg, and since I was six, I’ve dreamed of being someone else.”

Vera is authentic. She is what I used to be, says Zack. All the stories about Vera are based on my own life. But imagination is part of memories, and ‘literary truth’ has various sorts of ‘dresses’.

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I was aware of my role in life; to fill the vacuum in my parents’ life, and to be the one who helps changing the worse for the better. I was brought into the world as part of the antidote to grief and loss.  It is a difficult task, almost impossible.

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I got an email from one of my high school mates. He read my novel and wrote: “how is it that I knew nothing about your life?” the truth is that I did not understand my own life at the time. I don’t remember myself saying: “I am second generation to holocaust survivors. I did not ‘tag’ myself as such, and did not want to be in this place.

Let’s go back to what your mother said that there is ‘holocaust genetics’?

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Yes. I see it in my children and my granddaughters. For example, when my granddaughters were little girls, they used to go out of the house with a bag into which they packed necessary ‘things’ they might need while away from home. It is difficult to explain, grand words will not do that. It is just small nuances you see. This is my daily coping with the subject.

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Zack refused to go on living in constant fear. “I was determined to get to know myself better and to understand what tools I can acquire to intensify my ‘doing’ and reduce fear, the need to hide under the quilt in order ‘not to be’. I was determined to learn how to channel myself to constructive life. It did not come naturally to me. “to grow” is not necessarily what you hear, but what you don’t hear and have to figure out by yourself. Education, and one’s home penetrate through your pores. I was raised on ‘today I am alive, I wish to be alive tomorrow as well and to have my family around me tomorrow.”

It is a constant existential anxiety. Even while talking to you about it I am feeling the anxiety. In Israel there are many bereaved parents who lost their children in the army, yet at my time no one treated holocaust survivors like my mother as a bereaved mother who lost two of her daughters. ‘well, they perished in the holocaust’ was the attitude.

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            Without any coping system, or any other social-psychological system in Israel of the 1950s Zack became her mother’s attentive ear. “my mother had no one to talk to about her former life, so she talked to me. From my early days of childhood I remember her saying: ‘do you know what it means to be a mother whose children have not gone with the wind, but were left somewhere? “there”? ‘ It is difficult to understand.

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After many years of denial, and refusal to deal with the subject Zack went on a journey to Auschwitz-Birkenau with her daughter and her granddaughter. Three generations stood in front of the death barrack in which their mother, sister-aunt, and grandmother were imprisoned. Zack’s mother’s words about her children who were gone with the wind were there with them. The barrack in front of them, and the crematorium on their right-hand side. “when I was walking there, I felt that I might be stepping on their bones, as they were burned alive. And this was my mother’s pain: ‘I have no grave to go to. I have nothing. They were just scattered in the wind.’

 

Pain Forever and Ever

“My mother was an orthodox woman”, goes on Zack, “on Yom Kippur I used to sit at her side in synagogue all day long, and she was crying.  When the canto sang ‘God full of Mercy’ and got to the words ‘who were murdered, and burned’ she was in a state of almost fainting, and I had to pull her up from the floor. She used to say that there are different stages among holocaust survivors, and she is among the ‘highest’ stage. She lost daughters, a husband, parents, sisters and brothers, uncles, aunts, you name it.”

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You are drawing a very disciplined little girl; a good girl who wants to live.

“I was aware of my role in life; to fill the vacuum in my parents’ life, and to be the one who helps changing the worse for the better. I was brought into the world as part of the antidote to grief and loss.  It is a difficult task. Almost impossible.”

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            My mother was a huge soul, with enormous wisdom. With all the crisis we experienced as mother and daughter, she told me two years before she died: ‘I cannot understand how I did to you what I did. I should have had ten psychiatrists when I came back from the camp. Who understood whatever we went through? No one. Life was stronger than anything else. When you were born, I wanted to live for you.’

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            “before me she wanted to live for Annika, the only one who survived from her first family. Then it was for me. she said, ‘I did a terrible thing to you’. This was her greatness, that she understood. Through the grandchildren she succeeded to pad her wounds, but loss has been loss. It did not heal and did not get easier. With every bereavement in this country I remember her words: ’pain is pain for ever and ever when you lose a child. It does not go away, yet, there is distraction. The flow of life and daily routine distract your mind for a while, but then, when you are with yourself again, you are immersed in your loss and in this big hole in your belly.’” 

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Did it not occur to you to build an easier reality for Vera?

"Yes, it did, but that is a different story. The novel is not a truth generator, it is a literature generator. This was my way to deal with Vera. Actually, the novel is not about the holocaust, but about life here in Israel in the 1950s and 1960s. it is about a family restoring its life with the new language, the different culture and the financial difficulties. It is a novel about immigrants, about the fear of identity that is falling apart and about trying to absorb a new identity. It is a constant conflict which I have lived with all my life. Surely, every immigrant family experiences this sorts of feelings.