556
PARTISAN REVIEW
"journey
to
Poland" didn't begin in '75, but in early childhood, in Tel Aviv
in the 1950s. Distant shocks preceded the rift.
The "journey to Poland" began in that journey "to there"-the jour–
ney every child makes to the regions of before he was born, to the
unknown past of his parents, to the secret of his birth. My journey to
Mother's world began long before I "understood" who my mother,
Regina-Rina Poser-Laub-Govrin, was, before I "knew" that she survived
the "Holocaust," that she once had another husband, that I had a half–
brother. But there was the other "knowledge," that knowledge of
pre-knowledge and of pre-language, transmitted in the thousand languages
that connect a child and his parents without words. A knowledge that lay
like a dark cloud on the horizon. TerrifYing and seductive.
For years the journey proceeded on a double track. One outside the
home and one inside it. And there was an almost complete separation
between the two. As if everything that was said outside had nothing
to
do
with Mother. Outside, incomprehensible, violent stories about the
"Holocaust" were forced upon the little girl's consciousness. In school
assemblies, in lessons for Holocaust Memorial Day, and later on in lessons
of "Annals of the Jewish People," which were taught separately from "his–
tory" classes, and described events that happened in "another, Jewish time
and place," where King David and small-town Jews strolled among the
goats and railroad cars of the ghetto. Even the Eichmann Trial, on the radio
in school and at home, was an event you had to listen to, but it had no real
relation to Mother. (And even if things were said about it then at home, I
succeeded in repressing them from consciousness.)
At home, there were bright stories about Krakow, the boulevards, the
Hebrew high school, the cook, the maids, about skiing and summer holidays
in the mountains, in Zakopane, and sometimes on Friday evening, Mother
and I would dance a "Krakowiak" on the big rug in the living room. And
there was Mother's compulsive forced-labor house cleaning, and her peri–
ods of rage and despair when I didn't straighten up my room (what I called
"prophecies of rage" with self-defensive cunning), there was the everlasting,
frightened struggle to make me eat, and there was the discOlmected silence
that enveloped her when she didn't get out of bed on Yom Kippur. And
there was the photo album "from there" at the bottom of Mother's lingerie
drawer, with unfamiliar images, and also pictures of a boy, Marek. And sto–
ries about him,joyful, a baby in a cradle on the balcony, a beautiful child on
the boulevard. And a tender memory of the goggle-moggle with sugar he
loved so much (and only years later did I understand the terrifYing circum–
stances of that). And there were the weekly get-togethers at Aunt Tonka's
house (who was never introduced as the widow of Mother's older brother
