EMIL DRAITSER
31
Grandfather Wolf's further life in Odessa is a blank. What was on his
mind at that time? It's known on ly that in
1935
he lost his w ife. She had
a bad heart.
It's also known that he stayed in the city when the war broke o ut. He
perished during the occupa ti on. Why didn't he evacuate, as many oth–
ers did? Did hi s children leave him behind for certain death? It couldn 't
be! Then what happened?
I ask these questions of my second cousin Maya.
In
the prewar years,
she was in her early teens. She cou ld have remembered. Sipping her tea,
she speaks somewhat timidl y, it seems. She think s she might hurt my
feelings. She shrugs :
"You see, for a year or a year and a half before the war, he became
intimate w ith a woman. They lived together. She was ill and couldn't
leave. When the war started, they got a steamship ticket for him. But he
refused it. He stayed with her ... with that woman." She tries to make
the story as remote as possible. Some kind of woman ... Wolf Bender–
sky stayed with her. That is the whole exp lanation .
As our relative, she thinks, he sho uld have been a one-woman man
devoted till the end to the memory of his deceased wife. What romantic
rubbish! How unfair! And is it love, this immoral ca ll for self-sacrifice?
Or maybe, more likely, love is a voluntary self-denial in favor of the li v–
ing other-"Iive, love, be my light"?
My cousin didn't know what I've learned. "Some kind of woman"
was my grandfather's wife. A religious Jew, he cou ldn 't live in sin; he
had to be married. Believing that hi s chi ldren disapproved, most likely
he married that woman in a private ceremony, which explains my
cousin's ignorance of it.
He met this woman, nameless for me, with whom he spent the rest of
his life. I don't know anything about her. What she was-young or old,
beautiful or ugly-is not important. I know only one thing: for the sake
of her, he conscious ly accepted death. Staying in Odessa, my grandfa–
ther knew what was in store for him. There had been years of anti–
fascist propaganda in the country. There was the film
Professor Mam–
lock,
in which the Jewish protagonist's students beat him up and threw
him out on the street. There were other anti-fascist
films-The Oppen–
heim Family, The Swamp Soldiers.
The newspapers had already
reported
Kristallnacht.
With Hitler's invasion of Poland, numerous Pol–
ish Jewish refugees brought with them horror stories about German
atrocities. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact could deceive only orthodox
Communists; internationalists hooked on the idea of permanent world
