chuck under the chin.” After which he “walked away laughing.” If this was not bad enough, he returned to the floor, danced with another woman, to whom he also gave “a little chuck under the chin.”
Lothario, Michal had whispered on the tape.
Had Miriam been romantically interested in Rosensaft? The third and fourth and fifth scenes, all involving Norbert Wollheim, brought the question into relief. It was not clear where those interactions took place—Michal reported only shards of these conversations with him. In one, Wollheim is saying that she can have “no claims” upon Rosensaft’s time (or else he said she had “no claims” upon Rosensaft himself; Michal spoke too quickly for me to hear it clearly). In the next scene (also played upon a blank stage) Wollheim says something on the order of: You and I have more in common than you have with Yossele. And finally, on another bare stage, he tells her: “Rosensaft is with Bimko. They are going to be married.”
Suddenly it was all so clear. How could I not have seen it? Hidden beneath the dry brush of political meetings and committees, underneath the passions of Zionism and the debates about the future of the Jews, another story smoldered: Wollheim wanted Miriam; Miriam wanted Rosensaft; Rosensaft wanted Hadassah Bimko. The eternal tale that could play itself out anywhere: a prosperous city, a country estate, a displaced-persons camp.
What a sad story it was, I thought, as evening came on and Union Square began to bustle with office workers hurrying home. For the longer I contemplated my scenario, the more convinced I was of its veracity:
A woman survives what seems a lifetime of horrors and is surprised—stunned—to find herself still healthy, young. She begins to discover a new identity, a new life, one in which she is popular, active, involved; in which she learns new languages; where she is valued for skills she never imagined she possessed. She falls in love, reaches out for a husband when she discovers she is carrying a child, most likely his child. Then her new identity as Miriam is slowly forced to shrink, as if her range of motion must contract in proportion to the expansion of her belly. She is envied for her special foods and rations, and her popularity fades. The man rejects her. Her difficult pregnancy keeps her from the activities in which she was engaged. She has to give up her places in groups and committees. Slowly, what overtakes her is a sort of nineteenth-century confinement, literally a confinement in the hospital, wherein she falls under the care of Dr. Hadassah Bimko, the lover of the man she desires. And it is precisely at this point—when she is forced to remain bedridden, overseen by her rival—that the good doctor, that angel, becomes “that stinking, chain-smoking little troll.”
I whispered a passionate “thank you” to Dr. Schussler. And this gratitude was for her gracious silence; for relinquishing her therapist’s imperative to probe, and probe ever deeper; and, most of all, for allowing the patient some degree of ignorance about the story of her inception. The patient certainly had intuited the starkness of her origins. But it would have been cruel to inflict upon her the knowledge that her very existence had snuffed out a nascent life. For Maria-become-Miriam was barely born when her newfound joy was drained from her. Her moment of belonging, of wanting to be a Jew for the first time in her life, was taken from her by the being she called “a tiny ball of starving cells.”
It was not the patient’s fault, of course. But she had come along when she had come along. Her mother was about to be judged: Was she truly a victim? She was hallucinating from hunger; barely able to stand. And inside her was the tiny patient, her starving cells awash in her mother’s fear.
The patient grows toward birth, submerged in the noxious brew of the dying Miriam’s emotions: a flood of vengefulness, bitterness, hatred, cynicism, sorrow, and despair. O my dear patient! Even in your pre-life: consigned to the tribe of the inherently unhappy.
I put my head in my hands and cried. People walking by me in Union Square gave me a wide berth, as I sobbed uncontrollably, how long I do not know, only that night came on, and the square filled with frightening characters, and yet I wept. I was overwhelmed with the depth, breadth, urgency, and sheer inescapability of my kinship with the patient. We were born