The Third Generation

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M A R C H 2 0 0 0

She was a Holocaust princess, their living memorial candle, continuity. Who would have predicted that she would turn her back on her people to become a nun in, of all places, the convent at Auschwitz?

by Tova Reich

(The online version of this story appears in three parts. Click here to go to part two or part three.)

HIS was not the first time that the father-and-son team Maurice and Norman Messer, respectively chairman of the board and president of Holocaust Connections, Inc., had traveled home from Poland, but it was definitely the saddest. In all their business dealings for clients they had always come through with flying colors, which was how they had built their enviable reputation and their legendary success. But this time, in a most painful personal matter involving an exceedingly close member of their immediate family, indeed, the very future of their line, they had failed completely. Nechama, only child of an only son, had absolutely refused to see her father or her grandfather, either one-on-one or in any constellation. In any case, as they were categorically informed, she had taken a vow of silence. This was communicated to the two men by a matronly nun in sunglasses, who came to meet them outside the gate of the Carmelite convent -- the new convent, that is, a little farther back from the perimeter of the Auschwitz death camp, to which the nuns had moved after all that fuss. "Sister Consolatia asks that you respect her right to choose," the nun told them with finality, in English, though Maurice of course knew Polish. Hearing the signature phrasing, the Messers, father and son, could not deceive themselves that this was anything other than a direct quotation from their apostate offspring, their lost Nechama, now reborn as Sister Consolatia.

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Nevertheless, despite their unquestionably genuine and heartbreaking disappointment, they made themselves comfortable, as usual, in their ample seats in the first-class compartment of the LOT airplane. They always flew Polish, as a matter of policy, to maintain healthy relations with the government with which they had so many dealings; and they always flew first class, because to do otherwise would be unseemly for men like themselves, steeped as they were in such nearly mythic tragic history, a history that set them apart from ordinary people and therefore required that they be seated apart. And from a practical, business point of view, to go economy would look bad, as if their enterprise were falling on hard times. Everything in their line of work, naturally, hung on image. "Look," as Norman formulated it, with the pauses and swallows that usually heralded the delivery of one of his aphorisms, "we already did cattle cars. From now on it's first class all the way." Clients expected a premium operation from the Messers, and were billed accordingly. This trip, for example, had been paid for by an anti-fur organization that was eager to firm up its honorary Holocaust status, and Norman had managed, even in the midst of his private anguish, to do a little work for them, still in its early stages, admittedly, involving the creative use of the mountains of hair in the Auschwitz museum, shorn from the gassed victims -- a ghoulish idea on the face of it, which he was now massaging and dignifying in order to establish the relevant ethical connection that would ennoble the agenda of the fur account and give it that moral stamp of the Holocaust.

By now, of course, father and son knew all the flight attendants on the airline. Maurice persisted in referring to them, politically incorrectly, as "hoistesses," a teasing liberty for which he took the precaution of propitiating them, just in case, with little offerings from the luxury hotels of Warsaw and Krak�w -- miniature shampoos or scented soaps from the bathrooms, chocolate hearts wrapped in gold foil plucked off the pillows. He squeezed and harassed their vivid blondeness and springy buxomness hello and good-bye and thank you, muttering, "Don't worry, girls, don't worry, I'm safe."

"And he gets away with it, too," Norman painstakingly and unnecessarily explained to his wife, Arlene, "because he's this cute little tubby old bald Jewish guy with pudgy hands and a funny accent, and the dumb chicks from Czestochowa, they think he's harmless -- big mistake, ladies! -- so it turns into a stereotypical Polish joke."

They boarded the plane ahead of the common passengers, wearing to the very last minute their trademark trench coats -- the sexy semiotics, as Maurice and Norman interpreted it, of international mystery and intrigue. Then one of the attendants, Magda or Wanda or someone, without even inquiring, her brain imprinted with their preferences as if the storage of such information were her reason for existence, glided forward with a welcoming smile such as had long vanished from their wives' repertoires, bearing in front of her two living and breathing breasts a tray with their usual -- for Maurice, a glass of Bordeaux ("I'm a red-wine male," he liked to confide urbanely at official functions), for Norman, rum with Coca-Cola, two containers of chocolate milk, and a dozen bags of honey-roasted peanuts.

OR a long time they sat side by side in silence, each with his own thoughts, perfectly at ease with the other, apart yet joined, Norman tearing open with his teeth pack after pack of the peanuts, pouring them out into the ladle of his palm, jiggling them around like dice, and then, with his head tilted slightly back, dumping them into his mouth with a smack. He went on doing this automatically, mechanically. Dispatching the nuts this way was okay when he traveled alongside his father. The old man didn't mind, most likely didn't even notice; like most survivor parents, he probably just registered gratefully that at least his son was eating, and for Norman, it was a stolen pleasure, because this was not a snacking style in which he could ever have indulged had he been with his wife or daughter. That robotic, cranelike up-and-down motion of his arm drove the two of them crazy; they could feel its vibration even if they weren't looking directly at him. Maybe that's why Nechama went into the convent, Norman speculated -- because of his annoying habits.

As for Arlene, well, he was just not going to think about his upcoming meeting with her while he was masticating. He simply refused even to begin to plan how he would manage her on the Nechama problem when he got home, how he would confirm that, unfortunately, it looked, at least for the time being, as if this nun thing was a done deal. They could do nothing about it for the moment except, of course, to use Arlene's idiom, go on being supportive, love their daughter unconditionally, always be there for her, but, at the same time, they needed to allow time to grieve -- figuratively grieve, that is, not actually go into mourning by sitting shiva for seven days, like those ultra-Orthodox fanatics when one of their kids converted -- and then, of course, they'd need closure, they'd need to move on with their own lives, to let go of all this bad stuff, put it behind them, give the healing process a chance to work, blah blah.

"Look at it this way," he could say to Arlene. "The bad news is, it's a fact: she's a nun, so that makes her a Christian, I guess, a goy, a shiksa, even worse, a Catholic. We just have to face it. And also it's a problem, I suppose, that she had to go and pick that Carmelite convent right by Auschwitz, of all places, for her nun phase, where three quarters of our family were incinerated. Know what I mean? On the other hand" -- and here he would slow down and suck in air for greater effect -- "the good news is, she's safe, she has a guaranteed roof over her head and food to eat every day, guys can't bother her anymore, and, from a parent's point of view, we will now always know exactly where she is at all times."

Hey, he loved the girl as much as Arlene did, Norman thought resentfully. Why was he always the one on the defensive? Did he really need this added grief? Nechama was his daughter too, for God's sake. This whole mess was no less an embarrassment for him than it was for Arlene. Jesus, this could even impact their business, their lifestyle -- you hear that, Mrs. Messer, hel-lo? How was it going to look, he demanded of his wife in his head: "HOLOCAUST HEIRESS DUMPS JEWS"? It was an emergency damage-control situation requiring a rapid response. He had to figure out some way to market this negative to their advantage, to turn it around -- something like, you know, the ongoing trauma of the Holocaust, the continuing threat to our survival, the Holocaust is not yet over, et cetera et cetera.

No problem; he was prepared to deal with it. But there was one thing he wanted to know, just one thing -- why was he always the one who had to be, as Arlene would put it, supportive, like some Goddamn jockstrap? Why couldn't she be supportive of him once in a while for a change? Had it penetrated her ozone layer yet that everywhere her poor schlump of a husband went, he was a big man, he was greeted like a hero? Was she cognizant of that fact? In Warsaw the women adored him, especially since he had lost all that weight; but the fact is, over there they had always loved him, they loved him in any shape or form, they loved him for himself. They came up to his hotel room carrying bouquets of flowers and bottles of champagne, with beautifully made-up faces and beautifully sprayed hair, in shiny high-heeled shoes and gorgeous real-leather mini-dresses with exposed industrial-strength steel zippers running from neck to hem -- not that he carped the diem, needless to say. In the States they worshipped him, idolized him for his aura of suffering, like a saint, like a holy man out of Dostoevski. They revered him for never letting up on this miserable Holocaust business, for immersing himself in it every minute, for schlepping the Shoah around on his back day and night, for sacrificing his happiness to keep the flame going -- not for his own health, obviously, but for the moral and ethical health of humankind. The anguish in his eyes, the melancholy in the set of his mouth, the manifest depression in the way he blow-dried his hair, the sorrowful awareness of man's inhumanity to man in the way he belted his trench coat -- it turned them on, yes, it turned them on.

So big deal, his wife didn't appreciate him. So what else was new? She was happiest when he was away from home, that was obvious; she was delighted that his job required so much traveling. Fine, he could live with that, too, as long as somebody appreciated him, as long as someone somewhere was glad to see him once in a while and showed him a little respect. But it was another thing entirely to blame him for the whole fiasco. C'mon, was he the one who put the kid in the nunnery? Please! And why was he going home now, of his own free will, to listen to all that garbage? He must be meshugga. It was masochism, pure and simple, a sick craving for punishment -- he should see a shrink. Did he have any doubts whatsoever about what Arlene was going to dump on him, with her squeegee social worker's brain and her prepackaged psychological explanations? Oh, it was an old song; he had heard it a thousand times already. She would start in again with the whole bloody litany -- how it was all his fault, everything that had happened was his fault. Right from the start. First of all, what kind of sick idea was it to insist on naming a baby Nechama? A poor, innocent baby, to give her a name like Comfort, as in "Comfort ye, comfort ye, oh my people," like some sort of replacement Jew, like some sort of post-catastrophe consolation prize, as if they were all depending on her to make things right again after the disaster. Such a heavy load, such an impossible burden to saddle a kid with -- no wonder the poor girl took herself out of this world. Did he think names don't matter? There was a whole literature on the subject, on the effect of names on development and identity and self-image. What kind of father would do such a thing to his own flesh and blood? It was criminal, unforgivable. Why couldn't she have been given a normal name, some sort of hopeful, pursuit-of-happiness American name that people could at least pronounce, like Stacy, or Tracy?

And then this whole second-generation business that he had gotten himself involved with, dragging Nechama along like some sort of archetypal sacrificial lamb, like Jephthah's daughter, like Iphigenia. As a matter of fact, Norman knew very well that most mental-health types just loved the second-generation concept. They ate it up. But Arlene -- surprise, surprise -- didn't believe in it at all. Why? It was completely predictable: because it served Norman's agenda, that's why, because it legitimized and explained his obsession, and gave it status. There was nothing in it for Arlene. As far as Arlene was concerned, second generation was a made-up category, an indulgence for a bunch of whiners and self-pitiers with a terminal case of arrested development. The so-called survivors were the first generation; they were the ones who had been there, had experienced it all firsthand, and after them came their children, this bogus second generation, the survivor proxies, these Holocaust hangers-on, Norman and company, throwing a tantrum for a piece of Shoah action. So all those tough, shrewd, paranoid refugees who came out of the war -- you don't even want to begin to think about how they made it through -- suddenly they get turned into sacred, saintly survivors with unutterable knowledge, and then the second generation, born and reared in Brooklyn or somewhere, far, far from the gas chambers and the crematoria, gets crowned as honorary survivors. Suddenly these lightweight descendants are endowed with gravitas, with importance, with all the seriousness and rewards that come from sucking up to suffering. What could be neater? All the benefits of Auschwitz without having to actually live through that nastiness.

And what did they do to deserve this honor, this second generation? What exactly are their suffering bona fides? Well, they had it rough, poor babies -- they are victims too, you can't take it away from them. They suffered the psychic wounds of being raised by traumatized, overprotective parents with impossible expectations. They bore the weight of having to transmit the torch of memory, that kitschy memorial candle, from past to future. They endured a devastating blow to their self-esteem in consequence of the knowledge that their lives were a paltry sideshow compared with their parents' epic stories. It was sick, sick, pathetic -- "Holocaust envy," a new term in the profession, coming your way soon in the updated, revised edition of DSM-IV. And to think that he would expose his own child to such a pathological situation -- to think he'd go ahead now and render this acute condition chronic by prolonging the agony, by trying to pass the whole load on to Nechama like a life sentence, like indentured servitude, like guilt unto the tenth generation. Was it an accident, then, that she abandoned the Jews for the ultimate martyr religion, complete with vicarious suffering as its main value and a tortured skinny guy on a cross as its main icon? Was it an accident that she found her way back to the gates of Auschwitz? Had it never dawned on him where this morbid Holocaust fixation would lead?

Continued...

(The online version of this story appears in three parts. Click here to go to part two or part three.)

Tova Reich is the author of the novels Mara (1978), Master of the Return (1988), and The Jewish War (1995).

Illustrations by John Howard.