And yet not one of Libčice’s three thousand people said a word. No one reported the tall young Jewish man who arrived from Prague on most weekends between September 1941 and May 1942, even though he was not wearing his star.
My parcel contained so many stars because they were intended to supply not just my family but also the other Jews in that sleepy town by the Vltava. They were intended to identify them, to label them all, without exception.
Them, the others.
* * *
My father never said he was Jewish. I am not sure he ever said it before the war, but he certainly never said it afterward. He was not a great believer in clans or clubs. I cannot be certain whether this arose from some philosophical conviction, fear, or a deeper trauma. I suppose, like most tenets in life, it came from a mixture of ideas and experiences. Throughout my life, he repeated that it was up to each individual to choose who and what he or she was. I heard him label himself only once, and that was to say that he was Venezuelan.
Yet, growing up in Venezuela in a firmly Roman Catholic culture, attending a school run by Ursuline nuns, I felt out of place but never quite understood why.
I was the only child in my class who was born of a second marriage, whose parents had been divorced. A classmate once solemnly pronounced that I was the product of sin. With equal solemnity, I told her that she was the product of imbeciles.
As I grew up, I thought that was the extent of it. I was different because my mother and father had defied Venezuelan religious mores. I had unconventional parents. This both irked me and made me love them even more.
The fact that my parents were perceived as liberal, that my father was an immigrant, and that my mother worked full-time all served to compound the issue. And the matter of my parents’ house being filled with enormous sculptures of naked women and alarming canvases of deconstructed bodies did not help.
My father had no great love of organized religion and particularly disliked Mass with sermons. I thought this was, as he always explained, because he objected to men affecting to have a direct line to God. In fact, it was my mother, who came from a traditional Catholic family, who refused to take me to church. It occurred to me that this further segregated me from my contemporaries, who dutifully observed the Catholic calendar. Like most children, I wanted more than anything to be like everyone else. I distinctly remember one Ash Wednesday, during my first year in the Ursuline school when I was ten. My maternal uncle and aunt had taken me to church. I was thrilled to have the gray cross thumbed in ash on my forehead. I tried desperately to keep it intact for school the next day. In the bath that night, I kept my face away from the water. I took cushions from the room next to mine and placed them all around me on my bed to stop me from rolling over and inadvertently wiping the ash from my forehead in my sleep. I wanted to show them I belonged. This was the evidence needed that I was just like the other girls at school.
The ash did nothing to further my cause. No one else appeared at school with a dusty forehead the next morning. The problem was more intrinsic. I was set apart because those children and their parents determined that, somehow, I was not one of them. I know now the reason that some of the girls sniggered as I sat silently during the Monday discussion of the Sunday sermon was not because my mother had not taken me to church to hear it but because they suspected that I, like my father, was a Jew.
All of this I have discovered in recent years from classmates, family, and friends, who have given me their candid recollections. I was absolutely oblivious to it as a child. I never heard the word Jewish uttered by anyone in reference to me, my father, or anyone else. My time with the Ursuline nuns in Venezuela did not last long. At thirteen, I asked my parents to send me to boarding school, and, as their marriage was falling apart, they thought it best for me to study abroad. The secular American school I went to in Lugano in Switzerland had girls and boys representing over fifty countries and of all religious affiliations. The sense of not belonging disappeared. In that melting pot of cultures, I was relieved to find that no one cared whether your prayers were directed to Jesus, Hashem, Allah, or someone else entirely. And nobody visited my home to be shocked by my father’s peculiar taste in art.
In fact, I was first called Jewish by a complete stranger in an auditorium at Tufts University, when I was an undergraduate.
It was the end of the orientation process for international freshmen. The university had invited us to arrive a few days early to meet others in the class and familiarize ourselves with American campus life. I, together with hundreds of others, had duly complied.
As I left one of the talks, I was approached by a slight young man with short brown hair and intense eyes. Unlike most of the other students present, he had a rather formal manner, not least because he was wearing a jacket and tie. He spoke to me in Spanish and introduced himself as Elliot from Guadalajara.
“I was told we should meet,” he pronounced benignly. “Because we are both good-looking, Latin American, and Jewish.”
He beamed. I was baffled.
I have never been good at witty comebacks, but I was pleased to manage: “I am sorry, but you are mistaken. You see, I am not Jewish, and you are not good-looking.”
“You need glasses,” Elliot responded cheerfully, undeterred. “But you are Latin and, of course, you are Jewish. With a name like Neumann, you have to be.”
“Wrong. I was raised Catholic.”
“Where is your father from?”
“He is Venezuelan, but he was born in Prague,” I answered.
“You can call yourself what you want, but you must be Jewish. Many Jews left Europe before and after the war; your father must have been one of them.”
I had genuinely never thought about it until then. Was my family Jewish? Was my father a Jew? Was I? What did that even mean? Is one’s identity predetermined by inheritance? Or are you who you choose to be?
My roommate had brought her treasured telephone from home and connected it to a socket in our freshman room. It was in the shape of a laughing Mickey Mouse. To emphasize his laughter, one white-gloved hand was placed as if he was holding his belly just above his red shorts. The other held a plastic yellow receiver. The buttons were set out by his yellow boots. I used Mickey to call my father and tell him that all was well after my first week.
“Something funny happened the other day,” I added. “A Mexican boy I had never met before, all dressed up in a suit, came up to me saying I was Jewish.”
My father was intrigued and asked who he was. I told him and explained that Elliot had said that Neumann was a Jewish name.
My father’s initial laughter quietened.
“He said I must have Jewish blood.”
There was a pause.
His voice now came through, coarse and tremulous. He was upset. I had seldom heard my father upset. “Jewish blood. Jewish blood? Do you realize what you are saying? You are never to use that expression. Do you hear me? Never. That is what the Nazis said about us.”
Without further explanation, he hung up. I do not know if I started to cry before or after he did so. I stared at the enormous frozen smile on Mickey Mouse’s face, his tongue sticking out, and put the bright yellow receiver back in his white-gloved hand. I called back, kept pushing the buttons by the yellow boots, but all I heard was the continuous beeping of a busy line.