The Watchmaker's Daughter: A Memoir
Sonia Taitz
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 097556188X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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With drives of her own. It is here, during the Reynolds-Taylor standoff, that my mother began to buy up all the magazines on the stand; together, we hungrily devoured them. Did I ever ask my mother to explicate the hair-color valences of this story? Did I ever say, “Could this raven-haired temptress have been saved? Would the Nazis have hated her, too?” To my mother, this was just a game. To me, it was a growing obsession, if not a strategy. One day, I would venture out and save the Jews. I did.
Answered the doorbell or the phone, he sounded like Lurch, the Frankensteinian butler from the Addams Family TV show. “WHO IS DIS?” he would rumble, like a giant saying “Fee, Fie, Fo, Fum.” Sabbath brought a change to everything. Simon never worked on that day, and the importunate ticking of clocks (like the ravages of illness) was ignored. Instead, the synagogue became my father’s sanctuary. He would arrive as soon as the doors opened and take his seat on the corner of a long wooden bench, a.
Endlessly polished. Within the showcase lay velveteen trays holding jewelry; my mother wiped these treasures daily with a chamois cloth to make them sparkle. And work soothed his soul as nothing else could. With the loupe in his eye, my father seemed to see everything. Even when a customer came into the store, he might not look up, so immersed was he in the intricate mysteries of his timepieces. My mother, his assistant in the shop, would dash up to them and eagerly say, “Can I help you?”.
Now, my mother likes knowing that poor immigrants come here for sanctuary; she understands them, with their close ties to lost worlds. She understands the Spanish-speaking grandmas who wear plastic combs in her hair, the little girls who wear swirly polyester dresses and ruffled socks. She loves seeing the big families, all together (she would love to have such a big family, with daughters who never felt they needed to outdo their families with academics or fancy-shmancy jobs in sterile offices).
Mattress. I never learned to make that cake, chopped liver, flanken, or matzoh balls. All I can do is order in, and I blame feminism for that, for my contempt for her thankless domestic sacrifices. I am thanking her now as my children and I begin to try her old recipes. They praise Mother Theresa for devoting her life to others, so why not Gita Taitz? The soup for housebound Mrs. Schroodel, the packages of warm clothes for relatives stuck in Siberia, the fish sandwiches in onion rolls for my.