A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [193]
The air between them in their gracious living room somehow seemed to stiffen.
“Yes and no.” She insisted on making clear that the look Emmanuel was giving her would have no effect on what she had to say. “No, because I wouldn't have been married and all, but I do regret not having lived in Israel.”
Emmanuel looked away. Their grandson was watching from a distant couch with bemused fascination.
“If he would agree right now/’ she continued, “I would move to Israel.”
“And leave all our children here?” Emmanuel challenged.
“Ah, you see, there it is.”
“You wouldn't want that.”
“No?”
He shook his head.
“I am just more steadfast than you.”
“One of my brothers once almost went to Israel…”
And the conversation safely passed on to the story of how Sam had left Poland.
32
In Amsterdam
MEIJER'S KOSHER BUTCHER AND SANDWICH SHOP WAS too new and uncluttered to have any kind of a look other than clean. It was in the Rivierenbuurt, one of those twentieth-century parts of Amsterdam where everything was built to show off a little extra space because it had been settled by people from the center in search of more room. Sal Meijer and his son complained of a declining business, but they were busy most of the time. It was a pleasant place to be—a place to meet other Jews, which was not that easy to do in Amsterdam anymore. “I come for the society, not the food,” Victor Waterman, now in his nineties, would say to annoy Sal. In 1975 he had retired from the kosher chicken business in New Jersey and moved back to Amsterdam with this advice: “When you are from Europe, you have to go to America when you are young, make a lot of money, and then get out. Don't die in America!”
For years, when Waterman ran into people whom he had not seen since he left, he had this little joke he would try. They would say, “Where have you been?”
“In New Jersey,” he would say, hoping they took the bait.
“What were you doing in New Jersey?”
He would lower his voice, turn his face sinister, and say, “I was a killer.”
“A killer!”
Quickly he would shoot an index finger straight up and lighten his tone, “But kosher.”
One of Waterman's sons had also moved back to Amsterdam and had a prosperous art dealership. The two were inseparable. But in 1991 the son died of a heart attack and Waterman quarreled with his grandchildren and was alone. He settled in the Rivier-enbuurt and was a regular, a kind of local character in the sandwich shop part of Sal Meijer's. He never talked about his son, just as he had avoided the distant memories of his murdered family.
Sal Meijer was also a well-loved local character. People didn't know that in the same long, narrow, bay-windowed apartment he had found after the war, his nights were spent screaming. In quiet Holland, where people control themselves and don't carry on, where the story of Anne Frank was endlessly promoted instead of discussing the Dutch record under occupation, where Resistance heros increased their ranks in the popular mythology every decade, but collaborationists and deportees were not to be mentioned, more and more survivors and children of survivors were beginning to scream.
The Rivierenbuurt had been settled in the 1920s. The neighborhood sprawled with low buildings of handsome wooden art deco details and wide streets that told Amsterdamers that here there would be space to waste. The old Jodenbreestraat neighborhood never became Jewish again. There were not enough Jews. The synagogues of the neighborhood, except the Esnoga, remained in ruins. To the Jewish Community, they were ugly reminders of missing Jews. The Community gladly would have torn them down, but the city regarded them as historical landmarks