What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [77]
The shunga book ignited Naomi’s curiosity and interest as nothing else. That day she also bought her son a pair of Chinese engravings and a bronze sculpture of a threesome, with two men balancing a woman between them, held by her ankles. Now armed with the secret that dealers hide their erotic treasures, out of fear that they may offend some buyers or run into trouble with the authorities, and need to be coaxed to show them, Naomi began to hunt in earnest.
Born December 5, 1934, Naomi grew up in an affluent universe, the daughter of New Jersey cemetery owner Jerome Sisselman and his wife, Lorraine. “I wasn’t exposed to the world at all,” she said. “A kosher hotel in the Catskills and a kosher hotel in Miami. Those were my boundaries.”
That world began to expand when she was eighteen and babysitting an older sister’s children in Clifton. The fruit and vegetable vendor stopped by in his truck. Naomi went out to buy some things on a list her sister Harriet had left for her. When the transaction was complete, the peddler asked, “Who are you? Where’s Mrs. Cohen?”
Naomi had thinned out from her chunkier childhood, and the peddler had not recognized her. She explained who she was.
“That’s you. You look like a kalleh moid,” the grocer exclaimed, using the Yiddish expression for a girl of marriageable age. He asked if she had a boyfriend or was engaged. When she answered no to both questions, the peddler asked if a friend’s nephew might call her. “Sure,” she said. But as the peddler walked back to his truck, he turned. He had forgotten to mention one thing. “My friend’s nephew is a refugee,” he said.
Naomi was a little confused about why that might be an issue. “He’s Jewish, I presume,” she said, believing that as long as she dated a Jew her parents would have no immediate objections, a notion that proved mistaken.
When Siegbert “Siggi” Wilzig called, she agreed to go on a date. As they talked that first night, she learned that he was ten years older than she was and, more important, that he was a survivor of the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Mauthausen. Naomi assumed that her parents would be even more likely to embrace him for having suffered through the worst of the Nazi nightmare. Moreover, Siggi was ambitious. He had arrived in the United States penniless in the midst of a blizzard in 1947. His first job was shoveling snow in the Bronx. Five years later, he was already moving up in the world. He had started a business with another entrepreneurial refugee, buying stacks of fabric that matched the material used by manufacturers for their current handbags. The two men sewed and sold matching change purses, then the fashion. But it was too early in Siggi’s career for Naomi’s parents to see beyond their prejudices.
Not only was Siggi an uneducated refugee, but as a concentration camp survivor, he was suspect in their eyes. “They thought he was damaged goods. They worried that he was sick or weak or psychologically injured. He survived. How? Maybe he was a collaborator?” Naomi said, rehearsing her parents’ questions. “One night, six months after our first date, we went to the movies in Passaic with my parents to see From Here to Eternity. When we got home, Siggi asked them if he could marry me.” They responded with an unambiguous “No.”
So, on New Year’s Eve 1954, Naomi and Siggi eloped. They tracked down the only area justice working that night—the police court judge at the Passaic County, New Jersey, jail. After they were married, Naomi snuck home with the marriage unconsummated. She pleaded again