Massie - Art of a Jewish Woman: The True Story of How a Penniless Holocaust Escapee Became an Influential Modern Art Connoisseur

Art of a Jewish Woman

The True Story of How a Penniless Holocaust Escapee Became an Influential Modern Art Connoisseur.

BY

Henry Massie

booksBnimble Publishing

New Orleans, La.

Art of a Jewish Woman

The True Story of How a Penniless Holocaust Escapee Became an Influential Modern Art Connoisseur.

Copyright 2012 by Henry Massie

Cover by Nevada Barr

ISBN: 978-161750-991-9

www.booksbnimble.com

All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

First booksBnimble Publishing electronic publication: March 2012

Digital book(s) (epub and mobi) produced by: Kimberly A. Hitchens,

Art of a Jewish Woman

And what a vibrant voice! Its like a stream of water that fills your mouth.

Frederico Garcia Lorca, Yerma , Act 1, Scene 2

Why would anyone want to write about me? I am just a girl from a poor little village in Poland. But I had so many adventures. I cant believe all the things that happened to me. Sometimes truth is better than fiction because it is more unbelievable.

Felice Ozerovicz Massie

PART ONE. FRANCE

Language of Love

The train with four wooden carriages stuttered to a halt at the Lebanese crossing into Palestine near noon on a September day in 1935. Felice and her companion stepped into the sun, feeling the intense heat, tasting the sting of salt from the Mediterranean Sea to the west. For a moment a breeze from the mountains on the east brought a hint of freshness. The wild grass along the tracks was burnt golden. Everything was seared, scorched, except for the flowers in the border stations window planter boxes. Dust hung in the air from a gravel road that paralleled the tracks.

Inside the stone building, a British officer examined passengers travel documents and passports. When Felices turn came, the crisply uniformed colonel looked at her bare shoulders and her short beige and cream linen dress. She was beautiful, petite, just five feet tall, her long black hair in a chignon, lipstick and eye liner carefully applied. Then he looked at the man by her side. A marriage certificate issued the day before by a rabbi in Beirut said they were husband and wife. The man looked malnourished. He had a red beard and long ear-locks, and large spectacles covered his face. His black suit was all dusty, and his head was covered with a large Hassidic black fedora. The couple did not speak to each other.

Felice presented her documentsa Polish passport with an exit stamp from Marseilles dated two weeks earlier, and an entry stamp into Lebanon dated the week before, plus her French university diploma. She was twenty-five and had just graduated from the University of Nancy, France, with a doctors degree in dental surgery from the medical school. The colonel knew the deception: more and more Jews were using fictive marriages to make their way into Palestine as Hitlers Nazis spread anti-Semitism into Poland and closed off opportunities for Jews to make a living.

The colonel was under orders to do his part at the border to stop the flow of illegal immigrants into Palestine, which had been a British mandate since the end of World War I. There was a quota for Jews, intended to minimize conflicts with the Arab population. He asked Felice first in English, which she didnt know, then in French, Are the two of you married?

Yes, of course, she answered him.

What language do you have in common? he continued, probing the ruse.

But Felice and her newly certificated husband had no language in commonhe spoke Arabic and Hebrew, and she Polish, French, German, Yiddish, and some Russian. The language of love, she said in perfect melodious French, not missing a beat, flirting with the colonel.

His rejoinder: Tomorrow is my day off. I will meet you for dinner at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. She smiled at him. He stamped her entry visa!

The train steamed south. Sometimes it was within sight of the bright blue Mediterranean sand dunes bordering the tracks, sometimes inland among marshy wasteland, sometimes passing through orchards and citrus groves on land reclaimed from swamps by settlers from Russia and Poland. Occasionally there were Arab villages with stone houses and crops and fruit trees laid out in neat squares marked by low stone walls. Every once in a while cypress trees stood pencil thin, almost black like sentinels in rows along the edge of a field or road.

The carriage was humid and warm, windows pushed open to let in the salty air. A tall, skinny, coal black porter from the Sudan in a long white robe passed through the corridor with a tray of sweets, glasses, and a copper urn with mint tea. The train click-clacked and swayed from side to side. From her purse Felice took the letter her father Moses had sent her in France. Writing from their village in Poland, he had given her meticulous instructions, which she had read over and over and memorized in case she lost the letter. She was to go to Jerusalem with the man her father arranged for her to marry, and he would provide her with lodging and a job in return for the $200 her father had sent directly to him. The words and the trains click-clack and side-to-side sway lulled her like a metronome into daydreams, back to France.

In her reverie, she stood on the dock in Marseilles bidding Samy farewell. They had driven down from Nancy to Marseilles the day before. They were standing on the jetty. She wore her other dress, the black shirtwaist one hemmed just below her knees. She could only afford two and this one had served for school and going out on winter evenings. She grasped her small, battered suitcase. Inside it were her dental instruments, rolled in a cloth instrument case, and the precious French diploma that would allow her to earn a living. Even in high heels she had to stand on her tiptoes to reach Samys lips when the boats horn sounded. They tried to force normalcy into sadness. But they couldnt do it; the kiss was odd, not full, cautious.

I will write you. I will visit you. You will meet someone and have six children, he said.

I will have two children. One because I want children and a second to be safe in case something happens to the first. I will name the first one after you.

We will write. I will visit you in Palestine.

I will try to find a telephone when I am settled and call you.

It wasnt supposed to be that way. She thought they would marry when she graduated and live together in Neufchateau-des-Voges, not far from Nancy, not far from the Alps. Samy, a recent graduate from the medical school, had opened a practice there, and Felice planned to start a dental surgery practice. Samyfrom Bucharest, Romaniawas a legal immigrant with a right to work in France because of a French-Romanian agreement. Once married, Felice too could stay and obtain a work permit. Without marriage to a legal resident, Poles could only study in France and had to depart after graduation. But then Samy became ill, and having children was no longer possible.

The boat horn sounded again, louder, more peremptory, and Felice ascended the gangway slowly. She took a few steps and looked back. Samy had his handkerchief out to wipe away tears. Felice, too, started crying and bent her head down and pushed forward almost to the top of the gangway before she turned around again, ready to abandon the plan and rush back to Samy. He was gone. She took out her handkerchief and composed herself as she stepped onto the deck.

Aboard the large shipthe first she had ever been onshe settled into its rhythms of meals and port calls. She sunned on the deck and let her sadness ebb away. In Genoa and Naples she watched people disembark and embark and saw train cars shuttle on rail sidings set into cobblestones and pushcarts laden with luggage move to and from the boat. She had only the little money Samy gave her to get to Jerusalem. Her ticket paid for meals and a second-class berth.