Taitz - The Watchmakers Daughter: a Memoir

Table of Contents

Praise for The Watchmakers Daughter

A heartbreaking memoir of healing power and redeeming devotion, Sonia Taitzs The Watchmakers Daughter has the dovish beauty and levitating spirit of a psalm. The suffering and endurance of Taitzs parentsHolocaust death camp graduates who met at the Lithuanian Jewish Survivors Ball in a New York hotel (imagine Steven Spielberg photographing that dance-floor tableau)form the shadow-hung backdrop of a childhood in a high-octane, postwar America where history seems weightless and tragedy a foreign import, a Hollywood paradise of perky blondes, Pepsodent smiles, and innocent high-school hijinks where our author and heroine longs to fit in. Although the wonder years that Taitz scrupulously, tenderly, beautifully, often comically renders arent that far removed from us, they and the Washington Heights she grew up in, the shop where her father repaired watches like a physician tending to the sick tick of time itself, the grand movie houses where the image of Doris Day sunshined the giant screen, have acquired the ache and poignance of a lost, Kodachrome age. A past is here reborn and tenderly restored with the love and absorption of a daughter with a final duty to perform a last act of fidelity.

James Wolcott, vanity Fair columnist and author of Lucking Out

Sonia Taitzs memoir of growing up the daughter of a master watch repairman who survived the Holocaust is also a haunting meditation on time itself. Taitz writes with a painters eye and a poets voice.

Mark Whitaker, author of My Long Trip Home

Sonia Taitzs memoir of coming of age in postwar America is unusually gentle, loving, and insightful. This books understanding of family dynamics and the realities of the American Dream will resonate with us all.

Joshua Halberstam, author of A Seat at the Table

Sonia Taitz captures time in this deeply moving memoir of a womans journey back to herself. The Watchmakers Daughter is written with a wise eye and a generous heart. Unforgettable! Christina Haag, author of Come to the Edge

Praise for In the Kings Arms

Beguiling ... Taitz zigzags among her culturally disparate characters, zooming in on their foibles with elegance and astringency.

The New York Times Book Review

In the province of gifted poets, playwrights and novelists.

ForeWord Reviews

I thought often of Evelyn Waughthe smart talk, the fey Brits, country houses, good clothes, lineage for centuries... Even the heavy moments have verve and wit.

Jesse Kornbluth, vanity Fair essayist and editor of HeadButler.com

In her gloriously rendered novel, In the Kings Arms, Sonia Taitz writes passionately and wisely about outsiders, and what happens when worlds apart slam into each other.

Betsy Carter, author of

The Puzzle King and Nothing to Fall Back On

Also by Sonia Taitz

FICTION

In the Kings Arms

NONFICTION

Mothering Heights

PLAYS

Whispered Results

Couch Tandem

The Limbo Limbo

Darkroom

Domestics

Cut Paste Delete Restore

Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost, to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

EMMA LAZARUS
Inscription at base of the Statue of Liberty,
New York Harbor

To the tempest-tossed,
and
to their children

Prologue: The Man Who Fixed Time

Y OU COULD SAY THAT my father was a watchmaker by trade, but that would be like saying that Nijinsky liked to dance. Fixing watches was not only his livelihood but his life. This skill had saved him when he had been imprisoned at the death camp of Dachau, during the Second World War, and he continued to fix watches until the day he died. Simon Taitz was nothing less than a restorer of time. And I was his daughter, born to continue in his lifeworkrestoration and repair.

The minutes in my childhood home went by slowly and deliberately. They were accounted for by an endless series of clocks. Like the burghers of some old village, they sat around me as I listened to their secrets. Some kept the true hour; others were broken, chiming irregularly with dings and false, elaborate windups that led to weird silence. A few bombastically tolled the hours with notes that spread and reverberated. I was mesmerized by the whirly rotations within glass bell jars. I loved and feared the old cuckoos, with pendulums like overgrown Bavarian acorns. Clang and tick, pickaxe and wheel, a real hurly-burly.

My favorite was the one that sat on the breakfront in our apartment. Despite its size, this small mantel piece boomed throughout the house like an eight-foot grandfather clock. Westminster chimes, my father proudly explained as he wound it, a beautiful British diapason of notes, sometimes long, sometimes short, and ending with a hearty, chest-full boom-boom-boom. My fathers chest was large and round, his voice deep and resonant. I often thought that clock spoke for him and the dignified truth inside him. Time was company; it never left you. A look at a pleasant, numbered face, and youd practically hear it say: Yes, Im here. See? Im still marking the minutes. You can count on me.

When I think of my fathers face, I see the loupe, the watchmakers special magnifying glass. It was a small tube of black-painted metal worn on one eye, a mini-telescope that fit into the optical orbit as though it were part of the skull. Through the glass, my father surveyed a microcosmic ward of ailing tickers. His domain opened up with the tiny click of a pocket-watch door, releasing a magical world in which minute gears spun clockwise, counterclockwise, and back and forth, each with its own rhythm. Daily, he sat at his wooden workbench, presiding over the internal secrets of clocks, each revealing its tiny pulse as he restored it to the natural, universal order.

I thought of my father as a magical man and was in awe of him.

See whats inside? Still alive, hed say, opening the back of a pocket watch. My father could reverse time; my father could reverse fate. He could fix a broken face, a cracked and faded lens, and make it clear and true again. He could make a dead heart beat.

Though the phrase Arbeit macht frei was the notorious banner welcoming doomed souls to slavery in Auschwitz, my father did, in fact, feel freed by his work. It relaxed him into a state of patient grace. By the time I was born, he had been fixing clocks and watches for nearly three decades. Simon had learned his trade back in Lithuania, apprenticing to a master as a boy of fourteen. His father had died when he was three, when Cossacks, rampaging through his village, shot the young miller, leaving behind a young widow and three helpless children. This story was my first narrative.

Poor Bubbe Sonia! I would say about my paternal grandmother, after whom I was named.

Poor nothing, my father would answer. She was a special woman, strong and brave.

This Sonia Taitz, the original one, buried her husband on their land, sold the millstones, and fled their riverside home, escaping into what my father called deep Russia. I always imagined a dark, Slavic forest, and a young, Snow Whitelike woman, surrounded by menacing branches. Bright eyes in the night, sadists and murderers watching her and her three little children, my father, as in a fairy tale, the youngest. Her favorite.

The eldest, a bookish, lanky boy called Aaron, was sent away to wealthy relatives. They were not kind to him, and ultimately he ran away to Palestine and did manual labor with other raw immigrants. The middle child, Paula, was blue-eyed, dimpled, and flirtatious. After marrying hot and young, she and her husband were sent to Siberia by the Communists.