Eva Perlman and My Nose

“Get out of here or I’ll smash your teeth down your throat!”

Who uttered this terrible threat? A dangerous desperado being apprehended by a cop? A lunatic about to be dragged back to the asylum? No. My mother-in-law.

She had walked into her apartment in Bat Yam to find some teenage hoodlum with her precious jewellery box in her hands. It never occurred to her to scream or run away. She merely lunged at him and threatened him with the aforementioned words. He didn’t know how to handle this tornado of female fury, and took the wisest possible action. He bolted.

But Eva Perlman was used to handling bigger fry than an Israeli delinquent. She had managed to survive three successive concentration camps by using not only her sharp wits but also her muscles. In Belsen the Polish girls stuck together and took all the water rations for themselves. Eva told them it wasn’t fair. They should distribute the water equally amongst all the inmates. They laughed at her. She beat them up. They got the point.

You probably have in your mind an image of my mother-in-law as being some wild Amazon, but she wasn’t. She was quite small for a woman, and one of the most refined people I have ever met. But she was physically very strong. When my husband wasn’t around, if ever the children or I needed a hard nut cracked open, or a stuck jar top unscrewed, we knew that the best person to turn to was Grandma. She could do it all with just a slight, almost imperceptible, flick of the wrist.

At the beginning of our relationship she didn’t like me, for the same reason that many mothers of husbands don’t like their daughters-in-law: I wasn’t good enough for her son. He was descended from the Chacham Zvi, Satmar Chassidim, and a long line of talmidim chachamim. To the best of my knowledge, my ancestors never did anything more impressive than sell fish and old clothes. He was a scientist. I was a glorified telex operator.

As far as she was concerned, I didn’t have anything going for me but my nose.

I remember the first time I met her. She hardly spoke to me, but just stared and stared at the centre of my face. Later she phoned up one of the aunts and pronounced judgment on me. I didn’t have two shekels to my name, and was obviously not very intelligent, but I did possess a beautiful nose.

I don’t know why she latched on to my nose so much, as her own was nothing to be ashamed of (on a teenage girl it would have been called pert), but she did seem to have a thing about it. She fervently hoped that our children wouldn’t inherit my brains, but she did hope that they would get my olfactory organ. (Here she was sadly out of luck. My son has her nose, and my daughter’s comes from the other side of the family.)

When she first came to Israel, as a widow, Eva lived in an apartment by herself. When her health deteriorated, she came to stay with us.

Stuck alone with me for most of the day, she was quick to discover yet more flaws in my character. I was a slob, by which she meant that I didn’t clean the apartment with a toothbrush every day. I was a lousy cook, by which she meant that I couldn’t whip up those East European dishes she was addicted to, and which seemed to me just watery piles of fat and flour. In those rare moments when she felt any kind of affection for me, she would stroke her nose, smile at me, and point at my own. It was highly complimentary, but I wanted to be more to her than just a nice nose. I wanted to build a good relationship with her. I was at a loss how to do it, though.

And then I had an idea. My husband had told me that she would never talk about the Holocaust to anyone. I had an instinct that she was dying to talk about it, but only if she felt that the listener was really interested. And I was right. The moment she realised that I honestly wanted to hear about the hell she had gone through, our relationship began to take a friendlier turn. She told me how she used to smear her own tears inside her mouth in the camps because she had been so thirsty. She laughed when she punched the air with her fists to demonstrate what she had done to the thieving Polish girls.

I knew she was actually beginning to like me when she confessed to me the one fault she could find in her precious only son: it was his nose. Now, up until then I had thought that my husband had a normal, masculine nose, but Eva kindly pointed out to me otherwise. It was too wide here and here, and there was that disastrous bump which stood out a mile in photos. It just wasn’t the right kind of nose for an intelligent man to have.

Eva also began telling me about her life after the war. When she was liberated from the camps, she went back to Czechoslovakia. There she met and married my future father-in-law, the smartest man in the world (according to her) who could speak ten languages fluently. He had spent the war years in a Russian labour camp.

Together they tried to build a normal life, but times were hard for the Jews. It was difficult for a Jew to find work, and as there was little money, food was scarce.

In order to survive, my father-in-law began dealing in the black market. He made a success of it, but someone snitched on him, and he was put in prison for a year. The family was now without their one and only breadwinner, and Eva knew that unless she could bribe the anti-Semitic authorities her husband would be beaten or starved to death. There was only one option open to her. She began dealing on the black market herself.

It was a highly dangerous business. You never knew which of your smiling neighbours, or the people you exchanged goods with in dark alleyways, were really working for the Czech secret police. And she knew that if she were caught, her children would be taken away from her and brought up to be “good communists” in some state institution, which meant that she would never see them again. But somehow she made it through the year without anyone tattling on her, and was able to pay the prison officials enough for them to leave her husband alone, and feed her children.

Verbal communication between us was often difficult, and sometimes there were misunderstandings between us that only my husband could sort out. I didn’t know Yiddish, or any of the umpteen East European languages she could speak. She didn’t know English, and her Hebrew was terrible.

She once pointed to my sweet little children, laughed, and said: “Hitler’s jokes!” Now I don’t think any Jewish mother would be thrilled to hear her children described as Hitler’s jokes, and I was certainly no exception. I was very offended, to say the least. What kind of talk was that? My husband was at work, but as soon as he came home I told him that his mother had finally flipped. He confronted her, and soon they were both laughing. It turned out that she meant my children were jokes against Hitler. He had been determined to wipe the Jews off the face off the earth, and yet here were two Jews who had been born in no less a place than Eretz Israel years after Hitler himself was dead.

Thereafter she would sometimes refer to the children as “Hitler’s jokes”. I can’t say I ever thrilled to hear it, but I could appreciate what she meant.

Eva taught me how great HaShem’s gift of food is. I once walked into the kitchen and gaped at the sight that met my eyes. It seemed as if the entire contents of our fridge had been transferred to the two plates Eva was holding in her hands. I knew she liked to eat, but this was ridiculous. I burst out laughing. She looked me straight in the eye and said: “Do you know if you’re going to have food to eat tomorrow?” It dawned on me. Throughout the Holocaust, and those early years in Czechoslovakia, she had never been certain that there would be food to eat later. Food should certainly never be taken for granted. That’s why we have to thank HaShem for it.

Eva’s end came suddenly, and was totally unexpected.

One day my husband had an emergency situation to take care of at work and was obliged to work all night, so Eva and I were alone with the children. After I put them in bed, I took care of bits and pieces of housework. She didn’t seem to feel like talking. I was very tired that evening, and went to sleep earlier than usual.

That night I had a dream about a man who at the time was working in the same hi-tech company as me. In the dream he seemed very significant, though in reality, I never said anything more to him than “Good morning”. The funny thing was, that I knew I was dreaming.

At one point I said to him: “I have to go now. You know I have to get up for work.”

“Don’t go,” he said. “You won’t like what you’re going to find.”

“But I have to go,” I insisted. “You know I do. Otherwise I’ll be late for work.”

“Well,” he said. “I’m warning you. You won’t like what you’re going to find.”

At last I was able to get away from him, and I woke up. Immediately I noticed that the light was on in the kitchen, and was worried that it would wake up the children. I got up and went to turn it off.

And there she was. She was sitting on the floor with her back against the cabinet facing me, and dead.

We never discovered the actual cause of her death. She appeared to have just died, for no other reason than that HaShem had decided her time was up.

I still think about Eva a lot. It’s true that I might not have been the daughter-in-law of her dreams, but I think in the end she was able to appreciate my good points. I had given her “Hitler’s jokes”, and she could see how much I was devoted to her son.

At any rate I like to believe that before she died I was more to her than just a nice nose.

Eva Perlman and My Nose