The following extract is from The Spectacle Salesman's Daughter by Viola Roggenkamp. It is a novel about fourteen-year-old Fania, growing up in post-Holocaust Germany. Her mother Alma is Jewish and loves Christmas. As she says when her children complain that she doesn't follow Jewish traditions: 'We can celebrate the Jewish New Year and Yom Kippur so far as I'm concerned, but no one's taking my Christmas away from me.'
All of a sudden it's Christmas, and my mother enters into competition with German Christianity, and German Christian mothers in particular. Christmas is the biggest load of nonsense, it's true, but who minds nonsense when it's as lovely as Christmas can be. You have to give it to the Christians, this festival is a good idea, it could easily be a Jewish idea, but it isn't, nonetheless we celebrate it, and Alma Schiefer puts on the loveliest Christmases of all, each one lovelier than the last, but it costs money.
My father lays banknotes at her feet.
He won't have a single pfennig left, my grandmother warns her daughter, but he's giving his money to me, she says, and he laughs and raises his eyebrows and his hands. He can be wonderfully Jewish sometimes.
What's most important of all is the food, roast goose of course, two geese of course, the second to make pickled goose, it could be three really, anyway at least two, as for the bird, well we'll have to see, and stuffed goose neck on challah forChristmas Eve, that's when we'll need the first one, or should we have carp instead, and the tree, it must be really big, Paul, you sort out the tree, our ceiling's a good three metres fifty high, I'm quite sure of that, anyway we could always cut a bitoff the end, stop grinning like that, why's Pappy grinning, just because I said cut a bit off the end, was Jesus circumcised by the way, how should I know, ask his mother Mary, they always drape a cloth in front of it ...
... On Christmas Eve Vera and I have always stayed in bed until the evening. Not this year. I'm too old now. If we don't stay in bed, Vera grumbled, we'll have to help, it's always been so lovely just staying in bed. That's true ... So we stayed in bed. We listened to the radio for hour after hour, from early morning right through until it was time for presents, while she ran from one end of the flat to the other, rustling, crackling, whispering, giggling, her excitement came washing into our bedroom, ... Smells and sounds and voices reached us from the kitchen. My grandmother stood in the kitchen and stirred and chopped and kneaded and cleared things away for her daughter and passed things to her and did the washing-up. My mother, her black hair loose and powdered with flour, brought us little bits to try, a piece of goose neck roasted in goose fat and stuffed with goose liver, mince and marjoram, a pickled goose wing, a little dish of lemon posset, a piece of lightning cake with flaked almonds, a slice of poppy-seed challah, is it alright like that, is anything missing. Vera and I would sit back against our pillows and try everything out, she would watch our mouths, we'd taste a bit and sigh with delight, she would beam, we would beam, she'd roll her eyes and adopt a mysterious air, and so the day would pass, far too slowly for us, far too quickly for her, outside it would get dark.
The previous evening she'd stood on the stepladder until very late decorating the tree. Vera and I weren't allowed into the room. But afterwards she told us exactly what had gone on behind the closed door and so I know all about it as if I had been there. My father sat in his armchair and made comments from down below, you need another bauble there, that candle's too close to the branch above, Alma, if you leave it there it won't be lit under any circumstances, I won't allow it. He was drinking cognac with his sister. Aunt Mimi was drinking to numb the miseries of her love life, my father was drinking to numb the sense of giddiness he felt at the sight of his wife high above him, standing there in her tiny slippers with pink pompoms on the slender rungs of a ladder only just below the ceiling. My grandmother was sewing dolls' clothes, Aunt Mimi was crocheting dolls' shoes. Our dolls were always reclothed at Christmas time, even my old teddy bear. Needless to say they celebrated Christmas with us, all of them, every year. They sat under the Christmas tree, my mother needed them as part of the decorations, it was unthinkable that the dolls with their sweet-sad smiles should remain in our dark bedroom while His Mysterious Majesty the Christmas tree stood resplendent in the big room. We couldn't do that to them. They sat on the floor amongst the branches on Christmas blankets made of paper, they played with the red baubles and reached out with their tiny dolls' fists for chocolate pine cones wrapped in gold foil and filled with Melba cream, the Christmas room was their domain, they were very probably non-Jewish. My little naked dolls, the ones that had been trampled on, stayed hidden under my bed in their cotton-wool-lined cardboard boxes.
Don't you think you're overdoing it a bit, enquired Aunt Mimi looking up from her crocheting, her voice already somewhat thick from the cognac.
What do you mean, asked my mother from her perch near the top of the tree, if you can't see the stitches properly any more then let Mummy do it instead, the children notice if a doll hasn't got new things and I can't leave any of them out, that's just not on, can you hand me up that box of ring biscuits please and tell me if you think there needs to be more tinsel at the back there.
At Christmas time Aunt Mimi's lover Hubert Arnold Zinselmayer, chartered engineer from the jolly old Rhineland, is stuck with his Christian family. Even my mother thinks this is fair enough, though she cannot understand how a woman can allow her man to have another woman. But his wife doesn't know anything about it, said Vera, and my mother exclaimed in astonishment His wife! I mean Mimi, how does she put up with it, I could never square it with my sense of dignity. Aunt Mimi can't square it with her sense of dignity either, which is why she drinks cognac and seeks refuge at Christmas with her Jewish sister-in-law.
When my father went to the door on the twenty-fourth of December in his dark-blue suit and winter coat to go and collect his sister, and my mother called after him Make sure you're back by six, Paul, and don't let her tempt you into having a cognac, this meant there was only an hour to go before presents were given out, and Vera and I would get out of bed and wander off into my grandmother's room to get dressed at long last. The tension grew and grew, how much longer would my mother be able to bear it, Vera and I couldn't manage to beam any more, and nor could she. The final minutes of waiting were minutes where one could never know or certain whether they really were the final minutes. Then the feeling would well up that hopefully they weren't, that the moment wouldn't actually come when I have to be happy.
On Christmas Day evening the expected duly happened: she finally collapsed. She'd felt unwell the whole time, she hadn't been able to eat anything, almost no goose and very little carp. She sank onto the sofa with the words No, I don't want to lie down. My father took off her high heels and her skirt, loosened her suspenders and put the new camel-hair blanket on top of her. What can we do for you, he asked. Nothing, nothing at all, she said, and fell asleep, listen to records by all means, we heard her murmur, it won't bother me. Josef Schmidt was singing, my father loves the little Jew with the big tenor voice, he was even smaller than my mother, he'd died before he could get on the ship that was to take him to America. It was better to let him go on singing, if everything went quiet she'd wake up and in her exhausted state she'd feel frightened. A good hour before midnight she did finally wake up, refreshed and hungry for roast goose. One goose had already been eaten, the second was being pickled, so the third now made its entry, and as it had already been roasted my father carved off some pieces and served them to his recumbent wife on a tray with a bottle of champagne. We all sat around her temporary bed and watched her, Vera and me and my grandmother and my father. She gnawed carefully at the bony bits, she smeared jelly left over from the roasting onto pieces of breast and silently, pensively gobbled them up.
It is a Jewish festival after all, really, she said chewing away on a large mouthful of food, the mother's Jewish, the son's Jewish, it doesn't really matter who the father was. She picked up a drumstick and ate its crispy skin. And that's something else the Germans have pinched from the Jews: they celebrate the eve of the actual festival, because of course Christmas isn't until the following day. She tore meat off the drumstick with her teeth and washed it down with champagne. To round everything off, she produced a thunderous burp, offered her apologies, and sank back into the sofa cushions with a blissful smile.
Posted 12/12/2008 08:37:50 by The Little, Brown Santa with 0 comments.
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