In America, Germany is Europe
Alicia Oltuski
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The nights I was still awake when she came home from the West Side, Mamma and I listened to the tapes she’d recorded of her playing piano in the Julliard practice rooms. Then she’d put on CD versions by professionals. You could hear their breath through the recording, when they reached the recapitulation sections of sonatas and the sad parts of Chopin’s Ballades. When my mother said it, the word ‘piano’ had two syllables. Mamma started practicing on Julliard pianos when my second sister was born. She said she couldn’t concentrate at home, anymore. Most nights, after she put Felice to bed, Mamma would drive to the West Side and play. She got to know a security guard who issued her an ID to access the practice cubicles on the upper floors of the building. I used to worry that she’d get murdered in one of the small rooms, whose skinny windows you could block with only a card. The rooms had thick velvet curtains on their walls so that someone playing Beethoven didn’t disturb someone playing Debussy next door. I wondered if you could hear anything at all through the walls, in case of emergency. I imagined my mother having to defend herself with the fifteen by fifteen inch wooden boxes they put in Julliard cubicles for seats. They were difficult to lift but my mother is a tall woman.
When I started music at my Jewish day school, Mamma played a Wagner concerto in my room louder than it sounds with headphones on. She swayed her body like religious Jews do when they pray. It was a Deutsches Grammophone recording, the company whose CDs she bought in Germany and collected in little baskets in our living room.
“Fantastic. No?” she said. My music teacher had announced that we would be skipping Wagner because some students were morally opposed to listening to his music. “You can hear the excerpts on your supplementary tape at home, if you want,” Ms. Ballon said. She told us that Wagner said you could smell a Jew through his music. Mamma turned up the CD on softer parts and sang along.
In Frankfurt, in the summers, we played the piano in my mother’s mother’s basement. The Israelis that lived next door would walk by and shout to us from street level, “Where’s Barenboim?” They moved their fingers in the air. Mamma and I had gone to hear Barenboim give a master class at Julliard where he criticized students for gesturing while they played and talked about hand positions that resembled life rather than death. My mother’s friend, Shiela Silverman from New York, told her that Barenboim had conducted a Palestinian orchestra just that year. “That’s going a bit too far,” Shiela said.
In Frankfurt you could see the sidewalk from the piano room of my grandmother’s house. It used to be Mamma’s. There were still small Buddhas on the shelves from when Mamma was in her twenties. While my sisters and I were upstairs or at the park, my mother played piano. I could hear her train her left hand from a block away.
On Friday nights I slept at Oma and Opa’s house so that I could walk to synagogue. There were cone shaped stone obstructions that ran around the corners of the temple so that no explosive bearing cars or tanks could drive into its façade, even though a small car could get behind the barricades if it started half a block ahead. But Israeli guards stood by the entrance to spot suspicious people. They wore simulated army uniforms and sunglasses and said ‘shalom’ when you entered. On Saturdays, Mamma practiced piano and met us after services.
The main sanctuary was shaped like a dome and had bad acoustics. You couldn’t hear the cantor from the women’s section, only the mixed voices of congregants talking to each other in an overture.
My grandfather waved to me from downstairs when I arrived. If he didn’t see me, his friend would poke him with a prayer-shawl covered arm. Every so often, the rabbi banged on his prayer book for quiet. After the services, men my grandfather’s age would make blessings over vodka instead of kosher wine and argue over which songs they would sing that week. There was a long table and Opa always made me sit next to the rabbi’s daughters. They each had on variations of the same floral dress, the younger ones with shorter sleeves. Although there were five of them, none of them were my age.
After synagogue in Frankfurt, we met Mamma and her friends at Brizzi, an Italian locale. She was wearing sunglasses. More and more, Mamma wore sunglasses when it wasn’t sunny. Indoors, also. We called her ‘movie star.’
My parents and their friends talked about the Jewish talk show host with whom they’d attended high school and how he recently got busted for Cocaine and how that was bad for the Jews in Germany. Everyone asked where the baby had come from, Mamma had gotten so skinny.
When we got back to New York, the discs between my mother’s eleventh and thirteenth vertebrae exploded. She was supposed to give a concert in Steinway Hall for her fortieth birthday but they found two herniated spots. Instead, Mamma blasted the piece on the car radio when she picked me up from school. You could hear the Schumann Concerto from the open window when she drove down the block towards me.
Instead, we celebrated her birthday at a Russian mafia-run gypsy themed restaurant in Brighton Beach. Only four of the couples that came were American. The rest were from Germany. Pappa called them Greeners.
Mamma stayed home the following summer and called us in Germany at ten in the morning her time, four p.m. ours. “I’m calling you from a block of ice,” she said to me. She was seeing a physical therapist named Skip and had cut down piano to four hours a week.
“Too much klavier,” Oma said when people asked where my mother was.
When we came home, Mamma had renovated the living room. She propped framed scores signed by Daniel Barenboim and her piano teacher, Chaim, on the lid of the piano and got a metallic sound system that you could hear from the kitchen if you played it loud enough.
My mother had wanted to be an interior designer when she first moved to the States. Pappa joked that she revamped the apartment every time he left for business. He used to travel to Germany for three weeks at a time. Once, Mamma hired a newly immigrated Italian artist to paint the ceiling of my parents’ bedroom. His name was Cesare and he would stand on a ladder in his underwear painting grey and yellow columns in a cloudy sky. There are pictures of him in my sisters’ baby albums.
Last year, Mamma took the U.S citizens’ test. The embassy gave her a notebook with a diagram of checks and balances and a pamphlet on American history. My sisters tested her on the Star Spangled Banner. She’d played the anthem, as well as the Hatikva, on the piano for assemblies at our school, but she didn’t know most of the words.
“What are ramparts?”
Felice shrugged.
The night before the test, she renovated my sister’s room and hung six vintage mini-posters and a Broadway musical advertisement on the wall
“Give me liberty or give me death,” Mamma called to us from the kitchen. She always said Henry Patrick instead of Patrick Henry, but the official downtown passed her anyway.
Alicia Oltuski is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. She is an English major with a Creative Writing concentration. She co-edits the webwire of New Voices Magazine and contributes to the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin.