Free The Watchmaker's Daughter: A Memoir by Sonia Taitz Page B

untoward exoticism.
    I wished to see Billy’s name, along with mine, on that luminous Desilu pillow. Wild Billy—the exquisite, dirt-covered boy in my playground. I chased him around once—got free of my Bubbe and chased him. He stopped running away, then came at me and threw me down abruptly, shoving dirt by the handful into my mouth. I was totally shocked, but glad of the information. Billy had talked to me in his own language. It was foreign to my poignant Yiddish, and even his dirt had the taste of life in it.

Operation Blue-Violet
     
    A LL MOTHERS WORRY about their children, but mine must have been uniquely afraid of losing me or my brother to some sudden tragedy, and uniquely aware that such disasters could, and did, occur.
    As a small child, I kept getting cold after cold, bronchitis, fevers, croup, and chronic tonsillitis. I remember my doctor, a twinkling Jewish immigrant from Germany, coming regularly to see me. Dr. Hershowitz was an old-world gentleman, patient, genteel, and kind. Though he was a pediatrician, he himself was childless. When I visited his home office, his wife, a stout, middle-aged woman with yellow-blonde hair and piercing blue eyes would lead me into a waiting room that held a birdcage of canaries. Having little birds was very Mittel-European, very bourgeois. Though their apartment was as small as my own, and the “waiting room” really a dark foyer, I could envision the large, airy sitting room in Frankfurt where Dr. and Mrs. Hershowitz may once have served tea and cakes, as their canaries twittered by sunny French windows.
    “See my Fritzl sing to my Dietzl,” Frau Hershowitz would say, or something to that effect. (I always wanted to laugh, but she was dead serious about those fragile birds, who, even when dead and replaced, were always named Fritzl and Dietzl.) After listening to the songbirds, I’d take a seat on a tiny little chair by a tiny little table and take a comic book down from a shelf. All the comics were Disney, and all were about the Duck family. I especially loved reading about Daisy, who wore elegant shoes and screamed hysterically at Donald. It seemed a good turnabout, so unlike the situation in my own home, where no one dared talk back to my father, much less raise their voice to him.
    When I was really sick, Dr. Hershowitz would pay a house call, carrying a heavy leather black bag that closed on top with a big brass snap. Out of it would come his large rubbery stethoscope. The old doctor would meticulously insert the earpieces and, after asking me to lift my pajama top, hoist a cold metal disk to my chest. In German (which I somehow instantly understood), he would ask me to breath hard and to cough. Removing the earpieces slowly, the doctor would then shake his head dramatically at my mother, eyes raised to meet her consternation. Sitting on the edge of my bed with folded hands, he would say:
    “Sie ist echt krank.” She is truly ill.
    The language was remarkably like Yiddish. But there was a formality to it, a tightness of the lips and tongue, which made it seem as though stern things were being spoken of, and in this case they were.
    “Echt krank?” My mother would answer with her own perfect German accent, of which I could see she was proud. She seemed transformed from her Yiddisheh Mama self when she spoke like that. There was a layer of her that was of course concerned about the sickness being discussed, and another in which she was a lady, educated and well-postured, who could converse, any day, along the streets of the Danube or Rhine. After all, she had lived in Germany for years after the war, awaiting her American papers, and even dated a German Jewish doctor, whom, she always noted when telling the tale, drove her around in a convertible. In Germany, my mother apparently was Grace Kelly. Here, however, she was a tired mother with a pale, black-haired daughter who always seemed to have bronchitis, strep, croup, or tonsillitis.
    The fact of my illness