Free Hitler Made Me a Jew by Nadia Gould Page A

more it distressed me because she was always doing it at my mother’s expense. Then I realized why I had said I didn’t want to go live with them when Mr. Johnson had asked if we had friends with whom I could stay if I went to America.
    Meanwhile Luba was pleased with herself. She was a disciplined, meticulous housekeeper. Her favorite gesture was to show off with her index finger:
    â€œSee no dust!” She checked for dust in other people’s homes when their backs were turned and she smiled if she found some. I hoped that something would happen to her and that she would change and be nice, but she stayed the way she was. She spent money wisely. She knew good quality—where the real bargains were. She was well built and could wear anything. She was so lucky with herself. Her husband was kind, but she spoke of him as if he too were stupid like the rest of us. Her acquaintances thought she was an excellent housekeeper. In 1944 it was important for a woman to be a good housekeeper. Her friends and acquaintances came to play cards and have tea in her clean house, but they didn’t come to empty their hearts and seek comfort.
    Concord was a typical New England town with a Main Street and ubiquitous white churches with steeples and small white salt-boxes houses surrounded by stately trees, drugstores with comfortable leather booths where they served at any time of the day hamburgers, ice cream sundaes, banana splits, and double or triple deck Dagwood sandwiches with toothpicks to hold them together—odd foods for me, then. But the most peculiar thing for me to accept was that these restaurants sold medicines.
    Gaby and her friends from Junior High School spent time in the drugstores the way grownups in France did in the cafes. I was startled to see young people have a public life.
    With the help of my English teacher, I wrote the story of my escape from France for the school newspaper. It helped me find friends. There were so many activities to do at school, and there were so many things I didn’t understand about American Life. For instance, in the assemblies they had contests and the contenders were asked to identify a saying like “Good to the last drop.” I was awed when the contestant knew the answer “Maxwell House Coffee.” I couldn’t imagine how people knew such things, and I feared I would never be able to learn and catch up.
    Otherwise, the schoolwork seemed simple. I liked the way the teachers explained the work beforehand. It was very different from the system in France where you were told only afterwards what a subject was about and what you had to know to do the homework exercises.
    Even though I was happier in Concord than I had been in those beginning days in Philadelphia when I had wanted to kill myself, I was still very sad, and I missed my mother. There was no one with whom I could share those feelings.
    I discovered that reading the Bible was a distraction. It was a pornographic entertainment with the begats and begots, and I found sexual arousal speculating about love making in the beginning when the world needed to be populated. But mainly I worried about what would become of me. My life felt suspended with no future in sight. I didn’t get any news of my parents. The mail from Europe to the United States was not working. Until Sasha had come for me I had been sure my parents were dead. Talking French with Luba, Sasha and Gaby helped me regain hope that it might be possible for me to see my parents again someday.
    I envied the students in school who had an easy time speaking English and accepting the luxuries of their lives. They spoke very fast and were saying (I assumed) important things. At that time I was also bewildered by the disposable objects that people used: table napkins, sanitary napkins, jars, boxes everything to be thrown out—such overabundance made me uneasy. It went against the grain of everything I had been taught in France. And Luba