Every House Needs a Balcony by Rina Frank

to remove the buttons from inside her abdomen. In any case, Dad promised the surgeon that he would “make it worth your while.”
    That same evening, Lorie was taken to the operating theater, and the buttons and pins that she had swallowed in order to be loved by her school friends were removed from her belly. Later that evening, the pretty young vocalist who had appeared earlier in Father’s cabaret could be seen lying replete in the arms of the kindly surgeon.
    Lorie was released from hospital three days later, and no sooner had she walked into her home than a powerfulearthquake—nine on the Richter scale—destroyed half of Bucharest. As Lorie scrambled around on the staircase searching for somewhere to hide, all the stitches from her operation came apart. Father took her back to the hospital, and again she was rushed to the operating theater, where the incision was restitched.
    Another earthquake shook Bucharest the next day, but this time Lorie stood, still as a statue, in the middle of the room, not daring to move. The fear of her stitches coming apart again was greater than her fear of any earthquake.
    Dad’s brother-in-law Lazer, Lutzi’s husband, was sent to a forced labor camp, where he was put to work clearing away snow from the railway tracks outside Bucharest. He contracted a severe case of pneumonia and would have died were it not for Mom’s younger brother, Marko, who was a dental technician and “served” in the same forced labor camp. Marko nursed Lazer with great devotion and fed him antibiotics from the supply he kept in the dental clinic. Lazer was saved, although he had very nearly crossed the line.
    In return for saving Lazer’s life, my mom’s younger brother, Marko, wanted to find his big sister a respectable shidduch . My mother was thirty-two already and decidedly unmarried, when Lazer announced that he had a brother-in-law, albeit a disheveled one, who was a thirty-four-year-old bachelor and ran his own movie house. Needless to say, he neglected to mention Dad’s non-Jewish mistress, Mrs. Dorfman.
    Marko hinted to Lazer that a substantial dowry was on the books, and my father agreed to meet with the new prospect. He was annoyed at that time with Mrs. Dorfman for refusing to leave her sickly husband and marry him, even though he knew full well that his mother and sisters (and their husbands) would firmly oppose his marrying any woman who wasn’t Jewish.
    Mom was a trim and slender woman, elegantly dressed and well educated, who was employed as an accountant. And although Dad’s family didn’t really fall in love with her, she made a good impression on them.
    â€œShe’s an Ashkenazi snob,” they told him, “not a warm-blooded woman like us Sephardis, but she’s obviously intelligent and well educated and you can tell by her clothes that she’s well off.” And so Dad agreed to step under the chuppah with Bianca.
    They got married without too much enthusiasm for each other, and Mom began immediately to manage the movie house, putting the books in order. She imposed her kind of order and made sure none of Dad’s many impoverished friends were allowed in without paying full price for a ticket. No free rides here, she would say.
    Father employed his entire family and circle of friends in the movie house. He was used to making people feel good; when he came to live in Israel, he continued to help everyone. Except that he forgot that he no longer owned a movie house.
    So he went into the coffee distribution business.
    He would wander around in downtown Haifa with a three-tier conical tray, selling extra-strong Romanian coffee with an aroma that wafted all over Wadi Salib. He made a point of buying his coffee only from the Arab Nisnas brothers, who, while the coffee beans were being ground, would invite us in to taste their baklava and pistachio nuts before packaging the coffee in small brown paper bags.
    The