Kamikaze Lust by Lauren Sanders Page B

basement—before Neil coopted the space as his metal workshop/dungeon—and watch old newsreels on Dad’s rickety 8-mm projector. A buddy in the electrician’s union had given Dad the newsreels. I loved the beginning shots, with newspapers flying from the presses faster than anything I’d ever seen. Then came the zooming headlines, mostly about World War II and the Holocaust.
    As I watched Hitler’s face, streaked by the old film, I would ask Aunt Lorraine to tell me the story of her escape.
    “Again, you want the story?”
    “Please.” I batted my eyes, knowing she couldn’t resist.
    My paternal grandparents had lived in Lodz where my grandfather was a writer, a newspaper man. Early on, he sensed trouble and put his sister, his wife, and her two children on a boat for Argentina, where his own mother had been living for almost ten years. “I remember throwing up a lot,” Aunt Lorraine said. “The four of us clung together on that boat with only one blanket for weeks. We ate stale bread until it ran out. Then your father one day came back with a pickle and cut it into four pieces with his pocketknife. I never tasted a pickle so good. At night we slept crowded next to each other and your father, you know his bladder troubles. I worried nobody would let us in the way we stunk.”
    As she spoke, I saw it all in grainy newsreel images: the ramshackle ocean liner, the itchy wool blanket, my father, Aunt Lorraine, even my grandfather who was shot dead in a Polish ghetto after refusing to stop publishing his newspaper. My family history unraveled in a soundtrack of Polish, Yiddish, and Spanish. Those Sonnanovicz-turned-Slivowitzes with their bizarre migratory patterns had traversed ghettos from Lodz to Buenos Aires, and, finally, ended up in Bay Ridge, a hodgepodge of language, culture, and custom. By the time I was born, nobody knew what came from where. We ate kasha with pinto beans, brisket with Ragu spaghetti sauce. By day I saluted the American flag and sang “God Bless America;” but by night came the mournful sounds of Agustin Magaldi singing “Adios Muchachos” from Dad’s lopsided record player.
    I remember my father spoke mainly Spanish, preferring its romantic lulls and rolls to the colder, more guttural phonetics of the shtetls and to the slippery slang of Brooklyn English. It also came in handy whenever he and Aunt Lorraine didn’t want the rest of us to know what they were saying, though this peeved Mom. Not only did she feel excluded, but she herself had come from a long line of German Jews, the Most Favored Nation among the diaspora. Growing up, Mom’s voice shadowed me: You listen, Rachel! We might live with these Slavs, but you must understand the family you come from…you know who they mean when they talk about the chosen.
    Yet, those chosen among the chosen couldn’t forgive one of their own for marrying a Polack, and a Polack who moved comfortably through Brooklyn’s bodega culture was downright scandalous. Mom lost her MFN status the day she became a Slivowitz. Marrying for love was my biggest mistake. I was once a Durkheim, and now what? A nasty liqueur…where did they ever come up with that name?
    Later, having my own problems with that name, I would molt the Slivowitz skin myself. But as a young child, before I internalized the undercurrent of self-hatred that follows survival and started passing as Italian, I loved those zany Polacks; my grandmother and great Aunt Ida who fed me sweet babka and smiled, “good girl, good girl;” the brood of chubby-cheeked, hyperactive cousins, all boys, who fought with Rowdy and Neil, although Neil always ended up bruising this cousin’s wrist or sending that one home with a bloody nose.
    “A shame we Slivowitzes don’t make too many girls,” Aunt Lorraine used to say. “You’re the only one, the only girl. You’ll make us proud.” I remember her crying the day I received the scholarship to journalism school. It was the only time I ever saw