Bearing loss

BROKEN BIRDS:
The Story of My Momila
By Jeannette Katzir
340 pp. Jeannette Katzir $17.95

Reviewed by Steven Henderson

Those who live through horrific events leave behind their stories when they die—if they have chosen to tell them. But they leave unspoken stories, too, in attitudes and actions that require offspring to deal with the fallout of “broken” parents. Katzir presents such a legacy of sorrow in Broken Birds.

This memoir is a historical mix of past and present—the author weaves her parents’ stories of WWII and the Holocaust through her own modern-day family tale, showing the impact of the past upon the present.

Katzir’s mother, Channa Poltzer, describing the rise of war from her child’s viewpoint, tells a particularly compelling and heartbreaking narrative. Through her childish naiveté, we view the systematic murder machine launched against the Jewish people:

While outside playing, Channa often spotted grownups huddled in groups and speaking in hushed tones. More and more people seemed to be out of work, and more police were suddenly present. Rachel [Channa’s mother] tried to keep dinner discussions off the subject of what was happening, but Channa couldn’t help but overhear disjointed tidbits. There were frequent mentions of someone named Adolf Hitler and talk of fires and killings.

We first learn of Katzir’s mother’s life, then in a parallel narrative, her father’s, and finally the two are combined in a tertiary tale, the meat of the book: an interesting and provocative narrative of family drama, inheritances, and omnipresent sibling squabbling. Katzir is at her best when discussing the reactions of ordinary people to extraordinary circumstances.

Adolf Hitler enters the narrative as a palpable, and at times, main antagonist, even in the times set long after his death, prompting the family refrain uttered on several occasions, one of which is the birth of Katzir’s daughter. Channa, upon witnessing her granddaughter’s birth, exclaims, “Hitler has failed—the Poltzers have continued on!”

The older generation battled against Hitler throughout their lives. Sorting through Channa’s finances after her death, the Poltzer children find she’s hidden money “just in case” the Nazis returned to power. The distrust for humans in the wake of the war influenced all areas of their lives—Channa even kept money and business dealings a secret from her husband in case he were ever to leave her.

While Hitler is the shadow antagonist in the story, the family drama plays the main role. After reading of the indoctrination that the Poltzer children received—family was everything, and the outside world was not to be trusted—the betrayals by family members are poignant. In the end, Katzir makes the decision to excise family members from her life. The seeds of distrust for human nature sown by Hitler come to fruition decades later in the dissolution of a family.

The story is well written, though at times it bogs down in the daily legal drudgeries that occur at the end. Characters who once had a life of their own distill into caricatures: the peacemaker, the prodigal son gone bad, the outsider. It was disheartening, in a way, to feel real people slip away into cutouts of their former selves.

One character still remains untouched by this process, and continues to grow as a principal actor of the story. Channa, even after her death, grows through the stories that are told, appearing to me a more sympathetic character, even though, in many ways, her actions were more egregious than others’ in the book. One passage in particular discusses Channa’s needs and elucidates the book’s title. Katzir writes:

Unlike Mom, I applauded my children for their undertakings. When it came to my own accomplishments, however, Mom made it clear that she was unhappy that I had been so successful. When she said it, I could not believe my ears. ’I need you to need me,’ she explained.

But Mom, I will always need you.

’But I can’t help you. Your problems are too big for me,’ she confessed.

I tried very hard to accept the fact that Mom and Dad were broken birds, with a difficult past that continued to haunt them and shape their relationships.

The importance of family, the danger of its loss, and ultimately the need to overcome are at the heart of the book.

When Katzir, speaking of the Holocaust, asks, “ Mom, didn’t you miss your mother?” Channa replies, “Yes, but there were thousands of people who were killed ... and if thousands were being killed, I could bear the loss of my family.”

Katzir, too, must bear the loss of family members to infighting and squabbling, not directly to war and its brutality, but certainly a product of it. The scars are no less real.