Toil and Trouble
Or:
How the World Has Mistreated Me
(Thus Far)
by David Dvorkin
In the Beginning
I was born on October 8, 1943, in Reading, England, to Israel and Rachael Deborah Dvorkin. My mother told me that I was born at 11:45 p.m. on Erev Yom Kippur, the eve of the Day of Atonement. To her, this was significant. Ah, the religion question! I'll get to that later, probably repeatedly.
This was, of course, during World War Two. My father was a rabbi in Reading - the only one there, I think. He was also designated a chaplain to the armed forces stationed in the area, which I'm told meant that the house was filled with young Jewish servicemen from all over the world much of the time. He was also an air raid warden, meaning that during German air raids, he would put on an armband to signify his official position, a helmet to protect his head, and walk around his part of the city looking for chinks of light showing through people's blackout curtains. I'm vague on all of this because I'm vague on everything having to do with my parents. I didn't have enough interest in asking them detailed questions when I had the opportunity, and they tended not to volunteer much. The situation I've just described cries out for far more detail, but I don't have those details.
I do know that my father was in the synagogue conducting the Yom Kippur service when I was born, not out looking for light leaks, and that my mother, as she told the story, was very upset that he wasn't there with her and was too drugged to understand the significance of the day and why he had to be away. In later years, she would be unable to understand why, given the fearsome sacredness of the time of my birth, I didn't grow up to be a fearsomely religious Jew.
I have two older sisters, Miriam and Sylvia. (Officially, Dorah Miriam and Sophie Leah. Miriam always hated her first name, and Sylvia always hated both her names.) At the time of my birth, they were, respectively, nine and seven years old. My mother told me innumerable times how difficult it was for her, during an air raid, all alone, to get from the top floor of one of that high, narrow English house down to the basement, yanking two sleepy, whiny daughters down the stairs and carrying a large fetus inside her. (She was fairly short and must have been immense and clumsy during the last few months before I was born.) She always told the story with a laugh, but she told it so often.
She despised Germans, but not because of that. She was born in Lithuania, in a small town. She, a younger sister and brother, and two older half-brothers emigrated in various directions (England, Israel, South Africa, the U.S.A) before World War Two. Her father died of cancer, also before WWII. The rest of the family - her mother and the remaining siblings - died in the Holocaust. My mother's father, though, was an admirer of German culture and language and influenced my mother to be the same. In later years, she would speak of German as a beautiful language but of the Germans as monsters.
My parents were peripatetic by nature.
They met when my father had just become a clergyman and my mother was living with her older half-brother and his wife. I believe my mother's brother introduced my parents to each other. The brother was an established rabbi in England, so I assume he knew my father professionally. After they married, my parents moved to St. John's, Newfoundland, my father's first rabbinical position; my sisters were born there.
With stunning judgement, my parents grew tired of the snow and isolation in Newfoundland and decided to move back to England - just in time for the outbreak of war.
"Peripatetic" isn't the right word. Perhaps I should have said that they were chronically dissatisfied, but I suspect that's really the same thing. Before long, they were unhappy with England again. To be fair, it must not have been a pleasant place at the time. And Newfoundland, far away from bombs and air-raid sirens, must have seemed very attractive again. So they contacted the congregation in St. John's, the congregation wanted them back, and they booked passage on a ship back to Newfoundland.
Now, this was during a time when passenger ships in the North Atlantic were being sunk by U-boats, and Britain wasn't permitting people to travel on those routes unless they had very good reasons. My father got a letter from the congregation in St. John's, which he took to the Foreign Office (?), where he spoke convincingly to Anthony Eden (?) (I wish I could remember this stuff accurately!), and they got permission to go. With the bags all packed and ready to be taken down to Southampton, my mother had what she considered to be a premonition that this was a very bad idea, and she refused to go. They stayed in England. The ship was sunk with the loss of all aboard.
"Angels were watching over us," my mother assured me when she told me this story years later. I wondered why they weren't watching over all the others, the ones who went down with that ship, not to mention the tens of millions of soldiers, sailors, and civilians who died during those years - including my mother's own family in Lithuania. As my wife, Leonore, likes to say, "God gets all of the credit and none of the blame."
Life didn't improve in England after the war ended. Not in my parents' version of English history, anyway. It was cold, it rained, food was rationed. The grass was much greener on the other side of the fence. To foreshadow and heavily emphasize the irony, we next went to South Africa, as I'll describe in a moment, a land where, for the most part, the grass is far less green than in England.
The way my parents told the story, it was 1947, it was cold and dark and raining, and we were all huddled in one room of the house listening to the radio. The royal family were paying an official visit to South Africa. It was winter in England and summer in booming, low-cost-of-living South Africa. The announcer described the arrival of the royal yacht in Cape Town harbor, the sunlight on the sparkling waves, the cheering crowds greeting the yacht, the girls in white summer dresses coming to the foot of the gangplank loaded with fresh flowers to present to the King and Queen. My parents looked at each other and said, "We're going."
And the caravan headed south.
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