Clara's War Read Free Page B

kind word for the Russians, said, ‘At least they got this right.’ Apparently, the Russians knew something we didn’t about my baby sister. On the other side of the room, Mania was sitting on the baby bed where she slept. I could tell what she was thinking just by the look on her face. She would rather be out sledding while there was still snow on the ground and was ruing that she had brought up the concert at all. But it was like all the other things she had to confess to. Better to get it over with. Sooner or later Mama would have got it out of her anyway. She couldn’t see the glory in it. She had been told to sing, so she would sing.
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    For the next three months, all we got was humming. Humming while she jumped rope. Humming while she ran in and out of the house. Humming while my mama made her do the homework she hated. The one time Mama asked her to sing, Mania refused. She was as wilful as Mama, Babcia and Dzadzio. We would have to wait for the concert.
    The entire town was temporarily distracted from the Russian occupation. While waiting on the long lines which stretched outside the colonnaded shops, mothers braggedabout the Ukrainian and Russian folk songs their children would be singing. There wasn’t a loaf of bread to be found, but the air practically buzzed with gossip. I knew they were secretly keeping score. Which song was longer? Whose child was singing the favourites? Who had a solo and who was in the chorus? What would the mothers wear?
    It didn’t matter that Zolkiew was a speck on the map of the world, or that our house was on a dirt road covered in dust in summer and mud or snow in winter. Mama and her sisters always dressed as though they lived in a capital city like Warsaw or Vienna. Aunt Giza was the only who had actually lived in Vienna, and then only for a year. Although Giza reigned queen of the undergarment, even Dzadzio recognized Mama as the true Coco Chanel of the family. Whenever he wore out the elbows in his only sweater, my mother Salka had to be the one to pick out a new one; no matter that it would only be a mispucha –a relative by marriage–of the same charcoal grey sweater he bought every five years. September would bring Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah and the catalogues that arrived by mail from Paris, Berlin and Vienna. We would sit at the big kitchen table, catalogues everywhere, armed with scissors. Mama would have me cut out the bodice from one, the material from another, the skirt from a third, the collar from a fourth, ribbons from a fifth and put them together. She and her tiny doll of a dressmaker, Mrs Hirschorn, were thick as thieves. The two of them plotted out the family wardrobes for weddings as if they were military campaigns. Whenever Mania and I would show up in a new dress at the social hall we would see our friends wearing copies within weeks. Mama never said one word about how this pleased her.
    But that was before the Soviets. Silk, satin, taffeta, sequins, feathers and lace were all one-way tickets to Siberia. Rough,olive green uniform wool was the fabric of this season. The peasant look was more than fashion; it was a matter of survival. Some of Mama’s friends had even started to wear clothes that had once belonged to their cleaning ladies. Mama’s beautiful silk dresses were now locked up in the massive mahogany armoire that had outlasted most of the governments of Europe. But like any mother whose daughter was making her debut, Mama wanted to look as proud as she felt. So after many hours and too many cups of tea, the Reizfeld sisters had decided that it was ‘kosher’ to wear the prettiest of their schmatas, rags.
    Mania and I didn’t even have that much of a choice. Lead aria or not, Mania was stuck wearing the navy blue sailor suit that was our school uniform. As was I. As was every other girl in Zolkiew. To compensate, Mama ironed so much starch into the uniforms they could have walked to the concert on their