Mrs. Sima Licht lives in a 2-family attached house on a quiet avenue Borough Park, Brooklyn. She has lived in that same house for more than forty years, first moving there in the 1970’s to live one flight down from her Hungarian parents-in-law with her husband and their first two children. She considers Borough Park her home and has for many years, but has known many homes along the way; homes that figure prominently in her memory, and whose traces linger in her speech, attitudes, and kitchen.
She has not actually seen all those homes, but they have shaped her nonetheless. Many of them sheltered her parents, Romanian- Jewish immigrants during whose travels from war-torn Europe she was born.
She knows of the courtyard in Temeshvar (today Timisoara), Romania, in which Sima’s mother, Sassa, known to her descendants as their beloved Bobby Daskal, was raised in a loving, warm home. Sassa’s mother was a baker and caterer, who rolled out the dough of her crispy “kindel” nut confections across the clean kitchen table until you could see the wood grain through it, and rolled it up into sweet delicacies that were famous throughout the community. Sima knows how they taste from her own mother’s Purim baking, and sometimes nostalgically bakes them herself. She also owns the yellowed notebook written in her mother’s familiar hand which has that recipe in Hungarian, a language she can neither read nor speak.
She has heard of the small village in which Sassa got married. Sassa would often retell the story of her courtship with a smile; the story of the wedding, with pain. A relative, well known for his matchmaking skills, had tried to set her up with a certain young man named Yidel in the community. However she had had her eye on another Yidel; the dashing and talented Yidel Daskal, and asked the matchmaker to set her up with “this Yidel instead.” The shidduch was set, and Yidel courted her with carefully penned love letters in Romanian. Sassa once described those letters to her granddaughter Naomi: “Every word, a pearl.” Sima still has some of those letters, as inscrutable to her as her mother’s recipe book, stored away as a testimony to sweetness in terrible times. It was 1940 and war was quickly spreading across Eastern Europe. Rumors of Nazi approach were thick and fearful, and so Sassa and Yidel hastened the wedding, arranging a party without permission from the authorities, in a small village that they hoped would be less dangerous. The wedding was bright and joyous, until the local police arrived, guns drawn, to make arrests of the unauthorized Jewish marriage. Sassa and Yidel and all the guests fled the scene. Years later, Sassa would rue, “We never got to make the blessings on the bread.”
As the Nazis made their advances, Sassa and Yidel were lucky to be spared the ominous train rides that only ever left towards Germany filled to capacity with men, women and children who were never to return again. Recognizing that post-war Hungary was no place to raise their growing family, they relocated to Prague with their daughters, Yitty and Devorah. Prague, too, is a memory Sima bears, but it is only a waystation; one of many swiftly listed parental abodes that were only homes in the sense that they kept the rain out and trouble one step away. The face of Europe was changing and communism was marching westward. A few months after the family moved to Prague, Jan Masaryk, a well-known politician, was found dead, rumored to have been tossed out a window, and Sassa and Yidel realized that it was time to find a better place to raise their daughters. Yidel found a Russian politician in Prague who needed to sell his car quickly, before the USSR claimed it as government property, and Sassa and Yidel packed up all that they could and headed westward to Brussels, Belgium, with a short stay in Paris, along with Sassa’s brother Srul. Yidel, ever-resourceful, found a way to convincingly forge the necessary papers to get the family safely to Canada, and so in 1949, the Daskals boarded a ship, the Franconia, headed first to Quebec and then to Toronto, Ontario.
Once in Toronto, Sassa and Yidel settled into the newly budding Jewish community. They took in boarders, often young, orphaned Jewish-European men who had survived the Holocaust. Yidel found work at a textile factory, doing the night shift. Desperate to learn English, Yidel would bring home the newspaper, and Sassa and Yidel would sit together, laboring over the foreign words. In Toronto, Sassa gave birth to another daughter, Pela, and then to their youngest, Sima. Here, Sima’s memories begin to take their own shape, and divide: her memories of childhood are sweet, as Sima still remembers the cold Toronto winters and playing with her sister Pela in the garden. What she knows from her parents’ stories, though, is rougher: her father and mother had trouble finding enough work to pay the bills in Canada and so, just before Sima’s fourth birthday, the family moved to Norfolk, Virginia.
Sima remembers details of the move to a roomy, pleasant flat in the poorer side of Norfolk, where her father had a short stint as a Hebrew school teacher for inattentive little boys, and mentions the sunny backyard where she and Pela wiled away the long summer hours. The mosquitos there were fat and vicious – to this day the smell of witch hazel reminds Sima of the heat from their stings. She knows the community was not religious enough for her parents, but what she remembers is the sunlight shining everywhere, even on the floor beneath her bed.
Sima recalls the next move a year later to a cramped apartment above Bob’s Sporting Goods in Asbury Park, New Jersey. There, she and Pela attended a school temporarily stationed on the beach boardwalk; during recess, the students would try to sneak saltwater taffy from the vendors and gaze longingly at the shiny amusement park rides, whose tunes often punctuated their learning. That longing gaze became a prevalent part of her young adulthood, as she and her three older sisters began to set their sights on becoming more American. She tells of the time that Devorah decided that that the family would begin to celebrate birthdays. Devorah pulled down Sassa’s big book of handwritten recipes and whipped up a fancy vanilla confection, complete with blue frosting. All the sisters were excited to celebrate the same way their friends did at school, but when Devorah sliced into the cake, the inside looked like cottage cheese. Sima chuckles at the memory of the hysterical laughter she and her sisters shared at the sight of the unfortunate cake, but that was the first and last birthday cake ever served at the Daskal home.
One more home figures prominently in Sima’s memory. When Sima turned eight, the Daskals moved to Far Rockaway, New York, so that Devorah and Yitty could attend an orthodox Jewish high school in Williamsburg. The city was exciting for Sima. She remembers carpooling to school and eventually taking part in the first graduating class of the first all-girls Jewish school in Far Rockaway. She tells happy stories of her parents, sisters, friends and classmates, and of eventually helping a certain Mrs. Rochel Licht at her job at her father’s textile store in Brooklyn. Rochel was so impressed with Sima that she set Sima up on a date with her son, Levi. The rest is, as they say, history. Sima and Levi courted, married and together raised their five children in Borough Park.
When I press her about her family’s long journey, about growing up in a land both foreign and familiar, Sima talks about the inherent hardship in moving to new places. Her parents didn’t receive official documents until they had been in the U.S. for over three decades, and she remembers the palpable, unmentioned fear of deportation. Her classmates for the first eight years of her life were all Americans who were children of Americans, and she remembers the challenge in bridging the gaps in wealth and expectation. As Sima speaks of this, her tone is contemplative, but proud. She remembers appreciatively the great measures her parents took to make all their children feel at home and loved wherever they were. She turns to me and says, “My family moved to many places in all kinds of circumstances, but this made me accepting of all kinds of people, and I wouldn’t want it any other way.” She laughs and mentions, however, that to this day she still makes a birthday cake for each of her children and grandchildren.
