Zita Nurok

The house was the start of a new life in a new country for our parents. They’d made their way across the seas from Europe to South Africa in search of new beginnings. They brought with them the difficulties and challenges, but also riches from the towns where they had lived. My father’s education helped him establish roots, and earned him the respect he yearned for in our small Jewish community of approximately sixty families. My mother came in search of her own hopes, and dreamed that one day her mother and youngest sister who had remained in Lithuania would join her – dreams that would not come true. And so, their stories began.

My mother came from Riteve, a small town – shtetl - in the western part of Lithuania, where most inhabitants were Jewish, and spoke Yiddish. There was poverty and opportunities were few, with people often requiring support from welfare. Because of the lack of opportunity, people who were able immigrated to the outside world. Most of those who left Riteve immigrated to South Africa, before the First World War, and later before the Holocaust. Our mother left in 1929.

The majority of Lithuanian Jews were killed in Lithuania during the Holocaust, including the Jews of Riteve. The local populations - Lithuanian collaborators - did most of the killing - often under German supervision.

My father came from Kurshan in the North-West part of Lithuania. It was surrounded by hills and forests on the shores of a river. During World War II, most of the 900 Jews living there were murdered. Our father and some of his brothers and a sister had already left for South Africa before the war. He left in 1925. 

For him the Jewish calendar- the Sabbath, holidays, and prayers governed life. He focused on the observance of these throughout the growing years of my brother and me. Central to our Jewish life were the customs and traditions our parents brought into our home, replicating what had been familiar to them in Lithuania before the Second World War. Culinary traditions permeated our home on every holiday and many a Shabbat. The memories of those traditions that were observed as our mother grew up in Riteve became a form of art that she cultivated through her cooking. Year after year, in an endless cycle, they provided a certainty, a continuity and a security as time went by. From Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur, from Sukkot to Simchat Torah, from Chanukah to Purim to Shavuot, she provided our family with carefully created edible works of art. We eagerly looked forward to each holiday and many a Shabbat, excited in our anticipation of the holiday activities and the delectable foods that awaited us. Our home was filled with aromas of baking, with visual delights, and tastes that forever lingered to remind us until today of those times. This cooking helped our mother, passionately and proudly, to hold onto her origins. It meant more to her than merely providing tasty meals for a family; it represented a link that held generations of her family together. She produced challahs, often nostalgically recalling how she helped her mother bake before Shabbat. She made kneidlach, hamantaschen, perogen, blintzes, potato latkes, imberlach, kichlach, kreplach,taiglach (white and brown), cheesecakes, geschmirte matzos and much more. Her art also created for her an added sense of belonging to a community when she contributed to the shul events. She basked in the recognition of and wonder over her talents.

Stories she told us about her town in Lithuania came alive as she lovingly recreated her memories, weaving them into our lives. She told about the Yureh River, where she and her friends splashed and played, how they skipped and danced in the forests, and picked berries to cook, how they traveled with a horse and cart along the sandy roads and how she helped her mother at holiday times. These pleasant and joyful memories of her home stayed with her as she tried to reconstruct that life, despite the changes that time wrought upon her family.

Our small shul, where women sat upstairs and men down, provided a meaningful and comfortable routine for us, a place where everyone gathered and established bonds. Friendships grew among likeminded families, but differences and conflicts too were whispered throughout the community, sometimes becoming bigger stories to talk about.

But throughout those days in our home, ever present was a dark shadow that waxed and waned over the years. The Second World War became a reality in our family as it did in many other families, when our parents learned of the brutal finality of our mother’s mother and her youngest sister at the hands of the Nazis. Her story forever lurked in our home:

This message appeared in the pages of documents sent from the Soviet Union in 1944, to the American Committee of Jewish Writers, Artists, and Scientists, a body that was compiling a “Jewish Black Book” of Nazi crimes against the Jewish people.

We were that family in South Africa. Two brothers and another sister lived in New York. This faded newspaper article lay in an envelope in the bottom drawer of the dressing table in our parents’ bedroom for many years. I have it now. I light a candle to remember the anniversary of the deaths of a grandmother and an aunt. It was the year when I was born. The Talmud states that “when a child is born during a mourning period it is a blessed omen, a salve for the family.”

Thus were my mother’s hopes of someday reuniting with her family cruelly and brutally dashed.

What could she do with the shattering pain she must have felt when confronted with this truth? How many questions remained unanswered, haunting her through the years as she grappled with the reality that the war brought into our home?

And so, I believe that she must have lost herself in her own world of creation. She had additionally discovered a different art form as she sat hour after hour embroidering beautiful tablecloths and pictures with colorful silken threads, many of which she had brought with her from her beloved Lithuanian home. How proud she felt when I wore dresses she sewed for me as a child on her special Singer Sewing Machine. How she beamed when it was said that I was the best dressed little girl in the shul.

In the simplicity of her varied creations she expressed something more profound - something deeper - of beauty in place of the demons of horror that invaded her life. Perhaps she found the solace she sought in these places.

The house no longer stands in our town, nor is there a Jewish community. But perhaps stories like ours will remain with those families in our small Jewish community who scattered to the bigger cities in South Africa, and also to other countries around the world - these are stories that future generations must know.

In his moving essay Hope, Despair, and Memory, Eli Wiesel states: “The memory of evil will serve as a shield against evil.”

Zita Nurok, a regular contributor to Jewish Affairs, is an elementary school teacher who grew up in South Africa. She is a member of the National League of American Pen Women, and has served as Vice-President and President of the Indianapolis branch. The above story is based on real events