Tanya FrankFINDING TILLYHearing about the demise of my Yiddisher bube was like being socked in the kishkas, you see she had been dead to me for as long as I could remember, written out of society, the best kept secret there ever was. I was sixteen when I heard the news. These were the things that struck me: If only I had known that I had a bube who lived and breathed just twenty something miles away, I could have visited her. I was old enough to have taken the train to Banstead, to walk the two miles from the station to the mental hospital that was tucked away beyond the woods, invisible from the road. Upon entry to the mock gothic building with its red brick turrets and barbed wire surrounds, I might have found her working in the laundry, folding sheets or starching the doctors' coats, because that's what the women inmates did. At one o'clock in the afternoon I could have accompanied her on the daily constitutional around the spacious grounds, held her hand and squeezed it to let her know I was there. My bube's name was Klothilde Raudnitz. It was a hard sounding name with too many consonants for my liking. Maybe it had been shortened to Tilly. I hoped so. Tilly sounded soft and round and altogether more modern. After my bube's death, I thought about her a lot, and I missed her. I didn't think it was possible to miss someone you never knew. I wondered what we had in common, Klothilde, incarcerated for almost forty of her eighty-one years, and me. Did her hair curl like mine around her temples? Was it due to her that I had gold-green eyes? And what of my varicose vein, or my love for the written word? Might I, in my moments of melancholia have been hospitalized like her, had I been born two generations earlier? After some research and many years of prying questions, this is what I know for sure about my bube. She hailed from Vienna, Austria, where she was born in 1901. The youngest of three children, she lost her sister in a toboggan accident when it crashed into a tree. Klothilde was riding with her and suffered a concussion. The event was said by many to account for her "strangeness" thereafter. By the time she married my English grandfather, the only relative she had left was her beloved brother Kurt. She wanted to take him with her to London on that last boat out of war-torn Eastern Europe, but it was impossible, and he was turned back at the border. "I will find a way to bring you to us," she promised him. And she tried. By golly she tried, all throughout the blitz, until 1945 at the end of the war when she found out her tireless campaign had been futile. Her brother, my great uncle Kurt had perished at Auschwitz. Her decline was quick after that. She was diagnosed with non-systematized delusional insanity, certified and committed to Banstead Mental Hospital. Her three children (my father included) were told not to mention their mother. Before long her name was taboo. She was relegated to silence, as if she had never been here at all. I know she was plump, with high cheekbones and an even smile. Uncle Henry remembered that much. He was three years old when his mother was taken away. My father must have been four. I thought about them having their mother one day and not the next, and how long it must have taken them to stop crying for her, to collude with their father, and believe that she was dead? Bube, my bube, may never have known me, or known of me, but our lives are inextricably linked. Her suffering has informed my life's work, the telling of stories, the championing for justice. For when everything else is said and done, stories and truth are all we have left. When my children play piano with such finesse, I think of Klothilde and her heritage, Vienna, the classical music capital of the world. She comes to mind with the turn of a Yiddisher phrase, an apple strudel, or a pot of Hungarian goulash. In those moments I think I have come to know her.
*Originally published in Frank's blog The Diary of Tan Frank.
|