The Choice

New York, in a place called the Bronx, in a Jewish immigrant
neighborhood. Her life in America seems more circumscribed than
ours. We don’t talk about leaving.
Even in 1940, when I’m thirteen, and the nyilas begin to round up
the Jewish men of Kassa and send them to a forced labor camp, the
war feels far away from us. My father isn’t taken. Not at ĕrst. We use
denial as protection. If we don’t pay attention, then we can continue
our lives unnoticed. We can make the world safe in our minds. We
can make ourselves invisible to harm.
But one day in June 1941, Magda is out on her bicycle when the
sirens roar. She dashes three blocks to the safety of our grandparents’
house, only to find half of it gone. They survived, thank God. But their
landlady didn’t. It was a singular attack, one neighborhood razed by
one bombing. We’re told the Russians are responsible for the rubble
and death. No one believes it, and yet no one can refute it. We are
lucky and vulnerable in the same instant. e only solid truth is the
pile of smashed brick in the spot where a house used to be.
Destruction and absence—these become facts. Hungary joins Germany
in Operation Barbarossa. We invade Russia.
Around this time we are made to wear the yellow star. e trick is
to hide the star, to let your coat cover it. But even with my star out of
sight, I feel like I have done something bad, something punishable.
What is my unpardonable sin? My mother is always near the radio.
When we picnic by the river, my father tells stories about being a
prisoner of war in Russia during World War I. I know that his POW
experience—his trauma, though I don’t know to call it that—has
something to do with his eating pork, with his distance from religion. I
know that war is at the root of his distress. But the war, this war, is still
elsewhere. I can ignore it, and I do.
Aer school, I spend ĕve hours at the ballet studio, and I begin to
study gymnastics too. ough it begins as a complementary practice to