Boat of Stone: A Novel

By Maureen Earl

“An extremely readable and ultimately moving novel” based on the true story of a boatful of Jewish refugees refused entry to Palestine (The New York Times).

In October 1940, as the storm clouds of World War II gathered, the SS Atlantic set sail for Palestine. A condemned and overcrowded ship, it was overflowing with bedraggled Jewish refugees who, having bought their way out of Nazi Germany and Austria, hoped to find safety from the concentration camps that had begun to claim their brethren. But they were not destined to find the shelter they sought.

In this poignant novel, Hanna Sommerfeld recalls her long-ago voyage on the Atlantic—a journey plagued by epidemics and food shortages that led not to freedom but, improbably, to incarceration in a British penal colony off the eastern coast of Africa. For Hanna, it would also lead to a heartbreaking loss.

Weaving Hanna’s current life with her son’s family in Haifa, Israel, with her memories of marriage and her coming-of-age in the jungles of Mauritius, Boat of Stone is a unique Holocaust story that not only reveals a little-known chapter of history, but also introduces one of the most unforgettable characters you are likely to meet: a gritty, humorous, wise, and adventurous woman who refuses to become a victim. It is “a splendid novel” from National Book Award finalist Maureen Earl, author of Gulliver Quick (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 14, 2015
• ISBN: 9781453293706

Maureen Earl

Maureen Earl, the daughter of an RAF pilot and a French mother, was born in Cairo and educated throughout the world, and worked as a journalist with an Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker in Australia, New Zealand and the United States.

Book preview

1

Last night again I couldn’t sleep. I tossed my body, this venerable lump, about in the bed as if it belonged to someone else. My brain is an ocean of remembering. When I do sleep I dream: dreams which fuse with the days, barely surrendering to what others call reality. The past migrates into the periphery of the present, intrudes into the tide of now. Sometimes I become confused and exasperate Dita, my daughter-in-law, who, because she is always busy, is perhaps fearful of a day when I might become a feeble old woman. She shouldn’t worry, I have at least ten good years left yet. That I can feel in my bones.

But I could be wrong. Maybe I’ll go ga-ga and live the last years of my life as a dribbling old fool and drive them all mad. Who knows? Anyway, I’m not so terribly old; I have friends in their nineties who call me a girl. It’s more or less up to God now, but He can be a moody soul, with Him you don’t know what might happen next.

I got up last night and went to the bathroom where I stared at the mirror. One would think that a person would eventually get used to seeing old age scowling from the glass. But no, it’s always a shock. If I were plump I might appear more robust, but no matter what I eat, I stay thin. An altogether different thinness to the slimness of youth: my flesh is loose, my bones have shriveled and shrunk. Once my neck was long and lissome; Daniel used to run his fingers up and down it, as if it were a harp. But in spite of those over-priced calcium pills, my neck has all but disappeared. It’s there somewhere, it’s just not very noticeable—and sometimes it aches on the left side. A thing of beauty is not necessarily a joy forever.

The skin of my face looks as if desert winds have blown a pattern across it, but my chin does not have turkey flesh hanging from it like waterlogged laundry, and my mouth is without fraying edges that might make it look like a crumpled evening bag.

Hanna, you’re so vain, Daniel used to say.

And don’t I have reason? I replied. Amazing, now that I think about it, for I must have looked a sight: tattered clothes, worn shoes, unwashed hair—but such lovely hair it was: curling and thick, a reddish brown. And even when there was no water, no soap, still I tied it back with a ribbon or a piece of cloth, or lace if I could find it. When I was a girl I used to wind my braids into fat twists over my ears, pushing hair right into the ear so that I couldn’t hear what people were saying.

If there is an afterlife, and if from this place Daniel now looks down and spots me brushing at my feathery white hair or patting my face into shape as if it were putty, he must surely smile. But there again, maybe he glowers and says, Look at her. She’s still vain.

What he must wonder at, if he’s watching, is my foot: the clumping false foot that I have to clamp on before I walk. It doesn’t bother me much, this bogus foot. Unless I’m tired I can walk almost as fast as anyone else, but now and then the bone in the leg hurts, cramps with indignation. I lost the foot—the left—just before Daniel died; he always knew me as a woman with two feet.

More and more Daniel drifts back into my dreams, forever frozen in youth. His sweat smells like the sea. Daniel, melancholy, brooding, biting at the skin of his thumb until it is raw, his eyes extinguished lamps in round hollows as he fingers his yellow star. I never knew Daniel without that star. When we were newly married, he wore it at night, on the sleeve of his pajama top.

Are you crazy? I asked. You want to wear it to bed?

I certainly do. He attached it with a safety pin. They can rot in hell if they think I’m ashamed to wear it.

Daniel was not always that proud, that certain. Not at all; soon after that, they broke him. But he always wore that star. See, he would say, smoothing the coarse cotton as if it were satin, I wear it in place of my heart, on my sleeve.

Daniel? I look up at the bathroom ceiling as if he were perched on the roof, able to see through plaster and roof-tiles, I’m old! I triumphed! And to that surely he must smile. It’s not so bad being old, I tell him. There are compensations. People don’t expect me to be so polite now. That’s quite a relief for me, as you can imagine.

Who was he, this man Daniel to whom I was once married? Maybe he looks down at me and says, Fools do not become less foolish as they grow old.

Increasingly, in my dreams, I am haunted by the notion that it was my fault Daniel lost his assurance. I wake up, my skin chilled, and bury my face in my hands. It wasn’t my fault, of course it wasn’t, but maybe I could have been more patient, could have had more grace.

If you want a prince, Hanna, you must cultivate one, my mother said to me. It was one of the few pieces of advice she ever gave me, and certainly the last that I recall.

Instantly I dismissed such advice. "I don’t want to construct a man, Mutti, like I was making a cake or building a mansion. A mensch is born, not made."

Now, however, I’m not so sure.

A life in hindsight is a series of vignettes. Memories plummet out of sequence as I drift in timelessness among columns of recollections, as if walking through an ancient historical site. Last night, as I often do when I can’t sleep, I went down to the kitchen and brewed some of Dita’s tasteless herb tea, then climbed back up to bed, where, almost immediately—even before I was asleep—I could see a small paddle-steamer, shabby, its decks burdened with too many passengers, listing as it scuds down the Danube followed by three other antiquated steamers—all flying the swastika. I look at the viscous black smoke as it twists from the chimneys in a defiant dance of freedom. May it blow back and choke the tissues of their hearts and lungs, I say in my half-sleep.

I don’t want to dream such things. I don’t want to sustain this unsightly albatross that will not, cannot, flee. When we were living through those years I knew that what I saw, what I knew, might cling to me like slime clinging to an abyss that could never again be dredged clean. Time and time again I barricaded my eyes, my ears, my heart. By witnessing such atrocities I felt that I might be guilty of compliance. I could do nothing; my will had been proven feeble, even nonexistent.

I lie in bed and see the dancing black smoke, and think of the dance we were forced to perform, a dance of desolation in which each of us moved separately yet united as one; not knowing whether to defy or obey those who choreographed. In my half-sleep I move forward toward the decks, closer to the passengers; I see anxiety written in the lines of faces, necks strained to face the new stretch of river, shoulders taut, as if their very tension would propel the boat faster.

And now I see something else: in their numbed eyes I see hope. Mothers hold up children and point to the mountains that frame the valley. Old people dig their skeletal fingers into each other’s arms and stare, wide-eyed, at the river ahead. And I see a young woman, her hands held to her cheeks to prevent the wind biting her skin; she watches the passing mountains and modest thatched-roof houses. She leans lightly against her husband who looks apprehensive, as if he knows all this will somehow go wrong.

And I, now an old woman, want to reach forward and put my arms about that young woman, to comfort her, to stroke her hair and cheeks, as if I have become my own mother.

It was September of 1940. Daniel and I had been married almost three years. I was twenty-two, and he almost twenty-seven when we boarded the Schoenbrunn in Bratislava. That decrepit old paddle-steamer built for two hundred light-hearted tourists now carried well over seven hundred scruffy, dazed refugees. Most of us had already spent many months in holding camps, living on mud in torn tents, frozen and starved by winter. We never referred to ourselves as refugees; we were immigrants fleeing what Goebbels called the War of Flowers. That is what he called the Second World War, the Blumenkrieg. Very poetic, this monster Goebbels. Not bullets but flowers greet our soldiers, he said as his army marched into Austria, where indeed, baskets of blossoms and bouquets were strewn in their path as they strode into new cities and towns, baptizing more and more with hatred. And my son wondered why I laughed when the long-haired, sweet-faced children of the sixties thought they were the first to become Flower Children.

What is it about human beings that they have this compulsion to hate? Even our Bible teaches us to love our neighbor and mistrust the enemy. But we’re not the enemy! I would yell.

Time and time again I shouted this; Daniel would turn away, his pale eyes fogged with misery. It doesn’t matter what a man hates, Hanna, as long as he hates something. Maybe he was right: love and fellowship don’t seem to unite people as much as a common hatred.

It is our first evening aboard, we are all strangers to each other. Our common languages are German and Yiddish. I stand in the dining hall that once must have been very grand; the chandeliers still hang, dusty now and cracked, and the wooden paneling peeling where once it was burnished and rich. About the room are mounds of thin straw mattresses pushed back so that several hundred famished people can collect their bowlful of sausage and onion, their half mug of water. They gaze, outraged, this raggle-taggle mob, into the contents of their bowls. On this we are expected to live? As if they dined each night in fancy restaurants. All afternoon, since we boarded the boat, I have been hearing complaints, born of fear, but compounding fear upon fear. If I hear one more I’ll lose all control of my patience. Not that I am famed for my patience.

We have a leader, David Engleman. He is a member of the Hagana, from Palestine, with an accent quite unlike any of ours. He’s immensely brave about all this, as if four thousand sick and frightened people crammed into a flotilla of four rundown boats were an everyday event. He stands on a table, his arms folded, and explains that when we arrive at the Black Sea in Rumania, we’ll be transferred to oceangoing ships. From there we’ll sail through the Aegean to the Mediterranean, and directly to Palestine. The entire journey will probably take two, possibly three weeks. Not more.

He is well-fed. On his sleeve is a blue-and-white armband on which is embroidered a gold Star of David. His jacket is battledress, buttoned right up to the high collar. He looks like a movie star from America. His hair is dark blond and curly, his eyes forceful.

While we’re on the Danube there will be a Gestapo motor-boat arriving daily to investigate us, David continues, and all of us—including the crew—will have to obey their orders until we disembark in Tulcea and re-embark under a different flag.

Furious murmuring starts all about the room. But we paid for this journey! Why are we still beholden to them?

With our last pennies we paid! a man near me shouts. His legs are thin and bowed, like an antique French chair. We’re travelling legally.

David nods. Yes. But the rules are theirs.

How had this happened? How had I come to be part of a vanquished mob fleeing to a country none of us had ever seen? What did any of us really know about Palestine? We called it the land of Israel and spoke of it with reverence, but it was a legend, a stony foreign land from biblical stories. When I first told my parents Daniel and I had decided to go to Palestine, my father said, You think Palestine is a hotel that will put you up in comfort and not present you with a bill?

Suddenly everyone is clapping at something David has said. Such is the strength of the ovation that the chandeliers ripple as if in a summer wind. I also applaud, but I feel disoriented and my head is light. The clamor crackles in waves. In the back of my throat spice from the sausage rises up and mixes with bile. The roots of my hair are soaked in sweat. I look about the room, at these who are my brethren, and I am filled with disparagement. They are broken-winged sparrows.

Many months before we boarded the paddle-steamers there had been a night in our city, a November night of such terror that before the sun rose six hundred and eighty men and women had committed suicide. Mahatma Gandhi, whom I considered to be a sage, had recommended that we offer passive resistance. You will win, he assured us, if you remain calm and do not allow bloodshed. I sometimes ponder his advice. But not for long. In this particular case Gandhi didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. Passive resistance was the only recourse available to us—and it most certainly didn’t work. Maybe the great Mahatma, like the rest of the world, didn’t grasp that we were not dealing with a normal human being.

It took me many years to understand that many of us did resist. How? We stayed alive, that’s how. We survived.

But that was then. Let me first tell you a little about the today that has arisen from the ashes of yesterday. Twenty years ago I moved from Tel Aviv into this house in the French Quarter of Haifa with my son Martin and his family. Martin bought it as what the real-estate people call a duplex, then converted it into one house, giving me two rooms—not big, not small—upstairs. I have my own terrace off the bathroom. Don’t ask me why a terrace with a view was built off the bathroom, but it was. To invite friends for a cup of tea in the sun, I used to first check that the bath was clean, that the yellow plastic curtain was hanging neatly, that I had tidied my jars and tubes. Now I don’t bother; most of my friends are so peculiar or so old that if I hung my toothbrush and comb from my neck I doubt that they’d even notice. Or they’d think it was some contemporary art I was wearing.

I moved in here because Martin and Dita said that after I retired I was too isolated, that my solitude was making me crabby. More crabby than usual.

Eema, Martin said one evening, Why did you never remarry?

It’s never too late, Dita said, nudging her elbow into my ribs.

Your whole life you’ve stayed alone because of Abba’s death. Does that make any sense? Martin always refers to Daniel as Abba, even though he never met his father.

Sense he wants. I haven’t been alone, Martin. I just didn’t remarry. There’s a difference.

So here I live up the stairs, in what my grandson calls my lair. I turned the nicest room into a study, with an old desk that the owner of the stationery store in which I once worked threw out in favor of an unsightly modern thing. In the corner of the room I installed a new television set that the children were forbidden to use without my permission. I went out and bought pre-cut book shelves for the walls—the kind of shelving one rigs together at great cost to one’s patience and thumbs—and on these I put my books.

When I first arrived with those books, my grandson, then aged seven, stood with his hands in the pockets of his jeans. I don’t like those books. I don’t like the pictures.

He meant the photographs. You mustn’t look at them, Joshua. They’re not for you. Few with even seasoned hearts can see such photographs without wanting to draw back and close the book forever. They rupture a grief so raw that nightmares, abhorrent, macabre, strangle the nights and tarnish the days. I put the books on the highest shelf, and showed both grandchildren only one book with some photographs of a ship, an old Greek freighter that flew the Panamanian flag. It is the SS Atlantic.

I want to go on that boat, said Lara. She was a little less than five then. She jumped up and down in her red sneakers; she would take some toys and oranges and friends and sail to another country. Just like you did, Nene.

Just like I did. If you paid me all the money in the world, you wouldn’t get me out on even an afternoon’s junket around the harbor, let alone out on to the open sea. What do I see when now I look at a boat? I see a tomb. The sea I love—but from the shore. If I want to go somewhere—which I don’t—I’ll take a plane. I’m like a bird; I trust the skies.

And I showed them photographs of an island off the coast of East Africa, of an old French jail cloaked with equatorial plants that cling tenaciously to the archaic stone. It looks, in these photographs, mysterious and quite enchanting. This is where your father was born, I said. On the island of Mauritius.

Were you born there too, Savta? Both grandchildren call me Savta—Hebrew for Grandma—or Nene. I cannot for the life of me recall how they arrived at Nene, unless it was to distinguish me from their other grandmother, Miriam, whom they called Savta Miri.

No. I was born in a city called Vienna. A city that was once one of the most beautiful places in the world. Such a river it had, clean and blue. And such parks.

Can we go there?

No.

Why? Why can’t we go and swim in that river?

Because it’s now the sewer they deserve.

Oh, I know what you’re thinking. Get with it. It was a long time ago, people argue with me.

It was yesterday, I tell them. No, I’m not fashionable. Not on that subject. And why should I be? Look at what’s happening now that walls are ripped down, at the new hatred which is bubbling out of that continent. The human eye is still not capable of seeing what is within its reach. When they first started pulling down the Berlin Wall, I said, Maybe they’re just renovating it?

I didn’t talk to my young grandchildren about those years; I didn’t want to make them sad, or fill them with agitation. But as they grew older, slowly I handed them books to read. If from grief they turn away from past truth, they will be unable to appreciate the marvel of life when it is good. And I do believe that life is good, although it’s certainly becoming fantastic what with modern technology. Some years ago Joshua—this grandson of mine—brought me a photograph of a peculiar metal drawing that men of this earth have shot into the solar system to find men of other worlds.

He handed me the photo. Look, Nene.

The drawing showed a man and a woman standing naked, the man with his hand raised as if in peace. I nodded. Very nice, I said. Very imaginative. But to myself I wondered what they were thinking about. Do they truly think we could disembark on someone else’s world and remain peaceful? Why would they even begin to think this? On our own earth we don’t know how to institute peace, let alone keep it. Children are killed in battles that their parents say they are fighting for peace. In the very country in which I live we say Shalom—Peace—whenever we say hello or goodbye; yet we have no peace. So it seems to me that the naked man in that metal drawing—if he were to depict our species more candidly—should be holding a rifle or a baton or a grenade.

This new world of ours; often I hear people talk of overpopulation. I nod and say, uh-huh, yes it might be getting a little crowded. Certainly buses and supermarkets seem congested. But to myself I say don’t worry, before long they’ll again think of some inventive way of getting rid of unwanted people.

Once when I was in New York, I met a man who said he was building a new shopping mall. He said he was designing a heating system for this, based on the same principle as a giant microwave oven.

Wouldn’t that cook the people, like chicken and bread rolls? I asked him.

The man stuck his chin out and said not really.

What do you mean, ‘not really’?

Well. He shrugged. They wouldn’t feel it.

They tell me our planet is polluted, that our plants and soil and seas are choking. I clamp my left foot on tight and go for a walk near the cable car that sways down over cliffs to the beach at Bat Galim. I sit in the Miglador coffee shop and watch the sun hovering pink and gold just above the horizon. I look at trees we once planted that are now tall and supple, at children gathering up toys from parks and gardens; I see their healthy young mothers calling them for dinner, and I think, it is so very beautiful. So beautiful that I could not bear to take leave of this world.

And that is when I become befuddled. I walk home, dragging my left foot a little as it becomes heavier, and I look up. Great planning, I mutter. I survived for what? For death?

Imagine what I’d do if a thundering voice came booming down over the tops of the palm trees: Hanna, old woman, stop whining! Yours is not to question.

Not to question! Can you imagine those of us in this country not questioning? We are maestros of debate; there is not a soul in this land who does not have at least three opinions on every subject; we’re constitutionally unable to stay silent.

It is with my grandson Joshua that most of my debates take place. He is a tall, exuberant young man—he is now twenty-five—who likes to use grandiose words. I enjoy seeing him riled and hearing his words become weightier. You believe God is the source of everything? he asked me one day, about a year ago.

I pretended I hadn’t heard, and went on making my tea.

Nene, he persisted, knowing full well I’d heard. Is God the source of all life, of all good?

I nodded warily, pulling my shoulders up.

And evil?

I hurled the teabag into the sink. How dare you ask me to defend God! I yelled at him. How can I use words for something that transcends language?

My grandson backed away. Okay, okay. Keep your shirt on. In Eastern religions they perceive God as a manifestation, a vehicle, not the derivation.

Good! Then go and live in Tibet.

Here is another of our standard debates that starts under many guises: So Hitler made you into a good Jew? Joshua says. The first time he said this we were in Mount Carmel, eating hamburgers in a restaurant with red plastic seats molded right to the formica tables. I laughed. Who knows? To be perfectly honest I still don’t know what I or others mean when we talk of God. But if my convictions—such as they are—had their timid debut in such troubled times, then so be it.

That manifestation of faith is for the birds, my grandson says. It’s founded in fear, nebulous, primeval. Such words. God is a metaphor, he says, packing more french fries into his mouth.

Very nice. To think people worship, die for, kill for and spend their lives in pursuit of a mere metaphor.

Yes? So what do you say? That God is a Supreme Being? The author of all?

Metaphorically speaking, maybe.

But of course I don’t know, and I don’t much care. I care that my grandson and I are able to sit together in this curious restaurant, eating hamburgers with ketchup dripping from the buns, and thump our fists on the table as we argue about something as inarguable as faith. It’s almost but not quite as absurd as some of the arguments we used to have about his rock and roll music. One day, after I had shouted at him three times to turn the volume down, he took me by the arm and led me to the stereo set. Now, listen properly. Listen to the bass guitarist, to the way he mutates the sound. He’s a genius! So I listened, and still didn’t like it. Yes, I replied. He’s definitely a mutant.

Does it matter? Does he have to change his opinions just because of a belligerent old lady? And do I have to change mine for this loveable callow boy? Most arguments of persuasion are like putting on the heater, then opening the front door: most of the heat will drift away and you will have wasted your money—not to mention the energies you’re squandering.

But now and then I do wonder that so many realized a faith during a time when faith seemed laughable. Perhaps those years on Mauritius can be likened to making us all sit too long in a cold room, so that we craved heat. When we emerged, we never left the fireside, stoked it and kept it continuously burning. There again, there are those who during those years stopped believing entirely, who could not endure the idea that there was a divinity who could behold, yet who would—or could—do nothing.

When terror strikes, some crumble like old masonry. Some are numbed, some look for reason. When a person is backed against a wall he can shut his eyes completely or he can open them wider than they have ever opened—and then there is no telling what he might see.

Maybe now you begin to understand: my entire life is one single stretch over and around which I can glide, up and down, back and forth. The stories and moments of my life are intermingled. I am both old and young, fearful and bold, embittered and pacified. So now I shall tell you the biggest news of all: two months ago, into this duet, this floating, filled space, came a third dimension: the future. Two months ago Lara, my granddaughter, came into my room; she stood next to my chair, uncharacteristically shy, grinning at objects in the room as if they already knew

Reviews for Boat of Stone

[Michael Levy · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This story was very compelling, such courage, living in those conditions on that island as prisoners for almost five years. Finally they were able to go to palestine.