Ladder of Charity: Life of a Post-Holocaust Child

By Shirley Warter Faivus

No information available at this time. Author will provide once available.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669811435

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ABBREVIATED HISTORY

AND GEOGRAPHY

I would like to introduce the reader to a brief history of Romania as a reference and to help the reader understand some of the events and locations mentioned in this book.

Romania is a country in Eastern Europe. It is the only country in that geographical region where a Romance language is spoken. Between AD 106 and AD 350, Romania was under Roman conquest. That was Dacia Traiana. Between 350 BC and 20 BC, Dacia was conquered by the Greeks and possessed several Hellenistic archeological layers indicating some of the treasures of that civilization. The known Greek colonies were Tomis, Hysteria, and Callatis, which today is the Constanza region located on the Black Sea Riviera. Like many countries in Eastern Europe, Romania went through numerous wars, winning and losing parts of its territory. Traversed by nomads, ruled by Romanian Voievodal (regional feudal lords), it became a kingdom united by King Carol I from 1881 to 1914. In my time, the communist regime of Romania did not want to emphasize the royal history or the alliance with Nazi Germany during WWII. From 1774 to 1918, Bucovina, a province of Romania where all my family and I were born, belonged to the Habsburg Monarchy. In WWI, it became a battlefield of the Austrian, Russian, and Romanian troops. In 1919, Austria ceded the Bucovina province to the greater Romania at that time.

Romania is rich in natural resources, such as barium, salt, natural gas, oil, fishing, lumber, and more. The Carpathian Mountains extend from the north to the south, through the center of the country in an elbowlike formation. The mountains offer breathtaking scenery, unusual ancient rock formations, glens, rivers, lakes, and numerous old castles once belonging to Romanian and other European royalty. The Black Sea shore and the Danube River form the southern border of the country. After flowing through ten European countries, the Danube empties into the Black Sea. The Danube Delta has been visited not only by thousands of tourists but also by botanists, paleontologists, and archeologists. They studied the variety of animals and plants unique only to the delta. The village of Voronetz became a neighborhood of Gura Humorului (my native town in Bucovina) in 2005. It includes the painted monastery known as the Sistine Chapel of the East. It has been there since the time of Leonardo da Vinci.

SOME PERSONAL

REFLECTIONS

AND EVENTS

Sometimes I feel like I have lived more than one lifetime. I literally went from horse and buggy to electric car. I have been in the USA since 1964 and often felt that I did not fit in. When I went back for a visit to Romania, in my late twenties, I came to the sad conclusion that I no longer belonged there either. Immigrating as a teenager and leaving behind my country of birth, my native language, my home and friends was extremely difficult. Since I had been living in New York at the time of the visit I had been exposed to much more national and international news and information than my former colleagues. They had been living under Ceausescu’s communist regime and only got the propaganda news the government wanted them to hear. They were still believing in myths and false information about the atrocities that happened during WWII. The period between 1918 and 1989 was left out of the Romanian history books.

When I first arrived in the USA, in 1964, I was altogether focused on pleasant memories of my childhood and adolescence. It often helped me avoid the difficult reality of having to adjust to a completely unfamiliar environment and a different way of life. Coming from a communist country to the United States was not at all what I expected. Comparing my life in Romania with my new life as a political refugee was at times disappointing and even depressing. I could not understand my neighbors, the shopkeepers, or anyone who spoke only English. My family had left behind a bucolic town in the mountains, a spacious house in exchange for a three-room apartment for a family of five in the Bronx. I was too immature and naïve, at the time, to grasp the big picture and often got carried away by magical thinking.

The initial impressions and feelings on my part changed gradually with help from friends, family, and people in the neighborhood. Over time I came to weigh the negative sides in my new country against the positive ones. I am extremely happy to admit that the USA has been a far better place to live than any of the more than twenty countries I have visited after my immigration. I wholeheartedly hope and pray that it remains that way. Considering the political events that took place in the past several years, from 2016 to 2020, Emma Lazarus’s poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty must never be changed to America First, a hateful and racist concept and way to govern.

The last few verses of the poem The New Colossus are

Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

In sharp contrast to the Lazarus poem, the America First Committee was a 1940 American white supremacist and isolationist organization that sympathized with the Nazis. In Germany, at large rallies, Hitler encouraged hate, racism, and xenophobia. At the same time, the America First Committee was marching on New York’s Fifth Avenue with similarly hateful ideas and slogans. When the attack on Pearl Harbor took place, the America First movement went dormant. After all, the USA had been and still is constitutional democracy. After 2016, the leader of the free world awakened isolationism and racism in the hearts of his followers. Apparently, those sentiments were not buried very deep. Millions of MAGA (Make America Great Again) supporters followed in his footsteps. Those events have created great concerns and uneasiness in a larger number of Americans in general and especially among those who immigrated from all corners of the globe. Those events also raised deep concerns for me and my family.

THE COVID 19 EFFECT

We find ourselves in the second year of Covid-19, a pandemic that has plagued the entire United States and the rest of the world. Virtually everyone, separated from family, friends, and neighbors, found themselves isolated and with lots of free time to worry. I found myself, like many others, with more than ample time to reflect on my former life. That factor made me decide to write this book. Writing about my immediate American family and about my life before I emigrated to the USA will clarify some of the causes and effects in my relationships with family and friends.

My two grandchildren Sophie and Aaron are twelve and ten, respectively. I have seen them on Zoom from time to time. What do they know about my life? Will they be interested to learn about it? I put the same questions to their parents, Amy and Lauren, who are my American-born children. Their lives have been quite different from mine. Have I tried to expose them to cultural events like those that have influenced my own life? Yes, I have. Have these attempts sometimes led to crossed communications? Yes, they have. Despite many of the mother/daughter bumps in our relationships, neither of them rebelled in any noticeable way until they married. My husband Harry dealt with this by saying, Now they have a different boss. Perhaps they were trying to gain independence from their parents. My modus operandi had been to help with issues encountered by my children and family. I had been a trained school counselor and tried to find quick solutions and often succeeded. Instead of accomplishing the results intended, it resulted in my children distancing themselves from me and my husband. That is when I realized that helping one’s own children was a tricky business. My husband and I loved them dearly and only wished for their happiness and well-being. Our sons-in-law became their sounding boards. Children will blame their parents for issues that makes them uncomfortable. This explanation stemmed from my rational voice. My emotional voice, as a mother, made me sad and hurt, especially when Harry and I did not have enough access to enjoy our grandchildren. Because of my husband’s personality and temperament, he coped with the situation much better than I did. That is not to say that he did not feel hurt.

MY DAUGHTERS’

CHILDHOODS

Amy and Lauren were raised in Manhattan. Although a large urban area offered fewer possibilities for individual exploration in younger years, my husband and I felt that Manhattan was an excellent place to raise our