Books Saved My Life as a Young Refugee
By Esther Erman
When I was seven years old, I read a library book with a gray cover called Heroes and Heroines for Boys and Girls. In spite of being a little Jewish girl from the Bronx, the heroine who caught my attention and inspired me most was Joan of Arc. I went on to study French, including as my college major and for graduate work. And decades later, Joan continues to be one of my heroes.
Finding Joan of Arc is one small beam of light from a generally unhappy childhood. My parents and I arrived in the U.S. as refugees. They came from Poland—each the sole survivor from their family after the Holocaust. In addition to losing everyone and everything, they suffered ghettoization, Auschwitz, and unimaginable brutality and abuse. They met and married in a displaced persons’ camp in the British sector of Germany in 1945. Eighteen months after my mother’s liberation from Bergen-Belsen, she gave birth to me in Stuttgart. A few months after that, we immigrated to America and settled into our first home—a wreck of a tenement on the Lower East Side of Manhattan long before the area became trendy.
I learned the language of our home, which was Yiddish. That language served me well on Suffolk Street, where everyone spoke it. However, when I was four, we moved to the Bronx and I suddenly became aware that there were two kinds of people: English speakers and Yiddish speakers. I was in the second group, but I aspired to be in the first. Kindergarten gave me a chance. Along with learning English, I decided to stop speaking Yiddish. Even though my parents continued to speak the language to me, I always answered in English.
By the time I started first grade, I was a fluent English speaker—and now I was happily also beginning to read, in English of course. My mother soon noticed that when I read, my right eye crossed inward. Initially, she thought I was fooling around. Once it was clear that I couldn’t control my eye movement, my parents concluded that this was a real problem that needed to be fixed. Surgery frightened them. Instead, they found an eye doctor who could provide eye exercises.
This discovery raised several new challenges. First, the large expense would further strain the meager income my father worked very hard to earn. Second, getting me from the Bronx to the doctor’s Manhattan office would place an added burden on my mother. Twice each week she now had to push my baby brother in a stroller the five blocks to my school to pick me up, then schlep all of us to and from Manhattan by subway. My parents shouldered the efforts and sacrifices of the commitment to taking care of my eyes for three years, until we moved to New Jersey. Once there, access to a doctor became less burdensome—and it was soon apparent that the treatment I’d had was a success.
However. Even though the purpose of seeing the doctor was to exercise my eyes, my parents had somehow gotten the idea that, other than when doing the exercises with the doctor, I should “rest” my eyes. In particular, from the time I started treatment, they severely restricted my reading. To this day, I don’t know what the source of this thinking was, but it had huge consequences for me and for the atmosphere of our home.
Being a rebellious child, I did everything I could to exceed my permitted limits of reading, using all my creative energies to find ways to increase contact with the printed word. I snuck books under my blanket at night with a flashlight. I discovered the public library and would read there when I said I was going to a friend’s house. I even surreptitiously read the words on packaged goods.
But my path was far from easy. For example, my parents enlisted the neighbors to keep tabs on me. One neighbor in particular would watch me like a hawk, seeming to get a perverse delight in reporting my transgressions. My parents expressed immediate outrage whenever they caught me reading more than what was allowed, which happened often. “Look what you’re doing after we take you to the doctor and pay so much money!” they’d remind me. Although my reading was not the only source of warfare in our home, it did contribute greatly to the ongoing hostilities.
As an inherently determined child, I had become, and have always continued to be, passionate about books and reading. Ironically, as an adult I learned that, by my transgressions, I was doing the right thing for my eyesight! I wish my parents had understood that using my eyes was good—both for my eyesight and for the person I was becoming. It would have lessened the difficulties of my home life, bringing greater blessings of peace and harmony. I realize now that my parents really did want to take good care of me—that they thought everything they were doing was for the best. They were just misguided, and I can’t blame them, considering all they had been through.
It’s taken me years to begin to understand what it meant to be raised by two highly traumatized, albeit high-functioning, people. I credit books and my love of reading for filling my world with color, texture, possibility, and, most of all, hope.
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Esther Erman was born in Germany, the daughter of two survivors of the Shoah from Poland. After receiving her B.A. and M.A. in French from Rutgers University, she returned there for her doctorate in language education. She wrote her dissertation about Yiddish, her first language, which she had abandoned at age five. A multi-published author, Esther now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband Lee. When they’re not traveling, she loves to bake, quilt, and add to her monumental book collection. Her most recent book is Rebecca of Salerno: a Novel of Rogue Crusaders, a Jewish Female Physician, and a Murder.