Art of a Jewish Woman by Henry Massie Page B

to?
    Zalman Kaplan’s photography studio, where the family went for portraits, was near the Old Synagogue, and in the neighborhood to the south was the horse market and her father’s granary. Beyond were fields and forests.
    Although her childhood memories of Szczuczyn were romantic, Felice did not remember her home as especially warm. Her parents were formal with each other. She did not see them hug or kiss, and she didn’t think her mother had much time for her. Even when they started to employ two Polish maids, Manya and Katrina, to cook and clean and help with Miriam and Hanka, her mother still didn’t have much time for her. She was a great entertainer, and every day friends came to call. Avron Finkelstein came at 10 a.m. and Iczy Savitsky came at 3 p.m. for tea and little cakes. They were devoted friends of her mother, and they loved to visit. They were married men with families, yet Felice thought they must have been in love with her mother, though it was an unspoken feeling. Hanka and Freyda Tetenbaum were also regular visitors. Sometimes Felice felt jealous if they didn’t bring cakes for her too.
    Her mother was witty, too flirtatious with her friends, and more intelligent in a social way than her father, who had an excellent mind for business. Her father stepped in briefly when friends were there to say hello and get a cup of tea, then returned to his office. There was something Felice didn’t like about her mother’s visitors. She wasn’t sure what it was, but it didn’t seem right. She’d put a chair in the corner of the room or in the doorway and do her homework and watch. “My mother tried to shoosh me away, but I wouldn’t budge. I didn’t know what I was watching for, but I did it anyway.”
    When her parents or her mother and her friends didn’t want her to understand something, they switched from Polish to Yiddish, but Felice understood. She knew when they were talking about money or somebody’s bad behavior, even though implications of the words she overheard remained mysterious to her. She used to wonder if somebody would go to jail, or if somebody’s father would go away, a strange and horrible thought, even though divorce was unheard of in those days.
    The most sobering time in Felice’s childhood was when she came down with rheumatic fever at age twelve. She had to return home from middle school in Kolno and stay in bed for weeks with a high fever, inflamed joints that hurt too badly to walk on, and a fluttering heart. Dr. Tomashevsky came every day. Each time he examined her heart with his stethoscope, he said she would get better, “but you mustn’t do you homework. You must rest.” She thanked him with a smile and did the homework the school sent after he left.
    There was little else the doctor could do then, for there was no penicillin for the streptococcus. It could be lethal during the initial infection, as it was to the father of the family with whom Felice lived in Tel Aviv several years later. Many victims who survived the acute phase ended up with damaged heart valves and died prematurely in middle age, for there was no cardiac surgery until the 1960s. Felice recovered undamaged.
    As soon as Dr. Tomashevsky said she was well enough to go outside, they couldn’t keep her indoors. It was market day. Every Tuesday and Friday was a market day, and she loved to run across the street to the Rynek, which teemed with wagons, horses, animals, and farmers, and was so crowded she could hardly make her way through. The farmers who leased land or worked it for the landowners were known as the peasantry and they came from the countryside to the market with their wives to sell their products—all kinds of foodstuffs, fresh vegetables, fruit, cheese, eggs, butter, and milk.
    The landowners and farmers came from a radius of about 20 miles, about three hours wagon or buggy travel to town over gravel and dirt roads, to negotiate the selling of crops. Moses Ovezerovicz met with them, telling