The Watchmaker's Daughter: A Memoir by Sonia Taitz Page A

father saw unique defiance in his son’s every age-appropriate kick and raspberry. What was he to make of a little boy who seemed to learn about life from Dennis the Menace (a true paradigm of hyperactivity), Huck Finn, or Howdy Doody—who knew, and relished knowing, that he was “just a kid”?
    “Hey! You’re hurting me!” my brother would say. “And I’m just a kid!”
    What did the phrase just a kid mean to someone like my father? He had never been “just a kid.” After his father had been shot by the Cossacks, my father had had to be unwaveringly strong for his mother. There was no part of his life that had not witnessed tragedy and demanded sacrifice and resolve. So he had little experience with children, other than assuming that they obeyed their revered parents without question, as he had done.
    My father could not afford books for school. An athletic, resourceful boy who ice-skated everywhere in his frozen Baltic village, he was often forced to lend his skates in order to borrow a book and try to catch up. Even with his two older siblings becoming independent, he saw that he was a drain on his mother. So by age thirteen, instead of preparing for a Bar Mitzvah, he settled down to the discipline and promise of hard work. Later, he enrolled in the Lithuanian army and thrived under the rigors that, he felt, made him equal to all other men, rich or poor, Jewish or not. He believed in sacrifice, in unwavering routines. He had loved the army, where, he often told me, the officers complimented him on his being a good soldier “for a Jew.”
    How equipped was he to deal with American children, nourished and spoiled and played with and idolized? From the start, when my brother began to shout “No!”—sometimes punctuating his resistance by jumping up and down—my father took his little boy’s bravado as another mortal threat.
    “WHAT did I hear?”
    “You heared me say NO, Daddy!”
    “YOU—DARE—say ‘NO’—to ME???”
    “Yes, Daddy,” said my poor, normal, American brother, a kid with whom any other less exhausted dad would have loved to play catch.
    “Yes Daddy what?”
    “YES I Say NO to YOU!!”
    A beating followed, and would follow for years (for neither would stand down), ceasing only when my father’s arms were tired. This was a process called shmitz in Yiddish, a cognate for the word smite (which the biblical God was often wont to do). It was methodical, brutal, and sad.
    Yiddish has several words for hitting. There is the frask —a sort of slap (I received frasks from my mother for being “fresh,” but never on the face). There is a klahp— more of a one-time blow. And then there is the far more serious shmitz —implying a more sustained beating, perhaps with a belt (the dreaded rimmen ). My father had no need for the weaponry of buckles. His own massive hands drove the fierce message home.
    “OW! HEY! STOP! OWWWWW!”
    “Oy Shimon! Herr opp!” My mother would cry, which would make my father even wilder. He hated tears; they added to his rage.
    “THIS! WILL! TEACH! YOU! TO ANSWER ME LIKE THAT!!”
    “Watch his head! Pass opp zein kopp!”
    “AN! ANIMAL! YOU! HAVE! TO! BEAT!”
    “Ushtaks, Shimon!” Now she spoke Lithuanian to him. Stop!
    And then he would finally stop, exhausted.
    With loud theatrical sobbing, my brother crumpled on the linoleum.
    “I think you broke my head, you baldy!”
    “WHAT DID YOU CALL ME?”
    “Nothing.”
    It was simply impossible for my poor father to be dominated, or imagine the challenge of domination, by anyone, of any size, anymore. And his son was made of the same determined cloth. As for me, I picked up right away that it was best never to contradict my father. Not openly. I could never decide if my brother was brave or stubborn for challenging his unstoppable, windmill-fisted father.
    My mother found my supposed immunity annoying. “Why don’t you ever hit her?” I once heard her say, after her boy had been beaten down and