Gift : 12 Lessons to Save Your Life by Edith Eger (book club recommendations txt) 📕

a joyful laugh. I have never seen my mother rejoice, never heard her laugh from the belly, but in my body I feel the untapped well of her happiness.

When I get to school, the tuition money my father gave me to cover an entire quarter of school is gone. Somehow, in the flurry of dancing, I have lost it. I check every pocket and crease of my clothing, but it is gone. All day the dread of telling my father burns like ice in my gut. At home he can’t look at me as he raises his fists. This is the first time he has ever hit me, or any of us. He doesn’t say a word to me when he is done. In bed that night I wish to die so that my father will suffer for what he did to me. And then I wish my father dead.

Do these memories give me an image of my strength? Or of my damage? Maybe every childhood is the terrain on which we try to pinpoint how much we matter and how much we don’t, a map where we study the dimensions and the borders of our worth.

Maybe every life is a study of the things we don’t have but wish we did, and the things we have but wish we didn’t.

It took me many decades to discover that I could come at my life with a different question. Not: Why did I live? But: What is mine to do with the life I’ve been given?

*  *  *

My family’s ordinary human dramas were complicated by borders, by wars. Before World War I, the Slovakian region where I was born and raised was part of Austro-Hungary, but in 1918, a decade before my birth, the Treaty of Versailles redrew the map of Europe and created a new state. Czechoslovakia was cobbled together from agrarian Slovakia, my family’s region, which was ethnically Hungarian and Slovak; the more industrial regions of Moravia and Bohemia, which were ethnically Czech; and Subcarpathian Rus’, a region that is now part of Ukraine. With the creation of Czechoslovakia, my hometown—Kassa, Hungary—became Košice, Czechoslovakia. And my family became double minorities. We were ethnic Hungarians living in a predominately Czech country, and we were Jewish.

Though Jews had lived in Slovakia since the eleventh century, it wasn’t until 1840 that Jews were permitted to settle in Kassa. Even then, city officials, backed by Christian trade guilds, made it difficult for Jewish families who wanted to live there. Yet by the turn of the century, Kassa had become one of Europe’s largest Jewish communities. Unlike in other Eastern European countries, such as Poland, Hungarian Jews weren’t ghettoized (which is why my family spoke Hungarian exclusively and not Yiddish). We weren’t segregated, and we enjoyed plenty of educational, professional, and cultural opportunities. But we still encountered prejudice, subtle and explicit. Anti-Semitism wasn’t a Nazi invention. Growing up, I internalized a sense of inferiority and the belief that it was safer not to admit that I was Jewish, that it was safer to assimilate, to blend in, to never stand out. It was difficult to find a sense of identity and belonging. Then, in November 1938, Hungary annexed Košice again, and it felt like home had become home.

My mother stands on our balcony at Andrássy Palace, an old building that has been carved into single-family apartments. She has draped an Oriental rug across the railing. She’s not cleaning; she’s celebrating. Admiral Miklós Horthy, His Serene Highness the Regent of the Kingdom of Hungary, arrives today to formally welcome our town into Hungary. I understand my parents’ excitement and pride. We belong! Today I, too, welcome Horthy. I perform a dance. I wear a Hungarian costume: bold floral embroidery on a bright wool vest and skirt, billowing white-sleeved blouse, ribbons, lace, red boots. When I do the high kick by the river, Horthy applauds. He embraces the dancers. He embraces me.

“Dicuka, I wish we were blond like Klara,” Magda whispers at bedtime.

We are still years away from curfews and discriminatory laws, but Horthy’s parade is the starting point of all that will come. Hungarian citizenship has brought belonging in one sense but exclusion in another. We are so happy to speak our native tongue, to be accepted as Hungarians—but that acceptance depends on our assimilation. Neighbors argue that only ethnic Hungarians who are not Jewish should be allowed to wear the traditional garments.

“It’s best not to let on you’re Jewish,” my sister Magda warns me. “It will just make other people want to take away your beautiful things.”

Magda is the firstborn; she reports the world to me. She brings me details, often troubling things, to study and ponder. In 1939, the year that Nazi Germany invades Poland, the Hungarian Nazis—the nyilas—occupy the apartment below ours in Andrássy Palace. They spit at Magda. They evict us. We move to a new apartment, at Kossuth Lajos Utca #6, on a side street instead of the main road, less convenient for my father’s business. The apartment is available because its former occupants, another Jewish family, have left for South America. We know of other Jewish families leaving Hungary. My father’s sister Matilda has been gone for years already. She lives in New York, in a place called the Bronx, in a Jewish immigrant neighborhood. Her life in America seems more circumscribed than ours. We don’t talk about leaving.

Even in 1940, when I’m thirteen, and the nyilas begin to round up the Jewish men of Kassa and send them to a forced labor camp, the war feels far away from us. My father isn’t taken. Not at first. We use denial as protection. If we don’t pay attention, then we can continue our lives unnoticed. We can make the world safe in our minds. We can make ourselves invisible to harm.

But one day in June 1941, Magda is out on her bicycle when the sirens roar. She dashes three blocks to the safety of our grandparents’ house, only to find half