“I always wanted a real home with flowers on the windowsill.” — Carol King, popular song from the 1970s

Within hours of first breathing the cattle car’s nauseating air, we began to feel at home. “Home” was the edge of the wooden plank I sat on.— Elie Wiesel, Memoirs 

In the Jerusalem living-room of an elderly, Yiddish-speaking widow hangs an elaborately framed, three-dimensional rendition of a window. The carefully constructed diorama – the window is set in the yellow exterior wall of an old-fashioned, early-American-style house — is presented for your visual delectation in exquisite, lifelike detail.

There’s a real little flower box on the window sill, full to overflowing with tiny violet-colored nasturtiums; and dark-green wooden shutters (they’d come in handy against prying eyes such as yours) folding back onto the pale yellow wall. Your friend, the widow, is talking about the upcoming marriage of her great-granddaughter but you’re foolishly distracted, from across the living room, by a silly desire to look in through those little windowpanes, and are finding the desire thwarted (luckily for the secretive little people having supper inside) by a long draped curtain–an actual little swatch of red velvet with ivory-colored lace trimming, drawn back primly with a neat little bow.

The only peek you’re granted of anything inside that house is of an antique oil-lamp half-hidden behind the drapes, spilling its soft glow.

The pretty picture is charming, and heartwarming. Too charming, and too heartwarming, like candy for the eyes. In its skillfully created illusory depths we get a tantalizing hint of a small world unto itself, a distant, magical realm at once frustratingly unattainable and intimately familiar.

If you like thinking of yourself as someone who’s immune to blatant sentimentality such as this, you might try resisting its magnetic sweetness. You might tell yourself the picture is corny, and commercial; that it crassly concretizes something better left unsaid…something intangible and imaginary that should rightly elude our grasp, an ideal we sense instinctively, too true to be cheapened. You resent the artist for dipping our ideal into a tub of sugar before offering it for our consumption, but the picture catches your eye, and draws you in.

You’d like to gain entry, but that hidden home belongs to somebody else, some happy cozy somebody with a mother, and father, and grandparents, and brothers and sisters.

“I can’t stop looking at that picture,” I remark to the widow.

“Ah, yes.” She looks over at it fondly. “I know. My daughter she gave it for my birthday.”

We fall silent a few moments, as we’re both transported separately from her sofa to wherever the picture takes us.

I say, “I guess that’s what home is supposed to look like.” She tips her head thoughtfully to the side, and I ask, “Is that what it was like in Hungary?”

“Well….you know, I was only two when I left. In 1929. Because when my father died, she came here to Eretz Israel, my mother.”

“So you don’t remember anything?”

“Well…I remember sitting in…like a hatzer, and my mother was there and somebody was cutting my hair. And then, in 1997, I went with my cousin.”

“Oh. You did go back?”

“Yes, we was looking for the house of my mother. We was walking all around there, around the streets, trying to find her house, and asking the people but nobody knows, then comes this very old goya (non Jew), and I ask if maybe she knows where is the street. She looks at me, and she looks at my cousin, and she says, I knew your mother. At first I don’t know if to believe her. You know, this is after seventy years. Seventy-five years. So I says to her, Oh yes? You remember her name? And she looks at me and she says, Hurevitz.”

“Yes. This was my mother’s name. She says, I remember Hurevitz-nini! That means, Hurevitz very nice lady. She sees we look like my mother, you know. She keeps saying Hurevitz-nini! Hurevitz-nini! She says, your mother every Friday was giving me a loaf of bread.”

“So when you saw the house, did you remember it?”

“Ah, no. Because my cousin — she was eighty-one, or eighty-two — she didn’t want so much to see it and she wasn’t feeling so good so in the end we didn’t go with the goya. You know my mother she was killed, soon after my wedding. She came to me for Lilah Seder and then in the night she –”

“In the Holocaust?” As soon as I say this, I realize my mistake — she’d just said they were here in Israel.

“No, no. Here! A few minutes’ walk! After the Seder she walked back alone to Mea Shearim– she lived in Batei Ungarin — and in the morning people come to tell me, your mother she’s died. The Arabs killed her. Yes. That’s why I was going back. I wanted so much to see my mother’s house.”

                                                               * * *

Out the train windows on the way to see my sister, suddenly all the signs........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)