The Mezuzah in the Madonna's Foot: Marranos and Other Secret Jews: A Woman Discovers Her Hidden Identity
These thrilling and harrowing first-hand stories of fellow-survivors and their Spanish rescuers vividly reveal the unknown history of the Jews who found asylum from Hitler's Final Solution under Franco's Fascist regime. \ Originally published in hard cover by Simon and Schuster and by Harper/San Francisco in paperback, it was acclaimed as one of The Progressive's "BEST READING OF 1993" and won an award from the Jewish Book Council in the category of Memoir and Biography. It is the first...
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These thrilling and harrowing first-hand stories of fellow-survivors and their Spanish rescuers vividly reveal the unknown history of the Jews who found asylum from Hitler's Final Solution under Franco's Fascist regime. Originally published in hard cover by Simon and Schuster and by Harper/San Francisco in paperback, it was acclaimed as one of The Progressive's "BEST READING OF 1993" and won an award from the Jewish Book Council in the category of Memoir and Biography. It is the first volume of Alexy's Hidden Identities Trilogy, followed in 2003 by The Marrano Legacy, and in 2005 by In Search Of Forgiveness, recounting her own search for her lost Jewish heritage.
The Mezuzah in the Madonna's Foot \ Marranos and Other Secret Jews: A Woman Discovers Her Hidden Identity\ \ By Trudi Alexy Backinprint.com \ Copyright © 2006 Trudi Alexy\ All right reserved.\ ISBN: 9780595411597\ \ \ Chapter One\ Girlhood in Prague\ When my father was born in Czernovitz, the capital of the province of Bukovina, it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, ruled by Kaiser Franz Joseph, and most of the people who lived there spoke German. After World War I, Czernovitz was assigned to the kingdom of Romania. By the time I was born there, in 1927, its name had been changed to Cernauti, and its official language became Romanian. After World War II, the Soviet Union incorporated it and, of course, changed its name again. It is now part of the Republic of Ukraine, called Cernovci, and, with the rapid changes occurring as I write, I won't even try to guess what language is prevalent there today.\ In the late 1920s Czernovitz was a charming university town, alive with a bustling cultural life. My father's family owned a combination pharmacy-barbershop. His father was the druggist, and his mother, the official cast hairdresser for several theater companies in town, worked in the store with him. My father, Georg, was the middle child between a younger brother, Milos, and an older sister, Frieda.\ My mother, Norma, was born in Vienna and was an only child. In herfamily were well-to-do landowners with extensive farm, forest, and farm-machinery interests located close to the Russian border. Her father was killed during the first year of World War I, when she was only nine years old, and by war's end all of the family's holdings were lost to the Russians, never to be recovered. Her mother, my Oma Jenny, raised her alone.\ My father, whose photos as a young man reveal a striking resemblance to the dashing King Carol of Romania, was introduced to my mother when she was visiting her Czernovitz relatives, and was immediately captivated by her blue-eyed blond beauty and patrician air.\ After they were married, Father brought Mother to Czernovitz. Oma Jenny soon joined them, and my brother, Fredo, and I were born there, eighteen months apart. In 1929 all five of us moved to Prague and remained there for nine years.\ Several childhood memories stand out, not only because of their content but because of the exaggerated symbolic meaning they came to hold for me. Only much later did I recognize this flight into "magical thinking" as a child's attempt to explain the inexplicable, to make order out of chaos and to create a spiritual world where none exists.\ The first such event happened when I was two and a half years old. A minor throat infection turned into streptococcus sepsis, a type of blood poisoning for which there was no cure at that time. Fever kept me delirious for weeks. Huge boils, which appeared all over my body, had to be lanced without anesthetic due to a mild heart murmur. I have a clear picture of me sitting on a padded window seat in our flat, with my parents holding me still while the doctor cut open the abscesses on my legs, wrists, and back as blackish blood spilled into a basin on the floor.\ Later, one end of a strange glass coil resting on our dining-room table was inserted into my father's wrist, with the other embedded in my own. I can still see the blood coursing from his body into mine through the transparent coil while my own poisoned blood poured out through a cut next to it.\ This primitive blood transfusion saved my life. I have no memory of pain. I do, however, remember the color of the blood: my own was nearly black while my father's, bubbling through the glass coil, was bright red. That color contrast, and the fact that I soon felt better, made Father suddenly appear bigger than life, and the possessor of magical powers.\ Father's personality actively perpetuated this superhuman projection. His booming voice and his domineering manner discouraged all challenges to his authority. His frequent loud outbursts frightened us all, and I knew early on that the only way to escape his wrath was to do as I was told and ask no questions.\ Despite his stern manner, Father and I shared a frequent ritual. On many Saturday mornings, just he and I had lunch together at Lippert's. This was a most unusual automat-delicatessen, where each of the open-faced sandwiches, displayed in little cubbyholes along a wall, was a fanciful work of art. At the drop of a coin, a glass door would pop open on such edible masterpieces as the replica of an ocean liner, with asparagus smoke stacks and rolled-up anchovy portholes resting on layer upon layer of alternating ham and cheese decks, all floating on a sea of mayonnaise whitecaps; or an airplane with a lobster body, artichoke leaves for wings, and silvery sardine propellers stuck with toothpicks to red radish engines.\ Eating at Lippert's was an exciting adventure, but there was an ordeal I had to wrestle with each time we went there. The restaurant was located on the third floor of a tall building at the foot of Wenceslas Square in the heart of Prague. In order to get upstairs we had to take a strange tandem elevator made up of several individual doorless cabins, spaced just a foot or two apart and attached to perpetually moving pulleys. One had to jump on and off the open elevator cabins as they slowly passed by the exit on each floor. Every time I faced this contraption (oddly named "Paternoster," "Our Father" in Latin), I stood before it frozen in terror till Father jumped on, pulling me with him. Getting off was even more frightening. In my fantasy (which was to recur as a nightmare well into my adult years) I was certain I alone would somehow miss the last moment to get off and be trapped inside. I had no doubt that the cabin would turn upside down as soon as it...\ \ \ Continues... \ \ \ \ Excerpted from The Mezuzah in the Madonna's Foot by Trudi Alexy Copyright © 2006 by Trudi Alexy. Excerpted by permission.\ All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.\ Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. \ \
