Sometime during that awful era, I began fiddling around on the piano
As told to Shoshana Itzkowitz
I was only four years old when my mother passed away. Immediately after her petirah, my father, an older European man who didn’’t have much experience with child-rearing, packed up our house in Brooklyn and moved us — my twin brother, me, and our older sister — across the country to live near his sister. It was an act of both sacrifice and survival on his part; he wanted us to have a shot at a normal upbringing, and moving near Aunt Mira would afford us that.
We moved into a tiny ranch in the heart of Small-Town, USA. The previous owners had left lots of furniture, the most prized of which would become my best friend over the next 15 years: an old upright piano.
I have no memories of preschool; my nightmare life began in first grade. I still have pictures of that day: My older sister had painstakingly braided my freshly washed hair, and I wore my absolute favorite dress (it had been Cousin Chana’’s first, then her sister’’s).
For reasons I couldn’’t comprehend, I became the class queen’’s target. From Day One, I was bullied mercilessly. If I drank from the water fountain, Sarah announced that it was contaminated and no one else would drink from it. If I brought chips for a siyum, I’’d walk around the class trying to distribute them, but one by one the girls would grimace and motion me onward.
Create a free account to keep reading.
