Book #2 Sneak Peek
As a Jewish author in a post-October 7th world, I have decided to use my voice to promote strong Jewish characters and Israel, as well as our shared history, values, culture and heritage.
Nov. 10, 1977
Dear Diary,
Today was the very worst day of my hole entir life!!! At recess, Mean Mike started following me and Lizzie and Anati and Missy all around the playground and yelling fatty Maddie so evryone could hear. I wanted them to stop but I didn’t want to talk to them so I tryed my best to look down at the ground and just ignor it but its super hard to ignor a big jerk following you around and yelling things like there she goes fatty Maddie and she’s too fat to run fast so dont pick her for your team. Lizzie yelled at him to shut up but that just made him laff and say it louder. Me and my friends ended up going into the girls bathroom and we stayed there untill the bell rang. I tryed my best not to cry in front of them and turned to the wall so they wouldn’t see the tears I was holding back in my eyes. They tryed to make me feel better and called them stupid boys and they pretended not to see that I was cryng but I think they all knew I realy was. As soon as I got home from scool, I ran to my mom finaly leting all my tears out and saying I was never going back to scool. Never ever because I hate scool now.
~~~
I threw myself into my mom’s arms as soon as she opened the front door, sobbing uncontrollably. She was alarmed, thinking that something truly horrible had happened to me and in my third-grade mind, it had. The very worst possible thing had happened. I was being singled out and publicly ridiculed for looking different than most of my peers. I knew I looked different – less good than – most of the other girls in my grade. There were the obvious things, my knees weren’t knobby like all the other girls in our short party dresses of the ‘70s. When I wore a halter top or a two-piece bathing suit, I was aware that my tummy was round underneath where the other girls’ were flat. I remember being self-conscious of these differences very early, almost as far back as my memory goes. But it had never been brought to anyone else’s attention before; I had never been picked on, taunted, for the way I looked. I had always just assumed no one noticed these things other than me.
“Why did you name me Maddie?” I wailed into my mom’s body. “It’s the worst name ever! I want to change it!”
“What are you talking about?” my mom asked, equal parts upset and confused. “Your name is beautiful and meaningful. You were named for my mother, you know that. It’s a strong name, for the strong women in our family who came before us. Why, what’s this all about?”
Of course, I knew the story of my name. I’d heard it so many times. My full name is Madeleine Ariella. Madeleine is spelled the French way, which was already upsetting enough because no one ever spelled it right, and on the first day of school, teachers would stop and ask how it was pronounced, the extra ‘e’ causing endless confusion. In Hebrew, the name comes from the word ‘tower’ or ‘fortress’ and so it was meant to signify strength. My middle name Ariella is the feminine derivative of the name Ari, meaning ‘lion’ in Hebrew. It was a very strong name for one little girl. A lot of responsibility to live up to.
A lot of responsibility indeed. My parents named me Madeleine-the-French-way because my mom was born in France and that was her mother’s name. My mom never knew her parents because they were rounded up with all the other Jews of Paris and died in Auschwitz. Well, her mom died in the concentration camp; no one knows exactly what happened to her dad. My mom was born on March 5, 1942, and when the Vel’ d’Hiv’ Roundup started at sunrise on July 16th of that year, she was only four months old.
Hearing the frightening pounding of the boots and shouts in the building on the floors below her, my grandmother knew something terrible was happening, and hid her only baby, my mom, on top of a pile of laundry in the back closet of their apartment, praying her cries wouldn’t be heard. My mother has told me many times that this must’ve been the hardest, and most courageous, thing for her mother to do. She knew that they were about to be taken away and this was her best chance to save her only child. My grandparents were arrested by the French police, in collaboration with the Nazis, just for being Jewish. This Roundup rid Paris and its suburbs of nearly all its Jews. More than 13,000 men, women and children were arrested on July 16th and 17th and locked in the sweltering indoor sports arena called the Velodrome d’Hiver (hence, the Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup). For almost a week, they were given barely any food or water, and since the few bathrooms in the arena quickly clogged, people went to the bathroom anywhere they could. They were not told how long they would be kept there or what would happen to them next. They just waited, and many died. My poor grandparents must’ve been sick with worry about their baby girl, not knowing if she would live or die left all alone in their abandoned apartment.
I’ve been told that the stench of sweaty bodies, fear, death and defecation was overwhelming and suffocating. Since my parents didn’t spare me from the truth even as a child, I sometimes had nightmares that I was locked in the Velodrome with my grandparents and the thousands of others, who had no faces. It was claustrophobic and terrifying, and I would awaken sweaty, gagging and crying, my heart pounding. On these nights, Clara would let me climb into bed with her and fall back to sleep curled in her safe embrace. Of course, she understood about the nightmares; I’m sure she had similar ones. My mother later learned that her parents were split up after that first terrible week, and that was only the beginning of their journey towards death. Her mother was sent to the internment camp at Drancy and was later deported by cattle car to Auschwitz. No one knows what happened to her father after the day of their separation.
Two days after the Roundup, my grandmother’s dearest friend Iris, who wasn’t Jewish, snuck into their apartment, not sure what she’d find but hoping for some clue as to what happened to her best friend and where she might be. What she found instead was my mom, soiled and near death, sleeping on top of the laundry pile in their bedroom closet. Somehow the gendarmes hadn’t searched the apartment and discovered the baby left behind. Iris quickly cleaned the baby the best she could so the odor wouldn’t give her away, wrapped her tiny limp body in a sheet and placed the little bundle in her basket, praying the baby wouldn’t have the energy to wake and start wailing. She hurried back home through the mostly deserted streets of Paris in those days of panic and paranoia.
When she presented the listless baby to her husband Max, they made the only decision they could make - to nurture her back to health and keep her safe until her parents returned. At that time, they couldn’t even begin to imagine the fate that awaited the Jews of Europe. So, they layered as many clothes as they could on their bodies even in the relentless heat of July, packed one suitcase each and fled to the countryside under the darkness of night. They settled in an abandoned farmhouse and proceeded to raise my mom, Juliette, as their own. They explained their sudden presence, to anyone who might ask, with the story that their cottage had been billeted by German soldiers and they fled. Since they were unknown to the neighbors, there was no reason for anyone to suspect that the baby wasn’t theirs, or that she was Jewish. They raised Juliette for the next three years, choosing not to bring any other children of their own into this war-torn world. Juliette was a little girl completely adored, showered with the full love and affection of the only parents she’d ever know.
When the war was over, Iris and Max returned to a different Paris than the one they’d left years ago and began the search for little Juliette’s parents. Iris was devastated to learn that her dear Madeleine, best friend and mother of the little girl she loved more than anything, had died of typhus at Auschwitz. After waiting another year for any news of Juliette’s father and receiving none, they decided there was nothing left for them in a country that could have allowed these atrocities to happen and emigrated to the United States. My mom was raised by her loving adoptive parents as a Jew in Los Angeles. In honor of the memory of all their friends who’d been murdered in the Holocaust, Iris and Max, Bubbe and Zeyde to me, converted to Judaism, and ensured that my mom would learn everything they knew about her family and her heritage.
So even as a third grader, I totally understood the honor and responsibility associated with being named Madeleine, after my mom’s heroic mom. But the fact that my nickname rhymed with ‘fatty’ seemed so cosmically unfair. It played right into my tormentor’s hands and felt like God was playing a cruel joke on me by giving them such an unfair advantage. Given the remarkable story behind my name, this was a truly tragic coincidence, completely unforeseeable by my well-meaning parents. I couldn’t help but feel extra envious of Clara, who was lucky to be named after my mom’s dad Claude. The only thing her name rhymed with was Farrah, just the most iconic woman of the ‘70s. The sheer cruelty of the cosmos had no bounds. But I knew even as I said the words aloud that there was no way my mom was going to let me change my name. So, I persevered through the rest of third grade, with a lot of tears and much grit, until the mean boys found someone else to bully and finally left me alone.