Oh, You Beautiful Doll!

    When I was a little girl, a gentle man would come to our house on Monday nights and play guitar with us.  George's lessons were casual and fun, and I learned a lot about old fashioned folk songs and traditional American melodies.  (It's ironic, because I truly don't think this is the kind of music he usually plays, but he knew how my family worked!)   One of the songs I loved to play on the guitar was "Oh, You Beautiful Doll." 

    Of course, I didn't realize back then that the song wasn't an ode to a sweet young lady; to me, it was a song to sing to one of my dolls.  I'd dance around the house with a stuffed animal and sing to it, or when we were on long drives far from home, I would sing it to myself, imagining I was back in my own room with all the dolls to cherish.

    This afternoon, I spent some time in an exhibit honoring the childhoods of children of the Holocaust, and the dolls spoke to me.  I'd like to dedicate this blog to the stories of children as told through their dolls.

     This first doll was a gift from a Belgian girl who was born in 1942. You can see a picture of Edith Dar Muskat an infant, here.  Luckily, she survived her internment at Drancy, in France.  Her aunts were not so fortunate.  This is a doll she inherited from them, and eventually donated it to Yad Vashem.


     Marion Roth was thirteen years old when she was saved by the Kindertransport.  Think about the seventh and eighth graders you know; they aren't likely to carry a big doll.  This cloth toy dog was small enough to hold on to for comfort as she left her home in Berlin in order to make a safer life for herself in England.

    This next doll was named "Lala" by Vera Lifshitz, a little girl born in Lvov in 1940. "Lala" means doll in Polish, apparently!  It turns out that Lvov, which is now part of Poland, was occupied by the Soviet Union at the time Vera was born, and at three weeks of age, she was exiled to Siberia. This doll was given to her on the way from Siberia to Israel, by a kind person in Karachi.  Later, she learned Hebrew and gave the doll a Hebrew name: Ilana!

    When I look at "Bear" below (what a creative name!), I think about the Velveteen Rabbit. Fred Lessing was a schoolboy in Holland, just six years old when his family went into hiding.  He didn't have a lot of time and could only choose one thing to take with him. Naturally, it was this bear. Being in hiding wasn't easy for him; he was moved around a bit.  For awhile, he was in hiding with his brother, and then he hid as a Christian child with a family.  Only "Bear" knew his true identity, and was his friend.  

 

 This next one, melts my heart.  I remember taking part in Purimspiels as a kid, acting out the story of Queen Esther and her cousin/ father-figure Mordecai and how they saved the Jewish people from an evil man named Haman.  Rudolf Frenkel was already grown when the war began, but this puppet was a part of his childhood celebrations of Purim. It represented King Ahasuerus, who Queen Esther persuaded to save the Jews.
  When the war broke out, Rudolf was able to leave his family and get to Israel.  Later, a suitcase arrived at his new home.  His parents died at the hands of the Nazis, but they sent him what they could. In the suitcase was this puppet from his youth.

I relate to the story of this next bear.  Tabitha Mihali was from a town in Romania not far from where one of my great-grandmothers was born.  She was nine years old when the war was over and she was freed from the Czernowitz Ghetto.  This bear was a useful tool for life after the ghetto; it was a perfect hiding place for gold coins.  At a checkpoint, a guard suspected there was something in the bear, and was about to split the bear open.  Tabitha's little brother began to weep and wail.  (At a border crossing going into Germany in 1982, I also was whining; I couldn't find a book I was reading. Unfortunately that book was called When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit. My parents did not appreciate my screaming about Hitler at a modern German border crossing...)  Luckily, Tabitha's brother's moans were more useful than mine.  The kind guard quickly handed "Teddy" back to the children.

 The doll with blue and white stripes belonged to Roma Kwasna, who was already 32 when the war ended.  However, you have to remember that former prisoners had a lot of trauma to deal with.  There were all sorts of groups that tried to help the survivors.  One group created dolls to help out. There were many uniforms from the former prisoners--not ones that any human would want to wear again.  They repurposed the material to create clothes for the dolls.

  The little blonde doll's owner, Sima Kaplinski, escaped to the forests of Novogrodek. She and her husband survived as one of the Bielski Partisans that I wrote about last year.

One of the things I know about Grandma's childhood in the 1920s is that she was merciless with her dolls. She put make-up on them, cut their hair, and generally destroyed them out of love.  Well, you can see evidence here of how Emmanuella Kitz put make-up on this bear puppet, the only object remaining from her childhood home in Lwow.  She moved from hideout to hideout and confided in the bear, when she wasn't giving it rouge and eyeshadow.

Let me tell you my funny story about the one stuffed animal I cherish most.  Her name, ironically, is Rabbi Kristin Rabbit.  Why do I say "ironically?"  WELL, when I got her at age four, I didn't know what a rabbi was.  We first joined the temple (at my insistence) when I was six.  In fact, maybe it is through people teasing me about the rabbits name that I learned what a rabbi was!  I chose the name just as a play on words, a shortening of Rabbit.  But, I also had a new friend and neighbor named Sunny.   Around the time I got the stuffed animal, I learned that Sunny's real name was "Kristin".  It didn't make sense to me...but I thought it would be fun to have a hidden "Kristin" in my rabbit, too.

Think of the meaning of dolls in your life.  It surprised me to see how many purposes these ones had.