MOTORCYCLE GIRL AND THE JEW

I was barely 19 when I first met him.

His name was Max, short for Maximillian.

Max was Austrian by birth and American by naturalization. We instantly clicked and had immense love and admiration for each other.

He was a writer in Santa Barbara looking for a college student who could put all his manuscripts on his brand-new computer's hard drive. I guess he always thought of himself like the early 20th-century writers and only loved typing on an old typewriter. So, I typed all his manuscripts from hard copies into his new PC and helped him catch up with the computer technology. Three times a week, like clockwork, I typed and typed and typed and occasionally edited till my fingers ached all over. He always had more to add to my pile.

I complained once or twice, “Max, you’re a damn slave driver! My hands are going to freeze in typing position! I need them for work and do my school work,” to which he would respond, “Ah, but don't you agree that I am probably the wisest and the most handsome slave driver?” and with that, he would make me laugh, and I would continue typing.

Aside from our love for books and writing, we both had a great penchant for languages. You see, Max spoke German, English, French, Italian, and Chinese without a trace of an accent. Occasionally, to test me, he would switch languages in his effort to rekindle the poor German I’d learned as a child by leaving me his schedule and messages in German on my answering machine or sometimes even in French. I would know it was Max immediately after I heard the first three words: “Hey, motorcycle girl!” he would say cheerfully. Then he would continue:

“Can you come and type for a couple of hours after school and before you go to work? By the way, come hungry. My housekeeper worked herself to the bone to cook us a meal. It would be a terrible insult to her if you didn’t come to eat here. So, I expect to see you here then.”

He knew I didn’t even have time to eat on my long days. He would remedy my problem without nagging me. He knew I worked full-time. I was a full-time student with a triple major in Math, Physics, and CompSci and an intern at a computer company. I barely had time to sleep, let alone eat.

In the course of the first six months, a few hours each week, I went through piles and piles of his manuscripts in his home, where he lived alone. Yet he wasn’t alone. He shared another one of my tastes: Music. Growing up in a home where the sound of the piano was ever present, I have always loved classical music and operas. But my love was due to its constancy at home, not because I really, truly understood the content. Max showed me how to appreciate the music by giving the tunes and lyrics soul stories to accompany the notes. I learned to love Pavarotti, Maria Callas, Enrico Caruso, Leontyne Price, Fritz Wunderlich, Domingo, Carreras, Renata Tebaldi.... I still think of him when I hear “O Sole Mio,” “Nessun Dorma,” “La Donna e Mobile,” or works of Puccini (La bohème, Rigoletto, Madame Butterfly) Tchaikovsky, Mozart (Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, La Traviata), Bizet (Carmen), Verdi (Aida, Otello) … well, you get the point.

After the first six months, we have had digital copies of some of his work. He turned to me, pleased after all the work we’ve accomplished, and said, “Well, Motorcycle Girl,” he grinned, "I think we deserve a date.” (I only rode a motorcycle. I didn’t have a car. It was a sight to see with my black boots, black jeans, sometimes black, sometimes weather-beaten brown bomber jacket with my… you guessed it, black helmet)

“What do you have in mind, boss?” I asked.

“I’m gonna take you to the opera. Marriage of Figaro. And you’re gonna love it!”

I rolled my eyes.

“Max,” I said, sighing. “We have to dress up for the opera. Even I know that much. I have to wear a dress, and you need to wear a tux. But you don’t drive, and neither one of us has a car. How do we get there?”

“What do I call you?” he asked.

“Motorcycle girl.”

“Well, darling, all my life, I’ve never been on a motorcycle. How about I get the tickets, and you give me a ride on your motorcycle? I think you’re a safe enough driver.”

"Yeah, if the CHP picks up a roadkill in the form of a dead old guy who fell off a motorcycle, you better have a letter in your pocket that states you were on my bike with your own free will!"

"I trust your driving habits are safe enough," and with that, the argument was over.

So, come Friday night, I wore an opera-worthy dress, and Max had his tuxedo on, and we drove to Santa Barbara Symphony on my motorcycle. We made an odd couple. Yet we simply loved each other.

You see, I was 19, and Max, my very best friend, was 95 years old.

I adored Max for various reasons. Max was the happiest, most positive, most eager go-getter person I have ever met in life to date. We had so much in common in philosophy and vision of life. Yet we had quite a few very stark differences. I was a Baptist girl raised in a conservative, patriotic Christian home. Max was born in Austria and was 14 years old when the Jews were on the Nazis’ radar. He was born Jewish, and by default, he was declared an enemy of people he had never met. He was hated for his ancestry. Yet, he believed in no God and no religion.

The only time I ever heard any anger, sorrow beyond anything I’ve seen, desperation, and stoic resolve of what has passed in his voice in a single breath was when he said:

“There is no god! Don’t tell me that God loves me! How could a loving God allow twenty-nine of my closest relatives to die brutally, tortured, starved, burned, and leave me alone in the world to mock me for my loss as a child of 14? No God or nation loved us then.” That was the only time he showed the weight of his age, the burden of his experience, the closures he didn’t have.

“You know what a refugee is?” He asked me, not seeking an answer but a preamble to something he was going to teach me. Whatever definition I could give him would only be just clinical and meaningless for him.

“A refugee is someone whose family is ripped apart by the unimaginable violence of war. The children you went to school with will first turn on you for the supposed otherness in you. The JEW!" I remember the bitter single chuckle he had.

"We listened to the same music,” he said, indicating the lively classical music in the background, shaking his head, still having a hard time having seen the preposterousness of the alienation he'd experienced long ago.

"Went to the same dances, liked the same girls, our families ate at the same table at times, attended the same concerts, our fathers may have worked nearby, and our moms shopped the same stores. When that strange divergence light was turned on, our lights were dimmed as humans. We were no longer equals. We were demonized, valued much less than humans, a little more than animals, and my parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, and little cousins were all shuffled into cattle cars and taken away!”

“But you… You survived! God, let you live. He saved you.” I told him. I admit I was dumb. How could I give him any patronizing advice when I hadn't even lived yet, and he had seen far too much?

“There is NO god! If there is, then he is not a loving God! Do you have any idea what it means to hide away from your own mates for fear that they would turn you in? Trying to seek refuge in country after country and only to have them deny you like you are bringing in the plague! Our home was ransacked and set on fire. I, a 14-year-old boy, was stripped of humanity and became part of an ever-growing number of destitute, desperate groups of folks no one wanted in their vicinity. Near or far.”

“Where did you go then?” I asked.

“I smuggled into a ship. Then sailed to China as a stowaway.”

“Did they refuse you, too?” I asked, fearing the answer.

“No,” his voice softened as if someone just handed him his humanity back. “No, they didn’t.” I could feel and see the eighty-one-year-old relief that he exhaled then. Eighty-one years after he felt safe for the first time after his family’s demise, Max relived the reprieve as if it happened just last week.??

“I hope the war was over soon and you went back to find some distant family to live with,” I said, but he shook his head.

“I lived in a dorm-like building, sharing the hall with other men. There were thirty of us in that hall full of bunk beds. I stayed in China in that same dorm with those men for years.”

That response surprised me. Because Max was the most well-read individual I’ve ever met. He was multilingual, well-traveled, and an exceptional swimmer at his ripe age. He hiked and walked relentlessly.

“I never lost hope. I always prepared myself as if my salvation would come the next day and that I had to be prepared. I never smoked or drank. I always swam to exercise. In fact, I made other men in my hall to stop smoking. I read voraciously. I read everything I could get my hands on, and I learned every language I could. I did everything I could to finish the education my family started. You learn to hustle to get what you need. What I wanted was an education. I was hungry for learning. But "wants" were expensive luxuries a refugee couldn't afford. But I learned. I improved myself at every chance I got. I will keep on learning till my last day on earth. I learned to be happy and content while still seeking to do more, get more, be more,” he said emphatically.

“Did you get married at the refugee camp?” He shook his head no.

“Family meant more people to take care of while you could barely care for yourself. It would be unfair of me to seek the companionship of a young lady I couldn’t even provide a private room,” he said in his ever-gentlemanly tone.

“Then how did you get out of the refugee camp?” I asked, feeling the curiosity rise in me.

“May 14, 1948,” he said as if I would know what that meant. “The state of Israel was established," he clarified, "and one day, they said all the Jews are free. Free to go to Israel from anywhere in the world, free of charge.”

“Well, what did you do?” I almost shouted at him. He laughed.

“I took the bus to Israel and never looked back to China. I was going to call that brand-new country my new home. Yet, let alone being born there, I hadn’t even set eyes on it before. It was completely foreign to me. I was an Austrian. My parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and those before them have always been a part of Austria. But Austria didn’t want me. Europe didn’t want me. China let me stay, but I was a tolerated guest. Israel said, ‘Come, this is your home!’”

“Was it your home? Did you feel at home?” I asked.

“You have to understand, it was a brand-new country where people came together with their collective common experience of being an outcast as a Jew.”

“What did you do in Israel?” I probed further since he was in a talkative mood.

“I worked for the American Embassy since I spoke English. I also learned Hebrew when I moved to Israel. Because I was a stranger in my new homeland, I decided I could be a stranger in any country. So, I applied for an immigrant visa to move to America,” he said, his eyes drifting away again.

I could see that it was a long wait because he got the face of the man under a microscope once again. The one whom you ought not trust, so much so that you will inspect every facet of his life to deem him worthy to live in your country among your people. The inspected Jew, my friend Max, received an immigrant visa seven years after he applied for it. In the mid to late 1950s, he moved to New York.

Later that year, he met the woman who would be his wife, another holocaust survivor from his homeland. Lilly and Max got married. That year, at age 59, he touched the hand of a woman for the very first time in his life as a grown man. Lilly was a piano teacher. She and Max moved to California, where Max opened a button shop, and Lilly taught piano. They were blissfully married for over 20 years when Lilly succumbed to cancer and passed away. I never met her. But Max always talked of her fondly, referring to her as “Darling Lilly.”

He told me he wanted to do something amazing for their 15th anniversary. He said, “Darling Lilly, I want to take you on a world tour. I want my wife to enjoy the world as a welcomed tourist.” He was reclaiming his dignity and honor for himself and his wife from the world that denied him that for years. They were received as welcomed Americans rather than once hated Austrian Jews.

But at the time, Lilly replied,

“But Max, darling, we don’t have any money!” Max said,

“Sweetheart, you and I and Bank of America have money!” He mortgaged his paid-off home and took her around the world to 37 different countries!

Max’s life didn’t even start till he was 59 years old. Please let that sink in for a moment.

My dear friend Max Rosenberg died a few days short of his 97th birthday. He was 96. At a Jewish cultural center, his friends held a funeral over his cremated body. I didn’t get to see him before he died. He was sick just for four days, we talked on the phone, and he sounded strong, and I was busy with shit. I don't even remember what (work? school?) to go to see him. At the end of those four days, my dear friend Max passed away. His friend, tasked to take care of his final wishes, just followed the routine. Max had no one but his friends who loved him dearly. His assets went to the zoo, and a few other charities he willed; my friend and all traces of him ever existing were no more.

?Max wasn’t a Jew to me. Or an old man. He wasn’t a religion or part of an old chosen race descended from Abraham. He accepted that it was in his biology but rejected everything else it entailed. He was a human being, first and foremost. But more so than that, Max was my dear friend. I’ve got nothing left of him, not even an old picture. What little I had got destroyed during El Nino when my apartment got flooded. We didn’t even get a chance to finish all his manuscripts, and I have no idea what happened to those we worked on since he died so unexpectedly. I can almost hear you say he was 96, way past his expiration date.

No! He had so much to give, create, and contribute to humanity until his last breath. He had such propensity for life, likes of which could only be found in a young person just getting ready to go out in the world and discover all its wonders.

I’m no longer the 19-year-old “Motorcycle Girl” he lovingly called me. I no longer own a motorcycle; my boots and helmet are at rest. But anytime my work or life gets overwhelming, and I have so many goals to accomplish on top of them that I don’t have enough hours in the day to fit them in, I think of Max, regain my composure, and push on. That’s what he would want me to do.

So Max, in the end, I hope there's Elysium. I hope you are in it. I hope you found your family. I hope to see you again someday, a long time from now. And I hope to tell you that you were wrong, and I was right. (Faith, hope, and love. Even though it says love is the best, I think "hope" is right up there. Thank you for teaching me that) I miss you, my friend, and this is for you. Mizpah.