THE LION’S HEART DISEASE

Stefania Wortman in 1947

There once was a woman in Poland who had my very name—well, she was Stefania instead of Stefanie Wortman—and she lived in one of darkest corners of the most grotesque war. When she came out on the other side of that horror, she became a collector of children’s stories. She wrote feminist scholarship on books for young girls. She translated The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. She was not a storyteller but a lover and an interpreter of stories, a theorist of what they meant to children, and a vehicle for passing them on.

 
In the movie The Wizard of Oz, Judy Garland plays Dorothy Gale, but in Frank Baum’s book the girl has no last name. She is only Dorothy, and after the cyclone sweeps across the plains, she waits in the farmhouse, kept floating in the air, for hours and hours. Eventually she stops being scared and just feels lonely and then bored, and then she lies down on her bed and falls asleep. When she wakes up she is among the Munchkins, who dress all in blue. She also meets the Good Witch, who dresses in white. Dorothy’s blue-and-white gingham dress seems auspicious to everyone in this land of dreamlike symbolism.

Oz is surrounded on all sides by desert. It is not a civilized country like Kansas; witches and wizards still work their effects. When Dorothy cries about losing her home, all the Munchkins begin to cry with her, not because they understand what she has lost but purely out of fellow feeling.

 
On the last day of February 2009, I received an e-mail from an unfamiliar address with the subject line “About another Stefania.” The e-mail writer, a man from Poland named Marcin Otto, had been searching the internet for a “very dear lady” he remembered from childhood. When he found me instead and noticed that I was a writer, he thought I might be interested in hearing more about her. Though I was skeptical (Was it going to turn out that he needed help getting funds out of some foreign bank?), I had to e-mail him back to ask for more information. For one thing, I had been writing a poem about Marie Curie and fantasizing about traveling to Warsaw and Krakow, and this coincidence was somehow persuasive. Besides, though brief the e-mail seemed to convey a genuine interest in the lost woman, and I found endearing this attempt to find her or, failing that, to tell someone about her. Still, I wondered what Marcin Otto would want from me when I did respond—whether he just wanted someone to hear him or whether it was something different.

 
The opening of Baum’s book is as bleak as the black-and-white opening of the film would have us believe. He suggests the farm’s isolation by pointing out how far the lumber for the house had to be hauled onto the Kansas plains. Even catching a glimpse of a hook-nosed bicycling neighbor might be a relief in this waste prairie. Baum is relentless in describing everything in view—from the ground Dorothy walks on to her aunt’s once-pretty face—as grey. When Dorothy finds herself lost in Oz she worries that Aunt Em, assuming her young niece is dead, will have to put on mourning. Dorothy grimly acknowledges, “unless the crops are better this year than they were last, I am sure Uncle Henry cannot afford” the new set of clothes.

Even in the strange new world of Oz, things are more complicated for this Dorothy than for the one in the film. One by one she almost loses her traveling companions—the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, the Lion. Tiny animals like birds and mice have to rescue them from a stream or a field of narcotic flowers. Their motivations for reaching the City of Emeralds remain the same, but there is more debate over the relative merits of thought and feeling and which is more necessary to life. The scarecrow, who has surprisingly astute moments given his lack of brains, wonders whether the lion’s cowardice is rooted in some “heart disease,” as if in this fantasyland, pain and fear might be reduced to medical problems with scientific solutions.

About two weeks after I wrote back to Marcin, he sent me, much to my surprise, a PowerPoint presentation. I had guessed that he would just type and e-mail to me whatever memories of Stefania Wortman’s life he wanted to share. Instead, I opened his message to find a carefully assembled slide show, which seems to be addressed solely to me.[1] It is both historical in scope and intimate in tone, which is what makes the medium—one I associate with boring business meetings and academic conferences—so strange. Yet it also seems perfect for Marcin’s kind of storytelling in the way it allows him to direct my attention, now giving me blocks of narrative, now using a single suggestive photograph.

The first slide is just uppercase black type on a buff background. It reads REMEMBERING STEFANIA WORTMAN. The second displays a picture of a woman with short wavy hair, parted to one side. She wears a white blouse and a printed skirt with matching vest and sits in front of a chain-link fence holding a paper bag that in my imagination contains popcorn—as if she were at a sporting event. On this slide, Marcin introduces Stefania, whom he will call Stefa, the diminutive version of what he says is an old-fashioned name in Poland. He reveals that her father was a dentist, and notes that this is a point of connection for him, as Marcin now teaches the history of dentistry. According to Marcin’s reporting of her birthdate (1912) and the date of the picture (1947), she would have been about thirty-five.

Marcin says Stefa was Jewish but, not surprisingly, he can provide few details about how she survived the war in Warsaw. He does say that her family lived outside of the gated Jewish ghetto and that her mother, Eleanora, took great risk to work outside of her home and support her children (who would then have been young adults). On one slide he includes part of a scanned page from the 1936 Warsaw phone directory. Since Stefa’s father, Edward, is not listed, Marcin concludes that he must have been dead by that time. However, her mother, Eleanora, is there between Abram Wortman and Izaak Wortman.

 
My own family history is branching, hybridized, hard to trace. I assume that my predecessors are, among other things, German, Dutch, Scottish, and English, and that is based solely on my four grandparents’ names. I know very little about the ones who came before them. Maybe because my history is so diffuse, I feel, in a strange way, that Stefa is an ancestor—not a relative in the literal sense, though I suppose that is remotely possible, but through some other bonds. First, there’s something about her face in the photographs—she looks like the kind of woman who meets hardship with wit and good humor, the kind of woman who interests me just by her temperament. Also, I am drawn in, as Marcin guessed I would be, by Stefania’s bookishness. She majored in Polish Literature at the university. She later translated, in addition to Baum’s book, stories by Hans Christian Andersen and collected traditional Polish tales for children in an anthology called At the Golden Spring. Much of Stefa’s story requires my faith in a stranger’s telling, but this part at least can be checked by means of the worldwide library database. Just a few libraries have her books, but there they are, listed in the electronic catalog.

 
Within Marcin’s story about Stefa is the story of one place that was central to both her life and his: No. 5 Elektoralna Street. On the fourth slide, Marcin has included two photos of that address, one from 1906 and one from 1936, both in grainy black and white. One of the buildings in the row has a pediment in the earlier photo that seems to have disappeared in time for the later one. The buildings in the second photo also seem to have a story added, not flush with the lower stories, but set back slightly. I’m not even positive that these are the same building, but they’re close enough that I want to take Marcin’s word. He says the 1906 photo shows a sign for Edward Wortman’s dentist shop written in both Polish and Russian.

The fifth slide shows the same addresses from a different angle. This photo is from 1940 and features a banner in German that warns people entering this section of the city about the risk of typhoid. Next, Marcin includes two pictures of German soldiers burning buildings in the ghetto after the uprising and, with the date 1945, two pictures of the ghetto after it had been completely leveled. In one, an unidentified young girl wearing men’s shoes much too large for her feet surveys the damage.

Finally, I come to a picture of a midtwentieth-century school building three stories high with a fenced park across the street. Marcin writes that this is the same location, Elektoralna Street, where Edward Wortman’s dental shop once stood, and that this was the first of a series of schools built in 1966 to commemorate Poland’s conversion to Christianity a thousand years before. By coincidence, at the time of Stefania’s death, Marcin was teaching English to the fifteen to eighteen year olds who attended this school.

 
In Baum’s book, the Emerald City is all an illusion. It’s not only the projection of the great and powerful Oz, created by the small man behind the curtain, that cannot be trusted. When Dorothy and friends arrive at the gates to the city, they encounter a guard who insists on fitting them with spectacles that lock onto their heads. He claims the glasses are to protect their eyes from the dazzling beauty of the place, and once inside they see that everyone in the Emerald City wears them. However, it is clear to the reader—at least to the adult reader of the book—that the green lenses of the spectacles produce the wonders of the city, coloring everything from the marvelous palace, to the clothes provided to Dorothy, to the residents’ hair a lush color of green. Oddly, Dorothy doesn’t seem to notice that her friends have also turned green, which they must when she looks at them through the distorting lens that the great Oz requires to maintain his magic. This is one of the ways in which the movie softens the book, for when Judy Garland arrives, Oz does look like a place of real wonders including the one most memorable to me as a child, the weird and beautiful “horse of a different color.” Most startling of all, even after Dorothy and her small company learn that the Oz is a “great humbug” and the city is only a false green, even after the fallen wizard has flown away, headed back to Omaha in his homemade balloon, they continue to wear the lenses, dutifully taking them up and then returning them again as they come and go from the city.

 
Marcin narrates briefly how Eleanora and her two children escaped the Wortman family’s apartment on Elektoralna Street before the block was destroyed. Outside of the ghetto, they passed as Christians. Stefania’s brother was so worried about being found that he never left their quarters and eventually, Marcin says, he committed suicide. I wonder how Marcin learned this and what he knows about how it happened, but the bare mention of suicide is all he offers.

At the same time the bolder Stefania may have been helping other Jewish residents out of the ghetto. Marcin provides an enticing snippet from a Polish book, which he translates for me. Describing his escape from the ghetto in a book called The Last Eyewitnesses Speak, a man named Henryk Gantz says, “I managed to get through the gate unnoticed and Stefania Wortman was waiting for me on the other side, and she took me to another district of Warsaw to someone who looked after me.” Was this “our Stefa” as Marcin calls her? We can’t do more than guess that it was.

 
Another chance appearance: I was searching with no luck for more information about Stefania’s brother. What I found instead was a reference to Stefania through a website about survivors of the Holocaust. In the memoir of a woman named Bronislava Alland, who moved to New York after the war, I read a corroborating, if slightly altered in the details, version of the story Marcin’s slide show tells. Alland writes that she was a child of eleven when her father removed her and her mother from the ghetto and brought them to the German-run factory where he worked. Dressing up to look like an older child, one eligible for employment, Bronislava worked during the day and hid in the factory at night. Eventually her parents paid a broker to find her shelter outside of the factory, first with a Polish “aunt and uncle” in the country and then with a family in Warsaw that had two daughters. One of the girls was the same age as Bronislava, and the two worked and played together, going out together sometimes to buy blood for the family’s black pudding.

Eventually Bronislava began to attract notice in the neighborhood, and she was forced to move several more times, until she ended up living with a very poor family. She was confined to the apartment to escape detection, and her only occupation was reading. Reading fell down like a curtain over her painful situation, allowing her to forget for a while. She had to tear herself away from her books to go to meals, even though she felt hungry constantly.

Once, when Bronislava ventured out of this house, she met two women. Although one was younger, Bronislava describes her as graying and prematurely aged. As she talked with these women, the younger one revealed that she had been a librarian and kindergarten teacher before the war. Immediately Bronislava’s faint feeling of recognition gave way to certainty that she knew this woman, Stefania Wortman, from her former life in the ghetto. Scared for them both, Bronislava kept this information to herself, but she started to visit Stefania often, talking for hours about books.

When the family currently hiding her put these visits to an end, Bronislava felt bereft—though the bombing of Warsaw soon made her forget all about the two women. Her tale has nothing to say about how they fared through this second uprising. I e-mailed this memoir to Marcin, excited that I had found another reference to his “dear lady,” but he never responded.

 
In spite of these intersecting accounts, there are many parts of Stefa’s story that feel like gaps, and the more that I think about them the wider those gaps grow. Not that I fault Marcin’s storytelling—these holes in the narrative seem to be simply the work of time. He says that after the war Eleanora worked as a librarian at an orphanage, and that she and Stefania came to live there. But why? Did they live among the children? Did the work require that they stay? Did it have anything to do with Stefania’s weakened condition, which Marcin attributes to a radical mastectomy and Bronislava to a weak heart?

 
The Polish title for Stefania’s book, Czarnoksieznik ze Szmaragdowego Grodu, means The Wizard of the Emerald Court. Marcin explained this alteration to me by saying that it would make more sense to Polish children, to whom Oz means nothing. His comment made me consider what American children, including me, thought Oz meant. The only association I have with the word is as slang for Australia, but the OED cites the first instance of “Oss” for this purpose in 1908, which postdates publication of Baum’s book by several years. As far as I can tell, Oz was purely an invention on Baum’s part, and like many of the elements of the book, it appealed precisely because it was nonsensical, underscoring the strangeness of the place.

 
It was in the orphanage library that the two women met the crucial link—Marcin’s mother. Her own mother was dead and, during the war, her father was in a POW camp. In Marcin’s slide show, there are two pictures of his mother. In the first, taken in 1950, she stands round-cheeked and glossy-curled next to Eleanora, who wears her white hair pulled back from her face. “Mum” (Marcin doesn’t offer her first name) has her hand on Eleanora’s neck and their faces are together like close friends, but the older woman’s expression has a gravity that the other’s lacks. In the second, Marcin’s mother sits on a bench with Stefania, who would have been thirteen years her senior. There is snow on the ground and both women are bundled up. Mum’s cloth coat and the kerchief tied on her head look plain next to Stefania’s shiny dark fur coat and hat.

Though the Wortmans eventually left the orphanage, they kept in touch with Marcin’s mother and her new family. Stefania would later help to secure a publishing job for Marcin’s father, whose former affiliation with the Home Army, Armia Krajowa, made him a suspicious character in the eyes of the ruling communists.

 
It’s like a story in a book: Stefania Wortman was a young Polish Jew who escaped the death camps and helped others to escape them. After the war she lived in an orphanage with her elderly mother, who waited on her hand and foot as she recovered her health. She never married or had children, but remained with her mother, the two women devoted to each other and to the memories of their father/husband and brother/son. They met a young boy named Marcin, who loved to visit their book-filled apartment with his parents. Stefania cared for her mother until her mother’s death.

Marcin’s mother (left) with Eleonora Wortman, circa 1950.

 
When I received Marcin’s PowerPoint, I was so stunned I couldn’t think what to say. I’m embarrassed to admit that he had to e-mail me back to make sure I got it and to see what I thought. My brief thanks and my comments on what struck me about her life seem to have satisfied him. In my mind, this further reinforces what he said in his second e-mail about why the contact we had established was important:

Marcin’s estimation of my faith in others is more generous than I deserve. But, improbably perhaps, I have found something remarkable in Stefania’s life. Improbably, there is no twist to this story beyond the surprise of meeting an intriguing woman who died a few years after I was born. Marcin says that he lost touch with the women, and that Stefania died on the June 18, 1982, possibly from a relapse of breast cancer. His photo of the headstone she shares with Eleanora, a dark gray marker decorated with evergreen and daffodils, confirms the date.

 
In addition to compiling her children’s stories, Stefa must have thought seriously about their work in the world. In a 1958 essay Marcin quoted to me, she argued for the importance of fairy tales, insisting that they should never be supplanted by always-improving technology. It’s hard not to think of the violent uses of technology Stefania must have seen, the technology she must have escaped, and I’m frustrated that I can’t read the rest of her essay without a translation. In his introduction to The Wizard of Oz, Frank Baum claims that the children of 1900 still want fantastic stories, but that they no longer require the “heartaches and nightmares” that earlier children’s stories used to teach morals. I wonder if Stefa would have agreed with Baum that fantasy can be detached from moral instruction. I wonder how she would articulate the function of fantastical stories from her perspective, later in a century of horrors.

 
On their way to find Glinda the Good, Dorothy and her companions encounter an entire town made—people and all—of pretty but delicate china. They must make their way through the town in order to keep to their path, and yet as they walk through the streets, all of the people run and hide from them for fear of being broken or chipped. Dorothy admires their beauty but laments, “They are all so brittle!” Though her trip through Oz is full of trials, Dorothy has proven herself to be the opposite of these porcelain people. She is flexible and strong, ready to meet the challenges presented to her with quick thinking, ready to confront the heart disease of fear.

Note

1. This presentation can be seen in its entirety at www.michiganquarterlyreview.com