Hedi Lampert > Hedi's Quotes

“Well, I learnt from the nuns in the convent,’ said my mother. ‘Sister Ursula hated the Jewish girls, but after we’d all made signs of the cross on our foreheads and hearts, we would rub them away and quickly draw a Magen David when her back was turned.’
I was aware that, in spite of my mother’s feverish attempts to erase the sign of the cross from her forehead and breastbone, the nuns had succeeded in infiltrating the very fabric of her ethos, and there remained with her a niggling and persistent conviction, stubborn as the ink stains on the breast pockets of my father’s shirts, which no amount of scrubbing or soak after lengthy soak in bleach could eliminate, that bad children go to hell. Whenever I stepped out of line, she had wasted no time in tallying up my current score in the underworld. ‘That’s ten black marks in your book in hell,’ she’d say. And, if I had really incurred her wrath, she’d add, ‘dripping with pus and blood’. Sister Ursula would have been proud.
My Hebrew teachers had never threatened me with an eternity at the pleasure of Beelzebub – detention was generally deemed sufficient.

Excerpt from The Trouble With My Aunt by Hedi Lampert”
― Hedi lampert