In my whole childhood I broke two nutcrackers, the first of which succumbed in a trinket shop in Woodstock, New York. It was the weekend after Thanksgiving, and we were in town visiting family. My brother, inflamed by something I’d said or done, shoved me hard enough that my back bumped a table full of porcelain and glass. The toy soldier nearest the edge wobbled and then fell, its tall hat cracking in half upon impact.
Our dad shot us bothered glances as he passed the cashier fourteen dollars for a broken doll commemorating a holiday, a tradition, a religion that isn’t ours. On the way out the door, which announced our departure with a cheerful jingle of bells, our dad said nothing—just handed me the bag.
The second nutcracker had been a gift from my grandparents, who’d accompanied their non-Jewish friends to see the ballet performed in New York City. This statuette was sturdier, made of painted wood. White fur framed its head and face, and there was a lever on its back that could draw its jaw open and closed. For years, the nutcracker stood at attention on a dusty shelf above my bed. One day, when I was bored, I got up on the mattress, grabbed it off the shelf, and placed a Goldfish cracker in its mouth. When I pulled the lever, the doll’s boxy teeth came down and ground up the Goldfish. That was all it took to dislocate the jaw.
It’s as if I was rehearsing the choreography of The Nutcracker’s Fritz, who perennially breaks the nutcracker doll that Uncle Drosselmeyer has given Clara. But unlike the Stahlbaum siblings, I didn’t have a Drosselmeyer to bandage mine up.
In 1895, three years after Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker premiered in St. Petersburg, Russia, a Russian Jewish immigrant named Maurice Alexander opened the first doll hospital in the United States. Fleeing the Russian pogroms, Maurice first settled in Germany, where he worked for a man who restored broken dolls and clocks. He then moved to New York City and married a fellow Jewish immigrant named Hannah Pepper. Originally from Austria, she, too, had lived in Russia at the time of the pogroms.
The same year that the Alexander Doll Hospital opened its doors on the Lower East Side, Hannah gave birth to a daughter, Bertha. Because Bertha’s biological father had died during Hannah’s pregnancy, Maurice assumed the role of her dad.
Bertha’s earliest memories, then, revolved around the “wealthy, brokenhearted girls” who arrived at the hospital by way of horse-drawn carriages, desperate for Maurice to mend their porcelain dolls. She sympathized with these girls’ distress as much as she envied their affluence. And so, after years of watching her father tinker with disembodied heads and limbs, Bertha—who would later come to be known as Beatrice, the creator of the illustrious Madame Alexander Doll Company—determined to one day “make beautiful dolls that don’t break.”
It’s been six weeks since a pogrom in Israel killed over a thousand Jews, and six weeks since bombs in Gaza began killing tens of thousands of Muslims and Christians, and I can’t stop thinking about dolls.
I can’t stop thinking about the opening scene in the Barbie movie, in which a group of little girls, all tired of mothering baby dolls, see the blonde feminist for the first time and then proceed to bash the babies’ heads in, sending infant shrapnel flying. Here, the audience laughs and laughs.
I can’t stop thinking about the thousands of children killed—shot, stabbed, burned, beheaded, and bombed—in Israel and Gaza. I can’t stop thinking about the many adults who’ve proven willing to justify, celebrate, or even mock any of these deaths.
I can’t stop thinking about how the entire plot of the film hinges on Barbie—who was created by a Jewish American woman named Ruth Handler after World War II—waking up one day to discover that she is broken. She’s unusually agitated, flustered; she can’t get her shower to warm; she burns her toast and drinks expired milk; she doesn’t glide but falls off her dream house; and, worst of all, she realizes that her feet are flat. These maladies lead her on a journey to the Real World, where she hopes to locate their cause before returning to Barbie Land restored.
Perhaps I’m on a similar path. Perhaps the Real World has broken me. Perhaps I find myself drawn to a prelapsarian fantasy land, where the worst that can happen is your feet lose their superhuman arch.
It’s been six weeks. The destruction is ongoing. Dolls are on my mind—but so are their healers.
Maurice Alexander wasn’t the only immigrant to open a doll hospital in New York at the turn of the twentieth century. In 1900, a German Jew named George Chais founded the New York Doll Hospital on the Upper East Side. His grandson, Irving, started helping with the family business in 1945. Two decades later, Irving took over the hospital’s daily operations as chief surgeon.
Enter Luis Casas—a man who, in 1986, flew from his home in Bogotá, Colombia to visit Manhattan. It was there that he stumbled upon Irving’s hospital. He felt an instant kinship with it; after all, he’d opened his own doll hospital, Clinica de Muñecos Casas Reyes, in the early seventies.
It all started, according to Luis’s website, with his mother, who served as a “doll dressmaker for a big doll factory” in Bogotá. During school breaks, he would work at the same factory, tending to dolls’ needs.
“I wanted to be a real doctor,” the website goes on. “I had [a] passion for medicine, but at that time it was very expensive to attend … a university, and there was no financial aid available.”
He was so skilled with dolls that he eventually started selling his own. Then, one Christmas night, a client rushed to tell him that the one he’d sold her—a baby doll that was supposed to make sounds when rocked—had gone quiet, and could he please fix it.
That was the moment Luis had the idea to open his clinica de muñecos. “And it is now rewarding to say that we kept most of our family members busy working.”
Years later, after meeting Irving for the first time, Luis left Bogotá permanently and accepted an offer to work for the New York Doll Hospital as Irving’s assistant. In an article for Go! dated 2005, the reporter watches as Luis assesses a damaged Madame Alexander doll. These dolls are made from materials that are, as Beatrice Alexander intended, far less breakable than their porcelain predecessors. But that doesn’t mean they’re invulnerable.
“I think this one needs a new wig,” Luis says, standing at a workbench not far from boxes marked “hands,” “fingers,” “wrists,” and “eyes.”
Here, one imagines Irving shaking his head. “Just cheeks,” he replies. “The client just wants cheeks.”
Luis stayed in Irving’s employ for a total of twenty-three years. His work there came to a halt in 2009, when Irving, eighty-three, passed away following a long illness. With the doors to the New York Doll Hospital bolted shut, Luis set out to open a new one.
Nine weeks into the war, and hours before lighting the seventh candle on our third-generation menorah, my mom and I are driving through Front Street, looking for a place to park. It’s a Wednesday with windchill, and all the street spots appear to be filled. My mom calls on her “parking angels” to help us, as she often does. Within minutes, the angels deliver: we find a free public lot with several spots open.
“Thank you, parking angels!” my mom cheers as she turns into the lot.
We’re a half hour early for my appointment, so we stay in the car and I read aloud the first three pages of this essay. My lovely mother agreed to drive me across state lines without knowing exactly what I’ve been writing about, why my research has drawn me here. I figure that, before we go inside, she should have some idea.
After I finish reading, my mom is quiet for a moment.
“Look over there,” she says finally, staring out the right side of the windshield. I feel two twinges of annoyance—one for her shifting the focus away from my essay, and another for my inability to see whatever she’s referring to. All I can make out are the usual New Jersey sights: cars and trucks, stoplights and yield signs, lampposts, power lines, bare trees, and shops.
“Over there,” my mom repeats. And then I see it. Attached to the nearest lamppost is a large, plastic nutcracker. From top hat to green shoes, the soldier is probably three feet tall.
I push my way out of the car to take a photo, my whole body buzzing. Standing on the sidewalk, I come to find that this nutcracker is not alone. There’s one affixed to every lamppost along the entire street.
Thanks, parking angels, I think.
It’s time to head over, so we zip up our coats and walk two blocks to the storefront of the Secaucus Doll & Teddy Bear Hospital. Sandwiched between a pizzeria and a skin care clinic, the hospital has a display window that’s overflowing with dolls and stuffed animals. Most of these toys are in good condition. But a few, like the cracked baby head and upturned baby feet that are propped next to an EMERGENCY sign, tell a different story.
I open the door, from which hangs a “The Doctor is IN” poster. My mom and I step inside. The space is smaller than it appears on the outside, containing only a work area and a backroom with a few kitchen amenities. We find a place to stand among the hospital’s two desks—operating tables—and piles and piles of dolls.
“Are you dropping off or picking up?” a woman asks. I recognize her from the website: she is Ana Casas, Luis’s wife and fellow doll doctor. She, like her husband, is an immigrant from Colombia. Described online as a former hairdresser and “the only one who can add that final touch that makes the difference,” Ana looks to be in her early seventies, and has a streak of light purple crowning her short gray hair. She’s wearing glasses, an apron, and, like me and my mom, a disposable face mask.
“Actually neither,” I say, shifting my gaze from her to the two other, younger women here. Both are in their late forties to early fifties. One is sitting at a desk, finishing her lunch as she sews. Her dark hair is tied back in a ponytail, and her necklace and bracelet are a matching shade of gold. The other woman, who’s tall and wears deep red lipstick, says hello from the threshold between rooms. I begin to feel like my mom and I are taking up too much space here, and we are.
“I’m a student and a writer,” I say. “I called a few weeks ago to make an appointment. To learn a little bit more about what you do here.”
Ana’s eyes flicker with recognition. The woman in the doorway, whom I’ll come to know as Ana and Luis’s daughter Jeannette, makes her way into the backroom. The other woman, Sara, continues with her sewing. I wonder where Luis is.
Ana invites me to sit in the chair opposite her desk. Because there is only one, my mom remains standing. As she unzips her jacket, it occurs to me that I haven’t yet introduced her.
“This is my mom,” I say, “Ari.”
They exchange greetings, and then Ana nods. “So,” she says, sitting down herself, “ask me your questions.” I get the sense that she’s not sure about me yet—why I’ve come here, what I’m after. Her arms hang stiffly at her sides, like they’re made of plastic.
At the beginning of time, writes a sixteenth-century Jewish mystic known as the Ari, there was only God, and He spanned the entire universe. In order to make space for creation—for trees, for water, for ants and anteaters and teddy bears—God took one breath and contracted Himself, unleashing infinite darkness. He then called for light, at which point “ten holy vessels came forth, each filled with primordial light.”
These vessels were supposed to light the way to a perfect world. The problem was, they were delicate. Unable to hold such profound, sacred matter, they shattered. “They broke open, split asunder,” writes scholar Howard Schwartz, “and all the holy sparks were scattered like sand, like seeds, like stars.” From this breakage came kelipot, came forces of evil.
“That is why we were created,” Schwartz goes on. “To gather the sparks, no matter where they are hidden.” And once we have amassed enough of these sparks, the vessels will be like new, and “tikkun olam, the repair of the world, awaited so long, will finally be complete.”
Sitting amid a clutter of parts, I begin by asking Ana why doll hospitals are meaningful to her. As she considers her answer, I turn my attention to the painting mounted on the wall above her head. On the far right side of the canvas, a woman with fair skin, pinned-back brown hair, and a wide nose stands wearing a pastel-pink dress, peering down at what appears to be her young daughter. The girl, center, resembles her mother in almost every way—except for the fact that she’s got on a pink cloche hat and gold dress, her nose sits sharply and narrowly on her face, and she’s crying. She, too, casts her eyes downward, toward the doll in her arms.
The doll, bottom left, looks to be the descendant of mother and daughter, outfitted with a pink gown, pink hat, and light brown hair. Her limbs are broken at the joints; one of her eyes is gone; and long, jagged cracks run through the right side of her face, fragmenting part of her chin, eyebrow, and mouth. Her left eye, the one that’s still intact, is a piercing blue. It is the only eye in the painting that’s trained on the viewer.
“What doll hospitals mean,” Ana says, combing a hand through the purple tilde of her hair. “When we repair the dolls, we repair sentimental attachments.”
I look up from the notebook in my lap. I feel the buzzy feeling I felt in the parking lot, when I stared down nutcracker after nutcracker. “That makes so much sense,” I say. “You’re not just caring for dolls, but for the people who care for them.”
“Exactly,” she says. She then stands up, moves past me, and grabs a stuffed white rabbit from the pile by Sara’s station. I notice, above the entryway leading to the backroom, a small, gold wall-hanging of Jesus on the cross.
“You see this pretty bunny?” Ana asks. “He was so hurt when he came in.” She places the patient on her desk, picks up her phone, and shows us the before photo.
“Oh God,” my mom says. Her reaction is appropriate: Pre-Op Bunny was no bunny at all, but a scattering of tatters, a limp heap of skin.
“He was a shell of himself,” my mom goes on.
I nod. Ana sits back down. I ask her if she has any particularly memorable patients.
“Oh, of course,” she says, pushing her glasses higher on her nose. She tells me first of a little boy who buried his teddy bear in the backyard because his parents didn’t want him to have it. Why they rejected it, I do not ask.
Twenty years later, Ana says, the boy returned to his parents’ backyard. He approached his teddy’s burial site and began to dig.
“When he brought the bear to us, it was mostly intact. Just needed a little cleaning.”
The next patient Ana describes was also a teddy bear. As she speaks, I feel the valley between my breasts dampening with sweat. I forgot, in all my wonderment, to take off my coat. I want to but don’t, for fear of losing a single detail in the shuffle of synthetics.
“One day, a woman brought her son’s teddy to us while he was in the hospital. She begged us to fix him as quickly as possible, because her son needed him to sleep.
“I finished working on him the next day. But when I called back, no one answered. We tried calling for weeks—still nothing, so after a time, we stopped.”
Three months later, Ana continues, the woman came into the doll hospital sobbing. Her son had passed away that night, before Ana even had the chance to make repairs.
On Christmas Eve, eleven weeks into the war, and after days of crying in bed, I revisit Idiophone, a book-length essay by Amy Fusselman. Over the course of the first few pages, Fusselman meditates on her twenty-five years of sobriety, writing:
I am tired of battlefields.
I am tired of going to sleep like I’m in a war.
[ . . . ]
I want to be still like the world in snow.
I want to be still like the wooden nutcracker I saw backstage at Lincoln Center, standing on the shelf beside his identical brothers.
I didn’t know the nutcracker had identical brothers, but when I saw them together it made perfect sense.
More nutcrackers are needed in case one gets broken.
One always gets broken.
I want to be still and not break.
[ . . . ]
I want to open a door and get out of this world.
I want to get out of this world that is always at war.
Fusselman’s is an essay in which lines are broken, in which they accrete like toy soldiers, like holy sparks.
I, too, want to be still and not break.
But that’s not possible now.
The breaking has happened, is happening, and will happen—a kind of Christmas past, present, and future.
It’s happening in hospitals all over Gaza.
Hospitals, the one safe place that displaced Palestinians were promised—the one site of repair that the sick and injured and childbearing and dying could think of.
It’s happening in underground tunnels, where kidnapped Israelis are silenced, beaten, and worse.
It’s happening in America—the college student who threatened to slit Jewish throats; the white man who shot three Palestinian college students.
It’s happening in refugee camps, on social media, at burial sites, in governmental bodies, in human bodies.
The breaking is in my home.
My home, where I howl into the carpet instead of sleeping; where I have dreams of intruders breaking in after learning that my mom and I are Israeli; and where my parents discuss, for the first time, the pros and cons of buying a gun.
The breaking is everywhere.
What to do, then?
How to respond?
I’m tempted to write something easy, some version of “You can’t have rainbows without rain” or “Nevertheless, she persisted.”
I’m tempted because I don’t know what to write.
Because I don’t know what it means that the breaking I’m doing right now—the breaking of lines, paragraphs, and sections—is a kind of breaking that feels like healing, like refuah shleimah.
All I know is that I am tired of battlefields.
That I want to open a door to another world, like Clara waking up from a long night of dreaming, her nutcracker doll tucked safe in her arms.
Ana tells us about one more patient.
“The woman who brought him in told me he was her grandma’s bear,” she says, leaning into the story with her shoulders, her earlier apprehension seemingly gone. She speaks with a certainty, a devoutness that reminds me of my mom’s mom, who’s also an immigrant. Once she’s said her piece, my grandmother often places a hand on one side of my face and calls me her boobah, Hebrew for doll.
“Her grandma got the bear when she was very young. It came from the Steiff teddy bear factory in Germany, where some Jewish people were hidden during the war.
“We went to restitch him, and we found a small photograph, a family photograph, sewn inside his ear.” Ana lifts a forefinger and thumb to her own ear, like she’s about to pull out a magic coin.
“When the woman came back and we showed her what we found, she started to cry and cry. The people in the picture were her relatives. Most of them died in the Holocaust.”
My mom says she has chills. A bead of sweat travels down my midline as I scrawl Ana’s words in my notebook, closing a series of fragments with three exclamation points.
“It’s interesting that you bring that up,” I say. I tell Ana that we are Jewish, and that war—specifically the one unfolding in the Middle East—is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. “And I’m curious,” I say, peering over at Sara, who’s still sewing, and probably listening, intently, “what dolls have to do with that, if anything. What role they might play in times like these.”
Ana swivels a few degrees in her chair, but otherwise shows little reaction. It’s as if she knew this question was coming all along.
“War always shows up on the dolls,” she says. “In wars, they take toys from children to punish them, to be cruel.”
I think back to an image I saw of an Israeli child’s room, his bedsheets bloody, his playthings strewn about the floor. I remember a report I read of soldiers smashing toys at a Palestinian store.
“Dolls and teddy bears give children security in an insecure world,” she says.
I look over at my mom, who’s nodding along with conviction. At fifty-two, she’s often buying herself stuffed animals—Snoopies, sock monkeys, Jellycats, Ugly Dolls. Anything fuzzy and adorable. She’s told me in the past that this is likely her way of making up for all the toys her mom wouldn’t buy her as a kid. She’s still a child seeking security, my mother, as we all are.
I ask Ana if she always knew the doll hospital would be a family business.
“Yes,” she says, “our children learned in Bogotá how to fix dolls.” She points in the direction of the backroom. “My daughter Jeannette worked in a preschool, but she enjoyed dolls more than kids.”
I laugh. Relatable. Ana pulls her mask down and sips from her water bottle before continuing.
“When we started here, there were five of us. Then my husband passed away five years ago, and my sister-in-law is very sick.”
I inhale sharply, put down my pen. Luis. The hospital website, last updated in January 2021, gives no indication that he is anything other than alive. I wish he were here. I wish I could know his voice.
“So now we are three on the team,” Ana says. “Me, my daughter, and Sara, our good friend from Mexico.” Ana wheels her chair in Sara’s direction, and the four of us exchange smiles.
“It’s a lot to do,” Ana goes on, looking around the room, at all the piles and tools. “I’m not sure how much longer I’ll keep working.”
I swallow hard. As much as I want her to enjoy a retirement that’s probably long overdue, I find myself worrying about the dolls. About where all the boxes of arms and teeth and organ-fluff will end up, should Jeannette and Sara decide to close the doors.
Ana wheels herself back to her desk and gestures toward the painting I noticed earlier, the one with the family line of mother and daughter and doll. “This was painted by my brother-in-law,” she says, “many years ago. He was the one to convince Luis to open the hospital in Bogotá.”
I think about how many people Ana, Luis, and their family have helped over the years. How many breaks the Alexanders have mended, how many memories the Chaises have saved. They are all doing the work of tikkun olam, of repairing the world, one holy scrap at a time.
The phone rings, and Ana speaks with the caller in Spanish. I can feel our visit coming to an end; we’ve been here for over an hour already. My mom must feel this, too, because once the call is over, she asks Ana if she can take her picture. I squirm a little. It’s an intrusive request, a request that my mother, a lover of photographs, often makes. But Ana agrees, and I know I’ll be grateful to my mom later, for preserving a moment in which I was okay, healing, happy.
“Let’s do it with a patient,” Head Nurse Ana says. She picks up a doll, positions him on her lap, and runs a comb through his white-blond hair, like my mom and I had as children. It’s further proof that she’s the “miracle hair lady” that the website describes her as.
My mom snaps the photo. Ana mentions that this doll has eyes from Spain, where doll eyes are famous. These two are indignantly blue, like the eye of the doll in the painting. I picture her picking one up with a tweezer. Imagine her inspecting it by lamplight, then dipping it in milky glue and securing it in the socket.
Ana grabs a clear plastic bag out of one of her desk drawers, pulls it over the doll’s head, and tightens it around his neck. I suspect she’s trying to maintain the shapeliness of his hair, but it’s an odd thing, seeing a doctor smother her patient. I’ll think of it again that night, while watching a news feature about the hospital. After mentioning how excited she gets when people come in to pick up their dolls—how they cry, how they hug her and kiss her—Ana says, “The best part of the job is that nobody dies here. Nobody.”
Whenever The Nutcracker is performed, someone always declares war.
A massive battle ensues.
Toy soldiers and mice, circling each other with rifles and knives.
The Mouse King falls, and the audience laughs and laughs.
I want to rewrite this grave plot.
Turn it into a story in which no body dies.
I want to brush off their coats and say, Go home, everyone.
The war is canceled.
Go back to your families.
To your mothers and grandmothers and kids.
May every last one of you make it home.
God willing—בְּעֵזְרַת הַשֵׁם—ان شاءالله—they all have homes to return to, and dolls to dig out of the mud.
