Come to Grandma

A letter, finally;  a loving letter from my daughter's boy:


My grandfather, Zayde, my father’s father, never spoke to me. He gave me candy. He smelled of sweat. He worked in a factory. He was old, unshaved. His face was thick and guarded, a mask. He moved slowly, carefully. He spoke no English, but his eyes would follow me, this new thing, his grandson, an American kid, as I played in his house where candles burned for God and the family’s dead.

His wife was a pudding, an old Russian face dissolved into nothing, shapeless dress, shapeless body. Everything about her was slow and heavy as she moved from table to draining board, to knife, to cabinet, to bread and back to the table.

They had no past. They had no stories. One photograph, nothing more, of them forty years younger, but unchanged. Even then they were solid, hidden, impenetrable, staring into the lens. I never knew where they’d been born or where they’d lived. They could have been Russian nesting dolls or carved wooden trolls, souvenirs of a world not worth remembering. I learned nothing at all from them or my father. They came from Russia. That’s all. They came to turn their backs on their memories, sailed to America to leave their past behind. But it was there, everywhere, in their exile in Brooklyn.

From my mother, and her mother, I had a little more, just a word or two, a few facts, then nothing; just a little package of seeds, enough to grow a thicket of dreams and memories as I watched them at their chores or lay in my room staring at the ceiling. From this thicket there flew up terrifying stories. I imagined my ancestors and their friends cowering together, watchful, in the street. I saw them, again, in their homes, giddy, relieved, taking off their out-of-doors faces, smiling, then, startled, freezing at a sound.

They fluttered through my house. They were with us, they were with us, with their vests and their grizzled faces, in their shabby best. With the serene, haughty looks they wore beneath their beards at the market, with their love of their gardens, with their grief, their dreams. I saw them standing in my room, their eyes veiled, wary, sighing, receding into themselves. I knew them, their prayers. Their candles still burned, on the Sabbath table, still burned, for the dead, on the sink in my grandfather’s house. And how they loved their sweets: I saw their hands in the dried fruit, the bowls of candy.

I have two pictures of my mother as a child, in Russia. She’s my daughter’s age. In one, she sits on a rock in a painted garden. Behind her is a painted rose bush and a painted tree. She’s chubby, frowning, foreign. In the other, a class photo, she’s surrounded by two dozen children and a pretty, sober teacher. Her hair is pulled up into a top knot and tied with a bow. Her smile is dutiful. There’s a swirl of Cyrillic letters I can’t read across the bottom of the photo. She looks like me.

After this, from the dour, obedient child in her strange, foreign country, the photo record hurries forward twenty years to a formal, Lana Turner portrait. The picture’s inscribed to my dad, “I love you most in all the world.” After that comes the wedding photo, then the snapshots: with her husband, her children, playing her guitar. Then the photos on the beach in Cancun after the kids are grown. Then gaunt and otherworldly, at the end.

But everything in between, before the wife to be, after the little girl in her painted garden, all the immigrant years have been extinguished; The years of becoming, between the old world and the new, are gone. I can feel them, but I can’t see what was brought forward and what was left behind. A child, then a woman, and there’s nothing in between. I’m haunted by the pictures I haven’t seen.

How does it feel to float up into the night, to leave everyone and everything, to risk that much, to leave all of one life behind, and to fly away on a prayer, on a hope, that rises up in you like a scream? How does it feel to leave yourself behind and become an American?

I heard their dreams, felt them; to fly away, up out of our history. I wanted, like them, to become something new, inconceivable, amazing; no longer vermin, infection, Jew, Satan’s living face. I wanted, like them, and for them, to escape; to fly up into button down shirts, the Ivy League.

And I did that, I did that. I turned my back, too. But still, I’m a European Jew, only exiled now to a better address. What I know is what you knew. What I know is what I saw, and what was hidden. I heard you, I saw you. What you remember, I remember, too: the taunts and the laughter, the small eyes passing by, the shame of our fathers, beaten on the street. I remember the pogroms, the fury, the murders, the air of a wild holiday.

The whimsical rise of these fevers, without reason or warning, was memorable enough to scar those who saw these events, even those who only heard the stories, even those who only heard the silence from those who flew into the air, and left their lives behind them to begin again, like my folks, who flew up and tumbled and landed … here.

“What did you do in the old country, Grandma?”
“What could we do? We were Jews.”

There was nothing to be done. They ate what they grew in their garden. My mother’s father was a barber. She explained to me that a Jew drafted into the Russian army served for thirty years, a death sentence. And, once enlisted, they were still Jews, given the hardest work to do, the servants of servants, beaten, tormented. Death or this life, there wasn’t much to choose. My grandfather chose death, a suicide.

“What could we be?”

He was bright, she said, and sensitive, whatever that means; gentle, perhaps, fragile. I’ve seen their wedding picture. She looked pleased to be marrying him, smiling directly into the camera. He was handsome, a little abstracted, his head turned, listening. Like a poet, or a scholar. My mother’s voice was reverent, low, when she told me. Her mother, she said, had been witty, artistic.

And there the story ends. That’s all I know. He died and his wife took my mother’s hand and flew up into the sky, crossed over the ocean, and came tumbling down, in Brooklyn.

And now here am I, forever in exile, a captive of untold stories shared in a million devious ways.

“Sing to me, mother, father, tell me of my home.”

Under my mother’s joy, the rhythms of fear. “Take a scarf. Did you eat?” Pass on, demons. Or under her coat in the morning, safe against the cold, the fabric whispering, “These things I’ve seen … Stay close. Stay close. Please, God, don’t take these children from me.”
No words were said, or needed to be said. The fear is in the meat, in the shoulders, in the hands. It’s all there, the hungers, the partings, the deaths in the killing fields.

“Essen tattele. Ess,” my grandmother said, and that said everything, “Now there is food, so now you must eat. Who knows what tomorrow may bring?”

My father with his muscles, with his sweat, made us Americans. He raised us up, nodding, pleasant, delivery by delivery, up out of our poverty, out of the tenements, to live at last in a house on a street with lawns and trees. From exile to lawns in only thirty years, but, by then, it was too late for me. I’d already seen the ghosts, seen his labor and his worry, seen it all. He had poured himself in me: his wrinkled nose, his fury, his house on a blasted street, and his vision of America. I’ve lived the wish he had, lived his immigrant dream, become a doctor, turned my back on fifty centuries of faith and tradition that brought us only pain. I put that behind me and made myself a life, a life to be proud of, a life like the ones in my mother’s magazines. I mostly succeeded in becoming something new. I brushed the old words aside, but the pictures lingered. The wisdom of my elders, what they had to teach, what they knew, was in their eyes. They dared not speak of it, but I felt it, their truth, their frightening memories.

“What could we be? We were Jews.”
“Essen tattele. Eat.”

The tragedy of a hole in my pants.
“No. It can be mended. It’s just a seam. ”
Such a thin line between us and calamity.

Mother watching, always watching, from the window while I played down in the street.

And beyond that, what rises up, unbidden, in my mind’s eye: two women, a journey, a mother and daughter, running in their hope and their fear, like all the mothers running with their children, but these are mine. They’re inside me, tangled up in each other, lost in their terror, their pain and their dreams. A girl and her mother; one seeking a new life, a place where she can sing, the other looking only for a place where she can sit, her knotted kerchief in her lap, unwrapping her memories.

Two sides of the immigrant passion and both of them are in me; to run toward, to run from, to hide your treasures, to grieve in silence and to scream. To wrap your life in tissue paper, to crawl into your dreams, to look neither left nor right, but only on the bright star you’re following.