When I was growing up, I just didn’t think to ask my parents or my grandparents about “the old country” or their own childhoods. When my father was in his nineties and my mother had already passed away, I realized the time I had with him was coming to an end. He had in his memory a whole history of our family and of this country, that I knew little about. I didn’t want to lose all those connections. So, during the last year or two of his life, whenever possible, we looked through old photo albums and I asked him about his childhood and parents, but even he knew or said little of his family’s background in Europe.
My grandparents all came from eastern Europe, Russia, Poland, and Ukraine. Did I hear so little about their lives before coming to the US not only because I seldom asked but because the memories were so intertwined with trauma? Had they felt deprived of their voices?
In the novel Wandering Stars, by the mid 19th and early 20th century novelist and playwright Sholem Aleichem, one of the main characters sings a prayer in a “plaintive, authentic Yiddish melody.” It captures well one aspect of the lives of the characters in the novel, which takes place in a small Russian shtetl or predominantly Jewish market town at the end of the nineteenth century.
“…Dear God, the truth of exile
Is told in tears.
How long, how long, dear God, The awful fears
Of being beaten, driven
And no one cares.
When, oh when, dear God, wilt thou
Be who hears…”
Life wasn’t all pogroms and terror. There was love, family, and friendship. There was the Yiddish Theatre, religion, art and creativity. The singer was herself a possible future recruit for the theater. The culture and time described in the novel was also the culture and time into which my grandparents were born. Had they, like the fictional characters, lived in Europe as exiles from a “promised land,” or promise of home?
When I was young, my family lived in a ranch style house in a suburb of New York City. My grandmother on my mother’s side lived with us, with me, my parents, and brother, for half of the year. The other half, she lived with my aunt. Grandma was a short woman, in her sixties or seventies. She spoke little yet tried to live in accord with her memory of traditional ways of living and believing. When she was with us, for example, we ate Kosher meals so she would feel comfortable. But when she was gone from our house, she didn’t try to tell us how to live. And she provided a link to a reality, a history beyond what we knew in the U. S.
Despite her age, she could be fiery and passionate. She hated violence, for example. Maybe she’d seen too much growing up. One time, 2 older boys started a fight with me right in front of our house. I was actually holding my own against the two when grandma came rushing from the house with an umbrella in her hand. She started beating on the two attackers until they ran away. Then she started beating on me, while yelling “never get in fights. Never. Never.”
One evening, when I was six or seven, she and I were home alone…
*To read the whole piece, please go to The Good Men Project.
