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. Our dog, a Welsh Terrier named Peppy, started barking and my grandmother and I noticed a man outside the back door to the house. Instead of calling the police, she went to the closet and once again got out two of her big, trusty umbrellas; she kept one and gave me the other. We then ran to the back door, ready to strike the thief if he broke in, which he did. He was quite brazen or maybe stupid, trying to rob a home when a dog and two people were present. As he came through the door, we started hitting him with the umbrellas. But he was bigger than both of us combined and easily knocked us to the floor.
Peppy, however, had a deeply protective personality and was not so easy to brush aside. He growled and leaped at the guy, bit him on the thigh and latched on like he was trying to rip off the guy’s leg. The thief screamed, hit Peppy, and tried to knock him away but only succeeded in making Peppy angrier. I recall my dog pulling off the thief’s pants, but I don’t know if that’s an accurate memory. What I know for sure is that the thief turned and ran with Peppy chasing after him. No one ever tried to rob our home again.
When I was 10 or so, grandma suffered from difficult health problems. At night, after she was asleep, I would cautiously approach the door to her room to listen and assure myself she was still breathing. It felt like death was waiting to appear in her room and I wondered what it would look like or if some dark being would appear there. But during the daytime, she kept reassuring me⎼ “Don’t worry. I won’t die until after your 13th birthday and Bar Mitzvah.” And she did what she had said. She died one month after the ceremony.
For most of my life I carried that sense of death being close to me, of there being in the room next door a dark tunnel to something way beyond me. I carried a respect for ways of life very different from what I knew. And I began to marvel at the seeming power grandma had over death.
Each and every one of us has a connection reaching to eternity, to all beings alive both now and in the past. This connection is full of possibility. We can pull pogroms, hate, violence, and greed from that connection. Or we can pull love, creativity, and compassion for others, for ourselves, and our world. For those of us who know little of the lives of our parents and grandparents before we were born, we can, if we can create the opportunity, ask appropriate, loving questions before it’s too late.
It’s our lives. What will we pull out from that dark tunnel of connection? What will we create from its energy?
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