My father’s sister Rose still remembers the first time she ate pork.
“I thought God was going to strike me dead,” she laughs, as she watches me shift myself around on the couch across from her. “That was almost a hundred years ago.”
The room goes silent. She looks down at her hands, splays her fingers as much as she is able, then shakes her head at them. When she looks up at me again, I see the look of disbelief in her face. It’s a look I’ve seen too many times in the last few years.
“Almost a hundred years ago,” she says again, this time in a whisper. We both know she’s not exaggerating. At the age of one hundred and four, she is the longest-living of her parents’ children, though she was not their firstborn. That distinction belonged to her brother Julius, who was born in the Russia of Czar Nicolas II. He died of scarlet fever in Toronto, after returning home from Chicago, where he’d gone to study the violin. He was twenty-four. My aunt says he died of love sickness.
“He loved music too much,” she says. “He never took care of himself.”
There’s a picture of Julius on her night table. He’s seated, though you can’t see the chair; you can just see his thighs. He looks very formal; he’s dressed in a three-piece suit and he’s holding his violin upright, with the chin rest planted firmly on his left thigh. His left hand sits below the pegbox while,...
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