Mainly Against Forgetting

In contrast to the sun-beaten streets, their house was thick with dimness all summer. They turned down the shutters during the mid-morning hours–because of the heat, they explained. Their days started early. By the time I’d wake up, they had already finished their breakfast, and Saba Ze’ev was leafing through the day’s newspaper on the enclosed porch or reading one of his yellow-paged history books.

I would go to the kitchen and stand quietly in the doorway watching Savta Tova hunched over the stove, stirring with energetic hands the entrails of two or three steamy pots. The sweet smell of compote wafted in the air. I imagined the stewing apples, raisins, and prunes chasing each other in the swirling liquid. Now rose the sour scent of borscht; a dish only the grown-ups liked. 

Moistening her lips with the tip of her tongue, Savta would hum a drawn-out tune. The lamenting melody, I sensed, was born in some distant part of the world. It traveled with Savta in a hidden fold of her heart. When mouthwatering smells began to drift through the kitchen door and into the rest of the house, she’d make herself a cup of tea. The dark liquid flickered inside a thin glass held between her wide palms, and she would  turn away from the stove and look at me with her sad blue eyes.

“Boker tov, meydele,” she said with a warm smile.

“Boker tov, Savta,” I replied sleepily.

“Breakfast?” she asked as I walked into the kitchen and sat at the small table.

Munching on my buttered toast, I downed each bite with cold milk and watched her carry on with the cooking. Clad in her wide floral housedress, she sat tall and wide-shouldered on her kitchen stool like a queen upon her throne. It was a stepladder throne, its feet dressed in tiny black boots that made a dull sound when dragged across the linoleum floor. Its cushioned seat, small squares of red, white, and black, reminded me of the skirt my other grandmother sent from London for my sixth birthday.

Sitting sideways against the kitchen table, Savta leaned on it with one elbow and pressed down a ball of dough into a cookie sheet with the heels of her palms. I held the star-shaped cookie cutter she handed me, waiting to sink it into the yellowish softness. Indulging in the smell of flour, sugar, oil, and eggs, I executed the job with deliberate slowness to make it last as long as possible. The oven accepted the tray with a glowing red mouth and a wave of hot breath. Next, Savta clutched a limp chicken over the sink and with quick motions plucked its feathers onto a sheet of newspaper. Then, she peeled the potatoes, cut them in fours, and arranged them in the pan beside the chicken. At the end of cooking, Savta would fold the stepladder and tuck it away in the service porch.

*

This is what the afternoon hours in their house were like: the air, which was usually quiet, was now completely still. The squeaky sound of slippers shuffling across the marble-tile floors, revealing Saba’s movement from room to room, was absent. There stood his brown slippers at the foot of the bed like two puppies awaiting their owner’s return. In the dark of the room, they opened wide their frayed maws. Each sole, constantly altered by Saba’s socked feet, a map of broken-off pieces: miniature continents, islands, some ravines, and a few low hills. The puppy-slippers would patiently wait for him to rise from his nap. They waited very quietly, but I could hear their faint panting through the silence of the bedroom. 

*

Savta gave me sugar crystals whenever I fell ill. “This will cure your sore throat,” she’d say, pulling one of the whitish rocks from a green glass jar and placing it on my tongue. I believed that the crystal’s choking largeness, intense sweetness, and unpleasant craggy texture were vital for healing. Without some suffering, the illness would not go away.  

One night I woke up in their home, shivering with a fever. The walls moved in a sort of dance, and the curtain over the window grew wide and thick as it stretched out to the ceiling. Adjusting to the dimness, my eyes fell on the portraits of Savta’s parents on the opposite wall: two sepia-tinted figures standing side by side, connected by the shoulders. My great-grandfather, Beniamin Mosze,  sported a bushy beard and a pair of weary eyes. Beside him was my great-grandmother, her wide face framed by wavy dark hair, her lips thin, her jawline strong like Savta’s. Great-grandmother Chaja. My middle name. A name that bridges dreary Poland and sun-drenched Israel, the past and the future. Her namesake, I carry her in my bones; her remains inhabit no grave.

Feverish, I peered at the portraits through the scant light until their features sank and dissolved into the contours of their faces. Only her frail smile remained, hovering in the room like mist.

A tranquil, earnest smile.

A before-the-war smile.

By then I knew what had happened to her, but where did she come from?

The family might have lived in a small grey house, their yard separated from the street by a fence and a metal gate. Left ajar, the gate now squeaks on its hinges as the icy wind whistles, enlivening dead leaves, lifting them off the dirt road in bursts of dance. Thin snow falls in diagonal sheets, coating the rooftops white, piling against walls, heaping in pools in the empty alleys.

Earlier, children gamboled across the frozen face of the river, their squeals ringing in the air in a thousand shards of sound. Then, the lonesome river sat silently between the houses and the forest, gleaming in the dying sunlight.

Emerging out of my feverish imaginations like a figure in a foggy dream, Savta came into the room and sat beside me on the narrow bed. She rested a cool hand on my forehead and clicked her tongue, “Tza-tza-tza.” Then there was a cold wet something on my head, a sweet rock dissolving in my mouth, and soon, Savta’s soothing presence lulled me back to sleep. The following morning, I woke up my usual self. The sugar crystal worked its magic again, I thought, as I wolfed down my breakfast at the kitchen table, watching Savta kneading dough for kreplach—my very favorite.

Yet for the rest of the day, I kept wondering if my great-grandparents had paid me a visit the previous night; the four of them felt so close, so real. 

*

Years later, I would visit her in the geriatric ward, where the air pulsed with wafts of urine. She would grin as soon as she saw Ima walk into the room but often confused her for a long-dead sister or a nurse, then smiled with pleasure while Ima fed her applesauce with careful motions.

Savta and I both strained to recognize one another; her memory was crumbling, and I struggled to bridge the robust woman of my childhood with this frail elderly woman in a wheelchair. She stared at me with a hollow gaze, her bony fingers tight around a scratched plastic cup filled with lukewarm tea. I reached into my backpack to pull out my camera. Through the lens, I saw Savta in a new light, where every detail held meaning, even her dressing gown of large yellow and white flowers sailing in a dark blue sea. Once I snapped the shot, her wrinkled face smoothed with a wide smile, she placed the cup on the table, and extended her arms toward me. I gave her a hesitant hug, but as soon as we let go, she again forgot who I was, and Ima had to explain, in Yiddish. Savta’s Hebrew had been eaten away by Alzheimer’s.

Now I regretted my childhood dislike for Yiddish, a language that smelled of stale air hanging in stuffy rooms, sour-smelling clothes, and dust gathering between the pages of Saba’s history books. Yiddish had shapes, too: ornate wallpaper peeling in the lower corners, plastic flowers sprouting out of bulky vases, a stiff, yellowing oilcloth on the kitchen table, and a ball of rubber bands tucked in Saba’s special drawer in the kitchen’s service porch. But mostly, Yiddish was the language of the ones who were led like lambs to the slaughter. The language of death.

*

When a fellow Pole joined Savta’s ward, she sat with this tall gentleman on the back porch and the two filled the courtyard with Yiddish chatter. Soon, a girlish smile brightened her face, and she eagerly nodded to the sound of names and events. Later, she asked Ima to take her back to Rozprza, her home village in Poland. For all we knew, that forlorn hamlet near Piotrków Trybunalski might have been extinct by then, erased by war or time, yet in Savta’s memory it flickered on and off like a loosely wired lightbulb. She talked about potatoes grown in the fields, boiled in their skins, and eaten year-round. She talked about Saba’s brother-in-law, who had come to the village from the city of Wieluń at the start of the war to find work in a bottle-washing factory, and who one day dropped a bottle, slipped as he tried to grab it, and fell into the turbulent stream—never to be  seen again. She spoke about the puzzling wide asphalt road that was paved just outside her small village. When the war broke out, the villagers realized its purpose: delivering trucks and tanks. She then relayed afresh the journey from Poland to Siberia: the deep woods, the endless trudge in the snow, her painfully cold feet.

The flickering light in Savta’s eyes carried me there: a few glimpses salvaged from the yawning well of the past. Her gift. My inheritance.

Her smile faltered and then faded, and I thought: If I had lived there then. Wrapped in a woolen coat against a forever winter. Listening to the explosions coming from the distant battleground.

And after that …

And after that …

*

After one of my visits with Savta, I stopped in front of a cookware shop to scrutinize my reflection in the display window. I searched for a resemblance with any of her features or gestures, thinking: I do not share her fine flyaway hair, nor her lake-blue eyes, yet we are linked by an invisible thread. A thread perhaps spun by Eve as she stepped out of Gan Eden feeling defeated. Or liberated. 

An elderly woman then joined me at the window and stood close by, limp and stooped. I turned toward her and noticed her sweater was worn inside out, its buttons confusedly done. She then glanced at me with Savta’s hollow gaze, mumbled words I did not understand, and walked away, her steps small and tentative. I stood there looking at her back until she rounded a corner and was gone.

I turned back to the display window, but now my reflection did not stand alone. Behind it stood my mother; behind her, my grandmothers, Ruth and Tova; behind them, my great-grandmothers: Chaja-Rywke Rapoport, Malka Lewkowicz, Rebecka Grzebinasch, and the fourth, Frida Hershkovitz, Saba Reuven’s mother, whose face I did not recognize and whose name I did not know. And behind them, my eight great-great-grandmothers, among them Brunia Moskowicz and Sara Lis. And then, like a photograph developing in a solution tray, more women gradually appeared behind my great-great-grandmothers, their mothers, and their mothers’ mothers. And more women resurfaced behind them still, filling the window and spilling past it, fanning out beyond the walls of the shop, overwhelming the streets.

Some of the women wore their hair loose or woven into plaits, others wrapped it with a headscarf tied below the chin. A few faces were young and fresh; one of the women smiled, her brow raised with slight curiosity. Others were as wrinkled as ancient scrolls, furrowed with burden and sorrow.

There I was, looking at this infinite gathering of women who formed my bloodline.

Their eyes rested on me, gentle and calm.

Something was asked of me, I sensed. But what?

Then the figure at the very front smiled.

She knew the answer.

I knew it too.

“This is why I write,” I said aloud, looking at us all reflected in the glass. “Mainly against forgetting.”