in AD 70. Then God punished us by sending us into exile, or
galus
, as we call it, and the diaspora happened. We were cursed with wandering; we moved from region to region, from country to country. Every time we settled into a comfortable routine, something would come along and shake the earth from beneath us. Crusades, Cossacks, Tatars, Nazis. The earth shook in 1944, and a few years later my grandmother came to America with her stateless passport.
Enclosed in the brown envelope was all the correspondence between her and the bureaucratic government agency in charge of her naturalization. She was addressed as DP3159057. At the time, she told me, she was working as a secretary in Williamsburg. She didn’t mention the company she worked for, or what she did exactly, as a secretary, but she did mention that she shared an apartment with roommates on Hooper Street and that at night she was awakened by the cries they emitted in their terrible dreams. Everybody around her was haunted in the same way. So she gave her information to a matchmaker.
“I’m ready to start a new life,” she had said. She wanted to have many children. She had just gotten her period for the first time attwenty-four years old, and she was relieved. She had lost ten siblings in the war. She would ultimately give birth to eleven children.
She did not raise her kids with the same traditions with which her parents had raised her. It was a postwar generation, and if you hadn’t given up on God completely, you were well on your way to the other end of the spectrum. She had married an avid follower of what was beginning to be an extremist movement. My grandfather, while educated and successful at a young age, was the only man she had met who insisted on keeping his traditional beard in the New World. Later, their sons and daughters would grow up in a self-imposed ghetto led by rabbis who were trying to make sense of the Holocaust and appease the angry God that had razed the European Jewish population.
Over the years, my grandmother paid little notice to the winds of fanaticism blowing around her home. At times when the community was in its grips and my grandfather brought news of tightening restrictions into his home, my grandmother waved it away and sang a little tune as she carefully frosted a hazelnut torte. I remember that the little things made her very happy. She prepared such beautiful and tasty food, food the likes of which I found only when I traveled to Europe or ate in very old-style establishments. It was regal and classic in the way people rarely cook anymore in the United States.
To my grandmother I attached ineffable elegance. There was no elegance in Hasidic life, but there was elegance in her, in her origins, in her story, and in her inimitable cooking. My grandmother was European, and though I could not fully grasp what that meant, I imagined that it was something wonderful and otherworldly. I cherished the photos taken of her as a young woman in gorgeous hand-sewn dresses with rows of tiny cloth buttons. Iloved the way her slim ankles looked in delicate T-strap shoes. There was something spectacular about her loveliness and poise, which stood in sharp contrast to a photograph I had found in her drawer, one of her being carried out from Bergen-Belsen on a stretcher by the British Red Cross. To embody beauty after you had endured the ugliest of assaults, that was magic to me. I surmised that there was something very powerful at the core of my grandmother’s spirit.
My grandmother’s passport gave her name as Irenka, Hungarian for Irene. It was not a name I ever heard her called, but then no one called me by the name on my birth certificate either. It was custom to have a secular name, to make it easier for the outsiders to relate to us. Better that than they should resent us for having to break their teeth over our Hebrew names. My grandmother’s religious name was Pearl, a beautiful name that I thought I might give my daughter
galus
, as we call it, and the diaspora happened. We were cursed with wandering; we moved from region to region, from country to country. Every time we settled into a comfortable routine, something would come along and shake the earth from beneath us. Crusades, Cossacks, Tatars, Nazis. The earth shook in 1944, and a few years later my grandmother came to America with her stateless passport.
Enclosed in the brown envelope was all the correspondence between her and the bureaucratic government agency in charge of her naturalization. She was addressed as DP3159057. At the time, she told me, she was working as a secretary in Williamsburg. She didn’t mention the company she worked for, or what she did exactly, as a secretary, but she did mention that she shared an apartment with roommates on Hooper Street and that at night she was awakened by the cries they emitted in their terrible dreams. Everybody around her was haunted in the same way. So she gave her information to a matchmaker.
“I’m ready to start a new life,” she had said. She wanted to have many children. She had just gotten her period for the first time attwenty-four years old, and she was relieved. She had lost ten siblings in the war. She would ultimately give birth to eleven children.
She did not raise her kids with the same traditions with which her parents had raised her. It was a postwar generation, and if you hadn’t given up on God completely, you were well on your way to the other end of the spectrum. She had married an avid follower of what was beginning to be an extremist movement. My grandfather, while educated and successful at a young age, was the only man she had met who insisted on keeping his traditional beard in the New World. Later, their sons and daughters would grow up in a self-imposed ghetto led by rabbis who were trying to make sense of the Holocaust and appease the angry God that had razed the European Jewish population.
Over the years, my grandmother paid little notice to the winds of fanaticism blowing around her home. At times when the community was in its grips and my grandfather brought news of tightening restrictions into his home, my grandmother waved it away and sang a little tune as she carefully frosted a hazelnut torte. I remember that the little things made her very happy. She prepared such beautiful and tasty food, food the likes of which I found only when I traveled to Europe or ate in very old-style establishments. It was regal and classic in the way people rarely cook anymore in the United States.
To my grandmother I attached ineffable elegance. There was no elegance in Hasidic life, but there was elegance in her, in her origins, in her story, and in her inimitable cooking. My grandmother was European, and though I could not fully grasp what that meant, I imagined that it was something wonderful and otherworldly. I cherished the photos taken of her as a young woman in gorgeous hand-sewn dresses with rows of tiny cloth buttons. Iloved the way her slim ankles looked in delicate T-strap shoes. There was something spectacular about her loveliness and poise, which stood in sharp contrast to a photograph I had found in her drawer, one of her being carried out from Bergen-Belsen on a stretcher by the British Red Cross. To embody beauty after you had endured the ugliest of assaults, that was magic to me. I surmised that there was something very powerful at the core of my grandmother’s spirit.
My grandmother’s passport gave her name as Irenka, Hungarian for Irene. It was not a name I ever heard her called, but then no one called me by the name on my birth certificate either. It was custom to have a secular name, to make it easier for the outsiders to relate to us. Better that than they should resent us for having to break their teeth over our Hebrew names. My grandmother’s religious name was Pearl, a beautiful name that I thought I might give my daughter
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