I decided to bite the bullet and post my longer writting assignment here. I know i posted the first section earlier in the month but it's part of the piece as a whole so it's reposted. It's unfinished and sort of just an outline of where i'm going. I hope you enjoy.


I.

At five years old, I had the notion that everything in life had a rightful place: a baby in a crib, water in the tub, my dad in a suit and me, tucked under my mother's arm, my cheek pressed against the cotton of her t-shirt, smelling the sweet scent of detergent mixed with the familiar smell of her perfume. It was the start of fall in New York and outside, the leaves fought to keep their color and the sun hid behind a gray wash of sky. Even as a child, I could feel a lull in the mood, the dark tint of the day as winter demanded to be let in. It left me feeling unsettled but I resolved that I was where I was supposed to be – I was safe, burrowed into my mom on this afternoon.

Earlier in the week, my mom and I had made the trip to the library and picked out an armful of children's books. Today, I dug through the pile to find the perfect one. After a few moments of scavenging, I decided on Molly's Pilgrim, drawn to it by the cover illustration of a young girl with dark hair like mine. When I held it up for my mom's consent, she smiled and nodded approvingly.

Pressed against my mother's chest, I listened closely to the reverberations of her voice as she began to read, feeling the words as I heard them. I stayed like this, only turning my head slightly from the warmth of her so I could see the pictures. A few sentences in and I was already proud of my choice. The book told the story of Molly, a young Russian girl, adjusting to American life after emigrating with her Jewish family to escape religious persecution. Just before Thanksgiving, Molly's teacher asks all the students to sew a pilgrim doll and bring it in to share with the rest of the class. Excitedly, Molly brings news of the assignment home to her mom, who works all night to finish the project. But what Molly's mother creates is nothing like the pilgrims Molly had read about it. Instead, it looked just like her with long dark braids and a kerchief of vibrant colors. Confused and upset, she berated her mother for misunderstanding the assignment. Here is where the humming of my mother's voice ended. And this is when her voice cracked.

Apologizing and clearing her throat, my mom continued, reading the words of Molly's mother: "didn't you just tell me that a Pilgrim is someone who came to this country from the other side of the world to find freedom?" and my mom chokes on her words again. Now, I have lifted my neck and angled my head so I can see her face; there are tears lining her eyes. She is apologizing again and I just want her to keep reading the words she sees on the pages and not say the ones falling from her mouth.

This is the moment when I knew that she was different, that I was different – we were different. I couldn't place this emotion, this uneasiness, this feeling that something did not belong, that something had been misplaced. As the granddaughter of holocaust survivors, my life would be filled with sentences that were caught in throats, tears that swam up unexpectedly and emotions that we couldn't always decipher. It was on that day, in that afternoon with winter closing in, that I learned not everything was in its rightful place. My family's history was displaced – memories, stories, lives, had all been moved and lost.

II.

On Saturday mornings, we would load into the family station wagon and my dad would drive us from our suburban house to where my mother's parents lived in a dark, one bedroom apartment in the Bronx. He was always careful to lock the car doors and give a good look around the neighborhood before we walked the short distance to my grandparent's building. With my brother, I would run up the dimly lit stairwell, my parents, trailing cautiously behind. Always, when we reached the top floor, my small-framed, rounded grandmother would be leaning out of the apartment, waiting for us, her aged face upturned in a smile. One at a time, she would squeeze us tight and bring our faces to her chest, holding us there for a few seconds before pulling us to her face and wetly kissing our cheeks. She smelled like roast chicken and salt and clothes that had hung in the closet for too long; I breathed her in, sucking in her scent, believing that the deeper I inhaled, the more of her that would fill me and linger within me. My grandfather, tall and dense, with fuzzy strawberry blonde hair still framing his bald head, would greet us too, though not as thoroughly, getting up from the plastic covered couch in the living room, his arms outstretched for me, his little girl.

My brother and I would hunt around the apartment, each sneakered movement squeaking against the old apartment floors, as we looked for the hard candies my grandmother kept tucked away in each room and other treasures. We would find old dolls with painted lips and rouged cheeks set up on my grandmother's bureau and antiqued toy guns that fit in our small hands, buried in my grandfather's dresser drawer. While we busied ourselves, my grandfather, a butcher, filled paper shopping bags with frozen chicken breasts, slabs of thick brisket, fresh lamb chops and logs of kosher salami for my parents to bring home with us. Always, my mother would reach a point where her "thank yous" became strained and soon she begged that he “stop,” they “had enough and would be back for more soon.” But he did not relent, this was “good meat, kosher meat” and he wanted us to have it. My dad, placing his hand gently on my mother's arm, thanked my grandfather and took the last tin-foiled package from his sturdy but cracked hands.

When we took these trips to the Bronx during the summer months and into the early fall, my grandparents, in their mid-eighties, would travel back with us to the suburbs. My family went about their every day summer schedule – my dad commuting into the city for work, my brother off at day camp and me, running around the house in my bathing suit, waiting for someone to take me to the town pool. Before my dad left for work, he would pull two old lawn chairs from the garage and place them on the grass in our big backyard, angled towards the woods he was so proud of: a blur of thick tree trunks, one after the other, each topped with a pillow of green leaves cushioning the blue summer sky.

Once my grandparents had finished breakfast, my mom would escort them outside, where they would politely ask that she reposition the lawn chairs on the driveway. After some probing as to why they'd prefer the blacktop to the scenic backyard, she agreed and for the rest of the light hours in the day, my grandparents sat, nearly motionless, facing the quiet street.

III.

I didn't think to ask questions, not until I was older and it was too late. Questions meant making them remember, it meant being the reason that painful memories were unpacked and unhinged, left to travel from deep, buried places where they were stored for a reason.

Shortly after my father married my mother, he asked to interview her father and tape record their conversation. With a PhD in anthropology, a fascination with history and the distance of having lived an all-American childhood, my dad understood the importance of my grandparents' story, one that was running out of time. My mother, having so many of her own questions about her parents lives before she was born, was too close and too scared to ask them but willingly obliged and allowed my father to tenderly probe my grandfather about his experiences during the war, sparing my sensitive grandmother.

I have never listened to the 2 or 3 cassette tapes that my dad recorded during the few sessions he spent asking the questions that no one else would ask. Instead, I only learned tiny stones of history that my father shared with me, even when I didn’t ask. My mom, trying to protect herself and her children, was more guarded about what she knew and only inserted small blips of information when she grew nervous that she would forget or that I would never know to remember.

There were no complete stories with beginnings, middles or ends, only sentences, chards of the whole picture:

Someone in Poland, not a Jew, hid grandpa and his brother in their barn for years before the Nazis came and took them to the camps.
I took each sharp word and swallowed it, letting it prick me on the way down, hoping it would leave a scar.
He had two daughters; one was named Hannah and he had a wife too.
I tried to imagine my grandpa, distant from my mother all her life, as the adoring father to other children.
Grandma had a little boy and a husband too. She had twin sisters and she grew up riding horses and taking drawing lessons.
But how did they find each other?
Grandma and grandpa met in a displacement camp in Germany after the camps were set free. That's where your mom was born, in Munich, after the war.
Where had everyone else gone – my grandpa's young daughters and my grandma's baby boy? Weren't each of my grandparents from big families with lots of children? Where were they? There were so many questions and only one answer.
They were lost, all lost.

IV.

During one of their visits to our house for the weekend, when I was nearing my teens, my mom asked that I help my grandmother get ready for bed. The rest of the family stayed in the living room, piled onto the couch, watching reruns of All in The Family, my grandpa's favorite show. Softly, I took my grandmother by her warm wrinkled hand and led her into the room with the pull out couch. Already in her late eighties, her body was heavy from the day as I eased her onto the bed and helped her with her stockings. Kneeling at her feet while I unrolled the gauzy material, we were both quiet. It was a silence thick with warmth and the understanding that words were not only exhausting but unnecessary too. Her face, though drawn from the warm day, was sweet with a smile, just happy to be with her granddaughter. Then she spoke: I helped them. Shocked, I jerked my head up and her brown eyes, watery with age and emotion, met mine: I did everything I could during the war, I want you to know.