oversharing, part I.

Disclaimer: many of you have already read the bulk of the piece (either in my rants or in other pieces i've posted here) below but i have edited and expanded it a bit for the writing class i am taking and i thought i would share some excerpts. I am getting some good feedback and suggestions from my class and i'm at the point where i need to make some decisions about where i want to go with this. Here are some piece of the incomplete whole:

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I search for any morsel of memory: a photograph, a letter, any record or document from the lives my grandparents led before and during the war but I turn up nearly empty handed. It is as if I have slept through my childhood and teenage years when they were alive and their memories and stories were only a mind away from mine and now I have woken up, alone. I need to get some, any, even just one, of my many questions answered.

No, this isn't my story - it's my grandparents' story but it is mine to tell. And though it's not what happened directly to me, it's what happened to them, it is so much of who I am and how I identify myself.

Every phone call, internet search, research query, turns up a dead end. It is impossibly frustrating. These are not strangers that just disappeared. This is my family. My great grandparents, my mom's aunts and uncles and we know nothing - about how they lived or even how they died.

I am not going to stop searching. I know there is information to be found. There is no excuse for me to give up. This is my family – this is my duty; I owe it to them, to honor their lives by at least working, even if it's for the rest of my life, to find out all I can about who they were. This, so far, are the pieces, from my life and theirs, that I’ve pulled together.






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. My dad 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.

My brother and I ran up the dimly lit stairwell, our 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 squeezed us tight, bringing our faces to her chest and 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 I could hold onto. My grandfather, tall and dense, with fuzzy strawberry blonde hair still framing his bald head, greeted 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 hunted around the apartment, each sneakered movement squeaking against the old apartment floors, as we looked for treasures like the hard candies my grandmother kept tucked away behind decorative pillows. As we searched, we found 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 reached 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 New York 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.
Who instilled in me that fear of asking questions? Was it a look my mother gave me or was it a wall my grandparents built up around them? And what would have happened had I turned to my grandmother during a lull in conversation and wondered aloud: “tell me about your little boy.” Her face may have tightened and grown red in anger or worse, tears might have filled her eyes as she turned away from me in sadness and the pain of memory but at least I would have tried. Maybe it would have been different. I ask my question and she gets a deep and distant look in her eyes, the way one gets when they are judging if the art is hung straight on a wall. She would smile then, happy to have the door ajar, the window cracked – the chance to talk about him and it. But i didn't ask.

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 to 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 delicate gauzy material, we were both quiet. It was a tender silence, thick with 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, in a whisper: I helped them. 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. In the back of my throat, I felt a knot twist up and I quickly looked away, trying to stop the tears. I kept my head down, my cheeks burning as if all the hot tears meant to fall from my eyes had done as they were told, turned back, and instead, flooded my whole body with heat. I busied myself, smoothing and folding my grandma’s stockings, while she sat, again quiet, staring out the window. I looked up to see what it was she could make out in the dark night but there was nothing – only the metallic black of the night, reflecting our own faces back to us. Without looking at her or breaking her gaze, I took a seat beside her. In a slow motion, she moved her hand over mine, the way one would cup the flame of a candle to extinguish it. I helped the soldiers, I did what I could. Still, silence.

I say nothing but in my mind, there is noise. I see a scene from a movie: the wounded soldiers in their bloodied camouflage, lined up in cots like the tight white keys of a piano. They are whimpering in pain and moaning for morphine while other men, still able to stand upright, rush to their sides. There are women too – my grandmother, in layers of dark clothing, a shawl wrapped taut over her shoulders against the German winter, sitting at the bedside of a young man. She is faceless. I can’t make out her features or even the way her hair is fixed; I don’t know how to recreate her face sixty five years younger, I look to her now for an answer but I have no questions. She has said what she wanted to share and I have not probed. I have not asked the questions that I need answered now that it is too late.

V.
Typed and translated by a lawyer, my grandmother’s usually soft words are made hard: “I give this statutory declaration, together with my motion for compensation for damages to the body and health.” I have found letters, formal documentation that was sent to the German government in the later 90’s in an effort to receive war reparations. I am rereading each sentence over and over, waiting for the pain to be dulled, hers and mine: “Especially, I am most overwhelmed by my nerves. I am over anxious, there is no thing for which I can be happy about.”