Anna, second from the right in first row
Photograph taken in Iasi, Romania in the 1880s
In the backward glance of time travel, grandmother Anna is reaching up to put her veiled straw hat on a shelf above her dark, crepey dresses. The bedroom in the back of our apartment fills with the acrid smell of camphor, her winter coat packed in mothballs at the rear of the closet. Anna has just returned from breathing her own allotted share of toxic fumes. She's been gossiping on the bench in the middle of four lanes of Broadway traffic. The whale-size Pontiacs and chubby Checker cabs drive by northbound towards Harlem and southbound towards the diamond district. Mrs. Mandelbaum's grandson has graduated from law school. Mrs. Ziegler's husband is at Mt. Sinai for his gall bladder. In the kitchen, mother is working on her beef Stroganoff. Mixing the sour cream into the flank steak remains a liberation. She has held her ground against Anna, insisting on certain expansions of the family diet, but agreeing to eat the mouthwatering outlier foods only at Shanghai Palace.
Further back, mother is a small girl with a piece of chalk and a key playing potsy in Mt. Morris Park on 105th street. Boys are marching out of the tenements, boarding ships sailing east to France. Mrs. Mandelbaum's mother has died very young of influenza. Anna is tasting the soup she prepared for her husband. It might be too salty. Louis doesn't like salty. But it might not have enough flavor. He wants it to have flavor. He wants this and he wants that. Anna tries hard to get it right. If she doesn't get it right, Louis becomes sullen, frightens her little daughter. He doesn't smack them around, but still they cower when he comes into the room. He leaves a sour taste. Louis is not the man Anna thought she would marry.
I can almost see her before she makes the crossing from Romania, the city of Iasi, where hoodlum Jew-haters threw rocks in their windows. Mrs. Ziegler's father has been attacked in the street. It's suddenly clear that this has gone beyond the usual threat. Everyone has to pack up and leave in a hurry, sailing west to New York. Anna has a suitor in Iasi, Chaim Greenstein. He plays the clarinet and speaks flowery, literary Yiddish. Long before she dies in the nursing home on Long Island opposite the woman who lies awake at night making shadow puppets on the wall, something dies inside Anna when she says goodbye to him, Chaim. Something gets left behind. This remnant struggles to breathe. It reaches for me, for my son and his sons. It wants us to love one another extravagantly to compensate for the love lost in transit, blown off the deck of the ship into the Black Sea. It wants us to create openings for love.
But these boys, my grandsons, are growing up so fast. They never get to meet Anna's daughter, let alone Anna. In Minnesota, all they have from long ago and far away is me when I visit, weak tea no longer served hot in a glass. They are wallowing deep in America, kayaking down the Red Cedar river, running the bases on humid upper midwest summer nights. I want to gift them with the old stories. Make them some good soup, not too salty. I want to say to them, look, here is this little girl in Romania studying French and here is her daughter skipping rope in the gutter uptown. Here is your great great-grandfather Louis, a sad sack, a sorry case. See him glowering in a corner, empty pockets, emphysema. Maybe they can take his mind off his troubles. In some back-to-the future science fiction, Louis is walking with the two of them down to one of their favorite fishing spots on the big river, the Mississippi. It reminds him of the Danube, one summer outing when his mother laid out a picnic of cold chicken and pickled beets while he and his father dug for worms. He overhears his mother singing and clapping her hands. There is his Anna the day he fell in love with her in the English for immigrants class downtown, her blue eyes, her hair swept high off her lovely neck. Louis looks these boys up and down. He's bewildered by the noise and lights flashing around them, all the things they've accumulated in their short lives. But somewhere under the commotion of their America, he recognizes them. They belong to him.
-----------------------------------------
"The young and the old are linked in one long breath."....Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass
Please share your thoughts regarding this story and my 2019 book Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement by writing to me at seventysomething9@gmail.com