The Childhood
— for Lilly and Harper
Women with blue-black numbers on their naked forearms buy
groceries at our neighborhood A & P, until I ask my mother
what the numbers mean, and she averts her eyes to watch the black
conveyer belt carry a pound of butter, a bag of oatmeal cookies, a carton
of milk, a tin of coffee along the slow path to the bag-boy’s hand. And
I think of the Holocaust, the little I know about it, black hole into which
my relatives fell, about which no one speaks. Here, there are only Jews—
with and without yarmulkes or numbers, prayer shawls, hope. Here,
the gravelly voices of strangers rise above me in Yiddish, the language
of cobblestones and complaints, the hawkers of Eastern Europe or the Lower
East Side, wooden handcarts pushed by poverty and regret. My mother slips
three dollars toward the cashier’s open palm; the woman’s lifeline, I notice,
crosses twice. So many Jews here, untold stories, babushkas worn even
now in summer heat, troubles carried along with their paper sacks and
their shtetl walk, shuffling troubles, stooped shoulders, and apologetic
warning eyes, as if all burdens become internal. And all this I inherit
and come to understand. I breathe the dry dirt of the road my grandfather
traveled out of Kishinev, which I visit years later while teaching in Romania—
another story—and even his childhood travels with me—and I will live
to hear great-grandmother Fishman’s voice call to me from the old Jewish
cemetery where she rests, if anyone can call it rest. She died after the 1904
pogrom, after Cossacks raided Jewish homes on Christmas Eve, and in death,
she fell across and smothered her youngest child, an infant, who is buried
with her. When I visit their graves on an overcast, humid July day, headstones
bent and crowded, in mourning it seems, a boxcar of empty space eternally
filled with the dead. I fall to my knees and kiss a flat stone inscribed in Hebrew,
a language I can’t read, a stranger’s grave, and a stand-in for all my family’s loss.
But does it matter, with so much death, suffering, whose grave I kiss, whose life
I mourn? A small maple tree in front of my childhood home dies the year after
planting, but nobody digs it up. A reminder, my mother insists, of all who die
too soon. In my neighborhood public school, there’s no Christmas, no Easter,
only Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah, and I fast on guilt and denial, the foods
that feed me still, beyond the latkes and split pea soup, the knishes made
with salt brine and patience, the dough pounded and rolled thin, the potatoes,
onions, and kasha boiled until the steam is breathed into blood. Yes, it’s
the sadness I love, the taste of it in Passover wine, the dip of my little finger
enacting the Egyptian plagues, the flat matzos of near annihilation. Oh, how
childhood becomes who we grow into, sorrow of what’s gone and never gone.