Invoking the Ancestors

My great-grandparents, the Lobelsons

We invited our grandparents to the seder and they came, in steerage, carrying bundles. My great-grandmother in the photograph on the right hides her silver candlesticks in her skirts during the long journey from Romania. Now, they sit on the seder table. Our grandparents came from Budapest and Moldavia. From Santa Margherita Belice in western Sicily and from Minsk, it goes without saying. From Limerick and Calabria and from Lodz, though the last could not be remembered as they were in life. Only their names could be offered, a spectral after-image of the people they were before they perished in the Shoah. Still, they were with us. They were all with us. Our minyan of ten, a few still in their sixties but the rest seventysomethings, crowded together at the table, sharing the haggadot, reaching over one another to get to the charoset. Remarkably, there was still more than enough room for our ancestral guests.

Both of my grandfathers died before I was born. One, the patriarch of a large family, flourished into the Depression as the proprietor of a dry goods store on First Avenue. The other, Grandpa Louis, died all the way back in 1923. I inherited from my mother an ice cold antipathy for him, a man I never met. In the only photograph of him that remains, my mother works at being playful for the camera, sticking her head out between her parents. He is dapper in white shoes. You would never know that she always used the words stern and austere when describing him. But who can say? He might have been affectionate if he'd known me. He might have been the kind of grandfather who came to visit with candy bars and jump ropes in his jacket pocket, the kind of grandfather who would stroke your hair and kiss your forehead. Instead, he's a cipher who left behind nothing but a sour dread. Seders on my mother's side were led by my uncle who mumble davvened for hours on end, not seeming to care whether anyone else understood the escape from Egypt, the matzoh and maror.

My Hungarian paternal grandmother died when I was five and left me with only two memories, both pungent. In the first, she answers the door of the railroad flat on 107th street, a dense thicket of antimacassars and porcelain figurines. We ring the bell, the door swings open. There she is with her arms spread wide, ready to engulf us, shrieking "who's who in America?" No austerity on that side of the family. Everything about them was deafening and supersized. In the second memory, she's sitting on the terrible, scratchy needlepoint sofa in our living room. I'm on her lap. It's a good thing because it protects my little girl legs from the aggressively abrasive upholstery. But after a while, I start to suffocate in the surround of her enormous breasts. Sitting on the sofa unprotected would be better than having my face pressed into her perfumed cleavage. Seders on my father's side dispensed with the praying altogether in short order and went on to loud and insistent demands for soup.

All but one of the grandparents we invited along with Elijah to drink too much and eat copious amounts of food were born in Europe. They crossed the Atlantic, reading Yiddish newspapers, speaking in Sicilian dialect. They were small businessmen, glorified peddlers. They were tailors and plasterers. They lived in tenements and brownstones, inhaled garlicky air and drank homemade wine and bathtub gin. My Romanian grandmother, Anna, the only one of that generation I really knew, used to like to tell me about pogroms in Jassy when she was a girl. How they tossed rocks through the windows of the Jewish households. How in 1892, hundreds of Jewish shops were closed down, tradesmen driven out of the city. The following year, Anna and her family made pesach in New York.

The essential story.....the fleeing, the pursuit, the crossing, the wilderness, the illusion of arrival, goes on and on up to this moment. Everything is and has always been provisional. Roots are for trees. Our origins are fluid, our stories oceanic and subject to changing tides of interpretation, the interventions of history. They say my grandfather Louis became unhinged in something called the Panic of 1907 when he lost what little money he had. The financial upset in the year of my mother's birth and its attendant sense of failure and foreboding impacted the entire family saga. It's an elusive, but mesmerizing narrative...One of the many fragments floating over the seder table when we gathered our ancestors around us, not for the sake of nostalgia, but in the service of deep memory.


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Empowerment Epidemic

Courage has always been contagious. In Biblical times, there was a man named Nachshon, unremarkable in every respect, who took the first step into the water before the Red Sea split. After he got his feet wet, the entire Israelite nation followed him into the sea, a miraculous event we now celebrate at Passover. Courage is still contagious. You can see it spread like an unruly virus through a room full of otherwise ordinary people determined to craft a response equal to the dimensions of the outrage we all feel. The anger and disbelief launch an older woman out of her seat at an anti-Trump mixer organized to introduce all the scattered progressives in the neighborhood to each another. "I'm from Swing Left," she says. "We're gonna take down John Faso in the New York 19." "I'm from Bridge," an African-American woman tells the crowd. "We're working on Safe Communities, keeping ICE out of our towns." I'm feeling it too and even though I'm not an imposing presence, indeed shrinking with age from my full height of five feet, I jump up and turn to face the standing room only gathering. "I'm Susie Kaufman from Stockbridge. We need to get our Democratic congressman, Richard Neal, to do a town hall in the Berkshires. We have something to say and we expect him to listen."

I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of anything. But this is different. The miasma of mid-century Europe hangs over us, spectral and threatening. A storm is coming, our nightmares tell us. Complete with storm troopers. The sense of foreboding and the pressure to resist impacts everyone and filters down to the most seemingly inconsequential local situations. At the community center, where remarkably I have been taking a senior women's exercise class for well over a year, there is discontent. The young woman who leads our class in the winter is about to be replaced by an older guy who returns from Florida in May and expects to resume his teaching gig. We don't like his tasteless jokes and the way he singles people out for praise and criticism. Vulnerable seventysomethings have developed sore shoulders and lower back pain because he doesn't seem to know what he's doing. We petition the director to keep our female teacher in place and it works.  Speaking up has caught on. It's all the rage. The more you do it, the more you do it, and the more you do it, the more other people are influenced by the example of your bravery.

The same is true for writers and performers. Suddenly, there's an explosion of local talent, people reading, delivering monologues, storytelling, making music. At first, they're so frightened I can hardly hear what they're saying. They stand in front of the audience hunched over and whispering, hoping it will all be over soon. But now I see countless people just marching out to the edge of the precipice, raining their art down on us, an act of sublime generosity. Some of it is tender, reflective, but some of it is propelled by the energy of the fury. They are reluctant rockets of prophesy, these people. Their pronouncements are cutting straight through the swamp gas we are all breathing. Women, in particular, are refusing to play dead. Women flooded the streets of Washington and many other cities on January 21st. They prayed with their feet, as Abraham Joshua Heschel said in Selma. Now it's our turn to shout NO WAY. This is not armchair politics. People are asking each other, what are you doing in the resistance?

The gravity of our situation is bringing people out of hiding, reminding each of us that when the Passover haggadah speaks of slavery, it is both a metaphor and a newsreel. It is a metaphor for our entrapment in self, for our fear and an everyday reality on the ground. Syrians are enslaved, assaulted by chemical weapons, made into pawns in a satanic political game, Trump and Putin executing the daylight play. African-Americans are enslaved, vulnerable to violence on their way back from a 7-11 with a bag of Skittles. Palestinians are enslaved, on this the 50th anniversary of the Occupation. Women are enslaved by panels of men deciding their reproductive future. Pharaoh is ruthless and powerful, but every day a new Nachshon arrives at the Red Sea, casts off her cloak of invisibility and puts her foot in the water. It's an epidemic.

Please share seventysomething with other interested parties. I welcome your comments on email, facebook or on this blog. If you do not have a gmail account, comment as Anonymous, but please tell me who you are in the body of the remarks. Click on comments (it will say how many there are), select Anonymous from the drop-down menu, enter your comment and hit publish. If you do comment, I will respond on the blog, so please check back so our conversation can continue.