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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