Maybe Esther

I had no reason to suffer. Yet I did suffer, from early on, although I was happy and loved, and surrounded by friends, embarrassed to be suffering, but suffering still with a loneliness that ranged from razor-sharp to bleakly bitter and I thought it stemmed only from a feeling of missing out on something. The luxurious dream of a big family at a long table followed me with the persistence of a ritual.

And yet our living room was full of my father’s friends and my mother’s adult students, dozens of students who always stood by her until in time, there were several generations of them at our table, and we took the same photographs as other families: against the backdrop of the dark floral curtains lots of merry, slightly overexposed faces, all turned toward the camera, at a long, beautifully decorated table. I don’t know exactly when I first picked up on the hints of discord during my family’s loud, exuberant festivities.

You could count the list of those who could be considered part of my family on the fingers of two hands. I had no need to practice the piano scale of aunt, uncle, cousin, first cousin once removed and her husband, cousin, and great-uncle—up and down, up and down, and I was terrified of that piano, that aggressive totality of the keyboard.

In an earlier time, before we had our big dinner parties, a large family was a curse, because relatives could be members of the White Army, saboteurs, noblemen, kulaks, overeducated “enemies of the people” living abroad, their children, and other dubious characters, and everyone was under suspicion, so families suffered a convenient loss of memory, often in order to save themselves, even though it rarely helped, and on special occasions, any relatives who might fit these categories were generally forgotten, often hidden from the children, and families dwindled; whole branches of the family were erased from memory, extended families were pared down until there was nothing left of them but the joke about the two men with the same last name who are asked if they’re related. Certainly not, they reply: we don’t even have the same last name!

THE LIST

One day, the relatives from deep in my past were suddenly standing in front of me, murmuring their merry messages in familiar-sounding languages. Well then, I thought, I’ll have them make the family tree blossom, fill in the gaps, and mend the feeling of loss, but they crowded together in front of me without faces or histories, like fireflies of the past that shed light on small spaces around them, maybe a couple of streets or incidents, but not on themselves.

I knew their names. All these Levis—the name of my great-grandmother, her parents, and her siblings—would be scattered around the world if they were still alive. I knew that there were Gellers or Hellers; no one knows exactly which. I knew about a Simon Geller only from a note in Russian, a translation from a Hebrew newspaper that is no longer available anywhere. I knew the last Krzewins, the descendants of the Hellers, the relatives with the name that crunches like snow under your feet, like kovrizhka, gingerbread, between your teeth. There were also the Sterns, which was my grandfather’s name until he was twenty. My name would be Stern as well if the Russian Revolution hadn’t triumphed, and that was the name of his many brothers and sisters, his parents, and their many brothers and sisters, and his grandparents with their entire clan, if there were truly as many of them as I liked to imagine.

My distant relatives, Krzewins and Levis, had lived in Łódź, Kraków, Kalisz, Koło, Vienna, Warsaw, Kiev, and Paris, up to 1940, as I realized only recently, and in Lyon, my mother told me. Ruzija attended the university in Vienna, and Juzek studied in Paris, I recall my grandmother saying. I never learned who Ruzija and Juzek were; they were simply relatives of mine. Maybe it was the other way around: Ruzija studied in Paris and Juzek in Vienna. The word conservatory came up, but I don’t recall to whom it applied. And I recall being told that Ruzija and Juzek had to clean the sidewalk with a toothbrush. In Łódź, Kalisz, Warsaw, it was perhaps still vacation time, and at the conservatory the semester had not yet begun; they were at home and not in Paris or Vienna. When I heard this as a child, I thought their location was Switzerland, because our newspapers were reporting that in Switzerland everything was squeaky clean, and some people made a habit of squatting with little brushes and shampoo in front of their houses and scrubbing the sidewalk. I pictured the country drowning in soap bubbles, this country—or another—in its gleaming, unattainable spotlessness.

Some of my relatives’ names were so common that it made no sense to look for them. It would have been a search for people who happened to bear the same name, because in the lists they all appear together, next to one another like neighbors, intermingled, and mine cannot be distinguished from hundreds of others with the very same names, and anyway it would not have been possible for me to distinguish my family from strangers the way you separate wheat from chaff, seeing as it would have been a selection, and I didn’t want that, not even the word. The more of the same name there were, the less likely was the chance of finding my relatives among them, and the less likely this chance was, the clearer it became to me that I had to consider each person on the lists one of my own.

I painstakingly compiled their names, tracking down every Levi, Krzewin, Geller or Heller, and at some point, when I was standing in Warsaw’s military church facing the long lists that ran from wall to wall in tiny print, lists with the names of the dead from the Katyń massacre—why do we automatically look for our own names even in the lists of the dead?—I found Stanisław Geller on the lists and, in the chapel of the Katyń military church, I declared my affinity with all namesakes, including Stanisław, as though he and everyone I had yet to find also belonged to my family, all the Gellers and Hellers, and all the Krzewins and Sterns. Every Stern seemed like a secret relative, even those as remote as stars in the sky.

Years earlier, when I was in New York, I leafed through the yellow pages, the yellowed pages of an old phone book. Where are my grandfather’s brothers and sisters? Where are his father’s brothers and sisters, whose name was Stern and who had disappeared from Odessa in every direction? Were their descendants singing with the Velvet Underground? Did they have a bank? Were they teaching in Massachusetts, at MIT, or were they still working in a shoe factory? After all, somebody’s got to be working.

There were many Sterns in the phone book. Eight whole pages. Yellow-star Sterns in the yellowed phone book. Should I call up each one of them and ask? What did you do before 1917? Are you still waiting for the poor relatives from the east? Even after a hundred years? And the luminaries, should I include them on my list, or should they include me on theirs?

Who told me that one of our Levis was a bookkeeper in a button factory in Warsaw? Another Levi made the 501 jeans, the best ones I knew back when I began my search. He surely wasn’t one of us; I can’t imagine that someone in my family could have a yen for profit or any idea of how to seize opportunities that came along. As my thoughts continued to turn to the button factory in Warsaw or elsewhere, my conviction grew that no one who had remained in Poland could have made it onto a list like that.

I recalled a rescue list I’d seen in a movie, and I went through it as though it were possible that someone from my family could be recorded there and thus rescued, showing up on the Internet. I read one name after the other as though in search of winning numbers, as though I would have recognized someone.

There was no Levi or Krzewin, but I did find an Itzhak Stern, also a bookkeeper, though in a factory in Kraków. He was not a relative of mine, because my Sterns were in Odessa, and those who hadn’t emigrated much earlier were making revolution in the underground, yet one war later there were no rescue missions for them in Odessa and no more lists. Should I put this Stern onto my list anyway, because the others can’t be tracked down? Or would that be attempted theft?

There are, as is well known, games without winners.

Hello, my name is Joe, and I work in a button factory.

One day my boss came up to me and asked if I was busy.

I said no.

So he said:

Then push this button with your right hand.

Hello, my name is Joe …

THE RECIPE

The revelation that people left us struck me unawares; it settled over me like a shadow, covering my head like the basin that Don Quixote had used as a helmet and in which, centuries later, my blind babushka cooked plum preserves. Now the basin had been gathering dust on top of the cupboard for years.

When Lida, my mother’s older sister, passed away, I came to understand the meaning of the word history. My longing was fully developed, I was ready to submit myself to the windmills of memory, and then she died. I was standing there with bated breath, ready to ask, rooted to the spot, and if this had been a comic book, my speech bubble would have been empty. History begins when there are no more people to ask, only sources. I had no one left to question, no one who could still recall these times. All I had were fragments of memory, notes of dubious value, and documents in distant archives. Instead of asking questions at the right time, I had choked on the word history. Had Lida’s death brought me to adulthood? I was at the mercy of history.

The only thing I have from Aunt Lida is a recipe for a refreshing drink known as kvass. The recipe recently jumped out at me from a pile of unpaid bills, as though I owed something to Lida. After the war, Aunt Lidiya, or Lida, as we called her, was known as the classical beauty of the Kiev Pedagogical Institute, Lida from the Department of Defectology, as orthopedagogy is still called back home. Yet when I knew Lida, the same Lida who peered down at us serenely and unflappably from photographs, she was a shuffling creature in an apron who had said nothing for years, just served, one course after another, then into the kitchen and back again, on plates with a gilded rim. Eat! She had been the last one in the family to teach the deaf-mute children, she knew the secret, she knew patience, she cooked in silence, and now she was gone.

For a long time I couldn’t figure out what the EBP.KBAC at the very top of the slip of paper might signify. I stared at this EBP, thinking that the Cyrillic abbreviation could be understood as EBPопейский, YEVropeysky, European, or just as easily as EBPейский, JEWreysky, Jewish kvass—an innocent utopia of the Russian language and the Urbi et Orbi of my aunt, as though Europe and the Jews were descended from one root, and this recipe and this abbreviation fostered the refreshing hypothesis that all Jews, even those who were no longer Jews at all anymore, were among the last Europeans, having, after all, read everything that constitutes Europe. Or didn’t my aunt want to write out the word Jewish, because the incomplete and abbreviated form left open yet another interpretive option, for example, that this drink was not all that Jewish, but only allusively, only a little, in spite of the garlic?

The recipe turned out to be a kind of encrypted poetic exercise. I had never picked up on anything Jewish about my aunt, and there was nothing there anyway, aside from her penchant for cooking these dishes, which I couldn’t figure out until after her death, and I understood that she of all people, who wanted nothing to do with the whole pain of saying “Jew” and thinking of graves right away and who, because she was still alive, could not be a Jew, had learned a tasty, juicy set of recipes from her grandparents, who were still Jewish, and had adopted many things that even her mother didn’t know. Now gefilte fish, strudel, and chopped herring were part of Lida’s Ukrainian cooking repertoire.

INGREDIENTS:

One large bunch of lettuce

One large garlic bulb

One large bunch of dill

[One line is missing here]

You boil water and let it cool down to room temperature.

You rinse the lettuce, then you cut off the root and stem, then you cut everything into small pieces and peel the garlic.

This epistle was addressed to me. Who writes recipes in direct speech with a hint of pathos?

You should rinse and cut the dill

Then you stir everything and put it into a three-liter jar.

Had Lida been addressing me with this you, or people in general?

The three-liter jar, tryokhlitrovaya banka, rattled me even more. A generation of utensils lies between the kitchen over there, with its three-liter jar to store brine, its cheesecloth to strain the broth, its cast-iron pan, and my kitchen here. Where can you buy cheesecloth in Berlin? Over there we have little rags and worn-out towels and cheesecloth, copper basins and wooden spoons for the plum preserves, all of which had once been bought, and if you asked when, you were told, after the war.

She kept everything to herself, and when she died, all her strudels, gefilte fish, and sweet sausages with raisins went with her, her cookies, the ones with dried plums, the ones with honey, lemons, and nuts, and she also took the word tzimmes with her, as though everything had to remain a mystery. She kept everything to herself, her beauty as a young woman, all the reading she’d done, she kept it all inside, just for her husband, a war hero, felled by seven shots, one of the handsomest heroes, she said nothing about her illnesses and worries, her teaching methods, her increasing deafness, when she went in and out of the kitchen, she said nothing about the birthdays of the dead, the birthdays of the murdered, which she commemorated for years, alone, she also said nothing about other dates, she remembered everyone and everything that touched her in life, she said nothing about the war and the before and the after and all the trains and all the cities, the grief about her father, who survived the war, but did not return to the family and later lived next door, for years, in one of the nine-floor prefabricated buildings of our anonymous Soviet development. As she grew older and then old, she was still waiting, and eventually she turned mute, because she understood that she was going deaf, and so she returned to the deaf-mute children she had taught all her life, and if she could have, she would have kept her death to herself as well. I hadn’t asked her about anything and now wonder why I missed out on her so completely, her and her life, as though I had accepted her resolute deaf-muteness right from the start, her service and her role. What was I up to back then, anyway, when she could have given me everything, the recipe for EBP.KBAC, for example, to me and all of Eвропa?

PERPETUAL MOTION

Abstract thinking is not my forte, Uncle Vil, my father’s older brother, liked to quip, when I talked about friction losses. To test me, he gave me the most ingenious problems to solve when he visited, problems about Egyptian triangles, the model of perpetual motion, as though a fundamental truth would be revealed to me if I found solutions to Vil’s problems. But I never did.

He himself was the product of a Soviet metempsychosis, a transmutation of the energies between state, soul, and machine, the perpetual motion of my country. Vil was born in 1924, eight months after Lenin’s death, when the country was expressing its grief by naming factories, cities, and villages after him. Lenin lived, his name made power plant turbines revolve, your name shall be Lenin, and the lightbulbs glow. Hence my grandparents named their firstborn Vil, after the late Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who was considered the grandfather of all Soviet children, so Lenin had grandchildren, albeit no children. Even fifty years later, we were his grandchildren, and we said Dedushka Lenin, Grandpa Lenin, because everything was in motion but time.

There were all kinds of marvelous creatures, such as Rabfak, Oblmortrest, Komsomol, Molokokoopsoyuz; everything was abbreviated and compounded back then, Mosselprom, Narkompros, or Cheka, the most long-lived organization, which later turned into GPU, NKVD, KGB, FSB. I knew a Ninel, a name formed by spelling Lenin backward; a Rem, a son of Trotskyites, from Revolutsiya Mirovaya—World Revolution; a Roi, from Revolution October International; and I even knew a very nice Stalina.

Maybe the choice of name also had to do with the fact that my grandparents could still speak Yiddish: the Yiddish force of will—vil—shone through, and, in fact, no one in our family was as single-mindedly determined as Vil, who never stopped optimizing his efficiency, and even the authorities went along with him. In 1940, when he applied for a passport in Kiev at the age of sixteen, he got a document with a statement on the fifth line that he was Russian even though his parents were Jewish and had the corresponding note in their passports. With his blond mop of hair, blue eyes, broad shoulders, and narrow hips, Vil looked like the valiant Ivan from the fairy tale. It remains a mystery what mathematical operation could have led a Jewish couple to produce a Russian child, not even at birth, but at a passport agency. As a result, Vilya, as we called him, became a full-fledged Russian and shed the weight of his Jewish background, which receded to a mere detail, a superfluous add-on that was better left unmentioned. Besides, there was no cause to look back; there was only the future, for the world is vast, and knowledge infinite.

Vil’s little brother, my father Miron, born eight years later, carried on his grandfather’s name, Meir, in a modified form, and had the word Jew in his passport. However, for him there was no more Jewishness, so Miron also became a Russian, citizen of a nation of readers. He looked back at his ancestry pensively and with respect, if also a bit bewildered as to what he had to do with it.

The entire Soviet Union was against the force of gravity and dreamed of flying; Vil wanted to build airplanes. Even his body was aerodynamic, small and agile enough to go through life without friction losses. Vil could have stepped right out of the Soviet air force hymn everyone sang back then: We were born to make fairy tales real, to overcome space and expanse, we received steel arm-wings from Reason, our heart is an engine in flames. My heart beat faster and higher when I heard this hymn, fifty years later, especially the rising melody, Ever higher and higher and higher the flight of our metal birds steers, each of our propellers respires the tranquility of our frontiers.

At the age of eighteen Vil went to the front, like his entire class. They were packed into uniforms and sent off without the slightest notion of war, only of heroism. No sooner were they on the front in Mozdok in the Caucasus than the recruits charged into an antitank ditch under crossfire. When they had filled the ditch with their bodies, the tanks rolled over them. Vilya never told his parents exactly what had happened there at Mozdok; the only one to know was his brother Miron, who was eleven at the time. Miron retained this knowledge forever, maybe on behalf of his brother.

When the ditch was searched for survivors, Vil was found way at the bottom, squashed and shot through the groin. A miracle that there had even been a search, my father said.

Vil had severe contusions and traumatic epilepsy, and spent months in hospitals. He found his family in Ashgabat, thousands of miles from the Caucasus. Now a disabled war veteran, he was not beaten down by his injuries; instead, he used them as a motivating force and at the tender age of nineteen became the chairman of the Sports and Conscription Committee of Turkmenistan, the youngest minister in the Soviet Union.

He interrupted his university studies several times when epileptic seizures resulted in weeks of exhaustion. His tongue had to be held to prevent choking; my father kept talking about this tongue he had to hold, and every time he was surprised at his own words. How could Vilya still believe in Soviet power after the antitank ditch? I asked my father, and my father said that no one with doubts survived.

Eventually Vil studied mechanics and mathematics in Leningrad, exchanged air for water, and became a specialist in hydroacoustics. He had to solve the same problems as he had faced with flight, but resistance is stronger in water. Vilya optimized submarines so that the crew could hear everything without being heard, friction was avoided, and secrets kept.

He worked, worked, and worked on his own joyful wisdom, exploring the sound field and its inherent processes and the hydrodynamic problems of turbulence noise and the nonstationary functions of hydroacoustics. He even applied his sense of humor to his dialectical thinking, to his perpetuum mobile. In the name of our peace he worked for the war, but he himself spoke of maintaining equilibrium between forces, as though this was also just a question of mechanics.

Like Vil, I was born as a part of the state’s metabolic cycle, a hundred years after Lenin. I celebrated my birthdays together with Lenin, minus a hundred. I knew this would always help me to find my coordinates in the history of the world, but the vitality of the up-and-coming young state that was given to my uncle by birth had long since withered away. When I seemed doomed not to come up with solutions to his perpetuum mobile problems, I sensed how alien we were to each other. My uncle knew that I would never solve the problems he posed. If a solution were to be found for the perpetuum mobile, all disparities would be eliminated, as would questions of proximity, warmth, doubt, and possibly even kinship, because in Vil’s problems, everything human was regarded as a friction loss, as an obstacle to the incessant motion of hidden energies, my uncle’s dream. Maybe Vilya wasn’t joking at all—Abstract thinking isn’t your forte!—when he left the research field of friction losses to me, in his stead.

NEIGHBORS

I spent a large part of my childhood in Kiev in a new fourteen-floor apartment house on the left bank of the Dnieper, in a neighborhood that developed after the war and seemed to have no past, only a tidy future. But “no one is forgotten and nothing is forgotten,” as the poet Olga Bergholz wrote in remembrance of the one million casualties of the Siege of Leningrad. This line was borne in the heart, and replaced memory throughout the land. There was no escaping it since it assumed the role of prophecy, with its revealed truth and concealed lies; we were called on to forget no one and nothing in order that we forget who or what was forgotten. Our backyard games extended beyond jump rope and dodge ball to endless rounds of a cops-and-robbers-like game of “us” against “the fascists,” thirty-five years after the war.

My street was named Ulitsa Florentsii, in honor of our beautiful Italian sister city. We were fortunate to live there because our address conveyed the beauty of Italy and our connection to the world of beauty, meaning that we too could be beautiful, that we too were raised in the spirit of the Renaissance to experience a rebirth and be situated in the center of the universe, albeit behind the Iron Curtain. The ceremonial opening of Ulitsa Florentsii took place in 1975, and a plaque was attached to our building. The building belonged to a Soviet ministry, so we called it Sovmin House, and in comparison with the nine-story prefabricated buildings in the Soviet barracks style that surrounded our courtyard, our Sovmin house was a luxury in brick. However, no ministers actually lived here; the residents were civil servants of the state apparatus, middle managers, low-ranking supervisors, teachers with well-worn book collections, cleaning ladies, cooks, secretaries, electricians, engineers. We never found out what we had done to merit an apartment in this socialist paradise—four rooms with built-in closets, an alcove for the refrigerator, two loggias, and attic space. In the first weeks after we moved in, my father met in the elevator a KGB case officer who had interrogated him ten years earlier, and he came home with a variant of “My home is my castle.” My home is their castle, he said.