Maybe Esther

Later on, the families of the American consulate staff moved in, and once, on July 4, they ran up a big American flag on their balconies, as though they had conquered our castle. In 1977, when the flamboyant and boisterous Florence soccer team came to Kiev, our street had a second ceremonial opening, although we had been living there for a long time. The Italians were surprised to discover us in our Kievan Florence, as though we were Native Americans being discovered by Europeans. What a piece of news that people live here! The plaque was taken down from one side of our building and attached to the other.

The building was full of women who had moved from villages to the city in their youth. As they grew older, they began to forget their hastily learned and never fully rooted Russian and sank back into the embraces of their warm Ukrainian. When they retired, they pulled out their floral headscarves, with the knot facing forward, and looked so rustic that it was hard to imagine that they’d ever taken them off. They gathered downstairs on the bench in front of the fourteen-floor colossus, shelled sunflower seeds, and exchanged the latest gossip. One of the few elderly men who lived in our building—the men died decades before the women—sat on the balcony somewhere quite high up and played folk songs on the accordion that resounded mournfully across our monumental courtyard and accompanied us as we went our various ways.

I knew very few of the neighbors, and even they were just passing acquaintances. One couple, a charming woman and her husband, a military doctor, always moved with grace and dignity. We did not know quite what to make of their daughter, and we never approached her; we knew nothing back then about Down syndrome. In those days, no one kept such a child at home—maybe it was even prohibited—but the other residents, held back by timidity and admiration of the family, never indulged in idle gossip. My mother told me that the beautiful woman was an orphan from the Spanish Civil War who had been brought to the allied Soviet Union in the late 1930s.

I got to know two other neighbors, both of whom were born during the war year of 1941: Sergey, a war orphan from Ossetia, and Vadim, who was raised by partisans in Polesie. In the other wing lived Boris, a talkative man of an indeterminate age, always cheerful and forthcoming, the only one who had crawled out of the mass grave in a small Jewish town in 1941 when all other residents, from young to old, were murdered. Only much later did I find out that the uncanny monster that we girls in the courtyard between the long rows of high-rises had always feared—we called him The Madman—was the son of the fragile Boris, and maybe the final offspring of the vanished Jewish town.

Sometimes letters were addressed to us at Venice Street, Ulitsa Venetsii. Our building was situated on a canal, which not all letter writers knew. The letters arrived, because there was no Ulitsa Venetsii in Kiev, and so we were responsible for all of Italy. Because of this Venice, water came pouring into my dreams and flooded everything in them, but rescue always arrived when the water had risen as far as my seventh floor, always in the form of a golden gondola from a misty distance that came for me alone. I gave no thought to the neighbors drowning below me, forgetting them in my dreams.

Three floors below us there lived the lonely Makarovna, an elderly Ukrainian villager who had survived collectivization as a child only to lose her parents and fiancé in the war. For years she sat on the bench in front of our building in slippers and a headscarf. She was the feistiest of all, the brashest and unhappiest, always tipsy, sometimes amusing but never cheerful, and she gave us children candy so old it seemed to have dated back to the war provisions of last resort. In her bright yellow headscarf with shiny flowers in maroon and green, in her dark blue dressing gown—the retired woman’s uniform—and a look of intensity in her faintly bulging eyes, she struck me as one of the last of the strong, wild, beautiful people that had once settled here at the threshold of the Ukrainian steppe. Later she gave me all kinds of superfluous things, felt boots for infants or thickly embroidered handkerchiefs, which I have kept to this day; she gave things away because she needed money, but I didn’t understand that back then. From time to time she recounted jumbled bits and pieces about the war, family members who had died, and the collective farms known as kolkhozy, but either I hadn’t been paying enough attention or her delirium was making her mix up the Soviet catastrophes; in any case the years did not match up. In some accounts her family died in the war, but in others the family starved on the kolkhoz, and her fiancé had never come back, or had never existed, as I secretly feared. The war was to blame, that was the only part that was certain.

IN THE MUSEUM

I wanted to go back up and look at the bicorne that Napoleon lost at Waterloo, but my daughter dragged me down to the ground floor for the twentieth century. I sought to distract her with Dürer and Luther, but in vain; she brought me to the 1920s, where we raced through the strikes, the hunger, and Berlin’s golden age, for she wanted to go on, to go there, and as we neared the 1930s, I tensed up. She pulled me along to join up with a tour for adults; Let’s not, I said, but she reassured me, I know the score, Mama, and her comfort with the subject discomfited me more than her knowledge. She was eleven. We strode through the seizure of power, the ban on forming associations, the persecution of Communists, and when we were standing in front of the chart with the Nuremberg Laws and the tour guide—the Führerin, funny that’s the word for the woman doing this job, she was just in the middle of talking about the Führer—launched into an explanation of who, and what percent, my daughter asked me in a loud whisper, Where are we here? Where are we on this chart, Mama? The question really ought to be asked not in the present tense but in the past, and the subjunctive: where would we have been if we had lived then, if we had lived in this country—if we had been Jewish and had lived here back then. I know this lack of respect for grammar, and I, too, ask myself questions of this sort, where am I on this picture, questions that shift me from the realm of imagination into reality, because avoidance of the subjunctive turns imagination into recognition or even statement, you take another’s place, catapult yourself there, into this chart, for example, and thus I try out every role on myself as though there was no past without an if, as though, or in that case.

Where are we on this chart, Mama? my daughter asked. I was frightened by her directness, and to protect her from being frightened, I hastened to reassure her that we were not on it at all, we would have been in Kiev by that point or already evacuated, and by the way we weren’t even born yet, this chart has nothing to do with us, and now I had almost said if, but, and as though after all, when a man from the guided group turned to me and said, By the way, we have paid.

Even before I understood that he was telling me that the guided tour was not free of charge and that he thought that I too should pay or we would be freeloaders, my daughter and I, as though we had filched this eight-euro history, although, thanks anyway, I would not filch this kind of thing, so before I understood that without paying we had no right to stand in front of the chart or on it, that we had come to the paying circle too late; even before or as I thought all of that, tears came to my eyes, although I wasn’t crying at all, something was crying in me, I was cried for, and also the man was cried for within me, although he had no need of it, because he was in the right, we hadn’t paid, or rather, we actually had, but there is always someone who hasn’t.

CHAPTER 2

ROSA AND THE MUTE CHILDREN

SHIMON THE HEARER

He who does not find himself finds that his family will swallow him whole.

—ANCIENT CHINESE PROVERB

Seven generations, said my mother, two hundred years long we have taught deaf-mute children how to speak; my mother always said “we,” although she herself never taught deaf-mute children, she taught history. Surely she couldn’t think that teaching deaf-mutes and teaching history were one and the same profession. The way she described it, we would forever remain captive in this selfless dedication, and even future generations would not be free of the responsibility of the We, the responsibility of teaching others, of living for others, especially for their children. These seven generations sound like the stuff of a fairy tale, as though seven generations were enough to reach eternity, to attain the word.

We have always taught, my mother said, we have all been teachers, and there is no other path for us. She said it with such conviction that it sounded like one of those adages that our country thought tried and true, like “A voice cries in the desert,” or “A prophet is without honor in his own country.”

Her sister, her mother, her grandfather, and all her grandfather’s brothers and sisters, his father, and his father’s father taught deaf-mute children; they founded schools and orphanages and lived under one roof with these children, they shared everything with them. These altruists drew no distinction between their job and their life. My mother loved the word altruist; they were all altruists, she said, and she was sure that she, too, carried this altruistic heritage within her, but I was equally certain that I did not.

When my mother told me how our ancestors spread out across Europe and founded schools for deaf-mutes in Austria-Hungary, in France and Poland, I recalled the passage in the Old Testament, or so I thought, but it was actually in the New Testament: Abraham begat Isaac. Isaac begat Jacob. Jacob begat Judah and his brothers. Judah begat Perez and Zerah with Tamar—and more unfamiliar names. I knew this passage as vaguely as my own genealogy, but it seemed to me that our set of ancestors had no end either. One generation after the other, beyond our line of vision and beyond the horizon of family memory, taught speaking to the deaf-mutes. Do you hear their fervid whispering?

Sh’ma Yisrael, in the morning and the evening, Sh’ma Yisrael, Hear, O Israel, hear me!

The first ancestor we knew by name was Shimon Heller, Simon Geller in Russian. Maybe he was following the call of his Hebrew name; Shimon means “he has heard, the one who has heard from God and is heard by him.” The first disciple who heeded and followed Jesus was named Simon, I thought, although this story had no meaning for my Jewish relatives. My Shimon founded a school for deaf-mute children in Vienna, during the first half of the nineteenth century. He taught children how to speak so that they would be heard; otherwise his brothers in the faith would regard them as mentally ill, because the faculties of understanding and reason, they thought back then, reside in spoken language. To be heard is to belong.

Sound by sound, word by word, day by day, they learned to pray. I had grown up in the family of the Soviet Union sister nations; all were alike, and all had to learn my native tongue, but none had to learn prayers. All belonged to our We. I proudly believed that my ancestors taught the orphans of all nations. For an unacceptably long period of time, I couldn’t imagine what language my relatives spoke back then, what language they taught the children. My cosmopolitan present made me think they had taught the deaf-mute children to speak in all the languages of the world, as though deaf-muteness and orphanhood made for a blank page and the freedom to adopt any language and any history. As I saw it, our Jewishness was deaf-mute, and deaf-muteness was Jewish. This was my history and my heritage, yet it was not me.

Sh’ma Yisrael, hear me Israel, where is Israel?

I sifted through stacks of documents, looking for evidence of us in the old papers and on the Internet. The search command highlighted the word deaf in yellow, as though Google knew that yellow was the color of Jewishness, just as I knew that Google highlighted any searched term in bright yellow. Every story with the yellow deaf became a building block of my past, of my Internet Jewishness. Maybe my people had stepped right out of the Talmud, out of the story of the two deaf-mutes who lived near the rabbi and always followed him into the school where he taught, and sat next to him, observing him attentively and moving their lips along with him. The rabbi prayed for them, and at some point it became apparent that they knew everything the rabbi had taught his students; they had learned everything with their eyes. I tried to follow up on all the other stories with the yellow deaf, reading the passages surrounding the yellow highlightings and expecting these deaf stories to flutter up and take on a life of their own.

At the beginning of the history of my family stood a translation. In 1864, the writer and proponent of Jewish Enlightenment Faivel Goldschmidt wrote an article about Simon Geller and his school in a Lemberg-issued Hebrew newspaper, full of enthusiasm about Simon’s personality and his work. Sixty years later, the text was translated into Russian by Simon’s grandson, Ozjel Krzewin, and another sixty years after that, my mother discovered Ozjel’s translation in an archive in Kiev, together with other documents about my relatives’ schools. However, the Hebrew newspaper with Goldschmidt’s article was no longer traceable. Our family’s heritage is predicated on a questionable translation without a source text, and I am now telling the story of this family in German without there ever having been a Russian original.

My mother said, Always with the pencil, they all learned with the pencil, the point in the mouth of the teacher, the end in the mouth of the child. That wasn’t in Goldschmidt’s article, but my mother knew it. She told me about the pencil, amused by the simple trick, yet somewhat put off by how close the mouths came to each other. The pencil vibrated, and the children noticed how the language originates out of the tongue.

“For every illness, even the most severe, the Lord God sends healing,” Ozjel Krzewin translated the article about his grandfather, as though the latter had been a Jewish holy man. After two years the children could read and write Hebrew and German, and they could read lips fluently. After five years, the article went on to say, Geller’s pupils could speak so clearly that their speech barely differed from those who had been endowed with hearing. They set their heavy tongues in motion and lifted off their vocal burdens. Their prophet Moses had also had an unwieldy mouth and a heavy tongue.

When Shimon was still in Vienna, an adult came into his school. The man’s father had died, but he could not pray, because he was deaf-mute. He wanted to learn to pray in spoken language, and when he was able to, he went to the cemetery to the grave of his father, who had died many years earlier, to say kaddish. Even newspapers reported on this.

Ozjel appended his own name, Krzewin, to the name Geller in the translation. Did he want to highlight the relationship, or was the word already in the original text, an added name that Simon had earned? One Polish friend tells me that people named Krzewin are disseminators of knowledge; another says that krzew means “bush”: maybe your Krzewins planted trees. But the Jews had no land, I thought, they planted their trees in the air. I liked the idea that even the name of my ancestors was evidence of this exuberant urge to learn. I leafed through The History of Judaism, six volumes, The History of the Eastern European Jewry, two volumes, The History of the Jews, one volume. I walked back and forth at the Judaica shelves of the library.

I did not find a Simon Geller in the many thick books about Vienna and its institutions for the deaf and mute. The definitive text on the subject, The General Austrian Israelite Deaf-Mute Institute in Vienna, 1844–1926, had a Simon Heller for the time period of our Heller or Geller, but he was the director of an institute for the blind. That has to be him, said the lady in the archive; in the small world of pedagogy for disabled students there can only have been one Simon Heller.

The school started in Vienna, then made its way through rural Polish areas, through Galicia, like a traveling circus, staying briefly in a city, a town, a shtetl, before Simon moved on with his family, the orphans, and the children who were sent by their parents.

I peered inside and listened, thinking of the many selfless men of the Jewish Enlightenment who were inspired by the idea that to spread learning is to pass it from mouth to mouth. For these people, who were obsessed with hearing, the spoken language was everything. I gesticulated, called out, opened my lips, I tried saying Sh’ma Yisrael, again and again, Sh’ma Yisrael, as though I had never spoken, I shook the air, Sh’ma Yisrael, I wanted so much to be heard, putting my tongue and my language to the test, I tried to tell the stories, to render them in my foreign German, I told the stories, one after the other, but I did not myself hear what I was saying.

A FLIGHT

When Shimon, the teacher, returned from a fund-raising trip and strode along the town’s weather-beaten buildings, I did not let him out of my sight. God lived in these side streets: Poland, Polyń, Polonia, Polania, po-lan-ya, here-lives-God, three Hebrew words that made a Promised Land for the Jews out of the Slavic Poland, and they all lived here, driven by language. I did not let him out of my sight while he was running through the narrow streets to his children, and then, behind the next corner, he took off from the earth and flew through the starlit sky over the little town. Why not fly, what with all the worries in the world, fly, besotted and wistful, so many children, one’s own and the orphans, like stars in the sky, like six hundred thirteen commandments, you can’t count higher than that on one walk, I’ve tried to, they fly toward tomorrow, parallel to time and space, sometimes crosswise, following their own trajectory and the wise and stern books that we will never read and understand, the paths in the towns shimmer, dark green, my evening stroll, my hunt for Shimon, the teacher, who stuffs small, colorful glass balls from Vienna into the pockets of his black overcoat, which is darker than the night, sucking candy from Lemberg, a tad tart, because a tongue needs to carry a tang, and he always has a pencil with him, a kościół, a church, a jug, a candlestick, chase after him, a whirlwind in the sky full of flying objects, another church with bulbous copper spires and a sloping golden cross, then a fiddle and blue flower of a boy with big, long-lashed eyes, taking a few more turns over the earth of their beloved Polania, their Promised Land of Polonia, the house of God, and it is here that the story of a family, of kin, can begin, and maybe even this story.

THE GATE

My first trip abroad, in the summer of 1989, took me to Poland. The country was aquiver with shock therapy, the term attached to the economic experiment that lifted price controls. We had only six days, one of them for Oświęcim. I remember looking out the window at the flat countryside, which seemed familiar, as though I hadn’t gone away at all, with its gentle hills and long plain, unobtrusive vegetation, and slightly faded colors. I remember my fellow passengers in the bus, conversations about a music festival in Kraków, and a little shop at the entrance to Oświęcim, full of objects that had nothing to do with the memorial site, cheaply priced silver, necklaces, rings, crosses, maybe other items I am no longer seeing clearly now. Everyone who had already been in Poland had brought back silver. “Buy silver!” was the motto of the day. It’s easy to acquire a taste for these shops, and some of the ladies in the bus had brought irons and hair curlers to sell at a profit here in Poland. I remember my growing desire to buy something, anything, a simple chain necklace, for instance, although I really didn’t need one, while struggling with feelings of shame to be thinking about money and profit here at this gate; after all, I was from a good family, which in our case meant that we reined in our yen for profit, which wasn’t hard for us to do, since we had no money, and this conferred dignity on us and confirmed our sense of decency. But a new era had dawned, and our moral norms, which were carved out for eternity, no longer applied. If I didn’t buy the necklace, I would surely come to regret passing up the opportunity to join in and be part of the group, to be one of the people who could buy because there was finally something to buy, and if everyone did it, it was surely a good investment. Investment was one of those brand-new words, so it couldn’t be so bad to buy a silver chain here, at the entrance to Oświęcim, Auschwitz. That was not an immoral deed; it was in keeping with the times to be able to afford something mundane, as a sign of the victory over fascism, for instance. Still, the more I tried to convince myself of that, the more I felt torn apart and overcome with the feeling that pragmatism was inappropriate here. I think I recall holding my breath and opting for a compromise by buying three such chains as presents, as though their being presents jettisoned the question of good and evil. One for Mama, one for my best friend, and one just in case. I wound up keeping the last one for myself until a kind of unease impelled me to lose it; part of me must have wanted to let it go, yet I had a tinge of regret. Even Karl Marx wrote about the chains you lose on the path to freedom.

Once I’d purchased my three chains and was standing at the gate to Oświęcim, my memory ground to a halt. From this moment on, I do not recall anything. I have tried again and again to make my memory slip through the gate, just to have a look around, but it does not work. I was there, but didn’t retain any sense of what I experienced, and I didn’t reemerge until the next day, when we came to a lovely small town in the south of Poland, with a picturesque marketplace and kościół, a newly built, starkly modern church. I regained my composure at the sight of the young priest, whom I regarded as a creature unknown to me and all of science, as though he was the first person I had ever seen, as though I had just emerged from his rib, and as though he could not know that I belonged to his postdiluvian species. I beheld his sharp nostrils, his eyes, with their fan-like lashes, gazing upward to the Virgin Mary, his hands with their long, exaggeratedly decorous fingers, as though seeing everything human, the sum total of anatomy, for the very first time, though for some reason known only to God he was covered up by the cassock, and when he told us in a soft, impassioned voice about his new congregation, I couldn’t concentrate on his concerns, so beautiful he was, beyond all measure. Had I been capable of concentration, I would have had to let in my memory of yesterday, the word itself and what it stands for, how to concentrate people and oneself; instead something within me asked what celibacy and the will of God are about, if I am so attracted to him. I clearly remember having a firm belief in God at the very moment when I was confusing beauty with desire, a belief made possible by my having forgotten something, but I did not know what exactly.

My fellow passengers from Kiev (then considered Russians in Poland) were now adorned and equipped with all manner of silver, and uncharacteristically quiet. There was no chatter or chitchat, but I heard sensible questions about God, Communists, and economic reform. Their solemnity showed that they had not entirely awakened from their nightmare; its spectral images were still galloping on long thin legs in front of their eyes.