You’d never know it

from their shape or color

but since the pandemic

sick eggs are quickly filling the beds

at the Hospital for Sick Food

everyday a new batch, hauled from box cars,

merry salmonella cavorting inside their shells.

The head nurse insists the eggs,

though uncurable, must remain in quarantine

despite the dreadful stench.

She herself would smash them

to relieve their pain, but that would be

against divine and natural law, evil

as destroying embryonic

stem cells. And what to do

with other sick foods,

blighted spinach, toxic turkey-burgers

and tuna now forced from their beds?

Purge them all forever, some claim.

Shoot them into space to join

the distant bacilli of cosmic dust.

Mate them with the wasted sperm

of old whales,  wet dreams,

just to see what happens.

But the government insists

new vaccines will soon arrive,

prosperity’s around the corner

along with  peace and happiness

free from the need to pursue it.

At least there were a couple of apple trees.  Though I had to compete with the

scrawny cows to get myself an apple, trudge through piles of dung, be careful not to catch my body in the many sharp thorns that poked through the pasture’s yellowing grass.

Not that I wanted to starve the old cows abandoned here because they no longer produced milk.  Even their flesh was worthless.  But they could survive on apples at least through the summer, return the apple seeds to the soil so new trees would sprout.

I was so hungry that after a while I jumped high as I could despite my years, grabbed a branch and shook it so hard apples scattered on the ground.  By the time I fought my way between the old cows only a marble-size green one was left.  But I was learning to be grateful for small things, like the water from a murky stream I shared with the cows.  The water had a dark brown taste.

In India there are sanctuaries called goshala for old or injured but still sacred cows, who then play a useful role protecting other endangered species, such as vultures.

***

My name is Clare.  I’m 75 years old, in reasonably good health.

I realized I had been sent into exile, had, against my will, been thrust across the border between the relatively benign country of the unneeded and the far more odious country of the unwanted.  It happened one summer afternoon when I let my grandsons lure me into the basement of their house. If only to spend a few more minutes with them, I gave in. Something awesome we want you to see, grandma/ absolutely awesome/ You must see it, Grandma, must…

After tugging me down the stairs so I nearly fell on my face, the 12 year old ordered me to sit on a maroon sofa with broken springs while the 10 year old turned on the old TV to some soap opera.  Laughing, they both fled upstairs, after tossing into my lap a couple of bags of Goldfish crackers and a pink powdered drink packet.  They said they would return soon, banged the door shut.

But they didn’t return.   I tried to escape but the door at the top of the stairs

would not budge.  Something had been pushed in front of it, something solid as a slab left over from a bulldozed building.  I had seen many such around New York and other cities, especially now that the economy had recovered. Developers every day razed French and Italian designed 300 year old brownstones so they could build new mega-malls.

For months, I had looked forward to traveling between New York and LA

to visit my grandsons, as usual showered them with gifts, tried to hug them like when they were small.  Now they turned away.

Banging and screaming help brought no response, not even from Patsy, the family dog.  And despite the midsummer heat outside, the basement was ice-cold.  In the semi-darkness I looked for other means of escape, tripping over abandoned drawings, toy trucks whose wheels had long ago.  On the floor beneath a rusty sink were books I had brought them, parts of games, two framed collages I had made for them some years ago.  Bicycle wheels, an ancient treadmill, that damn rabbit-eared TV I was unable to turn off even when I pulled the plug.

It played all night, one sob story after another between ads for wrinkle creams and eye lifts, until a pale blue light broke through the basement’s darkness.

***

No, the basement’s cinderblock walls were gone; I noticed that the pale blue light was a wobbly net that suspended me over a vast open space. I had no memory of dreaming or, for that matter, of dying.  So I must still be among the living.  Very cold and hungry, the Goldfish gone except for a few crumbs as well as the drink I had liquefied from the rusty sink.

An ice floe drifting on a cold sea.  Tinged blue.  What else could it be?

I once saw a movie about senilicide (killing of old people; sometimes known as senicide).  Though it has not been reported in decades, Inuit from Greenland and northern Alaska had for many centuries, especially in times of famine, abandoned older members of a community to ice floes and set them adrift.  Usually they starved or froze to death.  In summer the community sometimes just tossed the elderly, as well as the infirm, into the sea. When prosperity returned, the abandoned were welcome back into the community if by some miracle they had survived and could swim their way home. Few could.

Yet worse, lapot, ritual killing of the elderly once practiced in Serbia and the feudal Japanese practice of obasute, aimed particularly at older women who were carried to a mountain and left to die.

All I could do was drift.  Maybe the floe would reach warmer waters and I could slide off before it melted?

***

So many fish, more than I’d ever seen, some with golden-red flesh poking through mottled gray skin.  Even some translucent eggs.   I remembered from a long ago biology course that once the eggs were fertilized, both male and female salmon left the spawning grounds and began swimming upstream, struggling through debris and the powerful current.  Despite the difficulties I kept swimming, struggling ahead when tossed back.  Anything to return to my old spawning ground.

When I thought I could go on no longer, I felt a hook, heard the voices of my grandsons.  Come back grandma/we miss you. No, no, no. I broke from the hook, kept swimming hard as I could despite a few gashes.

Kept swimming against the currents and tides, kept swimming, swimming, swimming, swimming, swim—

***

Moon streams through the window

long enough to illuminate

the silver flute a young girl is playing,

briefly turning  a  sonata in D Minor

back to the dazzling moment of its birth.

OLD MASTERS

Born with all their music inside them

waiting to be released at the right moment—

how else account for the Old Masters,

Mozart, Haydn, especially the deaf Beethoven,

scores of unreleased melodies forever lost

when they died.  Yet more sad the extinction

of melody itself as I know it,

replaced by noise, a mutation of ears

that eludes me much as the squawking of crows and gulls.

SPECULATIONS

Muse: Let me speculate why lately you’ve become so silent.

You’ve taken to your bed, weary of feeding my voracious appetite for imprinting stray feelings and impressions, making the ordinary unique—e.g. my need to interpret the hieroglyphics of birch bark, rather than simply admire the black markings.

You’re angry.  Consider me a spoiled child who took you for granted, haven’t treated you well over the years despite all you’ve done for me.

You’re stuck inside a brainfold, confined by the literalisti, aficionados of the surface,

to a nunnery or purdah, free only to peek from a small window.

You’re bored.  Must I a-muse you?   <Medieval French,  tickle your fancy. > OK, but how?  You already know all my jokes and tricks, despite my fervent quest for originality. For that I apologize.  But am willing to try once more.

Until I hear from you, I’ll listen to the music of the wind, its meters, tempos, forms, final cadences before another day’s performance.  No two renditions ever the same.

***

]]> http://www.barbaralefcowitzpoetry.com/?feed=rss2&p=1294 0 http://www.barbaralefcowitzpoetry.com/?p=1292 http://www.barbaralefcowitzpoetry.com/?p=1292#comments Sun, 15 Aug 2010 16:29:57 +0000 Barbara Lefcowitz http://www.barbaralefcowitzpoetry.com/?p=1292 MEMORY AND PHOTOGRAPHY

“[Photographs are] not so much an instrument of memory as an invention of it or a replacement.” –Susan Sontag

THE GIRL ON THE SWING

Decades later, I can smell the ropes of that swing, feel their coarse texture as I held on tight, twisting them together so I could spin in dizzying circles, sometimes grazing the oak tree near the swing my grandfather had built with a board and ropes attached to a stout branch of that tree. My own private amusement park ride, unrecorded by any camera, but relived– albeit in a much subdued manner–thanks to the wings of my brain’s architecture responsible for evoking memories.  But I cannot speak to the girl about what she was thinking and can only imagine her shrieks of delight. In fact she doesn’t and will never know I exist, though my adult self acknowledges we share the same DNA.

What did she look like?  A five-year-old girl with a laughing face, curly hair in the Shirley Temple style favored at the time; she wears a gingham pinafore trimmed with lace, lace-cuffed anklets in immaculate white shoes.  But no, I couldn’t possibly have seen her actual face back then.  I must be imagining it, editing the memory, as it were, by splicing in data from a photo taken about the same time and in roughly the same place: my grandparents’ summer boarding house in then rural New Jersey.   In the photo I am sitting on a birch-log bench, delighted to be holding a small dog.  Maybe someone had told a particularly funny joke just before clicking the camera.

I retrieve the framed photo from the table on which it’s displayed.    Charming, but the girl is distant as any photo image and inaccessible to communication as the Girl on the Swing.   How do I even know if the Girl on the Bench is indeed myself?  Only because my parents long ago identified her as such.  Still this two-dimensional girl’s image evokes no sense beyond the visual: I cannot, even in a subdued manner, feel the dog’s fur or the bench’s birch-logs, smell the lilacs in the background, the leather of my white shoes.

Voila!  I realize that I have “stolen” the face in the photo and superimposed it on the faceless face of the Girl on the Swing.   That is, I have edited the memory.  Such editing is doubtless the case of all representations of a remembered moment.  In this particular example, I am lucky enough to have the photo on hand, easy for my unconscious mind to cut and paste part of it into the original image.

(In a sense I am absent from my own representation in both cases, the imagined scene and what the photo captures, framed off from what came before or after. Like what did I do prior to climbing onto the swing, what afterwards?  Maybe I fell off the swing and suffered from a bevy of scuffs and bruises.  And probably the photo was posed according to the wishes of the unknown photographer.  After he finished I might well have pushed away the dog, relieved to be free from her. (My semantic memory is sure the dog’s name was Blanchie, Sadie Goldstein’s pet.  On second thought, was it Roxy, a dog that belonged to another boarder,  name of Jennie?)

THE GIRL ON THE SLED

My recall of a later moment, when I was sledding next to my friend Irene in Central Park, offers another example.  I was probably 12 or 13 years old.  When this scene emerges from my personal museum of memories, I can still feel how my hands ached from grasping the sled’s gleaming handle bar and grazing the cold snow itself.  But once again I cannot see my face.  There exists no photo of me on the sled to help me fill in that blank, but I do have an old photo of Irene taken at another time and thus, with the help of my memory of her, can transpose it to the image of her on her sled.  Dark curly hair, dark eyes . . . a slim build.

Relatively minor editing.  But not so the sudden reminder of the “silver” bracelet I (presumably) lost in the snow that day, never to find it again.  The bracelet was a birthday gift from an aunt.  Probably it was not really silver but some amalgam of tin and copper; it was decorated with embossed spiral designs, but it was clunky and much too large for my wrists.  Nonetheless I did not remove it for safekeeping before mounting my sled.  Mea culpa.  How could I be so careless?   How explain the loss to my aunt?

I’ve no recollection of removing the bracelet, yet I did incorporate the loss—i.e. edit it into—my memory of the sledding moment.  For my recall of that delightful moment led to a series of associations that might have had no connection with the scene in Central Park.  Maybe I lost it on some other snowy occasion?  It’s clear, however, that the loss of the bracelet bothered me.

Contrary to the traditional view that memories, once constructed in the brain’s synapses, are consolidated and hence stable, contemporary psychiatrists and neurobiologists believe a memory is never static.  Rather it is malleable and subject to constant change–or else no one would ever learn.  More precisely, one can change

one’s perceptions of the memory through analyzing its contents at a later time thanks to a more enlightened take on past events as shaped by subsequent experience.  Given their malleability, memories are, of course, open to distortions and “corrections” –especially if another person shares the memory but adds or deletes certain details.   But photographs, too, can involve distortions of reality.  (More later when I discuss my essay “Menorah, Swastika, YouTube,”

THE WOMAN IN THE COTTAGE

The following is what Daniel Schachter would call an” observer” memory, as opposed to the previous “field memories” —those memories in which we see ourselves vs. those in which we see only what we saw.”  All three examples, however, were recollected at a time when I was experiencing more than a usual sense of loss.

For a few years, starting in 1978, my former husband and I rented a small island in Casco Bay, Maine.  It had only one wooden cottage; “no electricity, no plumbing, no neighbors,” ran the ad in the NY Review of Books.  With little else to do but gaze at the ocean and the dance-patterns of the gulls, perhaps pick some wild berries or climb the rocks in the cove searching for driftwood, shortly after arrival on the island I fell into a trance-like state, fully conscious of my surroundings but convinced—especially on the

many foggy mornings–that they were self-contained.  The rest of the world, the rest of my life, existed, of course, but only as an abstraction; even familiar faces were hard to conjure up as the small island itself became a sometimes eerie combination of the real and imagined.  Despite the tranquility of the place, each time I arrived, starting with the second visit, I felt a peculiar anxiety about time. The house was the same, down to the exact location of the white mixing bowl, red colander, old leather couch with its crackled cushions and claw feet, hurricane lamps and the pinned-up maritime maps, thanks to the fastidiousness of the owners from whom we had rented the place. But on the wall just opposite the front door, as if in mockery, there stared the same mirror, its common sense wooden frame making it seem all the more powerful.  Hello, island.  Hello, cottage. Hello, face in the mirror, one year older than the last time you were reflected in silvery exactness in that same glass.

Hence the ritual dinner.  While never consciously planned as such, the event always unfolded the same way as the

first time: we would sit at either end of the pine kitchen table; look with pleasure at the white platter on which there sat three bright red barely dead steamed lobsters; the ritual bottle of Merlot; a salad in a wooden bowl and a loaf of blueberry bread. My ex would pour the wine, I would slice the bread, and as we extracted the first flesh from the lobster claws, a fog horn would sound and out the large kitchen window we could see the Scotia Prince, the nightly ferry from Portland to Nova Scotia, cross Casco Bay in the early stages of its journey east.  The hell with the mirror, with the new face-cracks and neck-sags it revealed; the hell with the battery radio that chattered the time, weather, latest baseball scores and murders; this was the repeatable moment! And if it was repeatable, no time has passed since the last such occasion.

Or so I made myself believe in the way one at times believes and at the same time does not believe an illusion, especially such a large illusion as stopping the flow of time.   Lobster, Merlot, bread, salad, white platter:  the table itself is the focus of the memory.  I only appear in the background, my face invisible because I am turned towards the table, perhaps setting something down.  The red colander?  But surely I would not place the colander on the table. Yet in my mind’s eye, there it is, a perfectly placed red presence gleaming more than the lobsters.  The more I envision the scene the more I’m convinced that in my mind I placed the colander on the table to enhance that table aesthetically, in other words distorted the memory by adding a prop that logically did not belong there, especially since that ritual dinner never included pasta of any sort.  Most likely, I did this shortly after encoding the memory, probably the second time the dinner took place, as if I were touching up a still life painting. Or using a Photoshop of the Mind if the memory had been a photograph instead of “just” a memory.

I can find no photo of the island, let alone the kitchen table, though some might well have existed.  Probably I tossed any such photos out to reduce the pain of realizing that far as I was concerned, the island was gone.  Absence of any photos would help me forget the place or at least modify my regrets.  I am reminded of a woman who took a scissors to the face of a detested former daughter-in-law, Louisa, (not her real name), excising her forever from any scene in which she might have participated. Never mind the gaps in what she allowed to remain, whether other faces or a background waterfall.  Louisa had been eradicated, a victim of the woman’s scissors.  Such “cleansing” of her photograph album must have made her feel quite powerful at the time.  When I happened to see those excised photos, I couldn’t help laughing at the naiveté of such an obvious attempt to forget all the pain, real or imagined, Louisa’s behavior had elicited and at the same time to satisfy the woman’s need to cling to other faces, other shreds of the past. Or else she would have torn up entire photos in which Louisa appeared rather than merely perform surgery on them.

A few years later the joke was on me.  More than 20 years have passed since I set foot on the island; odds are that I’ll never see it again, let alone walk upon it.  My then husband and I parted ways in 1988 and without his boating skills I had no means of getting there. Besides, its shared nature was intrinsic to my fantasy of the ritual dinner

serving as a repeatable moment. (I doubt he would think about it in the same way if I ever asked him; he is one of those people who insist they live only in the present, never looking back.)  A neighbor who had shared the island with us on occasion continued to rent the place after 1988, as did my ex and his new woman until for health reasons they decided to vacation elsewhere. A few years ago, the neighbor told me the white platter had broken beyond repair: so the table scene was unrepeatable after all.

PHOTOGRAPHY

What I called the Photoshop of the Mind, capable of transforming memories, pales in comparison with the actual Photoshop computer programs that first became available in the late 1980’s and has gone through several different versions since that time.  The program has been used to modify images to make them more aesthetically appealing as well as to “doctor” photographs for commercial and political purposes.  A recent example of the latter as I write this are the transformed photographs of the Gulf oil spill edited to make BP less culpable.

Only minimally savvy when it comes to technology, I was delighted to discover the creative possibilities, call them distortions, of images I had uploaded, of both my own artwork and various family portraits, some very old, as well as a few travel shots (not my métier) and unusual picture postcards.  What fun!  I could place a confederate flag in the hands of Abraham Lincoln—a trick made to order for cartoonists.   When I transposed one of my abstractions by inserting images of my grandchildren, making them part of a scene that, of course, they never had and never could experience, they found the result strange, even disconcerting, much more so than any of my many traditional collages. Why? Because of the traditional misconception, even on the part of kids, that photography captures reality pure and simple.

Still more entertaining my discovery that through the use of various “filters” I could transform my own, generally abstract, paintings into textured swirls, better yet, shift their shapes radically through use of the Polar Opposites option.  I could “spherize” a round shape so it protruded from the background, creating an illusion of depth.  Two round shapes could be spherized enough to suggest eyes, thus changing the original flat image into a statement about, say, voyeurism or Big Brother who observes and controls everything.  A red area could magically become purple or chartreuse, an ordinary window-like shape could with a click become a   stained glass masterpiece.  How Dali would have exulted had he had access to such a program, but likely he would be chagrined by the all-too-simple ways of making instant Dali imitations, quickly and without much thought to the symbolic implications of a melting watch.

Which brings me to the key image of a room, located, according to the uploader in Berlin, 1937.  A menorah (specially designed Jewish 7 branched candelabrum linked with the lighting of oil lamps that is the essence of the Chanukah legend) is prominently displayed on a windowsill with all of its lit candles casting the sole source of light in the dark room.  But clearly visible outside the window is a flag with a Nazi-style swastika and a storefront with yet another swastika—not a sprayed graffiti swastika but the dominating image of an actual metal sign. Coming upon this image on YouTube, with a voiceover of the Swedish singer Zarah Leander, a known collaborator with Goebbels, inspired me to write “Menorah, Swastika, YouTube,” an essay modeled on the prose villanelle, an unusual and semi-invented form with which I have often experimented for several years.  My fleeting comments and questions about the juxtaposition of swastika and menorah form the crux of the piece.   The photographer is unnamed, but the irony led me to  assume he or she was European, with a propensity towards irony, a quality often lacking in the American consciousness.

Did the scene actually exist on a Berlin or any other street? Did anyone ever gaze from the candle-lit window at the shop front with the Nazi flag?  Maybe.  But given the almost too blatant irony, the juxtaposition of inside and outside the room suggests more than a casual snapshot.  No, there was no Photoshop at the time, but what was to prevent the photographer from deliberately setting a scene by arranging props inside the room to suit his ironic purpose, in particular the menorah which may or may not have been on the windowsill in the first place, whether the occupants of the flat were Jewish or not.  Which raises a key question about the illusory nature of a photo, which is not greatly different from the illusory nature of a memory.  The more I thought about it the more I was convinced that the video itself was a carefully crafted illusion, at best an ironic political statement. Why else the Zarah Leander song in the background?

In the essay I move back and forth between the photo of the room to comment in more depth on the significance of the menorah and the nature of YouTube, ultimately questioning my assertion that photographs are the equivalent false memories.  Rather, most memories consist of the distorted photographs pasted inside the randomly arranged scrapbooks of the brain.  They repeat the same images time after time, images subsequently open to various perceptions and interpretations.  In another sense, photos, too, are infinitely repeatable given the easy means of replication.   Both memories and photographs are illusions—albeit many illusions can serve a useful purpose.

That video’s dark photo: an accident? A double act of defiance, a set arranged and captured for eternity by the mechanistic aid of a camera and a recording of a song? If the photo were not marked Berlin, 1937, one could take its brief joining of images as a politically correct collage that juxtaposes the brute and his victim: a Klansman and a black slave, a rifle and a lilac, Milosevic and an Albanian Muslim.

But despite their similarities, a memory and a photograph can clash, even contradict each other.  Inside a gold frame, a tea-colored photograph of a long ago family Thanksgiving dinner hangs on a wall in my own dining room.  (One of many such ritual dinners in a variety of settings celebrating the familiar shared legend about America’s early history as distinguished from the Ragged Island ritual dinner, a personal memory whose hidden motive was the wish to stop time.) My parents, my maternal aunts and uncles as well as my grandparents are posed around a table in the latter’s Brooklyn three-generational house, where I myself lived for a while as a four-year-old child.  The date is November, 1939:  this I learned from my parents.  Everyone in the photograph is now dead, though I recognize their long-ago faces.  Aunt Rhea is lifting a white coffee cup, its contents never to be tasted or consumed.  My father is leaning forward at one end of the table, as if he had just told a much appreciated joke.  Uncle Sam, quietly handsome, looks as genial as I remember him from later years.

But my own face does not appear, though I clearly remember sitting at the table between my Uncle Jack and my mother, directly across from Uncle Sam. No software existed at the time that would delete me and bring my mother and Uncle Jack closer to fill in the gap.  Had I for some mysterious reason, been sent out of the room prior to the rest of the people?  Punishment for spilling something on my dress? A need to take me out of earshot of some jokes or secrets deemed inappropriate for me?  More phantasmagoric: had I been spirited away by some mysterious force?  Less dramatically, perhaps my sense of sitting at the table is a false memory.  Yet I clearly remember Uncle Jack telling about a dead body found under the Coney Island boardwalk—a verbal rather than visual memory.   But certainly disturbing.  Did I start to cry, which led to my being ushered “out of the picture” ? As in many other instances related to both memory and photography, I’ll never know.  Perhaps if I had an eidetic memory, capable of retaining perfect images after a single glance. . . The popular term for such a talent is photographic memory.  But modern research affirms that the latter is nigh onto mythical except perhaps for small children.

First, or earliest, memories are likewise prone to mythologizing.  Dating such memories is always approximate, but usually they hark back to the age of two or three.  When I recently asked my adult daughter to tell me her first memory she mentioned sitting on a table while a photographer [sic] snapped her picture.  She said she had no recall of what she looked like, since she was looking, of course, at the photographer.  In the undated picture that resulted she has a round face, large dark eyes, a slight smile and seems to be about 18 months old.  A photograph of being photographed, a meta-photograph as it were!

We have come full circle.  If only I could spin once again in that wooden swing with its pungent ropes.

***

1935-2010

When I called you long distance

in your terrible last two years

you  often did not want to talk,

barely recognized my name

though we’d known each other more than 60 years,

shared what nobody else can ever know,

sometimes derisive jokes and  code words

we sustained long past youth.

Marcia, how could you abandon me in very late

middle-life, don’t you care how lonely I  began to feel

even before  I received word of your death

on far away Long Island. . .

It’s a trick, I want to cry out, like the ones

we used to play on the telephone long before

people had Caller ID—Is your refrigerator running?

Then go catch it; Do you have Prince Albert in a can? Then let him out.

On the bus to a summer camp where we waited on tables

you suddenly started to sing You’re the End of the Rainbow,

my Pot of Gold, a play upon the owner’s name,

and I joined in, my voice no match for yours.

The rainbow has dissolved in the dark June sky.

At least let me think you have soared

way over its arch, as in that old Judy Garland song.

You always said you could have been famous as she–

if your father didn’t think all singers were whores.

May these words you’ll never hear

make you laugh at the Angel of Death.

Marcia, my dear and oldest friend.

Te amo, Barbara

As much as I love the constant surf

audible all over Raratonga

no matter if high or low tide

sometimes I cry out

stop already, at least prolong

the intervals between pounding waves

for without the spaces between notes

melodies and movements

there would be no music

without the pauses between beats, brief

semblances of death, the heart would not stir

the body’s currents

And the sea retorts

that when the pauses slow down

finally expand so you no longer breathe

its rhythms will go on as always

What can I do but turn

to the thin consolation of thoughts

about those who lived and died

before Beethoven, how the yet-to-be-born

will  listen not only to the Eroica

but much music yet to be made

Still I will never hear what my

primal ancestors sang

to celebrate the first waves

the  many love-cries that preceded my birth

And the sea retorts

with a rush of silence

1. MAX

The subject line of my cousin’s email said “Grandpa Max”; attached was a computer-enhanced copy of a letter written in a graceful script, dated August 4, 1915.  It was addressed to Sam and signed Max, a street name in Denver added under Max’s flamboyant signature.  Contents were banal, some vague business issue, but still it was something, a shred from our long dead paternal grandfather’s life.

Or somebody’s life, a man named Max who was in business with a man named Sam and had gone to Colorado to recover from an unnamed illness.  TB?  In any case, a shred of someone’s figurative DNA.

Knowing little about my father’s family and less about Max in particular I felt a frisson of excitement.  Which quickly gave way to skepticism:  the letter was much too well written for a recent immigrant.  My skepticism was confirmed when I contacted another cousin, much older, who said Max had never been west of the Hudson River and never had any disease that would demand a stay in faraway Colorado.

Max: a slight and quiet man, whom I remember most as the dispenser of multi-colored Life Savers and, all too often,  the victim of  family mockery.  He used to hum and sing softly to himself, opera arias or Yiddish songs from the Old Country.   On his left arm he wore a small black leather box attached with a black strap.  (I later learned that such a box, worn by orthodox Jewish men, contained miniature prayer scrolls from the Torah.)  Max had emigrated from Eastern Europe to New York around 1890.  Had history been different, he would likely have been content to remain in his shtetl (small Jewish town) studying  the Talmud. In New York he owned a series of failed shops and worked most of his long life as a clothing cutter in the garment district.  He had a younger brother named Sam, whom I had never met; Sam was the successful one who made a fortune in the silk underwear business but apparently did not help Max raise his large family, much less make him a business partner.

So the letter was indeed addressed to great-uncle Sam, but from a different Max.  End of story.

Yet the email awakened my curiosity, dormant for a number of years, about not only my own skimpy knowledge of my family history, but the recent increase of interest in genealogy.  Jewish genealogy in particular—almost an oxymoron despite the plethora of books and websites.   Like most African-Americans, but for different reasons, for Jews from my Eastern European (Ashkenazi) background, the search was nigh onto futile. Jews from this large area, which at various times included Poland, western Russia, Ukraine, Lithuania, then-Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and present day Belarus, were only required to take surnames in the late 18^th century.  More urgently, records of our Eastern European ancestors had been destroyed by the Nazis in the Holocaust as well as by the Soviet occupiers, along with the towns (shtetls) where they once lived.  Ironically, some victims’ names only survived in Nazi concentration camp records.   Artifacts as well were demolished, some years ago I visited Vilna, home of some of my maternal ancestors, only to discover that tombstones with Hebrew lettering had been uprooted and used to pave streets and roads.

Given the historical isolation of many American Jews, the breaking up of traditional families and widespread intermarriage, the resurgence of genealogical research is no surprise.  Even a shred will do.  A faded photograph, a name on a ship manifest, like that of my great-aunt Dina who apparently died not long after immigration.

2. ROOTS

Beneath the soil’s surface along with the rocks, bones, worms, gems and artifacts there lies a hidden cosmos of roots impossible to map without exhuming them.  Layers of roots, spindly, fleshy, plump; rhizomes, tubers, corms; potatoes, carrots, beets…and, as we soon shall see, the almighty radish. In my minuscule garden, I study the spreading leaves of my sweet potato vine, which grew from an ordinary sweet potato I had placed in a jar partly filled with water and held aloft with toothpicks.   My mother had grown such plants, but I forgot how except that she lined the jars with some sort of cardboard and put them in a dark closet from which they emerged with green stalks she kept as houseplants in our dark NY apartment.  But my mother is long gone and I turned—where else—to Google for directions, of which I found few except that the jar should be placed in front of a window with southern exposure. It was deep winter, but I obeyed the rules, placed the jar by my sunniest window and made sure the water level was sufficiently high to nourish the root but not drown it.   After several weeks a tangle of thin roots emerged from the potato’s submerged point. Roots from a root! An urban person with little gardening experience, I took special delight the day I noticed a slim green thread growing from a bud near the top. Surprised by this early sign of my success, I dared to pot my treasure in soil.  More daring yet to place it outside come early spring, piling on more soil lest the squirrels had a taste for sweet potatoes.   As I write this it continues to thrive.  Will it survive the northern winter, bloom even a deeper and more intense green next year?

Mother, root. Root, mother.  At the time I could not fill in the connections further.  Maybe there was some deep-rooted psychological desire to not only emulate my mother but succeed in my own way.  Too pat, like much of pop psychology as well as much of its traditional roots  [sic] in Freud, Jung, and other psychoanalytic pioneers.   I realized I had a more immediate problem: to distinguish between a root as a cause and a root as an origin.

3. WORDS

The English word root has its own entangled roots. According to Robert Claiborne, it evolved from the Teutonic wrad, whose verbal DNA passed down into the Latin radix, radic, in turn leading to radical and the root vegetable radish. Ernest Weekly offers a different etymology: from the Anglo-Saxon rot via Old Norse, cousin of the German wort (also, curiously, the  German word for word).  A more distant cousin: the verb to root in the sense of grub or dig up, traceable to the Anglo-Saxon wrot (snout) and linked with the behavior of swine.  The family joker is the verb

rootle, from Dutch wroeten. The redoubtable W. W. Skeat notes in particular the Scandinavian, especially  Icelandic branch of the family.

4. DINA

Max the letter writer was not the right Max.  A false ancestor, as it were.  But

16 year old Dina was real enough, at least according to the ship manifest that included names from one branch of my mother’s family.  What particularly struck me as I viewed a copy of the manifest at the NY Public Library were the words “Deformity of the Spine” next to her name, which was partly crossed out; yet she, like her mother, my great-grandmother known simply as Bubby, and her siblings, was stamped “Admitted.  2/ 20/ 1904.”

No one had ever mentioned her, though I did learn that my mother, born 1909, had been named for her.  Was she sent back to Pinsk where she died young or did she die on the Lower East Side less than five years after her arrival at Ellis Island?

Impossible to learn anything more about her. So I made her up, shaped her into a fictional character with whom I exchanged a few imaginary letters.  My fantasy was eventually published in Where We Find Ourselves (State University of New York, 2009), an anthology of poems, essays, and stories subtitled “Jewish Women around the World Write About Home.”  I did braid some facts with the strings  of my narrative, which opened “Dear Dina, long dead great-aunt I never met, in my imagination you’re riding the Blue Train above the rooftops of Belarus.  I think they just called it Russia back then.  You’re riding over snowfields, that like everything else are tinged blue, even the miasmal fumes from the Pripet Marshes. “ I went on to imagine how her family in both the new and old worlds treated her disability and how she eventually ended up hiding on a wintry fire escape, which led to her fatal illness.

But Dina could not possibly have passed onto me any of her DNA (pun unintended)– not only because she presumably had no children but, more important, was not a direct maternal ancestor.  Bubby, yes, and Dina’s sister Annie, my grandmother. Both, having given birth to at least two daughters, would satisfy the theory made popular by Bryant Sykes about universal maternal lineage through women’s ability to pass on mitochondrial DNA.

Yet Bubby was stubbornly religious and I am an agnostic; she was the leader of her family and a wide circle of friends and I tend to be a loner. Annie was a splendid homemaker and cook; I can barely boil a potato.  Though both were definitely  ancestors, albeit recent ones,  it begs all logic to say that either was the source, in a causal sense, of any of my own quirks or skills. Better Dina’s legacy as source for the part of myself that is both curious and creative. to which I give full reign in the letters to her supposedly written by myself.

And maybe that’s what genealogical quests are all about, a form of self-expansion:  that 18^th century baron in the family tree of an Anglo-French acquaintance; that Mayflower passenger in the history of another, someone else’s kinship with Robert Frost. . .

5. WORDS

The most common definition, as opposed to etymology, of the word root is the subterranean part of a plant.  Given their hidden nature, Vegetable roots in particular can be mysterious.  I’ll never forget my surprise when, around age four, I discovered a slim carrot growing in the dirt beneath its leafy stem.

The word is also used in mathematics, music, and dentistry, among other contexts.  Connotatively, it can refer to a source or cause, as in, say, the root of his drug problem was abuse by his wicked stepmother and—here’s the rub—also as an indicator of origin. His drug problems originated from the time his father remarried and he had to live with his wicked stepmother.

Often the two definitions are confused.  The cause of my recent sore throat was bacteria that were passed around at a crowded meeting.  Its literal origin, or beginning, manifested itself when I woke up a couple of days after that meeting.  Simple enough.  But the bacteria also had their own ancient origin, going back four billion years to one of the earliest forms of life on the planet, probably formed in the sea and evolved over the eons into a vast array of descendants.  So its very long range cause was the primordial birth of one-celled creatures in its “eukaryotic” lineage.  In this case, the cause, the immediate cause, was more relevant, demanding the curative effect of an antibiotic or lemon lozenge.

Back to my mother’s sweet potato plants: the memory of her fondness for growing such plants appeared out of the gray, as it were, at a time when my creative energies had sputtered to a nearly complete halt, exacerbated by a series of personal losses and a particularly dreary winter.  But that accounts only for the timing of its origin; unless the term is stretched to the breaking point, if does not qualify as a cause.  For that I must dig more deeply into my psychological need to replace negative memories of my mother, who was bipolar much of her life, with more positive images.

So with genealogical information, which I now realize deals more with origins than causes.  Starting with the real Grandpa Max, my ethnic origins could—if the information were available—reveal information about my European history.   Maybe one of his great-great-grandfathers was a gifted singer, one of his great-great-great grandmothers a skilled weaver.  I have not even a trace of such skills; likewise with more recent and known information, such as the musical talents of several people on my maternal family tree.  Not that the information is worthless.  The problem comes when the information is assumed to be real without question e.g. my cousin imagining Max as a plucky pioneer with TB who rode the rails all the way from New York to Colorado early in the 20^th century instead of the quiet laborer that he indeed was.

And yet, I remember that in a bookcase in the sun parlor of the house in Brooklyn where Max lived with his family there was a shelf of books with bright yellow covers, each dealing with a famous explorer, Cortez, Pizarro, et al.  As well as books about Napoleon, allegedly his hero along with Enrico Caruso.

In the only photo I have of him he is maybe 20 years old, wearing a derby and posing with two unidentified young men.  No smile, but a touch of elegance, even pride, a passing resemblance to Charlie Chaplin.  Why do I keep it in my photo drawer since I rarely look at it?

As proof, among other such, that I didn’t just spring like Topsy,  proof

of  the  far-reaching but mysterious net of which my personal history is  but one nano-part.   And for the preservation of memory, which will disappear when I and the last of my paternal cousins pass from this world, maybe briefly known by name by another generation or two, a name like Dina or Max.

Long ago I set a story inside a martini

for a creative writing class, 1952 or ’53.

How sophisticated, surely

the professor would be impressed.

But his only comment was

Olive or twist?  Be precise.

I forget the characters and plot.

Some years later I graduated to vodka

straight from the freezer—a miracle!—

but these days I can tolerate only a sip,

besides hardly anybody drinks anymore,

at least the hard stuff; at a recent wedding

they served non-alcoholic wine, I guess

both bride and groom believed in getting high

from tai-chi and tantric breathing.

I tried my best to pretend and get a buzz

if only to drown out the terrible music—

O where are the foxtrots and tangos,

the roseate manhattans,  brandy alexanders,

near-virginal pink ladies?

I could set a new story in a can of Pabst,

but it would likely get crushed

and recycled,  reborn as a sheet of metal

suitable for making a knife, a rifle, wires

for a terrorist bomb.

Your tic in a box

more addictive than opium,

click all you want, even when

the screen goes dark

I own you, your digital tic,

your cyber Svengali,

whether online or off

I’m the love and bane of your life.

You may curse me and swear

to kill me once and for all

but it’s too late, I stalk you

everywhere, if not in one form

then another.

I forget nothing

though I confess that at times

I play tricks, like those cunning old gods

disguised now as memory’s jesters.

But we’re linked to the end

of your days. When your last

machine crashes, I will quickly

find another, sleek and sexier

than yours. If it’s any comfort,

all along I was just doing my job,

obeying orders that have nothing to do

with your clicks, your taps on my keys,

your relentless efforts to make me reveal

the right words, the right answers

to the riddles of nature and history,

the mystery of your birth, brief

time on this earth.

LOSS

“ I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail. . . . Thoreau, Walden

All three of Thoreau’s losses symbolize the upper class pursuits he scorned, but may still have subliminally craved: the hound a reference to hunting, the bay horse to a fancy show breed, the turtle-dove to sentimentalized love, the sort embodied in chocolate hearts on Valentine’s Day.

Many of my own losses are more literal. When a kid, I lost more than one roller skate key on a Brooklyn sidewalk. One of a pair of matched earrings, pair of shoes, pair of gloves. More recently, someone stole my wallet on a crowded Paris Metro; far worse than the loss of cash was the loss of my credit cards—the absence of which forced me to refrain from all but essential spending.

So perhaps some losses are to the good, like the excision of minor body parts: a diseased appendix, inflamed tonsils, infected teeth, various moles and other

body-weeds. Less tangible: old obsessions, angers, crushes on long ago baseball players.

But my catalogue of less tangible losses is doubtless full of holes–themselves

losses– like the gap in a stocking called an ozcke (“stocking eye”) in Polish, so the threads that remain become fringe around a skeleton’s hollow sockets.

Virginity—i.e., literal virginity– lost only once, but often I have lost my way in the farflung cities and towns I have visited, and have forgotten even the map of the neighborhood where I have lived many years.

Indeed, the forgotten itself is a close kin of loss, Uncountable the number of ideas, words, ambitions and goals once deemed essential to my existence, uncountable the dreams and old desires. Games, of course. Bets. Muscle tone, visual acuity, shed cells. And in the semi-foreign country of high tech, a plethora of pins and passwords.

Like most people my age, I have lost family and friends, not only to death but divergence of interests and geographic locations. And unlike Proust, I have discovered no Madeleine, except perhaps occasional smells, whether scents

or stinks. Or some random music stuck in my brain’s jukebox, revived at least once by an old nickel I had forgotten to spend.