Leah, the oldest, from my father's first marriage,
was born in 1926. We didn't know her,
but she hovered.
The apartment was small
and everywhere
the smell of absence -
the two of them
plus her mother,
my father's
first wife.
(Later, she acknowledged my brother,
but never me, nor my sister Dot.
Even in her obituary
we weren't there).
When I was little
I found her photo in my father's drawer.
We had the same hair - frizzy,
like our Zeyde's beard.
His name was Jacob,
and she was his first
grandchild.
Jacob came to America
with Bubbe Kaila,
and their son - my father, Iser
and their daughter, Miriam.
They came through Ellis Island.
On the ship Olympic.
The year was 1922.
Kaila lived to see five grandchildren
born in America. (I wasn't one of them).
When she died, Zeyde
went to live with Miriam
but he was too old-fashioned
for her husband, Ben, who was modern.
So Zeyde came to live with us
(by then I was born)
and I was glad.
Tonight I went to hear Billy Collins read his poems.
He says he doesn't do autobiography,
doesn't people his poems with the past.
He writes for his readers.
I write for the past:
It sits on my desk and watches me.
We have memorized each other,
the past and I.
Joyce Carol Oates wrote:
"We are linked by blood,
and blood is memory
without language."
I believe her.
One night I dreamed my brother was proud of me,
and the next day was easier.
In college when I read Alexander Pope's
Essay on Man where he wrote:
'The greatest study of mankind is man,' I thought:
The greatest study of humankind
is certainly woman.
Today I'm re-reading Janet Malcolm's In the Freud Archives.
Here Dr. Eissler says: Anna Freud didn't write as well as her father
because: She was a woman, not a genius.
I know I'm rambling but what comes to mind
is the death of Freud's sisters
by the Nazis.
And my friend Ivan's bubbe
who lived up the block from us on Park Heights Ave.
She wore purple numbers on her arm, everyday.
I was six-years old and my father asks me:
What kind of parents name a Jewish boy Ivan?
'Hey, you, dirty Jew, off!'
Ivans are tsarists, he says. Antisemites.
'Go to hell,' my father said.
They dragged him from the bus,
stripped him to his underpants
and beat him with a pipe.
Ivans, he whispers:
Jews don't name their boys Ivan.
When I was ten,
he said he had a novel in him.
Why don't you write it, Daddy?
But his shoulders slump
and his eyes are far away.
Looking for one book, I find another:
'Erik Erikson's Young Man Luther:
A Study in Psychoanalysis and History'
and I remember when psychoanalysis
first caught my attention: 1958, on a Camp Mildale
JCC bus. I’m 16, a junior counselor. A
few rows in front of me a senior counselor
is reading Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents.
I’m reading The Ugly American.The kid next to me
is reading a comic book. My father doesn’t
like comic books. He thinks they’re dreck,
like white bread, but he lets us read them.
Last night I dreamed about my sister Dot.
She was dressed to kill.
Her eyes were calm,
her body striking
and content.
She had a life after all those years of being dead.
I have been reading Louis Begley's
biography of Franz Kafka
The Tremendous World I have Inside My Head.
Kafka had three sisters:
Each one died in a concentration camp -
Elli in 1941, Valli in 1942 and Ottla,
Franz's favorite, in 1943.
Once my brother took me to Three Sisters
Ponds in Druid Hill Park
(Obviously I'm free associating because
the Three Sisters Ponds in Druid Hill Park
have nothing to do with Kafka's sisters).
My brother taught me to catch tadpoles.
We took them home,
made a place for them on the porch,
watched until they grew into frogs.
Then we set them loose in the yard ...
When the FBI came that time
I was eleven and home from school sick.
Mother wanted me to stay in bed
but I didn't. I stood by the living room door
and listened. Two men in dark suits.
One watched, the other questioned.
Mother's voice was always soft,
but today it was even softer.
Later she told me,
they wanted to know about Leah.
Hovering, still.
...
The whole time I knew him
my Uncle Ben said nothing to me.
He didn't even look in my direction.
He was mean to his children too
and, of course, to his wife,
though she cried for him when
he died in the automobile
accident
that people said - or she said -
she caused
stepping on the gas
instead of the brake.
"Miriam, What are you doing?"
he (supposedly) yelled as
the car
lifted
over the
embankment.
The air
filled with summer
and their daughter's visit.
I was seven when he died.
Walking to school a neighbor,
holding The Baltimore Sun,
(I have the article)
said: "He couldn't be your uncle.
He's famous, a
radiologist. He's
in the news
paper."
(So famous he
couldn't practice
at Hopkins
because
he was a Jew,
my second-grader self
knew) though didn't say.
The funeral was
that day.
He loved his dog,
a Doberman,
named Prince
who missed
him.
...
As a writer
I need to do anything I can to keep going,
write in any style, form,
or space that comes along -
use the resources available to me.
I think of this because
I heard talk of a writer who
stopped writing
because of technology.
That was a mistake.
Technology
is helping me
remember myself in the past.
It helps me remember
the past out loud.
I wish everyone would use it -
for public and private good.
It belongs everywhere - in nursing homes.
It keeps you alive.
A friend says she prefers
conversation to writing. I
like conversation too,
but it doesn't last forever.
Writing does.
On the other hand,
there are conversations
I won't forget -
my father's.
When I was in my thirties
and in New York,
I went to Leah's.
She made me a fancy dinner
and talked about art.
Before I left she said
she didn't want a sister
(though she sat
on the NARAL Board.
What does power
politics have
to do with every
day life -
but nothing).
On the way back to my hotel
that night, her husband
said: "She has a hard time
with women."
I figured
that
and more.
My father is writing me
from the grave.
He says he's sorry
he wasn't more whole
as a human being.
Even from up there
he falls into bed
for days,
stares at the ceiling
as if it holds an answer.
None appears.
He lies there
unhappy in his
not.
When he returns
he laughs
as if the past few days
belonged to some
body else's life.
Father
closes his letter
with a touch
that moves me
with a flutter
to the page,
and I am
here.
