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Un veynt far zikh eynem aleyn
Tonight and tomorrow are my grandmother's yahrzeit. This is the tenth year now. I find it strange to believe so much time has passed.
She was born in 1923. Her father was a pharmacist in Brooklyn, a rabbi's son who refused to hear Russian or Yiddish spoken in his house, and her mother was my namesake, the youngest of four sisters and the only one not to marry into the same family as the rest—my grandmother was their only child and not considered beautiful, which stuns me when I look at old photographs of her. Twenty years old and newly married, she had the rich dark hair and uptilted brows that black-and-white film loved, a mouth like Ingrid Bergman's; she acted at the Cherry Lane Theatre and studied at Brooklyn College and chose graduate school at the University of Iowa rather than the second lead George Abbott offered her in the national tour of Junior Miss. She never did professional theater again, but I remember that she could be heard from one end of the house to the other and never had to shout. In services, her voice was like bedrock under all the singing.
. . . I told her about
my grandmother, immigrants' daughter
in college at sixteen, actress, sculptor,
psychologist but for her dissertation
researched and left unwritten; she spoke
five languages that I remember. Slowly
memory gathered: crisp hair she let grow out
white as I grew older, deep voice husky
with years of cigarette smoke, strong
broad-fleshed face tactile as warm earth,
hands to urge form and story out of inked
or pencilled paper, watercolors, welded
metal . . .
—"Postcards from the Province of Hyphens"
My brother inherits his artist's skills from her. The house is full of her sketches, her sculptures. Even after she had to give up welding, because she was losing her sight in one eye, she drew. In retrospect, I understand that she played the violin only a little, and very badly, but I didn't know the difference when I was ten years old: she would play the opening melody from Fiddler on the Roof for me, and I was amazed. She was my grandmother, she could do anything. She wrote out the Greek alphabet for me in a sketchbook I still have and there was a Japanese wedding kimono in her closet. She did crosswords at the kitchen table and wore huge, smoky, tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses in strong sunlight. She took me to the beach in summer and watched me from the shore. When she stopped dyeing her hair, its color faded from black to purple to amethyst that lit up ghostly with the sun in her hair, so that for about six months she looks vaguely punk in all her pictures. Only a few months before she died, we went to see Fly Away Home at the Lexington Flick. She walked so slowly, I could hear her breath with every step: she had smoked since she was fourteen and she was not a slender woman. I think I knew even then, because the soundtrack to the movie made me cry. Fare thee well, my own true love, I'm going away. But I'll be back, though I go ten thousand miles. The rocks may melt and seas may burn, if I should not return. Don't you see that lonesome dove sitting on an ivy tree? She's weeping for her own true love as I would weep for thee. Come ye back, my own true love, and stay a while with me. If I had a friend all on this earth, you've been a friend to me. She had a nickname for me that no one else in my family has ever used. The oldest books I own were hers. The Dybbuk in Love is dedicated to her memory.
I still miss her.
She was born in 1923. Her father was a pharmacist in Brooklyn, a rabbi's son who refused to hear Russian or Yiddish spoken in his house, and her mother was my namesake, the youngest of four sisters and the only one not to marry into the same family as the rest—my grandmother was their only child and not considered beautiful, which stuns me when I look at old photographs of her. Twenty years old and newly married, she had the rich dark hair and uptilted brows that black-and-white film loved, a mouth like Ingrid Bergman's; she acted at the Cherry Lane Theatre and studied at Brooklyn College and chose graduate school at the University of Iowa rather than the second lead George Abbott offered her in the national tour of Junior Miss. She never did professional theater again, but I remember that she could be heard from one end of the house to the other and never had to shout. In services, her voice was like bedrock under all the singing.
. . . I told her about
my grandmother, immigrants' daughter
in college at sixteen, actress, sculptor,
psychologist but for her dissertation
researched and left unwritten; she spoke
five languages that I remember. Slowly
memory gathered: crisp hair she let grow out
white as I grew older, deep voice husky
with years of cigarette smoke, strong
broad-fleshed face tactile as warm earth,
hands to urge form and story out of inked
or pencilled paper, watercolors, welded
metal . . .
—"Postcards from the Province of Hyphens"
My brother inherits his artist's skills from her. The house is full of her sketches, her sculptures. Even after she had to give up welding, because she was losing her sight in one eye, she drew. In retrospect, I understand that she played the violin only a little, and very badly, but I didn't know the difference when I was ten years old: she would play the opening melody from Fiddler on the Roof for me, and I was amazed. She was my grandmother, she could do anything. She wrote out the Greek alphabet for me in a sketchbook I still have and there was a Japanese wedding kimono in her closet. She did crosswords at the kitchen table and wore huge, smoky, tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses in strong sunlight. She took me to the beach in summer and watched me from the shore. When she stopped dyeing her hair, its color faded from black to purple to amethyst that lit up ghostly with the sun in her hair, so that for about six months she looks vaguely punk in all her pictures. Only a few months before she died, we went to see Fly Away Home at the Lexington Flick. She walked so slowly, I could hear her breath with every step: she had smoked since she was fourteen and she was not a slender woman. I think I knew even then, because the soundtrack to the movie made me cry. Fare thee well, my own true love, I'm going away. But I'll be back, though I go ten thousand miles. The rocks may melt and seas may burn, if I should not return. Don't you see that lonesome dove sitting on an ivy tree? She's weeping for her own true love as I would weep for thee. Come ye back, my own true love, and stay a while with me. If I had a friend all on this earth, you've been a friend to me. She had a nickname for me that no one else in my family has ever used. The oldest books I own were hers. The Dybbuk in Love is dedicated to her memory.
I still miss her.
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Nine
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My grandmother was an artist too. She studied wood-carving around the turn of the century- a daring thing for a young Edwardian woman to do- and though she never practised professionally- marriage and the upbringing of children intervened- she never lost that urge to be making things- watercolour paintings, stuffed toys, jam....
I have a tiger's head she carved as a young woman. In a house fire it's probably the first thing I'd rescue.
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I was thinking, reading the poem, that it sounded kind of odd and almost old fashioned to have a family you like, that all through the twentieth century people have been writing about unhappy families so much that the thought of positive ones has been lost somewhere, and that's really sad.
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It's funny, because I never thought about it at the time. I look back and I see all the things she did, or I hear stories from my mother or my grandfather, and I realize how many different talents she had. (Languages. She and my grandfather were once in Italy. My grandmother was dark-haired, dark-eyed, and had a habit of picking up accents from her surroundings; her Italian was imperfect, but her pronunciation was flawless. My grandfather, on the other hand, opened his mouth and sounded exactly like a New York Jew. The waiter at the table where they were having lunch leaned over, glanced at my grandfather, and murmured covertly to my grandmother, "What's a good Italian girl like you doing with an American like him?") But when she was alive, I don't think I would have been surprised by anything she knew how to do.
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That is wonderful. Thank you.
We have a bust of my mother, age sixteen, that my grandmother did in plaster. It used to sit in my grandparents' TV room, in the window with the jade plants and cacti; now it's on the dresser next to the mirror in my parents' room, and occasionally there's a hat on top of it.
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I wish I had photographs of her I could post here. There aren't any; no one in my house had a digital camera until my senior year of college at the earliest. I might see if my grandfather thinks I could scan some without damaging them.
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I blame Tolstoy. There is nothing banal about happy families. My grandfather was a psychologist and a photographer and was once so bored at a university commencement that he cut open a golf ball with a pocketknife and got liquid rubber all over the professor next to him (which promptly got him banished from the ceremony, so perhaps it wasn't such a mistake after all), and when my grandmother caught her hand in the wringer while doing the laundry, he wrote her a parody of "My Bonnie Lies Over The Ocean" to cheer her up ("My Bunny Got Caught In The Wringer"), and on one of their earliest dates she performed "Anatole of Paris" on a street corner and attracted a considerable crowd. (She had met Danny Kaye. She described him to me as "redheaded and arrogant.") They were married three months after they met and spent their very first date trying to hitch-hike and because she had turned down the role in Junior Miss, his last words in an argument for years were always, "Listen, Fuffy—" They told great stories.
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Definitely. The least they can do is leave good memories!
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I am very fond of them. And the ones I'm not so fond of are at least still interesting.
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Thank you. I hope I did.
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Are there extra prints you could scan?
Nine
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She was a beautiful person. I want her to be remembered.
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Wow, yeah--from your descriptions, she sounds like she might've been an exceptionally competent spy.
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Heh. She did once convince some med students that she was—she needed anesthesia for some minor surgery, so as she was going under, she murmured to herself, "The ostriches must not get to Africa . . . I mustn't tell them . . . The ostriches must not get to Africa . . ." Which caused the students to have a very worried discussion about patient confidentiality and accidentally overheard information, so that when my grandmother woke up from the anesthesia, about the first thing she heard was the doctor who had been overseeing the procedure exclaming, "What have you been doing to my interns?"
(I approve of the icon, by the way.)
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Heheh. That's brilliant. It's got to be a little embarrassing to be outwitted by someone who's under the effects of anaesthesia.
(I approve of the icon, by the way.)
Thanks--I probably thought of it because you said her mouth looked like Ingrid Bergman's.