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.
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