Today we celebrated the eighth birthday of Hestia Hermia Linsky-Noyes and Tybalt Autolycus Taaffe, who have grown from soot-sprite kittens of destiny to full-fledged cats of legend, sometimes against all odds. We fed them a dinner of smoked salmon and mackerel and sang "Happy Birthday to Mew." Autolycus reached out for his inheritance.
Today was also my grandmother's yahrzeit: twenty-five years. It does not feel like that much time. It feels like another world. Her death is older than she was when my mother was born. My mother is older than she lived to be. I can still remember her smell, that primal recognition like a circuit that cannot ever be closed again; I remember her speaking voice, so deep that she was once famously mistaken for Odetta—they were staying in the same hotel—over the phone. I remember sitting on my grandparents' bed as she took out the old violin with its spare strings and its little block of rosin, awed at her playing of the opening motif from Fiddler on the Roof, even though I would come to understand that she played the violin like Jack Benny pretended to. Her parents really had taken her as a child to hear Heifetz and turned to her afterward: "See how you would sound if you just practiced?" Decades later, when the conductor of her college orchestra came through Oklahoma City and she rang him up to say hello, he was polite but blank until prompted, "Your worst second violinist ever," at which he exclaimed instantly, "Oh! Bernice! How are you?" My brother inherited her violin, but he took to the instrument as much as she had and eventually, gratefully, exchanged it for the trumpet. She would have preferred the piano, like Vladimir Horowitz. My niece inherited her Hebrew name, which she had in turn from her own great-grandmother, the woman so formidable an entire nineteenth-century shtetl called her "the Cossack." It may have been my grandmother's birth name; the naturalization papers of her parents differ on that point. For much of her life she was known as Bunny, though after she chose grad school over the second lead in the national tour of Junior Miss, my grandfather wound up arguments for years with, "Listen, Fuffy . . ." She had spent her adolescence through college acting with the Cherry Lane Theatre, which may or may not have been how she met Danny Kaye to describe him ever after as "redheaded and arrogant." She attracted a crowd on the street performing "Anatole of Paris" on one of her first dates with my grandfather. Their actual first date was spent hitch-hiking. My parents' house is still as full of her sketches and her sculptures as of my grandfather's photographs and slides. I never saw the one called Auschwitz that was stolen when the synagogue that had commissioned it was vandalized: realistically I know it was almost certainly destroyed on the night, but I keep dreaming of finding it in a private collection or donated to a museum, the black iron bones of an empty hand. We have The Sideshow, Send in the Clowns. She was a welder. She only stopped when she began to lose her sight in one eye. Every time I write about her feels like such a thin fragment of a life, all of which I can't even know. She owned books of Sholem Aleichem in Yiddish. I learned to do crosswords with her over breakfast. I don't think I will stop missing her. When she held me for the first time, the family story goes, as if her body recognized me as her own, her breasts let down milk.
I don't know how Lubitsch would feel about his movie never going out of style, but I do want to watch it again: "Actors taking on tyrants: Ernst Lubitsch's 'To Be or Not to Be'."
Today was also my grandmother's yahrzeit: twenty-five years. It does not feel like that much time. It feels like another world. Her death is older than she was when my mother was born. My mother is older than she lived to be. I can still remember her smell, that primal recognition like a circuit that cannot ever be closed again; I remember her speaking voice, so deep that she was once famously mistaken for Odetta—they were staying in the same hotel—over the phone. I remember sitting on my grandparents' bed as she took out the old violin with its spare strings and its little block of rosin, awed at her playing of the opening motif from Fiddler on the Roof, even though I would come to understand that she played the violin like Jack Benny pretended to. Her parents really had taken her as a child to hear Heifetz and turned to her afterward: "See how you would sound if you just practiced?" Decades later, when the conductor of her college orchestra came through Oklahoma City and she rang him up to say hello, he was polite but blank until prompted, "Your worst second violinist ever," at which he exclaimed instantly, "Oh! Bernice! How are you?" My brother inherited her violin, but he took to the instrument as much as she had and eventually, gratefully, exchanged it for the trumpet. She would have preferred the piano, like Vladimir Horowitz. My niece inherited her Hebrew name, which she had in turn from her own great-grandmother, the woman so formidable an entire nineteenth-century shtetl called her "the Cossack." It may have been my grandmother's birth name; the naturalization papers of her parents differ on that point. For much of her life she was known as Bunny, though after she chose grad school over the second lead in the national tour of Junior Miss, my grandfather wound up arguments for years with, "Listen, Fuffy . . ." She had spent her adolescence through college acting with the Cherry Lane Theatre, which may or may not have been how she met Danny Kaye to describe him ever after as "redheaded and arrogant." She attracted a crowd on the street performing "Anatole of Paris" on one of her first dates with my grandfather. Their actual first date was spent hitch-hiking. My parents' house is still as full of her sketches and her sculptures as of my grandfather's photographs and slides. I never saw the one called Auschwitz that was stolen when the synagogue that had commissioned it was vandalized: realistically I know it was almost certainly destroyed on the night, but I keep dreaming of finding it in a private collection or donated to a museum, the black iron bones of an empty hand. We have The Sideshow, Send in the Clowns. She was a welder. She only stopped when she began to lose her sight in one eye. Every time I write about her feels like such a thin fragment of a life, all of which I can't even know. She owned books of Sholem Aleichem in Yiddish. I learned to do crosswords with her over breakfast. I don't think I will stop missing her. When she held me for the first time, the family story goes, as if her body recognized me as her own, her breasts let down milk.
I don't know how Lubitsch would feel about his movie never going out of style, but I do want to watch it again: "Actors taking on tyrants: Ernst Lubitsch's 'To Be or Not to Be'."
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