First Grade

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“Don’t cry,” my mother tells me. I am in first grade, with a pretty knapsack and a lunch she packed me, and first grade always made me cry. “But I want to stay with you.” It was, to my five-year-old self, the most dramatic thing that I had to spend the whole day away from her, and I didn’t understand it. “You’ll be home soon.” -- “Don’t cry,” my mother tells me. It’s a habit that, as a twenty-something year old woman, I pretend I had grown out of. I’m sitting on her couch writing poetry – a piece from San Francisco that would one day become a friend’s housewarming present – and airplanes always made me cry. “I’ll just miss you, that’s all.” “You’ll be home in a few months.” None of us could have predicted a fucking pandemic that had probably already started, or known the next time I’d come back would be almost two years later. -- “I told you not to cry,” but I know she is also crying. She has stage four colorectal cancer, and we both wrote a piece with the exact sam...
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But in My Heart I'm Jewish

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I’ll tell you a story. It’s one of those deeper, family stories, but somehow I’ve always wanted to share it with you.

My grandmother was a Holocaust survivor, because her face was bitten by a German Shepherd as a child. Because there was a nurse, Marie, who told her parents that they couldn’t hide harboring a little girl. My mother tells her story best.

But I knew my grandma differently. I knew the woman who loved theatre and chocolates and beautiful dresses. I knew that when she passed away, and we drove to New York like we had throughout my childhood, her Manhattan apartment at the heart and height of everything suddenly felt too small to contain even the memories of us. I knew that when I let myself into her bathroom after the funeral to try on one of the abandoned garments, the dress was too small also and the laces snapped, and the hair tie I had braided so meticulously earlier that morning snapped in half a moment later, and I knew she watching.

I knew the woman who sat on my bed, in the dozens of places we lived in, telling me stories.

I knew that when I cried, I looked like her the most. I have her eyes.
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She came to me in a dream during that long week we stayed in her apartment. She was sitting on her patterned couch by the window overlooking the skyline, where my grandfather drank Turkish coffee late into the nights. I ran to her, and she lifted me up. Straight in the air, like I was still a child, and that dream meant the world to me because she passed away weighing half what I weigh now, hollow eyes and fur-lined garments, a walking testament to stories I hadn’t yet learned to see, and she had never been strong enough to lift me. But she swung me through the air like a little girl again, and I knew she was alright.
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I knew she carried a lot of regrets. From snippets she’d let slide on our walks through Manhattan, that magical city where anything happened, between sips of melting ice cream. From the jewelry that she left behind. From stories that my mother told me.
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I grew up, in my own way. I moved back to the Northeast. I borrowed her necklace, and looked in the mirror, and wore her story in my eyes. It was 12 years before I heard from her again.
--
The next dream was a darker one. Harsher edges and altered intonations that I could not conform to my memories of her, any more than I could fit into that dress.

I went to my weekly women’s class that evening, and to this day I don’t remember what the Rebbetzin was teaching.

π‘†π‘’π‘π‘π‘œπ‘ π‘’ π‘¦π‘œπ‘’ β„Žπ‘Žπ‘£π‘’ π‘Ž π‘‘π‘Ÿπ‘’π‘Žπ‘š, she said, partway through that lesson. 𝐼𝑛 π‘‘β„Žπ‘’ π‘‘π‘Ÿπ‘’π‘Žπ‘š π‘¦π‘œπ‘’’π‘Ÿπ‘’ 𝑠𝑖𝑑𝑑𝑖𝑛𝑔 π‘‘π‘œπ‘€π‘› π‘‘π‘œ π‘™π‘’π‘›π‘β„Ž π‘Žπ‘‘ π‘Ž π‘™π‘Žπ‘Ÿπ‘”π‘’ π‘‘π‘Žπ‘π‘™π‘’. 𝐴𝑛𝑑 π‘‘β„Žπ‘’π‘› π‘¦π‘œπ‘’π‘Ÿ π‘”π‘Ÿπ‘Žπ‘›π‘‘π‘šπ‘œπ‘‘β„Žπ‘’π‘Ÿ π‘ π‘‘π‘Žπ‘Ÿπ‘‘π‘  π‘€π‘Žπ‘™π‘˜π‘–π‘›π‘” π‘‘π‘œπ‘€π‘› π‘‘β„Žπ‘’ π‘π‘Žπ‘‘β„Ž, 𝑏𝑒𝑑 π‘‘β„Žπ‘–π‘  π‘‘π‘œπ‘’π‘ π‘›’𝑑 π‘šπ‘Žπ‘˜π‘’ 𝑠𝑒𝑛𝑠𝑒 π‘π‘’π‘π‘Žπ‘’π‘ π‘’ π‘¦π‘œπ‘’π‘Ÿ π‘”π‘Ÿπ‘Žπ‘›π‘‘π‘šπ‘œπ‘‘β„Žπ‘’π‘Ÿ 𝑑𝑖𝑒𝑑 π‘¦π‘’π‘Žπ‘Ÿπ‘  π‘Žπ‘”π‘œ…

She didn’t know that she was doing it. That she was, in the middle of whichever parsha she was teaching, detailing my dream completely.

She said that she was taking a small group to New York that week. To the gravesite of a famous rebbe, in the same cemetery my grandmother is buried in.
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Someone gave me a map of the graves. The last time I had been there was before my grandpa’s death. I had gone with my father to place a letter on the headstone they’d just set and I’d been crying in the rain – in truth I don’t know if it was actually raining, but in my memories it must have been – and I had not returned to that spot until this moment. What struck me was the Jewish emblems, magen davids and menorahs, rows upon stone rows of them. A comfort. A defiance.

Once upon a time, when I was still a child too young to know about it, a woman interviewed my grandmother in a documentary about the Holocaust. I played it from my kitchen in the midst of a pandemic, the first time in half my life that I had seen her face. I recognized her amethyst earrings and heavy French accent. Forgot how soft the voice that spoke it.

The woman interviewing her asked about religion – a thing I thought my grandmother, in the graveyard with this renowned rebbe, had completely detested.

π·π‘’π‘Ÿπ‘–π‘›π‘” π‘‘β„Žπ‘’ π‘‘π‘Žπ‘¦, my grandma answered in her soft-spoken voice that held years of rebelliousness, 𝐼’π‘š π‘›π‘œπ‘‘β„Žπ‘–π‘›π‘”. 𝐴𝑑 π‘›π‘–π‘”β„Žπ‘‘, π‘€β„Žπ‘’π‘› 𝐼’π‘š π‘Žπ‘“π‘Ÿπ‘Žπ‘–π‘‘ π‘œπ‘“ π‘‘β„Žπ‘’ π‘‘π‘Žπ‘Ÿπ‘˜, 𝐼’π‘š π‘’π‘£π‘’π‘Ÿπ‘¦π‘‘β„Žπ‘–π‘›π‘”. 𝐡𝑒𝑑 𝑖𝑛 π‘šπ‘¦ β„Žπ‘’π‘Žπ‘Ÿπ‘‘ 𝐼’π‘š π½π‘’π‘€π‘–π‘ β„Ž.
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Her headstone said all the usual things. I recognized her Hebrew name. The day that she was born, June 12. And the place where I had left the letter that my grandfather, years later and in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s, remembered as mine.
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And at the bottom of it all, engraved upon that stone where it must have always been, the last story that she never told me. The lesson I'm still learning, after everything.

J𝑒 𝑛𝑒 π‘Ÿπ‘’π‘”π‘Ÿπ‘’π‘‘π‘‘π‘’ π‘Ÿπ‘–π‘’π‘›.

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