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.
--
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.
--
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.
--
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.
𝑆𝑢𝑝𝑝𝑜𝑠𝑒 𝑦𝑜𝑢 ℎ𝑎𝑣𝑒 𝑎 𝑑𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑚, she said, partway through that lesson. 𝐼𝑛 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑑𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑚 𝑦𝑜𝑢’𝑟𝑒 𝑠𝑖𝑡𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑑𝑜𝑤𝑛 𝑡𝑜 𝑙𝑢𝑛𝑐ℎ 𝑎𝑡 𝑎 𝑙𝑎𝑟𝑔𝑒 𝑡𝑎𝑏𝑙𝑒. 𝐴𝑛𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑛 𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑟 𝑔𝑟𝑎𝑛𝑑𝑚𝑜𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟 𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑟𝑡𝑠 𝑤𝑎𝑙𝑘𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑑𝑜𝑤𝑛 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑝𝑎𝑡ℎ, 𝑏𝑢𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑑𝑜𝑒𝑠𝑛’𝑡 𝑚𝑎𝑘𝑒 𝑠𝑒𝑛𝑠𝑒 𝑏𝑒𝑐𝑎𝑢𝑠𝑒 𝑦𝑜𝑢𝑟 𝑔𝑟𝑎𝑛𝑑𝑚𝑜𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟 𝑑𝑖𝑒𝑑 𝑦𝑒𝑎𝑟𝑠 𝑎𝑔𝑜…
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.
--
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.
𝐷𝑢𝑟𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑑𝑎𝑦, my grandma answered in her soft-spoken voice that held years of rebelliousness, 𝐼’𝑚 𝑛𝑜𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔. 𝐴𝑡 𝑛𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑡, 𝑤ℎ𝑒𝑛 𝐼’𝑚 𝑎𝑓𝑟𝑎𝑖𝑑 𝑜𝑓 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑑𝑎𝑟𝑘, 𝐼’𝑚 𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑦𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔. 𝐵𝑢𝑡 𝑖𝑛 𝑚𝑦 ℎ𝑒𝑎𝑟𝑡 𝐼’𝑚 𝐽𝑒𝑤𝑖𝑠ℎ.
--
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.
--
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 𝑟𝑒𝑔𝑟𝑒𝑡𝑡𝑒 𝑟𝑖𝑒𝑛.
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