An expert on memory who once attended one of my talks told me that the most important memories all of us have are those that affect our emotions. She also said that the deepest and most important part of our memory is that which remembers injustices, and that we all have a moral compass of sorts that allows us to know when we’ve been wronged. According to her, psychologists tend to agree on this one point: memories of wrongs endured are the ones that shape us most intensely.
My memories and my child’s voice wrestle with the Big Lie. And they also expose some of the most basic traits shared by all human beings. And as I try to expose the Big Lie and allow my memories to overwhelm me, I tap a part of my own brain that I had never used before and didn’t even know existed. I also bind and gag the professor within me. And he shuts up without a struggle, happily. Instead of explaining, dissecting, and analyzing everything, I simply rely on images as conveyed by words. I discover the power of poetry through the images in my memory. I find a mantra to guide me: show, don’t tell; show, don’t tell.
Ironically, as I silence the professor, I also become a better historian. A historian of my own past and of my people’s past. I bear witness to a shared injustice and a vanished world denied by the Big Lie. So the very same professor who had written several books before, but never, ever received a thank-you for his work, begins to receive hundreds, then thousands of thank-yous. Readers of every kind, on every continent but Antarctica, write to me, and the overwhelming majority thank me for my narrative, the non-Cuban readers saying, “thank you for telling your story,” the Cubans saying, “thank you for telling my story.” Big difference. Not “your story” or “our story” but “my story.”
My readers let me know that there is more than one way to do history, that a poetic approach to the past written from memory draws the reader into other worlds more immediately and intensely. I’ve tapped into the truth, much more convincingly than I ever thought possible. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying that writing from memory is superior to doing research in an archive or that historians should give up on research altogether. Not at all. If that were the case, I’d be out of a job. I’m simply saying that there are different ways to write about the past and that the first-person narrative packs a wallop of its own. By focusing on images in my memory, I can bring the reader into the world I experienced, with an emotional dimension of the sort that professional historians are trained to avoid like the plague. Relying on memory rather than documents and employing emotionally charged images rather than footnotes, I can re-create the Cuba I knew for readers in different cultures and at the same time for many Cuban readers, including those who would love to silence me.
So, since my words bear witness to a history they’ve been trying to erase for over forty years, the enlightened Cuban despots ban my book and proclaim me an enemy of the Revolution.
I am thrilled by this, the ultimate honor. But it also makes me weep.
I ask myself: what next?
What now, Herr Professor Doktor?
Once again, my memory allows me to monkey with space and time. I am on the Left Bank of the Seine, in one of those Parisian restaurants where the waiters outnumber the customers. A conference has brought me here. Earlier in the day I had presented a paper on a subject very few people on earth care about: the translation of devotional texts in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It was a good paper, I thought. We conference participants are enjoying our banquet, thanks to our great patron, the European Union. Suddenly, someone very impolitely mentions that I had won the National Book Award in the United States. The conversation stops. Stunned silence. You could hear a pin drop or some diner slurp his soup in a far corner of the room. Everyone stares at me. The inevitable question leaps from someone’s throat, like a toad: “What book?” I mention my memoir and briefly describe it, feeling great embarrassment and shame. A historian is not supposed to write about his own past or that of his people, much less to do it as if it were a novel. I have betrayed my guild.
One colleague breaks the silence and says with a very pained look on his face: “Oh...Oh....you know what this means, don’t you? It means you’ll be remembered for that book, not for your work as a historian.”
“I can live with that,” I reply.
Then the French historian who is hosting the conference, a man whose work I admire, chimes in as only a French scholar can, with great precision, consummate clarity, and brutal candor: “Well...,” he says in thickly accented English. “Well...you certainly won’t win a prize for the paper you gave us today.”
Ouch.
So there I was, and here I am. I have strayed from my calling and, in the process, set an impossibly high bar for myself to clear—at least as far as most of my colleagues see it. Can I also win a prize for a book based on archival research? Can I atone for the sin of writing without footnotes? Probably not, many say. I have crossed a line that is taboo for most historians, though more by accident than by design: I have touched the lives of thousands of readers and produced a historical document. I have become a historical figure. I have irked a despotic regime and earned its censure. I no longer merely create useful footnotes but have instead become a footnote in the work of other historians.
In the meantime, however, no one can stop my mind from shuttling back and forth between Minneapolis and Havana and Paris, or Wolfenbüttel, or Xochimilco, or Yale, or Zagreb, or any other place on earth where I’ve been, during any time when I’ve been conscious.
Memory is the most potent truth, I still affirm. And it becomes even more potent when its treasures are examined with a novelist’s eye. As I also said in my preamble:
We improve when we become fiction,
each and every one of us,
and when the past becomes a novel our memories are sharpened.
So, it’s back to Paris once again, back to that conference.
We’re taking a break from our meeting, walking from one building to another, led by our Parisian host, the eminent historian. It’s early in the morning, and I’ve just walked into the holy of holies for all historians of Europe: the editorial offices of the journal Annales, which defines the cutting edge for my profession.
It’s a shockingly small office for such an influential journal and totally devoid of character. Everything is made of metal and plastic in this inner sanctum, and the windows are clear plateglass. It could pass for an insurance agency in downtown Kokomo. I expected something much larger, more imposing. Where are the Corinthian columns? The carved woodwork? The stained-glass windows? I expected some sort of tabernacle, too, where the key to the past would be enshrined. But all I can see is past issues of Annales on the shelves, and they look exactly like all the others I have seen and used in American libraries.
Fool. Imbécile.
History needs no temples, no trappings, no tabernacle. And it has many keys, not just one. We historians hold most of the keys to the past, as locksmiths at the ultimate museum, and our keys unlock doors to different dimensions, all of which are nestled one within the other, like Russian matryoshka dolls. But at the very center, at the deepest and most fundamental level of all—where all falsehoods dissolve like slugs in salt—access to the past is in everyone’s hands. And the key to that dimension is easy enough to find. So easy, in fact, that every despot fumes at the thought of it: that key is in every memory, in the images we carry with us, and the imagination with which we approach them.
I should have known that.
1 Confessions 10.8.
SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
Making Memory
• • •
WITH AN EXCERPT FROM
Who She Was: My Search for My Mother’s Life
FROM Who She Was: My Search for My Mother’s Life
On a windswept, darkening afternoon in December 2000, I brushed the snow away from the marker of my mother’s grave. With each sweep
of my gloved hand, the raised lettering of the simple plaque gradually became visible, showing her name, ELEANOR FREEDMAN, and the inscription our family had chose: A SPECIAL PERSON. It had taken me some time to find the marker, even with a map from the cemetery office and a computer printout designating the exact location like the block-and-lot number in a suburban subdivision. I had not visited the grave in twenty-six years, since another December afternoon, when my family buried her.
I could still see, after so many years, the tears sliding out of my father’s unblinking eyes. I could still hear my sister’s howls of grief. But my memories of my mother herself had grown vaguer and less distinct over time. I could not remember the timbre of her voice or the pattern of her inflections. I could not summon her face without a photograph. What I did recall in all its shameful detail was the only visit she made to me at college, and my command that she sit rows apart from me in my classes, that we pretend to be strangers until we were safely blocks away from the classroom building. I was just eighteen then, two months into my freshman year a thousand miles from home, and in the full thrall of this new independence. She was already dying of cancer, pulling me back in love and obligation to the excruciating spectacle of her demise. From that day until this one, my memory of her illness, of our family’s deathwatch, had eclipsed all the other memories of her existence.
Now I was forty-five, the same age my mother had been when the doctor found that first lump in her breast. I was only five years younger than she had been at her death. I was more than a decade into my marriage, as she had been in hers. I was the father of two children who looked at me, as I looked at her, only as a parent, not someone with a whole autonomous life, most of which had preceded their arrival. And, as if my own wish during college were taking revenge on me, I had discovered that my mother was more and more a stranger to me. Besides having been someone who died miserably and died young, I did not know who she was....
An odd thing had happened, though, during the previous few months. In conversations and occasional speeches, I found myself mentioning stray details from my mother’s life—her pride when Bess Meyerson was the first Jew chosen as Miss America, her dancing in the streets when the United Nations voted statehood for Israel. I wasn’t even aware at first of how often I was telling these stories until an old friend pointed it out. “I’ve known you twenty years,” he said one night. “This is the first time I’ve ever heard you talk about your mother.” His words jolted me. I had to ponder what my reflex to speak of her meant. I carried that mystery with me from place to place over the weeks, and eventually I came to an answer. I realized that, at last, I wanted to discover my mother’s life. I wanted, almost literally, to claw at that frozen cemetery ground, to exhume the soil flecked with her residue, and from it conjure the past.
• • •
Making Memory
On a Tuesday night in November 1974, I arrived home from college for the Thanksgiving weekend. I had made the nine-hundred-mile drive from Wisconsin to New Jersey out of a sense of fierce, awful obligation. My mother was nearing the end of her five-year struggle against cancer, and our family was now recognizing annual events as final rites.
Still, my mother insisted in her indomitable way that she cook a holiday dinner for two dozen members of our extended family. My father’s best estimate was that she had several more months to live, and we had already planned to spend Christmas week in the Caribbean, a last family vacation to parallel our last family Thanksgiving. My father made his living designing and manufacturing equipment used in cancer research, and so I had no reason to doubt his prognosis.
On the Saturday afternoon of Thanksgiving weekend, then, I headed off to Interstate 80 and ultimately to Madison. I knew my mother was scheduled to enter a hospital two days later to have pleural fluid drained from her lungs. My father had reassured me this would be a routine procedure and there was no reason for me to stay home and miss classes, especially so close to final exams.
I ran directly into an unseasonable blizzard on my way west and wound up snowbound in Ohio. I finally walked into my dorm room at dusk on Monday. The note I found from my roommate, explaining that I should call home immediately, led to a houseguest’s voice giving me a phone number in New York, which turned out to be at a hospital. My father answered. He told me that a medical resident had botched the lung tap and my mother was dead.
Almost thirty years later, I learned something else about the events of that Thanksgiving week. My father had bought my mother a present, something from the cutting edge of audio technology: a cassette tape recorder. He also bought her several ninety-minute cassettes. His plan, which became hers as well, was that she would dictate into those tapes her life story or her parting advice or some kind of farewell, something other than the helpless cry she loosed in the hospital: “I’m dying. My God, I’m dying.”
Because my mother died earlier than expected, she never had the chance to speak a syllable into those tapes. When my father told me in 2004 about their existence, I felt both harrowed and redeemed. I felt harrowed because of all the things I had missed about my mother, perhaps the most acute was the sound of her voice. Yet I felt redeemed because by this time I was nearly done with researching and writing the story of my mother’s life as a teenager and a young woman, which would be published in 2005 as the book Who She Was. In a very real way, I had put down on paper the words she might have intoned onto tape.
So the concept of “making memory” exists for me in a very concrete way, a process measurable in the notebooks and file folders and yellowing snapshots that built up in my office during my three years of work on the book. I had to make memory—or, to put it more accurately, to assemble memory—because memory did not exist. I was not alive during the years of my mother’s coming-of-age, the years from her first day of high school in 1938 until her wedding day to my father in 1953. I was not even the custodian of second-hand memory, because my mother had shared relatively little of her past with me. And I, a typically narcissistic teenaged boy, had never asked very much about it, either. I had to retrieve the past before I could play the mental trick of convincing myself that I remembered the past.
The mission of doing so, and the meaning of that mission, puts me in mind, of all things, of a theological distinction between Judaism and Christianity. One of Jesus’s most penetrating critiques of Jewish religion was that it emphasized, indeed privileged, doing over feeling. The practice of Judaism was based on adherence to 613 commandments, the mitzvot, that are enumerated in the Torah. For Jesus and his followers, the emotional connection to God was more important, more genuinely religious, than the fidelity to a list of requirements.
From that fork in the road derive two distinct religions that provide parallels for two approaches to memoir and family history. In our present literary climate, as in emergent Christianity, emotion is equated with truth. Factuality, much less historiography, is seen as an impediment to truth, the annoying clutter of empty ritual. Since individual memory is subjective, the implicit line of reasoning goes, then it is irrelevant to try to reconcile memory to historical evidence or even to use such evidence to fill in the gaps of memory. The unsurprising outcome of this belief system, I would say, is the number of memoirs that have been unmasked and wholly or partly fabricated, James Frey primary among them.
Perhaps because of my training as a journalist, I vigorously dispute the idea that the intellectual act of research is unimportant in memoir and does not serve art. And as an observant Jew, I have lived this truth another way. Even in Jesus’s time, and certainly now, many religious Jews would say that in following the mitzvot they come to approach the Divine. The act enables the emotion. The tangible enables the mysterious. Or so the process seemed to me as I worked on Who She Was.
What, after all, could I remember, if I had no memories? How could I imagine my way into experiences so foreign from my own? Growing up in suburban affluence in the postwar decades, what
kind of vicarious leap could I make into my mother’s life as a child during the Depression, a teenager during World War II, a young woman finding out that her European relatives had been killed, every one, in the Holocaust? What kind of arrogance would it betray for me to think I could understand the obstacles for a tenement girl going to college or the transgressive power of a Jew falling in love with an Italian Catholic?
Regarding my mother’s life across the chasm of incomprehension, I sometimes recalled an acting class I had observed in the 1980s, when I was covering theater for the New York Times. The class was led by Stella Adler, one of the most prominent disciples of Constantin Stanislavski, creator of the Method. Method acting is generally understood to mean a performer drawing into his or her own psyche to create a character, and in the hands of instructors such as Lee Strasberg and actors like Marlon Brando, that was certainly the case. Adler, however, embodied a different line of descent from Stanislavski. On the day I watched her, she was teaching her students how to portray royalty. And there was no possible way, she brusquely informed them, that they as members of a modern capitalist democracy could intuit the manner of a king or queen. They had no parallel experience. Instead, she showed the class slides of thrones, bejeweled crowns, the gardens at Versailles. Her liberating lesson was that you could study your way, research your way, learn your way into the role.
Tell Me True Page 18
