by Rita Gabis
She hated Christianity. “Bullshit,” she called it. One of my cousins thinks she conflated Christians with the Cossacks who terrorized the village where she lived as a small child. By the start of World War II, she’d divorced her husband (Harry Gabis, slim, dapper, seller of fine men’s suits), stopped keeping kosher, stopped the ritual dunk in the mikvah (“tub of stinking water”) and was raising her children alone, cutting hair, which she hated. As it had been for a time in Lithuania among a cross section of Jews and non-Jews, communism, with its egalitarian promise, enthralled her.
“I never signed anything,” she said once, referring to some document that would have signified actual party membership.
She sat across from me at her supper table. Out the two windows on our left, late spring and the hour did something to the pink-red of her azaleas; the iridescent color seemed to hover over the blossoms. Stains marked her tablecloth. She couldn’t see them anymore. We had wandered into an area of her past she didn’t want to speak of.
(It occurred to me at that instant that We Never Talked About It could be the generic title for all family reminiscences written until the current age of memoir when I Talked Too Much About It seems a better fit.)
Politics and her own personal liberation created a rift in the family; once she stopped keeping kosher, her father, Wolf, and her mother, Ķlarah, never set foot in her house again. But as it did for many, my grandmother’s brief entrancement with communism ended in anger. She had been duped; she hated the brutal machinations of the Soviet regime. The generals of Stalin’s army—some Jewish, some not—who pressed on to Berlin at the bombed-out end of the war, their exhausted troops freezing to death during brief night encampments in the first push through East Prussia, walked away from the war weighted down with medals. Shortly after, many were executed or sent to the Gulag for one treasonous act or another. In 1939, the famed Yiddish poet Peretz Markish was awarded the Order of Lenin. In 1949, the ubiquitous knock on the door summoned him to his death. “You’ll pay with your head for the love you bear the world,” he wrote. When my mother came into her life, my grandmother was horrified by the imprisonment of Babita, lost, probably dead in some unmarked frozen grave in the Gulag.
But for a time, while she cut hair and raised children and had romances, my Jewish grandmother must have felt modern, part of something grand, beyond the shtetl, beyond the long, dark, narrow apartment where she was raised after emigration. If only the children would behave.
Time after time she exhorted Leonard Bernstein, a chum of Aunt Shirley’s, to stop banging so loud on the piano in her Philadelphia apartment or they’d all be on the street. The landlord had already complained. Bernstein didn’t stop. My grandmother and her three children were evicted for their noisy love of music.
She often spoke of Israel to me, but rarely of the Holocaust. Certain subjects evoked so much passion that words left her. She’d moan. She’d throw up her hands, Oy. The subject wasn’t forbidden, but language couldn’t grasp it.
There she is; the not-quite-typical Jewish grandmother with her early divorce and secular ways and Oy vey is mir and chicken soup. “He was a Nazi,” Shirley said. And we all know what Nazis are, don’t we? Psychotics in knee-high boots. Killers. And in fact, I have a photograph of Senelis in those tall, dark boots.
But Senelis, I’d been told, hated the Gestapo.
A FEW DAYS after my talk with Aunt Shirley, my mother-in-law came over for lox and bagels. I told her about Senelis. “Oy vey,” she said, and put her head in her hands. Always ready to talk about the persecution of the Jews, she didn’t want to talk about this. It occurred to me that she was afraid it might compromise her love for me, even if she didn’t want it to. Instead we talked how she, like my grandmother Rachel, grew up in a Yiddish-speaking household.
“It’s a beautiful language,” my mother-in-law said.
I’d never thought of Yiddish as beautiful before. The Yiddishisms of my grandmother were delivered with the force and bluntness of jackhammers.
“Take a shayna maiydelah, for example,” my mother-in-law said. “The English—‘a pretty girl’—doesn’t have any of the heart of the Yiddish. The Yiddish has such tenderness to it, and it can’t be translated.”
And because she’s told me, I hear it suddenly, in that particular phrase. A shayna maiydelah. A pretty girl. Brief, that beauty. Of the daughter, the niece, the granddaughter, the childhood friend.
CHAPTER 4
* * *
BAD STUDENT
Finally, another letter from the archives; a thin, this time larger envelope, a small sturdy thread secured around a circle below the flap to seal it closed. Even in my dread, I loved the antiquity of it. Inside was a pay roster with names I would parse through dozens of times in the months to come. On two other pages, in Lithuanian, was a list of file numbers. A brief summary of their contents led me immediately to Google Translate. There, of course, I ended up with a strange mishmash—a telephone operator who heard on this day and has since was … 1941 saugumas … not mentioned … something about my grandfather … shooting … 7,000, 200 … testified … when … gone …
My immediate reaction was not to swiftly find a professional translator but to decide on the spot to learn Lithuanian—a task that would take time, and so was partially a stalling tactic, a division inside me; to want to know, to look away.
When I was very young, when Senelis and my aunts and my mother chattered in the warm holiday home in Hammond, Indiana, and I colored or watched cartoons, their words seemed almost like English to me, ordinary, knowable, at least to a certain degree. Then came a day, another holiday, when I was older, seven perhaps—oh, so grown up. My mother and her sister were in the kitchen. Perhaps my aunt snapped a dish towel, the drying done. Perhaps my mother lit one of her Kent cigarettes. Those details elude me, but what I do remember is that their mother tongue was now utterly incomprehensible to me. I was locked out of it. Whatever capacity I’d had for recall and comprehension vanished. I marked it, for it was one of those moments when a child feels the weight and separateness of a self. My hands, my hair, my thoughts, my wishes, my worries, my—life.
AND SO I FOUND Aldona, an old friend of an old friend, a second-generation Lithuanian. Her real profession was massage therapy, but she had two daughters who had both learned Lithuanian at her kitchen table. When the girls were small, she demanded that only Lithuanian, no matter how clumsily, be spoken at dinner. In six months, both were fluent. Because I had told her that when I was very young, I could understand much of the Lithuanian spoken around me, she had expectations.
Our few meetings took place in a small spare room, several floors up a cranky elevator, the same room where she worked on her clients. Stocky, with unruly short hair, she was warm and smart. In her presence, I felt the weight of her life, as if I were lying on her massage table and she was leaning into me, a forearm pressed hard on my shoulder blade, her knuckles kneading hard on my thigh. On her large desk, she flattened out the pages from the Lithuanian archives. She tried to get me to work at the words. She scolded; she insisted. I fumbled. I immediately wanted to sleep. Black out.
She went through the Lithuanian vowels and asked me to mimic them. I tried, immediately forgot. “Again,” she demanded. I couldn’t. I wanted her to do the work. I’d steered clear of the Lithuanian side of my family for so long that the intimacy of learning the language, of incorporating its sounds (right out of my childhood, right out of my grandfather’s mouth), was more than I could manage.
“Just read it to me,” I asked/begged/demanded.
“It’s your nickel,” she said, sighing, but resigned for the moment.
A fair number of the files from the Lithuanian archives mentioned my grandfather. They confirmed that he was chief of Saugumas in Švenčionys from 1941 to 1943. In the small room over Union Square, my tutor, who was not Jewish, who had Lithuanian family members turned in, so she said, to the Soviets by Jews and killed, read brief notes about a series of shootings aloud—no
context given, just a trace, a notation, and then she stopped. Horror played long and deep across her face, and she looked at me finally and shook her head.
“What is history?” I asked her.
“History is who you’ve lost,” she said.
A SCHEDULING GLITCH forced me to cancel our next lesson. I didn’t go back. Aldona’s kindness and depth, the strictness of her instruction, were too loaded for me, though I’ll brag to my aunts from my mother’s side of the family (whom I’ll soon see for the first time in decades) and to my mother that “I’m learning Lithuanian”—which meant by then that I’d purchased the Pimsleur Lithuanian language tapes, downloaded them onto my phone, listened to Lesson 1 for a minute—“Ar kalbate lietuvių?” (Do you speak Lithuanian?), and then pressed stop.
In February, a call came from my mother. In the clipped, awkward manner she adopts when she mentions her sister to me, she told me that my beautiful Aunt Karina with my shy and direct Aunt Agnes, a onetime amateur bowling champion in Kansas, were both traveling to Martha’s Vineyard for a visit. I immediately asked to come and interview them about Senelis. Permission was granted. And so on a cold Friday, my husband boarded the train with me at Penn Station, and we headed north.
The train rattled up the coast of New York and Connecticut on our way to a bus in Boston, then the ferry to the Vineyard.
Across the aisle, a girl my stepdaughter’s age chattered into her cell phone. The car smelled vaguely of cigarettes, even though they had long been banned in transit. The conductor, his waist too big for his blue suit, swayed up front as we rounded each curve. We reached a familiar shimmer of water on the right—Connecticut, home of my first marriage.
My then-husband and I were welcomed to the area with a small dinner party given by one of his colleagues at the maritime museum where my husband built boats. Seven or eight of us sat sated after a rich meal of cassoulet—the room still redolent of the dense mix of beans, sausage, and meats. The boat talk put my husband at ease. I was silent, a good listener, my strategy when I felt shy.
Bottles of wine caught the light. The other guests, strangers to me but for the few hours of this dinner together, were telling jokes. Someone was interspersing the joking with a discussion of Mike Plant, a world-class sailor from Jamestown, Rhode Island. He and his boat Coyote hadn’t been heard from for two weeks. Overwhelmed by working his boat into seaworthy shape and finding sponsors for a race, Plant hadn’t registered his EPIRB (emergency position-indicating radio beacon). A distress signal from his boat could be picked up, but the signal wouldn’t reveal the vessel it came from or its sailing path. Was it a fatal error? No one knew yet.
The man at our table talking about him, handsome, his face colored by a late-fall tan, was also an experienced sailor and calculated Plant’s odds like a surgeon talking about possible outcomes of a risky case. He spoke quietly, intelligently, and something about his considered speech made the sailor’s fate more real to me. Most of the dinner guests sailed. Their faces were pondering, grim. We sat with candlelight and dessert; somewhere in the ocean, Mike Plant foundered amid salt, cold, storms. Then jokes began again, maybe to dispel the sense of the ominous.
Another dinner guest, gray-haired, a bit corpulent, apropos of nothing it seemed, wisecracked, “How many Jews does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” I’m sure there was a precursor to the joke, but I’ve forgotten it. I don’t remember the punch line.
Did I interrupt the laughter at the end of the joke? I don’t think so. I draw a blank when I try to recall the rest of the dinner party. I’m like my mother in this way; memories of my own cowardice or moral failure can immediately become vague. What I do remember is that eventually I signaled to my husband that it was time to go. I was disgusted. The person who’d made the joke was intelligent, educated.
I was stupid and naive, caught out. On the way home my husband, Seattle born, from a family of Baptists and Protestants, joined me in condemning the crudity. In the dark of his truck that always smelled vaguely of the cigarettes I railed at him for smoking (nicotine yellowed the windshield), reminiscent of all the cigarettes I sucked on before I quit, I leaned against the passenger door. I thought of Mike Plant holding on to a bit of planking, or the grip handles of an inflatable raft, told myself I was lucky to be settled in a marriage, a life ahead of us in a beautiful place, even if a few people said ugly things there.
ON THE TRAIN, I pressed my forehead against the window as if I might see, in passing on the station platform, one of the kind, elderly members of a historical society (“We’re the hysterical society,” the woman had joked with me early on) whose property my husband and I lived on and cared for. All the society members were deeply committed to the preservation of local history; many had family ties to the region that went back centuries.
My father was still alive when I lived there. The year of that dinner party and the lightbulb joke, my Jewish grandmother was 103 years old and still kept her own house in Chilmark. I could call her on the phone, hear her voice, the little cough at the beginning of the call, the clipped bit of British still there—Darling.
The local Mashantucket Pequots hadn’t broken ground yet on the casino that would change the night sky into a permanent fluorescence. I loved the old stolen farms on land that had once been the domain of the tribe. North of Mystic, where the historical society was, sugar maples flared orange in the fall. A huge mulberry sailed green into summer. A cold millstream ran under our house. Each night dusk quieted the world.
Once a week I ran a dustrag through the small genealogical library on the first floor of the old house we cared for. Before the house was given over to the town, the last family inhabitant had lived there alone, wan, bespectacled, a local cultivator of the arts. The cavernous attic had numerous middling paintings he had done, but among them, stashed away in rolls in the eaves, were quick and lovely sketches of naked young men. I periodically laid them out flat and wondered. They made me melancholy, made me think of hidden life, hidden desire.
The hopeful faces of far-flung library visitors with Maryland and Florida even California license plates who tapped on the door, welcomed by the docent librarian, mystified me. To drive all this way to put your finger on a line in a ledger—such-and-such relative died of pig fever, great-grandfather so-and-so sold a barn. Why? I picked up broken robin’s eggs, pale blue in the grass. I made the rash mistake of pulling, from gaps in the front stone wall, some kind of precious historical, almost extinct, vegetation I’d taken for weeds encouraging cracks in the granite. I was forgiven.
AS THE TRAIN moved beyond my old life, I thought of my current husband’s first mother-in-law, Grace, who loved travel of any kind and was a committed genealogist. We had met at her eighty-eighth birthday party in a Turkish restaurant, belly dancers and all, six years after her own daughter’s death from colon cancer. A Lithuanian Jew, she put a remarkably unlined hand against my cheek.
“You have a hamish face, dear. Do you know what that means?”
The Yiddish escaped me.
“It means familiar,” she said.
Two years later, Grace would phone my mother to ask for permission to be my “other mother.” My mother agreed.
Yet even when Grace, whom I loved, tried to interest me in all the Litvak history and genealogy she’d immersed herself in over decades, I could only pretend to care. Her stack of photographs, shtetl histories, mini-biographies of relatives from Vilna—the Jerusalem of Lithuania—laid out carefully for me in her small, nearby studio apartment, pained me. “I’m a speed reader,” I told her, as I pretended to zip through what it had taken her decades to assemble.
Her Lithuania had nothing to do with me then. I was like my Jewish grandmother: repudiating, turning away from. Looking forward instead of back.
MY HUSBAND SHIFTED in his seat, tall, his legs stretched out awkwardly, half in the aisle. I watched him doze. He’s an investigative journalist. I thought about questions he has and hasn’t asked me, and I him. What we keep from each other. Wha
t we reveal.
Mike Plant’s boat was found finally. Capsized. The hull was painted black, making it hard to pick out from the dark swells. My Jewish grandmother lived on until my second year in Connecticut. At four o’clock one morning the call came; she had had a stroke the week before and for the first time in her life (excluding childbirth) been admitted to the hospital.
My first husband and I tried every fertility treatment available to conceive a child together, but could not. My second husband, asleep beside me on the train heading to Boston, adopted, with his first wife Lisa, a girl from China, my beautiful stepdaughter; my shayna maiydela.
CHAPTER 5
* * *
IT’S OPRAH’S FAULT
You may encounter reluctant witnesses. Attempt to gain their cooperation by appealing to their sense of civic responsibility … At this stage of the investigation, you cannot be certain of anyone’s degree of involvement or knowledge of the crime.
—HOMICIDE INVESTIGATION STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURES
* * *
On the hulking ferry from Woods Hole to Vineyard Haven, my husband went out onto the upper deck while I stayed below, away from the wind and cold, though the stink of fuel wafted through the grimy seating area. Car alarms kept going off, loud, annoying. A few islanders sat behind me and tried to guess the make of the car from the sound of the alarm.
