On Work and Freedom: For Holocaust Remembrance Day and Durban II
Apr 22nd, 2009
My amazing grandmother, Esther Klein, is turning 91 next month. She was in her mid-twenties when she was liberated by the Swedish Red Cross from an aimless, endless transport, after having spent several nearly lethal winter weeks in Ravensbrueck. Before that, she'd "worked" for several months in Auschwitz, after having lived for a very short time, along with her elderly parents, in a temporary tent city near her hometown of Seredna, constructed right along the railroad tracks, the better for the Jews to wait for their "ride."
Before that, Esther Herskovitz was a bright, active young woman with bad hay fever, living near the Czech border in a small town in a big house with an orchard and a vineyard and a large, warm family, all of which have since vanished, literally, into thin air. Except the allergies… and my grandmother.
Leviticus 10:1-3
Brother,
these rules will be the death of us:
this “how to please me”
this tutorial of the soul.
How can passion
wear a girdle?
Answer questions?
Wash?
Where is the sacrifice
in this ritual
if our flesh isn’t in it?
Today there are no signatures. I sign all my e-mails “S”, and it seems to be good enough. I have corresponded for months with people whose voices I have never heard. I do not know if they have a quick East Coast way of catching your sentences before you say them, or if they’re Midwesterners who listen until you’re well past done, and you’re waiting and waiting for them to say something.
I do not know these things because all the lines and words and sentences come out the same in my inbox, with no spaces or pauses or interrupted syllables, no heavy smoker’s timbre, no just-out-of-grad-school deliberateness. I cannot hear or feel. I know only what passes through the spell check.
Our Lady of Compromise
- at the Corner of
Stability and Main -
invites you to a
Sisterhood Brunch
in Honor of
Everyone Being the Same.
Of course, there was no way around it. I was going to have to read The Book. Not just because I am one of those hopeless voyeurs of pop culture - - long after I've popped, and despite being an outspoken literary…well…snob. And not just because I AM sort of a vampire myself, feeding on the lives and experiences of others to bring energy to my work. (Hopefully, the victims feel no pain.)
I was going to read The Book because it was about young women and desire, about unattainable longing. About wanting something that's bad for you but wanting it anyway. It was about the birth of self-knowledge, when you realize you have the power to evoke something crazy and wonderful in someone else. It was about the nostalgia of discovery.
Motherhood, like all good dwellings, comes with a basement, by which I mean a place to store the boxes of things which make us sad (or scared) to look at, or which simply crowd the main floor. We don't unpack them, for the most part. Instead we appear generally preoccupied, until we remember not to, like when our son says, "Look! I drew you smiling!" as if this were a terrific artistic leap on his part.
What's in my boxes?
The Social Well
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