My Romanian grandmother used to ask a riddle. How does the recipe for Romanian cake begin? The answer is: Steal two eggs. That is, improvise. At a moment when you’re not sure what to do, it’s a useful thing to remember. Fake it. Go through the motions. Pretend you know what you’re doing and sometimes it turns out that you really do. I got up, took back the talking stick and escorted the boy over to his mother; then I went back to the stool and stood there clutching the talking stick. And as I held it, I finally realized its deep ancient purpose: it stands for protection, a kind of guarantee that the host will keep life at a certain distance while the stories are being told. My grandmother’s saying: Once something happened. If it hadn’t happened, how I could tell you about it? flashed through my mind. Stories mark the “happened somethings” that are the most memorable and valuable in our lives. A woman gives birth, and it’s the most astounding story in the world; but we don’t expect her to tell it while it’s happening. The story’s for afterwards, when she draws a frame of memory and language around the miraculous event. The little boy’s ending broke that frame; it was a cri de coeur that came too directly from the heart of a five-year-old’s worst nightmare. As listeners, we didn’t feel embarrassed. We felt betrayed.
Remembering my grandmother, I thought about where such terrible stories come from and why we tell them. In her family just about everyone and everything disappeared, thanks to fascists and fate, down the coldest, darkest, most lost hole humanity ever fell into. Stories were almost all she brought over from Europe—and a pair of silver candlesticks that now sit on our dining-room table. I grew up feeling responsible for keeping alive the stories of people I never had a chance to meet.
At that point I knew what had to be done. Holding the talking stick, a host’s antenna for the world’s hardest-to-tell stories, I said to my tribe: “We’ve just heard the essence of all fairy tales: I’m lost! Find me! It is the oldest story ever told, and our young friend gave it to us straight from the source. I thank him for telling it. Now, who has the next story?” My own family history had reminded me that, even if the stories are almost impossible to tell or hear, we must keep listening. Only if we listen can the sanctuary be rebuilt, and the stories continue.
STORIES FOR THE CROSSROADS
“Well,” she concluded one afternoon, “I have no money to leave to my grandchildren. My stories are my wealth.”
YUKON ELDER ANGELA SIDNEY,
Life Lived Like a Story
PEOPLE OFTEN TELL ME they didn’t hear any stories when they were young, because, they say, their families were too busy or too shy, or simply didn’t remember much. But when I, ever curious, ask a few questions, they invariably think of a story, then another and another. Everybody grows up surrounded by a web of narrative. These include the little pieces of story that spice up everyday conversation, and the more “official” anecdotes and special sayings that make up each family’s body of oral lore. It is true that these are rarely thought of or even referred to as formal “stories.” Mostly, they float, barely noticed, through our daily talk and only long afterwards do we realize we’ve been hearing and unconsciously collecting them all along.
Some families are better than others at keeping their stories alive. My friend Grace Nostbakken grew up in rural Saskatchewan with five brothers and sisters, sharing a room on the second floor of a farmhouse that got so cold in the winter that they could keep a side of beef frozen in the room next to theirs. Now living all over Canada, they share a common e-mail mailbox; when one of them posts a family memory, the others chime in with their own versions. Thus electronics help a farflung family re-collect their precious history. My cousin Mark, a bridge engineer living in Sacramento, California, publishes a four-page weekly family magazine. It is a remarkable chronicle of the lives of the subscribers, of which there are about ten. To keep getting the magazine (which comes by post, not e-mail) we have to send in articles about our lives. Deaths, bar mitzvahs, weddings, adventures at work, children’s mishaps and triumphs—all of this is faithfully and lovingly reported within our own small network of readers and writers.
Our stories and sayings make a frame within which children make sense of their place in the world. Through often-repeated stories a family remembers its history, moral stance, ability to laugh at itself, moments of heroism and triumphs of survival. Growing up, we hear these little stories and fragments of memory all the time and don’t especially value them; later, we treasure them. They are how we know our passage through life has been seen, remembered and valued.
I grew up in a crossroads family, the only child of an American father and Romanian mother. If I still spoke the languages my grandparents knew, I’d be able to tell stories in French, Romanian, Turkish, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, German, Polish, Swedish, Yiddish and Japanese. Unfortunately, except for French and English, this rich heritage didn’t survive in the New World.
Our house was haunted by the deaths and dispersals of my mother’s Romanian-Jewish family during the war. Her father had been kicked out of Romania by the fascists, and he spent the war years in Detroit, Michigan, separated from his wife and only child. Her extended family wound up scattered around the globe in São Paulo, Tel Aviv, Paris, Bucharest, St. Louis and Detroit. On my father’s side, little was known or told about our ancestry. He knew his mother had escaped pogroms in Russia, grown up in Sweden, and wound up in the United States. His father had come from Poland.
As a child, I grew up with big ears and a closed mouth, doing more listening than talking. Some of my parents’ closest friends had been in the concentration camps, but they said almost nothing about their experiences—at least when a child was in the room. I became adept at listening to clues and hints and story-fragments of lost lives and vanished families. I grew up as a war-haunted American kid in the fifties, tuned to a story frequency and feeling that if I lost the signal in the static entire Jewish villages would suffer a second disappearance. The boy Mowgli, in Kipling’s Jungle Book, was raised by wolves and humans, and his words could have been mine: “My heart is heavy with the things that I do not understand.” I knew the feeling.
We are born into houses made of brick and wood. We are also born into houses made of stories, memories and sayings. The stories kept alive in families mark the crossroads of past, present and future. They are how ancestors encounter their descendants, they transform the memory of past terrors and triumphs into sources of courage for following generations, they confirm one’s place in the intimate network of one’s relatives and in the wider realm of the community.
My mother’s father, Nathan Louis Paves, was my chief storyteller. I could always count on him for a good anecdote. He’d led an adventurous life and he liked to talk about it. One story I liked to hear over and over again concerned an incident with a bully. It happened when my grandfather was about five years old. A big, mean kid named Vasily accosted him on the sidewalk. Vasily said, “Hey, Nick, wanna learn a new word?” My grandpa did, but the word he heard was one he didn’t know. Turns out, it was one of the worst words in the Romanian language. When he told Vasily he didn’t know what it meant, the bully sneered, “Why don’t you go and ask your mommy?” He did, and was promptly referred to his father. When he said the bad word aloud, his father slapped him. He told me it wasn’t a hard slap, but he wasn’t used to getting slapped at all, so it felt pretty bad. He cried; then asked his father, “Why did you slap me?”
“Because you said a very naughty word. Anybody who uses language like that in this house gets slapped.”
“But, Daddy, I didn’t know it was a bad word,” he said, “Vasily told it to me and said I should ask Mommy what it meant.”
“Ah,” said his father, who was, despite the slap, an intelligent and kindly man, “in that case, the slap is not for you. I gave it to you so you can give it back to Vasily. That slap belongs to him!”
My grandfather felt better. He went outside, found Vasily, and gave the slap back as hard as he could. He told me the bully never bothered him aga
in. (Strangely enough, there is a Hodja story with a similar plot. As a child, I was rather pleased to discover that my grandfather and Hodja Nasrudin had some things in common.)
When he was a young man, my grandfather left Romania to study engineering in Paris. While there, to my amazement, he belonged to a club called the Society for the Prevention of Seasickness, which believed that strenuous exercise with Indian barbells was one of the best preventative methods available. He used to demonstrate these exercises with a pair of barbells he kept in his room at the Jewish Home for the Aged, in Detroit. As he swung them wildly around his head, I’d duck and pray nobody got hurt, and I’d listen as my barbell-waving grandfather told me stories of his life.
From Paris he went to Japan, where he helped build the first skyscrapers. He added Japanese to the languages he already spoke: French, Romanian, Latin, Yiddish, Hebrew. Once, when he’d turned his ankle on the streetcar tracks, they brought a blind bone-setter to help him. In Japan, they explained, the blind were considered to have the gift of healing. My grandfather was impressed by the way the Japanese saw a disability as a gift. (Another Japanese custom he appreciated was mixed bathhouses—my grandfather liked women).
From Japan, he moved to San Francisco and got a job laying out power lines in the high Sierra. I, a skinny, bespectacled, middle-class kid in the suburbs of 1950s Detroit, loved to hear about how my irascible, fiery Romanian grandpa rode a mule in the mountains of California.
When he was ready to get married, he wrote to his mother back in the old country asking her to find him a suitable wife. The candidate should meet three conditions. He requested that she be beautiful, have a good singing voice, and come from a port city. The reason for this last, rather unusual stipulation was that he expected a woman raised in a port city to have a certain worldly wisdom, and not be merely a sheltered, over-refined Eastern European bourgeoise.
Such a miracle woman was found. My grandmother Fanny was beautiful, gracious, unaffected, cultured, a marvellous singer, an amateur painter and an inveterate journal-keeper; and she happened to come from the greatest port in the history of the world—Constantinople (once Byzantium, now Istanbul). He went home to Romania, married, had an only child, and did fairly well trading with Palestine. Then the fascists came to power; on the eve of the war, they kicked him out of the country. He had to leave his wife and ten-year-old daughter behind. He didn’t see them again for seven years.
Even though he was an engineer specializing in concrete, he was open to the possibility of supernatural experiences. When he was living in San Francisco, he felt very lonely and missed his family in Romania. One night in a dream he saw his grandfather walking towards him, his body filled with light. His radiant grandfather spoke to him, and said, “I’ve come to say goodbye. I love you very much. Don’t be sad now—your life will get much better.” So saying, he disappeared. In the morning my grandfather remembered his dream. He knew his grandfather had emigrated to the United States several years before and was living in St. Louis, Missouri, but he didn’t have his address. He wanted very much to get in touch with him after his dream, but he didn’t know how. He wrote a letter to Romania asking how his grandfather was, and where he could reach him. It was several weeks before he had a reply. The letter from home contained sad news. His grandfather had died a few weeks before. My grandfather remembered his dream and checked in his diary. To his amazement, his grandfather had died on the same day he’d had his dream.
My grandpa was a man of science, an engineer and an amateur mathematician. Yet after this experience he also understood that life had mysteries that science couldn’t fathom. There was a life of the spirit as undeniably real as the facts, figures and equations he used in his work. When he wanted to teach me his belief, he drew the mathematical sign for infinity—a horizontal figure eight—and explained that every creature possessed something infinite within them, something that could never die.
He’s gone now, and the grandfather he dreamed of died more than a hundred years ago. Only the stories remain.
My parents both have written brief memoirs. Reading them, I’m struck by how the stories I heard as a child have stayed with me. The themes of memory, survival, risktaking and abandonment run through my family lore. When I think about the stories I choose to tell, they often explore similar themes.
Here is a story from the memoir written by my mother, Palomba Paves-Yashinsky:
Winter 1945: It is 2:00 A.M. and a sudden sharp noise wakes us. A Jeep drives into our courtyard, its headlights flooding with a sinister white light our bedroom window; the Jeep drives up and stops right at our front door. We jump out of bed terrified. My mother lifts a corner of the curtain, very carefully. She turns pale, she whispers: “It’s a Russian army vehicle! What do they want here, in the middle of the night? God help us! Quick,” she tells me, “go hide in the kitchen!”
The doorbell rings; I run in the dark and hide. My mother hesitates; a loud knocking on the door, then a man talking in Russian. My mother, a housecoat hastily thrown about her, slowly opens the door and a Russian officer and his orderly walk in; I am peeking through the kitchen door, which has a small window. I don’t dare move. The Russian officer explains through his gestures that he and his orderly need a place to sleep overnight, they have been assigned to our flat. My mother, terror in her eyes, points to the only bed we have; she begins to prepare sheets and pillowcases for the officer; the orderly will sleep on a mattress on the dining-room floor. Like a sleepwalker, my mother moves to make room for the two men; her hands are shaking. They watch her. I observe them, they do not look brutal; in fact, they show a certain embarrassment, almost a shyness at having erupted into our life in this way, in the middle of the night.
And then, suddenly, the officer says to my mother in Yiddish: “Ich bin ein Yid! My name is Moishe Abramovitch! Do not be afraid!” My mother, disbelief and wonder on her face, walks to him and shakes his hand. “You are Jewish?!” She is relieved, no longer scared. “My dear, you may come in—the Russian officer is Jewish,” she calls to me. And, a smile on her face, she serves him and his orderly tea and biscuits; they can stay, we feel safe, he is our brother, despite his forbidding foreign uniform.
Her stories of a child’s terror, courage and liberation are part of my family heritage. From my American father, Jack Yashinsky, I heard stories about life in the submarine corps:
I got into a bit of trouble at submarine school by altering a card that was issued to my group directing us to a mess hall that was a considerable distance from where we took classes. There was a closer mess hall, so practically the whole class changed the card to be able to use the closer one. The training officer got wind of what had happened and announced that he was going to collect the cards in order to inspect them. Everyone got busy changing the location of the mess hall on their card by erasing; I thought that it would be so obvious that the cards had been tampered with that I just turned mine in as it was; I convinced my friend, Frank Yannett, to do the same. Our reward for being honest was thirty days of extra duty polishing floors after training hours. We had to appear before a “Captain’s Mast” (a procedure for meting out punishment). The presiding officer—I think he was Admiral Nimitz’s son—intimated that the reason for our misbehaviour was fear of being assigned to a sub after our training. I was so offended by his remark that I said he could assign me to a sub that was in dry dock, the USS Boarfish, but he just smiled and gave us the extra duty. The USS Boarfish was the last sub to be lost during the war.
I was put ashore on muddy Samar [in the Philippines] to wait for assignment to the submarine base up at Subic Bay. It was the rainy season and the whole island was one big mudhole. We were put in tents and told to stake out an army cot to set up housekeeping. All there was were the cots. No blankets, no mosquito netting, not a single dry surface to put anything on. It was miserable. What a place to spend your birthday in, I thought. My eighteenth was coming up and I was feeling down about being away from home in such a godforsaken place.
June 14 rolled around and I turned eighteen. I wanted to get a present for my birthday just to cheer myself up. What I needed was a pair of boots. The Navy had only issued me standard black oxfords back in the States, and the mud on Samar was more than ankle-deep. There was an airstrip on the island, not far from my camp. I decided to go to the quartermaster depot there to see if I could talk somebody into giving me a pair of jungle boots. Well, the Airforce QM rating wasn’t about to part with any boots for a woebegone sailor—he told me to get lost. But I must have looked really woebegone, because he called me back and asked me why I thought he should give me them. When I told him it was my birthday he laughed, reached under the counter, and tossed me a pair. I tried them on. They fit. And they really cheered me up.
As I was slogging back to the camp, I saw a file of enemy soldiers being led off somewhere. They didn’t look very dangerous to me. They were all kind of small and looked as unhappy as I had before the boots.
I spent the following days out at the airstrip watching the B24s and B29s fly in from their bombing raids. A lot of them were shot up, with big holes in the wings and fuselage. A few of them couldn’t use their flaps and would go off the end of the strip into the drink. I remember trying to get some of the pilots to take me along on a raid. They wouldn’t do it. They thought I was crazy.
I spent a year in Subic Bay, mostly working in the radio shack; in fact, I was on duty the day a message came in announcing that a bomb with the equivalent of twenty tons of TNT had been dropped on Hiroshima; a few days later, another bomb was dropped on Nagasaki and a few days after that the Japanese surrendered. A few months after I had arrived on the sub base, I was resting on my cot in the barracks when I heard the screen door slam and a voice asking if there was a Yashinsky somewhere. The voice belonged to my oldest brother, Ben, who was in the Army medical corps and had been assigned to the Pacific theatre after having spent a couple of years in the Atlantic theatre aboard a troop ship ferrying wounded soldiers back to the States. I didn’t know he was anywhere near Subic Bay; but he had been assigned to duty in Manila and found out, I don’t know how, that I was not far away. I managed to get a short leave of absence and went up to Manila where we spent a few days together. By the war’s end, my mother had four sons on active duty in different parts of the world.
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