Grandpa died when I was three. We went by train to Detroit to fetch him home for the burial and to take Grandma back with us. I never asked about it. I did not have the right questions. Did we go on a long echoing train ride in the tubular dark with lights like mislaid stars going off and on when I was a very little girl? My nose pressed hard against the cold window, Edie warm and silent beside me, Harry across the aisle sandwiched between Mom and Dad. In the growing up years, I often dreamt of dark trains racing through the night, hearing the echo of my cries—blindly reaching for my sister. Once a year on the anniversary of my grandfather’s death we visited his grave. Shoulder to shoulder and elbow to elbow in a cramped car packed like sardines We drove for many eons on an endless highway shouldered by vivid fall foliage—complaining and bickering endlessly. Grandma crowded in the rumble seat with us drying her red rimmed eyes coming and going. At the cemetery we waited gracelessly in the car or standing by the car door while Celia found her way through the granite markers with the mysterious stones perched on the top prostrated herself on the grassy mound in front of the one marked with Grandpa’s name and wailed in a deep and primitive way. We watched them go as they got smaller and smaller disappearing through a big black scrolled iron gate and reappearing again over the little grassy knoll that separated us from the inconsolable small woman who didn’t seem to belong to us anymore. We didn’t talk much about death, during these post holocaust years imagining heaven as a separate world where everything was the same as here but different because God and the angels were there and you got everything you desired. We didn’t dare talk about death above a whisper—lest you wake up the malach hamavet (the angel of death.) By the same token you never paid or received compliments to your family without a lot of spitting (pttoo, pttoo) or saying kinahora (to ward off the evil eye.) If things were going too well, if life was too good, if the bride was too beautiful the Cossacks and the Nazis were just around the corner. Six—million Jews—gone I heard about “the camps” in the third grade at the Yeshiva of Central Queens alluding to some of our teachers who looked gray and had numbers on their arms and were missing fingers. I didn’t visit a cemetery or attend a funeral until my father’s death in 1965. Provincetown, summer 2022/2025
Hiding Out