By Jill Salberg, Ph.D.
For many first and second generation American Jews the Holocaust stands as the defining event in their lives. Much like the list recited at Yom Kippur: Who escaped, who didn't, who went to Palestine, who to South America, who was hidden, who was revealed. The list could go on and on but the fundamental event defines it all: who lived and who died. For me the story is more ephemeral, about what was lost, sacrificed in order to live. And this story started thirty years before, while the seeds of the Shoah were growing, during the resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe. This era brought thousands of Jewish immigrants to America while the doors still remained opened. I always felt I was one of the fortunate ones, my grandparents left long before Hitler, long before an Anschluss, a final solution. I have only begun to fully comprehend that their good fortune was mixed with great separations, hardships and loss.
Marianne Hirsch (1997) has coined the term "postmemories" based on her research on children of Holocaust survivors and survivors of other traumas. She defines postmemories as deferred effects on persons or even communities who are at least one generation removed from the actual trauma. In American Imago Fall 2002 she states, "Children of refugees inherit their parents' knowledge of the fragility of place, their suspicion of the notion of home." She starts the essay with a quote from "Buried Homeland" by Aharon Appelfeld: "Czernovitz expelled its Jews, and so did Vienna, Prague, Budapest, and Lemberg. Now these cities live without Jews, and their few descendents, scattered through the world, carry memory like a wonderful gift and a relentless curse."
This memory becomes the fabric of nostalgic longing, which parents then relate to their children about "the old country" and grandchildren hear fragments about over family dinners. In "The Future of Nostalgia" Svetlana Boym suggests that, "Nostalgia (from nostos-return home, and algia-longing) is a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed. Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one's own fantasy". My grandparents left Europe at young ages, under difficult circumstances. For them America was considered a better life and longing for the old life was unacceptable, unthinkable. Instead it was not thought about and couldn't be mourned. But that past life gave colors to stories and tales, which became part of my family myth.
This essay in many ways represents my beginning attempts to come to terms with experiences and memories, which were never clearly formulated or stated in my family. They are my grandparent's gifts, curses, hidden memories and, ultimately, their legacy. They have crossed the Atlantic packed in plain wrapping, carried ashore at Ellis Island, to the Lower East Side and transmitted from person to person, generation to generation.
Where Is This Place
Where is this place whose name I don't know? My grandfather said, "I came from Prussia", but I thought he was Polish. He arrived in America when he was 18, before the First World War. "One day I had a vision in Prussia. The vision was that life was over in Europe and that life is in America". I thought this sounded so mystical, a vision. What kind of place is it that one can have "visions"? He, like so many others, worked countless hours just to save enough money for the steerage fare to sail to America, the "Goldene Medina". He told me very little about the old country, as if life really started upon landing here and following his dream. He was the first of his family to come here. He left his parents, many sisters and brothers and his memories.
"Do you remember seeing the Statue of Liberty?" I asked. "Yes, yes, we all knew about it back in Europe". I thought he would've had more of a reaction, more to say. Was she not a vision? Upon arriving he immediately got a room in a boardinghouse on the lower east side of Manhattan with all the other immigrants scrambling for work and a better life. He had already worked on a sewing machine back in Europe and so easily got a job in a sweatshop, working long hours. "In the morning I would stop at one place, three cents for a roll with meat drippings, of course you paid more for the meat. I paid for the room by the week. I had to be careful, I was saving for my own business". But I never heard the name of his town, his shtetl. Where was it, near Warsaw, near Germany, how will I ever find it without a clue? I hear his voice saying to me life was over for me there, why do you need a name? Hitler destroyed what I left, why does it matter?
He had a "rags to riches" story, which he loved to tell me. Mostly I wanted to hear about the dreams, the elusiveness of his life. What did the shtetl look like? I have no idea, although I now have seen countless photos of shtetls throughout Poland and the Pale of Settlement but not one photo has his face, or his family. Were you happy then? Who thought about such things, everyone worked, I went to Cheder until I was 9 then to work to help the family. That was life then, we didn't ask such foolishness. But somewhere, if life was over in Europe you must have felt something akin to loss, need, desire and some belief that it was to be found elsewhere. How else could you collect the inner resources to leave it all behind and strike out alone, uncertain of ever seeing your family again? He would probably shrug, say something like I planned on being a very rich man, I was going to make it happen for me but I also planned to bring my mother and sisters over. How could I know they wouldn't leave? I even went back before Hitler invaded and pleaded with them, gave them money, Ach. It's done.
My grandfather's life here followed a path, one that he worked hard on. He workedand saved money to start a business with "two brothers". It was the time of World War I and this business got an army contract to make pants. The two brothers were not related to my grandfather and drew lines of allegiance with my grandfather on the outside. He said they stole his money, two years of scrimping, going without in order to save. He told me he was so depressed he thought about committing suicide. "They stole not just my money but also my dreams".
So Papa, what place is of your dreams? Oh that is easy, it's my home in the Catskills, in Liberty. He told me that when he worked his way up to being a foreman in the sweatshop he, like all the other foremen, received two weeks paid vacation in the Catskills. This was sheer delight for him. He said the countryside so reminded him of home, hills and mountains green and lush, no concrete or buildings like the city and fresh lakes everywhere. He would lie in the sun and swim nude in the lakes, just like he had back home. I have asked Polish people I meet now in my life if there is a part of Poland with lakes and green mountains. I am told there is, it is located in the northern part of the country near Germany. Were you dreaming of home Papa?
He promised himself when he became rich he would build a home here. And that is what he did. After the war in Europe was over he began buying land and building and rebuilding homes. The original house he bought was rebuilt twice. The first stable, for he learned to ride horses and owned a few, later became a home for my uncle. My mother's house was built while she was pregnant with me. I partly grew up in this house, summers and vacations, and after college often would go to visit and stay. I found myself there, both in the encounters with the luscious countryside, the horses, the freedom from parents, and in the dialogues with him, with Papa Max. He recognized my mind and respected my choices. While in graduate school he wanted to understand my work as a psychologist and therapist and said to me, "So the meshuganas, they lie down on the couch and cry to you?" I said "Yes, something like that".
But he also knew that I loved this home and place as much as he did. On the top of the stable he built a pigeon "house". "Once when I went to Warsaw I saw that all the wealthy people, they had on the roofs of their homes the most beautiful doves. I knew that when I had such a home I would have these birds". It is such an idiosyncratic detail for him to have noticed, the doves and their houses on the top of the roofs of the rich. It is odd - for it means he did not notice the people - but strangely appealing to me. I know for him to have noticed this bit he must have been looking upward, upward beyond the doors and windows of the house, beyond street level towards the sky. And I can see him doing that, standing on a street, drinking in every single piece he was seeing as if part of the air he breathed, sketching it all out in his mind, this house, this roof, this life.
In many ways picturing him this way captures a snapshot of his movement, his motion in life was never just forward, certainly not backward as many of us can be vacillating on the fence of ambivalence. He moved forward looking up towards his dreams, up and never down and always imagining. And he moved with a plan, a detailed drawing in his mind of what he wanted. In the living room of his home in Liberty he bought and had installed a white marble fireplace mantel, all beautifully and ornately carved. It stood pristinely on the wall, a symbol of wealth, of class and of status. If he had peered into a window in a fancy home in Warsaw this is the kind of piece he might have seen, or maybe just imagined. The only thing, which belied all of this, was that there was no true fireplace, no real hearth, and no stone or brick chimney. Where the logs should be burning was a make-believe fire "light" turned on and off with a switch. Strangely mannered, empty and sad is a marble fireplace with no place for the fire. Maybe that's what happens when your eye is on the edifice and not on the people.
I don't know if the pigeon house he later built on top of the horse stables replicated in any way the ones he had seen in Warsaw. I don't even remember his building this, only of his taking me up to visit the pigeons. We would be driving around the property in a golf cart, his preferred mode of transportation once he was in his 80's and arthritis made extensive walking painful. We would enter on top of the stables, a building built into a sloping part of the property so the two levels, entered from above or below and from west or east placed you either into the stables directly or the hayloft above. Past the hayloft lies the narrow, steep ladder like stairs to the pigeon coop. We would climb up together and he would open the door to this attic like room where a flurry of feathers, squawking noise and a distinct odor of pigeon would smack you in the face. The floors and walls were sheets of aluminum and made a funny tinny sound as our feet moved across the floor. Some pigeons would immediately fly out through the portal at the tippy top of the coop roof. Many would stay settled on their nests, guarding their eggs. Most of the birds were white, my grandfather's attempt to replicate doves, but a few "strangers" had joined this house over the years and their gray colored offspring could be seen amongst the flock. "You see these birds", he would say to me as he walked around, "they are families, but sometimes a bird goes to the wrong nest; maybe by accident, maybe a troublemaker". These birds obviously knew my grandfather and his tricks. He would walk around investigating and making decisions about who belonged where. I would ask why he had to move the birds, especially if they were warming their eggs but he would insist that these families were mixed up and he knew who belonged with whom. I thought this patriarchal omniscience was funnily absurd; how could he possibly know and know better than the birds!
But that was the tenacity of his sense of mind, the strength of his will. These birds were to do his bidding, follow his rule or escape through the roof hatch to freedom. But freedom meant leaving behind the family. My grandfather's countless re-livings, doings and undoing, endless attempts of making it all work out only to make it all happen the same way, somebody stays on a nest and somebody has to fly away. If only life were that easy, if only we had the power, the ability to rearrange our families, our circumstances. Do homing pigeons always come home? What if they don't, what if they get lost, what if they go to the wrong home?
He died when I was thirty-seven years old. The family held on to the property for a while but many members didn't use it, preferring to go other places. Times had changed and tastes had changed. Most of my extended family didn't get along well enough, if at all, to make family time viable there. How did this happen? His desire, his dream became their burden, their loss. It was sold.
This was quite a few years ago and it was then sold again. This time it was sold to a family of cousins, siblings and their children who love it. I recently took my family to visit, perhaps as a way to say goodbye again. I walked along the roads and grass that I had walked on thousands of times. The grass was as green as ever, the rolling hills filled with trees looked so inviting. I inhaled that wonderful air. It smelled so good there. Only the misted over drizzly day made it hard to keep walking. It felt so familiar and yet surreal, as if I was in a dream only I was awake in this dream. I actually slapped my arm to see whether I was dreaming or awake. How could I be here, on this paved road, near my favorite lilac bush, in my home, my old room and yet not my home? How could I return and not get to stay? And did my grandfather ever dream of Prussia this way; as a memory so embedded in one's senses that you smell, taste, touch it but it eludes your grasp only to disappear in the mist of morning light?
This new family seems to have what my grandfather would have wanted, a family that really enjoys being together. They have undertaken rebuilding the homes, the stables and the property. Just like my grandfather, busy at work building the place. On the higher plane of land in front of hayloft/stable entrance they have built a large in ground swimming pool. At one end is a big slide and all around the pool are chairs and lounges. They tell me they plan on totally refurbishing the stables. They envision a huge family room with a large big screen TV and pool table and at the other end a big working kitchen and dining table. They plan on this building being the "common" house where everyone will hang out, have big family meals together and spend time. The pigeon coop will be left as attic space, no longer needed to house lost families. This new family is turning the place into a refuge and oasis, a place for family to return to and thrive from each other. My grandfather loved this place. He loved his family. Only he didn't know how to build what had to be left behind.
Thoughts on Loss
I have returned to my own memories and thoughts for not only a self-reflective visit but as a further way to understand the "uncanniness" of intergenerational transmission of thoughts and feelings, of loss. My grandparents died in 1989, four months apart as many couples do who have spent lives living bound up with each other. Although the death of my grandparents is not recent in time I have known that I wanted to reflectively think about their lives and stories. They were interesting, colorful people who left their legacy of stories with me. I hadn't realized the full extent of what was embedded in their stories and my own, until now.
I have specifically sought to look at how "postmemories" are an example of transgenerational transmission of trauma, specifically traumatic loss. This concept suggests that there is an unconscious means through which people communicate profoundly felt and yet unverbalized feelings and experiences to those closest to them. Hirsch & Spitzer (2002) further define "postmemory" as "a mediated relation to (in Stefan Zweig's phrase) a lost "world of yesterday" that they themselves had inherited from parents and grandparents . . ." Although my grandfather would often talk with me about his life in Europe and here in America I hadn't realized fully the threads and weaves in his stories about his attempts to create a new life for himself and his growing family. I had always thought of him as one of those tough peasant stock from the old country who weathered a great deal to achieve one of the American dreams of a better life. He built a business and with that built and rebuilt homes for his children and their children.
This external scaffolding distracted one from knowing how great the sacrifice was on his part in order for this kind of life to happen. I have come to realize that in some way what he couldn't build was the connective glue of family. That was what he had lost in the coming to America. His sense of family had been torn apart and his mother and sisters refusal to leave Europe prior to the Holocaust reinforced the breach. He could only try to recreate this externally by owning "homing" pigeons, birds who by instinct always know to fly home. Even his attempt to reconfigure "pigeon families" reveals the deep longing for both "a" home and the "right" home configuration which scar tissue forms over but never fully heals.
Hirsch (2002) speaks of the fragility of place that then is transmitted to the next generation without having experienced this directly. There is the quality of the uncanny in all of this, which I find is best captured by reverie. In allowing myself to creatively "play" with my grandfather's memories I came to realize that I had never known the name of the place that was his home. This became significant as an indicator of what could not be told, nor spoken about; a further example of how unconsciously things get transmitted across generations. Oftentimes what is not told becomes a signifier more noteworthy than what is told.
This untold loss then gets hidden in the mind's attempt to undo the traumatic loss, in this case my grandfather's behavioral actions of constructing homes. The compulsive building and rebuilding of houses and the shifting of pigeon families I understand as the underlying tenacious hold unresolved longings for what was left behind has on the immigrant. In his book "The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning" James Young, quoting Arthur Danto, makes an important distinction between memorials and monuments, "we erect monuments so that we shall always remember and build memorials so that we shall never forget." This is exactly the immigrant's dilemma; where one wishes to both remember and forget, to hold onto the past and completely let it go. My grandfather's house building and pigeon "arranging" certainly can be seen as encompassing both; a monument to what he wanted to remember and prove he had achieved, while also a memorial to what was lost and could not be found, nor forgotten.
Despite the compelling need of leaving Europe, a place soon compelled to expel its' own Jews, the mixture of longing, wishing for reunion and rejection left my Grandfather unable to settle the internalized and unintegrated conflicts inside of himself. Boulanger (2004, in press) writes " . . .the loss of contextual continuity immigrants chronically experience creates an absence they are rarely motivated to acknowledge . . .Nonetheless, dissociated aspects of self experience acquired in or representing the culture they left behind continue to break through in the form of affects, dreams and inexplicable enactments." The pigeon families are one such enactment where my grandfather relived and enacted a strange ritual and I held the unacceptable feelings of both disbelief (What in the world is he doing? Creating chaos!) And the wish to maintain order (Can't you just leave them alone? Don't change things!).
I also hold the longings in the form of nostalgia. This nostalgia became part of my own personal internalized experience. I was often told that I had an "old soul". I became someone who both absorbed other peoples longings and actively became nostalgic for a time and a place I could not have lived or seen. Boym states, "For some nostalgia was a taboo, first wave immigrants are often notoriously unsentimental, leaving the search for roots to their children and grandchildren". And so I hungered for stories and books about the life I imagined my grandparents had left in Eastern Europe. Old films from the 30's and 40's are my favorite as are collecting furniture and "tsotchkes" from that period. I feel as if I can create a stage set of what I imagined life was like then. In some ways I have come to inhabit the familial sense of loss and inability ever to retrieve that place called "home".
In Freud's classic paper on the subject of mourning he noticed how loss is internalized, grieved and ultimately gotten over. He believed that ties to objects, to others needed to be let go of so that new attachments would occur. Butler (2003) revisits mourning and subtly improves Freud's ideas by suggesting that, "So when one loses, one is also faced with something enigmatic; something is hiding in the loss, something is lost within the recesses of loss . . . At another level, perhaps what I have lost "in" you, that for which I have no ready vocabulary, is a relationality that is neither merely myself nor you, but the tie by which those terms are differentiated and related". What Butler is saying is that we may lose and love again but the tie, the specific connection from oneself to a specific other is also lost, needing to be grieved and that particular tie is irreplaceable. A new connection means a new tie, not a re-used tie.
With this in mind I want to further suggest that what is transmitted transgenerationally in traumatic loss needs to be thought of as a multiply layered problem. Often the traumatic loss cannot be put into words, either because of the pre-verbal age of the person experiencing it and/or the overwhelming situation it is occurring within. The trauma remains split off, both unknown and unknowable, preventing mourning from taking place. The internal resources, which my grandfather drew upon to cope with and master unbearable loss and distress, helped him survive. But these resources, survival mechanisms such as denial, dissociation and disconnection, could only limit what was available for him to know and process.
I have tried to undo this survival mechanism by both holding these feelings and entering my own mourning with a different intent. Physical survival was not the issue for me as it was for him. Instead I have felt often in my life that the imperative was around the survival of meaning, holding on to meaning in the face of it being denied or destroyed. Psychoanalysis has held the marker for "meaning-making" and challenged me to form a creative mourning process whereby I expanded meaning in the face of loss. Reverie and memoir presented themselves as the vehicles for this creativity, writing as my instrument. What interested me in these stories was the co-mingling of person, time and place leading me into deeply felt and complex layers of meanings to my life and my grandfather's life. Sometimes you need another generation or two to fully capture the lost thoughts, the "postmemories" and painful feelings. In this way we live in, live through and ultimately live without the people we love.
Post-Script
I dreamt that I am on a boat on a river in Europe. It is wide like the Danube only this river flows across Europe, from West to East. The river is calm, the countryside beautiful. In the next scene I am in a café in Eastern Europe. It is the 40's and a table is filled with people talking and enjoying themselves. I notice that two of the people are my grandparents; they are not young but not old, still quite vital. I am talking to the owner about possibly buying this café/restaurant. I awake and realize that this dream is a totally new construction. I have created rivers that don't exist which flow in directions not possible. I have resurrected my grandparents and placed them in 1940's café intellectual society. They were barely educated in real life. I have created a new life for them, filled with some of my own fantasies and delights, good conversations, stimulating ideas and a great cup of cappuccino.
References
Boulanger, Ghislaine (In Prepartion). "Lot's Wife, Cary Grant and the American Dream: Psychoanalysis with Immigrants". Contemporary Psychoanalysis
Boym, Svetlana (2001). The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books.
Butler, Judith (2003). "Violence, Mourning, Politics". Studies in Gender and Sexuality,
Vol. 4:1, pg. 9-37.
Freud, Sigmund (1900). "The Interpretation of Dreams". S.E. Vol. IV&V.
_____________(1915). "Mourning and Melancholia". S.E. Vol. XIV.
Hirsch, Marianne and Spitzer, Leo (2002). "We Would Not Have Come Without You":
Generations of Nostaligia. American Imago, 59.3, pg. 253-276.
Young, James E. (1993). The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning.
New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
|
