A Voice From the Past Speaks Volumes

“Zet zhe, kinderlekh, gedenkt zhe, tayere, vos ir lernt do. Zogt zhe nokh a mol un take nokh a mol.”

“Remember, dear children, what you are learning here. Repeat it again and again.”

--”Oyfn Pripetshik,”

Yiddish folk song

*

The walls of my Great-Aunt Bernice’s sitting room are covered with family portraits. Big, glossy color photos track her three sons and their families through years of hippie prints, dark disco glasses and feathered hair.

I study the images with amusement when I visit her Rancho Palos Verdes home, trying to remember my relatives as those younger faces frozen in time. Bernice’s gallery is a testament to the rituals that bring our family together, the anniversaries and bar mitzvahs that mark our lives. The stories in between those celebrations--my sister, Rachel, taking up swing dancing or my cousin, Billy, breaking his arm in his first football game--are easily forgotten.

In the corner of the room, next to the grinning school pictures of my younger cousins, hangs another portrait washed in gray tones. My great-great-grandfather Mendel Frankel sits somberly surrounded by his wife and children. For me, it is the first family portrait, one of the few glimpses I have of the strangers who made a vague and circuitous journey from the Ukraine to Buffalo, N.Y.

I barely know their stories, but I’m always drawn to the solemn woman sitting in the middle with my infant grandfather perched on her lap. My Bubbe Jennie, my great-grandmother. From her, I get my middle name and a connection to the past.

*

It’s the fifth night of Hanukkah. The candles are lit at Bernice’s. My Grandpa Marvin--her brother--is visiting and they begin reminiscing as I half listen, trying to follow the seemingly infinite branches of my family tree.

It was a big family, my grandfather patiently explains. Forty-six first cousins. He shakes his head, as they resurrect memories from their childhoods. Riding in Mendel’s wagon as he peddled rags on the streets of Buffalo. Sleeping on the sitting room couch to make space for the young relatives, new emigres, who bunked in their rooms.

I find it hard to follow as they wind back through the years, many memories punctuated by long gaps erased by time, others aching with sharp clarity. There are more details I want to know. How did Mendel get here? Did we have relatives lost in World War II? Do we still have family in the Ukraine?

“Back then, there were things we didn’t want to hear,” my grandfather sighs. “Now there’s so much I want to know and there’s no one left. There’s no one left to ask.”

*

The few details of one story--his mother’s journey to America--he hangs on to vividly:

When Jennie was 18, she left Kamenets-Podolskiy, a large town in the Ukraine, and headed west with her younger sister, Bessie. They entered Romania illegally, paying Russian soldiers to hoist them above their heads as they crossed a river in the dark of night.

With the help of a Jewish relief agency, the two girls wandered around Europe for three months, dodging borders now long gone. When they finally set sail from Holland to America, they sat in steerage for two weeks, nourished by a shipment of bananas. Mendel was waiting for them in New York.

I try to imagine their journey and wonder: Am I still part of that story?

A portrait on the mantel captures Jennie and her husband, Max, on their wedding day. I stare at their serious gazes, their hands carefully cupped away from one another. Bubbe Jennie died two years before I was born. In her wedding picture, she is no more than 21--young, slender, beautiful. Up on the portrait on the wall, holding my grandfather, she is wider, less defined. What happened in those years?

“We have a tape of her telling the story of coming here,” my grandfather interrupts my thoughts. “One night when your father was little, he switched on his tape recorder as she talked about it.”

His matter-of-fact statement stuns me.

Uncle Harold rummages upstairs and finds the tape. I lean forward in anticipation as he puts it in the machine, waiting for sound to give life and depth to the flat, black-and-white image I hold in my mind.

Loud tones leap into the room, unintelligible.

“I can’t understand it,” my grandfather frowns, concentrating. “It’s a bad copy.”

“You gave it to us, Marv,” Aunt Bernice says mildly.

I strain against the noise of the dishwasher and the muffled background sounds, trying to make out distinct words.

Suddenly a creaky tune floats out through the static.

“Oyfn pripetshik brent afayerl un in shtub iz heys . . . .”

“Aaah,” my grandfather smiles. “You know this.”

Bubbe Jennie is singing, humming an old familiar Yiddish folk song admonishing children to learn their alphabet. It was a song of resistance in the ghettos of Nazi Germany and the underground of the former Soviet Union.

“Remember, dear children, what you are learning here. Repeat it again and again. . . . When you grow older, who will understand that this alphabet contains the tears and the weeping of our people.

“When you grow weary and burdened with exile, you will find comfort and strength in this Jewish alphabet.”

The tune ends, overtaken by muffled noises.

“I can’t hear it,” my grandfather gives up, frowning again. “I just can’t hear anything.”

But I can. The piece I hear is the lilting, haunting melody I imagine this strange woman singing years ago as she came to a new life, the tune I remember my father singing to me when I was young, a melody my grandmother often hums. A piece of my story. I hold on to it.