Introduction

Editorial Review

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Excerpt

Mushrooms

The woods behind our house in Hesse were darker than any I have seen since, through eighty-two years of life. The dirt was black and soft, like crumbled velvet, and the tops of the trees were knit together so tightly that even in the middle of the day, after just a few steps, I could hardly see anything at all. The spruce trees were fat, with thick dark green needles, and amongst them grew elms and ash, with heavy leaves that would tear free, one at a time, and fall silently to the ground. It seemed to me, as a child, that there must have been some rule in the forest. Things happened singly, all alone. That is how I remember it. The ominous caw of a crow. Then silence. Then the rapid terrified scuttle of a small animal, a rodent of some kind. Silence. An owl hoots. A wolf howls. Silence. The rat a tat of a woodpecker.

My sister Eva took me to the woods. The last time we went there, we were searching for mushrooms. I was seven and she was seventeen. She held my hand tightly. I was afraid of the woods, and she knew it. I think she was also a little afraid. I could feel the blood pulsing in her wrist. She breathed rapidly. We stepped into the darkness. She was carrying a basket. It was spring time, and it had been raining, and the forest smelled wet and ancient, the smell I always associated with mushrooms; the air was warm but the ground still cold when I dug my hand under the wet leaves. Eva read fairy tales to me at night, usually the Brothers Grimm, but when we walked into the forest, she always reminded me that they were nothing but stories. She told me no father would ever leave his children in that darkness, no silent princesses sat alone weeping in the trees. There was an abandoned castle in the forest- years later when I went back at the invitation of the mayor of Lauterbach - I saw that it was less a castle than a small estate, crumbling with only a remote air of aristocracy - but at the time it seemed like a castle, and I always chose to believe that an exiled princess had once lived there, that her father had found his way to her through a magical ball of yarn, that a prince, cursed to be a baby deer, was rescued by that princess and eventually saved her from her exile, so that one day her sad father followed his ball of yarn to an empty castle and never saw her again. It would be nice to believe that the people who are taken from us have run off to different kingdoms to marry princes. It would be a much nicer ending than what happened. To my mother and father and two of my three brothers. And to Eva.

Before we had even started digging for mushrooms, someone stepped out of the darkness of the woods, and my heart stopped. Eva and I stood perfectly still, and the sounds of the forest, one by one, ticked off, howl, chirp, snapping twig. I could see by the outline that it was a man, tall and young, his feet pounded the forest floor and interrupted the order of sounds. He was running in our direction, but I was not sure if he was running towards us or away from something else. He came close enough to see his black eyes, and then my sister froze. She said, “You scared me.”

The man stopped in front of her. I squeezed her hand because for a moment I thought I might have become invisible. He said, “You’re late. I’ve been here for hours.”

“Not hours,” she said. “Rachel needed to finish some school work first.” When I heard my name, I was relieved. She had not forgotten me.

He said, “You should have come alone.”

“I wouldn’t be allowed to come alone. There can be strangers in the woods.” He touched her waist.

“Am I a stranger?” he said. A shaft of light broke through a tree and lit his face. He had a light beard and mustache, and I thought he was very handsome. His hand was big, and her back seemed small. It seemed so big it looked like it had crashed into her back and flattened there, and like it would be there forever now, so I was relieved when she reached back and peeled it away.

She bent down so that we were face to face. “Rachel,” my sister said. “I am going to show you a good spot to look for mushrooms, and I want you to stay there and look and promise me you will not leave. I am going to be very nearby, also looking for mushrooms.”

“I want you to look with me,” I said.

She said, “We need to find a lot of mushrooms, and it will be better if we look in two places.” She brought me to a spot we had been to a few times in the last year. We had pulled two fallen logs together to make a place to sit and eat the snacks we packed, just an apple and bread. The logs were still there. There was a small creek nearby, and sometimes deer came there to drink. If I was quiet enough, I could hear their tongues lapping and then the swallow, as the cold water rolled down their throats. She left me there, and I found a basketful of mushrooms in no time, and then sat on the log, scratching two bites on my ankle until they bled. I looked up at the ceiling of trees. In that spot, there were a few breaks, and the sunlight came down in cones and highlighted a tree stump covered in dark green moss, a stone in the river that created an eddy of seething water, a small white flower. When my sister finally came back, her hair was messy, and the collar of her shirt was crooked. She was alone. She examined my basket of mushrooms and told me I had done a marvelous job. Eva always chose superlatives. She would not say good when she could say marvelous. She would not say love when she could say adore. She would not say scary when she could say terrifying.

Eva was going to marry that boy. I met his sister two decades later, in a small cafe in Washington Heights. She said she doubted I would be related to the girl her brother had loved, but she had lost everyone and was looking for any kind of connection. When I told her that Eva was my older sister and that I remembered her brother, she trembled all over. Although the war was long over, she was still terribly thin, and her hair grew only in clumps, leaving patches of pale skin. It was a faint red color; she had tried to tame it into a bun. I could see scars on her scalp, but most people had scars, and I did not try to imagine where they had come from, because imagining was never worse than reality. When she stopped shaking, she asked me if my sister had survived. I told her she was dead, and she started trembling again. She then asked me if I looked at all like my sister. I told her my sister looked like my father - tall and thin, with light hair and blue eyes - and I looked like my mother. She could see for herself what I looked like - slanted black eyes, small pointed nose, jet black hair, and not much bigger than a coffee table, though some of that was due to malnutrition. In my first year in the DP camp, I grew six inches, so that I could almost feel my bones stretching, painful and exhilarating at the same time.

Her name was Miriam Solarz. She lived in Sweden. She gave me the address of her house and told me to call her if I was ever in Sweden. Before she left, she showed me a picture of my sister with the boy from the woods. His name was Elias Auerbach.

My sister never got to have a wedding. I didn’t want one. I married my husband, Julius, also a survivor, in front of a rabbi and two strangers while we were still living in the displaced person camp. We had two sons, David and Simon. Simon died of a cerebral hemorrhage when he was twenty-six years old. David married a girl from Miami in an elaborate wedding in a synagogue that looked more like a church, with a choir and a gold-plated bima and gigantic flowers. He lives in Miami in a house with a pool and he has two children who call me Grandma and are too busy to say much more than that.

When Julius died, I stayed in New York for several years, but after I had a mini stroke, David insisted I had to move to Miami. I did not want to go to a place where I knew no one, but then friends started to move, to Florida, to California, to places where their children lived, or worse - they died, and when I realized I knew more of the dead than the living, I agreed to move, but not to Miami. I knew what life would be like in Miami. They would put me in the most expensive, fancy nursing home and leave me there. My niece Annette was always sweet to me, and she told David I would like it in Atlanta. She invited to me to come here. At first I lived with her, but I saw I was a nuisance, so I moved to the Jewish towers, where I could have friends. It’s like when the boys were little, and I sent them to preschool so they could make friends their own age. Now I live where all the other old Jews live. Officially, it is called the Zaban Towers, but my friend Agnes calls it the zombie towers for all the old men clomping along with their walkers, the clomps, admittedly softened by tennis balls on the legs so it is more of a thump. Thump, shuffle, thump, shuffle. I am glad Julius died before he was reduced to such a state. Annette is a good girl, but she is busy, so I’ve learned how to fill the days. We play Mah Jong and bridge and talk about the grandchildren we never see and the husbands who have died.The husbands - they have become more wonderful with each year since they left the earth. To hear Agnes tell it her husband could fly. I am not complaining. Annette could just as easily do nothing, like the children of many of my friends. We have a Shabbas dinner together almost every week, though sometimes it is just Chinese food arranged on plates, and sometimes it’s just the two of us, sometimes the children are in town. I know it is isn’t easy. Annette has to pick me up, through terrible traffic, since they live on the other side of town and I now limit my driving to a three-mile area, which includes my synagogue, the drug store, the grocer and the YMCA swimming pool where I do water aerobics.

Julius died twenty-one years ago, when he was seventy-two. He was nineteen years older than I was. He lost his wife and two children in the war, and then to lose another son. But he never complained. He had been a pediatrician in Poland, and he became a pediatrician in New York. At first, all his patients were Jews and Italians but later there were more blacks and Mexicans. He still loved it. A baby is a baby, he said. Julius loved all forms of celebration: a bris, a birthday party, a bar mitzvah, a wedding, even that thing the Mexicans do when the girl turns fifteen. He never turned down an invitation. I would say, what are we going to say to these people?

He would say, put on something pretty, Rachel. What are we going to say? What everyone else says, Congratulations. Then we eat some cake, maybe we dance. What could be wrong with that?

Once we went to one of the blacks’ weddings. I was used to black people by then, but when I was in the DP camps, and I saw black American soldiers, I had never seen a black person before. I tried to look up their sleeves to see if they were black all the way up. I changed colors in the summer, so why shouldn’t they? The wedding was in Harlem. I thought we would be killed, but Julius said he had known the boy since he was born. The boy had had something wrong with him - a kidney problem I think - and Julius said weddings are not just a celebration of love, they also mean a boy has become a man, and for this boy in particular, that was reason for a big celebration. Julius drove. I wanted to take a cab, but Julius said it would be a waste of money. There were burnt-out buildings and bums everywhere, huddled under newspapers and wrapped in plastic bags. Loud music came out of the buildings, and girls, almost naked, danced on the street corners, a scared and defiant dance I recognized as desperation. They were prostitutes, I knew, like the ones I used to see after the war, trying to get the American soldiers to give them something. I said, why is this happening in America, and Julius said, there have always been people left behind. There were whores in Germany too, even before the war, and drunks, and crazy people.

I thought our car would be stolen, but there was a parking lot behind the church and two men in tuxedos were helping people out of their cars and up the sidewalk. One of them, a giant of a man, recognized my husband. He said, What’s up Doc Rosenblatt? Julius looked at him strangely, and then smiled. Ah, Deshawn, I told your mother you would be over six feet. You had the biggest feet of any six-year-old boy I have ever seen.

The boy, Deshawn, walked us into the church and sat us in the second row, in an area marked reserved. He said the Andersons would be so glad we came. He shook my hand and told me that my husband was the coolest guy in all of the Bronx. It was such a lovely day. The mother and father of the boy getting married - I can’t remember his name - it was a regular name like John or Joe - came to see us and make sure we were comfortable. The mother wore a hat with a lace veil on it, and she smelled like roses. Then the grandparents, the cousins, the uncles, the boy himself. Julius shook hands with everyone and when they thanked him for saving the boy’s life, he said the boy had saved himself.

I think that was my favorite wedding of all, including my own children. A lady in a light blue dress sang a beautiful song, and everyone was crying. The groom was so handsome, and the bride was a tiny thing in a pouffy white dress with a long train. I told Julius she looked like an African princess. He whispered, just tell her she looks beautiful. I knew that! There were things I told him that I wouldn’t say to other people. Like when a Mexican man came one time to fix our pipes, and when he couldn’t understand me, I figured he did not speak English. I got the superintendent, and when he started speaking in Spanish, the man said, I speak English. I just can’t understand her. I wanted to die. When people hear my accent, they ask me where I am from. Washington Heights, I tell them, though I know what they mean. What am I going to say? If I say I am from Germany, they will think I am German. I am not German. I am a Jew. I never belonged to that country. I don’t belong to this one either. They tried to make a Jewish state in Israel, but really the land the Jews should inhabit doesn’t exist any more. Milk and honey, a land of sweetness and soft green hills, and enough rain and piercing sunlight. I think it is on the other side of the clouds. Not heaven. The promised land.

Julius did not like it when I talked that way. His family were Zionists. He was very proud of the state of Israel. We both went to Palestine after the war. Julius never told anyone else, not even his sons, that when we arrived in Palestine, his family who had left before the war at first refused to accept him into their home. They were ashamed of him, ashamed of all survivors. We had let ourselves be led like lambs to the slaughter, they said. We didn’t fight like they fought against the English and the Arabs. Julius had let his wife and children be murdered - where were his scars, where were his bullet wounds? He should have died defending them. Believe me, this is something Julius thought himself, and so when he stood there, in the sandy street outside his uncle’s house, a house with glass windows and olive trees in the yard, and was told there was no room for us, he understood and walked away. It was only when the Jewish police went back with us and ordered his family to take us in - the shelters and hospitals were stretched thin, so if you had a relative, they put you there, no matter what condition you were in - that they opened the gate and embraced him. Me, they said nothing to. Julius introduced me as his wife, and then the man, an uncle of an uncle I think, looked me up and down and said, Pretty enough. Julius was not angry with his uncle. He understood that they could never understand. He felt the same way about the guard who smashed his baby’s head against a wall. He was an animal, he said. We heard once of a child who fell into the tiger cage at a zoo and was of course destroyed. He said the guard was like that. They did not shoot the tiger. It was being a tiger. If he could find the guard, he would put him a cage, but he would not kill him.

I am not like Julius. I can remember the face of the German soldier who dragged my mother down the stairs in 1938 on the night of the November pogrom that is called Kristallnacht in the history books. He was in my brother Jacob’s class at school; his father worked in the light bulb factory, and his mother had skinny legs with dark hair, and she used to wait until a Jewish child walked by their house to sweep the dust and crumbs out their front door into the child’s face. Kurt Boller. He dragged my mother by her beautiful black hair and then they harnessed her to an oxcart and made her pull the cart, along with Hanna’s mother, tossing shit at them, emptying chamber pots on their heads. I can remember the face of the soldier who shot my brother Levi because he was deaf and did not turn around when the boys, who were rounded up for deportation, were told to turn around. My mother and I saw it, from where we were standing, and she gasped but said nothing. Although I was a hundred feet away, I can remember his icy eyes, and the way he laughed, with a crooked front tooth, his hands red and inflamed with the cold, wrapped around the butt of his rifle. He poked my brother’s body, and then shot him again. I am eighty-two, so this man would now be one hundred if he is alive. I would know him if I saw him, and I would kill him. I would kill him in a terrible, slow way.

Annette insisted that I come to Elizabeth’s wedding, even though I told her I am tired of weddings and funerals alike. No more celebrations or mourning for me. The time has come for me to pull up a chair and just watch. Annette sent Benjamin to get me. I haven’t seen him in two years, since he moved to Minneapolis. While I was waiting for him, I mentioned this to William the doorman. William asked me what Benjamin did in Minneapolis, and for the life of me I couldn’t remember, and then I said, who knows? Does it matter? I waited in the lobby for a long time. He was late. When the boy walked in, he looked around, as if there were a hundred little old Jewish ladies waiting for him, and then, having determined that I was the only one he crossed over and said, “Aunt Rachel?” I looked up at him. “Are you ready to go?” Was I ready to go? I was sitting there in a dress with my purse watching them set up for lunch. Maybe he thinks this is what I do every day.

“Of course,” I say. He walked quickly to the door, pushed it open, and then realized I was a dozen steps behind him. He held the door open, letting all the hot air in, and I waited for William, the doorman, to say something, but William was reading the newspaper and couldn’t be bothered.

The car was parked out front, a Mercedes. All the Jews drive German cars now. Benjamin did not open the door for me, and it took me a minute to work the handle, then to figure out the seat belt. He said, “For the record, this is my father’s car. I would never drive a car like this.” He lurched out into the street. “Gas guzzler.”

We drove in silence. His mother must have told him that I hated the highway, because he took the long way over the surface streets, past the gigantic houses that have sprouted up all over the city. My friend Mila Goldstein’s house was torn down, and now the Taj Mahal stands in its place. Mila’s house was lovely, and now, like Mila, it is no more. The obliteration of the past is a human hobby. Sometimes we try to recreate it in our own memory, but what’s gone is gone. If you cut down an apple tree and then plant another in its place, it is not the same tree. I was contacted by authorities in Hesse two years ago. They had received funding - probably from a Jew - for a new project. They were going to make bronze life-sized statues of children to stand in front of the houses from which those children had been taken. They would put their names - Yakov Spivak, age eight, murdered in the Holocaust, and when people walked past, they would think of the little boy. This was their idea. I said, why are you doing this? Those who care, already care, and those who do not never will. Give the money to hungry children in Africa. They said, but we must remember, and I said, someone will put a baseball cap or paint a mustache on the face of the boy. It is such an easy mark. The best intentions always are. Let it go.

The Germans and the Poles have made a great industry of the desire of Jews (particularly those with no personal connection to the Holocaust) to visit the places where their great-great-grandparents came from. It is a regular Jewish Disney World there now, with Shabbas services in the synagogue, Jewish restaurants and klezmer music, but the funny thing is: there are no Jews. It is like the Museum of Natural History, only we are the dinosaurs on display behind the glass. The truth is, this is a feeling I have everywhere. Someone from Annette’s synagogue asked me to come speak with the children on Yom Hashoa. One of the little boys asked to see my tattoo. When I told him that only people who had been in concentration camps had tattoos, he looked confused. Their idea of the Holocaust is shaped by movies and television, so that seeing a survivor in person has the same excitement as seeing an elephant in the wild, something that is only rumored to exist suddenly becomes real. But then it does not fit their preconceived notion of what it should look like - too big, too small, not sad enough, not scarred enough, too sad, too scarred. When people ask me where I am from, I say Washington Heights. I know what they mean, but I say Washington Heights. When they ask me when I came to America, I say, 1952, and when they ask me where I came from, I say, somewhere else.

When we got to the wedding, Benjamin honked his horn and drove up the driveway. There was a large van in front of us unloading an elderly gentleman in a wheelchair. The boy said, “There’s Bubbie and Zadie.” An elegant woman in high heels was attempting to maneuver the wheelchair away from the van and over the grass. I thought Benjamin should get out to help, but it was not my place to say anything. I also thought he should open my door, but he sat there with the engine idling, and finally he said, “You can get out if you want to. I have to help drive people up the driveway.”

A man I recognized took the wheelchair from the older lady. It was Annette’s brother in law. I have only met him once or twice, so I forgave myself for not remembering his name, just Annette’s complaints about him. He was not a man of great accomplishments, but look, my David is accomplished, but not so nice, and here was this man, caring for his father. I wished I had not come. They would be eating lunch soon at the towers. Agnes and I always took the first shift. 11:30, then we try to walk a little. If Julius was here, he would tease me. What’s the rush? But now, when I have all the time in the world and nothing to do, I wake at dawn. I watch the smoggy sunrise and think of all the people who have died. I can’t even watch television. Nothing makes sense. When I complained to Annette, she got worried. She took me to the doctor to see if I was maybe getting demented, but I am fine. I am completely sane. My memory is perfect. I remember what happened sixty years ago, and I remember what they served for dinner last night. In the end, the doctor agreed with me: nothing on television makes sense.

Everyone was walking in one direction, so I followed, and then found a row to sit down. It was an unusually hot day for April, but the sun was shining, and a nice waiter offered me a glass of water. Most of the other seats were empty, and I realized I had arrived very early, probably because Benjamin had other things to do. Annette has a pretty house, big but at least it was not a monstrosity. It was in a modern style, with large windows. The wedding was being held in the courtyard that opened to the back where there were woods, mostly full of scraggly pine trees, a few oaks, nothing like the woods in Germany. Julius once went to a meeting in San Francisco, and a colleague there took him to see the giant Redwoods. He said that was the closest he ever came to feeling the darkness of the European forests. The giant trees, he said, looked like a fairy tale come to life, which was believable in Eastern Europe, where the wonderful and the horrible mixed so easily.

Annette must be busy. Usually she would come and find me and make sure I was comfortable. She feels responsible for me, like the daughter I never had, even though we are distantly related by American standards. Her mother’s sister married my brother, Michael. Annette’s mother used to bring her to New York to go shopping. They would come to Washington Heights for a visit. Julius nicknamed Annette the meshuggah hiner, crazy chicken. She had so much energy- showing us the clothes she bought, telling us about the shows she saw, the Statue of Liberty - as if we had never seen it. She always wanted David and Simon to come with them, be a tourist. Sometimes Simon would go, if it was a museum. Shows and shopping he didn’t like. Simon was quiet and studious, like a little cheder child he was, with his nose in books all the time, though they were books of fantasy with elves and witches. I would have liked for him to read something useful once in a while, history or science, but Julius told me that everyone grows up on his own schedule. The boys who got tallest early end up the smallest. Don’t rush him, Rachel, he would say. After all, the world is small and there really are not so many places to go. Walking through the noisy streets of the city, jostled by strangers, with cars honking and mysterious things falling from the sky - paper, drops of water, once even an egg fell and smashed right in front of me - I would wonder how he could say such a thing. To me I had gone as far away from Lauterbach as another planet. I am one of the few people who can say she has lived in two entirely different worlds, the earth and somewhere that has yet to be named.

David was the practical one. He didn’t care about where he was from, only where he was going. If I tried to talk to him about my brother, his namesake, he would shift from foot to foot for a moment before saying he had to go, he had baseball practice or a big exam or a date. He studied business in college, and then more business, and now he does something with money, I don’t know what, but he must do well, because the house is big, the swimming pool is big, the children each have a car, and they ski and take trips to Mexico and all have healthy tans. I am happy for him, but I do not know him. If I had not carried him in my body, I would wonder that he was my son. He idolizes his father; there are pictures of Julius all over the house, but I do not see Julius in this man.

People ask me if I think the Holocaust could ever happen in America. I usually say no, because that is what they want to hear, but I think human beings are capable of doing the most horrible things to each other at any time and any place. Nowhere is safe. This makes life rather bitter, I am aware, but anyone who has been tormented as a child by otherwise seemingly normal adults must know its truth. I used to play dolls with a little girl named Trudel. Trudel and I were the best jump-ropers in our grade at school, and every day at recess we counted higher and higher, trading off the title of champion with ease. Her house was not as nice as my house, but she had an excellent collection of dolls, by dint of being the youngest of five girls. Her mother worked as a domestic in a big house, and her father was a truck driver, so they were seldom home. Her older sisters managed the house and cooked the meals. One day, her mother arrived home early. She was an ugly woman. If you wanted to draw a witch, you might choose some of her features. She had a large mouth with a loose lower lip that drooped low almost to her chin. Large eyes, almost all white, with small dots of grey in the center, surrounded by chapped raw skin that she worsened by constantly rubbing. She stood in the doorway; I felt her presence for some time before she said anything and carried on playing, nervous for Trudel, for the presence of a silent adult usually meant someone had done something wrong. We had concocted a tea party, and Trudel’s doll asked my doll if she would like some more. Hep! Hep! Trudel’s mother cried from the door. At first I thought she was coughing, but then she blocked out the light, her large shadow swooped over me, and she shouted, Hep! Hep! and clapped into my ear. Then she laughed. Hep, hep! She pushed me over. I scooted away from her, and she flapped her hands like she was shooing chickens. Trudel stared blankly at me. Her mother clapped and flapped at me until I had no choice but to gather my school books and run away.

My mother was in the kitchen when I arrived, panting and crying. I told her what had happened, and she forbade me to ever go to that house again. Hep, hep is a herder’s cry. It is used on cattle, sheep, chickens, and Jews.

Annette finally finds me at the wedding. She is in a rush, like always, meshugah hiner, and fanning herself with the program. She sees that I am seated. There is some kind of problem with the caterer or the dress or the music, and she can’t stay. She asks me if I am hot, but when I say yes, she doesn’t offer to do anything about it. She rushes off. A man and a woman sit in front of me, and the woman puts her purse down to save a seat for someone. The man is large and broad-shouldered, and I realize I will not be able to see over him, but I don’t care enough to move. Other people’s children have never mattered much to me. Julius was different, but then Julius was a pediatrician. Other people’s children were his whole life. The boy who died was named Joshua. The girl was Judith. He refused to give these names to any of our children. He could not bear to speak them, and when he treated a child named Josh or Judy, he made up a nickname. He called the boys little bear, little sheep, and the girls little kitten. The parents thought he did this to all the children, but they were wrong, only those named Josh or Judy.

Sometimes, when I was sadder than usual, Julius brought me to the office. He said he needed help, but what did he need with my two left hands? He had good nurses to help, and I only made things more difficult. I couldn’t type or write prescriptions. He said people liked meeting his wife. He was proud of me. He would tell the young mothers to ask me how to soothe a crying child, how to make a baby go to sleep, how to break a fever. He said, Rachel, show them how you rub the baby’s back. The mothers handed over their babies with so much trust. I felt them, warm and hazy, in my arms. They nuzzled into my neck. Who hurts a baby? I would wonder. Their necks were damp and soft; there is a spot between a baby’s shoulder blades that you can press, ever so firmly, with your thumb, and it works like pressing a button. They get quiet and relax, and just like that they sleep, suddenly slack against your shoulder, formless in your arms. Once it was a Joshua he wanted me to hold. He said, this little bear is making life hard for his mother. He doesn’t want to sleep. When the mother, a tiny little thing who still looked like a child to me, with her liquid black eyes and soft mouth, handed the baby to me and said, help me with my Joshua, I glanced over at Julius. He met my eyes and looked away. I knew what he was thinking. Somewhere in the human heart is the ability to take this small thing by its pink crinkled feet and smash it. Julius and I had to learn to live with that knowledge.

After Kristallnacht and the murder of Levi, my father moved us to a larger town to live. Trudel’s family moved into our house. I know this because in 1982 the survivors from our town were invited to return. There were twelve survivors, but only I and one other man elected to return. Julius did not want me to go. He knew of my anger, and he warned me that I would not be able to obtain the justice that I sought. Justice in this world was not something Julius believed in. He was miraculous in that way: he was comfortable with giving and not receiving; with the fact, even, that he gave willingly, and others grabbed and yanked and stole from him. I don’t know what I was thinking. I went alone. A man named Moses Frankel also went. He knew my brother David. He asked me if I knew what had happened to David, and I said I had heard that David was killed at Buchenwald, and he said this was true. Trudel had grown up to look just like her mother, fat and pink. When she saw me, her eyes grew wide, and before I could say I word she said, we bought the house legally. The Germans sold it to us. I said I don’t want the house back.

Her daughter hid behind her mother’s bloated calves, blinked at me with the same eyes with which Trudel had blinked at me the day her mother interrupted our tea party. I said, I live in New York now. I have three children. If you are wondering why I am tan, it is because I have just come back from a cruise. Then I wondered why I was explaining myself to this woman. Trudel’s little girl stuck her finger in her nose. We own the house, Trudel said. I can show you the deed. I closed my eyes. I don’t want the house, I told her. I asked her if she knew where the Bollers lived. She told me Kurt and his two brothers died in the war. His mother was still alive, in the same house where they had always lived. I wondered if Julius would let that count as justice.

Everyone back then was trying to get to America, but you needed someone to say that you would not be a burden to the nation. My mother’s aunt and my father’s cousin were there, but they helped their own families first. Then my father managed to secure passage for my brother Michael and Eva. Eva and Michael went to the train station. I do not know what happened after that. They got to Hamburg, and something was wrong with Eva’s papers. She was not allowed on the boat. She eventually came back to Frankfurt, but I was gone by then. My mother found a way to send me to France where I would live in a convent as a Catholic orphan. She took me to the train station. We had to walk in the street. My mother had washed my dress the night before. I complained because it was itchy, and she said she was sorry, but she had to use cheap soap; it was all that she could find. The ends of the sleeves had not gotten all the way clean. There were rims of gray sweat around the cuffs, and I pulled my coat down to hide them. I was ashamed. I looked at my mother. Ever since the night she was pulled down the stairs, she walked with a limp, and she hobbled to walk quickly, afraid we would miss the train. She looked old and tired. We passed a German mother pushing a pram and holding the hand of her daughter. The girl was about my age, but she was a city girl, with a black velvet coat and a white rabbit fur muff. I could see the girl’s perfectly white collar - no stains - and the white satin ribbon that tied back her hair. It seemed to me at that moment that the girl had never been and never would be dirty or soiled in her entire life. She met my eyes and looked away. Her mother did not look at us. She stared straight ahead. I do not know if it was because we were not worth her gaze or if she was saddened by the fact that we were forced to walk in the street. She had on black patent leather shoes; even the wheels of the baby carriage were bright and shiny, only there was a very slight squeak as it passed us. My mother was wearing torn white stockings, and I could see the flesh of her legs through the rips. She looked so human and pitiful that I remember wanting to cry and hug her and never leave her and also wanting to run away and pretend that I did not know her. She held my hand. Her hand was damp and soft. I snuck my head close to it and smelled its salty, soapy scent. To this day, it is the smell of my mother and of everything too good for this world.

The train station was very crowded. We had to shoulder our way through the crowds. It was obvious when we got to the part of the train that would be taking the Jewish children, because it smelled of boiled chicken and bread and onions, the food our mothers had packed for the journey. In my recollection, none of the children spoke, though I am sure this is not true. What I remember is that over the hum of the usual train station noise, the announcements of arrivals and departures, the greetings and the good-byes, there was a condensed cloud of collective anguish, of mothers all at once pushing their children out into the world, a feeling I have never seen since that day, because like the sounds of the woods where I went with Eva, things in nature happen one by one. Each baby bird is nudged from the nest. Each leaf falls. It was the most unnatural thing, to have all these children, all at once, heaved overboard into the great unknown. My mother pressed me into her body; her coat was coarse and thick. She held my head with ungloved hands, then knelt down to look into my eyes. In memory, her whole face is glazed and shining, as if she were encased in a coat of thin glass. In my memory, I poke at her cheek to see what she feels like. Of course I know she was crying. I know that when she put her hands on either side of my face and held me still she was memorizing the look of me; she was trying to imagine the whole of my life in that moment. When my son Simon died, I caught sight of my tear-streaked face in the mirror of the hospital and saw my mother’s face that day. Even if we had grown old together, we couldn’t have loved each other more or known each other better. We would have just had more time, more days to brush up against each other and either smile or apologize, and then get on with living. Life is meant to be lived in the general orbit of those who love us, though we cannot protect each other, not from heartbreak or injustice or murder. Love is the weakest shield, but here is the truth. It is the only shield. My mother put me on the train, and then I lost her face in the sea of the glassed-in and fogged-over faces of women in coarse wool coats watching their children leave. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

1. We Are Gathered is set at a wedding, but you never hear directly from the bride and groom? Why would the author make that choice and what are your memories of weddings you have attended?

2. There are several unlikeable characters in this novel. Why would the author include their perspectives and did you become more sympathetic to them as the novel progressed? It is possible that one character is the actual narrator of the book?

3. Annette, the mother of the bride, reflects after the wedding that the title of the Salvador Dali painting, The Persistence of Memory, is wrong.
"The persistence of memory. I think that is a title of a painting Jack Chandler showed me once when he took Elizabeth and me on a tour of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. I can’t remember the painting, but I know now, looking at Elizabeth’s wedding dress - what am I supposed to do with this wedding dress? - that the title was wrong. The persistence of things, of wedding dresses that will never be worn again, of forks and spoons trampled into the dirt, of this planet once all the people and their dogs have died, things maybe, but not memory. Memories die with us."
Which is more persistent, memories or objects, and in what was do works of art - paintings and poems and symphonies- change that equation.

4. Jack Chandler, the bride's father's college roommate, is the only non Jewish guest to have a role in the novel. He is an outsider, but he plays key parts both in the bride's life and in the life of her mother, Annette. Why would it be easier to reveal your thoughts to a stranger than to someone from your own community?

5. In the last chapter two characters come together in a magical realist story that differs from the other chapters. Why do you think those authors chose those two characters to meet in the final chapter - Steven Shapiro, who is mentally ill - and Rachel Rosenblatt, a Holocaust survivor- when they clearly did not actually know each other and why did she title it True Love?

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