Drawing Breath in Chapters by Rose Gerszberg
“Drawing Breath in Chapters” by Rose Gerszberg is an essay about family, about the intergenerational transmission of trauma, about resilience and about love. The author is the daughter of Holocaust Survivors and was herself born in a Displaced Persons camp shortly after the Second World War. The family moved to the United States and lived and worked on a chicken farm where Gerszberg learned hard lessons about coping in a family reeling from trauma.
Gerszberg writes vividly about the cost to an empathic child of protecting her parents, especially her mother, from further emotional damage. Risk was everywhere, going out with friends might lead to tragedy, and it felt as though no one could be trusted since during the war, friends and even family turned Jewish people over to the Nazis.
Even so, Gerszberg and her younger sister managed to survive the complexities of their upbringing. Gerszberg writes: “With time to think and distance to reflect, I marvel at the functioning daughters my parents turned out. Yes, we were borne along, my sister and I, through the often incoherent language of our childhood.”
The essay is segmented, told in “chapters,” reflecting how fragmentary, “incoherent,” memory can be, especially in the context of trauma. In her craft essay in Brevity, Sonja Livingston writes: “When trauma collides with narrative—inasmuch as narrative can exist in chaos—perception is upended, resulting in stories that aren’t always orderly.”
As an adult, Gerszberg gathers information about her European family and what happened to them. “Life as a child of Survivors resembles something akin to an archaeological dig. One that never ends.” She grew up in the shadow of what was unsaid. “Ours were childhoods made solemn by silences and secrets and watchfulness.” Perhaps those secrets are what drove her to write, to air her history like the wash she and her mother used to hang, to find sense in the fragments of family history available to her.
Each “chapter” of this essay is a testament to a vibrant family that survived against the odds and somehow managed to start new lives in the aftermath of unimaginable loss and trauma. In her author’s note, Gerszberg writes of the power of words to create understanding. Although narrative can’t make meaning out of the madness of the Holocaust, Rose Gerszberg’s testimony, like the eight candles on the Chanukah menorah, shines a light in the darkness for future generations. —CRAFT
A stowaway made the long trip to the United States with my mother, father, and me. Unbidden and unticketed, tucked into the pocket of a gray overcoat, chilled by early fall’s ocean breezes, pushed back by hope—grief nevertheless made the long Atlantic crossing and clung tenaciously, even as we debarked in New York.
Straining against the weight of so much loss, my parents began a salvage operation of epic proportion that I watched play out in grainy relief. Not till I was four or five did I begin to grasp that there were stories too painful to tell. I knew Hitler before I knew Disney, and in the isolation of our South Jersey chicken farm I began to piece together the shards of my parents’ brokenness that held us all hostage.
Especially my mother’s. I learned over time that if I woke to the smell of sugar cookies it meant that my mother had been racked by memories during the night. She likely climbed wearily from her bed and sought solace in the flour, sugar, and eggs she managed to mix together, like a salve, and deliver in a sweet concoction that belied its bitter genesis.
Sometimes when her guard was down she talked about a little boy she had left behind in Europe, the baby she’d entrusted to the care of a non-Jewish family in the hopes she could save him. And though told after the war that he’d died, she lived her life plagued by doubt. Once I mustered the courage to extract a name—Eli, Eli Adler. I imagined him in every baby face I saw. I imagined her nursing him contentedly and cooing into his round face, unaware that the horror that would soon engulf them was already seeping under the doors and windows of their peaceful Lyzansk home.
Two photos are the sum total of the physical evidence of my mother’s pre-Holocaust life. One is a family photo occasioned by the rare visit of an American aunt and her two boys to the tiny shtetl of Grodzisko in the early 1930s. Relatives have been gathered, and in a moment that would have punctuated the sweet monotony of life in the shtetl, a photograph is taken. The visitors are easily identified, seated center, the aunt in a black dress with a halo of white collar highlighting her full face and sleeves that ended well above her elbow. Her young sons, seated on the ground at her feet, are outfitted in miniature three-piece black suits, likewise topped with crisp white collars. Everyone else, organized by family and age, flanks them.
The youngest of my Weingarten family, a baby girl with big black eyes and a helmet of dark bangs, Leah, is held protectively in my grandmother’s lap, second row, left. Her siblings and cousins sit rigidly on the ground, legs straight ahead of them, while fifteen or so older family members form two rows behind. All stare solemnly at the unknown photographer.
My mother, Baila, tall for her fourteen years, anchors the upper left corner, her lips relaxed in an aspect of calm I rarely saw, her hair cut in the short bob of the day, inspired no doubt by some errant magazine or catalog that made it into that isolated little town.
The American aunt and her two boys would soon leave, and, in the way moments become significant only in the knowledge of what is to follow, the photo would take on meaning far greater than a record of their trip. The image captured that day would become tangible evidence of the Fingerhut, Weingarten, Nussbaum, and Sprung families of Grodzisko, Poland. Real to me only as ghosts.
Then, twenty years ago another photograph surfaced. My mother, a few years older, stands alongside an aunt and uncle and their two young children, a boy and girl. The aunt, a favorite of my mother’s, I was told, stands stoop shouldered though she can’t be more than twenty-five. Her bearded husband is somewhat more animated, but clearly no less serious about the business of raising a family on the limited resources of the mid-twentieth-century Polish shtetl.
I conjecture, of course, because no one in the photo survived but my mother.
She again appears incongruously fashionable, a small leather bag slung easily over her wrist, a gold belt at her waist. More than once I have wondered how my mother, in that remote town where home and work were confined to one street, knew not only to bob her hair but also to separate a few strands into a shadowy bang and then to complete the whole effect with a wisp forced against her cheek in a most insolent spit curl.
Was Baila influenced by Sears catalogs that might have served as inspiration for the fabrics her family bought and sold? And even so, how did she manage the adaptation? Was no one struck by the sheer audacity of it? I’ve often imagined, as I look at her inscrutable face in the photographs, the dreams she must have had as a young woman, the yearning to explore the world’s vast array of beautiful things.
There’s no way to know, of course. I knew mostly my mother’s haunted self. Left to rely on disconnected bits of information, I tried to cobble together a version of her life before I came into it. To this day boundaries between the real and the imagined are murky, like the story I overheard from a distant cousin of the baby brother my mother was left to tend, she just a child herself, and the fire that erupted, which she escaped and he didn’t. I heard about the tiny baby clothes my grandmother refused to discard. How the trauma rendered her infertile for over five years, after which she had seven more children. Only my mother and my aunt Nechama (“Chuma”), child number six, would survive.
I have looked with utter wonder at these people, no more tangible than family legend, and hungered to grasp the connection between them and me. But when I stare at their deep-set eyes and prominent cheekbones I recognize a kinship I cannot deny. They are the proof of my having belonged somewhere once, part of a people whose violent disappearance impacted the universe more than their brief enterprise in it. I hear them speaking to me. I try to match the faces with the few stories my mother told me. I stare at her sisters and brothers seated stiffly on the ground—so little, so unknowing.
The evidence, I suppose, points to a mother I never really knew, a woman who couldn’t have known how far destiny would heave her, not then, when real life and dreams were making their tentative peace within her. The woman my mother was when she was caught in the click of a camera’s shutter came to an abrupt end in 1939. Almost nothing would remain. Not the life, not the children. Not the dreams suggested by that spit curl.
Life as a child of Survivors resembles something akin to an archaeological dig. One that never ends. In the search for my pre-Holocaust mother, I coaxed my aunt Chuma into allowing me to film an interview with her. Over the course of five hours, my Weingarten family’s story unfolded, a story that pivoted on a singular detail—survival. The interview closed with a wistful sigh as Chuma carefully lifted the shawl her mother wore to light Shabbos candles, a shawl she had somehow kept all those years, and murmured, “It outlives the woman who wore it.”
But between the first and last frames, my aunt had created a record of events that, though she remembered them through the eyes of a child, answered at least some of the questions so long shrouded in mystery.
And eventually set the stage for two trips to Poland.
The first, shortly after 9/11, with my eighteen-year-old daughter, Naomi, was intended to uncover clues about what happened to my mother’s baby, Eli. Sadly it did not. Not in a search of official records and not in interviews with the old residents of Grodzisko and with local nuns who were known to sometimes hide Jewish children. Instead, that trip took my mother’s life from the realm of myth to the real.
I already knew from my aunt’s testimony that Polish neighbors reported to police that the Weingarten family was still alive. Over two days before Pesach, her parents and brothers and sisters, hiding in the forest, were tracked down and murdered (the seder’s bitter herbs forever made more bitter for my mother). Baila and her much younger sister, Chuma, separated from the others and cowering in a grain pit, were found by a Catholic farmer.
“I didn’t give you your life and I won’t take it,” he said, and with that led them up to his attic where he hid them until the war’s end.
Now decades later, I found myself, together with my daughter, climbing the stairs to the attic where the two sisters lived in terror for sixteen months. It seemed like time had circled back on itself. It was here that my mother and aunt survived, and I was here with the lone son of that farmer, long dead, who had risked his own and his family’s life to save them.
And I was releasing their ghosts.
But the details of where my family was murdered were only brought to light on a second trip with my son, daughter, and niece.
By the time I returned in 2014, the house with the attic and its secret no longer stood, except in my memory of them. But with a translator in tow, we went to the home of the oldest known living resident of Grodzisko. I showed her my one precious photo, and she became animated with recognition. “Baila, Miriam Esther, Chuma, Beirish, Leah, Shevach…!” She’d known them all.
“And I know where they’re buried,” she said.
She walked us the few minutes to the Jewish cemetery, and there, just inside the fence of yellow flowers, she pointed to a depression in the earth, the telltale sign of a mass grave. “This is where they were shot.”
In a voice hoarse with emotion I asked, “The men and the women together?”
“And the children,” she answered.
In the silence of that place, my son began to intone the mournful Kel Maleh Rachamim prayer for the dead, the first, I am certain, in all these long years to mark my family’s deaths. From the mists of secrets and betrayals, I had come to retrieve the story they could not tell.
When we finished the prayer we lingered, reluctant to leave the men and women who were the family we’d never know.
And the children.
It was a complicated affair, growing up in the shadow of so much pain.
I searched the clues for the prewar mother and father whose lives I entered only after they were irretrievably altered by loss. I knew enough to tread carefully in the minefield of tensions that defined my parents’ marriage, a second marriage that was a consolation prize of sorts for the first-choice spouses they each had lost—along with the loss of a child each. And I, like a replacement child, was tasked with the mission of fulfilling for my parents their unrealized hopes for those children. But more than that, charged with the massive task of fixing their brokenness. For though each of my parents had lost their first families, they had also lost everyone else.
No! “Lost” is so wrong. Not lost like happenstance, bad-luck lost. Not like the misfortune brought on by tumors and viruses. Not the loss of stupidly driving drunk or taking the little skiff out in a storm. Not the “Who by water, who by fire…?” loss intoned on Yom Kippur.
Not lost, but wrenched.
I am one of many whose lives were informed by events we didn’t live. Ours were childhoods made solemn by silences and secrets and watchfulness. Is “protect” a skill set? I’ve made a whole career out of just that. Protect my mother, my father, at all costs. From what exactly? From more pain. Disappointment. From ever getting an inkling that the children they brought into the world “after Hitler”—in my mother’s shorthand—were less than perfect, were, at the end of the day, only children.
If the intensity of my mother’s parenting left me suffocated, it no less imposed an outsize power. Only when I myself became a parent did I understand the responsibility foisted on me of fulfilling the unfulfilled promise of so many lost souls. Only then did I realize how weary my little-girl shoulders had been from the impossible burden of being perfect. Of shielding my parents, at all costs, from distress.
Yet the sources of angst I inflicted seemed to be legion. A temper tantrum in a store because I wanted a doll we couldn’t afford got me the doll. But joy lasted only till my mother, in an outburst of anger a few days later, admitted that she had been driven to steal it. I watched sorrow make its way across my mother’s face, and though I didn’t yet understand that she couldn’t afford a lot—either in money or in the headspace to apprehend what it is to be a child—I did know that, unlike before, this sorrow was my doing.
“Fun nisht geyn un nisht forn, hot men nisht keyn kharote” was the stock response when I wanted to do something. “From not going one has no regret.” Which meant “No ice skating for you because you might break a leg like Ethel….” No party!—unseemly—though I’d be dressed to leave. No going off with friends because I might not return. Because the wrong step could make all the difference between safety and catastrophe.
It was a training ground for caution as I grew to intuit my parents’ love amidst a sea of material and emotional limits. I learned to weigh my own needs against the toll, real or imagined, it could take on them. And with everything so big, as big as life and death, and precarious, I was primed to consider decisions with painstaking deliberation and to not trust outcomes.
So much belonged to me, so much I was responsible for, that it still pits me against my own longings and grips me with fear—the fear of failing those I love.
Among my mother’s playbook of Yiddish sayings was the frequently reprised “Keyner zet nit zayn eygenem hoyker,” or, “No one ever sees his own hunchback.” My mother brooked no gossip and was quick to cut the busybody off at the knees with this observation about a person’s inability to see his own flaws. This tendency, coupled with little patience for small talk and a deep mistrust of almost everyone, left her with few close friends.
She did, however, belong to a community of chicken farmers and Survivors, “Greeners,” like us. Though we attended each other’s bar mitzvahs and weddings, my mother’s interaction with them was guarded. Unwilling to share confidences, she did not seek them out nor they her. Yet, I ached for friends and was baffled by my mother’s retreat from them.
Asking questions, especially about the war, was off-limits. But I began to understand more about my mother’s mistrust as I learned of wartime betrayals by non-Jewish townspeople and even by other Jews. Even by family. Though suggested in hushed whispers, stories circulated about my mother’s own relatives vying for too few hiding places. I once overheard her speaking with my aunt about their young sister who’d been turned out by the Polish man hiding her when he was offered more money by one of our cousins. My mother recalled hearing that sister pound on another neighbor’s door—someone who’d been her friend—in the hopes he would hide her. To no avail. Our cousin survived, and to my mother’s credit, this painful episode was never brought up to him.
It didn’t have the makings of a remarkable moment. But then nothing ordinary does. And it was just that, the most ordinary day, late morning, early fall. My mother and I were hanging wash. The line was just behind the house, which sat on a hill at the end of a long gravel driveway. One way in, one way out.
My mother, as I said, was hanging wash, one of the less demanding chores she assumed in those years on the farm. She was wearing shoes, in contrast to the work boots and rolled-down socks she wore in the coop, collecting eggs, and otherwise ministering to the needs of chickens. Thousands of them, cute when they arrived as chicks, that my mother tended under giant heaters all through the night to ensure they survived long enough to become an income-producing crop.
My sister, Pessie, and I once persuaded her to let us take two of the chicks to keep as pets. But it didn’t take us two little girls very long to be equally happy to banish them back to the coop, so little relief did they offer from the grinding boredom.
Hanging wash was one of the day’s less tedious chores, and my job was to hand my mother the clothespins. I liked it, the rhythm of it. It was a game…how close to the precise moment my mother needed the clothespin could I airlift it into her waiting fingers. Not unlike the remedies to her sadness that I prepared for the precise moment they would be needed.
I felt safe. And just like that I looked up at the open sky and thought, We are the first people in the universe. With memory so patchy, it’s curious I remember the thought, and comforting that I remember anything at all. Because our life, my parents’ and by extension mine, was a blur of labor and loss where grueling work and pervasive sorrow made childhood shaky and left me longing for a terra firma I could not yet frame. We were ten minutes out of town and ten years after Liberation and isolated by more than the need for my father to ferry us in the back of the pickup truck to any place we needed to be. There was no before. I didn’t know about grandparents or extended family. And though ignorant of the facts, I knew only that I was at their parenting mercy, a lone sailor on an unknown sea. There was no one else, and all I hoped was that they knew a little more than I did.
In the isolation wrought by silence and mistrust I experienced childhood as a self-contained universe. Our land stretched flat and scruffy, except for mountains of snow in the winter after the tractor cleared a path to the road. Summers imposed steamy, languid days that my sister and I struggled to fill. And time was marked by the tedium of hours-long stints in the egg room packing eggs that seemed to be in endless supply, distractions few and reprieves rare.
This was the backdrop against which I silently railed and waited for something to happen. And it did.
I was ten when a raging fire erupted in the middle of a warm May night. Only when my bare feet registered the cold concrete of the porch did I wake and reflexively turn to go back inside. My mother, arms tight around me, pulled me forward, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the blaze. In a surreal moment I spotted my father running toward the flames—to save what?—and I screamed in terror till he resignedly backed away.
The magnitude of it all went right over my ten-year-old head as I brooded mostly about the underpants I would have liked to have been wearing that night to the neighbors who took us in. An old couple named Goldfarb, they were fellow farmers and Survivors, and I remember noting how odd it was that they lived at one end of the chicken coop where they had carved out a small apartment.
Our farm days had suddenly, finally, come to an end, yet I still work to excise her, that girl without underpants, even now as I walk around my Upper East Side neighborhood where everyone is just so finished.
The summer after the fire found us in a three-room bungalow that sat in an open field just off the road. There was no running water. But mercifully by the time school started, we’d moved to “town”—Lakewood—first to a rooming house and later to a modern marvel of a three-bedroom, two-bath home close enough for me to walk to school.
My father had by then opened a cabinet shop, while my mother continued to work the farm. Daily she’d leave early for the fifteen-minute bus ride to the coops, returning exhausted to put up supper. And I, unasked, assumed the job of keeping the house tidy, clean, and ordered.
But my mother was also busy with something else—buying real estate, raw land that she permitted and flipped. I’d watch her at the kitchen table, clearly stressed, poring over mail she could barely read, and sometimes overhear, without comprehension, her beleaguered “The bank is going to call the note.”
It has taken me many decades to appreciate the gravity of risk that my mother assumed.
And the smarts. And the courage.
The move to Lakewood had expanded my vistas, and by the end of grammar school I’d convinced my mother to let me attend Central, a Hebrew high school on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. I lived with my aunt Chuma and her family in Brooklyn from Monday to Friday, and for the four years that I was a weekly commuter my weekends were circumscribed by a ritual that featured an orange Naugahyde La-Z-Boy recliner that anchored our living room.
My week began on a 6:15 bus to New York. From the moment I stepped onto that bus I would begin the countdown of days and hours until I’d step off again Friday afternoon. A short walk brought me home where soon, with the lighting of Shabbos candles, my mother eased her weary body into the welcoming arms of her La-Z-Boy. I would then tuck myself into the crook where carpet met chair and savor with relief my having returned home to find my mother still there.
To the naked eye the calm scene, mother and daughter sharing light conversation, maybe simply sharing space, was just that. But I knew that it spoke to my terror of losing her.
I had by then gleaned a skeletal account of her life in Europe, and though I wanted to ask Where was your baby while you were in hiding? What did you and your sister talk about during those months in the attic? Do Pessie and I remind you of your own brothers and sisters? I never did. I just sat in awe, sucking in her thereness, grateful she hadn’t been taken, happy I still had a mother who sat relaxing in an orange vinyl La-Z-Boy. Her throne.
I did not know till high school that there were Jews who’d been born in America. Not till I visited classmates in high-rise apartments that featured book-lined walls where I was offered familiar foods referred to as “cold cuts” by mothers who spoke clear, unbroken English did I know.
I was learning context, my parents’ experience in opposition to the experience of regular American Jews. Those who filled out their children’s applications, planned vacations they could dependably bank on taking, had degrees, and laughed easily and freely like they had not a worry in the world. With every piece of new information I was struck by the distance between them and me. And like an infant’s advance from chaos to order, it was as bewildering as it was intriguing.
Against this other, bigger world, events gained clarity. I began to see my parents’ lives in the context of a verifiable history, one connected to a shared voice that demanded a new word—Holocaust (Shoah in Hebrew)—by which to call it.
I was reminded of the World War II newsreels my father watched and my mother refused to watch. For her the war remained in shadow. But when the Eichmann Trial was broadcast live from Israel through spring and summer of 1961, my mother was riveted. Each day I came home to find her seated in front of the TV. I remember Eichmann, an emotionless defendant, jaws set and eyes staring vacantly ahead from inside his cage as my mother and I and the world—and Eichmann himself—listened to witness testimonies of the Nazi atrocities perpetrated on the Jews of Europe.
At last, my parents—and all Survivors—had been seen.
But trauma is a relentless byproduct that, like radiation, can contaminate from afar and infect everything it touches. In the delivery room just as my doctor announced that we had a son and handed him into my waiting arms, my first thought was of the Jewish newborns murdered by Nazis in their first breath. Never can I look at a baby’s sweet face or watch toddlers embraced by eager mothers at school’s end without wondering if these are perhaps the reincarnated souls of those babies who never had a chance.
Even a national tragedy like 9/11 triggered pain beyond the expected. As I shared in the country’s collective grief, I ached for my parents who had suffered in post-Holocaust isolation. Sometimes even scorned for the shame of victimhood. Against the media’s coverage I considered my parents’ aloneness in grief. Who was there to validate their sorrow or acknowledge those they had lost as The New York Times did in its daily obituaries, “Portraits of Grief”? There was no PTSD diagnosis, no grief counseling. Left to mourn their losses on their own or simply set grieving aside for another day, they marshalled whatever remained of strength and faith to raise their families.
With time to think and distance to reflect, I marvel at the functioning daughters my parents turned out. Yes, we were borne along, my sister and I, through the often incoherent language of our childhood. But somehow, though their parenting was clumsy, our parents were able to deposit us safely into a future filled with joys they could not have imagined.
And this triumph I attribute to love. Never did I feel that I was anything if not my parents’ singular reason for being. The evidence is clear. The sacrifice. The muddy work boots and unending demands of our chicken farm meant that we could attend a Jewish day school. My father’s insistence that my sister and I be outfitted each spring with a light wool coat he called a “topper” when I rarely saw either of my parents wear something new, the shortened workday on the weekend to make time for the Seaside Park boardwalk and Carvel on the way home, and their open delight at a good report card—I knew amidst the scarcity of everything that all effort and pleasure revolved around my sister and me.
Moreover, I recognize in the face of it all a grace and dignity. My mother’s “Never enter a room without saying hello to everyone and never leave a room without saying goodbye.” “Make a decision and don’t waste any more of the shoe salesman’s time!” Her appreciation of the well-sewn garment, even if beyond our reach. The hint of Chanel N°5 in the air on the rare occasion she dressed up.
And as I ventured out into the world, I began to fully grasp the wisdom, fortitude, and yes, the love that together with my parents had survived the war.
I’m wearing a linen chemise minidress that July night of my first date with Shep. It’s 1968, and I’m a newly minted high school grad with summer looming wide and pointless ahead of me till the start of college. As he opens the car door, Shep slips me a piece of paper with a one-line quote, the gist of which I still remember: Sometimes someone walks into your life and changes it forever.
Shep couldn’t have been more prescient, and the unlikely surprise of our meeting was something I’d never take for granted. Older, clerking that summer for a local judge before the start of his third year of law school, he urged me, as I hedged, to say yes to a date, with “Aw, c’mon, take a chance.” He wooed me with the living he’d already done and I was hungry to begin, and we married two years later.
Although a child of Survivors like me and a product of South Jersey immigrant egg farmers, Shep had processed the traumas suffered by his parents with an optimism and drive to explore that were utterly foreign to me. And seductive.
Smart and experienced, funny and warm, he nudged me into adulthood. Pressed me to step out without fear. Pried open curiosity my Survivor parents strove to squelch in the hope they could keep me safe. And as he raced headlong into the wind, he took me with him, holding on for dear life.
I found my core in those years. And with the births of our children—three boys in quick succession followed by a girl—I set out to remedy through them the war-ravaged mothering my mother had inflicted on me. My children would be fearless and soar.
But then way before the job was done, Shep caught me by surprise again.
On an unusually warm Super Bowl Sunday in 1988, Shep went for a bike ride with our boys, the usual five-mile route around the lake near our home in Lakewood. A few hours later I was clearing away a French-toast breakfast when suddenly Seth, at sixteen our oldest, shouted for me to call 911. Shep lay on the bedroom floor, his full head of brown curly hair still wet from his bath. As EMT medics stormed the house and began CPR, I silently paced and prayed, catatonic. When I peered back into the bedroom after what seemed like hours, I knew by the blue of his feet that Shep was gone.
For me, there could be no “Why me?” I was already a veteran of the meaningless and arbitrary. “I am not the first and I won’t be the last” became my silent mantra. And notwithstanding a sense of having been sliced in half, I knew no way but forward.
The approach of Chanukah always brings me back to 1988. Like a countdown. Beginning with the bright-red boiled-wool coat I bought four-year-old Naomi in a cute Upper West Side shop. A coat she wore as we headed out with her three older brothers to see Cats on Broadway. The Andrew Lloyd Webber musical was a Chanukah treat, and its songs had caught Naomi’s fancy. She sang her little-girl versions all that long drive home and reprised them often during the shiva we would sit only a few weeks later.
That Chanukah was the last time we lit candles as a family, one big menorah for Shep and me, and four miniatures, one for each of the kids. We lit, each in our turn, and then we sang. “Maoz tsur yeshuati….” What we lacked in musical ability we more than made up for in zeal and delight. The sheer delight of being together.
As rambunctious and demanding as our children were, they never failed to fascinate me by simply being, by making the two of us, Shep and me, into a family. Because family was the Holy Grail, the much-longed-for missing piece for those of us brought up in the shadow of the Shoah.
By the next Chanukah, we were a family on life support. Breathing without feeling, mechanically obedient to the prompts of the calendar’s rhythms, I navigated a becalmed sea on autopilot in the interest of saving the precious passengers I held on board. Again, we lit the candles, and as the last one took flight each night, and I’d long to crawl into the comfort of grief, my mind would silently scream, “Sing, goddamit, sing!” And we did.
The Chanukah candles have now been lit more times than I’d like to admit. I’ve lit them through challenging child-rearing years, with and without stepchildren. I’ve lit them in different homes, mostly in cold New Jersey winters, and also in the warmth of Southern vacations. I’ve lit them in windows looking out at suburban streets and in windows facing high-rise towers.
Today, I light my one menorah. The little menorahs are long gone. They’ve left to start menorah communities of their own. I visit these communities often and never fail to be stunned by how prolific they’ve been. Entire tables filled with menorahs large and small, some award-worthy and others primitive as can be. A veritable explosion of light. The voices that now sing “Maoz Tzur” are many and varied, still toneless but exuberant. I watch my children light with their children and think, I have brought them safely into port. I’ve held the line.
And then I go home to my own sweet space for the final lighting of the night. Today’s pared-down version is without the urgency of my young, fraught parenting days, but still with more than a tinge of the old ache. I light, and then my mind screams as it has for all these years, “Sing, goddammit, sing!” And I do.
My six-year-old granddaughter, Tal, asks me how old I am. When I tell her, she says, “Wow, that’s a lot of numbers!”
Enough numbers to have seen the world I thought I knew turned on its head. But, mostly, like my parents, I worry about the children. As I did not so long ago when I was alone on the beach with Tal’s little sister, Mira. She is three, and while her parents and her siblings are out on a boat, she is in my care. I’m leaning into the moment, savoring, when a sudden wave leaves us both drenched. I recognize the terror on Mira’s face, and as I grab a towel I reassure her, “Mira, you are safe. I am here to keep you safe. My job is to keep you safe.” In an instant her big round eyes lock onto mine, she relaxes, and I understand it all.
ROSE GERSZBERG is a writer living in New York City and Miami Beach. With a master’s degree in corporate and organizational communication, she has written primarily in the marketing and nonprofit development sectors. Her deepest passion, however, lies in deconstructing what it means to navigate a life. Born in 1950 in a Displaced Persons camp, Bindermichl, in Austria, much of her writing and public speaking have focused on the Jewish immigrant experience as she lived it. “Drawing Breath in Chapters” is her first published work and belongs to a larger body of essays that include memoir and social commentary. She is not active on social media, preferring instead to share through her writing and personal contact.
Featured image by Albert Laurence, courtesy of Unsplash.
