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…
This was the year, practically a lifetime in the making, when the desire to write became the need to write. It took over my days as I listened to the news and tried to absorb the madness. It woke me from sleep and wouldn’t relent until I made my way to the desk.
This first chronicle of my life in chapters is not presented as a sequence of events but as a reflection on how time has colored my experience of events. Thus, tenses don’t always remain in the past, and swaths of living are deliberately absent in the interest of preserving a central theme—how the horrors of the Holocaust affected me and became central in a journey to wrest meaning.
Compounding the challenge of selectively navigating a robust life was my deep regard for words and language.
When I was a young reader, it was my habit to read the last paragraph of a novel first, as a gauge of its “stick to the ribs” potential. To this day I remember the final line of Richard Llewellyn’s novel, How Green Was My Valley: “How green was my Valley, then, and the Valley of them that have gone.”
The long-ago words resonate like a sigh that I’ve held close all these years.
With age, I’ve become more patient, and more willing to move naturally to the end of a writer’s words. But still, I need to respond viscerally to those words. That’s my expectation, that words, no less than music, are notes that, in their most effective iteration, evoke a chill up the spine.
To achieve that response, I strive to string them together in a rhythmic cohesion that has the potential to stir the soul. Words, like music, stir me, and by giving them deserved examination, I honor them. I hone them till they are sharp, cut them till they are efficient, and link them together with a recognition of how their rhythm can animate their power.
I charge them with the huge responsibility of expressing their truth with purposeful economy and precision and demand of them no less than the composer demands of his composition—to not hit a discordant note and to inhabit the soul long after the final bow.
Thus I write each morning to the music of Leonard Cohen. His older raspy voice is deserving of the wisdoms he delivers so succinctly that the listener’s brain cannot help but be awed by the unexpected awareness.
Likewise, for me, understanding is the goal—of truths, of depths unplumbed, of shared humanity we can do no less than revere if only for the span of a sentence.
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.
