blogfromgog / блогизгога

Now fall is here and the golden birds
All fly home over the deep blue waters;
I sit on the shore and gaze into the brilliant glitter
And our farewells sough through the trees.
These farewells loom large, our parting so close,
But our reunion was certain.
That’s why my sleep is so sweet when I dream with my
Head on my arm.
I feel a mother’s breath on my eyes
And a mother’s mouth against my heart:
Sleep and dream, my sweet child, for the sun is gone.
-Edith Sodergran

The Russian-Jewish poet Osip Mandelshtam once said that to remember is to invent. Our attempts at memory of ourselves and others are always a creative act--the methods of weaving a cohesive past are always an act of creation. Perhaps this is something my grandmother, Beverly Stern, handed down to me as well. Her stories, which I remember her telling me since the time I was a child, whether about great-grandma Rose keeping live fish for dinner in the bathtub, or her mother's eyes that matched the color of my grandmother's favorite flower—the iris, were always the kinds of family legends perhaps creatively-remembered. And no doubt, my own memories of my grandmother are colored with the same modes of recollection. In her last years, my grandmother had more trouble keeping her memories aligned, as what was more recent faded into the past, as if when she looked at me now she still saw the child who used to go searching for quartz stones along the beach at Dolphin Marina. She never could have enough of those pale pink luminous stones, that she claimed she used as paperweights—to keep things from blowing away in the breeze. I remember things about her from my childhood. She was my only grandparent growing up, as my mother's father died before I was born, and her mother and Sy, my father's father, died during the same summer when I was still too young to understand. I regret that I never collected enough of my grandmother's colorful memories, and with every death more links to the past seem to fall beyond our grasp. The things I remember about my grandmother are her toughness. This small woman survived two bouts of breast cancer and a series of strokes; she was tenacious of life. There was always one more summer in Maine she wanted to see, one more Passover to boil eggs, buy horseradish, and eat gefelta fish for, one more Yom Kippur to say the prayer for the dead whom she could not forget in the ancient language of her ancestors, my ancestors, who came to this country with little more in their hands than hope and a promise. As people grow into old age, time seems to flow backwards for them, as the memories of my grandmother's more distant past became more real to her than her present.

I remember waking up mornings when she would come to visit us from New Jersey, we'd make her oatmeal, she'd eat everyday, and she'd sneak us candy, twixes. We, my brother and I, were her and Sy's only grandchildren, and my own mother tells me how thrilled they were to finally have a female Stern. She was the youngest in her family, like I am, and grew up in the hardest of times, struggling through the depression, working in a cherry factory (to her last day she refused to eat one!), and perhaps it is because of these very real hard times she no doubt experienced that the memories she made for herself of her past are far brighter than they could have been. She always wanted more.

A few summers ago now, the summer she first fell ill, I went to St Petersburg Russia, the city where my great, great uncle Beryl took part on the abortive 1905 revolution, and to whose sister I have an uncanny resemblence. The city's Jewish population has long since shrunk, but there is still the enormous synagogue with its 'conical caps and onion domes which loses itself like some elegant exotic fig tree amongst the shabby buildings.' It took a good hour and a half of walking to find the building with its high gates and guarded entrance. In the synagogue, I thought of my grandmother, and bought her a silver necklace with the star of David, which I gave to her when I returned and visited her in the hospital. Since that day she never took it off. I’m thankful I got to see her a few times more over my spring break, and to see that she still had on the necklace I’d given her.