Exodus: A Memoir by Deborah Feldman

Author:Deborah Feldman
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: marni 04/12/2014
ISBN: 9780399162770
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2013-01-02T06:00:00+00:00

V

spirituality

I may not have recognized myself in America, but on my very first trip to Europe I experienced the immediate, reverberating sensation of making contact with something old and almost, but not quite, forgotten. And so I kept coming back, thinking that if I felt that again, that maybe this time around I’d understand what it was.

Three years after leaving I found myself in Paris in a café by the Arc de Triomphe. It was spring, and the maple trees surrounding the Place Charles de Gaulle were in full blossom. Down the avenue Carnot, two rows of plane trees were still only puffed, their thin, gnarled limbs spreading tremulously from a satiny-barked trunk. As I finished my café sans lait, I felt a lump in my throat, remembering how my grandmother thrilled to the blossoming trees each spring, calling out their names as we passed them, explaining to me what made each species unique and special. Cedar was prized for its aromatic wood, acacia for its delicate yet strong leaves. An occasional linden tree would remind her of Europe. How she would have loved Paris, I thought. How sad that she never got a chance to visit.

When I was a child, I watched my grandmother light the traditional Jewish yahrzeit candle every morning on the same table, where it would burn for twenty-four hours until the next one was lit. It was a grieving custom, but in this case the expression of it was subversive. It was not permissible to mourn relatives who had passed so long ago—Jewish law limited the mourning period to a maximum of one year. After that it was considered imperative that the grieving move on; after all, one had to accept God’s will. But my grandmother never stopped lighting those candles, and although she claimed that they were for this one or that one, I knew that the one flame represented the souls of her entire family, from her two-year-old baby sister to her seventeen-year-old brother, all of whom had been gassed in Auschwitz.

I carried that mourning with me. I spent nights lying awake picturing the faces of all those dead children, tormented by the idea of their aborted existence. Was I really here simply to replenish the family, as my grandfather had said? Was it up to me to birth their souls into the world so that they could live again?

Or was it enough, I considered now, looking down into the dregs of my coffee cup, to retrace their path, so that they could be seen—so that their memories could live on forever in my spirit?

I looked up at the blossoming trees, their leaves glowing a pale, luminous green in the sunlight, and asked myself, Would my grandmother have wanted to visit Paris? No matter how eloquently and nostalgically she talked about Europe, not once did I hear her express a desire to revisit. Was it all burned landscape for her, a wasteland of murdered souls and spilled blood? Or did she feel rejected

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