The Woman in the Photograph by Mani Feniger

Author:Mani Feniger [Feniger, Mani]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Nonfiction, Retail
ISBN: 0985134402
Google: 72L3ugAACAAJ
Amazon: B009KSFI28
Barnesnoble: B009KSFI28
Publisher: Keystroke Books
Published: 2012-06-01T04:00:00+00:00

So many people lost far more than my mother. She was one of the lucky ones. Yet I had never acknowledged the value of her paltry treasures—enameled teaspoons, a silver vase, a gold chain that had once been her father’s watch fob. I was beginning to understand why someone would cling to an old necklace, a piece of tarnished silver, or the belief in a vanished bank account—the only markers of a lost life.

“I need to pursue this,” I said to Michael. “It would be a way to prove that her belief was right, not about the honesty of the Swiss, but in her certainty that her father’s bank account still existed. I have a copy of a letter that my mother wrote in 1953 claiming that her father deposited his money in a bank in either Geneva or Lausanne. Can you imagine what was going through her mind?”

In the first years after Alice came to America, the traumas of the past must have paled in comparison to the promise of a bright future. But my father’s death shook loose the debris of all that had been destroyed. I saw my mother at the age of thirty-nine, looking around our house and seeing how drab it had become, how threadbare the Persian rugs she’d shipped from Germany in the first trunk Lynne’s father picked up, how dull the worn tweed slipcover on the couch. I could imagine her clenching her jaw to hold back the tears of rage, the memories of wealth that dissolved into ash like the books burned in the square in Leipzig, and the precious savings she concealed on her person as she crossed the border into Palestine, now all used up, with nothing to fall back on. It was at this juncture that she made a renewed effort to find the Swiss bank account.

“I used to have a poster of a painting by Diego Rivera, The Flower Carrier,” I said to Michael. “You know it, the one where the peasant in the picture is bent over with the weight of the large basket bound to his back? His basket was supposedly filled with flowers but you can feel the burden of the pain he carries on his shoulders. That’s how I feel. I thought that because I was born in America, I wasn’t really affected by the persecution of the Jews or whatever happened to my relatives—not personally—but I was wrong. I do carry the weight of what occurred before I was born.”

“That’s a lot to take on,” Michael said. He meant to be sympathetic, but it also confused him that I was suddenly so absorbed with the issue of my Jewish responsibility.

I could see his perspective. The religion of my childhood had offered little solace in my younger life, and except for attending several bar mitzvah rituals, I had not participated in anything that had to do with the Judaism in all the time Michael knew me. If someone asked me what religion I was,

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