What are the Blind Men Dreaming? by Noemi Jaffe

Author:Noemi Jaffe
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781941920374
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing
Published: 2016-08-25T04:00:00+00:00

FAMILY

When we arrived at the camp, my mother had been trying to hide her two nephews under her coat. Her sister had gone mad on the journey there. The Germans sent those who would survive to the left and those who would die to the right. My mother and father went right. I never saw them again.

She can’t help wondering had her mother not tried to protect her nephews, would she have been safe? Should she not have protected them, since it was obvious they would hurt her chances? Of course, Mother also says that it was all for the best, that it was the hand of fate. If her mother had not died that way, she would have died some other way and, who knows, maybe she would have suffered more. She speaks affectionately of her mother. She talks about how, as a child, she’d help out in the kitchen counting eggs—one, two, three, crack, one, two, three, crack—and cracking every third egg. Her mother would see this and laugh. Then there was the time when, in the middle of the night, her mother got some bad news and hurried out of the house without a coat, through the snow, to help someone who was sick. Because of this, she caught pneumonia and almost died.

She sings a song in Hungarian, which was also spoken in her hometown, Senta, along with Serbo-Croatian: Erwi, Lili, Shari, Marishka, Rosali, Ella, Bella, Iutchi, Karolina, Gerte Otche Razno. In the song, a mother calls her eight daughters to dinner. These eight daughters are her family and the mother who is calling them is her own mother. The mother in the song who calls her eight daughters is all mothers calling their daughters to dinner. Mothers call their daughters to dinner and the daughters go eat dinner. This, independent of women’s history and of feminism, is what it means to be a mother—to call one’s daughters to dinner. And this, going to eat dinner, is what it means to be a daughter. Just like the woman in the song, she also has only daughters. Her three daughters are also those eight daughters. She did not know how to, was not able to, and did not want to be a mother who would keep calling her daughters to dinner, and they did not know how to, were not able to, and did not even want to be the kinds of daughter who went to dinner. But none of this matters, because at the end of the day, that is what she did, that is what she is. She is a mother who makes goulash, Pesach and Rosh Hashanah dinner, and her daughters go to her with their families.

Her three daughters are great hostesses, love having guests over, and serving them food. In their family, there is an eagerness to serve which could even be construed as feminist because of how it maintains a certain femininity, and in its subtle, yet inexorable, command of domesticity. Father would

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