from Chapter One, "Moving Beyond Endings"
There are people who are, from an early age, by nature and inclination, attached to the past — anthropologists, historians, archivists, novelists and poets of their own lives, keeping meticulous or quirky records, looking back methodically or nostalgically or satirically. They go back to their hometowns, sniff the air for change or continuity. They keep in touch with their earlier selves. My husband and youngest son are among this tribe. I never was until I was well into middle age. I was simply too busy, too engaged, too willfully intent on the here and now to do much meditating on where I had been. I must have had a sense, too, absorbed from my father’s spoken and unspoken injunctions, that the past might be a painful place, better avoided than confronted. It was better to keep looking forward for fear of seeing something terrible — what was it? something dangerous, forbidden. If I looked back, I or someone else might be destroyed. Remember the fate of Lot’s wife, of Eurydice.
Still, after 50, it seems, almost everyone becomes a memoirist. Is the impulse simply hormonal, physiological, the flagging of desire, a weariness of the flesh that makes what has happened seem more exciting than what is to come? Or is it the acknowledgment, finally, of one’s own inevitable death that brings the wish to set the record straight?
I had been interested enough in my family’s past to encourage my father to write a memoir in his later years. But it was not until after his death in 1988 that I felt that interest turn to a mandate. I traveled a number of times to family homes and workplaces in Central Europe. I started learning Hungarian. I read and reread letters and other family documents. I bothered people, especially my mother, with questions. I took notes and photographs, kept journals and wrote essays. I haunted certain sections of the library. I was, it is true, a little obsessed. I needed to know more about my family’s lives in a world that had been destroyed by war.
It was relatively easy to ask questions and guess and speculate about my parents, whom I thought I already knew pretty well. But my grandparents’ generation was truly a lost continent to me, a place that I had never seen and would never reach. The lives of those people, their voices, their rages, their charms, their joys, their habits, their gestures — these are as remote to me as the time in which they lived. Yet, mysteriously, as surely as if they had instructed me, I have learned from them.
“You act as though you grew up with a lot of servants,” a neighbor with a wicked tongue once said to me many years ago. I was probably out in the yard in my jeans and workshirt, raking leaves or replacing a bicycle chain, trying to keep track of three small boys, trying to keep my sanity. But she had picked up something in my tone, in my bearing, an attitude of entitlement — not evident to me — that gave her an inkling of a life I had not even lived. It’s true that my parents had been comfortable in their suburban New York existence, that we had a solid middle-class life, even some hired help. That was between 1941 and 1954, when a not-so-wealthy, one-paycheck family could easily afford a maid. But by the time of my neighbor’s comment, my husband and I were living on his assistant professor’s salary, plus what I could earn as a part-time schoolteacher. Still there was, evidently, something osmotically remembered, something in my manner that rubbed this woman the wrong way, and that something had been transmitted — as I now guess — from my magnificent grandmother through my mother to me. Call it a form of inheritance. But since my grandmother’s virtues are not admired in a democracy, except in celebrities or movie stars, my neighbor’s assessment confirmed the earlier opinion of my schoolyard days, where the consensus had often been, to my sorrow, that I was conceited, stuck-up. It was this grandmother, Elza Roheim Fürth, who became the subject of one of my first efforts to write about my family. Elza’s suicide was in 1931, when she was 54, five years before I was born. Because there are so few stories about her, I cherish the ones I have.
Sometimes, when I wear her big ring, I try to imagine Elza Fürth, even though my mother’s hand was the one I saw wearing it nearly every day during my childhood. My mother, Eva Fürth Perl, had a hand a lot like mine, square and functional with roundish fingernails. I can see the ring on her neatly manicured hand or on the kitchen windowsill where she used to put it when she was scrubbing potatoes or mixing up a meatloaf, or on the glass-topped, chintz-skirted dressing table where she left it at night.
The story of the ring goes like this: Grandmother bought it — an index-fingernail-sized sapphire encircled by diamonds — after winning at baccarat in the casino at Monte Carlo. She was there with her husband on holiday and had already spotted the big blue chunk in a jeweler’s window. She went straight from the gaming tables to make her purchase. That was like her, the family commentators say, perfectly in character — impulsive, vain, beautiful, showy, extravagant.
