Some of my earliest memories are of my mother's mother. She took care of us often at the beginning, and I retain an ancient memory of her racing to close the kitchen cabinet doors before I got there as I wheeled around her house in search of pots to rattle. Oddly, I remember little of my grandfather in those years, though he later embodied some of the qualities I wanted to emulate: toughness, determination, capability, imperturbability.
When you are young, grandparents just come with the territory. You never think much about them. They are not as stern as parents, and they often represent the gateway to exotic treasures that do not exist at home. It was not until I was a teen-ager that I thought about where my mother's family had come from, and what they had experienced on the way to their new home across the ocean.
For a long time I had no interest in what they might have experienced in that unknown place in those far-off days. The past becomes important only when the child's horizon explodes in an endless range of questions: Where did I come from? Why was I born into this family and not another? Why are the lives of my parents and grandparents so different? Why do some of my grandparents speak decent English while some others act as if they still lived in the Old Country?
If my father's parents seemed not to have recovered from their youth in the Middle Ages, my mother's parents were up to date. They had emerged from a mir, a communal village in White Russia -- my mother's birthplace -- to a life filled with a panoply of gadgets and modern marvels. They owned the first television set I could watch regularly. Ten years later, night-owl ads on television could never interest me because my curiosity about novelties had already been sated at their house.
They filled the role of entertainer for years, along the way teaching me some basic lessons I have carried through life: how to get money from the bank, how to use a hammer, how to know when it is polite to begin eating. But they became truly human for me when my grandmother showed me her family photograph album, with pictures of distant cousin, this one now in New York, this one in Amsterdam.
A child has a hard time imagining that grandparents might have cousins. Family relations are too complex for a young mind, especially when the extended family is scattered all over the planet. I rarely met any of the people in those pictures, though they could show me they were special when I did. Once, for example, on the roof of a building in Brooklyn, a man who had until then been just a frozen face in a picture book became mythological to me when he flipped through a wad of ten dollar bills in his wallet and bestowed one on me, the first I ever held in my hand.
Generally, the photograph album was reserved for stiff European faces, for bodies clad in dark, shapeless clothing, posing formally, faces that no longer existed except in the memory of my grandmother. She could barely talk to me about them. The war had carried all of them off, demolishing the dreams that her family would get together again. I was not old enough to know that there had been more than one war, so I did not know whether she was talking about 1915 or 1940.
To the end, my grandmother used the word "machine" to refer to a car. Even my mother remembered the first time she saw a car in her village, surrounded by curious townspeople. She, the child, was astonished enough to recall the event to me, and older people must have been as amazed as if they had seen people fly. But that small town twenty years before the first car braved the dirt roads of the Ukraine is the background of the most memorable picture my grandmother ever drew for me
My grandmother never thought of herself as a great storyteller, but how she described her first glimpse of my grandfather is burnt so clearly into my own mind that I might as well have lived the experience myself. It is so vivid that I have more than once dreamed that I was there. The most beautiful sight in her long life, she told me, was that of a man on a horse trotting into town, the man who would eventually change her life and result in mine.
That image, that thought, that beauty -- they are mine. They are me before me, time before time, time out of time. They represented an iconic moment in Libby Taitelbaum's life, but they endure in a perverted form in my memory as a family story with pictures, one that could easily have died fifty years ago with my grandmother but did not.
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