Our immediate surroundings were occupied by Mom and Dad and Effi’s mom and dad. They were younger characters, who would hand down their stories to us every year when we were Old Enough.
Except for my Mom, who kept quiet.
What did we know of my Mom’s past?
In a village among Christians, a five-year-old Jewish girl fearfully recites Hail Marys, a prayer differentiating life from death. Later, with her mother and father, in the woods with the partisans. And years later, when we were Old Enough: an ambush in the forest, shots fired, everyone escapes, leaving her behind. Her mother, alone, comes back for her. More shots. Mom wakes up hours later in the arms of her dead mother, hidden beneath her body. Her mother is covered with blood. And ants.
How could she not hate ants?
And what else happened to you, Mom?
You mustn’t know.
By the time she passed away, only a few tiny episodes of her story had come to light. A detail here, a detail there, in between the gaps. But Mom’s story was like Braille — it was the gaps that produced the content.
After Mom died, we went to Poland with Dad. I asked him, “Dad, is there anything about Mom that you know and we don’t?”
No.
Mom and Dad were surrounded by uncles and aunts, grandfathers and grandmothers, people related to us by the Law of Compression. They all had their own stories, which we tried to understand, but mainly they spoke about each other. Although our families were small, they still tended to disconnect, to distance themselves. Calls were made on Rosh Hashanah and Passover. “We must get together,” they would say, then dig themselves in — stations broadcasting not distress signals, but boxes of bonbons.
We were seldom bought candy, since there would be plenty of bonbons every holiday. We never ate the bonbons because they could be given as gifts. And so each holiday, bonbons were hurled from one family to the next. Happy holidays. And between the holidays, the boxes were stored on the top shelf next to Uncle Tulek’s African figurine, which simply could not be displayed because of its huge black penis. Poor Uncle Tulek had lost his mind in the African heat. And you couldn’t throw the figurine away because there might come a day when he would visit and want to see it.
We wanted to know what had happened to them there.
Why wouldn’t they say?
Why did they keep their distance, not spend time together?
We knew their war had begun in 1939. Way back at the beginning of time, in 1939, the Big Bang had occurred, and the meaning of its visible crumbs would become apparent only if we could comprehend the instant of that explosion.
The residue left by the Big bang was evident in Grandpa Yosef’s neighborhood. The crumbs, the people closed off behind blinds. The ill people, the strange ones. Gershon Klima, labeled a madman with the endorsement of district psychiatrists, but to us the greatest of friends. And Crazy Hirsch, undiagnosed, who lived in a scary hut in the woods and who must have possessed parts of the truth. And Rachela Kempler. And Eva Lanczer. And Adella Greuner. And Asher Schwimmer.
We got to know the neighborhood residents on summer vacations spent with Grandpa Yosef. Almost every summer, for half the vacation — after the unavoidable fate of going to camp, where there was horse-riding and pottery and swimming and soccer and team games — we came to the neighborhood, thirsty for the truth, to meet the people and their miracles. It was a marginal neighborhood, mostly paths and yards, with only one real street, Katznelson Street, and the rows of houses that branched off the main street made do with the proximity of its name. Grandpa Yosef, for example, lived at 8-b Katznelson, even though his house was some distance from the real Katznelson, the main one, which was a paved road. Katznelson Street ran down the length of the neighborhood, affixing its name even to the distant houses, but the name was shrouded in mystery. Which Katznelson?
The main hypothesis was Berl Katznelson, the leader of the Zionist labor movement, just like the streets in every other town in Israel. But some of the neighbors supported their own Katznelson, the poet and author, whose first name was Yitzhak. They remembered him from Lodz before the war, and from the days in the Warsaw ghetto. And Mr. Orgenstern recalled yet another Katznelson, a furniture merchant in Jezupol. It seemed as though the residents had enough problems — why did they care which Katznelson this was? But there was unrest in their hearts. They had to know — was it Berl or Yitzhak? They very much hoped it was Yitzhak. At least in their neighborhood. He had perished in Auschwitz, poor man, after managing to escape to France. From there they took him, from Paris to Auschwitz.
Year after year, the doubt would suddenly be hurled into the most innocent conversations: Berl or Yitzhak? So one day I went to find out. I was fourteen, and wanted to put an end to doubt in the world. I went to the Municipality of Haifa, which had jurisdiction over Kiryat Haim, and found a clerk to interrogate. “Which Katznelson is the street named after? The famous Katznelson, or their Katznelson?” I demanded. The clerk made his enquiries with a grave expression and replied, “Berl Katznelson, of course.” I told him that the neighborhood residents would prefer their own Katznelson, and would it be possible to change it? I explained that their Katznelson had been a great poet in Poland, and since he had perished in the Holocaust it made a lot of sense for his street to be in their neighborhood. The clerk nodded silently, then asked, “Kid, are you doing a school project or something?” To call me a kid that year was a very serious transgression. I left, hunching my shoulders in the leather jacket I wished I had.
Effi put an end to the problem.
She walked up to the sign, wrote “Yitzhak” in front of “Katznelson,” and told everyone it was Yitzhak, not Berl. And ever since then everything has been fine. The residents are happy and the postmen don’t get confused. Only Orgenstern, even though he’s been dead for two years, still has a sour face. There really was a furniture merchant in Jezupol called Katznelson. You could order all sorts of bureaus from him and once a year, before Passover, he would bring all the orders in from town. He had two daughters, this Katznelson did, and the eldest one had married a goy.
It was a neighborhood of slow troubles. Every moment lingered long enough to have a bite taken right out of it. Even the sun was sober there. Every morning it carefully infiltrated the neighborhood and its rays climbed up the walls. As soon as they reached the windowsills, they encountered pillows, comforter covers and blankets waiting to be aired out. Heavy clothing hung on laundry lines. Waving excitedly, motivated partly by wind and partly by urgency, the damp clothes prodded the sun: Please start drying! That white shirt over there, for example, we’ll be needing that tonight. And onwards the sun climbed. Blinds drawn. Why stop here? Why lash white-hot blinds with sparks of fire? Just get to work. Go up top, to the solar panels. Save these people some money. Theirs was a blue-collar sun, a day laborer, without benefits. They had no need for light flickering among the leaves, for emeralds of dew, mulberry rubies, shadows in the pitanga tree. What use was that? They simply needed it to dry, to warm, to flood with light. Before noon, a thorough job. Towards evening, indifferent brush-strokes among the shadows, another afternoon load of laundry spat out from the windows onto the lines, a few more tomatoes set out in Pyrex bowls: Please ripen these as quickly as you can.